The Malcontents (19 page)

In the midst of the housekeeper being explanatory and patronizing, the maid confiding to Mark that she had too much to do, the picnic being finally served on Wedgwood plates which Mark carried in, a new suspicion had been half-formed, without shape, one of the phantoms that was going through their minds. Bernard had been the traitor. That was stark, they took it now as though they had known it for a long time. Did that mean that someone else had known or guessed? And had doctored his drink as some sort of indication, warning or sign? Had it been more than a piece of party foolishness, drunk or drugged? Was there a meaning to it?

Not much of that was said, but the thoughts passed round, and were sometimes thrust back as useless, foreheads furrowed under the bright neo-Victorian chandeliers. Once, after a question left unanswered, Sylvia observed: ‘Well, if I’d been one of you, I shouldn’t have been too pleased with him myself.’

As they sat round the table, it was another question which they couldn’t leave alone, which preyed on them. Bernard had done it.
Why
? It was the cry which Tess had uttered as soon as Sylvia’s announcement had sunk in. Now it recurred to her, to Stephen, to Mark. Even Sylvia was at times engaged, for the winding in and out of strain, anxiety, bafflement, sheer misery – like a smell at the same time piercing and heavy, such as hyacinths in a sickroom – also infected her.

Why had he done it?

In the lorry drivers’ caff, talking to Stephen alone, Mark had been brisk and dismissive about motives for treachery. He wasn’t now. There he had mentioned money, people betrayed their side for money – he mentioned that again, about Bernard, only to reject it with something like contempt. That wasn’t through delicacy over the dead; he was speaking with respect, but without sentimentality. He might be more tender than the others, but also he was the least sentimental of them. He wasn’t sparing Bernard or anyone else, this was his own insight. Money wasn’t the reason: the others agreed.

There was some speculation, the talk was whirling round at random, purposes and relevance hadn’t yet reformed, about how much he had been paid. They knew nothing of how agents were employed or chosen.

‘Perhaps,’ said Stephen, ‘in the next ten years everyone will have to learn.’ They couldn’t understand why Bernard had been picked: and yet it had been a good choice. (Tess was thinking, ashamed that her intuition had misled her, how Neil had, in the students’ common room, brought out Bernard’s name: in his abstract fashion, without any intuition or feeling he had got it right. He wasn’t interested in human beings: it was humbling, it was maddening, that abstract thought had got it right, and feeling hadn’t. Yes, Neil had come closest.)

Tess mentioned what he had said the morning before. That started other thoughts, but for the moment it was a distraction. Bernard had been picked out somehow, said Stephen, but it would have taken superhuman intelligence to arrive at him out of the blue. The first initiative must have come from him. At some time he must have offered himself. Again, why? Motives, even double motives? Why? About the whole mechanism, they were allowing nothing like enough to chance. None of them had so far experienced much betrayal in their inner lives. They hadn’t met much motiveless malice. They knew about selfishness and cowardice, and, Stephen certainly, about cruelty. But all of them, except perhaps Mark, would have been at a loss with the quicksands of labile characters, the confidence men of this life. Yet that wasn’t the cause of their being deceived: for they thought, and in this they were right, that with Bernard, however little they understood him, they were dealing with a personality no more motiveless, as strongly structured, as their own.

‘Samson or Judas?’ asked Mark.

‘What does that mean?’ Stephen couldn’t match that flash of elation.

‘Pulling down pillars. You know, I said something about nihilism the other night, didn’t I? Tearing down the whole place just to see what happens. There are plenty of people we know who feel like that.’

‘They’re no good,’ said Stephen.

‘You couldn’t feel like that if you tried,’ said Mark, gazing at his friend.

‘Nor could I,’ said Sylvia.

‘I might, you know.’ Mark’s face was candid, pure.

‘Not for long.’ That was Sylvia.

‘Perhaps not for long.’

‘You talked about building something.’ Stephen said, also intimately, ‘You can’t build anything with people like that. I think – no, that’s understating it, I know – I’d rather have most sort of conservatives than have anything to do with them.’

‘I think you would,’ said Mark. There was a pause.

‘Anyway, that wasn’t Bernard. It might he Lance, but it wasn’t Bernard. He believed in order, in the long run, as much as anyone alive.’ Mark smiled.

‘Samson won’t do. What about Judas? I mean, just playing both sides for the hell of it. Not really knowing which side he’s on. Taking himself in more than anyone else. I bet you, a lot of double agents are just like that.’

‘Do you believe that’s like Bernard?’ said Tess.

‘Doing himself in, in the end. There must be a death-wish in most of them, mustn’t there?’ Mark glanced round for their response. Once or twice, since Bernard had been identified as the betrayer, the thought of suicide had recurred.

‘Do I believe that was true of Bernard?’ he answered Tess. He hesitated, and then went on: ‘No, I rather wish I did. But no. Not for an instant.’

‘No. He was clever, he was hard,’ Mark was speaking with neutrality, keeping down his imagination. ‘I believe that when anyone like that gives away his own side, it’s because he’s decided the other is going to win. I believe he was one of those who has to be on the winning side.’

Just then – they hadn’t moved from the small table, though none of them, not even Sylvia, was drinking – Stephen, whose concentration was shot through and ragged that night, asked how they might have suspected him, what indications they ought to have picked up. He was a pretty good actor, said Tess. That’s putting it mildly, said Mark. But really, she went on, he’d always been a bit apart from the rest of them, hadn’t he? Always over-quiet? If one couldn’t trust one’s feelings, maybe one ought to watch for those who didn’t behave like everyone else.

It didn’t occur to any of them that others, watching their whole group, might have noticed that they didn’t behave like everyone else. Their abstention from demos and protest, their discipline, their outward decorum (apart from Lance’s breakaways) owed something to Stephen’s own impact: that was his style, and Mark’s too: they hadn’t been much like their activist contemporaries. A very shrewd political observer, used to points of danger, might have noticed that, and considered them worth watching. In historical fact, that had actually happened.

Stephen, forcing his attention back, was thinking about what Mark had said, not many minutes ago – about Bernard and ‘the winning side’. As recently as Monday night, Stephen remembered, Bernard had said that the poor were always right in the long run. That was why he had to be an anti-Zionist. Stephen mentioned this, and said to Mark: ‘He sounded as committed as anyone we know.’

‘It must have been a cover,’ said Tess.

Yes, his control (without that, those two years of sitting among them made no sense at all) had been absolute.

‘But still,’ said Stephen, ‘I think he had a pretty clear vision of the future.’

‘Perhaps too clear,’ said Mark, ‘I should say, he saw very clearly what we were up against. And liked it a good deal too much.’ Mark added:

‘You ought to have heard him talk to me in the botany garden. Yesterday morning. It sounded like an analysis. But it wasn’t. He was admiring the power too much. He understood where the power existed, all right. He didn’t believe it was going to topple for a long time to come. He wanted to get amongst it.’

‘Did you feel that, at the time?’ said Sylvia.

‘I’m not sure. Sort of, perhaps.’ Mark went on: ‘He was brighter than most of us. He came from outside, more than we did. Perhaps he liked power more. Or the thought of it. It’s a dangerous thing to like.’

To the others, it seemed that he might be getting near one motive, but they were left dissatisfied. Mark was more free from self than they were, often he saw deeper: yet here they felt he was oversimplifying, maybe he was too good or pure a soul to see all the turbulence and murk. Curiously enough, not one of them gave an instant’s consideration to the most prosaic of thoughts. It wouldn’t have occurred to them, not even as a possibility, that Bernard might have wanted to climb – not as his sole desire, but as part of it. He might have been tempted by the comfortable life into which they had been born. They could imagine him – this was Mark’s version – aiming to be a backstairs eminence, among the secrets and the decisions. But they couldn’t imagine that he might relish the kind of bourgeois life which that would bring.

They couldn’t imagine it, because they liked that life so little, and valued it less. They knew it, moment by moment, since they were born: it had no hold on them. Even for Sylvia, who was drifting, apart from her love for Mark, it had no charm. Above all, it didn’t bring them any moral calm. Stephen had enjoyed his father’s house, the pictures were good to look at, he mightn’t meet such comfort again: and yet he would have said, with simplicity, that he didn’t care if he never set foot in such a house as long as he lived. He would have said that, not putting on any act, as a matter of plain truth. Of course, neither he nor the others could project themselves into their middle age. They couldn’t predict the nostalgias, the regressions, even the pathos, that might be waiting for them. Nevertheless, the likelihood was that a change had occurred in people like themselves, that they were a sign of it, and that their statements expressed not only what they expected and wished to happen, but what actually would: or, as Thomas Freer used to ruminate, not only the future of desire, but the future of fate.

So it was natural that they couldn’t conceive how Bernard would see in their lives, or their parents’ lives, any kind of temptation. In that they were wrong: but still, in not crediting that that could drive him, they may have been right for the wrong reasons. For anyone as clever as he was, the way was open enough, he could have obtained a modest share of privilege, without doing anything more adventurous than taking his examinations and doing his research. If any of them had made that suggestion, though, it would have seemed oversimple too.

There was another temptation, different in kind, which they might have wondered about, Stephen most of all, for it was one he should have recognized. That was the temptation of superiority. It wasn’t common, but it had happened before, for a man of gifts to feel himself elevated above those round him: and sometimes that sense gave a supreme freedom. I can act as I like because I am myself: it proves that I am myself. Some strange abnormal secret actions had been performed with that force behind them, perhaps mixed up with other forces which were shared with less arrogant men. No, arrogance wasn’t the tone of those with this exalted certainty of their own powers, any more than humility was the tone of those who felt inferior. Not arrogance, but more like the condescension of a first-class player knocking about with club members on a local court.

If their temperaments had contained a trace of this themselves (but all except Stephen were devoid of it) they might have thought again about Bernard. Did he hug the secret joy of being more brilliant, freer, than anyone round him? Of getting away with moves that no one else could? Mark, in his compassion, would have said that that wasn’t the whole of Bernard or anyone else. Perhaps it could be part. Certainly, until Bernard had come across Stephen, he hadn’t met anyone remotely as intelligent as himself. It might have been easier for him to exist in a complex of superiority. Stephen himself had not been quite immune from it: but he had had to match himself, since he was twelve, against the competition of the English professional young, trained like racehorses. Some things, he had learned, he could do as well or better than anyone near him: at others he was only adequate. Even in his own field, people his own age had gifts denied to him. Others had kinds of insight different from, and maybe more valuable than, his own. Mark had. So Stephen as a very young man, despite a residue of pride that would live with him, had already learned some of his limits. It wasn’t available for him, as it could have been for Bernard, to go on dreaming the megalomaniac dreams.

Only Mark had the psychological passion to persevere about Bernard’s motives: the others were distracted by thoughts which, all through the evening, had been fragmenting everything they said. Practical thoughts. Selfish thoughts. Questions unanswered and perhaps unanswerable. At one point, the time was passing, after nine o’clock, Tess asked: ‘Could he have committed suicide, after all?’

‘It would be the nicest solution,’ said Stephen.

‘Except for his parents, I suppose,’ she said.

‘I don’t see that it can ever be proved. Either way.’

‘It would make sense,’ said Sylvia. ‘You know, it seems the obvious answer.’ She was speaking, eyes lit up, with eagerness. Then she went on: ‘But none of you believe it, do you?’

‘I wish I did,’ said Tess.

Stephen added: ‘Yes. I keep thinking it might be true. Of course it might. But I’m afraid I don’t believe it.’

‘Nor did Neil,’ Tess broke out: ‘Do you remember, he didn’t even stop to think. The moment we mentioned it, he just took it that the drug idea was right.’

They were remembering something else: Neil, at the first revelation that there was a traitor, crying out that he ought to be got rid of.

‘Could he have meant that?’ Tess asked.

‘I think he did,’ said Mark.

‘I think he did,’ Stephen repeated. Not even Lance had shrugged off what Neil had said. ‘But – this would have been an imbecile way to try. It was much more likely just to keep him quiet, if he was freaked-out at all.’

They weren’t irrational, even now. Yet the thought of Neil in action didn’t leave them: Stephen didn’t wish it to leave them, or himself. Tess, noticing his gaze down at the table, felt that under the stern expression there was relief. She wasn’t sure what it meant, or aware that a new decision, or the chance of one, was playing with him.