The Sleep of Reason (15 page)

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t see why he should invent the story, do you?” Leonard’s grey eyes were regarding me cat-humorously through his glasses. “Especially as it stops us exerting ourselves.”

No doubt that was why I hadn’t been badgered on the telephone for several days. It hadn’t been thought necessary to tell me that I wasn’t to trouble myself further.

“Well then,” I said. “It’s only a formality today. Why not come along?”

“It’s only a formality,” said Leonard. “Why come along?”

“You know as well as I do. Just to patch things up.”

“In that case, it’s not precisely a formality, is it?”

It resembled an argument with his father – over tactics, or principles, or choices – such as we had had since we were young men. But it wasn’t quite like that. Leonard was just as immovable, but gentler and at the same time more certain. The matter had been mishandled. He and his colleagues (but I now felt sure that his was the authority behind them) weren’t willing to appear placated, until they had made their own terms. They weren’t being noisy. They were merely abstaining. It was the quietest form of protest. Maybe others would understand.

“What about the Vice-Chancellor?”

“He’s only got to see reason, hasn’t he?” said Leonard.

Vicky had told me that, if she had appealed to him to go easy on her father, he would have done it. She (for once confident) was sure that she could do anything with him. But that was the one appeal she couldn’t make. One oughtn’t to use love like that, unless one can pay it back. And also I, having heard her secrets, couldn’t use it either: she had said so, direct as usual. Well, that did credit to the decency of her feelings. And yet, for once confident, she was for once over-confident. Listening to him, I didn’t believe that, if she had promised to marry him tomorrow, she would have changed one of his decisions about Arnold, or even his tone of voice.

Was it possible that, miserable about her, he – who was as decent as she was, and no more malicious – was taking it out of her father? I didn’t believe that either. It was hard to accept, but personal relations often counted not for more, but for far less than one expected. There were people who in all human affairs, not only politics but, say, the making of a painter’s reputation, who saw a beautiful spider’s web of personal connections. Such people often seemed cunning, abnormally sophisticated in a world of simple men: but when it came to practice, they were the amateurs and the simple men were the professionals.

“Can’t you really go a step or two to meet him?” I asked.

“I think it is for him to meet us.”

Dead blank. So, killing time before the Court, I chatted about some of the scientists I knew of his father’s generation – Constantine, O—, B—, Mounteney. As usual, I found an obscure amusement in the way in which Leonard and his contemporaries discussed fellow scientists twenty or thirty years older than themselves. Amiable dismissal: yes, they had done good work; once, they deserved their awards and their Nobels: but now they ought to retire gracefully and cease cluttering up the scene. Mounteney – “It’s time,” said Leonard, “that he was put out to grass.” With the same coolness Leonard remarked that he himself, at thirty-one, might very well be past his peak. His was probably the most satisfying of all careers, I said: and yet, for the reason he had just given, I was glad that it had not been mine.

Somehow, casually, I mentioned Donald Howard. It was good of Leonard to have found him a niche. No, merely sensible, said Leonard. Of course, he added vaguely, you knew something about the affair in your college, didn’t you? Yes, I knew something, I said (I felt sarcastic, but Leonard, like other conceptual thinkers, had a thin memory, didn’t store away the things he heard). I even knew Howard a bit. Would I like to see him for a minute? Out of nothing but curiosity, I said yes. Leonard spoke to the apparatus on his desk, beside Vicky’s picture. Within minutes, Howard came, head bent, into the room. He shook hands, conventionally enough. He wasn’t quite as graceless as I remembered, though he had some distance to go before he became Lord Chesterfield. His shock of hair, which used to push out from his brow, had been cut: he looked more like the soldier that most of his family had been. He wasn’t cold to me, but equally he wasn’t warm. Did he like living in the town? He’d seen worse, he said, without excess. How did he enjoy the university? It was better than a technical college, he said, without excess. He seemed to think that some conversational initiative of his own was called for. What was I doing in this place, he ventured? I had come down for the Court, I replied. I shouldn’t have thought that was worth anyone’s time, said Howard. After that, he felt that he had done his duty, and escaped.

Leonard grinned at me.

“How good is he?” I asked.

“Oh, he’s better than Francis (the Getliffe family, like Edwardian liberals, called their parents by their first names) used to think. By a factor of two.” Leonard went on to say that at the time of his dismissal from the college, and during the research which led up to it, Howard had been paralytically lacking in confidence: so much that it made him look a scientific fool. But that he wasn’t. Now he had been given a “good problem” and was having some success, he showed a certain amount of insight. He’d never be really first-rate: he’d probably never make the Royal Society, said Leonard, as though that were the lowest limit of man’s endeavour. But he could develop into a competent professor, conscientious with his students and with half-a-dozen respectable scientific papers to his name.

That sounded like a firm professional judgment. When I asked about other parts of Howard’s life, Leonard had picked up or remembered little. He didn’t know – as I had heard and believed to be true – that Howard had ceased to be a fellow traveller. He hadn’t gone through a dramatic conversion, he had just moved without explaining himself into the centre of the Labour party. About his marriage – yes, Leonard did know, coolness breaking, showing the tentative nervous interest of a man who should be married himself that Howard had divorced his wife. She had gone off with Eric Sawbridge, who, unlike Howard, had stayed a communist, pure and unbudgeable, and wouldn’t budge until he died. He had served nine years in jail, after passing on some of the early atomic information, and had come out unchanged.

“One of the bravest men I ever knew,” I said to Leonard.

“Francis says the same,” Leonard replied. But to him all this, all those crises of conscience which had riven his scientific predecessors, all the struggles, secret and public, in which his father and I had spent years of our lives, seemed like history. If he had been our age, he would have felt, and done, the same as we did. As it was, he signed the “liberal” letters, but otherwise behaved as though there were nothing else that a man of goodwill could do.

It was getting on for three, and I got up.

“I still can’t persuade you to come?” I said.

“I’m afraid not, Lewis,” he answered, with an unyielding but gentle smile.

In the Court room, one side wide open to the afternoon sun, in fact so open that curtains had to be drawn to avoid half the table being blistered, the first item on the agenda took three minutes. And those three minutes were the stately minuet.
Resolution
of confidence in Disciplinary Committee
. The secretary reported that three of the students had found accommodation elsewhere: Miss Bolt had announced her engagement, and did not wish to undertake further study. “Any discussion?” said Arnold Shaw, sharp eyes executing a traverse. Not a word. “May I ask for a motion?” This had been prearranged: resolution of confidence, moved by a civic dignitary, seconded by an academic. “Any further discussion?” Not a word. “Those in favour?” Denis Geary looked across at me while hands were going up. No, there was no point in indulging oneself, though he, unlike me, wasn’t interested in guarding Arnold Shaw. His hand went up, so did mine. “Unanimous,” said Shaw, giving a pursed smile, with a satisfaction as great as Metternich’s after one of his less commonplace manoeuvres.

The whole of the rest of the proceedings was dedicated to the October congregation. Flummery, of course; but then people, even serious people like Denis Geary, enjoyed flummery: there were wafts of pleasure, as well as mildly dotty practical suggestions, in the air. Lord Getliffe would preside. Honorary degrees would be presented. The Court had already approved the names of the honorary graduands. Dinner. Speeches. Who should speak? That particular topic took up a long time. I sat absent-minded, while the general enjoyment went on. At last (though it was actually only about half past four) I got out into the summer air. Would I have tea? Shaw was pressing me. No, I had an engagement soon. That was embroidering the truth. For the first time on any of my visits to the town, George Passant had sent me a note – like all the letters I had ever received from him, as short and neat as a military despatch – saying that he was otherwise occupied and couldn’t meet me for our usual drink. All I had to do was call on the Patemans, when the father was home from work, and settle my account. Then I could go to the Residence, obligations fulfilled, though (I was still thinking of Leonard) not in a fashion anyone could congratulate himself upon.

Still, it was pleasant to walk by myself round the campus (that word also had swept eastward) in the still sunshine. The students were dressed differently from those I used to know: young men and girls in jeans, long hair, the girls’ faces unpainted and pale. Transistor radios hung from a good many wrists. Pairs were lolling along, arms round each others’ waists: that too wouldn’t have happened in my college before the war. I stretched myself on the grass, not far from such a group. The conversation, however, as much as I could catch, was not amorous but anxious. They nearly all carried examination papers with them. This was the time of their finals: they had just been let out of a three-hour session: they were holding inquests. Dress changed: social manners changed: sexual manners changed: but examinations did not change. These boys and girls – they must have been round twenty-one, but they were so hirsute that they looked younger – were at least as obsessed as any of us used to be. They had another paper next morning. One girl was saying that she must shut herself up that night, she needed to put in hours and hours of work. Wrong, I wanted to say: real examinees didn’t behave like that: don’t look at a book, don’t even talk about it. But I kept quiet. Whoever listened to that kind of advice? Or to any other kind of advice, except that which they were already determined to take?

It was pleasant in the sun. I was timing myself to arrive at the Patemans’ house at six. Now that I knew the way, I managed it to the minute. But Mr Pateman was not there. His wife let me in, the passage dark and odorous as I entered from the bright afternoon. From the front room the record player was, just as last time, at work. In the parlour high tea was laid. The room was empty except for Kitty, who, cutting a slice of bread, gave a little beck of recognition.

“He’s not in yet, I’m afraid,” said Mrs Pateman again.

“I told him the time I should be coming.” She was the only woman of the household whom I liked: I couldn’t let myself be rough with her.

“The doctor doesn’t have his surgery till six, you see,” Mrs Pateman began a flustered explanation.

“I’m sorry,” I had to say. “I hope there’s nothing much the matter?”

“Of course there isn’t.” Kitty gave a fleering smile. “There’s never anything the matter with him–”

“You didn’t ought to say that about your father.” Mrs Pateman seemed overwhelmed in this house, this “simple home” which even to me was uncomfortably full of egos. Kitty shrugged, looked at me under her eyebrows, and informed me that Dick was camping, and wouldn’t be back for a week. She said it in a manner which was little-me-ish and at the same time hostile, no, not so much hostile as remote from all of them. She might be resenting his having a higher education, while she, appreciably cleverer, had been kept out of one. I found her expression, partly because of its mobility, abnormally difficult to read. I guessed that she might, despite the fluttering, be as hard as the others. That was as far – and perhaps even this I imagined or exaggerated – as I could see that night.

Taking her slice of bread, she went back with light scampering steps to the front room, where I assumed that Cora Ross was waiting. Mrs Pateman, naturally polite, embarrassed, continued to explain about her husband. He was always one for going to the doctor in good time. He had a stiffness in his throat which he thought might be associated with a backache (a combination, I couldn’t help thinking to myself unknown to medical science). He was always careful about what she, echoing him, called “germs”. That accounted, I realised, for the disinfectant smell which hung about this room, even in his absence. He must add, to his other unwelcoming characteristics, a chronic hypochondria.

At last he came in, head thrown back, hand outstretched. He gave me a stately good evening, and sat down to his corned beef and tomato ketchup. Meanwhile his wife was saying: “He didn’t find anything, did he, Percy?”

“Nothing serious,” he said with a condescending smile. “I’m a great believer,” he turned to me, “in taking precautions. I don’t mind telling you, I should recommend anyone of your age to be run over by his doctor once a month.”

I said that I couldn’t stay long. I wanted only to finish up this business of his son. I hadn’t heard until that day that he had been accepted by — (the neighbouring university). That completed the story, and they ought to consider themselves fortunate.

“No,” said Mr Pateman, not angrily but in a level, reasonable fashion. “I can’t be expected to agree with that.”

“I do expect you to agree with that.” I had come to break this tie. To be honest, I didn’t mind a quarrel: but I wasn’t getting it.

“Well then, we shall have to agree to differ, shan’t we?”

“Your son,” I said, “is a remarkably lucky young man. If he were here – by the by I have not had a word from him about his news – if he were here I should tell him so. He might have been thrown out for good. As it is, this is exactly like going on at the university here as though nothing had happened.”