The Sleep of Reason (20 page)

Another citation; looking out over the hall, I felt, or imagined, that my sound eye was getting tired. I didn’t observe that a note was being passed up to Lufkin: in fact, during that ceremony no one but Lufkin would have had a note passed to him. I was surprised to be tapped on the arm by my neighbour and be given a piece of paper. On it was written, in a great sprawling hand, the simple inscription:
Mansel is all right
.
L
.

Rubin, last on the list, had returned to his seat with his scroll; Francis Getliffe gave the valedictory address, and Margaret led me away. I had begged myself off the mass luncheon, and she and I ate sandwiches in an office. I told her, not that she needed telling, that I should be glad when the Court was over. She knew that I couldn’t rely on my energy that afternoon, that I, who had been to so many committees, was nervous before this one.

Because I was nervous, I arrived in the Court room too early, and sat there alone. I read over the agenda: it was a long time since any agenda had looked so meaningless. Item No. 7 read:
Constitution of Disciplinary Committee
. It would take a couple of hours to get down to it. Previously I had thought that Leonard Getliffe and his friends had been well-advised, the tactics were good: now the words became hazy and I couldn’t concentrate.

The others clattered in noisily from the luncheon, some of them rosy after their wine. Francis Getliffe took the ornamental chair, looking modestly civilian now that his golden robes were taken off. Arnold Shaw, flushed and bobbish, sat on his right hand. Francis was just going to rap on the table when his son came and whispered to me: “I’m very sorry that you had to come.” Civil of him, I thought without gratitude. Did he know that, if you are in any kind of conflict, the first law is – be present in the flesh?

Francis Getliffe cleared his throat and said that, before we began, he would like to say how sorry the entire Court was to hear of my misfortune, and how they all wished me total success in my operation. Several voices broke in with “my lord chairman”, saying how they wished to support that. I duly thanked them. Down below the words I was cursing them. Just as energy had seeped away, so had good nature. The last thing I could take was either commiseration or kind wishes.

As though at a distance from me, the meeting lumbered into its groove. Lumbered, perhaps, a little more quickly than usual, for Francis, though a stately chairman, was surreptitiously an impatient one. Someone by my side crossed, one by one, five items off. The sixth was
Extension to Biology Building
, and even Francis could not prevent the minutes ticking the afternoon away. The voices round me didn’t sound as though they could have enough of it. The UGC! Architects! Appeals! Claims of other subjects! Master building plan! Emotions were heated, the voices might have been talking about love or the preservation of peace. Of all the academic meetings I had attended, at least half the talking time, and much more than half the expense of spirit, had been consumed in discussions of building. Whatever would they do when all the buildings were put up? The answer, I thought, though not that afternoon, was simple: they would pull some down and start again.

At length I heard the problem being referred (by an exercise of firmness on Francis’ part) to the Buildings Sub-Committee. Sharply Francis called out “Item No. 7.” I gripped myself: I had to be with them now. It was hard to make the effort.

Focusing on Francis, I was puzzled that he didn’t ask the Vice-Chancellor to leave us. Whether Shaw knew it or not, he was going to be argued over.

Instead Francis gazed down the table.

“Professor Getliffe,” he said to his son, “I think you have something to say on this matter.”

“Yes, my lord chairman,” Leonard said to his father. “My colleagues and I want to suggest that we postpone it. We should like to postpone it until next term.”

“That would give me a chance,” said Shaw briskly, automatically (Good God, I was thinking again, still not reacting, how many months would he have survived in Whitehall?) “to send round a paper on the present arrangements for discipline. And how I propose to make one or two changes.”

“Thank you, Vice-Chancellor,” said Francis, who might have been thinking as I did. “Anyway,” he addressed the room, “I must say, I think there is some merit in Professor Getliffe’s suggestion, if it appeals to the Court. I know this seems an important piece of business to some of us, and it would be a mistake to rush it. I’m anxious that everyone should have the opportunity to give us his views. I believe Sir Lewis is interested, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, I am rather interested.”

“Well then. We hope you’ll be able to attend the Court next term. Completely recovered. Then I shall propose we might set aside the first part of the meeting for this business. We shall very much want to hear your opinion.”

I said, yes, I should try to attend the Court. In temper, in ultimate let-down, I could keep to the official language. Would anyone to whom the official language might as well have been Avar or Estonian, realise that they were considering me, that this was a put-up job between father and son?

Leaving the meeting in time to escape conversation, I got a university car to myself to take me to the Residence. There, among the smell of leather (to me an anxious smell), I sat in a state both harsh-tempered and depressed. The let-down, yes. The wasted effort, yes. The physical discomfort, yes. But this was a state, concealed from others, that I used to know, and didn’t often now. The bizarre thing was, I had got my way. Through the Getliffes’ indulgence I had won Shaw four months’ grace. If I had been at my most competent, I shouldn’t have done better than that. I might easily have done much worse (there would be time, there was still the residue of a planner working within me, to lobby Denis Geary and some of the others). I should never know whether – if the Getliffes hadn’t treated me with pity – I could have made my effort that afternoon at all.

When Margaret saw me enter our bedroom at the Residence, she said, “You’ve been doing too much.” I said, “I’ve been doing nothing at all.” Before I told her the story, she made me lie on the bed: then, reassured, she let me talk. This time I wasn’t using the official language: Margaret was used to me when I wasn’t giving events the benefit of the doubt. She sat beside me, looking down with a curious expression, clear-eyed.

She told me it was six o’clock, nearly time to dress for the dinner that night. Was I going to be able to manage it? I nodded. She didn’t protest: she just remarked that a drink would help, and she would find one. Soon she returned, with Arnold Shaw following her, in his shirt sleeves and carrying a tray, eupeptic, enjoying himself as butler. He poured a large whisky for her, and an even larger one for me. He splashed in soda, spooned the ice. Then, as he picked up the tray, ready to depart, he said to me, with a wise reproving frown: “It was irresponsible of you. To come here today. It was irresponsible, you know.”

The door shut behind him, brisk executive feet pattered down the passage. I took a gulp at my glass, and then I laughed. It was a sour laugh, but it was at least a laugh.

Margaret joined in. “I’ve been wanting to do that for quite some time,” she said. “I’ve been wondering just when you wouldn’t mind.”

Since I couldn’t knot a tie easily one-eyed, she did it for me, and I went down before her into the drawing-room. David Rubin and Francis Getliffe had already arrived, and as I joined them Rubin was saying that sometimes, this autumn, he had felt his intellectual analysis might be wrong. He meant, his analysis of the chances of peace. It had always been blacker than either of ours, more pessimistic than that of anyone we met. Yet he knew as much as we did, and more. He said he was inclined to trust his analysis, not his feelings: said it with a shrug and began to cachinnate. He was not the lightest of company when the cachinnation broke out and he was predicting the worst. Still, he said, sometimes he felt he might be wrong. If so, he went on sarcastically, it wouldn’t be any thanks to people like us. We had, all three of us, done our best, we had spent months and years of our lives, we had tried to find ways of action. It hadn’t affected the situation, said Rubin, by .001 of 1%. If things did go right, it would be no thanks to us: it would be due to something as random and as incalculable as a change in the weather.

Others came up to us. Francis was being less fatalistic, when David Rubin took me aside. In a corner of the room he indicated my patched eye and said: “This is a nuisance, Lewis.”

It sounded brusque. But it wasn’t so. He looked at me with monkey-sad eyes, incongruous above his immaculate dinner jacket (his colleagues gossiped, why should a man of his morbid pessimism appear to be competing as the Best Dressed Man of the Year?). His eyes were sad, his nerve ends were as fine as Margaret’s. He wasn’t going to harass me with sympathy, or with alternative plans for surgical treatment.

“Yes,” I said, without any bluff.

“These retinas are getting rather common.”

I asked him why.

“Quite simple. We’re all living longer, that’s all. You’ve got to expect bits of the machine to break down.”

He had judged it right, he was being a support.

“You’ve played your luck, you know,” he said.

He went on: he had a check-up every six months. When did I last have a check-up?

I said something about American hypochondria.

“Maybe,” said Rubin, with astringent comradeship. “They’ll find something sooner or later. Let’s see, you’re ten years older than I am. But remember, I did my best work before I was thirty. I bet you, I’ve felt older than you have – I bet you I have done for years.”

But, when we had gone into dinner, the courses clattering in the most lucullan of all Arnold Shaw’s feasts, I sat with Rubin’s brand of consolation wearing off. The amnesia of the first drinks wore off too: going into hospital next day, I had to stop drinking early in the meal, though I didn’t want to. The mechanics of politeness jangled on: I turned from the honorary graduate’s wife on my right to the one on my left and back again: they found me dull: I just wanted the day to end.

There was one diversion, though. Vicky had led the women out, and the rest of us had reseated ourselves at Shaw’s end of the table. Shaw was in excelsis. He had made four distinguished scholars honorary graduates. There was also Lufkin, who had been forced upon him by the engineers, but still he was good enough. Shaw saw them all round him. He was a man of uncomplicated pleasures, and he was content. He was also content because he had given them splendid wine, and drunk a good deal of it himself. Again, Lufkin was an exception. True to his bleak rule, he had drunk one whisky before dinner, another with the meal, and now, while the others were enjoying Shaw’s port, he allowed himself a third. But it was he who dominated the table. He was explaining certain circumstances, to him still astonishing though they had happened a couple of years before, surrounding his retirement.

“I decided it was right to go. Before there was any risk of being a liability to my people. Not that I wasn’t still at my best, or I should have got out long before.” He sat there skull-faced, still youthful-looking for a man in his late seventies. He delivered himself as though indifferent to his audience, completely absorbed in his own drama, projecting it like something of transcendental importance and objective truth.

“What do you imagine happened?” It was the kind of rhetorical question no one could answer, yet by which men as experienced as Rubin and Francis Getliffe were hypnotised.

“Nothing happened.” Lufkin answered himself with stony satisfaction.

He went on: “I made that industry.” It sounded gigantesque: it was quite true. He had possessed supreme technological insight and abnormal will. He had made an industry, not a fortune. He had more than enough money for his needs, but he had nothing to spend it on. By the standards of his industrial colleagues, he was not a rich man. “I made that industry, and everything inside it. I used to tell my people,
I am your
best friend
. And they knew,
I was their best friend
.”

Heads, hypnotised, were nodding.

“What did they do?” Silence again. Again Lufkin answered himself. “Nothing.” He spoke with greater confidence than ever. “When any of my managers retired, the whole works turned out. When my deputy retired, the whole organisation sent a testimonial. What did they do for me?”

This time he didn’t give an answer. He said: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

He repeated: “I wasn’t
hurt
. I was
surprised
.”

When we joined the women, it was only minutes before Margaret spoke to Vicky and Arnold Shaw and took me off to bed. Alone in our room, I said to her: “Paul Lufkin is lonely.” I was wondering, how used were the others to this singular display of emotion? Horizontal fission, we used to call it. Lufkin sincerely believed that he wasn’t hurt. And yet, even he must realise at least that he felt lost. After great power for forty years, power all gone. After a lifetime of action, nothing to do. Once he had talked of retiring to Monaco. Now, so far as I knew, he lived in Surrey and came to London once a week for the committee of a charity. “Paul Lufkin is lonely,” I said.

“He’s not the only one,” said Margaret.

I asked what she meant.

“Didn’t you realise that Vicky was waiting for a telephone call all night, poor girl?”

In the solipsist bubble in which I had gone through that day, I had scarcely noticed her.

“Did she hear?”

Margaret shook her head.

“That nephew of yours. I’m afraid he’s throwing her over, don’t you think so?”

“It doesn’t look good.” I was sitting on the bed, just having taken off the eyepatch. I was trying to speak about Vicky, but the black edge cut out the light, the orange fringe was giddily swimming, and I let out that complaint only for myself.

THE next morning, tea trays on our bed, Margaret sketched out the day’s timetable. There was a train just after one, we could be in London in a couple of hours: that would bring us to the hospital before tea. The less time I had in the dark, the better, I said. I knew that I should have to lie on my back, both eyes blindfolded, to give the retina hours to settle down.