The Malcontents (27 page)

Meanwhile, Thomas Freer, expression not anxious but melancholy, was reflecting. Underneath all his façades, despite the ingenuity of his defences, he didn’t often, or not continuously, deceive himself. He wasn’t going to lose only his son’s company, which unlike his wife he had basked in and enjoyed. He was – not dramatically, not with words but nevertheless in a sense which both of them recognized – going to lose his son. That was what this meant: marriage didn’t matter, but the timing of this departure did. Some of it was his own fault. Some of it was circumstance. That didn’t matter either. The parting did. Thomas Freer loved his son: mixed up in his deviousness, it was nevertheless the simplest thing about him.

Still, his defences were getting to work, and getting to work in their labyrinthine fashion, concealing much, concealing what he felt and didn’t wish to face. Lucidity could be masked over: and Thomas Freer was letting himself mask his with some social lucubrations. The girl wasn’t a brilliant prospect. She had her points, she wasn’t unattractive, she was bright enough. But not a brilliant prospect. Bishops weren’t what they used to be. The Bench had descended several steps down the social scale. Bert Boltwood was a nice little man but – He might go a little further. Probably not, he was a bit too wild. Still, even now, even at that, a Bishop’s daughter
would
do
. She would
just about do
.

Thomas Freer found this conclusion vaguely consolatory. It was only he – and then intermittently – who knew the holes in such defences.

Suddenly, in a resonant tone, he announced: ‘We shall have to ask them in. We shall have to.’

This was another form of defence. Social arrangements were the plinths of an ordered life. Neither of the others recognized what he was doing, confronting each other as they had been for instants without any defence, unguarded.

Kate Freer, brought back to daily things, asked: ‘When? Tomorrow?’ (That was Saturday, precisely a week after the dinner party.)

‘No, I should have thought that was a shade too early. One doesn’t want to rush things.’

‘When then?’

Thomas Freer considered.

‘I’m inclined to think that Sunday would be reasonable. Does that suit you?’ he asked Stephen. ‘Yes, Sunday evening would be reasonable.’

‘Won’t he be preaching?’

‘Well, ask them for nine o’clock. He ought to have finished by then. He
ought
to have.’

Not long after, while they were still sitting round the table, Thomas Freer engrossed in protocol, nine o’clock on this Friday night struck from the cathedral. Stephen was listening for the downstairs bell. Mark wasn’t late. Stephen said: ‘That does seem to be about all, doesn’t it? If you’ll excuse me–’ He contrived to keep his tone as level as though they had been discussing nothing but a cousin’s anniversary, and left them there.

Mark was waiting in the hall. As they went out into the lane, the air was still. The last time they had walked along there together, the bells were going through their combinations, but it would be twenty-four hours before there was another practice, and no sound came from the cathedral tonight. The building stood in the dark, unlit and empty as a ruin.

For an instant, Stephen felt a superstitious tightening or shudder (‘someone walking over my grave’, the old housekeeper would have said): it was a relic from the past, a sense that people had prayed inside there that week, prayed for him. Certainly the Bishop had prayed. It was possible that so had Thomas Freer.

Mark was saying that he had brought Tess in his car.

‘By the way,’ he went on, ‘I’ve told her all I told you this afternoon.’

‘Have you?’

Mark smiled: ‘I didn’t want to be with you both tonight on false pretences.’

‘How did she take it?’

‘She can accept anything. Much more than you can, you know. You’ll find that out.’

As they came to the bottom of the lane, Mark suddenly stopped, resting one hand on a bollard. He said: ‘I don’t think anyone else need know. Or ought to.’

‘She’s discreet.’

‘So are you.’ Mark added: ‘If it helped, I shouldn’t mind all that much. But it wouldn’t do any good. It might give some unnecessary pain.’

He moved out on the street, and then back, one foot restless.

‘I had to let Sylvia know that I was going away. I think she’ll be waiting in the pub. She wants to look after me.’

‘Yes.’

‘I haven’t told her about Bernard. You can see why, can’t you?’

‘I think so.’

‘She wants to look after me. It would mean that I was asking her to.’

‘I wish you could.’

‘Sometimes I do too,’ said Mark. ‘Then Bernard – that would be the first thing I told her. But–’

He hesitated. His spontaneity had left him.

‘She’s a good person. Of course she is. She’s so proud. Only a good person can throw away her pride as she does.’

Quickly Mark began to walk across the street, towards the parking space. Stephen, beside him, had already crossed that street, in this identical place, on his way to the coroner’s office not many hours before.

Tess was sitting in the warm car. As she got out, she caught her breath in the sharp air. She looked expectantly at Stephen: yes, it was all done, he said, she and her parents would be invited to the Freers’ house on Sunday night. ‘With a certain amount of formality.’ Stephen smiled at her.

‘Oh, I shan’t mind that! I shan’t mind that.’ She laughed, kissed him, was delighted, almost as though she hadn’t till now emerged from incredulity.

Taking his arm, pressing it, she walked between them, as they turned to their right, along the street. Stephen noticed that, after a short time, but as though by a conscious decision or effort, she took Mark’s arm also, and pulled him closer to her.

He was leading them to the pub in which they had conferred, after the first alarm, trying to predict the future, the previous Saturday night. It wasn’t an habitual meeting place of theirs, but Mark seemed to be choosing to remind them: some of the future they had tried to predict was past by now: he might have been doing it out of irony, but, so the others took it, more likely to give them what he could of reassurance and peace.

The sign of the turbaned head shone floodlit opposite the darkened shops. They quickened their steps, getting inside out of the cold. The lounge, on a Friday night, was half empty: as Mark had expected, Sylvia was already there, sitting at a table by herself, a glass of gin in front of her. Her great eyes lit up when she saw them. She had paid more than usual attention to her face, blotting out the etched precocious lines.

‘Well!’ she said, as Tess sat beside her and Mark brought tankards of beer.

He remarked without emphasis: ‘Sylvia doesn’t know about you two. I thought you’d like to tell her yourselves–’

‘Yes,’ said Stephen. ‘We’re getting married.’

‘Oh, what luck,’ cried Sylvia. Immediately, without any of her self-consciousness, she leaned round and kissed Tess on the cheek. The two were nothing but acquaintances: so far as they had a relation, it was one, not quite of dislike, but of suspiciousness or something near to mutual jealousy. Yet, though Sylvia was herself careworn, at least for a moment all that was discarded. Everyone there had made a discovery, or would do so when they could look back, which comes to those undergoing a crisis: that personal relations were a luxury, except the rooted ones. The likings of the nerves, the hostilities of the nerves, they all got washed or swept away. A common danger or purpose, and you were living alongside those whom fate had given you. It was only outsiders, elaborating on their own feelings, who attributed the same to people in action: thus misunderstanding the quality of action such as these had gone through, or action on a bigger scale. Mark might have known this by instinct, but Stephen had learned by now: some feelings were simpler, compulsorily simpler, than until inside them one would ever think.

Then Neil arrived, was bought beer by Mark, and also told of Stephen and Tess.

‘Good for you,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you want.’

He was gazing hard-eyed at Sylvia, whom he had neither met nor seen before.

‘Are you in on this?’ he said.

Against that kind of attack, she was composed. She said: ‘I know there’s been some trouble.’

‘You’ll know some more before you’re much older.’

It now appeared, what Stephen and Tess hadn’t realized, that Mark had attempted to collect the other members too, perhaps as a sign of goodbye, of all suspicions having been taken from them now, or a silent acknowledgement of what he couldn’t say.

‘Where is Emma?’ he asked.

‘Gone off.’

‘Where to?’

‘How the hell should I know?’

That was all. He added that she’d probably get into Trotskyist hands, or some such foolery.

‘What about Lance?’

‘I called him.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said he’d rather take a trip on his own.’

Stephen did not suppress a grim smile. Mark said: ‘I wonder. I wonder if we oughtn’t to do something about him.’

‘What can we do?’ said Tess.

‘You could say in court what a splendid guy he is,’ said Neil to Stephen. ‘That would be bleeding nonsense. It’s bleeding nonsense what you’re doing for me.’

‘Not completely.’

‘Stuff it. You’ll have to stop this sort of nonsense. If you’re going to be any good to us.’

Neil was repeating what he said the day before, without alteration or concession, any concession, though he interrupted himself to buy a round of drinks. He said that the only test of an action was objective, did it help the cause or not, nothing else entered. He broke off: ‘You needn’t worry your guts about Lance.’

‘Why not?’

‘He’ll survive.’ He went on: ‘And if he didn’t, it’s his own funeral. He wouldn’t be any loss.’

‘I can’t take that,’ said Tess.

‘Take it or don’t take it. He’ll survive. Or else he’ll dig his own grave.’ He stared round. ‘We’ve been in a war. In a war somebody is going to get hurt. We lost this one, but we haven’t done so badly. Lance might be a casualty, that’s the only one.’

Others were thinking that, since Stephen had in effect told him that Bernard had been the penetrator, Neil didn’t so much as mention him, as though even his name didn’t exist.

‘I’m all right,’ said Neil. ‘I suppose you two are all right.’ He was speaking to Tess and Stephen, and then turned to Mark. ‘I suppose you are. We shall keep at it somehow.’

‘I’m going away,’ said Mark. Sylvia, eyes not leaving him, once more heard him, with an expression open and relaxed, announce his plan.

‘You’re giving up hope, are you?’ said Neil. ‘I can’t say I’m surprised.’

‘No, I’m not giving up hope. But it’s not the same as yours.’

‘There’s only one kind of hope in this world.’

But there were different kinds of hope, strong and passionate, round that table. Tess, flesh and spirit at one, able to assimilate her knowledge of Mark, still certain that human beings were capable of good – that she would sometime, not too far ahead, in her own time, find a better life: Stephen’s, more shadowed, remorseful and less able to assimilate, his mind not trustful and becoming less so, and yet his emotions in tune with hers, more simply so than his mind told him: Mark’s, which, since he hadn’t a religious faith, he didn’t explain, but seemed to rest in existence itself: and Sylvia’s.

When Mark got up to fetch their final round, she couldn’t stop herself speaking to Stephen. He was sitting next to her, but her question, abandoned, out of control, could have been heard by others.

‘Have I any chance?’

Stephen said: ‘I hope so.’ He didn’t know what to predict. He repeated: ‘I hope so,’ and meant it.

She said: ‘Shall I go after him? Wherever he goes?’

‘Could you?’ He was thinking, despite her spirit, she was a conventional girl at heart, she wasn’t made for the reckless choice.

‘I ought to.’

Before Mark returned, she just had time to say: ‘Steve (she hadn’t called him that since they were children). I envy you, you know. You’ve found your way, haven’t you? I haven’t. And God knows he hasn’t either.’

When at closing time they left the pub, and the five of them walked back – without the argument, the agitations or the false optimism of the Saturday night before – through the empty museum-like streets, Stephen couldn’t get those last words out of his thoughts. Yes, he and Tess had found a way. So had Neil. Give and take the chances of life, part of what was to come one could already see. It gave confidence, it gave one’s own kind of hope. Not so with the others. Indeterminacy. The word from his own trade chased through his mind. One couldn’t foretell their fate – except the fate that must happen to everybody. Did that give them, even Sylvia, a glimpse of limitless expectations? Was there something lost, when one had found one’s way?

Of course there was. But not to lose it, was like not cutting the ties of youth. Stephen was thinking of those two as though they were younger than he was. Sylvia would renounce limitless expectations that moment, if only she could change her fate for Tess’. Would Mark change with him? Mark had never known limits, he behaved as though complete free will was his. Sometimes such expectations gave others a flicker of envy, the mirror-image of Sylvia’s: but, Stephen thought, his concern wouldn’t be over, no, they wouldn’t be safe until they had found a way.

They were all standing together, in sight of the cathedral (no shudder for Stephen now, no footstep of someone walking over his grave). They were all, except Sylvia, talking with a kind of comfort, like passengers having got over mountains in an aircraft, the air still turbulent, but with the assurance passing round that the worst of it was over.

Published by House of Stratus

George Passant In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series Lewis Eliot tells the story of George Passant, a Midland solicitor’s managing clerk and idealist who tries to bring freedom to a group of people in the years 1925 to 1933.