The Malcontents (3 page)

At that Stephen was, for the first time at the table, fully alert.

‘But you’ll leave Tess with us for a bit, will you, sir? We’ll get her safely home.’

‘Oh, we trust you, Stephen,’ said the Bishop’s wife, with a smile which exuded confidence in her own judgement. She had discovered, or thought she had, that there was tenderness between her daughter and Stephen. Of which Mrs Boltwood wholeheartedly approved, and had already had delectable daydreams planning the wedding.

Outside, a clamour of bells had started. ‘Practising,’ said the Bishop. ‘Good chaps, giving their time on a Saturday night.’ He began to stir his short strong legs. ‘Well, well, Tom, it’s been a very fine dinner, I must say.’

Thomas Freer said: ‘It’s always good to see you, Bert.’

As the Bishop got up, he patted his daughter and, in homely fashion, told her not to be too late.

In the lane, when Tess and the young men had at last got free, the bells were clanging: not a single bell, but the whole peal, shuddering out with mathematical solemnity. The night had turned colder, the sky was now brilliant with stars behind the spire, but none of them spared a backward glance. They were half-running to reach the pub in time. During the evening, Stephen had managed to give Tess the first sketch of the news: now he was telling her more. Tess’ mother was right in thinking that there was a tie between these two: but she didn’t know what the relation was, and she certainly didn’t know that Tess, in addition to loving Stephen, was committed in another sense, and was one of the seven whom they called the core.

Their steps echoed in the empty street, past the school, the bank. Then the black windows of shops, one or two passers-by. The mouth of the market place, the lights of the Saracen’s Head. There was Neil St John, waiting for them in the corner, coming towards them on his heavy cyclist’s thighs.

‘What’s this in aid of?’

Quickly Stephen said no more than he had said to Mark four hours before.

‘We can look after that,’ Neil’s squashed face was set, flushed up to the high temples, where the hair didn’t grow.

‘We’ve got to take it,’ said Stephen, voice cool and biting, ‘that someone’s on to us.’

‘Sod them. Sod the whole gang of them.’

Neil was exuding anger, all through his compact powerful body. His capacity for passion was no surprise to the rest of them, but it still impressed them and made him formidable. It would have been hard for an outsider, looking on, to guess whether he or Stephen had more authority over this group, or which was likely to be it’s leader. What was certain was that the others took for granted this young man’s animal force, took his personality for granted and had ceased to wonder about him.

Earlier in their acquaintanceship, which had begun about two years before, they had done so. He was actually the youngest of them, only twenty, and a student in sociology at the local university, the one Tess was attending. He came from a family much poorer than any of theirs, poorer even than the Bishop’s used to be, and from a slice of society that even the Bishop wouldn’t have known first-hand. His father was a docker, their home was in Bootle, how they had acquired that grand-sounding surname no one knew, and Neil himself cursed it away as though he had been an American black loaded with a slave-master’s name. His father and mother were both Irish Catholics, and that was another heritage which Neil cursed away.

He hadn’t yet become an intimate friend of the other three, but he was one of their springs of action, and they trusted him. That was why he was the first person Stephen had asked for that night. In fact, it had been his initiative, more than anyone else’s, which had started their present plan: the plan which, as they sat round the table in the pub, once old-fashioned, now tarted up, fairy lights and noise and all, with a jukebox conveniently blanketing all they said, seemed now at risk.

Mark, efficient, gentle with the barmaid, had bought pints of beer just on the call of time. They had no need to discuss the plan, which they all knew off by heart. Both as part of his field work and as part of his politics, Neil in the past year had been ‘casing the joint’ of the back streets in the town. Near his own lodgings, he had discovered a street of terraced houses let to West Indian families: in some the conditions were ‘all right by Irish standards’: in one section of three houses the blacks were being rack-rented as they might have been in a nineteenth-century slum. Those facts were not in dispute. All four had visited the rooms, and so had the other three members of the core. Two families to one room: a turnover of comings and goings which defeated the local authorities: evictions of some immigrants who didn’t know the laws nor whom to turn to.

If the victims had been white, that would have been bad enough. But they weren’t white, and for all these young men and women, that brought them to a fighting-point. This Saturday night no one foresaw what was soon to happen: and when it did happen, some simplicities were forgotten. But there were real simplicities. Tess was concerned for sheer misery: Mark wanted people to be good: Neil was outraged by the helplessness of the poor: Stephen, who sometimes seemed the hardest and most sceptical, couldn’t tolerate the sight of suffering. But though they were affected each in a different fashion, they were together about race. To them race, or rather the wiping-away of race and its effects, was as near a faith as any of them had, or as most people ever had. So far it was simple. But the plan did not end there, but began. Neil had tracked down the sub landlord of those three houses. He too was a West Indian, with the name Finlayson. He had been persuaded to talk (it was here that the first scruples had entered and been argued away). The chain of property led from him – that was true in law, and, anyone could persuade himself, in fact – back to an agent: and beyond the agent to the ultimate owner of the whole street, who turned out to be an influential Tory MP, a member of the Shadow Cabinet, and one who was proved to have interests in South Africa.

‘That’ll blow the roof off the bastards,’ Neil had said.

This could be made a master stroke against racialism. It had to be well timed. Such a chance wouldn’t come again. Anti-racialists in all universities, not only this one, would join in. This core had their contacts with others. So they had waited until all the ‘presentation’ was complete. They had plenty of advisers, public relations men, open politicians and secret ones: no one except themselves, though, had been told the whole truth: that was at the insistence of Stephen, who had the clearest mind among them. In precisely two weeks and three days from this Saturday, ‘the balloon’, to use Neil’s exhorting phrase, ‘would be ready to go up’. Now it was under attack. As they faced the news, they felt a cause endangered, faith denied, and anger, including moral anger: some of them felt also traces of guilty compunction, of secret knowledge driven underground, and perhaps of fear.

When they had to leave the pub and walked back towards the street, opposite the cathedral, where Mark’s car was parked, they were still talking in low tones, although there was no one to hear.

‘We can’t stop now,’ said Mark, fervent gaze traversing them all, ‘that’s the one thing clear.’

‘I hope it’s clear to everyone,’ said Stephen.

‘It’d better be,’ Neil burst out, but he, as well as the others, waited for Stephen to go on. His temper was often below the surface, so were his patches of eloquence: and they had learned when they had to listen to him.

‘This may not be pretty,’ he said. ‘They’ve all (he meant the other three) got to be told. So that they can get out if that’s what they choose. Tomorrow night.’

‘If anyone gets out now’, said Neil, ‘then we’re finished with them.’

‘In certain circumstances,’ Stephen remarked, ‘they might feel that wasn’t such a deprivation as we think.’

Mark gave a chuckle, spirits high in the excitement, but Tess intervened: ‘I don’t think anyone will, you know.’

‘They’ve had it bloody easy up to now.’ That was Neil, suddenly as deliberate as Stephen.

‘No, but Emma’s solid, isn’t she? And so is Bernard–’

‘Lance?’

‘We all know about him,’ said Tess. ‘But I think he has his pride.’

She was speaking unassertively, but with responsibility. And she had some: for it was through her, young as she was, that the core had come together. Meeting Stephen through the cathedral functions, and Mark as Stephen’s friend, she had brought them in touch with Neil and the others at the university: as he learned about the local plans, Stephen had decided that here, on his vacations from Cambridge, was the place to act. But Tess was speaking not only with responsibility, but with a kind of modest vanity. In most things, intellectual and otherwise, she deferred to Stephen, and often to Mark: but about people she had a sense, which would some day turn into a maternal certainty, that her judgement was better than theirs, not least when it came to themselves.

The cathedral bells were silent now: so was the narrow street opposite, down which they walked, not often arguing but making contingency plans, walked to the end and back and kept retracing their steps while the clock chimed eleven, then the quarter and the half-hour. It was a street of Georgian houses, once elegant, such as might have suited Thomas Freer’s taste, but all converted into lawyers’ offices, not even a caretaker living there on a Saturday night.

How much did ‘they’ know? Who were ‘they’? Stephen reported that his father hadn’t been precise, and presumably didn’t know: the information could have come from a colleague who might very well have political connections. It wasn’t certain how much they knew, or what they intended.

‘But we always underestimate the other side,’ he said. ‘We mustn’t make that mistake this time.’

What could the other side do? It depended on how good their intelligence was. ‘It can’t be all that good.’ Neil, despite outbursts in which he was abusing them and all they stood for (‘they’ll never give in until we get rid of them, and that goes for everyone you know’), reminding the others that they came from that provenance themselves, was being realistic. ‘Someone couldn’t keep his mouth shut all the time, that’s all.’

That was what it looked like. One of them must have let a word slip, perhaps after some drink, perhaps a vague euphoric threat against an eminent person, perhaps cheering someone up at a black and white party. Yes, in the narrow street, shut in by the tall houses, they said it must have been something like that.

‘But that might be enough,’ said Stephen.

It wouldn’t need much insight to anticipate, not all, but some of their own moves. And the enemy’s right course would be to get in first. That might not happen, but it had to be reckoned with. A counter-campaign, starting soon. What kind of campaign? Again it was a question of how good the intelligence was.

Stephen said that he would press his father to make inquiries. Those might have to wait until Monday. Meanwhile, they ought to consider hurrying up their own moves: once they were in the open, they couldn’t be quite silenced, the important part of the job would have been achieved.

None of them seemed specially nervous as they walked up and down, up and down the street. They weren’t anxious by temperament, any of them, not even Stephen, who had the most foresight. The adrenalin was pouring through them, the exhilaration of being near the point of action. And also, the more they talked, the more they listened to the hard realistic estimates of Stephen and Neil, the further the dangers receded. It was an alarm, but, the more they looked at it, it became less of an alarm.

‘Well, that’s all we can do tonight,’ said Neil all of a sudden, not long after the half-hour struck. ‘See you tomorrow.’

With that by way of good night, he turned out of the street into Friar Lane.

‘Going to see Emma,’ Mark observed, as the footsteps died away.

‘Perhaps,’ said Tess. ‘Good luck to them.’

‘He might have told us,’ Mark went on, and the others smiled at him. Within minutes, they had returned to the car park, and there Stephen took Tess in his arms. While the kiss lasted, Mark was opening the car door: for here Stephen’s authority had broken down, he didn’t drive, he had to leave it to his friend to take the girl home. As he crossed the road in front of the cathedral, he waved back to the two of them inside the car.

When Mark was driving them up the London Road, he and Tess reminded each other of the plans. There was no more to say than had already been said that night, but it was a comfort to repeat themselves.

‘It will be all right,’ said Mark, like an older brother.

‘It’s got to be,’ said Tess, like a sister, taking care of him in her turn.

Soon, past the gleaming shops, past the station, under the neon lights, they came to the park corner. Away to the left, in the back streets, was Neil’s room, and, not half a mile away, the houses whose existence had set them going. Yet neither of them gave those houses a thought. They had become as abstract as the diplomatic causes of a war, or the origins of a family quarrel. Instead Mark was asking: ‘How are things with you and Stephen?’

‘Fine,’ she said.

For Mark, the whole evening seemed to have passed out of mind, and that was genuine. If he had glanced at her, he would have seen that her expression was diffident, radiant, stubborn. She couldn’t switch thoughts easily as he could, but memories and hopes were flooding within her and shone out of her face. And also she couldn’t resist another half-thought flickering in the air. She wasn’t at all vain, she was glad and rather surprised if a man was attracted to her, she was grateful that she had a little charm, yes, thank God, for Stephen. But yet, driving home late at night, she was ready for most of the men in their circle to (if she had spoken, she would have used an old-fashioned phrase) make a pass. Not so Mark. Not a sign or a touch of it.

‘You’ll have to be careful,’ he was saying. ‘He wants to be loved: and he doesn’t want to be shut in. Somehow you’ll have to find the way between the two.’

He really cares, she was thinking. He would like her to be good and happy, and Stephen too. No one else cared as much. And yet he didn’t seem to want that kind of happiness for himself. So handsome, so kind. He was so sensitive about others’ lives.