A Coat of Varnish (5 page)

‘Of course, he’s a businessman,’ she told them. ‘His sort of business doesn’t always look straightforward if you don’t understand it. But, you must believe it, he’s kept to the rules. He’s kept to the rules. He’s much too clever not to. And, you’ve got to remember, money matters to him, of course it does, but his political career comes a long way first. He’d never take the slightest risk with that.’

Kate had told Humphrey before that the girl was no fool. That was just about the correct line for her, he thought. Whether she was right or wrong, he had no conception and no way of making one. He could see that, unfortunately, Kate did have a conception, and a powerfully negative one. Kate would look after anyone in trouble: she was fond of this girl, and felt responsibility for her, since she worked in Kate’s office at the hospital. Not that the girl had the faintest practical need to work. Her father lavished money on her, cars, horses, anything she asked for, or even didn’t ask for. Yet, in the modern fashion, she needed to have this job – at which, Kate had told Humphrey, she perversely didn’t show maximum concentration or energy. In any case, Kate had to protect her. She was doing so, not effusively, but with a kind of astringent warmth.

It was clear to Humphrey that Kate had the lowest opinion of the girl’s father, and that she accepted all that his enemies were saying. To Susan, she showed a little temper and impatience spontaneous enough, like a slap in the face to rouse one who wouldn’t fight, but that helped conceal what her judgment really was. Well, Humphrey thought, she was perceptive, she was often in the Thirkill home, she knew the man. She might well be right. On the other hand, Humphrey had to remind himself that Kate, so willing to devote herself to anyone who needed it, and despised by Lady Ashbrook in consequence, was not impartial about political personages. Kate could be funny, sharp-tempered, warm-natured, but in politics she made Lady Ashbrook look wishy-washy, a lukewarm sitter on the fence, too ready to give the Labour Party and the Government, anyone connected with them, the benefit of the doubt. Kate didn’t do so. It would seem to her in the nature of things that Tom Thirkill was corrupt. For sheer unqualified Toryism you had to go to women of her class, Humphrey thought. Kate came from a military family, a line of officers in a county regiment, not a smart one. She had their virtues, and just occasionally, in the midst of her worldly sense, their beliefs. She couldn’t understand why Humphrey should be sceptical and uncommitted. He found it endearing that for once her charity deserted her. She found him endearing, but didn’t budge.

Susan broke out with another grief, or maybe the same one in another shape. Lady Ashbrook’s grandson was coming home for a few days’ leave. He would hear this new mutter, menace, against her father. Was it going to spoil things between them?

‘It mustn’t,’ said Kate.

‘Will he hold it against me?’

‘Not if he’s any good.’ Kate’s tone was hard and tough.

‘I don’t know what he’ll think,’ cried Susan.

‘I’d have thought he’ll take it pretty lightly.’ Humphrey dared not overdo it; but he had to help Kate out. ‘He knows about the Press. After all, he’s lived in this world.’

‘Not in Daddy’s world.’ Another of Susan’s flashes of realism.

She wanted to talk about the young man, and that enlivened her, perhaps giving the comfort within a love affair when just talking of the loved one seems for mirage-moments to make them all well. Kate hadn’t really had the chance to speak much to Mister, had she? Mister was much more unusual than he seemed. He was artistic, but he kept it dark. He wasn’t sure that he ought to stay in the Army. Perhaps he was wasted. She didn’t want to see him getting bored. He did get bored easily. That was a weakness, and she had to watch it.

Mister was a curious name to hear a girl utter so possessively. It was what his family called him, except for his grandmother with her trenchant Loseby. As a nickname it seemed inexplicable to nearly everyone, except to a very few familiar with certain tribal customs: to them it conveyed two messages, which told that he had once had an elder brother now dead and, second, where Mister had been to school. No one around would have picked up these messages, except Humphrey who was bred to those tribal customs and, surprisingly, a close friend of his living nearby, an American psychologist of scholarly perseverance and a sardonic fascination with the relics of aristocracy.

With Susan temporarily in better heart, once or twice giving secretive smiles, Kate took charge, ordered her to wash her face and make up again, and then go home. Had she anything to put her to sleep? She kissed Kate, thanked her, managed a challenging smile as she said goodnight.

‘Poor girl,’ said Kate, as they heard the downstairs door bang.

‘Poor girl indeed.’

‘What do you think of the boyfriend?’

‘He’s very amiable. Also fairly lightweight.’

‘He’s had too much love. He’s had too much love from her.’

‘Of course. She’s doing it all wrong.’

The two of them were speaking the same personal language, as though they were more intimate than in fact they were.

‘You realise that she’s been sleeping with him for a couple of years?’

‘It seemed a fair guess,’ said Humphrey.

‘You realise that she has slept with quite a few men and it has always gone wrong in the end?’

‘That I shouldn’t have guessed,’ he said. ‘I might have thought she longed for it and was sad at what she was missing.’

Kate grinned. ‘It surprised me a bit,’ she said. ‘But whatever she’s missed, it isn’t that.’

The room in which they were sitting was like Kate herself, well groomed, tidy, roses on one table, sweet peas on another. She did her own gardening, her own housework, as well as being the second in command of administration at a large hospital. She wasn’t tall, she wasn’t heavy but had strong shoulders, strong hips, firm flesh on shoulders and thighs. It was a physique made to wear, made to work. It was also a physique which had a special attraction for Humphrey. He was one of those men to whom some physical disparities were in themselves attractive. He liked, more than liked, the contrast between the strong active body and the face above. The face might have belonged to a different woman. It was fine and delicate. She hadn’t Celia’s small-featured prettiness, her forehead was broad, eyebrows arched, eyes piercing grey, nose aquiline, narrow, long. It was a face which could look high-spirited and younger than she was (she had just turned forty), but it also told to those who studied faces that she lived in touch with her own experience.

‘I suppose you’ve no news of Lady A – you can’t have?’ he asked.

‘You can’t have, either, can you?’

He told her that he had had a talk with the doctor, irksome, inconclusive.

‘I rather like him. You don’t.’

‘I don’t react as strongly as you do,’ Humphrey said. ‘Either way.’

She smiled, and said that she would telephone Lady Ashbrook that evening. ‘It’s not exactly a treat, talking to her,’ she remarked. ‘All she wants is to get me off the line.’

‘Don’t bother about ringing her,’ he said. ‘You do enough for duty. Much more than enough.’

‘Oh, one can’t leave her alone. You can imagine what it must be like.’ She gave a rueful diffident grimace. ‘Of course, she hasn’t any use for me.’

Humphrey knew that Kate was painfully honest when others didn’t like her. She even seemed to expect it unless proved otherwise. He said that Lady A had about as little affection to spare as anyone on earth, but that didn’t encourage Kate. So he left it, and asked: ‘How is Monty today?’ Monty was her husband.

‘He’s resting,’ she replied, without expression.

Monty was fifteen years older than she was, and they had been married for nearly as long. Humphrey, not pretending to himself that he was disinterested, had tried to find out about the marriage. She was as loyal as Susan to her father, but Humphrey had discovered something, though not all, from other sources. It seemed to have been a curious history. At the time that Kate first met him, Monty appeared to have had a high reputation as a philosopher – to be precise, as a researcher in mathematical logic. What he did, or was trying to do, was entirely incomprehensible to Humphrey, and must have been so to Kate. So far as Humphrey could understand from academic friends, Monty had an ambition to lay down the foundations of mathematics from the inside, proving them to be a man-made construction. It was a megalomaniac ambition, said one of the academics. There had never been anything in it; the man was wasting his time. But Kate had been ready to adore a genius, Monty had the aura of a genius, and was ready to be adored.

It seemed strange to Humphrey that Kate’s shrewdness and insight hadn’t saved her. Maybe he didn’t realise, or didn’t want to, that she also had a longing to worship – when she was a young woman, possibly even now. Humphrey did realise that there must have been physical charm for her, too. With a marmoreal head, abstracted, stately in his movements, Monty was still an impressive-looking man.

Kate had duly married and cherished her genius. He had retired from his academic post in order to have all his time to think. They had probably (Humphrey’s information wasn’t certain about this) bought this house together. Since then she had brought into it the money they lived on. There was her salary from the hospital. With her excess energy, she taught courses in personnel management at a technical college not far away. Even so, their income was low, by the standards of the Square, and she had to eke it out. Fortunately Monty believed that living meagrely would prolong his life. He had taken excessive care about his health. When she had told Humphrey that he was resting, that was the most frequent answer she gave to enquiries about Monty. So far as Humphrey’s academic friends recalled, Monty hadn’t published any kind of paper for years.

‘Couldn’t you do with a rest yourself?’ Humphrey asked, though he had to do it carefully, tentatively.

‘No chance of that.’

‘Aren’t you rather tired?’

‘Not too tired to give you a drink.’

Unlike Lady Ashbrook, Kate enjoyed being hospitable, though how she afforded the liquor she was ready to pour out Humphrey couldn’t begin to imagine. She gave him a considerable whisky and took one herself. They were able to forget about others outside that room, and there was happiness quivering in the air. There was also strain, a not unpleasurable, but pervasive strain. They had not exchanged a word of love, not ever, nor of desire, scarcely even of affection. If either had given an indication of wishing to go to bed, it would have happened. Humphrey knew it; so, he was sure, did she.

He didn’t move, and tried to keep his voice quite steady. He wanted more. Whether she did, there he couldn’t trust his own hopes. He hadn’t defined how much she was bound to her husband. She certainly took her duty seriously, but she might feel more than duty. If so, Humphrey would do better to withdraw at once. A light come, light go affair would be a relief for a while, but no good to either of them.

Yet they were happy. Just before the crystals of recognition were beginning to form, it was good to sit there, the sun streaming in, a hot and sharp-edged beam falling across her lap. It was she who had to answer to herself – to conscience, if that was dividing her, or to something deeper than that. For him there was no struggle. So the initiative had to come from her. Through that glowing evening, she didn’t take it, and in time Humphrey went away.

‘It’s impossible to enter into an extreme situation,’ Alec Luria said to Humphrey, ‘unless you’re in it yourself. Or have been in it not too long ago.’

It was the Friday afternoon of that same week, and they were walking, in the constant sunshine, round the Square gardens. Lady Ashbrook, not departing from her timetable, could be seen sitting on a bench. They had been talking of her, but it was that sight which was the trigger for Luria’s remark. Humphrey waved, Luria swept off his panama hat with an unhurrying bow. Lady Ashbrook inclined her parasol, a minimal gesture, in their direction.

Even if Humphrey’s own company had been welcome, about which from day to day he wasn’t certain, he wouldn’t have taken Luria along to meet her. She had conceived one of her harsh dislikes for him. It had made no impact, Humphrey telling her that this was the most distinguished man around that summer. Humphrey had introduced them; she had demonstrated her own kind of politeness, which was not polite, and said later to Humphrey that she didn’t wish to make new acquaintances. That was all.

‘You can’t enter into an extreme situation,’ Luria went on brooding. ‘No one has much capacity for feeling. It could be something we’re all losing. There are times that frightens me. I’d choose for us to feel bad feeling than not feel at all. I’d choose for us to be cruel with feeling than to be cruel without. The evidence is that that’s how the maximum horrors have been done.’

Luria had a knack of making a scrap of conversation sound like a prophecy. Once or twice in the future, Humphrey was to recall this one. Perhaps it was that his manner was solemn, his voice an octave deeper than an English voice, his face set and patriarchal, with mournful Jewish eyes. In fact, he was not much more solemn, mournful or portentous than young Paul, but he must have seemed patriarchal since he was a boy. At this time he was well under fifty, but at sight everyone thought him much older. Humphrey had first come across him on a professional trip to America years before, and they were closer friends than is common for men to become in middle-age. Humphrey had a respect for him, which wasn’t an uncommon response to Luria: Luria, to Humphrey’s surprise, returned the respect, which, underneath the elaborate courtesy, was an uncommon response from Alec Luria to anybody.

Luria’s career had been a type specimen carried to the extreme. Father and mother born in Galicia; Alec, eldest son, born in Brooklyn; extreme poverty, father a repairer of books and at night a Talmudic scholar; son intelligent, all sacrifices made for him, character and gifts fusing without effort, the highest academic successes. He had become a psychiatrist, but then the power which made him a father figure also made him change his profession. The concepts of psychiatry weren’t right; he had to make psychology respectable – to a mind as honest as his own. Thus he had turned from psychiatrist to psychologist, and a dissident one. His reputation was massive enough to get him, very young, a major professorship. He was also when very young a major pundit, but lonely in the purity and justice of his mind. Just and pure as his mind was – and this gave Humphrey considerable spectator’s pleasure – he was not, however, without a taste for the frailties of this world. He had married two wives, both gentiles, both rich. He accumulated money. He was fond of luxury. Not many academics, however pundit-like, would have thought it appropriate for a summer vacation to rent a duplex apartment in Eaton Square. He had much more tenderness than Humphrey for the charms of the
beau monde
.