An Accidental Man (38 page)

‘Ludwig and Karen are discussing Greek vases.'

‘Patrick Tisbourne and Henrietta Sayce are engaged to be married.'

‘Richard, could you give me a lift home?'

‘Sorry, Ann, I'm taking Karen.'

‘Matthew has brought his Irish valet.'

‘Matthew is going too far.'

‘George Tisbourne is removing Clara.'

‘Clara has passed out in the hall.'

‘Sebastian, don't.'

‘Nobody marks us, Gracie.'

‘Yes, Austin's looking.'

‘Bugger Austin.'

‘Ralph, let's go to the pub.'

‘Oh, Ann, how super!'

‘Ludwig and Karen are still discussing Greek vases.'

‘Ralph and Ann have gone to the pub.'

‘Psst, Oliver.'

‘Oh, Andrew, goodie goodie.'

‘Could you help me to remove MacMurraghue?'

‘Who's MacMurraghue?'

‘This chap.'

‘I see what you mean.'

‘Matthew's valet is bickering with Austin.'

‘Matthew's valet seems rather an aggressive chap.'

‘Now he's shoving his way towards Gracie.'

‘I say look at Gracie and Sebastian!'

‘They are in each other's arms!'

‘They are kissing each other!'

‘Austin has given the Irishman a push.'

‘Oliver, just get hold of his other arm.'

‘A fight is starting!'

‘Karen, I am going to take you home.'

‘No, Richard, I —'

‘Karen is in tears.'

‘Karen, I am going to take you home.'

‘Matthew's Irish friend has passed out in the hall.'

‘Austin has called Sebastian a cad.'

‘Gracie is in tears.'

‘Oh I
am
enjoying this party!'

‘So you are haunted by that scene,' said Ludwig.

‘Yes,' said Matthew. ‘I saw this group of people standing in the open space and then I realized that they were demonstrating. It was winter, a dark yellow afternoon with some street lamps on and a little snow falling rather slowly. They were holding a board protesting against the trial of a writer. There were only about eight of them. It looked so odd, almost embarrassing, as if something were trying to happen and not succeeding, this awkward group standing there in the snow with their board, dressed in black, all padded and stocky in their fur hats and boots. They looked so lonely and sort of gratuitous and aslant, if you know what I mean, like something in the corner of a painting. And of course everyone who passed by looked the other way and quickened their step as soon as they saw what was going on. Then I saw a man coming along who looked as if he too would pass by. He hesitated and he looked round, and then he came back and began shaking hands with them. That shaking hands — I can't describe it — it was suddenly as if that place had become the centre of the world. He was still standing there when the police arrived. Four police cars drew up. It was all very quiet, there were no gestures, no raised voices. The police looked weary. They helped the demonstrators into the cars. They were all taken away, including the chap who had joined them. The whole scene was erased and there was nothing left but the snow slowly falling and the day getting darker and people passing by who didn't even know that it had happened at all.'

‘And later?'

‘Later I learnt who some of them were. The news gets round somehow. Some of them went to labour camps, some into mental hospitals, you know.'

‘Yes. And I suppose that chap too.'

‘I suppose so.'

‘So pointless,' said Ludwig.

‘Yes,' said Matthew, ‘Yes.' He went on. ‘Things that were relative once are absolute now. One feels it's the end of the line. Politics and war used to retain some decencies. Also their power was limited. No nation could destroy another, governments couldn't get at their subjects, and in the interstices of it all human beings could flourish. So tyrannies regularly broke down.'

‘Won't tyrannies always regularly break down?' asked Ludwig.

Matthew was silent. It was a sunny afternoon, teatime. The Irishman, whose name was Geraghty, had laid the table and made the tea. He had achieved social advancement by getting inside the house. Now he was outside in the sun dreamily weeding. The walnut tree was translucently golden, absorbed in its own faint trembling. Overhead an aeroplane droned peacefully in fine pitch towards London airport.

‘Then,' said Matthew, ‘you could give your life, you could give years of suffering. If you didn't die of it you could probably retain your personality and because of the muddle in which everything was at least you had a chance, and what you did was significant, it couldn't be unmade, you couldn't be unmade. Of course there were brutalities and at a certain point of suffering the mind fails. But that wasn't part of the system. Not because of any virtue in the system, I mean in the bad ones, but because of the muddle. But now —'

‘Yes,' said Ludwig. ‘More than to die, the willingness to rot. I would give my life, I think, more willingly than I would give my mind.'

‘Yes,' said Matthew. ‘“For who would lose, though full of pain, this intellectual being . . .” One can face suffering and one cannot imagine death. But the destruction or perversion of one's personality, could one face that? And for nothing.'

‘For nothing. And Yet —'

‘To live on to regret the just action, to forget the just action, to forget justice itself.'

‘Anyone might regret acting rightly if the consequences were awful. But aren't you exaggerating the differences? People come out of labour camps. These great actions exist and are known of, even now. You said the news got round. Who knows what deep effect they may not somehow have?'

‘Yes, these are the great actions of our century. These are our real heroes. These are the people whose courage and devotion to goodness goes beyond any dream of one's own possibility. Courage is after all, when sufficiently refined, the virtue of the age. It is always perhaps the only name of love which can mean anything to us. We speak of love because we are romantics, and we mean, however hard we try, something romantic by it.'

‘Yes, yes. But, Matthew, not really quite for nothing, their actions I mean.'

‘Well, maybe in the great web of cause and effect, who knows. But it's not significant any more, it's more like gambling, it's roulette.'

‘But that doesn't make virtue something different.'

‘I don't know,' said Matthew. ‘One wants to say “Of course not”, but what is that “of course”?'

‘All right, perhaps those chaps in the snow didn't think they were causing anything, preventing anything.'

‘That was what made them holy.'

‘But if they were good, they were good in the same old way. We don't think virtue has changed in ordinary things, so why here?'

‘Perhaps only now can we see what it's really like, anywhere.'

‘Virtue has always had to be its own reward.'

‘Only in a philosophical sense, dear boy. Fortunately for the human race virtue usually offers many other rewards besides her fair self.'

‘No, but really, in the end, one is good in order to be good!'

‘Where is the end? Where those men stood? I'm not even sure of that any more. One wants things to be better, things ought to be better. There shouldn't be starvation and fear. That's obvious. It's when you try to go deeper than the obvious, when you try to go where God used to be —'

‘But we can do without God, I should think!'

‘Mmm.'

‘Better without Him, isn't it?'

‘So one feels.'

‘But isn't one right to feel it?'

‘I don't know.'

‘I don't understand you. Do you mean that behind ordinary decency and duty there's nothing, there's chaos? You were saying things were more absolute now. Then you said because it was all roulette we could see now that virtue was all superficial or conventional or something —'

‘There are absolutes where calculation about causality comes up against a brick wall. But these are not moral absolutes. Perhaps indeed they make moral absolutes impossible. When you can't calculate perhaps it doesn't matter so much how you act.'

‘But that's despair!'

‘That's one name for it.'

‘But do you mean that because of the latest human frightfulness we can see what was invisible before —'

‘That there are no categorical imperatives.'

‘Because in the end we're bound to fail?'

‘Not exactly. What is failure, anyway? It's just that at a certain point calculation must break down. It's like Gödel's theorem. It's built into the way things are. Perhaps.'

‘There's nothing deep?'

‘Not that kind of thing. Of course all this is easier to see now because the old religious fogs are blowing away.'

‘Yet you wanted to become a monk!' said Ludwig.

‘Oh that. That was quite different.'

‘It can't be different,' cried Ludwig, ‘it
can't
be!'

‘That is what philosophers always say,' said Matthew and smiled. ‘More tea?'

‘There must be a way through.'

‘A subterranean river? We know where that leads to.'

‘Another of your beastly absolutes?'

‘Yes.'

‘You do upset me!' said Ludwig. Then he laughed. ‘This is Gracie's favourite cake. She calls it Tennis Court Cake.'

‘It's all right with Gracie?'

‘Oh yes perfectly. I'm very glad you didn't see that fracas.'

At the party Gracie had been suddenly ferociously jealous because he had spent so long talking to Karen. She had explained it all. Ludwig had understood it all. He felt that his love had been deepened, though the hurt remained. To recognize the hurt and to feel that love was deepened, that was good.

‘You and Gracie are just off to Ireland?'

‘Yes, we thought we'd get away together before the wedding arrangements get really hotted up.'

‘Excellent idea.'

‘So anyway,' said Ludwig, ‘you think I should hang on to what I'm sure of and not worry about the rest?'

‘Yes. And not be beguiled by guilt.'

‘I won't fall into that trap.'

‘You are by nature a guilty man.'

‘I worry about my parents.'

‘They will come round, they'll have to.'

‘I sometimes feel it's dishonourable to take the easy way.'

‘Of course you do. And you sometimes feel nervous frenzied impulses to get yourself punished. But these are not your deepest and most serious thoughts.'

‘I guess you're right.'

‘You see, we still have a vocabulary.'

Ludwig laughed again. ‘Well — that's something.'

‘Possibly everything.'

‘So you think —'

‘You are not one of the heroes we spoke of just now. All this adds up to the appropriateness of your continuing your present course of action.'

‘But appropriateness is not enough.'

‘So indeed you feel, and this is where guilt and worry about your parents and ridiculous considerations about honour and so forth find a fault through which they can enter. You are discontented. You want to work it out so that you are perfectly justified and absolutely guaranteed. You feel there must be such a structure.'

‘But there isn't.'

‘No.'

‘Ugh-hu,' said Ludwig. ‘I think I'll have some more cake.' After munching for a moment he said, ‘But then, according to you, virtue is an illusion?'

‘The idea of it is an inspiration, an important one, in some sense conceivably a necessary one.'

‘But it is an illusion?'

Matthew looked out of the window at the Irishman who was asleep under the walnut tree. ‘What does it matter what we say here? Very few people ever come here. Here language breaks down.'

‘But those heroes you spoke of?'

‘It may cheer them up for a short while to feel that they acted rightly.'

Ludwig whistled. ‘Wow!'

‘By the way,' said Matthew, ‘have you been to see Dorina?'

‘No.'

‘I think you ought to go.'

‘What's that funny word you used?'

They laughed.

‘Well, you can see her at the Tisbournes,' said Matthew. ‘It will be all much easier there and much less dramatic.'

‘Yes, I know.' Ludwig was about to say that Garth had written to him about Dorina. He was about to go on to tell Matthew about Garth's man killed in New York. Then he decided he did not want to mention Garth to Matthew just now. He felt ridiculously possessive already about Matthew. Again he had given his heart. How easily it had happened.

‘I've brought your supper on a tray,' said Mavis.

‘I was just coming down,' said Dorina.

‘Well, dear heart, I'll take it down again. Mrs Carberry has set the table.'

‘No, I'll have it here.'

‘No, please, Dorina. Let me take it down, we'll have supper together.'

‘No, no, Mavis, I'll have it here,
please
don't argue, I can't bear it, sorry.'

‘Sorry, darling. I hope you'll like it. I wish you'd eat some meat.'

‘I hate meat.'

‘I suspect undernourishment may be part of — part of it all.'

Dorina's room was powdery dim and yet sunny, obstructed by great shafts of hot evening light which seemed to fill it, making the sisters almost invisible to each other. Sunlight on a window in another street dazzled in Dorina's eyes, and she shifted, shaking her head. She was wearing a short light padded dressing-gown, white and a little soiled. Her feet were bare.