George Passant (18 page)

THE winter passed. George spent less time with me than formerly; partly because I was working intensively for my final examination in the summer – but also it was now Jack who had become his most confidential friend.

As soon as Eden’s decision was made, George had thrown himself into the interests of the group. Several young men and women from the School had been added to it; George talked of them all more glowingly than ever. On the few occasions I went out to the farm that winter, I felt the change from the group which George first devoted himself to. George and Jack, I know, formed parties there each weekend.

George never visited Eden’s house again, after the Sunday night when we walked back in the rain. I scarcely heard him mention Eden or the firm; and at Eden’s the entire episode of Martineau and George was merely the subject of comfortable reflections.

It was Eden, however, who told me in the early spring that Martineau was making another move, was giving up the agency. He had found some eccentric brotherhood, not attached to any sect, whose members walked over the country preaching and begging their keep. This he was off to join.

‘Ah well,’ said Eden, ‘religion is a terrible thing.’

We heard that Martineau was due to leave early one Saturday morning. I went along to his house that day and outside met George, who said, with a shamefaced smile: ‘I couldn’t very well let him go without saying goodbye.’

We had to ring the bell. Since the house had been transformed, we did not know where Martineau would be sleeping. The bell sounded, emptily, far away; it brought a desolation. At last his housekeeper came, her face was hostile, for she blamed us for the catastrophe.

‘You’ll find him in his old drawing-room,’ she said. ‘And if things had been right you’d never have had cause to look for him at all.’

He had been sleeping in the drawing-room, in one corner. A rough screen where the sofa used to be; in the bend of the room, between the fireplace and the window, where we used to sit on the more intimate Friday nights, a bed protruded, and there was an alarm clock on the chair beside it. The Ingres had been taken down, the walls were bare, there was a close and musty smell.

Martineau was standing by the bed, packing a rucksack.

‘Hallo,’ he cried, ‘so glad you’ve come to see the last appearance. It’s specially nice that you managed to find time, George.’

His laugh was wholehearted and full of enjoyment, utterly free from any sort of sad remembrance of the past. He was wearing an old brown shirt and the grey coat and trousers in which I had last seen him; he had no tie, and he had not shaved for days.

‘Could I possibly help you to pack that?’ said George.

‘I’ve always been better with my hands than with my head,’ said Martineau. ‘But still, George, you have a shot.’

George studied the articles on the bed. There were a few books, an old flannel suit, a sponge bag and a mackintosh.

‘I think the suit obviously goes in first,’ said George, and bent over the bed.

‘This is a change from the old days in the firm,’ said Martineau. ‘You used to do the brainwork, and I tried on the quiet to clean up the scripts you’d been selecting as ashtrays.’

George laughed. He could forget everything except their liking: and so (it surprised me more) could Martineau.

‘How is the firm, by the way?’ asked Martineau.

‘As tolerable as one can reasonably expect,’ said George.

‘Glad to hear it,’ said Martineau indifferently, and went off to talk gaily of his own plans. He was going to walk fifteen miles today, he said, down the road towards London, to meet the others coming from the east.

‘Will there be any chance of seeing you here? On your travels?’ said George.

‘Some time,’ Martineau smiled. ‘You’ll see me when you don’t expect me. I shall pass through some time.’

He went to the door, called ‘Eliz-a-beth,’ as he used to when he wanted more coffee on a Friday night. He ran down the stairs and his voice came to us lilting and cheerful: we heard her sobbing. He returned with a buttonhole in his shirt. When we had left the garden and turned the corner, out of sight of the house, he smiled at us and tossed the buttonhole away.

Just before we said goodbye, George hesitated. ‘There’s one thing I should like to say, Mr Martineau. I don’t know what arrangements you are making with your connections here. As you realise, they’re not people I should personally choose to rely on in case of difficulties. And you’re taking a line that may conceivably get you into difficulties. So I thought I ought to say that if ever you need money or anything of the sort – I might be a more suitable person to turn to. Anyway, I should like you to keep that in mind.’

‘I appreciate that, George.’ Martineau smiled. ‘I really appreciate that.’

He shook our hands. We watched him cross over the road, his knapsack lurching at each stride. Up the road, where the houses rested in the misty sunshine, he went on, dark between the trees, until the long curve took him out of sight.

‘Well,’ said George.

We walked the other way, towards the town. I asked if I should meet him out of the office at midday, as I often did on Saturdays.

‘I’m afraid not,’ said George. ‘As a matter of fact, I thought of going straight over to the farm. I don’t suppose you can allow yourself the time off, can you? But Jack is taking over a crowd by the one o’clock bus. I want to work in a full weekend.’

The Warning

I took my final examination in May 1927, two months after Martineau’s departure; and went into chambers in London in the following September. For several years it was only at odd times that I saw George and my other friends in the town.

Some of that separation was inevitable, of course. I was making my way; it was then that I entered the chambers of Herbert Getliffe, who turned out to be as lively, complex and tricky as Jack himself; there was the long struggle with him (amusing to look back upon) before I emerged to make a decent living at the Bar. And in the process I formed new friendships, and got to know new worlds. That occupied me for a great part of those years; but still I need not have seen so little of George. It was natural for people as shrewd as Rachel to think that I was forsaking my benefactor and close friend of the past.

It was natural; but it was the opposite of the truth. Not by virtue, but by temperament, I was at that age, when I was still childless, bound by chains to anyone who had ever really touched my life; once they had taken hold of me, they had taken hold for good. While to George, though he enjoyed paying me a visit, I became incidental as soon as I vanished from the group. And before long he was keeping from me any news that mattered deeply to him. Yet I could feel that he was going through the most important time of his life.

From various people I heard gossip, rumours, genuine news of his behaviour. Olive sometimes wrote to me; and she was intimate with George again, when, after her father’s death in 1930, she came into some money and returned to live in the town. Her letters were full of her own affairs: how she finally decided not to marry Morcom, though for a few months they lived together; how his old jealousy at last justified itself, for she had fallen in love with Jack and hoped to marry him. In the middle of these pages on herself, frequently muddled and self-deceiving, there occurred every now and then one of her keen, dispassionate observations upon George.

Materially, he was not much better off. Eden paid him £325 a year now; he still lectured at the School. But there was one surprising change – so surprising to me that I disbelieved it long after I ought to have been convinced. He had joined, as a concealed partner, in some of Jack’s money-making schemes.

They had actually bought the agency and the advertising paper from Martineau and his partner Exell, a year or so after Martineau joined his brotherhood. When Olive returned, the three of them had invented more ambitious plans, and in 1931 raised money to buy the farm and run it as a youth hostel.

These stories were true enough, I found: and they appeared to be making some money. As Olive wrote: ‘Of course, with Jack and me, we’re just keen on the money for its own sake. But I still don’t think anyone can say that of George. He gets some fun out of working up the schemes – but really all he wants money for is to leave him freer with his group.’

George had come, more thoroughly as each year passed, to live entirely within his group of protégés. He still carried young people off their feet; he still gave them faith in themselves; he was still eager with cheerful, abundant help, thoughtless of the effect on himself. Jack was only one out of many who would still have been clerks if they had not come under his influence. And there were others whom he could not help practically, but who were grateful. Olive quoted Rachel as saying: ‘Whatever they say, he showed us what it’s like to be alive.’

That went on: but there was a change. This was a change, though, that did not surprise me. It had been foreshadowed by Jack years ago, that night of our celebration in Nottingham. When I heard of it, I knew that it had always been likely; and I was curiously sad.

I heard of it, as it happened, from Roy Calvert, whom I met at a dinner-party in Cambridge. He was then twenty-one, polished and elegantly dressed. He talked of his cousin Olive. He was acute, he already knew his way about the world, he had become fond of women and attractive to them. He mentioned that George was attracting some gossip. George was, in fact, believed to be making love to girls within the group.

Roy had no doubt. Nor had I. As I say, it made me curiously sad. For I knew what, in earlier days, it would have meant to George.

I thought of him often after that piece of news. I had no premonition of danger; that did not reach me until a year later, until Morcom’s call in the summer of 1932. But I often wished that George’s life had taken a different curve.

During one case which regularly kept me late in chambers, so that I walked home through a succession of moonlit nights, those thoughts of George would not leave me alone. He was a man of more power than any of us: he seemed, as he used to seem, built on the lines of a great man. So I thought with regret, almost with remorse, walking in London under the moon.

I wished that I had been nearer his own age: I might have been more use to him: or that I had met him for the first time now.

Time and time again, I thought of him as I had first known him.

IT was one of the last days of the Trinity term of 1932 when Morcom visited me. I had just arrived in my chambers, after an afternoon in court.

‘I was passing through on my way back,’ he said. ‘I thought I’d call–’

He had been sailing, he was tanned from the sea; but his face was thinner, and a suspense seemed to tighten his voice.

We had dinner, and then I asked if anything was wrong.

‘Nothing much,’ said Morcom. He paused. ‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I’m worried about the people at–’ He used the name of the town.

‘Is there any news?’ I asked.

‘No news,’ he replied. ‘I’ve been away from them. I’ve been able to think. They’ll finish themselves with a scandal,’ he said, ‘unless something is done.’

‘What sort of scandal?’

‘Money,’ he said. ‘At least, that seems to be the dangerous part.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Rumours have been going round for months,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t help hearing them. As well as – private knowledge. When I got away, I realised what they meant.’

‘Well?’

‘There’s no doubt they’ve been working up some frauds. I’ve known that for some time. At least I knew they were pretty near the wind. I’ve only just begun to think that they’ve gone outside the law.’ He paused again. ‘That’s why I came in tonight.’

‘Tell me what you’re going on.’

‘I don’t think I’m wrong,’ said Morcom. ‘It’s all sordid. They’ve been spending money. They’ve invented one or two schemes and persuaded people to invest in them. On a smallish scale, I expect. Nothing very brilliant or impressive. They’ve done the usual tricks – falsified their expectations and got their capital from a few fools in the town.’

I was invaded by a strange ‘professional’ anxiety; for, although exact knowledge of a danger removes some fears, it can also sharpen others. A doctor will laugh, when another young man comes to him fearing heart disease – but the same doctor takes an excessive care over the milk his children drink. So I remembered other frauds: quickly I pressed Morcom for the facts.

What had happened? What were their schemes? What had been falsified? What was his evidence? Some of his answers were vague, vague perhaps through lack of knowledge, but I could not be sure. At times he spoke with certainty.

He told me, what I had already heard from Olive, of the purchase of Martineau’s advertising agency, and the organisation of the farm and another hostel. But he knew much more; for instance, that Miss Geary – who had taken George’s part in the committee meeting years ago – was one of the people who had advanced money.

‘You may still be wrong,’ I said, as I thought over his news. ‘Stupidity’s commoner than dishonesty. The number of ways people choose to lose their money is remarkable – when everyone’s behaving with perfect honesty.’

Morcom hesitated.

‘I can’t tell you why I’m certain. But I am certain that they have not behaved with perfect honesty.’

‘If you’re right – does anyone else know this?’

‘Not for certain. As far as I know.’ He added: ‘You may have gathered that I see very little of any of them – nowadays.’

His manner throughout had been full of insistence and conviction; but it was something else which impressed me. He was angry, scornful, and distressed; that I should have expected: but, more disquieting even than his story, was the extraordinary strain which he could not conceal. At moments – more obvious in him than anyone, because of his usual control – he had been talking with hysterical intensity. At other moments he became placid, serene, even humorous. I felt that state was equally aberrant.