George Passant (20 page)

‘We didn’t think you’d be here so early,’ she cried. Then, catching someone’s smile, her eyes flew to the clock on the mantelpiece: it was after eleven, and she looked at me before breaking into laughter.

‘Good to see you,’ Jack began, a little breathless and embarrassed in the greeting, until, in a moment, his old ease returned. He took me to one side, and began chatting humorously, confidentially, as though to emphasise that he had a special claim upon my attention. ‘Life’s rather crowded,’ he chuckled when I asked him about himself. ‘I’ve always got something going to happen, you know. I’m just getting on top of it, though. Clearly I am.’

The room had become noisy again. The others were drinking and talking, leaving us in our corner. Over Jack’s shoulder, I saw Olive watching us with a frown as she talked to George. Jack was inquisitive about one of my cases. ‘If I’d been on the jury, you’d never have got him off–’

Olive came and took us each by the arm.

‘A few of us are going into the other room,’ she said. ‘We can’t talk with everyone about.’

They had been quarrelling. Jack looked displeased, as she led us into the other sitting-room. It struck cold as we entered; she lit the lamp and knelt down to put a match to the fire.

‘It won’t be warm enough,’ said Jack. ‘We’d better go back.’

Olive looked up.

‘No,’ she said violently. Jack turned aside; his cheeks reddened.

George came in, bottles clinking in his hands, and Daphne carried the glasses. Rachel followed them.

‘Oh, isn’t the fire going?’ she said. ‘I thought you two had been here all night–’ then she broke off abruptly.

George’s attention at last became diverted. He gazed at her from the tumblers into which he had been pouring gin.

‘It isn’t cold,’ he said. ‘The fire will soon be through.’ He was placating the inanimate world, as he always had done, never willing to admit the worst of his surroundings.

Olive stood by the fire. The rest of us brought up chairs, and she whispered a word to Jack. She was restless with excitement; a tension had grown up in the room, a foot tapping on the floor sounded very loud. She broke out, inclining her face to me with a quick smile: ‘What are you here for, anyway?’

‘To have a look at you.’

‘Lewis, is that true?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I had a feeling,’ she said, ‘when I saw you tonight – that there was something else behind it. I don’t believe it’s just a casual visit, is it now?’

I did not speak for a moment. In the presence of Rachel and Daphne I could not be frank.

‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘I was a little worried about some of you.’

‘What about us?’

‘I heard something – by accident – that made me think you might be taking some silly risks.’ I paused. ‘Some silly financial risks.’

I expected George to interpose, but it was Olive who answered. She exclaimed: ‘Who told you that?’

‘No one,’ I said. ‘I only had the faintest suspicion. I worked it out from something your cousin Roy happened to say. He said it quite innocently, you realise.’

‘He says a good deal that isn’t innocent.’ Olive laughed, frankly and good-naturedly.

I said: ‘Look here, I want you to tell me if there’s anything in it. I’ve seen enough money lost, you know.’

Again it was Olive who answered. ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you. There’s nothing to tell.’

Jack began to talk of my practice, but in a moment Olive interrupted.

‘You’re not to worry about us,’ she said. ‘You understand? You can worry about our souls if you like.’

Suddenly she ceased to be competent and masterful, and her voice went hysterically high.

‘We’ve changed since your time,’ she said to me. ‘Haven’t we changed?’

‘We all have,’ I said.

‘That’s no good. That’s just playing with me,’ she said. ‘We’ve changed, I tell you. We’re not the same people. Don’t you see that?’

George shifted in his chair.

‘There’s something in it, but it’s an exaggeration put like that,’ he said. ‘You’ve all developed–’

‘We’ve all developed!’ Olive cried. ‘As though you’d nothing to do with it. As though you haven’t been more responsible than any of us.’

‘I accept that,’ said George loudly. ‘You don’t think I should pretend not to accept it. I’m proud of it. I’m prouder of it than anything else in my life.’

‘You mean to say you’re proud of having us–’

‘I’m proud that you’re the human being you are. And the same of Jack. And all the others. As well,’ said George, ‘as of Lewis, here.’

‘I’ve had more to do with myself than you have, George,’ Olive broke out, ‘and I should laugh at the idea of being proud.

‘Yet I’ve been complacent enough,’ she went on. ‘God knows how I found any reason for it. I’ve never done an unselfish action in my life without feeling complacent for being such a whirl of compassion. Oh, I know I looked after my father for years – don’t you think I was smug with myself for doing it?’

‘If you’re going down to that level,’ I said, ‘we are all the same. You oughtn’t to be savage with yourself – just with all people.’

‘Just with life,’ said Rachel. ‘Good God, girl, you’ve done more than most. You’ve had a man madly in love with you.’

‘Do you think,’ she cried, ‘I ought to be glad of that?’ She hesitated. ‘That was the one time,’ she said, ‘when I thought I might do something unselfish.’

‘When?’ cried Rachel.

‘When I lived with him,’ said Olive.

‘Why, you were in love with him,’ Daphne said, after a moment’s silence.

‘I never was,’ said Olive. She swept an arm round. ‘They know I never was.’

‘Why then?’ George leaned forward. ‘For all those months–’

Olive said: ‘I did it out of pity.’

Everyone was quiet; I looked into her eyes, and saw her glance fall away. Suddenly George laughed.

The strain had broken down: Jack was whispering to Olive, his eyes and hands eloquent and humorous; Daphne was sitting on the arm of George’s chair. I could feel that only my presence was keeping them from a wilder eirenicon; friend as I was, I was also a foreign influence, unfamiliar enough to keep the balance between decorum and release. My own nerves frayed (for I too had been played on by the undersweep of passion), I was glad when Olive rose to go to bed. Soon George and I were left alone.

We filled our glasses, settled into the easy chairs by the fire, and talked casually for a few minutes.

‘It’s a long while,’ said George comfortably, ‘since we came down here together.’ I was touched by the sentimentality, unselfconscious and unashamed; perhaps, I thought, it came the easier to George, for, in spite of all his emotional warmth, he was less bound to the past than any of us, far less than Morcom or myself. Perhaps to those like him, solid in the core of their personalities, four-square in themselves, feeling intensely within the core but not stretching out tentacles to any other life, it is easier to admit the past – because it does not matter much, as he showed in our separation. While to Morcom, tied inseparably to a thousand moments of the past, it came too near the truth to acknowledge its softening hand, except by a smile of pretended sarcasm.

After that remark, we argued amiably; George had lost little of his buoyant appetite for ideas. I enjoyed his mental gusto for its own sake, and also because it was impeding the purpose which brought me there.

‘We had some rather good talk tonight,’ he said, after a time, with the change of his manner to an elated but uneasy defence that still covered him when he talked of the group: ‘Didn’t you think so?’

‘Yes. I confess–’

‘Of course you’ve got to remember the relevant circumstances,’ said George hurriedly. ‘The kind of people they would have been if they had been left to their own devices. You’ve got to remember that. Not that they’re not an extremely good collection. They’re better than they’ve ever been, of course. We’ve had some reorientations. I’ve reconsidered some of my opinions.’

‘Still,’ I said, ‘I was glad to see some of the old gang. Particularly Olive. Though I thought she was too much upset–’

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ George replied. ‘She’s had something to put up with, you know. You can’t deny that she was magnificently frank about it – she got the whole affair in its right proportion. There aren’t many people who’d do that.’

Obstinately he repeated: ‘She was magnificently frank.’

‘I could find another name for it,’ I said. ‘But still, I wasn’t thinking of her being upset by a love affair. I thought there might possibly be some other cause.’

A frown, or something less (the fixity with which he would at any time have heard a criticism), came into his face.

‘What else could be the matter with her?’

‘I didn’t know her circumstances, since her father died. I thought – perhaps – money–’

‘Ridiculous,’ George interrupted. ‘Completely ridiculous. Her father left her a hundred and fifty a year of her own – and the reversion of the rest of the money when her mother dies.’

‘It can’t be that, then,’ I said. ‘I just felt there might be trouble.’

‘With no justification at all.’

‘Everything is all right?’

‘As a matter of fact,’ said George, ‘I wondered why you were asking about our affairs.’

‘I was worried.’

‘I think I should have been approached first.’

I half-expected a burst of anger; but instead his manner was more formal than exasperated.

‘If I could have got you alone before she spoke–’

‘I was prepared to believe that might be the reason.’

‘You understood what I meant to ask?’

‘I gathered it.’

‘George, I can speak out with you. I meant – it’s easy to get into financial tangles that are dangerous. If so, you could trust me to help, couldn’t you?’

‘I know exactly what you meant.’

‘Will you let me ask the same question – now?’

‘I’ve got nothing to add.’ Each reply had been stiff and distant.

‘I can’t do this again, you know.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Everything’s completely well with them? With yourself?’

‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life,’ George raised his voice. I put in a question about his position in the firm.

‘I’ve dismissed that business for the time being. I had to make a deliberate choice between the successes I considered important – and the successes’ – he laughed – ‘that an ordinary man with his little house and his little motor car would consider important. I decided that I couldn’t achieve them both, and so I was prepared to sacrifice the trivial ones. Just as you – have sacrificed some successes that I should consider essential. You’ve repressed all your social sense – well, I should simply have found it impossible to make a spiritual hermit of myself. Even – if it does give the Edens of this world a chance to humiliate me for ever.’

As I had often done when George was talking, I listened to the different levels of self-explanation. I heard nothing that bore on the apprehension. After we had talked on for a few moments, I said: ‘The trouble about these choices – I’m not saying that you oughtn’t to have made this one – is that you couldn’t help yourself.’

‘I could certainly help myself–’

‘Anyway it does mean a certain practical inconvenience. Money and so on. How’s that treating you?’

George’s face opened in a chuckle. ‘I’m harassed sometimes, as you might expect. I haven’t borrowed from you recently, but you mustn’t imagine you’re completely immune.’ He passed on to stories of the group in the last years. He got up to close the windows for the night: he said in a quiet voice: ‘I’ve gained more from the last year or two than all the rest of my life. I know you all think I’m incapable of any sort of change. You haven’t noticed that I’m more suggestible than any of you.’ He looked over the fields, in the darkness. ‘I’ve had my effect on these people – and they don’t think it, but they’ve had an effect on me. And I’m better and happier because it’s happened that way.’

MORCOM was away that weekend. I asked Roy to tell him that I had been in the town, and had called on George and Olive.

Through the autumn, a busy time for me, I was often uneasy. The visit had not brought anything like reassurance; but there seemed nothing I could do. As the months passed, though, I began to feel that my anxieties had run away with me. I heard nothing more until a Friday night in December.

I was tired after a day’s work, lying on my sofa with a novel, which, when those moments came to have a significance they did not then possess (through the memory of action, so to speak, which is halfway between involuntary memory – recalled for instance by a smell – and that which we force back), I remembered as Thomas Wolfe’s first book. The telephone bell rang. It was a trunk call, and among the murmurs, clangings, and whispers of the operation, I had the meaningless apprehension that sometimes catches hold as one listens and waits.

Then I heard Roy’s voice: ‘Is that, you, Lewis?’

The words were precise and clear, isolated in sound.

‘Yes.’

‘You should come down tonight. There’s a train in half an hour. It would be good if you caught that.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You should come at once. Morcom and I are certain you should come at once. Can you?’

‘Can’t you tell me? Is it necessary?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t you tell–?’

‘I’ll meet you at the station.’

Through the carriage window the lights of villages moved past. As my anger with Roy for leaving me uncertain became sharper, the lights became circled in mist and passed increasingly slow. We stopped at a station; the fog whirled under its lamps. At last the platform. The red-brick walls shone in the translucency; as I got out, the raw air caught at the throat.

Roy went quickly by, missing me in the crowd. I caught him by the arm. He turned and his face was serious and excited.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘They’re inquiring into some of George’s and Jack’s business. They questioned them this afternoon – and took away the accounts and books.’

It sounded inevitable as I heard it. It sounded unlike news, it seemed something I had known for a long time.