Homecomings (17 page)

‘In that case you’re losing your grip,’ Lufkin gave a cold, jeering smile. ‘
Of course
they’ll keep it going.’

‘Why do you say that?’

For a second I did not put it past him to have inside knowledge, but he answered: ‘No one ever closes a place down. Governments can’t do it; that’s one of the things that’s wrong with them.’ He went on: ‘No, you’d better assume that they’ll keep it ticking over. But not putting enough behind it, blowing hot and cold the whole wretched time. That’s what I call making the worst of both worlds.’

‘You may be right,’ I said.

‘I’ve been right before now,’ he said. ‘So it won’t be much satisfaction.’

In his negotiations Lufkin made much use of the charged silence, and we fell into one now. But it was not my tactic that night to break it; I was ready to sit mute as long as he cared. In time he said: ‘We can assume they’re going to hopelessly underestimate their commitment, and unless someone steps in they’ll make a mess of it. The thing is, we’ve got to save them from themselves.’

Suddenly his eyes, so sad and remote in his hard, neat, skull-like head, were staring into mine, and I felt his will, intense because it was canalized into this one object, because his nature was undivided, all of a piece.

‘I want you to help,’ he said.

Again I did not reply.

He went on: ‘I take it the decisions about how this job is done, and who makes the hardware, are going to be bandied about at several levels.’

Lufkin, with his usual precision and realism, had made it his business to understand how government worked; it was no use, he had learned years before, to have the entrée to cabinet ministers unless you were also trusted by the Hector Roses and their juniors.

‘I’m not prepared to let it go by default. It’s not my own interests I’m thinking of. It’s a fourth-class risk anyway, and, so far as the firm goes, there’s always money for a good business. As far as I go myself no one’s ever going to make a fortune again, so it’s pointless one way or the other. But I’ve got to be in on it, because this is the place where I can make a contribution. That’s why I want your help.’

It sounded hypocritical: but Lufkin behaved just as he had to Bevill the previous New Year’s Day, not altering by an inch as he talked to a different man, just as stable and certain of his own motives. It sounded hypocritical, but Lufkin believed each word of it, and that was one of his strengths.

For myself, I could feel a part of me, a spontaneous part left over from youth, which sympathized with him and wanted to say yes: Even now the temptation was there – one that Lufkin had never felt. But, since I was a young man, I had had to learn how, in situations such as this, to harden myself. Just because I had to watch my response, which was actually too anxious to please, which wanted to say yes instead of no, I had become practised at not giving a point away: in a fashion different from Lufkin’s, and for the opposite reasons, I was nearly as effective at it as he was himself.

That night, I still had not decided whether I ought to throw in my influence, such as it was, for him or against him.

‘I can’t do much just yet,’ I said. ‘And if I tried it would certainly not be wise.’

‘I’m not sure I understand you.’

‘I’ve been associated with you,’ I told him, ‘and some people will remember that at the most inconvenient time. You can guess the repercussions if I overplayed my hand–’

‘What would you say, if I told you that was cowardly?’

‘I don’t think it is,’ I said.

For his own purposes, he was a good judge of men, and a better one of situations. He accepted that he would not get further just then and, with no more ill grace than usual, began to talk at large.

‘What shall I do when I retire?’ he said. He was not inviting my opinion; his plans were as precise as those he sent to his sales managers, although he was only forty-eight; they were the plans such as active men make, when occasionally they feel that all their activity has done for them is carve out a prison, In reality Lufkin was happy in his activity, he never really expected that those plans would come about – and yet, through making them, he felt that the door was open.

As I heard what they were, I thought again that he was odder than men imagined; he did not once refer to his family or wife; although I had never heard scandal, although he went down to his country house each weekend, his plans had been drawn up as though she were dead.

‘I shall take a flat in Monaco,’ he announced briskly. ‘I don’t mean just anywhere in the principality, I mean the old town. It isn’t easy to get a place there for a foreigner, but I’ve put out some feelers.’

It was curious to hear, in the middle of the war.

‘Whatever shall you do?’ I said, falling into the spirit of it.

‘I shall walk down to the sea and up to the Casino each day, there and back,’ he said. ‘That will give me three miles’ walking every day, which will do for my exercise. No man of fifty or over needs more.’

‘That won’t occupy you.’

‘I shall play for five hours a day, or until I’ve won my daily stipple, whichever time is the shorter.’

‘Shan’t you get tired of that?’

‘Never,’ said Lufkin.

He went on, bleak and inarticulate: ‘It’s a nice place. I shan’t want to move, I might as well die there. Then they can put me in the Protestant cemetery. It would be a nice place to have a grave.’ Suddenly he gave a smile that was sheepish and romantic. In a curt tone, as though angry with me, he returned to business.

‘I’m sorry,’ he put in as though it were an aside, ‘that you’re getting too cautious about the Barford project. Cold feet. I didn’t expect yours to be so cold.’

I had set myself neither to be drawn nor provoked. Instead I told him what he knew already, that at most points of decision Hector Rose was likely to be the most influential man – and after him some of the Barford technicians. If any firm, if Lufkin’s firm, were brought in, its technicians would have to be approved by the Barford ones. Lufkin nodded: the point was obvious but worth attending to. Then he said, in a cold but thoughtful tone: ‘What about your own future?’

I replied that I simply did not know.

‘I hear that you’ve been a success at this job – but you’re not thinking of staying in it, there’d be no sense in that.’

I repeated that it was too early to make up my mind.

‘Of course,’ said Lufkin, ‘I’ve got some right to expect you to come back to me.’

‘I haven’t forgotten that,’ I said.

‘I don’t understand all you want for yourself,’ said Lufkin. ‘But I can give you some of it.’

Looking at him, I did not know whether it was his harsh kindness, or a piece of miscalculation.

WAKING, I blinked my eyes against the light, although it was the dun light of a winter afternoon. By the bedside Margaret, smiling, looked down on me like a mother.

‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

It was Saturday afternoon, the end of a busy week; the day before, Barford’s future had been settled, and, as Lufkin had forecast, we had got our way. Soon, I was thinking, lying there half-asleep in Margaret’s bed, we should have to meet Lufkin officially –

‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

I said that I ought to get up.

‘No need.’ She had drawn an armchair up to the bed, and was sitting there in her dressing-gown. She stroked my forehead, as she said: ‘It’s not a sensible way to live, is it?’

She was not reproaching me, although I was worn out that afternoon, after the week’s meetings and late nights, dinner with Lufkin, dinner with the Minister. She pretended to scold me, but her smile was self-indulgent, maternal. It was pleasure to her to look after anyone; she was almost ashamed, so strong was that pleasure, she tried to disparage it and called it a lust. So, when I was tired and down-and-out, any struggle of wills was put aside, she cherished me; often to me, who had evaded my own mother’s protective love, who had never been cared for in that sense in my life, it was startling to find her doing so.

Yet that afternoon, watching her with eyes whose lids still wanted to close, letting her pull the quilt round my shoulders, I was happy, so happy that I thought of her as I had at Lufkin’s, in her absence. For an interval, rare in me, the imagination and the present flesh were one. It must go on always, I thought, perhaps this was the time to persuade her to marry me.

She was gazing down at me, and she looked loving, sarcastic, in charge.

No, I thought, I would not break this paradisal state; let us have it for a little longer; it did not matter if I procrastinated until later that night, or next week, so long as I was certain we should he happy.

Thus I did not ask her. Instead, in the thickness of near-sleep, in the luxury of fatigue, I began gossiping about people we knew. Her fingers touching my cheeks, she joined in one of those conspiracies of kindness that we entered into when we were at peace, as though out of gratitude for our own condition we had to scheme to bring the same to others. Was there anything we could do for Helen? And couldn’t we find someone for Gilbert Cooke? We were retracing old arguments, about what kind of woman could cope with him, when, suddenly recalling another aspect of my last talk with Lufkin, I broke out that Gilbert might soon have a different kind of problem on his hands.

I explained that, like me, he would be engaged in the negotiations over which firm to give the contract to – which, now that the decision had gone in favour of the project, was not just a remote debating point but something we should have to deal with inside a month. Just as Lufkin was too competent not to know my part in the negotiations, so he would know Gilbert’s; it might be small, but it would not be negligible. And Gilbert, after the war, would certainly wish to return to Lufkin’s firm: would he be welcome, if he acted against Lufkin now?

I told Margaret of how, right at the end of our tête-à-tête, when we were both tired and half-drunk, Lufkin had let fly his question about my future, and I still could not be sure whether it was a threat. Gilbert might easily feel inclined to be cautious.

Margaret smiled, but a little absently, a little uncomfortably, and for once brushed the subject aside, beginning to talk of a man she had just met, whose name I had not heard. He was a children’s doctor, she said, and I did not need telling how much she would have preferred me to live such a life. The official world the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism – she disliked them all. Quite indifferent to whether I thought her priggish, she was convinced that I should be a better and happier man without them. So, with a touch of insistence, she mentioned this new acquaintance’s work in his hospital. His name was Geoffrey Hollis; perhaps it was odd, she admitted, that so young a man should devote himself to children. He was as much unlike Gilbert as a man could be, except that he was also a bachelor and shy.

‘He’s another candidate for a good woman,’ she said.

‘What is he like?’

‘Not much your sort,’ she replied, smiling at me.

Years before, each time Sheila had thrown the name of a man between us, I had been pierced with jealousy. She had meant me to be, for, in the years before we married and I loved her without return, she was ruthless, innocent and cruel. What had passed between us then had frightened me of being jealous, and with Margaret, though sometimes I had watched for it, I had been almost immune.

Nevertheless, the grooves of habit were worn deep. Hearing of Hollis, even though her face was holding nothing back, I wished that I had asked her to marry me half an hour before, when there was not this vestigial cramp keeping me still, when I had not this temptation, growing out of former misery and out of a weakness that I was born with, to retreat into passiveness and irony.

I was gazing at her, sitting by the bedside in the cold and browning light. Slowly, as her eyes studied mine, her mouth narrowed and from it edged away the smile of a loving girl, the smile of a mother. Upon us seeped – an instant suddenly enlarged in the rest and happiness of the afternoon – the sense of misunderstanding, injustice, illimitable distance, loss.

In time she said, still grave: ‘It’s all right.’

‘Yes,’ I answered.

She began to smile again and asked, putting Gilbert’s dilemma aside, what I was going to do about Lufkin and how much I minded. She had never pressed me before about what I should choose to do when the war ended. I could break with the past now, there were different ways of earning a living ahead of me, she had been content to leave it so; but now in the half-light, her hands pressing mine, she wanted me to talk about it.

THE Minister tended to get irritated with me when there was an issue which he had to settle but wished to go on pretending did not exist. His manner remained matey and unpretentious but, when I had to remind him that the Barford contract must be placed within a fortnight, that two major firms as well as Lufkin’s were pressing for an answer, Bevill looked at me as though I had made a remark in bad taste.

‘First things first,’ he said mysteriously, as though drawing on fifty years of political wisdom, the more mysteriously since in the coming fortnight he had nothing else to do.

In fact, he strenuously resented having to disappoint two or three influential men. Even those like me who were fond of the old man did not claim that political courage was his most marked virtue. To most people’s astonishment, he had shown some of it in the struggle over Barford; he had actually challenged opinion in the Cabinet and had both prevailed and kept his job; now that was over, he felt it unjust to be pushed into more controversy, to be forced to make more enemies. Enemies – old Bevill hated even the word. He wished he could give the contract to everyone who wanted it.

Meanwhile, Sir Hector Rose was making up his own mind. The secret Barford file came down to me, with a request from Rose for my views on the contract.

It did not take me much time to think over. I talked to Gilbert, who knew the inside of Lufkin’s firm more recently than I did. He was more emphatic than I was, but on the same side. It was an occasion, I decided without worry, to play safe both for my own sake and the job’s.