Homecomings (27 page)

‘Is it going to work?’

‘I think so.’

‘It’ll be all right if the old lady gets better or worse. Because if she gets worse the agents will have to put someone else in. But it’s going to be fatal if she stays moderately ill.’

His information was accurate. Mine was one of four service flats, looked after by a manageress; within the last fortnight, she had gone to bed with a heart-attack.

‘It’s pretty adequate,’ I said, as though apologizing for myself.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Gilbert.

Like other apolaustic men, he had the knack of making one’s living arrangements sound pitiful. I felt obliged to defend mine.

‘It’s
better
anyway,’ Gilbert conceded. ‘I grant you that, it’s better.’

Although he had dropped into speaking of my physical comforts with his old concern, he would not volunteer a word about any common friends, anyone I might be interested in, let alone Margaret. The May night, the petrol smell, the aphrodisiac smell: as we walked he talked more, but it was putting-off, impersonal talk, deliberately opaque.

As I watched him stretched out in a leather armchair at my club, just as he had been the night he offered to stand down over Margaret, his body was relaxed but his eyes shone, unsoftened, revengeful. There was nothing for me but to be patient. I set myself to speak as easily as when he was working for me. How was he? What was happening to him? What was he planning for his future? He did not mind answering. It gave him a pleasure edged with malice to go on elaborating about his future, knowing that I was getting nowhere near my object. But also, I thought, he was in a difficulty and glad of an opinion. Now that the war was over, he could not settle what to do. Perhaps the Civil Service would keep him; but, if he had the choice, he would prefer to return to Lufkin.

‘The trouble is,’ said Gilbert, ‘I don’t believe for a second he’ll have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘What about the bit of fun-and-games when I slipped one under his ribs?’

‘It was fair enough.’

‘Paul Lufkin has his own idea of what’s fair. Opposing him isn’t included.’

‘I got in his way as much as you did,’ I said, ‘and I’m on definitely good terms with him now.’

‘What’s that in aid of?’ said Gilbert. He added: ‘The old thug will never have me back. I wish to God he would.’

‘Why do you want to go back so much?’

He said something about money, he said that he might be marrying at last. At that moment he was speaking cordially, even intimately, his face flushed in the clubroom half-light; I believed that the mention of marriage was not a blind, I even wondered (he kept all clues from me) who the woman might be.

I said: ‘As I told you a minute ago, I get on well with Paul Lufkin nowadays. Better than I used to, if it comes to that. Will you let me feel out the ground about you?’

‘Why should you?’ His glance was suspicious, and at the same time hopeful.

‘Why not?’

He cupped his hands round the tankard on the table.

‘Well,’ he said, with a hesitating, unwilling pleasure, ‘if it’s not too much of an infliction, I should be damned relieved if you would.’

The room, not yet lit up, was cool as a church in the summer evening, but Gilbert glowed in his chair: other men had gone up to dinner and we were left alone. He glowed, he swallowed another pint of beer, in the chilly room he seemed to be exuding warmth; but that was all he gave out. Although he had accepted my offer, he was returning nothing.

I was thinking: I should have to play his game, and bring in her name myself. It meant a bit of humiliation, but that did not matter; what did matter was that he would see too much. It was a risk I ought not to take. As I bought myself a drink, I asked: ‘By the way, have you seen Margaret lately?’

‘Now and again.’

‘How is she?’

‘Is there anything wrong with her?’ His eyes were sparkling.

‘How should I know?’ I replied evenly.

‘Isn’t she much as you’d expect?’

‘I’ve quite lost touch.’

‘Oh.’ He was briskly conversational. ‘Of course, I’ve kept my eye on all of them, I suppose I see them once every two months, or something like that.’ He was spinning it out. He told me, what I knew from the newspapers, that Margaret’s mother had died a year before. He went on to say, with an air of enthusiasm and good-fellowship: ‘Of course, I’ve seen quite a lot of Helen and her husband. You did meet him, didn’t you? He’s a decent bird–’

‘Yes, I met him,’ I said. ‘When did you see Margaret last?’

‘It can’t have been very long ago.’

‘How was she?’

‘I didn’t notice much change.’

‘Was the child all right?’

‘I think so.’

I broke out: ‘Is she happy?’

‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Gilbert asked affably. ‘I should have thought she had done as well as most of us. Of course you can’t tell, can you, unless you’ve known someone better than I ever did Margaret?’

He knew, of course, how my question had been wrung out of me. He had been waiting for something like it: I might as well have confided straight out that I still loved her. But he was refusing to help. His mouth was smiling obstinately and his eyes, merry and malicious, taunted me.

I had to honour my offer to Gilbert, and I arranged to call on Paul Lufkin. When I arrived at the Millbank office, where in the past he had kept me waiting so many stretches of hours and from which I used to walk home to Sheila, he was hearty. He was so hearty that I felt the curious embarrassment which comes from the spectacle of an austere man behaving out of character.

Some of his retinue were waiting in the ante-room but I was swept in out of turn, and Lufkin actually slapped me on the back (he disliked physical contact with other males) and pushed out the distinguished visitors’ chair. Now that I was, in his eyes, an independent success, a power in my own right though still minor compared to him, he gave me the appropriate treatment. The interesting thing was, he also truly liked me more.

He said: ‘Well, old chap, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’

He was sitting at his own desk, showing less effects of the last years than any of us, his handsome skull face unravaged, his figure still as bony as an adolescent’s.

‘Believe it or not,’ he went on, ‘I was thinking of asking you to come to one of my little dinner-parties.

‘We must fix it,’ he said, still acting his impersonation of heartiness. ‘We’ve had some pretty jolly parties in our time, haven’t we?’

I responded.

‘There’s a secret I was going to tell you. But now you’ve given me the pleasure of a visit’ – said Lufkin with an entirely unfamiliar politeness – ‘I needn’t wait, I may as well tell you now.’

I realized that he was delighted to have me sitting there. He wanted someone to talk to.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘these people want to send me to the Lords.’

‘These people’ were the first post-war Labour government, and at first hearing it sounded odd that they should want to give Lufkin a peerage. But although he was one of the most eminent industrialists of his day, he had, with his usual long-sightedness, kept a foot in the other camp. He had never been inside the orthodox Conservative party: he had deliberately put some bets on the other side, and since 1940 that policy had been paying off.

In private his politics were the collectivist politics of a supreme manager, superimposed on – and to everyone but himself irreconcilable with – a basis of old-fashioned liberalism.

‘Shall you go?’

‘I don’t see any good reason for turning them down. To tell you the honest truth, I think I should rather like it.’

‘Your colleagues won’t.’

I meant what he must have thought of, that his fellow-bosses would regard him as a traitor for taking honours from the enemy.

‘Oh, that will be a nine days’ wonder. If I’m useful to them, they’ll still want me. And the minute I’m not useful they’ll kick me, whether I’ve got a coronet or not.’

He gave a savage, creaking chuckle.

‘Most of them would give their eyes for one, anyway. The main advantage about these tinpot honours – which I still think it’s time we got rid of–’ he put in, getting it both ways, as so often, ‘isn’t the pleasure they cause to the chaps who get them: it’s the pain they cause to the chaps who don’t.’

He was very happy, and I congratulated him. I was pleased: he was as able in his own line as anyone I knew, in the world’s eye he had gone the farthest, and I had an inexplicable liking for him.

I inquired what title he would choose.

‘Yes, that’s the rub,’ said Lufkin.

‘Haven’t you settled it?’

‘I suppose it will have to be the Baron Lufkin of somewhere or other. Lord Lufkin. It’s a damned awful name, but I don’t see how I can hide it. It might be different if I believed in all this flummery. It would have been rather fun to have a decent-sounding name.’

‘Now’s your chance,’ I teased him, but he snapped: ‘No. We’re too late for that. It’s no use rich merchants putting on fancy dress. It’s damned well got to be Lord Lufkin.’

He had the shamefaced, almost lubricious, grin of a man caught in a bout of day-dreaming. He had been writing down names on his blotter: Bury St Edmunds was his birthplace, how would Lord St Edmunds look? Thurlow, Belchamp, Lavenham, Cavendish, Clare, the villages he knew as a boy: with his submerged romanticism, he wanted to take a title from them. He read them out to me.

‘Pretty names,’ he said, inarticulate as ever. That was all the indication he could emit that they were his Tansonville, his Méséglise, his Combray.

‘Why not have one?’ Just for once I wanted him to indulge himself.

‘It’s out of the question,’ he said bleakly.

I thought he was in a good mood for my mission. I said I had a favour to ask him.

‘Go ahead.’

‘I should like to talk to you about Gilbert Cooke.’

‘I shouldn’t.’ Instantaneously the gracious manner – fingertips together, Lufkin obliging a friend – had broken up. All at once he was gritty with anger.

As though not noticing him, I tried to put my case: Cooke had done well in the Civil Service, he was highly thought of by Hector Rose and the rest –

‘I don’t think we need waste much time on this,’ Lufkin interrupted. ‘You mean, you’re asking me to give Cooke his job back?’

‘I wanted you to hear–’

‘That’s what it boils down to isn’t it?’

I nodded.

‘Well, my answer is short and simple. I wouldn’t pay Cooke in washers.’

It was no use. Implacable, tied up in his anger, as rude as I had seen him, he cut me short.

When I reported the answer to Gilbert, he said: ‘That’s burnt it.’ His face flushed, he went on: ‘I never ought to have let him get the smallest blasted bleat from my direction, I never ought to have let you go near the man. There it is!

‘Well,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’d better make sure that the chaps here want me. I’ve always said that in business you’ve either got to be a tycoon or a born slave, and damn it, I’m not either. I once told P L that.’

‘What did he say?’

‘Offered me a three-year contract.’

On his disappointment Gilbert put a dashing face; when he turned it towards me it was still pursed with comradely malignance. I fancied that, whether I brought him good news or bad from Lufkin, he would not have relented. He had so often relished letting slip a piece of gossip, but he was relishing even more holding on to one.

Before I could search for another link with Margaret there happened what at the time seemed a wild coincidence, a thousand-to-one against chance. One Saturday morning, thinking nothing of it, I was rung up by old Bevill, who, after a period of what he himself described as ‘the wilderness’, had returned to Whitehall as chairman of the atomic energy project. He was just off to the country for the weekend, he said: he had a ‘little job’ he wanted to ‘unload’ on to me: would I mind going with him as far as Charing Cross?

In the circumstances, I thought he might have risen to a taxi: but no, Bevill stood at the bus-stop, briefcase in hand, bowler hat on head, getting a modest pleasure out of his unpretentiousness. At last we mounted a bus, the top deck of which was empty, so that Bevill, instead of waiting until the platform at Charing Cross, was able to confide.

‘I’m being chased, Lewis,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming up, and somehow giving the impression that he was really on the run.

‘Who by?’

‘People who always know better than anyone else,’ the old man replied. ‘I don’t know about you, Lewis, but I don’t like people who’re always positive you’re wrong and they’re right. Particularly intellectuals, as I believe they’re called nowadays, or else have the impertinence to call themselves. The nigger in the woodpile is, they can make a hell of a lot of noise.’

‘What do they want?’

‘Do you remember that fellow Sawbridge?’ The question was rhetorical; old Bevill, my brother, and the Barford scientists, Hector Rose, and I were not likely to forget Sawbridge, who had not long since been sent to jail for espionage.

The bus in front of us disappeared out of Whitehall with a swishing scarlet flash: we were stopped at the traffic lights, and Bevill stared up at Nelson’s statue.

‘Now that chap up there,
he
was a different kettle of fish from Sawbridge. You can’t make me believe he would have betrayed his country.’ In action, the old man could be as capable and cynical as most men: in speech he could be just as banal.

‘You can’t make me believe he would have had any use for intellectuals,’ Bevill went on darkly. ‘Kicked them in the pants, that’s what he would have done.’

As we curved round Trafalgar Square, Bevill told me that some people unspecified were asking ‘silly questions’ about the trials of the atomic spies: why had they all pleaded guilty, why were the prison terms so long?

‘Long,’ said Bevill. ‘If you ask me, they were lucky to get away with their necks.

‘But I tell you, Lewis,’ he went on, more like his patient political self, ‘some people are asking questions, all in the name of civil liberties if you please, and we don’t want any more questions than we can help because of the effect on our friends over the other side. And so it may be a case where a bit of private conversation can save a lot of public fuss, even if it does seem like eating humble-pie.’