Homecomings (36 page)

‘I didn’t want to give my opinion,’ said Rose smoothly and slowly to Jones, ‘before I had some indication of what you others thought. I still don’t want to rush things, but perhaps this is a reasonable time to sketch out the way my mind’s been tending. As for your question, Lewis, I don’t consider that we’ve been making unduly heavy weather of this business. We want to see that this man gets fair treatment: and we also don’t want to take an unjustified risk for the Department. It isn’t entirely easy to reconcile those two objectives. I’m inclined to think that you slightly, not very greatly, but perceptibly, exaggerate Passant’s mental qualities, but I won’t quarrel with the view that he is a distinctly better mind than Cooke, for example, or, as far as that goes, than most of the ordinary principals in the Department. I think I remember saying much the same thing when I first saw him. On the other hand, that doesn’t entirely persuade me that keeping him wouldn’t be a mildly regrettable risk where the Department stands to lose slightly more than it stands to gain. After all, if we keep Passant, we gain a principal in some ways rather better than the average, in some ways, as you very properly pointed out, Lewis, rather worse. And at the same time we take on a definite hazard, not of course a serious one or one likely to materialize in fact, but the kind of hazard that you can’t escape if you commit yourself to a man of, I don’t want to do him an injustice but perhaps I can reasonably say, powerful, peculiar, and perhaps faintly unstable personality. There’s bound to be a finite chance that such a man wouldn’t fit in for his remaining thirteen years or whatever it is. There’s a finite chance that we should be making trouble for ourselves. There might just possibly be some row or commotion that wouldn’t do us any good. I don’t think that it is responsible to take those risks for the sake of an appointment at this level. I think I should conceivably have come down in Passant’s favour if we were able to consider him for something more senior. He’s the sort of man, in fact, who might have been far less trouble as a cabinet minister than he’d be in the slightly more pedestrian ranks of the administrative service.’

‘Well,’ said Jones, ‘I don’t think anyone could add much to a summing up like that.’

While there had seemed a doubt, Osbaldiston had been as painstaking as Rose himself. Now he tilted back his chair, and sounded more than ever offhand.

‘Agreed,’ he said, as if anxious not to waste any more time. ‘Though perhaps it’s a pity that we didn’t catch the chap young.’

‘In that case, with your approval,’ Rose remarked, ‘I propose to report on him to the Commission in terms something like this. I’ll send you a draft. But I propose to say that he has filled a principal’s place here quite up to standard form, and in one or two respects better than standard form. That we consider him intellectually well up to the level of the administrative class. But that at his age, bearing in mind certain features of his personality, we shouldn’t feel entirely easy about fitting him into the Department as an established man.’

‘It might be a friendly thought,’ said Jones, and he was speaking with good nature, ‘to tell him to withdraw and not fag to go up to the Commission. Because there will be nothing they can do but say no.’

‘I agree,’ said Rose.

I began, keeping my voice down, still seeming reasonable, to open the argument again, but in a moment Osbaldiston broke in: ‘It’s no use going over old ground.’

‘I really don’t think it’s very profitable,’ said Rose.

Then I lost my temper. I said they were too fond of the second-rate. I said that any society which deliberately made safe appointments was on the way out.

‘I’m sorry that we can’t carry you with us, Lewis.’ Rose’s eyes were cold, but he was keeping his own temper.

‘You do not realize your own prejudices,’ I cried.

‘No, this isn’t at all profitable and we must agree to differ.’ Rose spoke with exaggerated calm. ‘You’ve had more experience in selecting men than any of your colleagues. As you know, I for one have often been guided by you. But you’d be the first to admit that no man can be infallible. And even very wise people sometimes seem no more infallible than the rest of us, the nearer they get towards home.’

He had permitted himself that last arctic flick. Then, leaning back in his chair, his face smooth, he said: ‘Well, I think that is all for this morning. Thank you all very, very much for sparing your valuable time. Thank you, John. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you
very
much, Lewis.’

Back in my room, I stared out into the sun-bright Whitehall with the gauze of anger, of something like anxiety, of despondent restless bitterness in front of my eyes. It was the state that I used to know more often, that I had lived in during my worst times. It was a long while since I had been so wretched.

It had come pretty easy, it had not given me much regret, to slip out of the struggles of power – as a rule I did not mind seeing the places of power filled by the Osbaldistons, those who wanted them more. But that morning, gazing blankly down at the sunny street, I was wretched because I was not occupying them myself. Then and only then could I have done something for George and those like him.

The men I sat with in their offices, with their moral certainties, their comfortable, conforming indignation which never made them put a foot out of step – they were the men who managed the world, they were the people who in any society came out on top. They had virtues denied the rest of us: I had to give them my respect. But that morning I was on the other side.

IN Whitehall the fog was dense: it was a little whiter, I could make out the lights in the shop-fronts, as the taxi nosed up Baker Street. By the time we reached Regent’s Park, the pavements were clear to the view as far as the glowing ground-floor windows. Trying to damp down expectation, I was soothed by the fog shutting me in: instead of the joggle of the taxi, the reminder of adult expectations to which one did not know the end, I felt the sheer cosiness of a childhood’s winter afternoon.

Whatever my expectations had been, I was surprised when I entered Davidson’s study. For Margaret smiled at me, without much trace of trouble: Davidson did not look up: they were playing a game. In the fireplace stood a teapot, cups, a plate of crumpets, but on Davidson’s side the tea had a skin on it. The crumpet’s butter was solid. He was leaning, his face still distinguished even though his mouth was open with concentration, over the board. So far as I could pick up at a glance, the board was home made, something like a chess board but not symmetrical and with at least three times the number of squares on the base line: at some points there appeared to be blanks and hazards. They were using ordinary chessmen, but each had some extra pieces, together with small boxes whose function I did not begin to understand.

As I looked at Margaret’s face, it seemed to me that I remembered returning to the house in Chelsea, finding Sheila staring with psychotic raptness at her chessmen: it was not a jab of pain, it was more like the pleasure (the exact converse of the Dantesque misery) with which, in the company of someone whom one safely loves, one looks in at a place where one has been miserable.

‘She said that you might be coming,’ said Davidson without preamble, gazing up under his eyebrows and then back at the board.

I said, ‘Just for a few minutes’, but Davidson ignored me.

‘You’ll have to play, of course,’ he said sternly. ‘It’s a much better game with three.’

It was, in fact, a war game which Davidson had perversely invented while he and his friends were pacifists in 1914–18. So far as I could judge, who envisaged the game stretching on, the three of us kept speechless there, it was elaborate but neat, crisp because he had a gift for concepts: Davidson wanted to explain it to me in all its beauties, irritated because I did not seem to be attending. I did not even pay enough attention, Davidson indicated, to the names of the two sides. They were Has-beens and Humbugs. The Has-beens were the side Davidson was commanding: their officers were chosen from his allies, associates and teachers, for Davidson, with his usual bleak honesty, knew critical fashion when he saw it. The other side was picked from Davidson’s irremovable aversions, among them D H Lawrence, Jung, Kierkegaard; various Catholic intellectuals and Communist art critics had places as brigadiers.

I did not know enough about the game to lose on purpose. All I knew was that Davidson would never get bored with it.

I could not even guess whether Margaret was willing to break the peace-of-the-moment.

Just then she was threatening one of her father’s rooks, who stood for an academic philosopher known to all three of us.

‘He oughtn’t to be on your side anyway,’ said Margaret.

Davidson studied the battle-plan.

‘Why shouldn’t he?’ he said without attention.

‘He’s going to be the next convert, or so the Warden says.’

‘The Warden,’ Davidson remarked, still preoccupied with his move, ‘is a good second-class liar.’

At last he guarded the rook, and was able to gather together the conversation – ‘he [the philosopher] is about as likely to be converted as I am. He’s a perfectly sensible man.’

‘And you couldn’t say fairer than that, could you?’ Davidson smiled: he liked being teased by his daughter: it was easy to feel how he had liked being teased, perhaps still did, by other women.

‘He was always perfectly sensible,’ he said.

‘However did you know?’

‘I don’t remember him ever saying anything really crass,’ said Davidson.

‘But you all said the same things,’ said Margaret. ‘I always wondered how you could tell each other apart.’

It was the first time I had seen her alone with her father. I had heard her talk of him very often, but never to him: and now I listened to her sounding gay and very much his daughter. Although I should have known better, I was surprised.

It was true that she felt something stronger than dislike for the beliefs of her father and his friends, and still more for their unbeliefs. She had been passionately convinced ever since she was a child that their view of life left out all that made men either horrible or splendid.

And yet, seeing her with her father, upset because I wanted nothing but to speak to her alone, I had to notice one thing – that she was proud of him. Her language was more like his than mine; in some ways her nerves were too.

I noticed something else, as I tried to calculate when the game might end – that she was disappointed for him. By the standards of his friends, he, who in his youth had been one of the most glittering of them, had not quite come off. He was no sort of creative person, he was not the critic that some of them had been. He had no illusion about it: at times, so Margaret divined, he had suffered because of it, and so did she. She could not help feeling that, if she had been a man, she would have been stronger than he. That protest, born of their relation or edged by it, had been too deep for me to see, in our first time together. I imagined her as other people did: all they imagined was true, she was loving, she was happy to look after those she loved – it was all true: but it was also true (and the origin of much that she struggled with) that her spirit was as strong as her father’s or mine, and in the last resort did not give an inch to either of us.

The game continued. Repeatedly Margaret was glancing at me, until suddenly, as though screwing herself to the threshold edge, she said: ‘I want to talk to Lewis for a minute.’

It was Davidson’s move, and with a faint irritation he nodded. In an instant I followed Margaret into the hall; she led me into the drawing-room, which was dark except for a dim luminescence from the street lamp outside, bleared by the fog: the room struck chilly, but her cheek, as my fingers touched it, was hot, and I could feel my own skin flushed. She switched on a light: she looked up at me, and, although we were alone in the long room, although there was no one else in the house except Davidson, her voice was faint.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘That’s easy to say.’

‘No, it’s not easy to say.’ She had roused herself. Her face was wide open: it might have been smiling or in pain.

‘I tell you,’ she cried, ‘there’s no need to worry!’

I exclaimed.

‘Do you believe me?’ she cried.

‘I want to believe you.’

‘You can.’ Then she added, in a matter-of-fact but exhausted tone: ‘I’ll do it.’

She went on:‘Yes, I’ll tell him.’

We were standing in the corner of the frigid room. I felt for an instant the rip of triumph, then I shared her tiredness. It was the tiredness which comes after suspense, when the news may be good or bad: suddenly the good news comes, and in the midst of exaltation one is so light-headed with fatigue that one cannot read the letter through. I felt that happiness had sponged my face, taking away care like the smell of soap in the morning: I saw her face, also washed with happiness.

We stood quiet, our arms round each other: then I saw there was another purpose, a trouble, forming underneath the look of peace.

She said: ‘I’ll tell him. But you must wait a little.’

‘I can’t wait any longer.’

‘You must be patient, just this once.’

‘No, you must do it straightaway.’

‘It’s not possible,’ she cried.

‘It’s got to be.’

I was gripping her shoulders.

‘No,’ she said, looking at me with knowledge of us both, ‘I don’t want you to, it would be bad. I promise you, it won’t be long.’

‘What are you waiting for?’ To my bewilderment, she replied in a tone sounding like one of her aunts, astringent, cynical: ‘How often have I told you,’ she said, ‘that if you’re going to hurt anyone, it’s no use being timidly considerate over the time you choose to do it?

‘I always told you,’ she could not leave it alone, ‘that you did more harm by trying to be kind. Well, there’s nothing like practising what one preaches.’

She was trapped, so that she could not bring herself to tell the truth to Geoffrey, or even mildly upset him. By a minor irony, the reason was as prosaic as some which had from time to time determined my own behaviour. It happened that Geoffrey was within a fortnight of sitting his examination for Membership, that is, his qualification as a specialist. It happened also that Geoffrey, so confident in general, was a bad and nervous examinee. She had at least to coax him through, take care of him for this last time: it meant dissimilating, which to her was an outrage, it meant not acting, which was like an illness – and yet not to look after him, just then, when he was vulnerable, would mean a strain she could not take.