Last Things (14 page)

Just to add an edge to it, I thought that she was misjudging me that night. Not dramatically, only slightly – but still enough. It was true – she had heard me amuse myself at others’ expense as they solemnly professed to wonder whether they should accept a job they had been working towards for years – that most decisions were taken on the spot. When one asked for time to ‘sleep on it’, old Arthur Brown’s immemorial phrase, when one asked for the forty-eight hours’ grace of which I was bad-temperedly telling Margaret – one was, nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, merely enjoying the situation or alternatively searching for rationalisations and glosses to prettify a decision which was already made.

That wasn’t quite the case with me that night. I had in my mind all the reasons why I should say no. So far Margaret was wrong. But only a little wrong. What I wanted was for her to join in dismissing those reasons, take it all lightly, and push me, just a fraction, into saying yes.

Reasons against – they were the same for me as for Francis, and perhaps by this time a shade stronger. He had said that he couldn’t do much – or any – good. I was as convinced of that as he was, whoever did the job: more so because I had lived inside the government apparatus, as he had never done. That hadn’t made me cynical, exactly (for cynicism came only to those who were certain they were superior to less splendid mortals): but it had made me Tolstoyan, or at least sceptical of the effect that any man could have, not just a junior minister, but anyone who really seemed to possess the power, by contrast to the tidal flow in which he lived. Some sort of sense about nuclear armaments might one day arise: what Francis and David Rubin and the rest of us had said, and within our limits done, might not have been entirely useless: but the decisions – the apparent decisions, the voices in cabinets, the signatures on paper – would be taken by people who couldn’t avoid taking them, because they were swept along, unresisting, on the tide. The tide which we had failed to catch.

That wasn’t a reason for not acting. In fact, Francis and his colleagues believed – and so did I – that, in the times through which we had lived, you had to do what little you could in action, if you were to face yourself at all. But it was a reason, this knowledge we had acquired, for not fooling ourselves: for not pretending to take action, when we were one hundred per cent certain that it was just make-believe. If you were only ninety per cent certain, then sometimes you hadn’t to be too proud to do the donkey work. But, if you were utterly certain, then pretending to take action could do harm. It could even drug you into feeling satisfied with yourself.

By this time, our certainties had hardened, that nothing useful could be done in this job. The year before, when Francis was offered it, we thought we had known all about the limits of government. We had flattered ourselves. The limits were tighter than self-styled realistic men had guessed. Azik Schiff couldn’t resist saying that he had warned us about social democracies. Vietnam was hag-riding us. Bitterly Francis said that a country couldn’t be independent in foreign policy if it wasn’t independent in earning its living. That remark had been made in the presence of some of Charles’ friends, and had scandalised them. To many of us, the window of public hope, which had seemed clearer for a few years past, was being blacked out now.

All this was objective, and I didn’t need so much as mention it to Margaret. Nor the other reason against, which was more compelling than with Francis. He had his research to do, and I had my writing. He had the assurance that any good scientist possessed, that some of what he had done was right (it was no use quibbling about epistemological terms; in the here-and-now, in Francis’ own existence that was so). No writer had that assurance: but, exactly as his work was a private comfort, no, more than comfort, justification, so was mine. And – this was a difference between us – I had more to finish than he had, perhaps because I had started later. I had never liked talking about my books, and should never have considered writing anything about my literary life. I had had my joys and sorrows, like any other writer. In fact, most writing lives were more alike than different, which made one’s own not specially interesting, except to oneself. After all, the books were there.

However, quite as much as ever in my life, as much as in the middle of the war, this preoccupation remained with me. It had been steady all through, it hadn’t lost any of its strength. In the middle of the war, I had been a youngish man, I hadn’t the sense of losing against time. I had been too busy to write anything sustained, but I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It had been like going into a safe and quiet room. If I took this job, I could do the same, but I wasn’t youngish now. I should have liked to count on ten years more to work in.

Ten years with good luck. Margaret knew that was what I was hoping for. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about my lifespan. She did say that this would mean time away from writing. Francis, she forced herself to say, had talked about a year or two in office: and he had said that he couldn’t afford a year or two. She didn’t ask a question, she made the statement in a flat, anxious tone, the lines deep across her forehead.

Yes, in every aspect but one, Francis and I were in the same situation, or near enough not to matter. So that the answer should also be the same. There was just one difference. I should like to do the job. I should enjoy it. It was that, precisely that, which Margaret hated.

She had been utterly loyal throughout our married life. She had tried not to constrict me, even when I was doing things, or showing a vein within myself, which she would have liked to wipe away. It wasn’t that she thought that I was an addict of power. If that had been so, she felt that I should have acquired it. And she had learned enough by now to realise that this job I had been offered carried no power at all: and that the more you penetrated that world, the more you wondered who had the power, or whether anyone had, or whether we weren’t giving to offices a free will that those who held them could never conceivably possess.

Nevertheless, she would have liked me to be nowhere near it. Her own principles, her own scrupulousness, couldn’t have lived in that world, any more than her father’s could. She despised, as much as he did, or his friends, the people who got the jobs, who were ready to scramble, compromise, muck in. She couldn’t accept, she resented my accepting, that any society under heaven would need such people. She was put off by my interest, part brotherly, part voyeuristic, in them – in the Lufkins, the Roger Quaifes, even my old civil-service colleagues, who were nearer in sympathy to her. When I told her that they had virtues not given to her father’s friends, or to her, or to me, she didn’t wish to hear.

‘It’s all second-rate,’ she had said before, and said again that night.

Here was I, out of spontaneity (for, though I had trained myself into some sort of prudence, I was still a spontaneous man), or just for the fun or hell of it, ready to plunge in. I should even have enjoyed fighting a by-election: but that wasn’t on, no government with a majority of three could risk it. Anyway, if I said yes, I should enjoy making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords.

To her, who loved me and in many ways admired me – and wanted to admire me totally – it seemed commonplace and vulgar. As our tempers got higher, she used those words.

‘That’s no news to you,’ I said.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘In your sense, I am vulgar.’

‘I won’t have that.’

‘You’ve got to have it. If you mean that I’m not superior to the people round us, then of course I’m vulgar.’

‘I don’t want you to behave like them, that’s all.’

The quarrel went on, and I, because I was not only angry but raw with chagrin (on the way home, I had been expecting a bit of applause, ironic applause maybe: she spoke about temptation, but she might, so I felt, have granted me that this particular temptation didn’t come to all that many men), was having the worst of it. I betrayed myself by bringing up an argument which in my own mind I had already negated: the necessity for action, for any halfway decent man in our own time. I even quoted Hammarskjöld at her, though none of us would have used his words. She looked at me with sad lucidity.

‘You’ve been sincere in that, I know,’ she said. ‘But you’re not being sincere now, are you?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because this isn’t real, as you know perfectly well. It isn’t going to be any use, and if it were anyone else you’d be the first to say so.’

Since that was precisely what in detachment I had thought, I was the more angry with her.

‘Well,’ she said at last, without expression, ‘I take it that you are going to accept.’

I sat sullen, keeping back the words. Then I crossed over to the sideboard and poured myself a drink, the first either of us had had since I returned. Once more I sat opposite to her, and spoke slowly and bitterly (it was a conflict that neither of us had the language for, after twenty years).

I said, that if anything could have made me decide to accept that night, it was her argument against. But she might do me one minor credit: I hadn’t lost all my capacities. It would be better to decide as though she had said nothing whatever. There were serious arguments against, though not hers. I should want some sensible advice, from people who weren’t emotionally committed either way. There I was going to leave it, for that night.

It was already early morning, and we lay in bed, unreconciled.

AS we were being polite to each other at breakfast, I repeated to Margaret that I should have to take some advice. She glanced at me with a glint which, even after a quarrel, wasn’t entirely unsarcastic. One trouble was, I had made too many cracks about others: how many times had she listened to me saying that persons in search of advisers had a singular gift for choosing the right ones? That is, those who would produce the advice they wanted to hear.

No, I said, as though brushing off a comment, I thought of calling on old Hector Rose. He knew this entire field of government backwards: he was a friendly acquaintance, not even specially well disposed: he would keep the confidence, and was as cool as a man could reasonably be.

Margaret hadn’t expected that name. She gave a faint grin against herself. All she could say was that he would be so perfectly balanced that I might as well toss up for it.

When I telephoned Hector at the Pimlico flat, his greetings were ornate. Pleasure at hearing my voice! Surprise that I should think of him! Cutting through the ceremonial, I asked if he were free that morning: there was a matter on which I should like his opinion. Of course, came the beautiful articulation, he was at my disposal: not that any opinion of his could be of the slightest value –

He continued in that strain, as soon as I arrived in their sitting-room. He was apologising for his wife and himself, because she wasn’t there to receive me, to her great disappointment, but in fact she had to go out to do the morning’s shopping. As so often in the past, facing him in the office, I felt like an ambassador to a country whose protocol I had never been properly taught or where some customs had just been specially invented in order to baffle me. I said: ‘What I’ve come about – it’s very private.’

He bowed from the waist: ‘My dear Lewis.’

‘I want a bit of guidance.’

Protestations of being at my service, of total incompetence and humility. At the first pause I said that it was a pleasant morning (the porticoes opposite were glowing in the autumn sunshine): what about walking down to the garden by the river? What a splendid idea, replied Hector Rose with inordinate enthusiasm – but first he must write a note in case his wife returned and became anxious. Standing by my side, he set to work in that legible italic calligraphy. I could not help seeing, I was meant to see.

Darling, I have gone out for a short stroll with Sir L Eliot
(the old Whitehall usage which he had inscribed on his minutes, often, when we were disagreeing, with irritation).
I shall, needless to say, be back with you in good time for luncheon. Abiding love. Your H.

It was so mellow out of doors, leaves spiralling placidly down in calm air, that Hector did not take an overcoat. He was wearing a sports coat and grey flannel trousers, as he might have done as an undergraduate at Oxford in the twenties. Now that we were walking together, it occurred to me that he was shorter than he had seemed in his days of eminence: his stocky shoulders were two or three inches below mine. He was making conversation, as though it were not yet suitable to get down to business: his wife and he had been to a concert the night before: they had an agreement, he found it delectable to expatiate on their domestic ritual, to get out of the flat two evenings a week. The danger was, they had both realised when they married – Hector reported this ominous fact with earnestness – that they might tend to live too much in each other’s pockets.

It was like waiting for a negotiation to begin.

When we turned down by the church, along the side of the square towards the river, I jerked my finger towards one of the houses. ‘I lived there during the war,’ I said. ‘When I was working for you.’

‘How very remarkable! That really is most interesting!’ Hector, looking back, asked exactly where my flat had been, giving a display of excitement that might have been appropriate if I had shown him the birthplace of Einstein.

We arrived at the river wall. The water was oily smooth in the sun, the tide high. There was the sweet and rotting smell that I used to know, when Margaret and I stood there in the evenings, not long after we first met.

On one of the garden benches an elderly man in a straw hat was busy transcribing some figures from a book. Another bench was empty, and Hector Rose said: ‘I’m inclined to think it’s almost warm enough to sit down, or am I wrong, Lewis?’

Yes, it was just like one of his negotiations. You didn’t press for time and in due course the right time came. The official life was a marathon, not a sprint, and one stood it better if one took it at that tempo. People who were impatient, like me, either didn’t fit in or had to discipline themselves.