Last Things (34 page)

Very quietly Margaret said: ‘Am I not to come?’

‘He thought she might be more panicky–’

‘No.’

Margaret’s tone was level, unemphatic. ‘I shall come. I can sit at the back of the church.’

She did go. I offered to go with her, but she refused. When she returned – the wedding had been early in the morning, and it was not yet eleven o’clock – her expression would to others have seemed controlled.

‘That’s done,’ she said.

She sat on the sofa, smoking, not looking at me.

‘You know, one always imagines what one’s children’s weddings will be like. Do you do that about Carlo’s?’

‘No, never.’

‘Perhaps it’s a mother’s privilege.’ For an instant, her tone was sharp-edged. Then she went on: ‘I’ve imagined all sorts of weddings for Maurice. I haven’t told you, but I have. So many women would have married him, wouldn’t they? But I never imagined anything like this.’

I asked something pedestrian, but she didn’t hear.

‘He looked very nice. Very handsome. I think he was happy. No, I’m certain he was happy. I used to tell myself, all I wanted was for him to be happy.’

Had she met the girl? Oh yes, Maurice had brought her (Margaret) into the vestry. She and the best man were the witnesses. There had been one other person, a stranger, in the church: not Maurice’s father, who had sent flowers and a cheque.

What was the girl like – the question wanted to come out, but I hesitated. Margaret didn’t need to hear it. She said: ‘She’s almost pretty.’

She added: ‘She wanted to say something to me, but she could hardly get out a word.’

After a moment, still not letting go: ‘I wanted to say something to her, but I wasn’t much better.’

Three weeks later, I was able to see Maurice’s wife for myself. He brought her to tea one afternoon, and trying to settle her down and to smooth away her shyness (and our own), Margaret and I complained heartily of the misty weather, and made a parade of drawing the curtains and shutting the evening out.

‘Oh, never mind,’ said Maurice, entirely serene. ‘It’ll be worse where we live, won’t it, darling?’

His wife didn’t reply, but she understood, and gave a dependent, trusting smile. I was thinking, as she sat in the armchair, turning towards him, Margaret’s description wouldn’t have occurred to me. She hadn’t a feature which one noticed much, but she wasn’t, either in the English or the American sense, homely. Often she wore the expression, at the same time puzzled, obstinate, and protesting that one saw in the chronically deaf. How deaf she was, I couldn’t tell. Maurice spoke to her with the words slowed down, deliberately using the muscles of his lips, and she seemed to follow him easily. Sometimes he had to interpret for Margaret or me.

She was wearing a nondescript brown frock. But, as well as her limp catching the eye, so did her figure. Standing still, she looked shapely and trim.

We should have had to quarry for conversation if it hadn’t been for Maurice: but he took charge, like an adoring young husband acting as impresario. Each time he spoke to her, she smiled as though he had once more called her into existence.

Yes, they had a place to live in. They were buying a three-bedroom house in Salford, so that Di’s mother could live with them. I knew about this in principle, for as our wedding present Margaret and I had paid the deposit. Maurice would continue at his job at the mental hospital. Di would earn some money, typing at home.

‘We shall manage, shan’t we?’ he said to her, with his radiant unguarded smile.

‘If we can’t,’ she said, ‘we shall have to draw in our horns.’ When she spoke to him, her tone was transmuted: it became not only confident and trusting, but also matter of fact.

All that we could learn about her, through the deafness (our voices sounded more hectoring as we tried to get through, the questions more inane), was that she was utterly confident with Maurice, and not in the least surprised that he had married her.

I did manage to have one exchange with her, but it couldn’t have been called specially illuminating. I had been casting round, heavy-footed, for gossip about the Manchester district. I happened to mention the United football team. Her eyes suddenly brightened and became sharp, not puzzled: she had heard me, she gave a sky-blue recognising glance. Yes, she liked football. She supported the United. There wasn’t a team like them anywhere. She used to go to their matches – ‘until I met him’. It was the first time she had referred to Maurice without directly speaking to him, and they were both laughing. ‘I’m not much good to you about that, am I?’ said Maurice, who had no more interest in competitive games than in competing at anything himself.

In time, it had seemed a long time, Maurice got up and said: ‘Darling, we shall have to go. Old Godfrey will miss us at the service. You know, there mightn’t be anyone else.’

They had a little church backchat to themselves. I had never been certain whether Maurice was a believer, or just a fellow-traveller. The girl seemed to be devout. Then they got up, and Margaret went towards her and embraced her. Looking at Maurice, she stood uncertain, not knowing which way to go, while I in turn approached and laid my cheek against hers.

When we heard the lift door close, Margaret sat down again and sighed. After a while, she said: ‘Tell me, Lewis’ (actually she used a pet name which meant that she needed me) ‘is that a real marriage?’

‘I haven’t the remotest idea.’

‘No, I want to know what you think?’

‘For what my guess is worth,’ I said, ‘I’d say that it probably was.’

‘It would be a consolation, if I were certain of that.’

As she had told Godfrey, she wanted Maurice to be like everyone else: or as near like as he could come. Perhaps she was thinking, as she did later, about the nature of goodness. He was behaving, as he so often did, in a way which would have been impossible for most of us. If behaviour was the test, then he did good, and most of us didn’t. Margaret and I had often agreed, behaviour was more important than motive. And yet she, as a rule less suspicious than I was, had her moments of suspicion about this son she loved. Was it too easy for him to be good? Was it just an excuse for getting above, or out of, the battle? Did he really feel joyous and whole only with those who were helpless?

She didn’t ask me, because she felt that I was likely to be hard. In fact, I shouldn’t have been. There was something, I should have said, in what she suspected. He might even desire a woman only when she was disabled and had him alone to turn to. That was why, incidentally, I was ready to believe that his was a real marriage. But also, not in terms of desire but of well-being, he might be at his best himself only when he was with the unlucky and the injured. But that was true of everyone who had his kind of goodness. Did that make it less valuable? Maybe yes. It depended whether you were going to give any of us the benefit of the doubt.

Nevertheless, I thought, when I was a young man, if I had met Maurice and my nephew Pat, I should have been hypnotised by Pat’s quick-change performances and attributed to him depths and mysteries which he didn’t in the least possess. Whereas I shouldn’t have been more than mildly interested in Maurice and should have said that you couldn’t behave like that if you were a man.

After having seen more people, nowadays I should be much more sceptical about my ‘explanation’ of either of them: but I shouldn’t be in the least sceptical of one thing, which was which of the two I preferred to have close by. Virtue wore well after all.

THERE weren’t many dates which Margaret and I celebrated: there was one that November which I couldn’t celebrate with her. The twenty-eighth. First anniversary. For her it meant nothing but pain and extreme isolation – the hospital waiting-room, the dead blank, no news. She didn’t wish to be reminded. So I called in at my club and, avoiding friends and acquaintances, stood myself a drink.

That was the most private of celebrations. After all, it had been the most private of events.

I knew by now, not that it was a surprise, that traumas didn’t last in their first efficacy. This trauma didn’t keep me immune from hurt, as it had done for a time, when I had only to recall the date and bring back oblivion. One’s character and one’s nature weren’t so easily modified or tamed. Traumas weren’t so magical as that. And yet, they weren’t, or this one wasn’t, quite unavailing, and the effect took some time to fade right away. Not always but often I could ride over disappointments and worries, just as people more harmonious than I was had been able to do, without effort, all their lives.

That autumn (it hadn’t always been so) Margaret was worrying more about Maurice than I was about Charles. Walking alone in the park I wasn’t thinking of what he used to say to me when he accompanied me. Which added to my well-being and perhaps if he had known, to his.

After Maurice’s visit with his wife, Margaret heard of them only by letter. And it was not until December, when his term had ended, that we had a sight of Charles. He called on us ostensibly to pick up letters, but really to invite us to dinner the following week at Chester Row.

As we got ready to go, we hadn’t an inkling of what to expect. Margaret said it was like going out when she was a young woman, not on terms with social occasions. She was trying to dissemble that she was more than a little tense. When we arrived, we might not have known what to expect: but, whatever we had expected, it wouldn’t have borne any resemblance to this.

The housekeeper, beaming, took our coats from us in the bright hall. ‘Mrs Calvert wonders if you would mind going straight up to the drawing-room, Lady Eliot.’ Inside which, the first thing we saw was Azik Schiff, sitting on the sofa, looking unusually subdued. Muriel came towards us. ‘I’m so very pleased you could come, Aunt Meg,’ she said, giving us formal kisses. She was wearing a long frock, so that Margaret appeared distinctly underdressed: and, I noticed by a sideways glance, so did Rosalind, who was installed in an armchair. I wondered how long it was since Rosalind had gone out to dinner and found herself underdressed.

‘You’ll both probably have Scotch, won’t you?’ said Charles standing beside Muriel, polite and decorous in a dark suit. Though he and Muriel drank so little, they had provided for all our tastes: both Azik and Rosalind had been given Campari, presumably from domestic knowledge acquired by Muriel. As though to make us feel at home, which was the last thing any of their guests were feeling, Charles joined us in taking a whisky, which must have been another display of courtesy.

Two sofas, three armchairs, made an enclave at the street end of the long room. Muriel disposed us and then sat in one of the armchairs, utterly composed, like one presiding over a salon. Charles took his place near to the shelf of drinks: just once I thought or fancied I caught a flashing dark-eyed glance.

They each asked host-like questions, but the conversation didn’t flow. Margaret, trying to sound easy, remarked that the room was nice and warm. Yes, said Muriel, the heating system was efficient. ‘Actually,’ she went on, ‘we both like it a little cooler. But it was a case of majority opinion, we thought. So we stepped it up five degrees. I do hope that was right?’

Her eyes fixed themselves earnestly on her mother, then came back to Margaret. Nothing could have been more thoughtful or made them more uncomfortable. ‘Don’t mind about me,’ said Rosalind, out of countenance.
‘Of
course
we mind about you,’ said Muriel in a clear voice. An instant of silence. Up in the square, the church clock struck once: it must have been a quarter to eight.

‘How quiet it is here,’ I remarked, thinking it was not the most brilliant of conversational openings. Charles said: ‘At the weekends’ (this was a Saturday night), ‘we might as well be living in a small country town.’

I didn’t have the presence of mind to enquire when he had ever lived in a country town, small or otherwise. Azik made a contribution, standard Mitteleuropa, not Azik’s own uninhibited self, about the charms, the variety, the changes every quarter-mile, the village shopping streets, of London.

It went on like that, after we moved downstairs to the dining-room. I sat on Muriel’s right, Azik on her left, Rosalind next to me, Margaret next to Azik, Charles at the head of the table.

‘Six is the easiest number, isn’t it?’ Muriel said with demure pleasure.

The food was excellent, soup, grouse, a savoury. They had acquired some good claret, such as Azik and I might have provided. It was all as formal as any small dinner-party we were likely to go to. In fact, it was appreciably more formal, since not many of our friends had the domestic help for this kind of entertaining, nor the peculiar deadpan style which Muriel found natural and which, that night at least, it amused Charles to adopt. It all seemed – would they have done this for anyone else’s benefit? – like an elaborate, long-drawn-out practical joke: the kind of joke in which Muriel’s father used to involve himself, so that sometimes it looked as though he had forgotten that it was a joke at all.

The conversation round the dinner table was stylised also. Azik and Charles had an exchange about Asian politics, on which Azik was knowledgeable because of his business. They might have been meeting for the first time. Neither gave much away about his political opinions, or whether he had any opinions whatever. Enquiries about Muriel’s child, not fended off, politely replied to: yes, he was bright and flourishing. Enquiries from me about Charles’ friends: those were fended off, though Charles gave an amiable smile as he did so. The only direct talk, propriety for once relaxed, came when Azik produced the precious, the inevitable topic of his son. Next October, 1967, David would be going to his public school. They had finally decided on Westminster: despite all their resolves, they couldn’t let him go away from home: he might win a scholarship (‘certain to,’ said Charles with professional competence), but even so he would enter as a day boy. For a while Azik’s parental passion dominated the table and the family relations spread among us all. At the end of the meal, however, we had returned to a discussion of jewellery.