Last Things (37 page)

Hearing my gibe, he gave a grim smile, lips pulled down.

‘I should have thought’, he said, ‘that I was in a privileged position.’

He went on talking of the penalties that anyone breaking official secrets might pay. We both knew all about it. Some careers could be closed, or at least impeded: one would find mysterious obstacles if one attempted most kinds of official life. Martin’s concern, and mine, became practical, almost as unethereal as though we were trying to watch over Charles’ health.

To some, it would have seemed puzzling, or even unnatural, that Martin should be so much affected. True, he had shown a glint of brotherly malice, of obscure satisfaction, that, after all his troubles with his own son, I should run into one with mine.

But that glint emerged from feelings which contradicted it. Martin had a family sense much stronger than my own. Charles might have existed for years as an incarnate reproach to Martin’s son: but he was also the chief hope of the whole family. With any luck, Martin believed, he was going to make his independent name. And Martin imagined him making a name in the official world where Martin could himself have been successful. It was noticeable, I thought, that people living inside what Charles’ friends called a ‘structure’ couldn’t easily picture able men fulfilling themselves outside. That had been true of me when I lived, as Martin did now, in a college, or afterwards in Whitehall and Westminster. Somehow these institutions, which had their own charm to those inside, set limits to one’s expectations. Enclaves which made for a comprehensible life. When one left them behind, as I had done, it was a bit of a surprise to find that enclaves weren’t necessary, and that comprehensibility wasn’t such a comfort as one had thought.

So that some of Martin’s hopes for Charles I could get on without, and my concerns, as we walked back and forward across the Nursery turf were less sharp-edged. Yet still I was shaken by thoughts of prosecution – or less than that, plain scandal, almost as my mother would have been. One’s self-sufficiency dropped away. One cared where one didn’t choose to care: often where one ought not to care. Scandal, notoriety, row. He was proposing to act – so far as I could tell – according to his beliefs. To many – what did I think myself? – they were decent beliefs. Scandal, notoriety, row. I wasn’t a stranger to them myself, and had survived.

Yet that wasn’t a consolation, as I walked with Martin in the chilly afternoon.

‘I’m not certain’, Martin was saying, after a period in which we had each been brooding, ‘that what I did (he meant, his resignation) was right. If you think of what has happened, it wasn’t.’

‘You couldn’t have predicted that.’

‘There is not much excuse for being wrong.’

It was true, we had all been wrong. We had foreseen that if men made nuclear bombs they would use them. There would be the slaughter of many millions. We shouldn’t escape a thermonuclear war. It was because he couldn’t accept his share of that responsibility that Martin abdicated. As it turned out, what we expected was the opposite of the truth. We shouldn’t have believed it, but an equilibrium had set in. It might be an unstable peace, but it had been peace for over twenty years. By this time, we were afraid of other fates, but not of major war.

So the most quixotic action of Martin’s life looked, in retrospect, like a bad guess.

I said: ‘Perhaps it helps the rest of us if one or two people show they don’t approve of mass annihilation.’

‘I wonder.’

He had been right about Hiroshima, I said. We got hardened to killing with astonishing speed: it was one of the horrifying features of the human animal.

‘I dare say’, Martin remarked, ‘that you and I have become hardened too, don’t you think?’

‘Does that surprise you?’

‘You know, this business that Charles is kicking about, there was a time when I couldn’t have taken it, could you?’

‘Most people can take anything. Not many kick.’

‘Perhaps that will be a comfort to him some day,’ Martin said.

‘It’s the only one he’s likely to get.’

What was to be done? ‘You could do more harm than good,’ said Martin, thinking of his own attempts to guide Pat, who put up no resistance and then found some new manoeuvre. With Charles it would be a mistake to try anything remotely subtle: he wasn’t labile as Pat was, but he was hard to take in. The only way was to be direct. We arranged that I should write him a letter, saying that this gossip had reached me, and telling him he ought to be aware of the Official Secrets Act. Then Martin, back in Cambridge, would ask him round. They were on good terms, it would be easier, and conceivably more effective for Martin to talk to him than for me.

The pavilion bell was clanging, and Martin showed a disposition to return to the game. I delayed him, having something else to ask.

‘Your information,’ I said. ‘How did you get it? You haven’t told me–’

He hesitated.

‘Everything is in confidence, you needn’t worry,’ I told him, playing a family joke, that he was so secretive that he didn’t like telling one the time.

He returned the gibe.

‘Within these four walls,’ he said, waving a hand towards the bare expanse, mimicking a colleague of ours long since retired.

‘Well then,’ he went on, ‘it was through Nina.’

I exclaimed, and recalled some talk about attachments.

‘From the young man Bestwick, I suppose?’

‘I think not.’

Martin’s reply, unusually brusque, sounded as though he didn’t favour Bestwick.

I said: ‘I have a lot of use for him, you oughtn’t to write him off–’

‘I’m not writing him off. I rather wish that it did come from him. But it was from someone else.’

‘Why did she tell you?’

‘I fancy she was trying to protect him.’

‘Not Charles, of course?’ She was fond of her cousin, but they had never been close.

‘Oh no.’

It seemed that Martin was not certain whom she was protecting. That afternoon, I couldn’t identify the name.

But I could identify the way secrets leaked. Just as they got hold of news about Porton, so they had let out their own news. There was a certain perverse symmetry about it. Particularly as Nina was the channel, one of the most trustworthy of girls.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘this mustn’t go any further.’

‘Nina told me that.’ Martin smiled. ‘Just to make certain, I told her the same.’

I didn’t like what I had to say next.

‘You’d better impress on her that she mustn’t tell her brother.’ That was the nearest I could go to impressing on Martin that he mustn’t tell his son. It was bitter to have to say anything, but after the disclosures of last year I dared not take a risk.

Martin said, without expression: ‘I don’t think that’s necessary. You needn’t worry, he won’t be told.’

THE results of our communication with Charles were not dramatic. To me he wrote a civil and affectionate answer, saying that since he had now studied the Official Secrets Act, there was some danger that he would get mixed up and include it in his papers in the Mays: while Martin reported over the telephone that Charles had in conversation been completely sensible, but neither admitted nor denied that the rumour was correct. ‘If he is considering anything,’ Martin said, ‘then he’s got it worked out every step of the way.’ Which had been true of Martin himself, in his days of action.

With that I could do nothing but leave it. There were some disturbances at London colleges throughout May, but they did not amount to much more than shouting in the streets and in the quadrangle at King’s. I paid them very little attention, since I still knew nothing of any link between student risings and this warning about Charles. In the same spirit, when the major rising actually started, in the first week in June – at the end of the Cambridge, but not the London, term – I watched the film shots on television with a detached interest, not much more involved than if these events had been taking place in Stockholm or Warsaw.

Which, in everything but language, they might have been. The students, and especially the students milling in the streets, looked as international as airports. Hair, dress, expressions, slogans, pop music – as well as the same hatreds and the same hopes – had broken across frontiers like nothing else in the century. Watching these spectacles, I thought the only local difference was that the police weren’t using shields. This was the most international activity I had ever seen.

Pictures of the principal, students at each shoulder, being interviewed on the pavement. Yes, he had been requested not to enter his office. Requested? No reply. Communiqué that night from the
Students’ Headquarters, Principal’s Office
.

Messages of support from Essex, Oxford, Sussex, Cambridge. That conveyed nothing to me. If I had known, I might have reflected that the sight of young men and girls fighting in a porter’s lodge, swearing like George Passant in a rage, some of them being frogmarched by policemen, seemed some distance away from quiet conferences in the boudoir-study at Chester Row, a dozen heads round the table, talking in the low unassertive voices that were common form, refreshed by some maidenly coffee or Coca Cola. It was as long a distance as from any staff headquarters to the front line.

For Margaret, who had taken part in ‘demos’ in her youth, and for me, who had seen the street mobs in Germany, the sight of violence wasn’t pretty. Maybe it wasn’t to some of the planners. That I didn’t know and, since I was uninterested, didn’t think about. But I did have a passing thought that there were organising minds behind it.

Anyone who had spent half an hour inside a political movement would have realised that. There was a fair amount of chaos. Some allies, including Muslim liberators and a free-drugs party, must have been an embarrassment. There was some violence which didn’t appear premeditated. But too many contingents arrived at what seemed the right time. Too many squads (the serious invaders, as opposed to the irregulars, seemed to work in platoons of round about a dozen) knew what to do. College porters, secretaries, staff, were picked up, led out, put gently enough into cars, all too quickly and smoothly to be true. True, that is, in terms of the student manifestoes, or what we heard on the news or on discussion programmes from Olly himself.

Spontaneous. Rising against grievances not attended to for months. Complaints not recognised. Student rights. Participation. He gave us all that, as his face became familiar on the screen. He wasn’t smooth. He had what had come to be called a classless accent, meaning one which could belong only to a small but definable class. He had the gift of speaking like a human being, who believed what he said and wanted you to believe it too. He didn’t appear clever, and sometimes not coherent. Several of my acquaintances said that, if he joined either of the major parties, he would get office before he was thirty.

‘Tell me, Antony,’ said one of the cordial television interviewers, ‘do you expect to get most of your demands?’

‘We can’t help not get them.’

‘But what, I know you’re explaining what the students are insisting on straight away, what do you really expect to get?’

No smile. ‘We shall get what we take.’

He wasn’t hectored on the screen, as the national politicians might have been.

‘Yes, I understand, but that isn’t your basis for negotiations, is it, Antony?’

Long, disjointed, sincere speech.

‘You mean, do you, Tony, that you want to establish rights for all students everywhere?’

‘We’re not only struggling for students, but for everyone who’s not allowed to speak for himself.’

‘That means, doesn’t it, that even if and when you reach a satisfactory settlement at the college, you’ll still go on protesting–’

‘The struggle will go on.’

The principal of the college, interviewed in the same programme two nights later, wasn’t so comfortable, nor so respectfully treated. He was a man in his mid-forties, with a neat small-featured face. I hadn’t met him, but as he was a physicist and a good one, the Getliffes knew him well. He was said to be fun in private, and to be conscientious and open-minded. Why he had given up science and taken to university administration, none of his admirers could understand. Perhaps he couldn’t, as on the box he gave an impression – so unjustified, that he ought to bring a slander action against himself, someone said – of being irresolute and even shifty.

Yes, he was in favour of student participation at all levels. They would be welcome on suitable college committees.

‘But aren’t you on record as saying, Dr Dinshaw, that the students’ claim to a place on appointments committees–’ Dinshaw. That, of course, was a special case: it wasn’t considered in the students’ interest to take part in appointments of lecturers or professors.

(Why the hell, said Margaret, doesn’t he say that they’d be totally incompetent to judge?)

But didn’t Dr Dinshaw agree that the students felt it was very much in their interest? Dinshaw. There were two views about that, after all, there were students and students. The students with whom Dr Dinshaw would have to negotiate, however, had only one view? Dinshaw. The real academics among the students, the ones who would really understand about academic excellence, and that was the important thing about a place of higher education, didn’t take part in this kind of student activity.

Of all his remarks, that one sank the principal into most trouble with the press. From then on, the interviewer was needling him. What did the principal understand by the students’ wider aims? If they reached a settlement with the college, then Mr Ollorenshaw had pointed out there were claims on behalf of others? At last, badgered, Dinshaw broke out that it wasn’t his function to negotiate for the entire human race.

For us, a few minutes’ diversion. Each night for a week, there was something about the students. When Charles came round one morning to fetch some clothes, I mentioned that, to begin with, we didn’t like to miss the news. But, as a spectator sport, rioting became monotonous. We were getting tired of it. He smiled. I didn’t think of asking him whether he knew any of the participants. Instead, he mentioned that he had seen Francis Getliffe, who was off to spend the summer at the house outside Montpellier, which, with his usual decision, leaving me out of it, he had bought that spring.