Last Things (42 page)

Very loud hear-hears from both sides of the house.

Voice:
Well then. Was any of the information which reached the public press covered by the Official Secrets Act? I should like a straight answer from the noble lord. Yes or no
.

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
I am not prepared to let the noble lord form my answer for me. My answer is in fact the same as my answer to his last question
.

Voice:
The noble lord seems incapable of giving a straight answer. (Order, order, and a few hear-hears.) Perhaps, since we shall be bound to hear in due course, he might conceivably answer this one. Is the government intending to prosecute any of the persons concerned under the Official Secrets Act?

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
No, my lords
.

A few cries of why not, and then a venerable figure spoke, with a disproportionately strong voice, from the government rear.

Lord F:
Does the government realise that many of us on this side and throughout the country share our young people’s detestation of this atrocity called biological warfare?

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
We fully realise what my noble friend has said
.

Lord F:
Further does the government realise that anything said about biological warfare by any of the young spokesmen during what I prefer to call the events of last June was said in a spirit of genuine and absolutely spontaneous indignation?

I looked at Charles, so that his glance met mine. The whites of his eyes were as milk-clear as a child’s, the irises almost black. For an instant, blinking not winking, the lids came down and opened again.

Lord F had spent his life in liberal faiths and never lost them, but Walter Luke could have done without him that afternoon.

Lord Luke of Salcombe:
We all know, at any rate, how genuine my noble friend’s spontaneous indignation is
.

The voice under the gallery was raised again, but there were grumbles of order, the leader of the house was half-getting up to intervene, until among a hubbub the supplementaries ceased. One of his colleagues was patting Walter on the knee, and – because another was speaking near to a microphone – we heard a bass and presumably confidential ‘well done’.

Walter’s cheeks were ruddy and shining. Probably not knowing that he had done an old friend a good turn (for Monteith and his apparatus didn’t pass on much to ministers, perhaps in this case the bare results, not names which they regarded as peripheral as Charles’) he had enough reason to be modestly pleased with himself. His permanent secretary was likely to have warned him that ‘this might be an awkward one’: students by themselves were a delicate subject by now, students plus security were as delicate as you could reasonably get short of espionage. I should have been prepared to bet that the officials had done some conferring with Walter’s political boss (the Secretary of State, Walter’s ‘honourable friend’, who sat in the Commons and for whom Walter, as his number two, answered in the Lords). Any official would have wished that an experienced politician had to cope with that subject, not an amateur such as Walter.

Still, Walter had done well. I hadn’t had attention to spare, but now I was thinking, he might have sunk the Government into trouble. He had got away with it. If this had been the Commons, he would have had a rougher time.

Just then I noticed Azik Schiff entering the chamber and jerking his head in the direction of the throne. I hoped that he wouldn’t look up towards the gallery. He had been made a peer that summer and for a few weeks had revelled in it. He had still been at his most exuberant, when in Muriel’s garden, I thought of him and two different kinds of love, thought of him as a happy man with emotions spilling over.

Now I didn’t dare to meet him. Certainly not with Charles by my side. Perhaps, if I believed that I could have been any use to Azik, I might have found the courage, or shamed myself into it. As it was, all I wanted was to avoid his eyes.

It was easier (and more selfish and self-protecting) to return to thinking of Walter. Just as when, not so long before, I was planning a Christmas party and George Passant told me that he was in horrifying trouble: then as now, one’s first impulse was to escape, one needed to get him out of the house.

Yes, Walter might have got the Government into trouble. Strange how tactful he had been. Transformed from the brash scientific roughneck of his Barford years. As though he were acting. Sweet reasonable public face. Once upon a time he used to make brisk observations about men with public faces. Stuffed shirts. Then, as though no happier phrase had ever been invented, he would repeat it.

But I recalled that as a very young man, when he was first elected a fellow of the college, he had been as tactful as he was this afternoon. Also self-effacing. Perhaps he had overdone the brashness. It was a part that suited him. Now he seemed to be returning to his youth. I wondered whether he was bland to his officials. Or whether they were treated to the middle-period Walter: unregenerate, behaving like a tycoon in a film, cracking insults out of the corner of his mouth. Strange how a man so rigid in character should act parts in his life. No, not so strange. Just because he was so rigid, the transformations had to be hard-edged. With others they happened in the flux of life, merging into one another, like the colours of an iridescent film, merging continuously and still preserving the same and unique film.

It hadn’t been only Walter’s tact, though: there had been some operating in private, through ‘the usual channels’ perhaps, or with Walter and his colleagues conducting some informal little talks themselves. Lord Catforth would have been exposed to blandishments. It was clear that the official opposition had been squared. That was easy to do in a security matter: besides, the official opposition was at least as gently disposed to young rebels as the government, probably more so. Almost certainly, Walter Luke would have had a drink with his opposite number on the Tory side. The opposite number would know, without being told, that Walter proposed to obscure the issue and tell a ministerial fraction of the truth. The opposite number also would know that the students’ disclosures were factually true. Walter would wrap up his answer so as to avoid a direct lie. In effect, though not in legalistic words, he might be telling one.

Both front benches, and many experienced persons in the House, would know all those things. It would be a mistake to imagine that they felt qualms of conscience. This was how you had to behave, if you were going to govern at all. Walter had taken it as all in the day’s work.

I must have been letting loose a smile, for Charles, sitting at my side in the gallery, returned it, though he could not have guessed anything near the reason. I was thinking about him and one of fate’s practical jokes. For it was because of him, who had with strong approval seen me shut the last door on politics and so dismiss the most minor of the three themes of what Margaret’s forebears would have called my moral life – it was because of him that I was here, returning to the old subject, interested in the machinery as I used to be. No, as I had confirmed to myself in hospital, it wouldn’t capture me again, but there it was.

Just as it was because of Charles that I had been reminded of the other themes, stronger than the first. I had been reminded that they could revive, and had – face to face with Muriel I knew it – already done so.

Walter had instructed me that, when we were tired of sitting in the gallery, we were to make our way to the tearoom. If questions had been followed by the Rhodesia debate, it would have taken more force than mine to tear Charles away: but in fact the next item on the order paper was the second reading of a bill to legalise the use by other denominations of certain redundant Anglican churches. Charles’ spirit was not so deeply stirred by that, and so soon we sat close to the tearoom tapestry, waiting for Walter Luke.

When he arrived, I had to introduce Charles to him. He was asking us both, before he sat down, had we heard the bit of fun and games? By which he meant his performance. It was an unnecessary question, since he knew we had come for nothing else. We nodded.

‘Was it all right?’ said Walter.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Did you think it was all right?’ Walter had turned to Charles.

‘Yes, it was excellent, sir.’

‘I thought it was all right myself,’ said Walter Luke.

He wasn’t being jocular at his own expense, comparing his present incarnation with the not-so-distant past, or recalling his one-time animadversions on persons fulfilling public functions such as he now fulfilled. There was no irony about Walter Luke. There never had been. He was enjoying his existence, and he proceeded to make a hearty tea, eating several cakes and pressing them on Charles, very much as my father had done at their only effective meeting.

Walter was asking Charles about Cambridge, and said – and this surprised me, much more than similar apostrophes from Lester Ince – that he had never liked the place. Why not? Well, as soon as he got really going on his research, the Cavendish was proceeding to break up. As for the college, it got on his nerves. Sometimes men like old Winslow made him feel there ought to be a servants’ entrance constructed specially for him, Walter. (Loud, crackling laugh which caused heads to turn from nearby tables.) Then there was Roy Calvert. It got you down, living within touching distance of melancholia.

I hadn’t realised that the young Walter – he was speaking of himself at twenty-four or five – had observed so much.

‘You knew Roy Calvert then, did you, sir?’ Charles asked, polite and expressionless.

‘You’ve heard of him, have you?’

‘Just a little. From my father.’

‘I was jealous of him sometimes,’ said Walter with simplicity. ‘Poor chap.’

To him, Charles’ question must have seemed pointless. Yet Charles himself he seemed to have taken a fancy to, though he couldn’t have found much in common.

After tea, he asked us not to go unless we had to: it was a bit early to start drinking, but we might as well pre-empt a corner in the guest room.

It was the same tactic that Francis Getliffe had used on my last visit there, and the same window corner. Walter stood for a moment, spine as upright as though he were in surgical splints, gazing over the river through the November drizzle. The necklace of lights on the south bank dimly glimmered. It was not a spectacular vista, but he was gazing at it with proprietorial pleasure, as though he owned it.

When we sat down, the room was nearly empty, though one figure was in solitude drinking gin at the bar. In a comradely, roughly casual but unaggressive tone, Walter said to Charles: ‘My lad, what are you going to do with yourself?’

‘Do you mean tonight, sir?’ Charles, trying to gain time, knew that Walter meant no such thing.

‘No. I mean what are you going to do with your life?’

Charles asked, gently: ‘What do you think I ought to do?’

‘Damn and blast it, old Lewis will be better on that than I am.’

Charles looked at me and said: ‘He’s been very good.’

It was a gnomic remark, but it sounded genuine and without edge, and I was touched.

Charles went on: ‘I should be grateful for some advice, I mean it, you know.’

Charles forgot nothing. He remembered Margaret teasing me after I had refused Walter’s present job. And the family exchanges about asking advice. One’s truisms had a knack of coming home.

‘Well, you’re obviously bright, anyway you’ve proved that. So that you must be sure of what you can do best–’

‘Yes. But how many things are worth doing?’

Suddenly Charles’ tone had changed. He was now speaking with intensity and force. So much so that Walter dropped his avuncular manner. His horizon-light eyes, set full in the rugged head, confronted Charles’ deep-set ones.

‘No, not many. That’s why most of us just do the things that come to hand. That’s what I’ve done.’

‘But is that always good enough?’

‘How do I know? Only God would know, if he happened to exist.’

‘Would you have liked to do anything different, yourself? If you’d had an absolutely free choice?’

That wasn’t disrespectful. There wasn’t any offence, umbrage, mock humility or presumption on either side. They were talking with a curious mixture of impersonality and friendliness, something like Mansel and a colleague discussing an eye operation.

‘I used to think’, said Walter, ‘that I should like to have done some first-class physics. I never did. Not within bloody miles of it. The war came along and I got shunted from one job to another. They said they were useful. I thought they were useful. That was a hundred per cent copper-bottomed excuse for not doing real physics. And sometimes I looked at myself in the shaving-glass and said Walter my lad you’re a fraud. It isn’t any blasted excuse at all.’

Charles was listening, hand under chin. Just for an instant, perhaps because of Walter’s rolling Devonshire, and his Christian name, the tableau brought back the old Victorian picture, the youth hanging onto the sailor’s tale: in my early childhood I had it fixed in my mind that the sailor must be Raleigh.

‘Then I began to get my head down to its proper size,’ Walter went on. ‘All that was just damned silly inflation, I thought. What difference should I have made if I’d stayed in a physics lab every blasted minute of my life? The answer is, damn all. There aren’t more than five or six men in the whole history of science who’ve made a difference that you can call a difference. And that’s where you don’t belong, Walter Luke.

‘Take old Francis Getliffe. He’s kept at it year in, year out. He’s done some pretty nice work. If I’d stuck at physics as long as he has, I might have done about the same. I should have chanced my arm more than the old boy.’ (After hearing Francis, not far from that same spot, express pity for Walter’s ill-fortune, there was a certain pleasure in witnessing the same process in reverse. Did Charles know that, of the two, most of their fellow scientists thought that Walter had the bigger talent?) ‘Well, if old Francis had never existed or had gone in for theology or stamp collecting or something of the sort, someone else would have come along and done exactly the same work within a matter of months. All that happens is that the old boy gets a hell of a lot of satisfaction. I suppose I might have got that too. But damn it to hell, what does that matter? When you know that you could be got rid of and no one would feel the difference?’