Last Things (47 page)

Whether Maurice knew or not, Charles had been sleeping in his old bedroom at the flat since less than a week before we returned from Cambridge.

During the daytime he had been nearly always out, possibly with Muriel: one heard him telephoning her each morning. He seemed in high spirits, with patches of contemplativeness. He gave no indication that he also was in a period of waiting.

That evening, as we sat chatting, chatting to induce the telephone to ring, Margaret occasionally gazed at the two of them – her innocent, her strenuous one – and then at me. She might have been thinking of the time we had talked about them in that room. The events of their growing up, commonplace to everyone else as another family’s photographs, at times dramatic, searing rather than dramatic, to us. I recalled (I didn’t have to bring it back to memory, it was always there) the morning when we sat there, having been told that Charles, then an infant, was recovering from meningitis. In thanksgiving, we didn’t speak about him but about Maurice. We repeated, just as we had said in the hospital,
we must save him from everything we can
. Margaret had been as good as her vow: her love for Maurice had deepened, not grown less, deepened with the trouble he had caused her, not through conflict but through ineptitude or lack of self. As for me, I had tried to follow her. What will could do, I had done. Other men, I thought again that evening, would have done better.

Two days later, the child, a girl, was born. The first medical reports were encouraging. As a newborn baby, she seemed everything she ought to be. Of course, some disabilities they couldn’t test for, yet. It would be weeks or months before they knew. So that one of Margaret’s anxieties was not eliminated, though for the time being assuaged. She couldn’t let herself go, but, trying to suppress it, she was full of joy.

The baby was born on 2 July. The medical opinions reached her next day. That same evening, I was entertaining a foreign acquaintance at a club. When I arrived home, it was quite early, not yet half past ten, but the drawing-room lights were switched off. Margaret called from our bedroom.

She was not undressed, but was sitting on the chair in front of her dressing-table.

‘Carlo has been talking to me,’ she said. ‘I think he’s gone off to tell Muriel.’

‘What is it?’

‘He asked me to tell you. Of course he’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘What is it?’

I knew her face so well, yet it was difficult to read. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks a little flushed. In a temper she sometimes looked like that, but at that moment her temper was cool. ‘He’s come out with his plans. I ought to say that he was extraordinarily nice. He even waited to talk until he knew that I wasn’t anxious about the baby.’ (Just as, I had a recollection, my first wife had once delayed telling me the most wounding news – until I was in good health.) ‘Mind you, I fancy he’s been certain himself for quite a time.’

‘What is it?’

She made me sit down on the bed. She said: ‘My love, a part of this you’re not going to like. Most of it seems perfectly sensible. Anyway it may be right for him.’

Angrily, I told her that I liked news broken fast. I was already ready to punish her for being the bearer of bad news. Sitting there, she seemed more guilty than Charles could be.

‘He has it all worked out.’

Then, quite quickly, she told me. He had decided that he must make a name within a few years. The world was going too fast, he wanted to have some sort of say before he was middle-aged. He had been studying the careers of the American foreign correspondents in the thirties. They had done their piece. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t do as well. Languages weren’t a problem to him. Politics he knew as much about as most people his age. He had no racial feeling, he could live anywhere. He was used to hard travelling –

‘That’s not very dreadful,’ I said. Yes, it might suit him.

‘You haven’t heard it all.’ He was determined to have his say in the minimum possible time. Other people could do what he proposed to do. He had to get his nose in front. Once he was recognised at all, he could rely on – what he was too cautious to call his talent. Though he was right, Margaret said, he had most of the qualities to become a pundit. He wanted to be a sane voice. But, to do that, he had to start with something a bit out of the ordinary –

‘What is it?’ I cried out again.

‘That’s where the risk comes in,’ said Margaret.

‘What risk?’

He accepted that he couldn’t persuade a paper to use him yet awhile, she said. He had to prove himself. So he was setting off to get near the action: meaning, to begin with, the Middle East. He would have to work himself as near battles as he could. Somehow, within a year or two, he was going to find something to sell: then some paper or other would employ him. It wasn’t going to be pleasant. He insisted that he was extremely cowardly. Still, that was part of the exercise. Brave men weren’t specially good at becoming international pundits. He had worked out the odds, and meant to take his chance.

‘Good God,’ I said, ‘how romantic is all this?’

I asked her, still angry with her because she had borne the news, whether she had tried to dissuade him.

‘I said that it wasn’t what I should have chosen for him,’ said Margaret.

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He said that he realised it. And that you wouldn’t have chosen it for him either.’

He had told her also that he had wished all along that he could settle for something which we should like. But you can live only in your own time, he said.

‘And he’s determined to go on with this?’

‘He didn’t tell me in so many words, but I’m sure that the arrangements are already made.’

That rang clear as truth, as soon as I heard it. As with my brother Martin, Charles’ calculations were performed long before he spoke, perhaps before he knew that his own decision was already final.

‘Does he know’, I said, ‘that I shan’t have an easy night until this is over?’

‘Do you think I shall?’

‘That may be for the rest of my life.’

‘Have you forgotten that he’s mine as well as yours?’

For an instant we were blaming each other. She was appealing for me to come close to her: while in pain and rage I was wishing that everyone round us could be torn down, along with me, if this I had to endure. I felt as savage, as possessed as I had in other miseries, not many of them in my entire life, two deaths perhaps, Charles’ own illness. I felt at that moment without relief or softening from age or any consolation that had come to me.

‘Is he thinking of anyone else at all?’

Margaret did not reply.

‘Does he know what it means to anyone else?’

Margaret said: ‘He’s pretty perceptive, and I’m certain that he does.’

‘Is
that
why he’s doing it?’

Margaret and I glanced at each other, thinking of how we had protected him in his childhood, knowing that we couldn’t have another, telling ourselves that this was a precious life. The first time I saw him in hospital, I had taken him, rolling-eyed, waving-fingered, into my arms, resolved that no harm should come to him.

‘No,’ said Margaret, ‘you mustn’t take more responsibility than you have already.’

She meant, what I had said to her often enough, that affections, especially in families, didn’t carry the same weight on either side. I ought to have known that, from the way I behaved to my mother. It was a kind of vanity to suspect that another’s choices depended on his relations with oneself. Choices, lives, were lonelier than that. Charles was making a choice lonelier than most of ours had been. That was no consolation for me, sitting there in the bedroom. All I could do was think of him, not with affection, not even with concern, but with anger mixed with a kind of fellow feeling, or a brutal sympathy of the flesh.

It took me a long time before I could say to Margaret that I had been cruel, shutting her out when she spoke about Charles as her son, and that without her to tell it, the news would have been worse.

THE next morning, Charles did not get up for breakfast, but soon after joined me in the drawing-room. After he had uttered a greeting, bright and neutral, he sat in a chair opposite mine across the disused fireplace.

‘I think Mummy has told you, hasn’t she?’ His tone was easy and intimate: the only sign that he might not be free from strain was that he fell back on that term from childhood.

‘Yes, she has. Last night.’

He said: ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you.’

I did not reply at once and he went on: ‘I’m very sorry. Believe me.’

‘Of course you haven’t disappointed me.’

‘Well,’ he said, more freely now, ‘it isn’t exactly what you might have looked for, is it?’

‘You’ve done far more than I had at your age. With any luck you’ll go on doing more.’

‘I shall need a bit of luck–’

‘Yes, I know that.’

I hadn’t been speaking out of self-control, or even out of resignation. I hadn’t prepared myself for how to meet him, there were none of the speeches which one made up in one’s head and never spoke. In his presence I felt nothing of the anger, or the suspicion, that a few hours before I had projected on to Margaret. To my own astonishment I was buoyed up by – what was it? Maybe his energy or his resolution. Or it might have been his nerve. At no time in my life could I have done what he was committing himself to do. It seemed as though a new force had taken charge.

He must have realised that there were going to be no reproaches. More, he may have seen that a kind of relief, not happiness or content but more like trust, had come into the air between us. Neither of us could have known the reason. Ties, half-memories, the sympathy of those who are close together even where their purposes contradict each other. Later, I wondered whether I was stirred by something of myself which, that morning, had been long forgotten.

When I was younger than Charles, less educated, much less sophisticated, I had once declared my hopes. They had been embarrassing to recall in middle life. Asked by a girl who loved me a little what I wanted, I had said – not to spend my life unknown: love: a better world. Those hopes might have been embarrassing later, but they were true of me at the time I spoke, a good deal truer than any refinements and complications would have been.

Yes, the first of them died on one, or waned. Yet it drove me on for the first half of my life. As for the second, when I said it in that old-fashioned schoolroom, I didn’t have any intimation of where it would lead me, either in the search for sexual love or that other kind, which I felt for my son, sitting there across the fireplace: but it had lasted until now. But the one that I shouldn’t have confessed to, even a few years later, because it sounded so priggish or worse still so innocent, that had been true too.

It wasn’t as passionate as personal desires – nor as haunting as the sense of the ‘I’ alone, oneself alone – but it was there. It had bound Francis Getliffe and me together all our working lives. It led us into defeats and sometimes humiliations, led us either through our temperaments or through a set of chances, into backstairs’ work, secrets, all kinds of closed politics. Of course, it wasn’t pure. Our own self-esteem took part, or certainly mine did. Nevertheless, trying to judge myself as indulgently as Father Ailwyn had instructed me I believed that I had wanted some good things. Whether I had helped to get any, that was another matter. Very little, I had often thought before of Francis and myself. The only work which I was certain had been useful took place in the war, and there we were avoiding a worse world, not making a better one.

Yet some of the pleasure – utterly unanticipated by either of us – which I felt in Charles’ presence that morning, was because he too had the same desire. He too might be rapacious, as much as I had been, and self-absorbed, possibly more. There was, though, something left. It wasn’t the simple and good, such as Maurice, who had vitality to spare for tasks outside themselves. Charles had plenty. He would use it differently from the way I had done. He might be more effective. All might go wrong. He might throw himself away. Still, even the bare desire was like a touch fingertip to fingertip, conducting a phase of life.

I said: ‘I can understand that you’re in a hurry. But can’t you get a footing in some slightly less dramatic way?’

‘You don’t believe I haven’t thought of that?’

‘Well, why not?’

‘It isn’t on.’ Charles gave a rationale, clear and patient, of what he was aiming at. Only in his generation, he said, could you become a spokesman before the age of thirty. But plenty of people, at least as competent as he was, would like to be such a spokesman. To get there, you had to do something special.

‘You’re telling me this is the only way?’

‘I think it is for me. If I were more of a performer, I might find another way in. But I’m not.’

He broke into a friendly smile.

‘Look, you realise that I’m a lot more careful than you are. I have plenty of respect for my valuable life. I don’t even like flying in aircraft much. Let alone in an aircraft which is being pooped at. So you needn’t worry about me going in for heroics. I’m much too sane. I’m only too damned sane.’

Although he was trying to reassure me, he was not pretending. But I knew, and he knew that I knew, that none of that, however much it wasn’t invented, would affect his actions. He would brood over a risk for days or weeks or months, just as he had presumably brooded over this choice of his, calculating all the odds: and then, if he thought it worth while, take it.

I had never been able to disentangle the nature of his courage. In some ways he had, before this, reminded me of Roy Calvert, Muriel’s father. Their minds were similar, precise, concentrated, clear. Their wilfulness was similar. But their courage was different in kind. Roy was a brave man, in a sense that Charles would for himself have totally disclaimed. Roy, though, had a suicidal streak. I had heard him, on a night which I should have liked to forget, tell me during the war how he had tried to throw his life away. He had done it out of despair, out of a melancholia he couldn’t shift. He had made a choice: it wasn’t one which Charles would have considered making. It wasn’t a gamble, it was an abdication. Roy had impressed on me that when he made it, he wasn’t mad. He wasn’t mad, he said, he was lucid. ‘Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hands too.’