Last Things (48 page)

I hadn’t to cast back for those words. Charles could never have said them. He would have distrusted Roy’s protestations of not being mad. But it was with absolute confidence that he had made his own simple statement about being ‘too damned sane’.

I believed him, totally. It was I, not he, who was tempted to read a pattern into events which he didn’t even know. If he had known them, he would have repudiated with impatience what I was tempted to see. History wasn’t like that, he would have said. Not personal history. He would have been right. The patterns weren’t real. Perhaps the weaver of the pattern, however, told one something about himself.

Then Charles asked me for an introduction. It was to a Jewish friend of mine who worked at the Weizmann Institute.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘That’s nice of you,’ said Charles.

He was beginning his Levantine journeys on the other side: easier, or at least not impossible, that way round, he said, but despite our connections he might have some explaining to do in Israel.

‘You needn’t write to—,’ the Jewish friend. ‘But I can use your name?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Bless you.’ He looked at me with what appeared like a filial grin. I was gratified that, even at this stage, he was invoking me.

Suddenly I began to think. Of all my acquaintances who might be of use to him, this one was about the most obscure.

‘Carlo,’ I said, ‘what are you up to?’

Bland gaze. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why have you just thought of him? What about David Rubin? And–?’

David Rubin, grey eminence in the United States, was also one in Israel: for years he had been an intimate of mine.

The gaze flickered. ‘As a matter of fact, I wrote to David R myself, a little while ago–’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are you up to? Anything this chap can do, Rubin can do a hundred times over. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘But what?’

Another surprise that morning. He blushed. It was a long time ago, when I had last seen him do so. Poise precarious, he broke into a weak smile.

I had it. He had been making an attempt to appease or to soothe me. He wanted to demonstrate that he had finished with his pride; he would use my influence when it was a help; any conflict had gone, he was glad to have me behind him. It was well meant, I thought, as, knowing it all, mocking each other and ourselves, we couldn’t keep our eyes from meeting.

It was well meant, but not quite careful enough in execution. Actually he had been meticulously thorough, not neglecting any contact, and taken the best advice open to either of us. This had been happening for months past, possibly before he admitted to himself that the choice was clinched.

Then, and only then, I realised that his timetable was already fixed: and that he had broken the news only a few days before he was due to leave.

AS a result of Margaret’s persuasion, I telephoned Muriel. Would she care to see me? One of us ought to make the offer, Margaret had said: and, since she herself had at the best of times been uneasy with the young woman, it had better be me. The voice at the other end of the line was polite but frigid. Yes she was by herself. She wouldn’t think of asking me to go out of my way – I must be extremely busy, but of course if I had nothing else to do – When I went to her in her drawing-room, where she had once invited me in a different mood from this, she turned to me a desensitised cheek: as desensitised as Sheila’s, I had a flash of random but chilling memory, as she said goodbye one night at a railway station and had become shut within herself.

There might be some play in the test match, Muriel observed from a distance. It was midday, the rain had stopped earlier in the morning, there was an interval of sunshine. The ground would be pretty wet, I replied, as awkward as a young man not knowing the next move. Perhaps the bowlers would get some help, she said.

I sat silent, rather than go on with spectatorial exchanges. Her hair glistened as though it had been attended to that morning, falling, though not luxuriantly, to her shoulders.

At last she said: ‘So he’s going, is he?’

‘He must have told you?’

‘Yes, he’s told me.’

‘I’m sorry–’

‘You needn’t be sorry. If it hadn’t been for you, this would never have happened.’

Her tone, light, impersonal, was intended to give pain.

‘Do you think I like it?’

‘You made it happen. You made him want to outshine you.’ Her tone was still impersonal, but unrelenting. I tried to answer without expression.

‘That’s not all of it.’ I added: ‘I tell you, it’s not even most of it.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, he’d be happy here today.’ She had been sitting with her usual stillness. She broke it just enough to spread out her hands.

I said: ‘Are you so sure that you know everything that’s moving him?’

‘I know that if you’d been different and out of his way, he’d have been content.’

She was looking at me, not so much with hatred as with cruelty. She had set out to stop any attempt to console her, or even to share her feelings: up against that, she was opposing a satisfaction of her own.

I was on the point of leaving her. I had had enough of ruthlessness: maybe this was how she had dismissed her husband and was now, in a different situation, dismissing me.

She said: ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’

‘You ought to realise that no one can stop him.’

‘You could have done–’

‘If what you say is right, perhaps me last of all.’

‘You would have stopped him’, she cried, ‘if you’d liked me more.’

That was said with as still a face as her harshest remarks: and yet, it was the nearest she could come to an appeal. So I replied, more gently than I had spoken up to now: ‘That’s nonsense, and you know it.’

‘If you’d thought I was right for him.’

‘That didn’t even enter. If I’d thought you were the most perfect woman in the world, I couldn’t have done any more.’ All of a sudden I felt that she might crack unless I came closer. I said: ‘As for you, I’m not sure whether I like you or not. I never have been. But I admire you a good deal. Charles has been lucky.’

She braced her shoulders, gave something like a smile of recognition. Possibly I had judged right. The silence had become less strained.

After a while she said, quietly, almost placidly: ‘Do you remember, the first time we talked about him here? I said that what he chose to do – it might matter to others. Well, I wasn’t far wrong, was I?’

She went on: ‘And you said something like if he’s lucky, so it might. It’s a peculiar way of being lucky, isn’t it?’

I wondered if she had used that kind of irony on Charles.

She offered me a drink, but I said no, unless she would join me. She shook her head. She said: ‘I suggest we go and sit in the garden. Just for a few minutes. You can have a look at Roy.’

For an instant, the name recalled only her own father, about whom we had not once spoken. Then I grasped that she was speaking of the child. As she led me through the downstairs sitting-room, I saw the pram, open to the sunshine, standing by the garden wall. The little boy had a pile of bricks in front of him. With great Viking shouts, he was methodically hurling them, one at a time, over the side of the pram. The curious thing was, he seemed to be registering regular intervals between each throw, something like thirty seconds, as though he were timing himself by a stopwatch or engaging in some obscure branch of time and motion study.

I burst out laughing.

‘Was is dat de joke?’ young Roy enquired, solemn face ready to grin.

‘Difficult to explain.’

‘Was is dat de joke?’ he asked his mother.

‘Uncle Lewis thinks I shall have to pick up all the bricks,’ she said, like one rational person to another.

Loud laughs. A vigorous hurl. ‘Dat is de joke.’

He looked a bright intelligent child. His head was taking on the shape of Muriel’s, with her forehead and high crown. The only features that seemed to come from his father were the dark treacle-colour eyes which Irene had brought into Martin’s family and which were dominant over the blue.

I mentioned this to Muriel.

‘Yes. It’s rather a pity, don’t you think?’ she said coolly, as though Roy ought to have been born by parthenogenesis.

‘He’s fairly good value, though, he really is,’ she said, still trying to speak coolly, but without success, as sitting on a garden seat she gazed devotedly towards the boy. Was she one of those, I thought, who after the splendours and miseries of sexual love – about which she had her own kind of knowledge, less ornamented and perhaps clearer than most of ours – turned for a different, untroubled, idyllic affection to their children? Just as old Mr March had presumably done, when he watched his son in infancy. Just as my brother Martin had done. Just as I had done myself. None of us learning anything from what we had watched, with sympathy and even with pity in others. Not even learning that this idyll was at its best, and of its nature, one-sided: whereas sexual love gave one at least a chance of full return.

Sexual love could look the more dangerous: some of those who had explored both might bring back a different report. Was Muriel, with all her deliberate composure, going the same way? After what she had seen of her own mother’s love for her and what she had been able to give back? After what she had not only seen, but sadistically said, of me and Charles?

‘He hasn’t taken anything else from his father, as far as I can see,’ said Muriel possessively, watching another chuck, accompanied by yells of laughter, as though he had found the best of all possible jokes. ‘That’s just as well,’ she added.

She turned to me, less armoured than she had been in the drawing-room.

‘Did you know’, she said, ‘that his father tried to do me a good turn not long ago?’

I shook my head.

‘You’d heard that he was always latching on to Charles and me?’

‘Yes.’

‘You expected that he was after the main chance, didn’t you? Can you guess what he was really doing?’

I said, I hadn’t the slightest idea.

‘As a matter of fact, he was trying to badger Charles into marrying me. It would be a good idea, he kept telling him. You’d have everything between you. All the old patter. I expect you’ve heard your nephew at it.’

‘Well, he seems to have been capable of being good-natured for once.’

‘He always was, if it didn’t get in his own way.’ Her face darkened. ‘I don’t know. He may have worked it out that if he interfered between me and Charles, and bullied Charles about marrying me, that he’d produce the opposite result. I wouldn’t put it past him.’

‘That sounds too subtle.’

‘He was so subtle sometimes he didn’t know what he was aiming at himself. You can’t believe what a bore that was to live with. When one didn’t have an idea what he was using one for. And when he didn’t have an idea either.’

She went on: ‘He was no good. I was well rid of him. It never ought to have begun. After him, Charles was someone to fasten on to. He can be secretive, you know that. But at any rate he is a man.’

To my astonishment, she seemed to be visited by euphoria.

‘Mind you,’ she said with something like sternness, ‘I don’t want to leave you with a false impression. I haven’t given him up, you know. There’s plenty of time. Touch wood, he’ll do what he’s setting out to do. He couldn’t go back on that, that’s not the way he’s made. But when he’s done it, he won’t go an inch further. He’ll call it a day. He won’t take more chances than he need, he’ll settle down very early. It won’t be long before he’s much older than I am. Isn’t that so?’

It was not for me to deny.

To begin with, she had behaved as though she wanted to dismiss me, clear me out of her life. I might be fancying it, but here if nowhere else she appeared like a repetition of Roy Calvert. He was much kinder than she was, but no more hypocritical: I had seen him get rid of emotional lumber, when it was a case of
sauve qui peut
, just as finally as she had dispensed with Pat.

But no, she might desire to, but she was not doing so with me. There was a practical reason why she shouldn’t. She was holding on to Charles, with tenacity, with tenacity which exuded its own hope. She wanted me as one of her channels to him, or her card of re-entry, exactly as, during the separation between Margaret and myself before our marriage, I had preserved the acquaintance of Austin Davidson.

That was a practical reason for talking to me and in fact confiding, as she had just done. It was useful that she should have me within calling distance. Yet, though she might not admit it, there was another reason, perhaps a stronger one, why, holding on to Charles, she also needed to hold on to me. Anyone as unpadded as she was, and as contemptuous of nonsense about human relations, thought they were easy to cut off sharp – by a stroke of the will, clean, sharp and clinical.

One could imagine her, much older, thinking that all such relations had been a self-deceit: sexual relations, they turned mechanical and came to an end: friendships in the long run were a habit and no more: love for one’s children, of that she had had warnings, and they had come true. With an obscure pleasure, she might alone, old, reflecting by herself, in her head reduce them all to nothing. The trouble was, that reduction was entirely abstract, no one lived like that. Human relations might be no more than she had come to think: but with them, however old she was, she would have to make do.

There were even some, very much more tenuous than the primary ones, which she would find surprisingly hard to cut. One could over-complicate them, I had often been guilty of that, but still there were some which, not at all imperative, nowhere near the centre of one’s life, continued to dog one. To an extent, that was true of her relation with me. It bore a family relation to many others. It was, in a sense, the relation of rivals, that is of two who had a claim on the same thing. On a job, if you like: or, what was more common, on a person.

Of all the relations that one saw or entered, these could be the most mirage-like, shimmering, hardest to define even in one’s own mind. Yet two men struggling for the same post could, for a fluctuating instant, feel closer than any friends. The same was occasionally true between rivals for a woman: and much more often, so far as I had seen, between an old intimacy and a new. Thus Muriel, wanting Charles alone, without any residual link to me, couldn’t help attaching some resonance of that link on to herself. I had watched that happen several times: with Mr March and his son’s wife: with Sammikins, when his sister married Roger Quaife: even with Margaret and Martin.