Last Things (7 page)

So, as Margaret and I walked, with our own perverse nostalgia, across the end of the square, past the church and the white scarred planes, along the street for a few hundred yards, we couldn’t imagine what we were going to. When we came outside the house itself, it was like the one that I had lived in towards the end of the war, under the eye and landladyship of the ineffable Mrs Beauchamp: a narrow four-storey building, period latish nineteenth century, ramshackle, five bells flanking the door with five name-cards beside them. Rose’s was the ground-floor flat: it couldn’t be more than three or four rooms, I was reckoning as I rang the bell. It was another oddity that Rose should live in this fashion. He had no private means, he might not have earned much since he retired from the Department, but his pension would be over £3000 a year. That didn’t spread far by this date, but it spread farther than this.

But, when he opened the door, all was momentarily unchanged. Strong, thick through the shoulders, upright: his preternatural youthfulness had vanished in his fifties, but he looked no older than when I saw him last.

‘My dear Lewis, this is extraordinarily good of you! How very kind of you to come! How very, very kind!’

He used to greet me like that when, as his second in command, I had been summoned to his office and had performed the remarkable athletic feat of walking the ten yards down the corridor.

He was bowing to Margaret, who had met him only two or three times before.

‘Lady Eliot! It’s far far too long since I had the pleasure of seeing you–’

His salutations, which now seemed likely to describe arabesques hitherto unheard of, had the knack of putting their recipient at a disadvantage, and Margaret was almost stuttering as she tried to reply.

Bowing, arms spread out, he showed us – the old word ushered would have suited the performance better – into the sitting-room, which led straight out of the communal hall. As I had calculated when we stood outside, they had only one main room, and the sitting-room was set for dinner, napery and glass upon the table, what looked like Waterford glass out of place in the dingy house. Round the walls were glass-fronted bookshelves, stacked with volumes a good many of which, I discovered later, were prizes from Marlborough and Oxford. A young lecturer or research student at one of the London colleges, just married, might have been living there. However, neither Margaret nor I could attend to the interior decoration, when we had the prospect of Rose’s wife herself.

‘Lady Eliot,’ said Rose, like a master of ceremonies, ‘may I present– Darling, may I introduce Sir Lewis Eliot, my former colleague, my distinguished colleague.’

As I muttered ‘Lady Rose’ and took her hand, I was ready for a lot of titular incantations, wishing that we had Russian patronymics or alternatively that Rose had taken to American manners, which seemed unlikely. It was going to be tiresome to call this woman Lady Rose all night. She was alluring. No, that wasn’t right, there was nothing contrived about her, she was simply, at first sight, attractive. Not beautiful: she had a wide mouth, full brown eyes, a cheerful uptilted nose. Her cheeks seemed to wear a faint but permanent flush. She must have been about forty, but she wouldn’t change much; at twenty she wouldn’t have looked very different, a big and sensuous girl. She was as tall as Rose, only two or three inches shorter than I was, not specially ethereal, no more so than a Renoir model.

Margaret gave me the slightest of marital grins, jeering at both of us. Our reconstructions of the situation…elderly people ‘joining forces’, marriage for company. If that was marrying for company, then most young people needed more of it. As for Rose’s putative plea, the only reason for reviving our acquaintance seemed to be that he wanted to show her off, which was simple and convincing enough.

In actual fact, as company in the conversational sense, she wasn’t a striking performer, as I discovered when we set out to talk. She was superficially shy, not at all shy deeper down. She was quite content to leave the talk to us, beaming placidly at Rose, as though signalling that she was pleased with him. I picked up one or two facts, such as that there had been another husband, though what had happened to him was not revealed. If there had been a divorce, it had been kept quiet. I couldn’t gather how she and Rose had ever met: she didn’t belong to any sort of professional world, she came perhaps – there was a residual accent – from origins like mine. I knew that when Rose left the service he had taken a couple of directorships: my guess was that he had come across her in one of those offices; she might have been his secretary.

Well, there they were, eyes meeting down the table. ‘Jane darling, would it be troubling you if you reached behind you–’ The one aspect which baffled me completely was why they should be living like students. It might have been one of the games of marriage, in which they were pretending to be young people starting out. If so, that must have been his game, for she would have been satisfied wherever they had lived.

She was an excellent cook. On nights when we had worked late together, Rose and I used to split a bottle of wine, and he had recollected that.

He was talking with elaborate animation to Margaret about the differences between Greats in his time at Oxford, and the philosophy in hers at Cambridge. Jane listened and basked. As for me, I was engaged in a simple reflection. A woman had once told me that she didn’t know, no one could possibly know, what a man was like until she had gone to bed with him. It was the kind of comment that sounded wise when one was young, and probably wasn’t. And yet, looking at that pair, remembering how so many people had pigeon-holed Rose, myself among them, I felt that this once there might be something in it.

Table pushed back after the meal, for the room was small though high-ceilinged, we sat round the grate, in front of an electric fire. Rose and his wife had finished drinking for the evening, but hospitably he had put a decanter of port on the floor. Some more fine glass, from the archidiaconal or even the Highgate home. I mentioned former colleagues. I tried to get him to say something about his career.

‘Oh, my dear Lewis, that’s really water under the bridge, water distinctly under the bridge, shouldn’t you agree? I don’t know whether Lady Eliot has ever had the misfortune to be exposed to the reminiscences of retired athletes,’ he was gazing, bleached-eyed, at Margaret, ‘but I assure you that mine would be, if anything, slightly duller.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Margaret, who still found him disconcerting.

‘But then, my dear Lady Eliot, if you’ll permit me, you haven’t spent getting on for forty years in government departments.’

‘Do you regret it?’ I said. I had learned long since that one had to tackle him head on.

‘Regret in what particular manner? I’m afraid I’m being obtuse, of course.’

‘Spending your life that way.’

Rose gave his practised, edged, committee smile. ‘I follow. I should be inclined to think that, with my attainments such as they are, I shouldn’t have been markedly more useful anywhere else. Or perhaps markedly less.’

‘That’s a bit much, Hector,’ I broke out. I said that, when I first reported to him and for years afterwards, he had been tipped to become head of the Civil Service. That hadn’t happened. He had finished as a senior permanent secretary, one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Whitehall, but not at the absolute top. Most of us thought he had been unlucky, and in fact badly dealt with. (I noticed that this seemed to be news to his wife, who had blushed with something like gratification.) Did he mind?

‘I doubt if it would have affected the fate of the nation, my dear Lewis. I think you will agree that the general level of our former colleagues was, judged by the low standard of the human race, distinctly high. That is, granted their terms of reference, which may, I need hardly say, be completely wrong, a good many of them were singularly competent. Far more competent than our political masters. I learned that when I was a very lowly assistant principal, just down from Oxford. And I’m afraid I never unlearned it. Incidentally, out of proportion more competent than the businessmen that it was my misfortune to have to do official business with. Of course my experience has been narrow, I haven’t had Lewis’ advantages, and my opinion is
parti pris
.’ He was speaking to Margaret. ‘So you must forgive me if I sound parochial. But, for what it is worth, that is my opinion. That is, the competition among my colleagues was relatively severe. So a man who by hook or by crook became a permanent secretary ought to feel that he hadn’t any right to grumble. He’s probably been more fortunate than he deserved. There was an old Treasury saying, Lewis will remember, that in the midst of a crowd of decent clever men anyone who became a permanent secretary had of necessity to be something of a shit.’

Rose delivered that apophthegm as blandly as his normal courtesies. His wife chortled, and Margaret grinned.

‘Well,’ said Rose, ‘I qualified to that extent.’

‘Hector,’ I said, ‘you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Haven’t I, my dear Lewis? I really do apologise. I am so very, very sorry.’

We gazed at each other. We were less constrained that night than we had been during the years in the office. And yet he was just as immovable, it was like arguing with him over a point on which I was, after all the paraphernalia, going inevitably to be overruled.

Rose was continuing, in his most unargumentative tone.

‘Recently I had the pleasure of introducing my wife to the Italian lakes. Actually we chose that for our honeymoon–’

‘Lovely,’ said Jane.

‘Yes, we thought it was a good choice. And, as a very minor bonus, I happened to come across an inscription which might interest you, Lewis. Perhaps, for those whose Latin has become rusty, I may take the liberty of translating. It is pleasantly simple. GAIUS AUFIDIUS RUFUS. HE WAS A GOOD CIVIL SERVANT.

‘Don’t you think that is remarkably adequate? Who could possibly want a more perfect epitaph than that?’

I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was parodying himself. I nodded my head, in acquiescent defeat. Impassively he let show a smile, but, unlike his committee smile, it contained a degree of both malice and warmth. Then he gave us, his wife for the first time assisting in the conversation, a travelogue about Como and Garda, the hotels they had stayed in, the restaurants they would revisit when, the following spring, they proposed to make the same trip again. This honeymoon travelogue went on for some time.

Then, when we got up and began our goodbyes, Rose encircled us with thanks for coming. At last we got out into the road, waiting for a taxi: the two of them, while they waved to us, stood on the doorstep close together, as though they were ready to be photographed.

As we drove past Victoria through the Belgravia streets, Margaret, in the dark and sheltering cab, was saying: ‘How old is she?’

‘Late thirties?’

‘Older. Perhaps she’s too old.’

‘Too old for what?’

‘A child, you goat.’ Her voice was full of cheerful sensual nature. ‘Anyway, we’d better watch the births column next year–’

She went on: ‘Good luck to them!’

I said yes.

She said: ‘I hope it goes on like that.’ She added: ‘And I hope something else doesn’t.’

We had both enjoyed the bizarre but comforting evening, and I had remembered only intermittently (and that perhaps had been true for her) that she had news to break. Now she was angry again – at me, at herself, at the original cause – for having to fracture the peace of the moment.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Your nephew.’

Muriel had told her the story that afternoon. Pat was having other women, certainly a couple since the marriage, with the baby due in the New Year. It was as matter-of-fact as that.

‘He’s a little rat,’ said Margaret.

With the lights of Park Lane sweeping across us, I remarked: ‘You can’t do anything.’

‘You mustn’t defend him.’

‘I wasn’t–’

‘You want to, don’t you?’

I had never been illusioned about Pat. And yet Margaret was reading something, as though through the feel of my arm: an obscure male freemasonry, or perhaps another kind of resistance she expected, whenever her judgments were more immediate and positive than mine.

We didn’t say much until we were inside our bedroom.

‘It’s squalid,’ said Margaret. ‘But that makes it worse for her.’

‘I’m sorry for her.’

‘I’m desperately sorry for her.’

Her indignation had gone by now, but her empathy was left.

‘I know,’ I said. I asked how Muriel was taking it.

‘That’s a curious thing,’ Margaret gave a sharp-eyed, puzzled smile. ‘She seems pretty cool about it. Cooler than I should have been, I tell you, if you’d left me having Charles and done the same.’

A good many women would have been cooler than that, I told her.

She burst out laughing. But when I repeated, how had Muriel reacted, her face became thoughtful, not only protective but mystified and sad. In her composed, demure fashion, Muriel had been evasive about her husband during previous visits; this time she had come out with it, still composed but clinical. Not a tear. Not even a show of temper.

‘What do they think they’re playing at?’ said Margaret. ‘He wasn’t in love with her, we never believed he was. He was after the main chance, blast him. But what about her? It doesn’t make sense. She must love him, mustn’t she?

‘After all,’ she went on, ‘she’s only twenty-two.’

A silence.

Margaret said: ‘I don’t understand them, do you?’

She was upset, and I tried to comfort her: and yet for her it was no use being reflective or resigned. For, though this mess was quite far away from her – it wasn’t all that dramatic or novel, and Muriel was no more than a young woman she knew by chance – it had touched, or become tangled with, some of her own expectations. None of us had expected more from all the kinds of love than Margaret. With her father, those afternoons as she sat by him in his loneliness, she had felt one of them finally denied: and with her sons also, as she grew older, there was another kind of isolation. Maurice passive, gentle, but with no flash of her own spirit coming back: Charles, who had spirit which matched hers, but who responded on his own terms. She had invested so much hope in what they would give her: and now, despite her sense, her irony, she sometimes felt cut off from the young. That was why Pat and his deserted wife became tokens for her: they made romantic love appear meaningless: all her expectations were dismissed, as though she belonged to another species. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell her, but I did no good. Unlike herself, so strong in trouble close to hand, that night – on the pretext or trigger of an acquaintance’s ill-treatment – she felt lonely and unavailing.