The Malcontents (11 page)

Whatever the result was going to be, Sylvia was lost in love for Mark. Her self-possession, which impressed all those round her, had to herself utterly failed. It was a love more innocent, younger, purer (despite the fugues of her imagination), less organically warm than Tess’ for Stephen, but still total. For his sake she was behaving dishonourably – which she didn’t like, though she was so exalted about Mark that it cost her less effort than Stephen thought in order to protect him. She would have done much more than that, to serve him much less.

Sitting in her car, before she started to drive them to the university, she said: ‘I tried to get Mark out of it. Last week.’

That had been, Stephen was thinking, before he himself had had any warning, before the hints from his father on Saturday afternoon. In everything she said about the imbroglio, Sylvia was firm, efficient, authoritative but apparently, in her first approach to Mark, she had been more tentative, and now was taking the blame for that.

Stephen had enough friendly feeling to try to console her.

‘Whatever you’d said, you ought to know him, it wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he remarked.

The severe expression didn’t soften.

‘I didn’t do it properly,’ she said.

‘When he’s on the move, nothing in the world will stop him.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Sylvia. ‘I don’t understand the lot of you, as far as that goes.’ She gave a sharp-edged, deprecating smile. ‘I’ve never been one for causes, though. I just sit back.’

‘There’s been someone else who wasn’t one for causes, hasn’t there?’ said Stephen, probing into what she knew.

She replied, quick on the point: ‘Yes. Someone’s given you away, of course they have.’

‘Who? Can you tell me?’

‘I’m not certain. I can tell you one thing. It wasn’t that man up there.’ She waved a hand, with a gesture of dislike, in the direction of Lance’s flat.

‘You’re sure?’

‘I tell you, I’m not guessing. I’ve seen some papers. That I really know.’

Stephen had been confused during his interview with Lance, at one moment convinced jet-clear of his suspicion, at another finding it wiped away. Even now, though intellectually he believed what he had just heard, some of the suspicion was still whirling round, the crystallization wasn’t complete. ‘Well then,’ he was attempting to shake himself free, ‘who was it?’

‘I’m not certain. I’d tell you if I was.’

There wasn’t much on paper, she explained: at any rate, not much that had come to her. Nothing at all that dealt with the real security operation: she was sure there had been one, though there was nothing on paper about that, or if there were, it would be kept on secret files. But Lance happened to be marked down – as the most vulnerable. His case didn’t need any professional security work, or much in the way of information from inside. They might get him anyway. If other things were too delicate to touch, they might get him for drugs.

Stephen left behind at the university to share the morning’s news with Tess, Mark duly discovered, alone in the garden, Sylvia drove him into the town. They entered an old-fashioned restaurant in Granby Street, and as they passed to their table businessmen’s heads turned to watch them: anywhere, they would have been a handsome couple.

In an alcove, while they were ordering (the crisis would have made Stephen austere but Mark was ready for a solid meal), Sylvia spoke across the table. Her tone, instead of being severely brisk, had turned soft and loving. She said: ‘I once waited for you a couple of hours here, do you remember?’

‘It must have been someone’s fault.’

‘Oh yes, we got it straight on the telephone that night–’

Mark, usually so spontaneous, so natural at leading others to say what they were truly feeling, for once gave an embarrassed smile. Yet he was affectionate with her, and for Sylvia, who hadn’t seen him for several days, that was enough. She didn’t wish to break the peace of the moment. She could feel that he was preoccupied and fervent, but she loved it when he made the exertion to break out of himself and said something to please her. She had to make her own exertion: it was very hard: why weren’t things placid, why couldn’t they sit on like this? She kept delaying. She made some chit-chat. She recounted brightly how Lance had demonstrated his stock of LSD and tried to recruit her.

‘Can you imagine it? Aren’t people extraordinary?’

It was not until Mark had mopped up his steak-and-kidney pie that she said, in a voice that sounded constrained and hard: ‘I’ve been talking to Stephen.’

‘Oh, have you?’

‘I’ve told him that Lance Forrester isn’t the one you’re looking for.’

‘No?’ To her bewilderment, Mark, expression radiant, broke into a happy mocking laugh.

‘You knew?’

‘I obviously don’t know as much as you.’

His expression was radiant: but as so often, except when he was being kind and perceptive about others, she found it difficult to read. Sometimes it didn’t matter, it only made her think of him, wonder about him, more. But now it did matter: had he made some resolve, hidden from her? Why was he so – excited, no, more than excited, lit up from inside?

In the same hard voice, which she couldn’t control, she said: ‘Please, be careful.’ And then, almost in a whisper, she shyly added: ‘Darling.’

‘I don’t see what use carefulness is going to be now. Do you?’

He made it sound matter-of-fact, like one sensible and prosaic person talking to another. She said: ‘Anything you do, will only make it worse. The same with the others. All you can do is sit it out. You must be patient. Please.’

‘Don’t worry.’

‘There’s nothing you can do.’

‘I expect that’s right.’

‘What are you thinking about?’ she cried.

‘Oh, there might be one or two little things to put straight, that’s all.’

She was being fended off, that was the one thing she was certain of. She set herself (self-consciousness and pride didn’t matter, she scarcely realized how, alone with him, she threw them away, nor what a release that was) to be sober and accurate.

‘You can’t get anything straight with these people. They hold all the cards. They have it neatly stacked up. I can give you the details if you like.’

‘I’ll take your word,’ said Mark lightly.

‘You’ve offered them the opportunity of a lifetime. They’re not philanthropists, they’re pretty hard in their own fashion. They’re going to take you on. Believe me, there’s not a chance of putting things straight with them.’

‘Not a chance in the world.’

She was more disconcerted by that reply than by anything he had said so far. She had reshaped her own words, but she didn’t expect and understand this agreement, casual, easy, unperturbed. She had to hack on.

‘Well then. At the best they’re going to make an example of you. That means they’ll expose you. At the worst they’ll prosecute, and that’s more likely than not. Very much more likely,’ she said, speaking straight to him and slowly. ‘It’s going to be very dirty. And all you can do is take it.’

‘Oh, I’ll take it.’

‘
Can
we ride it out?’ Suddenly, the emphasis, the realistic assessment went out of her voice, and she sounded youthful and pleading again.

‘There’s not much else to do, is there?’

A pang of disappointment for her: she had hoped for more than that.

She went on: ‘Darling. Do take it quietly. Resign yourself as much as you can. That’s the best way out,’ And then–’

He looked at her with a brilliant smile. When she saw that, there were times, as now, when she didn’t know whether he cared about himself at all: and she, self-bound, felt melted and lost.

‘Don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘Get away from them, and let it wash over you. It’ll pass, you know.’

She said: ‘Please don’t do anything now. Come and see me tonight. We’ll have a quiet time.’

‘I’m not sure that’s possible.’ He was making a gentle apology. ‘There’s a meeting of the others this evening.’

‘Must you go?’

‘If I didn’t, they might think I’d done the damage.’

To her astonishment – used as she was to his spirits, so high and (as she thought to herself) so lonely – he began to hum. She recognized the Jemmy Twitcher song. She couldn’t resist a smile herself: ‘You are absurd.’

Then, pressing him again, she said: ‘Then come and see me afterwards. It doesn’t matter how late it is. It’ll be restful. I’ll play you some music.’

Mark said, as though to soothe her, that he had no idea how long the meeting would go on or what would happen there. In any event, when it was over he would ring her up.

That afternoon, while Stephen and the others were waiting for the crisis, only a handful of people in the town knew anything of their affairs, or gave them a thought. There were a quarter of a million people living round about; no one has ever done a survey of what is happening, on such an afternoon, to so many human lives. For many of course, it wouldn’t be much different from the day before or the day after. For a few, the anxieties of any of Stephen’s companions would have seemed trivial beside their own. If statistics are any guide, there must have been, in the homes and hospitals of the town, something like six or eight men and women who were nearing their deaths that day, as on any other day throughout the year. That was in the nature of things, just mortality: but to some close to them those words would have been no comfort.

Nearer home, that is nearer Stephen’s home, the fates were less evident and the goings-on more domestic. The Bishop had come away from a Rotary luncheon, and was for once slightly depressed about his fellow men. It wasn’t his daughter who was on his mind, or at least not heavily. He had noticed that she was preoccupied, but assumed that that was on account of a young man: since his wife was not a silent partner, he hadn’t been left in doubt who the young man was. Well, that would be more than satisfactory: anyway, for the Bishop was a hearty man, he hoped and expected that his daughter would marry someone soon enough, enjoy herself, have children and be happy. He was very fond of her, and he thought of her marriage as being as happy as his own.

So it wasn’t she who, that afternoon, had lowered his spirits a few points. It had been some of his hosts at the luncheon. The Bishop could get on with anyone, and in his ascent through the Church he had got on with many businessmen. Yet in some deep, private, inadmissible recess he didn’t really like them. That was un-Christian, and the Bishop didn’t approve of forming an attitude to groups of people, instead of to separate human beings. Nevertheless, when he did meet businessmen as a group, and listened to their backchat and exchanged his own, he found them discomfiting. If this was how men thought about the poor, or those who worked for them – he was used to it, and yet, each time it happened, he was never used to it. The Bishop was a Christian socialist, in what was by then an old-fashioned but also a rooted sense. He was not deluded, he didn’t expect businessmen or anyone else to talk or behave like St Francis or Beatrice Webb. But that they could talk as they did: that they could blissfully believe that these opinions were still permissible: it made the Bishop absentminded, inattentive to his timetable, which usually he adhered to with the dutifulness of a Cabinet Minister, distracted him for a quarter of an hour, a long time for him, from the sermon he ought to have been preparing for a parish church next Sunday, the second after Epiphany.

In his office, Thomas Freer, more apprehensive by nature than the Bishop and informed of matters of which the Bishop was still totally ignorant, had phases of worry about his son. He had not spoken to him since the evening before. Some of those words were still wounding. Thomas Freer took more blame, and felt more sadness than others, including maybe his wife, would have imagined. Despite his self-indulgence and self-protectiveness, he could be candid with himself. He knew that he was very selfish, but he also knew, and couldn’t help knowing, that he wasn’t sufficient to himself. It wasn’t entirely for his own esteem that he worried about his son.

He had received no more news. He couldn’t decide, he had no means of knowing, when either side would take action: or even, for he was still capable of a surreptitious hope, if they would. That day did not seem specially significant, or at least no more than any day that week.

As the afternoon went by, Thomas Freer spent the time drafting a letter to the Chancellor of the cathedral. It was a standard business letter, such as he wrote several times a month: however, as he became engrossed in the draft, his thoughts – for minutes together, and then for longer than that – left him alone. He enjoyed writing in his stylish italic hand. He enjoyed the process of composition. It was more of a nepenthe than one might have thought.

There were other activities that afternoon. The Bishop’s wife, who still behaved as she had in their first living, was visiting sick West Indians in a street not far from Neil St Johns’ room. Mrs Kelshall was preparing the pastry for chicken liver patties, a luxury for her husband which they couldn’t often afford. Sylvia Ellis sat staring at her typewriter, wondering whether Mark would keep his promise to ring her up that night. Could she find an excuse to get access to more papers? Even that would be a relief.

Some of them were thinking, couldn’t keep the thoughts away, of what was going to happen: but none of them that afternoon was thinking what had happened. Just as Sylvia, who had as much conscience as most girls, could push out of mind the fact that she had been disloyal to her employers, so could Stephen, Tess and Mark push out of mind some of their own behaviour: and they had done worse than that. They hadn’t been continuously complacent, or merciful to themselves, about it. When Stephen had said to his father that the side one was on counted more than the steps one takes, that would have been self-evident to Neil: but to Stephen it was a rationalisation which (if he hadn’t been swamped by the revelation of betrayal) wouldn’t have been free from guilt. But he had found – it wasn’t a new discovery – that moral affronts against oneself drive out the moral affronts one has oneself committed: and so, more overpoweringly, do hopes and dangers.