The Malcontents (17 page)

In a patch of silence, Stephen said: ‘Your father was rather good this morning.’

He said it without any preliminaries, harshly, almost grudgingly. But neither he nor Tess was pretending to the other, they weren’t acting as though stronger than they were, or less afraid.

‘I think he is, when he’s up against it. I wish I was.’

‘You’re not bad.’

Stephen could be eloquent, making love. That wasn’t eloquent, but it was naked, and gave her warmth.

‘I suppose parsons get plenty of experience with people’s crises, don’t they?’ she said.

‘No. Most of them would be no more use than–’ He didn’t finish and then went on: ‘No, he’s just got more spirit than I have. Or you either.’

He gave her a slight smile, hard-edged. He could sometimes put on humility, but she hadn’t heard him speak so humbly – nor in that sense so intimately – before.

They had returned to the treadmill-recurring questions, faces close, when Mark stood behind them. He said: ‘Ready to move?’ He was looking fresher than they were, the whites of his eyes were as milky blue as a child’s: but, without showing the tightness of strain, he was quiet. He had eaten at home, he said, he didn’t want anything more. Leading them to his car, putting Stephen in the back seat and Tess beside him, he began to drive fast up the London Road towards the country. They weren’t past the railway station before Tess reverted – she couldn’t keep it quiet, she couldn’t make any other conversation – to the question of drugs.

‘Have you ever heard of anything like that?’ she asked Mark.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. Yes, didn’t some people get deranged on LSD?

Driving by the side of the park, he said: ‘Of course. They’re said to find themselves in odd places. Without remembering how they got there. Like being drunk.’

There were reports of hallucinations, said Stephen. Someone might walk out of a window, it was conceivable.

‘It doesn’t seem very likely. But we can’t think of anything else that makes any sense at all. Can you?’ He was speaking to Mark’s back.

‘The trouble is,’ said Mark, ‘none of us knows much about drugs, do we? You don’t. I don’t.’

They were at the beginning of the suburbs.

‘We’re not switched on,’ said Mark.

‘I wasn’t so sure this morning,’ said Tess. ‘But now I am. He was doped all right. Someone doped him.’

In a moment, Mark commented: ‘He could have done it himself, couldn’t he?’

‘Not him. No, not him.’

Jerky, spasmodic, sometimes desultory, the interchange went on until they were entering the drive of Mark’s house. It was half-a-dozen miles out of town, in the placid, neat-hedged, domesticated midland countryside (romantics thought that countryside was sempiternal, but it would have been unrecognisably more unkempt only two hundred years before). The house itself was shining red brick, white-silled, white-gabled, all shining spick-and-span red and white, a pretty 1920-ish version of Queen Anne, bright and sparkling like a children’s picture book. It was a good deal larger, as well as more comfortable, than the neighbouring manor houses which manufacturers like Mark’s father had a habit of renovating for themselves. Mark’s father, though (whom Stephen had met only once, since he returned to England so rarely), was an independent man, as independent as his burgher predecessors. He was self-made, and he made his own comfort and prescribed his own house. Mark was not just an only child, but a child of old age: his father was over sixty when he was born, and the fortune had been well started during the first world war. This house had been by way of one of its first celebrations: and there Mark’s father had lived, quite alone, improbably serene in the big establishment until he married in his fifties.

In the middle drawing-room, windows giving on to rolling pasture, a copse in sight (a view as tranquil as, and less anaemic than, the watercolours round the walls) – in that drawing-room which Mark had reserved years before for his own use, Stephen had sometimes wondered (not that afternoon, there was no free thought to spare) how much richer was Mark’s father than his own, Several times over, he thought. But he hadn’t much notion how rich his father was. It was third-generation wealth, not first: it had probably been shrewdly handled: it could have accumulated. Also Stephen’s mother had some money in her own right. Maybe there was less difference than one imagined as one walked through the three drawing-rooms at Thurlby, the dining room, the breakfast-room, the billiard room, which was never used, the music-room, which in Mark’s father’s bachelorhood often was. Mark’s father took a simple pleasure out of looking opulent: Stephen’s father’s pleasures weren’t so simple. Maybe there was less difference, if one had access to their holdings. But Stephen was not likely to know until his father died. Thomas Freer’s gift for labyrinths of secrecy was in most matters very great, but in matters of money it became not only a gift but a dedication.

They hadn’t long arrived before Neil was shown in.

‘How did you get out?’ said Mark, composed and host-like.

‘Emma’s car.’

‘Is she here?’

Impatiently Neil shook his head. ‘She’s out on her feet. Blasted fool. She’s had a bad trip.’

Neil wasn’t noticing the house. which he hadn’t been inside before, not even to record anger that the bourgeois could still live like this. More than ever indifferent to environment, he sat there as unaffected as in his own room. Yet he was seething with anger of a different kind, anger churning from inside.

‘They came with a warrant this morning,’ he announced, not wasting time. ‘They went through everything I’ve got. Damn them to hell.’

‘What were they looking for?’ asked Stephen. Since the telephone conversation, he and Tess had wondered, but had not expected this.

‘What do you think? Acid, grass, the lot.’

‘There was nothing there, though, was there?’ Mark said. Neil had always been as little indulgent as they were themselves.

‘Nothing that they didn’t put there.’

‘They haven’t, have they?’ said Tess.

‘We’ll see. Do you think that we’re going to benefit from the splendid impartiality of English law?’

He asked: ‘Have they come round to any of you?’

The others said no.

‘I thought as much.’

He was seething with bitter fury, more abstract than anything the others felt, more morally outraged. He was one of those combatants, such as Lance had jeered about on the Sunday night, to whom the right is on his own side – the right, the moral justice. One had to be his kind of combatant to be rigid with that moral certainty. It was his strength. One had to be capable of that unambiguous anger. It wasn’t the fair-minded, much less the reflective or ironic, who were made to survive in conflict, and in the end to have a chance of winning. Anger, total anger, was the prime necessity.

Stephen said – his father’s advice sifting unwillingly back – that Neil must have a lawyer. Neil, capable of sustaining his emotion and being simultaneously practical, agreed. Who should he go to? Stephen replied that they might as well all use Hotchkinson: he was said to be competent. Neil nodded: he knew when to take advantage of middle-class know-how.

Then Stephen said: ‘About Bernard.’

‘What about him?’ Neil’s voice was level.

‘We’ve been thinking.’ Once again, Stephen brought out their explanation. Neil sat without moving a feature, and remarked: ‘You’ve got it.’

He was quicker to accept than any of them had been, and more positive. He was more positive also that someone, not Bernard himself, must have done the drugging.

‘Yes, it was that shit Lance. His idea of a nice party.’

‘That’s what we think,’ said Tess.

Stephen added: ‘I don’t see who else it was likely to be.’

‘We may as well find out.’ Neil broke out. ‘Christ Jesus! If it hadn’t been for that bastard, we should have got away with it all.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Mark. ‘I really doubt it.’

‘You’ve doubted everything, haven’t you?’ Neil turned on him. There was hostility in the room: Neil had no affection for Stephen, but he was less hostile to him than to Mark. Businesslike again, Neil said that they needed to cut out the talk and ask Lance the straight question, yes or no.

‘I did that yesterday. About the other thing,’ said Stephen.

‘You didn’t get anywhere.’ It wasn’t a question, though Neil hadn’t heard in precise terms that the others had information – over and above Stephen’s impression – that Lance was not the betrayer.

Neil went on: ‘Trying again this time?’

‘If necessary.’

All of a sudden Neil stirred.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d better do it myself. It’s a chance to have it out with the bleeder.’

He stood up, exuding purpose, glad to be moving, light on the balls of his feet. He would ring them up if he had news, he said: he would find his way out, he said. He left without any kind of goodbye.

It was still early in the afternoon. The others returned to the condition they had known before, but instead of wearing it more lightly, they felt it worse: it was that special blend of boredom and dread which, they were later to realize, took up in terms of time so much of any crisis or any period of action: it was the anxious ennui which was an occupational affliction of a soldier before battle, or a politician when his future was being decided by others, himself as powerless – and preferably as silent – as a giraffe in the zoo.

The longer it lasted, the less they got used to it. That afternoon there was even more waiting to do. They were waiting – for what? Well, for Neil’s telephone call. That wasn’t decisive, it couldn’t matter much: and yet it was something to wait for. Once Stephen rang up his house, to ask if there were any messages: none at all. The three of them, so used to talking to each other, could find nothing to talk about. There were extensions of silence. Mark began playing records, and that came as some kind of relief.

At last the telephone. That must be Neil, some news. Mark went quickly to answer: the others saw a frown cover his face.

‘Oh,’ he said. And, a shade less easily than usual, ‘Oh yes. That’ll be all right. Yes, I’ll expect you.’

He came back to his chair saying: ‘That was Sylvia. She’s coming out here. After the office.’

Neither Stephen nor Tess commented. More records. The maid brought in tea. It was half past four before the telephone rang again. Again Mark answered: ‘Hallo, it is you, is it?’

He nodded to the others: this was Neil. He didn’t summon Stephen to conduct the talking. It had been part of their discipline that personal relations were submerged, that each of them was interchangeable with any other.

‘I’ve had a session with him,’ Neil was saying.

‘Well?’

‘He didn’t admit a thing. He says, of course he gave her (Emma) a dose, she asked for it. He says, he nearly tried the effect on Stephen, it might have been interesting, he says. But he wouldn’t have done it to Bernie, it wouldn’t have crossed his mind, Bernie wasn’t anyone you wanted to try it on.’

‘Well?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I feel inclined to believe him.’

Objectively, said Neil, it might be true. Oh, and Lance hadn’t denied the possibility of Bernie acting under the influence of LSD. It happened often enough. He had actually known someone who, during a trip, had been certain that he could levitate.

To the others, Mark reported Neil’s end of the conversation something like word-for-word. They were disappointed, disproportionately so; they had expected, they had been curiously certain, that one anxiety would have been clinched. Once more restless, Stephen telephoned his home: once more no message whatever.

‘Do you want us to go?’ he said to Mark, not referring directly to Sylvia’s visit.

‘No, don’t go.’

Both Stephen and Tess assumed that Sylvia was making an excuse, this was another of her pretexts (she was so importunate, at the same time so haughty and so meek) to be with him. They also assumed, knowing that Mark was for once embarrassed, that he would be glad of their company when she came. They had nothing else to do, there was nothing to do but wait, and so they stayed.

The last of the light faded over the fields, Mark drew the curtains. With a grin towards the other two (quieter than usual, he was still livelier than they were) he put on a record from
Fidelio
. The cries of liberty swelled and mounted, waves of hope fulfilled surged through the room. Stephen, more depressed as he listened, was blaming Mark, it was one of his lapses of feeling – his abandon, as though he didn’t expect anyone to care – to make them hear the sound of such a joy.

‘She’ll be free soon,’ said Mark, letting them see that Sylvia was on his mind. ‘She’s very dutiful about not leaving the office early.’

Music and time lingered on, they weren’t sedated, they had the night to get through. Six o’clock struck from the clock over the fireplace. Minutes passed, and then Sylvia made an entrance. Yes, she made an entrance, for in her extreme self-consciousness (perhaps sharpened the instant she saw Mark was not alone), recalling to Stephen the time when she was much younger, she couldn’t walk in naturally, she flounced from the door, head bent forward and then thrown back, like an old-fashioned music hall comedian projecting himself on to the stage. It wasn’t comic, it would have been jarring on the most peaceful of afternoons, to see the absurd and put-on smile on the severely beautiful face. ‘Here I am,’ she cried.

She expected to be kissed, and yet wasn’t certain how to make him. Though he had his own unease, Mark couldn’t let her remain in hers. He put an arm round her, brushed her cheek (awkwardly for him, his physical grace failing him as though copying hers), and said ‘Come and settle down.’

He led her to the sofa, asked her to have a drink. ‘Good idea,’ she said over-brightly, and then, as he brought a tray, poured herself a large-sized gin. The others took more modest ones, their first that night. It wasn’t simply however that she was accepting comfort which they wouldn’t: despite her nerves, she was a strong girl with hearty hunting tastes, and was used to drinking more than any of them.

‘Hallo, Stephen,’ she said, greeting him for the first time. ‘Hallo, Tess.’