The Malcontents (2 page)

The drawing-room in Thomas Freer’s house was entirely in his taste. That wasn’t because his wife was negligible; there she was, sitting among her guests, all present except Mark Robinson, who, she remarked equably, was not often late. She was a big strong-muscled woman, whose forehead, deeply lined, seemed out of harmony with the heavy body: it was easy to believe, if one looked only at the fine and delicate features, that she had once been beautiful. Now, despite the harassed skin, she seemed content, able to absent herself from trouble, amused by what had happened to her.

Her husband was the same age within a year and they had had Stephen, their only child, when they were in their thirties. But Thomas Freer looked younger than she did, and did not absent himself at all. In this company he was in command. It was a bourgeois gathering, and he liked it: the Bishop and his wife and daughter, his own wife and son and his son’s cultivated friend, just arrived, with polite apologies. That was all, and as it should be. Thomas Freer was himself a bourgeois, but of an unusual kind: to himself he might have smothered the word patrician. His grandfather had been a prosperous solicitor in this town, and his father, and now himself. He could afford to let his partners do most of the firm’s practice, and indulge himself as Registrar, the layman responsible for the cathedral’s legal business. Like others of the few remaining old families in the town, his had started as Unitarians, but his father had moved into the Anglican church. That suited Thomas very well. He enjoyed a small society, he would have detested being taken out of it, he liked his own position. He liked being able to devote himself to causes already lost, such as Union Now and the local Liberal Party.

He had a good deal of taste, and all of it was good. He would have thought it vulgar, and certainly unhistorical, to envisage this fine Georgian drawing-room of his furnished only in its own period: that wasn’t how things had gone, or how they ought to look. So, round the walls, there were a couple of Cotmans, a small Boudin, his prize possession, and then, in the same latitudinarian spirit, a William Scott.

It was his own taste to live in the house, in the deserted centre of the old town, which might be picturesque but was also inconvenient. The Provost (who would have been called the Dean if the cathedral had not been a modern creation) lived next door, but then he had to. Otherwise no middle-class family, let alone one as well-off as the Freers, slept at night within the same square mile. That seemed to Thomas Freer appropriate, and gave him a devious, or perhaps an aesthetic, pleasure.

He was a slender man, as tall as his son, though there wasn’t much family resemblance between them. The father was also personable, but in a neat-skulled, small-headed fashion, with the first sign of nutcracker jaw and nose. His manners were easy but sometimes seemed as though he were parodying himself. When he went round the circle and asked, ‘Bishop, may I give you another glass of sherry?’ he might have been a diffident parson addressing a prince of the Church, or alternatively a connoisseur thrusting priceless liquor down an uncomprehending crop. Certainly the Bishop was puzzled, the more so as Thomas Freer often called him Bert.

The Bishop was only just getting used to his Registrar’s dinner parties. In fact, the Bishop, scolded into them by his wife, a woman as large as Kate Freer and many times more dominant, was only just getting used to dinner parties of any kind. He was a small square man with a roseate complexion and a comfortable north-country accent. He had come from a humble family in Lancashire, made his way by scholarships through grammar school and Oxford, and had no social pretensions or pretensions of any kind at all. Despite his rise up the ecclesiastic hierarchy, he was, of the people in that drawing-room, still much the poorest.

The Freers had both inherited money: Mark’s father was a hosiery manufacturer and well-to-do: whereas the Bishop was paid on about the same scale as a university lecturer. He could manage to send his daughter, a short sturdy pretty girl who had been whispering to Stephen, to the local university, and lived not very differently from his own old headmaster in his native town. But it was the Bishop who, during dinner, took it upon himself to change the conversation. The party had moved downstairs, for the dining-room was on the ground floor, smallish after the big room above, another example of Thomas Freer’s carefully anachronistic taste, with Queen Anne chairs older than the house, candles on the rosewood table. The food was fine, though not in large quantities: the wine was good, but didn’t circulate often. What Thomas Freer did circulate was a set of reflections which didn’t seem – except to hypersensitive ears – to be coming to a point.

He was sitting with Mrs Boltwood, the Bishop’s wife, on his right and on his left her daughter Tess. At the other end of the table, the Bishop and Mark were flanking Kate Freer, with Stephen interposed between the Bishop and Tess. Thomas Freer, in his easy modulated tones, appeared to be addressing no one in particular when, after the soup, he set about asking the air at large some questions, as though engaged in a labyrinthine exercise in introspection.

‘I sometimes wonder, don’t you know, what one would do if one could get the faintest glimpse of the consequences. Do you think I’m wrong? Of course, I’m not very clever at foreseeing consequences. But I wonder how many people are? Doesn’t one get into a situation, I’m sure I have, of trying to do good and finding that evil comes of it?’

The three young people were silent. From the other end of the table, Kate Freer gave a sound which tinkled like a distant chuckle, or even a giggle.

‘Thinking of doctors, don’t you know.’ Thomas was weaving away. ‘I’ve often thought that being a doctor would be a decent way to live. Does that make sense? And they’ve kept children alive, that was a nice thing to do, they’ve kept them alive all over the world. With the consequence that there are going to be more people than the world can cope with, so they tell one. I only wonder, but mightn’t that be a classical case of doing good so that evil might come? One can’t see one’s way–’

‘Of course they’re doing good,’ said Mrs Boltwood, nose protruded in indignation.

‘Maybe. Who is one to judge?’ Thomas was weaving again. ‘Or take the October Revolution. I suppose that, if we’d been Russians in 1917, everyone round this table would have been for it, we should have thought we were doing good, don’t you think we should? But looking back, of course I’m very ignorant about history, should we have been? If the Russians had muddled on without it – one might have saved millions of lives. Looking back, if there hadn’t been the revolution, there wouldn’t have been much chance for Hitler – we could have escaped another war, one might have thought. One hopes so much, don’t you know, but I wonder if we could see the consequences of what we hoped for–’

That was the point when the Bishop broke in. It was not so much that he was out of sympathy with Thomas Freer, though that was true: but more, he was embarrassed that Stephen and the others, not usually inarticulate, had stayed quite mute. There was something behind this allocution, meanings left unspoken: the Bishop liked young people to be carefree, he wanted to take away the strain. Until now, for him it had been an ordinary Saturday night: no, not quite ordinary, what he described to himself as a posh dinner was still an event. Nevertheless, it was a date like other dates. Dinner at the Registrar’s. Saturday, 10 January 1970. Tomorrow, Sunday, first after Epiphany, the quietest period of the Christian year. But now the Bishop felt impelled to exert himself.

‘It’s a mistake to fancy one can foresee everything, Tom. We’ve got to do our best inside the situation. What they used to call the So Sein. That’s all we have to play with.’ The Bishop’s accent rang oddly round that table: but he wasn’t prepared to be out-faced and out-cultured by his host. In secret, the Bishop, who had his own modest pride, believed that he was a good deal the cleverer man. Then he said: ‘Now Stephen. Tell us how those pulsars are going on.’

It sounded at the same time graceless and also very warm. It affected Stephen as both these things. On another occasion he would have been amused to hear his father’s techniques brought to a dead stop: it didn’t often happen. Thomas Freer was too evasive for most men. Curiously, however, the Bishop’s interruption, well meant as it was, produced an effect opposite to that intended. If Thomas Freer had known, he would have been more than ever satisfied. For the diversion made Stephen, not less tense and impatient, but much more. His father’s probing – the inaudible dialogue which only the two of them could hear, though Mark had caught some echoes – that chimed with his own thoughts. Now this kind man was distracting him away from them. It was still a long time until the dinner could be over. He had to force himself to produce a polite reply.

‘I don’t think we’re getting much further, sir.’

Stephen, as the Bishop knew, was doing research in astrophysics. For the sake of lightening the party, the Bishop would have been prepared to show interest in any intellectual subject, but this one happened to be a favourite of his. Stephen wished he had never heard of it.

The Bishop made cheerful noises about quasars and pulsars.

‘It’s wonderful how much we know, compared with twenty years ago.’

Stephen made another effort, trying to liberate himself.

‘Sometimes I think it’s more wonderful, what we shall never know.’

‘That’s very interesting, Stephen, that really is. What exactly do you mean?’

‘I mean, if ever we thought nature was simple, now we know for sure it isn’t.’

Almost against his will, or his concentration, Stephen began to talk more freely.

‘That is, if there are any universal laws for the cosmos, they must be very difficult. So difficult that it looks as though we may never know them–’

‘Do you mean,’ said the Bishop, sparkling, ‘that our minds are limited and the cosmos isn’t? Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I shouldn’t put it quite that way.’ Stephen gave an involuntary smile. ‘But I don’t think the universe is going to look beautiful ever again. No nice beautiful simple generalizations like Einstein’s. It’s just a hideous tangle, and it’s becoming more tangled every time we look. And, if you like, you can say that our minds are too simple to cope.’

The Bishop, ruddy face blushing deeper as he chortled, said: ‘Well, you know, that doesn’t come as altogether surprising to anyone in my profession. After all, what you’re saying about the cosmos, theologians have sometimes said about the mind of God.’

The Bishop, indomitable, persevered, sure that he was bringing peace. He was so bright, so happy, that others were happy too. True, Thomas Freer wore a lugubrious expression, as though cosmology were not a suitable topic for a man of taste. But even he did not resist the Bishop’s spirits, the Bishop’s speculative joy – the hundred million stars in the galaxy! the billions of galaxies! the rim of the universe, to which the galaxies were rushing and rushing over!

Stephen was as disciplined as anyone there. He had to keep up his share of the conversation. Mark, who was reading history and was nothing like as knowledgeable as the Bishop, could come in only when he began to ask about the chances of intelligent life. Kate Freer’s long-sighted eyes might be deceiving her about her left-hand neighbour, but she thought that he looked excitable and restless. She had an indulgent spot for that young man, so gentle as well as active, so affectionate to her. She didn’t know that he and her son, and Tess Boltwood too, were all reckoning on the Bishop going to bed early before his Sunday work: and then they would be released.

The pudding was in front of them and their glasses of sauterne. The candlesticks were reflected clear in the rosewood. It seemed a comfortable dinner party, one of many in that house, just as Thomas Freer expected his dinner parties to be comfortable. The Bishop continued to preside, amicably, joyously, over his seminar.

‘There must be intelligent life elsewhere, I should be flabbergasted if there wasn’t. There must be,’ he said.

Mark and Tess emphatically agreed. With them, that was an article of faith. And some day we should get in touch with it.

‘I’m not quite so certain of that,’ said Stephen.

‘But you don’t doubt that there must be life, do you now?’

The Bishop was fond of them all, but it was Stephen he respected.

‘It’s beginning to look as though life may be a rarer chance than we ever thought.’

Stephen, with automatic competence, out of the front of his head with his preoccupation pushed deeper down, went through the arguments he could have reeled off in his sleep. Conceivably, though not very probably, life might be one preposterous fluke. We might be alone in an infinite silence, a random plasma of matter and energy, numberless billions of suns, burning away, billions already burnt away, progressing without anything that one could call meaning or purpose, all a prodigy of mindless waste, in the direction of entropy and thermodynamic death.

That didn’t quell the Bishop, who possessed a remarkable gift for reconciling any idea with any other. Multitudes of planets with intelligent life, scattered all through the universe – yes, he liked that idea, he liked any prospect of life. He was perfectly prepared to reconcile that idea with the Christian revelation. On the other hand, if Stephen’s scepticism turned out to be the answer, if human life was an extraordinary incident in the middle of infinity, well, that was marvellous too! Perhaps more marvellous! Meaning and purpose, said the Bishop warmly, those old theological proofs were nothing but naïve: but still, alone in the universe, that would be a special place for mankind, could anyone deny the exhilaration of that, could Stephen?

Stephen could not resist breaking into his curiously youthful, ironic, pleasing smile.

From the upright clock in the corner, the minutes ticked on. The party had not moved upstairs again. Thomas Freer remarked, in a formula all of them had heard before as one giving the final demonstration of his liberalism, that in this house there was no separation of the women after dinner. The Bishop behaved according to plan, or according to the plan of three people there. He announced, with amiable matter-of-fact humility, that it would soon be his bed-time.