The Malcontents (22 page)

Sometimes, but very rarely, in a state like Stephen’s, a fluke happened from outside, and one could back out; then one felt judicious, for not having made the decision in a hurry: in everything but the act, one had. Usually – and this was just about to happen to Stephen – there was no chance of backing out and one moved, or was passively transported, to a second crystallization. At this point – it could be very sharp – the decision, already made but shied from and submerged, became conscious. Then one had it.

Analysts of the emotions had made that discovery about love a long time ago; but it was just as true, and sometimes more significant, about unerotic states. Until the decision was conscious, then one felt free and also conflict-ridden, as Stephen had done, with intermissions, up to this Thursday afternoon. Even when it was conscious, there remained consequences, new choices where (perhaps one deceived oneself) one still felt free. One decision was forming itself clear in the open, in front of Stephen. When he couldn’t resist it, there were others which he hadn’t let himself bring to mind: but they were waiting there.

In the middle of the afternoon, Stephen made his way, strolling, even dawdling, as though absent-mindedly, towards Neil’s room. He had not rung up to say that he was coming: all through that week (and also in times without crisis) their appointments among themselves were punctilious: this was the first one to be left to chance. By this time, Stephen realized what he was doing. It was a piece of superstition or self-defence. He would be glad if Neil were out.

Actually, as Stephen could see from the windows, lighted in the cloudy afternoon, Neil was in. He was not alone. When Stephen tapped and entered, Emma was sitting on the divan, looking flushed and sullen. Lance Forrester sat, not lounging but half-forward, in the armchair. From Emma’s side, Neil said: ‘It’s you, is it?’

Lance gave a sharp smile. ‘Welcome,’ he called out.

In the bare room, they had, as though by instinct, packed themselves close together. Their voices were unhabitually quiet. They gave the impression that they were having to think about ordinary physical reflexes, such as how to control their breathing: rather like exiles, who, in their new country, think twice about the most routine of activities, as it might be finding their way to a lavatory door. That was true of Lance as much as of Neil. If they had been prisoners of war, their CO would have trusted them to behave well – but out of training, not first nature. Lance, without a drink or smoke that day, hadn’t lost his nonchalance but was having to force it. Just as he said now: ‘The other night, I told you, we shouldn’t come back to this pad. It brings bad dice. Here we are again!’

‘Never mind that,’ said Neil.

‘Never mind what?’ Lance wouldn’t stop. ‘You can see how right I was.’

Ignoring him (as a companion, it was better to have a coward than someone who insisted on forcing hangman’s jokes), Neil spoke to Stephen, who had taken a canvas chair, some way apart.

‘I suppose you know.’

‘I think I know everything you do.’

Voice hard with suspicion, Neil said: ‘Not to say a damn sight more.’

‘You’ve seen Hotchkinson, have you?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you think of him?’

‘He’s all right. He’s a decent chap.’

Even at that moment, this seemed to Stephen a curious encomium. It passed by. There was a quick exchange, suspicious on Neil’s side, but factual and competent. Hotchkinson had given Neil precisely the same opinion as he had to Stephen, though apparently without bullying. He had discussed the defence in more detail. Everything would be challenged, they had nothing to lose. But Hotchkinson hadn’t pretended that there was a chance of getting them off. As to the outcome, his prognosis had been as unqualified as to Stephen. The sooner they got used to it, the better.

‘So we’re ready for them to pick us up,’ said Lance. ‘Well, you can’t say it isn’t interesting.’

‘They’ve organized it bleeding thoroughly, you have to give them that.’ Neil’s anger broke out, but the force, the sense of outrage, were not as powerful as on the previous afternoon; they still assuaged him, but did not totally heal him. ‘Blasted drugs in this place. Organized. Planted. I keep asking you’ – this was to Lance, in a ringing whisper, and Stephen heard the echo of recriminations recurring, uselessly circling, for hours before he arrived – ‘whether you ever left any of your fucking stuff here–’

‘I keep telling you, not likely. Too precious.’ Lance didn’t resist adding, and this again he must have done before: ‘That is, unless I was too high, one of those sessions.’

‘By Christ!’ Neil’s suspicions flashed simultaneously at Lance and at the police. ‘All organized. When you take on the whole machine, they make the rules and don’t stop at smashing every single one of them.’

He stared at Stephen with an expression fixed, unyielding.

‘Well. You’re sitting nice and pretty, so it seems. You’re safely out of it, aren’t you?’

‘They’re not charging me.’

‘It shows you what influence can do.’

The blood was rising in Stephen’s face.

‘That may be too simple,’ he said in a level tone. ‘I’ve no information.’

‘We can guess,’ said Neil. ‘The bourgeoisie looks after its own.’

‘This isn’t very useful,’ Stephen made an effort to keep his tone unchanged.

‘It’s just as well to understand how the machine works.’

‘Have it your own way’.

Neil let out a soft, jeering laugh, edged with contempt, not so much for Stephen, though that existed, but much more impersonal contempt.

‘So you can sit by and watch, can’t you?’

Stephen was angrier than he had been at any time that week. He might have been presented with a last excuse. It was one he couldn’t take.

‘No, he said, ‘I shan’t do that.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

Even now, decision not only made, but crystallized, committed, the false reliefs, the attempts at a moral solvent (convincing no one, not even himself) did not quite subside. He said: ‘I suppose you weren’t the fool who doped Bernard Kelshall, were you, by any chance?’

‘In God’s name, what’s that got to do with it?’

‘It might have had a lot.’

‘If it gives you any satisfaction – no, I wasn’t.’

Stephen asked: ‘Have I got to believe you?’

‘You can believe what you bleeding well like.’

There was a longish pause, in which Lance, half-aside, said that they weren’t going to find the answer to that one. For his money, it could just as well have been suicide. Neither Stephen nor Neil paid any attention.

At last Stephen said: ‘I shall give evidence for you. It won’t be much help.’

‘What evidence?’

‘You’ve never had anything to do with drugs in your life. I can say that. It happens to be true.’

‘Not a scrap of use.’

‘Very little use. More or less negligible.’

‘Nice plushy young bourgeois giving me a certificate of character, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

‘If you like.’

Neil said: ‘It won’t do you any good.’

‘Perhaps not.’

‘Getting into the scene by the back door, aren’t you?’

Stephen did not reply.

‘I don’t see why you should,’ Neil said.

‘The reasons don’t concern you.’

‘Bloody Quixotism. Is that it? I’ve got no use for that.’

Neil was jeering again, unmoved, though there might have been a shade less contempt. ‘You’re going in for the luxury of honourable behaviour. So that you can feel good. Individual salvation, that’s what you’re after. There’s no doctrine of individual salvation that doesn’t get in the way in the long run. We have to eliminate all that stuff. Just fancy our positions were reversed. Which, by the nature of the system, is impossible. But do you imagine that I’d do as much for you? Not on your sweet fanny. Unless I thought two things. First, that I could have some effect. On the blasted trial. Second, that I was certain you were objectively useful. To the movement. If I wasn’t certain of that, you’d have to take your chance.’

He went on: ‘Of course I shouldn’t be certain of it, either. I don’t believe you’ll ever be objectively useful to the movement. If you live a hundred years.’

‘Perhaps it’s as well for you,’ said Stephen, ‘that I don’t make the same conditions.’

‘It doesn’t signify one way or the other,’ said Neil. ‘Whatever you do.’

He showed no more interest in Stephen’s evidence, or even whether he had aborted it. It was possible that he knew Stephen well enough, and assumed – not with gratitude, but with indifferent respect – that that wouldn’t happen. Instead, he began to talk about his future, or rather to revert to earlier talk about it, which had left Emma mutinously silent ever since Stephen entered the room. For herself, she would have behaved as Stephen was behaving: she had no feeling for Stephen, except maybe envy that he could make a gesture denied to her. While Neil was making the opposite of a gesture, something her imagination revolted at, and saw as too dingy to be borne.

Neil had been talking prosaically about his future – and, with Stephen now present, he did again. The trial; suspended sentence. He couldn’t take risks while that lasted. Or for long after. They would have tabs on him. Anyway, student politics were no good. Foreign politics were no good. Instant revolution was a blink in a middle-class eye. Fatuous talk about alternative societies. All middle-class nonsense. He wasn’t going to waste his time.

Defeatist, said Emma.

The only real politics left in a country like this was on the shop floor. That was where he was going. Marxist politics on the shop floor. He would go back to Liverpool. He could pick up with people he knew. Not in the docks, more straightforward in a big firm. They would have it against him that he’d been to college, but he’d get round that in time. The union would look after him. It didn’t matter that there were tabs on him there. Marxist shop stewards had tabs on them too. He would be one himself some day. Then he could do some real work. ‘How long?’ Emma had said it before, in rage, in anticlimax.

‘A few years,’ said Neil. He would have to win their confidence, he said. If he knew the people he had come from, it wouldn’t be all that easy.

‘Then little strikes in the shop!’ cried Emma.

‘Of course. That’s what it’s all about. To begin with.’

‘It’s running away,’ she said.

‘Don’t be childish. It’s the opposite.’

‘It’s letting everyone down.’

She meant, letting her down, or her dreams about him. She wasn’t heartbroken, her kind of passion was too wilful for that. But she was deserted. Not many people had seen Neil as romantic, but she had. He had been her new-style hero. She had imagined conspiring for him when he went to prison, keeping him when he came out. She had pictures of standing beside him in the streets, when the rising broke through. She wasn’t overrating herself. She had as much physical courage as anyone not insane. She would have been splendid among the Paris students a couple of years before. Yet she wouldn’t have been so splendid after the revolution had succeeded, or any revolution that had happened or could ever happen. It was like dreaming of a lover, and then settling down in marriage to find out what he was like in the boredom of ordinary days. It was like that with Neil now. The flat routine he was setting himself, the boredom of slow talk on the factory floor, the keeping sight of ten years ahead, the calculations, the analysis, the union climb – that took away the aura he had once had. That wasn’t the hero she wanted. That wasn’t for her.

She had all the unsentimentality of the romantic, perhaps unsentimentality doubled because it was mixed with sex. She could snatch at men to replace him. It wouldn’t take her long. There were activists less rational than these had been, projects and visions more inflamed, danger, a new existence, round the corner. That was where the excitement lay.

During the morning, Stephen had foreseen most of the external consequences for them all. But those which were already in train within them – they were still hidden. This was the first to break surface. Stephen had nothing to say to her. He had no claim, and not much influence, upon her. Although, at least in terms of intellect, he understood Neil’s choice in a way to which she was blind. For, although he and Neil had little in common – they had been allies without a personal relation between them, except perhaps subliminal resentment or dislike, sharpened that afternoon – they were searching for a purpose, and by this time (as another consequence) it had to be a disciplined purpose. That was what Neil was looking for in shop floor politics: possibly, more likely than not, he was already home. Which Stephen wasn’t. He was going on the same search, but the answer might take him a long time to find.

Soon afterwards Lance, with an air of casualness, asked: ‘What about me?’

Since he first saw Lance in that room, Stephen had been preparing himself for this. Now, uncomfortable, suddenly ashamed, he pretended not to understand.

‘I mean, do you feel inclined to give a bit of evidence for me?’

Lance had put on a brash, impudent smile.

‘I’ve thought about that.’ Stephen’s reply was slow in coming.

‘I wonder, do you feel inclined to say you’ve never seen me smoke anything but a nice Virginia cigarette?’

‘No. I can’t do that.’

‘I suppose you can’t. Perhaps that wouldn’t be too convincing.’ Lance’s expression was changing. ‘But you could tell them, couldn’t you, that I’ve never gone in for pushing. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve looked after myself, that’s all. I’ve never sold anything in my life. You could tell them that.’

An empty pause.

‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ said Stephen.

‘You said you can’t do Neil any good. But you’re appearing for him all the same.’

‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I didn’t say quite that. I can give concrete evidence about him. I can say, I shall say, that I’ve been here with him often enough and I’ve never seen him touch a spot of grass. Either here or anywhere. That might make five per cent difference for him.’

‘You could say you’ve never seen me sell a spot of grass.’

‘That wouldn’t make the slightest difference at all.’