The Malcontents (7 page)

‘You’d better. You’ll have to soon enough.’ Stephen wasn’t looking up at her face, or at any other. ‘I can tell you all the details that I’ve heard. But you’d better believe me.’

‘Oh, cut that crap. We believe you,’ said Neil, businesslike, the quickest in response. ‘And, you said yourself, on Saturday night’ (to those who had been present, it seemed more than forty-eight hours before) ‘we might have to hurry up. That’s damn well certain now. We go on the attack. Blow up the whole bloody shooting match before they get us. This week.’

‘And take the consequences?’ said Bernard.

‘We take the consequences whatever we do. That’s it, isn’t it?’ Neil made Stephen raise his head, and fixed him with a glare, interrogative and impersonal.

Stephen nodded. ‘We have to be ready for that.’

‘Then we get in first. Jesus, we’re not going to be caught like rabbits in a trap.’

‘I’m with you.’ Emma gave a great smile, complicit, comradely, respectful, straight at Neil. ‘We’ll have something to show for ourselves at any rate.’

Stephen was sitting very still. Suddenly he stirred himself. ‘That may be right,’ he said. ‘But is it safe to talk about it? Now?’

Lance Forrester, slumped in an armchair, said in a knowledgeable aside: ‘That’s your second point, is it? Yes, I get you.’

Lance hadn’t uttered before, except as an absent greeting. In the badly lit room, it was difficult for the others to see if his pupils were slotted down. His speech might have been a little slurred. Yet Stephen turned to him with something like relief.

Neil shouted ferociously: ‘What do you mean?’

‘It doesn’t matter what I mean,’ Lance had a lazy smile, ‘but I know what he means.’

‘What’s that?’ said Tess, but she, watching over Stephen’s mood, had half-guessed.

‘Oh, that the give-away must have come from inside, i.e. from one of us, dear Neil.’

‘Sabotage.’ Neil was on his feet. ‘You’re trying to break us up at last, are you?’

There was incredulity, rage, upheaval in the room. ‘Take it back,’ called out Emma.

Bernard added, in a cold quiet tone: ‘It shouldn’t have been said.’

Unmoved, Lance waved a hand in Stephen’s direction.

‘Just ask him,’ he said.

Stephen did not reply at once. Then, without expression or inflection: ‘I can’t see any alternative.’

More angry murmurs. Neil had begun to shout. For the first time, Stephen raised his voice.

‘Listen.’ He had taken charge: he continued, with a depth of bitterness, coming out in harsh, clear words, that quietened them all. ‘You might realize that I’ve thought of the possible ways out. It’s just conceivable that they could have got hold of all our names – which they have. They just conceivably might have been tailing us from early on. Though in cold blood I suggest that that would be considerably flattering our own significance. They could certainly have discovered a lot of what you two (he gestured to Neil and Lance) did with Finlayson. They’ve bought him back just as you bought him to begin with. All that is conceivable. I should like to believe it. What isn’t conceivable is that they should have somehow learned from outside exactly what goes on here. Exactly who does what. Not only what we’ve planned. But what we’ve discussed. The only pieces of paper in existence have gone straight into my bank. There’s not been one word, so far as I know, certainly not by me or anyone speaking to me, over the telephone.’

‘They could have bugged the room,’ said Emma, suspicion brilliant in her eyes.

‘I’ve even thought of that. Though it’s flattering ourselves again. But we’ve met in other rooms. Most of the summer we took extra precautions and met in the open air.’

He added: ‘We’d better all think about it. Without fooling ourselves.’

‘We’ve been penetrated, anyway,’ said Mark.

‘Without fooling ourselves.’ Stephen repeated. ‘There’s only one realistic method of penetrating a group like this.’

No one there could be certain of the climate of the meeting, it changed so fast. Protests jarred out, and arguments, chains of rational argument, were started: but some of the protests and arguments came from those who, maybe without admitting it, were convinced. And yet being convinced didn’t become stable within them. The one certain emotion in the room was a miasma – shot with its opposite, a brilliance – of distrust. The miasma couldn’t be shifted by anything that was said or felt: except that sporadically, in one or more of them, it cleared, as it had for Emma a few minutes before, into brilliance like a fog clearing, and showing a pattern of suspicion bright as a spider’s web on a misty morning. It was distrust such as most of them had never known. Yes, they had known distrust of the forces, the people, they were fighting against: but that was abstract, but here it was, as it were in the flesh, in the central nervous system, within themselves. Before this, some hadn’t been close to each other, there had been, if they had examined their feelings, elements of dislike, as between Neil St John and Lance. But those had been swept away, made irrational, or suppressed deep down, in the common cause – or in the group loyalty which had, deeper than will or personal relations, been carrying them along.

For Tess, who believed, who couldn’t avoid believing, what Stephen had said, it was like hearing that someone she loved had been speaking of her with malice behind her back. Like hearing that Stephen himself had, when she wasn’t present, been traducing her. She hadn’t, not once in her life, been made to realize that kind of disloyalty. Ambivalence, the coexistence of affection and spite, the interplay of kindness and cruelty, or what her father would have called good and evil – those were discoveries she had still to make. And when she made them, she would not find them much easier to accept. Nor would others there. It was only the cold who learned that lesson lightly, or who knew it without having to learn it at all.

Mark, less self-centred than anyone in the room, living at high pitch in others’ passions, had noticed that Tess was near to tears. He had not seen her in this state before, not in trouble or uncertainty over Stephen. She was as tough as any girl but now she would have to be looked after.

Time was passing. None of them could have told how long they had been there, in the midst of analyses of information (Stephen had been compelled to reproduce his conversation with his father), ‘inquests’ about innocent leaks, retracking so as to unconvince themselves: they were most of them orderly and used to business, but an outsider wouldn’t have known it, hearing the spasms of conversations, the phases of incoherence, which were themselves a kind of defence.

Neil had not produced the ritual tea and sausage: though he kept speaking with angry violence, he seemed too far gone for that. After a while, Lance said he was going to the loo, and was a long time away. During his absence the others fell into silence, a silence so strained that the room appeared to have gone darker.

When he returned, and settled back into his chair, no one spoke. He looked round the circle, and with a smile, or at any rate a rictus, of jeering animation said: ‘Well. We might as well give a thought to who did it, don’t you think?’

The air was dense with hate. He was hated for saying it. Yet it had been thought.

It was Bernard who, after an interval, spoke first.

‘We can’t get any further without.’

Stephen said: ‘We have to know.’

Neil broke out, with frightening fury: ‘Whoever it is, I don’t care who, whoever it is ought to be liquidated. It would be worth nine years’ stir to get rid of a bastard like that.’

(At that time, a life sentence, which was what Neil was referring to, usually meant not more than nine years in prison.)

‘That’s no use,’ said Stephen, with distaste that sounded like contempt.

‘Speak for your blasted self.’

‘I’m speaking for everyone–’ Stephen glanced round the set of faces, some pallid, some as flushed as Neil’s, excited, difficult to read.

‘Christ, you might have done it yourself.’

‘Yes, I might. For all that anyone knows.’ Stephen’s mouth twitched in a hard, Nordic, fighting smile.

‘How do we know,’ Neil shouted on, ‘that you haven’t invented all this bullshit about your father–?’

‘You don’t know. You’ll have to trust me, that’s all.’

‘My God,’ said Emma, without her man’s ferocity, ‘but we don’t know who to trust.’

‘You’ll have to decide for yourselves.’ Stephen added: ‘We shall all have to decide for ourselves.’

There was another patch of silence. Then Lance, who, without effort, sounded both airy and cool: ‘Yes, that man’s (he nodded at Neil) talking bilge. Where do we go from here?’

‘The best that can happen,’ Tess broke in, ‘is that – whoever did it – just clears out of our way.’

‘That’s too easy,’ said Bernard.

Stephen: ‘I agree with Tess.’

Bernard: ‘No, we can’t forget as easily as all that.’

‘No, we can’t forget,’ said Stephen, ‘but we can’t start reprisals. There’s no end to that.’

‘I should like to know,’ said Lance, voice lively after Stephen’s, ‘just how this friend of ours is going to clear out.’

Miasma thickening, the argument went on. Distrust flickered from one to another, like static electricity leaping, pairing couples as it had paired Neil and Stephen. With all present in the room, no one could speak to one he trusted: though most trust had gone. They would have to meet tomorrow. No reprisals. The hope, the intimation, was that someone would be absent. Loaded words, intended for someone who should be absent. No reprisals. Then the rest of them could prepare themselves.

As it grew later, the exchanges became curiously formal. The bouts of rage had quite vanished. Innuendoes died down, and no one could ask who would be present next day. Remarks were made as at an official meeting, attended by members who did not, outside the office, know each other well. The only breeziness came from Lance, after another long visit to the lavatory (no one was free enough to ask, had he gone for a fix?). He said: ‘If it’s all the same to everyone, that is everyone who feels like coming–’ he grinned – ‘I suggest we make it my pad tomorrow afternoon.’

He grinned again, towards Neil: ‘No hard feelings. We might have better luck.’

It sounded, and could have been, the remark of a gambler changing his luck, or a piece of sheer superstition. As they all – after what had happened, they still found it difficult to part – got up to go, Lance gazed round the room, and said, with the satisfaction of one dismissing a place where he has heard bad news: ‘Well, we shan’t come here again.’

As Mark drove his car towards the Bishop’s house, on the back seat Tess was holding Stephen’s hand. None of them spoke until, suddenly, Mark drew up by the side of the road, the house a hundred yards away, gate not yet in sight.

He said: ‘I’m going to have a breath of air. Back in ten minutes.’

He walked away from them, beside the neat hedges. It was late, the road was silent, beyond one garden he could see a single light in a bedroom window. For an instant he wondered, with an indulgence that might have belonged to someone much older, what the two of them were saying to each other. He felt an elation so natural to him that he didn’t examine it, though to others it would have seemed alien or disassociated. Yet to him life was going faster, and immersed as he was in the spectacle and thoughts of the evening his step was light.

When he returned to the car, he knew at a glance that Stephen hadn’t a glimmer of his own mood. He had left Stephen to comfort Tess: but it was Stephen who needed comfort now. Of what he and Tess had said in privacy there was no sign: all that was left was prosaic, the timetable for tomorrow, who should see whom. The meeting had been arranged for five o’clock, to give ‘someone’ (who is it, Stephen said again, as he must have said obsessively to Tess) a chance to make a decision. For the rest of them, there were confrontations ahead of them, as well as other decisions to be made. It sounded matter-of-fact, like the routine of any crisis.

As soon as Tess had left them, Mark said: ‘You’re not tired, are you?’

‘No.’

‘Right.’

In fact, they each had the complete absence of fatigue that comes with any violent feeling: just as in an unhappy love affair one can go without sleep and walk for miles, or in waiting for news of a mother’s illness.

Mark knew the town well, better than any of them, ever since, while he was still at school, he had gone on solitary, wilful explorations. Without asking, he began to drive fast down the London Road, away from the suburbs, into the city centre. Apart from a series of trucks clanking past, there was little traffic: the tarmac gleamed under the headlights: in the darker streets, buildings closed down on them.

‘Who is it?’ said Stephen once.

‘Wait a bit,’ said Mark.

A little later, Mark remarked: ‘It’s turning out a long weekend.’

He had said it lightly, throwing back an irony of Stephen’s in the cathedral precinct on Saturday night but Stephen wasn’t fit for irony just then. Any more than he was fit for, or even noticed, another irony when they came to their destination. It was a lorry drivers’ caff, open all night, which Mark had visited before in the small hours. They, and their friends, not only the core, entertained fellow feeling for the lorry drivers: but, as they made their way in, the lorry drivers did not entertain fellow feeling for them. It wasn’t so much their dress: they were wearing sweaters and jeans. It wasn’t their hair: some of the younger drivers grew hair at their necks and down their cheeks, much longer than theirs. It was something in their manner, though Mark’s was gentle and Stephen’s quiet. The lorry drivers recognized them at sight, and didn’t like them. There was a barrier neither of them could have climbed. There were one or two curses, meant to be heard: more discontent, paradoxically enough, than if a pair of well-to-do young men had entered that same caff a generation before.

Stephen noticed none of that. He didn’t lift his eyes from the formica-covered table, carrying rings of liquid still not dry, shining like snail-tracks under the naked bulb. He didn’t lift his eyes until Mark brought mugs of coffee and sandwiches, thick bread, thin ham, edges of fat protruding. Neither of them had eaten, apart from Stephen’s slice of cake at the Kelshalls’, since midday, and they found themselves – appetite having its own tactless way – shamingly hungry. Then Stephen said: ‘Who is it?’