The Sleep of Reason (24 page)

After we had said good night to Francis, who was staying at the Athenaeum, Martin and I sat in the dark taxi, swerving in the windy dark through empty Mayfair streets. Nothing eventful had happened to him, but we went on talking in my drawing-room, talking the small change of brothers, anxiety-free, while the windows rattled. He had nothing to report about Pat, but for once he spoke of his daughter Nina. Yes, she seemed to have a real talent for music, she might be able to make a living at it. She was a great favourite of mine, pretty, diffident, self-effacing. If the luck had fallen the other way, and Pat had had that gift, Martin would have been triumphant. But he was composed and happy that night, and, though he was an expert in sarcasm, that specific sarcasm didn’t get exchanged.

NOW I had started moving about again in London, I had to pay a duty visit to Austin Davidson. It was not such an ordeal as it had been, Margaret told me, She, except when I was in hospital, went to him each day. In fact, when we called at tea-time, passing by the picture-hung walls, he was able to meet us at his study door and return to his armchair without help or distress, though he waited to get his breath before he spoke.

In the study, strangely dark, as it always seemed, for a connoisseur of visual art, the only picture I could make out hung above his chair. I thought I had not seen it before: a Moore drawing? The December night was already setting in, the reading lamp beside Davidson lit up nothing but our faces.

He looked at me from under his eyebrows: from the cheekbones, the flesh fell translucently away. His eyes, opaque, sepia, bird-bright, had, however, a glint in them.

“I’m sorry about your catastrophe,” he said.

“It’s all over,” I replied.

“You notice that I used the word catastrophe?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old men get a remarkable amount of satisfaction out of the physical afflictions of their juniors.” He gave his old caustic grin. “There’s nothing to make an old man feel half his age – as much as hearing that someone twenty years younger has just died.”

It might have been an effort. If so, it was a good one. It had the note of the unsubdued, unregenerate Davidson. Margaret and I were laughing. If most men had said that – certainly if I had – it would have sounded guilty. Not so with him. It sounded (just as his talk about his own suicide had sounded) innocent and pure.

He leant back, brown eyes sparkling. He was delighted that he could entertain us. For the next couple of hours, except when he heard himself gasping, he forgot to be morose. Another friend of his came in, whom Margaret and I had often met, a man about my age called Hardisty. He had been a disciple of the set to which Davidson belonged: he was clever, miscellaneously cultivated, good-looking apart from being as nearly bald as a man can be: he believed that Davidson and his friends had been the new Enlightenment, and that it would be a long time before there was another. He did most of the talking, while Davidson nodded, for they formed a united front. Neither Margaret nor I wanted to be abrasive, so we left them to it, Davidson occasionally making some reflection which gave Hardisty a chance to eat a tea young Charles wouldn’t have thought contemptible. Savoury toast: Chelsea buns: éclairs. Davidson’s housekeeper had provided tea for us all. The rest of us ate nothing, but the tea disappeared, and Hardisty chatted away between mouthfuls, the sort of man who did not put on weight.

Davidson recalled when, just before the 1914 war, he had seen his first Kandinsky. It had been uncivilised of the Russians not to understand that that was a step forward. Yes, said Hardisty, perfectly in tune, art, any art, had its own dynamic, nothing could stop it. You mightn’t like it, you mightn’t understand it, but since the first abstracts were painted nothing could have stopped the art of our time. A little later, he said, just as easily, morals had their own dynamic too. In a few years, for example, we should all regard drugs, or at least most drugs, as we now regarded alcohol. It was much too late for any of us to start on them, he said, brimful of health, but still – Again Davidson nodded. Yes, he said, it was interesting how the taboos had been vanishing in his own lifetime.

“In my young days at Cambridge, don’t you know,” he went on, “homosexuality was a very tender plant.”

Hardisty gave an acquiescent smile. For as long as Margaret and I could remember, he had been living with another man. This partner I had seen only once: I had an idea that he didn’t fit into our sort of company: but the arrangement had been as stable as most marriages. Certainly Hardisty was a happy man.

“By and large, this has been a dreadful century,” Davidson was saying. “But in some ways we have become a bit more civilised.”

He seemed satisfied, either by the reflection or because he had not been too tired by the effort to talk. “Do you know,” he said to his daughter, “I think I’m going to allow myself a drink?”

On the way home, Margaret, just because his spirits had lifted (she had begun to feel justified in not giving way to him that summer) looked youthful and gay: youthful, gay, maternal, as though she had just heard that Maurice had passed an examination.

We kept another social engagement that week, this time at one of Azik Schiff’s theatre parties. As the party joggled for position in front of the Aldwych, the lights were washing on to the streaming pavement, but an attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting with an umbrella, another attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting in the foyer to lead us to our place. Our place, to begin with, was a private room which led out of the near-stage box. Waiters were carrying trays loaded with glasses of champagne. On the table were laid out mounds of pâté de foie gras. In the middle of it all stood Schiff, looking like an enormous, good-natured and extremely clever frog. By his side stood his wife Rosalind, looking like a lady of Napoleon’s Empire. Her hair was knotted above her head, her mouth was sly, her eyes full. She was wearing an Empire dress, for which, in her fifties, she didn’t have the bosom. On each of her wrists, thin and freckled, glittered two bracelets, emerald and diamond, ruby and diamond, sapphire and diamond, and (as a modest concession) aquamarine. Jewellery apart, skin-roughening apart, she had not changed much since I first met her. For she was an old acquaintance: she had been Roy Calvert’s wife. But, although immediately after Roy’s death I had written to her for a time, it was not on her initiative that, a few years before this theatre party, we had met again. It was on her second husband’s.

No doubt Azik thought that, in some remote fashion, I might be useful. I didn’t mind that. He had the knack, or the force of nature, to think one might be useful and still have plenty of affection to spare for one on the side. I had a lot of respect for him. He had had a remarkable, and to me in some ways an inexplicable life. In the thirties, when Roy Calvert had been working in the Berlin oriental libraries, Azik also had been in Berlin, a young student, ejected from the university under the Hitler laws. He had escaped to England with a few pounds. Somehow he had completed an English degree, very well. Somehow, when the war came, he escaped internment and fought in the British army, also very well. He finished the war in possession of several decorations, a first class honours degree, and what he had saved out of his pay. He was thirty-three. He then turned his attention to trade, or what seemed to be a complex kind of international barter. Eighteen years later, by the time of this party, he had made a fortune. How large, I wasn’t sure, but certainly larger than the fortunes of Charles March’s family or the other rich Jewish families who had befriended me when I was young.

It seemed like a conjuring trick, out of the power of the rest of us, or like an adventure of Vautrin’s. I once told him that if our positions had been reversed, and I had had to become a refugee in Berlin, I should – if I had been lucky – have kept myself alive by giving English lessons, and I should have gone on giving English lessons till I died. Azik gave an avuncular smile. Obviously he thought rather the same himself.

He was not in the least like my old March friends. They had become indistinguishable, by my generation, from rich upper middle-class gentile families, rather grander Forsytes. Azik was not indistinguishable. To begin with, he went to synagogue, whether he believed or not. He was a devoted Zionist. He would not have considered anglicising his first name. Unlike the Marches, who, in common with their gentile equivalents, had taken to concealing their money, Azik enjoyed displaying his. Why not? He was an abundant man. No one could be less puritanical. So long as he could leave young David – Rosalind, late in life, had given him a son, by this time ten years old – well off, he liked splashing money about as much as making it. Anyway, he created his own rules: he wasn’t made to be genteel: sometimes I thought, when people called him vulgar, that in following his nature he showed better taste than they. As another oddity, he was politically both sophisticated and detached. He made large contributions not only to Israel but to the Labour party: and in private treated us to disquisitions as to what social democratic governments were like and exactly what, if we got one next year, we could expect from ours.

His entertainments were no more understated than the rest of him. He had a passion for the theatre, and he had a passion for trade. So he mixed the two up. Theatre boxes, plus this gigantic running supper: snacks before the play, snacks in the intervals, snacks after the play. Other people went to ambassadors’ parties: ambassadors got used to going to his. There were several present in the private room that night. It was no use being finicky. There was more Strasbourg pâté on view than I remembered seeing. One waded in, and ate and drank. It bore a family resemblance to a party at a Russian dacha, when the constraints had gone, the bear hug was embracing you, the great bass voices were getting louder and the lights appeared to be abnormally bright.

While listening with one ear to a conversation on my left (a Hungarian was asking Azik what effect on world politics Kennedy’s assassination would have – it had happened a fortnight before), I talked to Rosalind. Once she had made up to me because I was Roy Calvert’s closest friend: all that was forgotten. I was one of many guests, but she liked to please. How were my family? Like a businessman, or a businessman’s wife, she had docketed their Christian names. She always read everything about us, she said, with a dying fall. That was more like old times. At close quarters she looked her age: the skin under her eyes was delicately lined. (I heard Azik saying robustly that he didn’t believe single individuals affected world politics. Whatever had been going to occur before Kennedy’s death, would occur, for good or bad.) She was using a scent, faint but languorous, that I didn’t recognise. Even before she married her first rich man, she had always been an expert on scents.

“Unless I get another glass of champagne, I shall just collapse,” she said, with another dying fall. That was still more like old times. Soon she was talking about Azik, with adoration, but her own kind of adoration. Except that the name happened to have changed, she might have been talking about Roy Calvert thirty years before. To an outsider’s eyes, they seemed distinctly different men. A good many women had thought Roy romantic. He had been gifted, but he had had to struggle with a manic-depressive nature, often so melancholy that he detested his own life. He had been, at least potentially, a great scholar. Rosalind had adored him. She had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of a scholar should. When she spoke of him, there was no one else in this world: and there was also, in the midst of the worship, a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.

On the other hand, Azik was not a romantic figure, except in the eyes of someone like Balzac. It would be stretching a point to suggest that he had an over-delicate or tormented nature. But once again, when Rosalind spoke of him, there was no one else in this world. Once again she had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of an international entrepreneur should. And once again, in the midst of the worship, there was a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.

It was a great gift of hers, I thought, to fall in love so totally just where it was convenient to fall in love. Though she wasn’t an adventuress, she had done better for herself than any adventuress I had met. Roy had been well-off, at least by our modest academic standards of the time (I had seen his father’s name over a hosiery factory when I walked to school as a boy): Azik was perhaps ten times richer. She had loved each of them in turn. She herself said that night, in the sublime flat phrase of our native town: “No, I can’t say that I’ve got much to complain about.”

In the throng of the party Muriel joined us, Roy Calvert’s daughter, born a few months before he was killed, so that she was over twenty now. I had seen her, intermittently, in the last few years. As a child she promised to get the best out of both her parents’ looks, but by now, though she had a kind of demure attractiveness, that hadn’t happened. Her nose was too long, her eyes too heavy-lidded. Usually those eyes were averted, her whole manner was demure: but when she asked a question, one received a green-eyed sharp stare, perhaps the single physical trait that came from her father. No, there was another: her face one wouldn’t notice much, now she was grown up, but when she walked she had his light-footed upright grace.

Rosalind chatted on about Azik’s exploits. Muriel, eyes sidelong, put in a gentle comment. On the face of it, she thought Rosalind was underrating him. Whether this was Muriel’s way of amusing herself, I didn’t know.

The bells were ringing, we went into our box. Azik’s passion for the theatre was an eclectic one, and we were seeing a play of the Absurd. Within a few minutes I tried, in the darkness of the box, to make out the hands of my wristwatch: how long before the first interval? In time it came. Back into the private room. Back to more champagne, the table restocked, dishes of caviare brought in. But back also to a sight I had had no warning of. One of the diplomats had taken charge of Margaret, I was in another group with Azik – when I saw, in the corner of the room, dinner-jacketed like the rest of us, my nephew Pat. He was talking, head close to head, with Muriel. I put my hand on Azik’s massive arm, and drew him aside. I indicated the couple in the corner, and in an undertone said: “How do you know that young man?”