The Sleep of Reason (25 page)

“It was impossible to fit him into the boxes,” said Azik, misunderstanding me, as though apologising for not doing his best for Pat. “So I asked if he would not mind to join us for our little drink–”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how did you come to know him?”

“I must say,” replied Azik, “I think he presented himself to my wife. Because his father was such a great friend of Calvert.”

He moved his great moon face nearer to mine, with a glance of friendly cunning. Did he have any suspicions about that story? In fact, it was quite untrue. Martin had known Roy Calvert only slightly: they might have walked through the college together, that was about all. Of course, it was conceivable that Pat had picked up a different impression. Family legends grow, he must have heard a good deal about Roy both from me and his father. As for Rosalind, I doubted whether she had known, let alone remembered, many of Roy’s Cambridge friends.

“I did not raise objection,” Azik said. He added, putting a finger to the side of his squashed and spreading nose: “Remember, I am a Jewish papa.”

I told him, I sometimes felt I should have made a pretty good Jewish papa myself. But some of our thoughts were in parallel, and one at right angles.

“Your brother’s is a good family, I should say,” said Azik.

I would have disillusioned him, if it had been necessary. But it wasn’t. He knew as well as I did that the Eliots were not a “good family” in the old continental sense. He knew precisely where we came from. But he meant something different. Azik saw, much more clearly than most Englishmen, what the English society had become. It was tangled, it was shifting its articulations, but in it men like Martin had their place.

I asked Azik whether he had seen much of Pat.

“Ach, he is very young,” said Azik, with monumental good nature and a singular lack of interest. Our thoughts still did not meet. Azik began to speak, quietly but without reticence, about money, Muriel’s money. “I have to be careful, my friend. Mu will have something of her own when she is twenty-one.” Calvert (as Azik always called Roy) had not had much except a big allowance: but what he left had been “tied up” for Mu. “He was a very careful man,” said Azik with a kind of respect. “However, that is chicken feed.” Azik, totally unprudish about money, unlike most of my rich English acquaintances, told me the exact sums. “But Calvert’s father, no, that isn’t such chicken feed.” Rosalind had been bequeathed a life interest in half of it; the rest was in trust for Muriel, and would come to her next year. “Fortunately, she has her head screwed on.”

Before we parted, Azik could not resist explaining to me how different his own dispositions were. “I have made over a capital sum to Rosalind with no strings attached. So she can walk out on me tomorrow if she can’t stand me any longer.” He gave an uxorious chuckle. As for David, well, need anyone ask? Though I did not need to ask, Azik insisted on telling me of a magniloquent settlement.

After another instalment of the Absurd, we returned for the second interval in the private room. This time, seeing that Pat had reappeared and was once more close to Muriel, I went straight to them.

“Hello, Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, treacle-brown eyes wide open and cheeky. “Who’d ever have thought of seeing you here?”

“Daddy would have hated it if you weren’t here, you know that, Sir Lewis,” said Muriel, precisely. She was utterly composed.

I asked them how they liked the play. Muriel smiled, lashes falling close to her cheeks. Pat began: “I suppose we can’t communicate, at least that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

Yes, that was the idea.

He looked at Muriel. “But I can communicate with you sometimes, can’t I?”

“I think,” she said, “I can communicate with Daddy.”

For a moment, I had cursed myself for mentioning the play. It was true that for two acts it had been expressing non-communication: but at the end of the second, as though for once human beings could make themselves clear to one another, there had been a lucid, and in fact a lyrically eloquent description of fellatio. I had been with Pat in company where he would have found this an occasion too hilarious to resist. But no, now he was holding his tongue: was he being protective towards her, or was it too early to frighten her?

I watched her, her eyes meekly cast down. She did not appear to be in need of protection. She was so composed, more than he was. I knew that Rosalind, like other mothers whose own early lives had not been unduly pure, had taken extreme care of her. She hadn’t gone unsupervised, she had had to account for any date with a young man. And yet I should have guessed – though I wouldn’t have trusted any of my guesses about her very far – that she was one of those girls who somehow understand all about the sexual life before they have a chance to live it.

“Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, “are you open on New Year’s Eve this year?”

This time he was really being brash. I had to answer that I had been pretty much occupied that autumn, we hadn’t made up our minds. That was, in literal terms, true. But Margaret and I had got into the habit of asking our families and close friends for New Year’s Eve: neither of us had suggested breaking it. The point was, he was begging for the two of them – as though Vicky, who had been invited the year before, could be dropped, or as though they might all have an amicable time together.

“I think,” put in Muriel, quick, sure-footed, “Daddy said that we’re having dinner with you soon, aren’t we?” (She meant Azik, Rosalind and herself.)

Yes, I said.

“That will be nice.”

Pat looked at me, as though he would have liked to wink. He wasn’t used to anyone as cool as this – who could, so equably, declare his proposition closed.

As Margaret and I were given a lift home in one of the diplomatic cars, acquaintances beside us, we couldn’t have our after-the-play talk. In the lift, going up to our flat, she was silent, and stayed so until she had switched on the drawing-room lights and poured herself a drink. She asked if I wanted one, but her tone was hard. Sitting in the chair the other side of the fireplace, she said: “So that’s the way it is!”

Her face was flushed: the adrenalin was pouring through her: she was in a flaming temper.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“You have,” she said. “Your nephew. What does he think he’s up to?”

“How should I know?”

“It’s intolerable,” she cried. I was thinking, yes, she was kind, she took to heart what Vicky might go through: but also Margaret was no saint, she was angry because she herself had, at intervals, been taken in by Pat. I was getting provoked, because of the disparity we both knew between Margaret’s kind of temper and my own. I had to make an effort to sound peaceful.

“Look here, I don’t know much about this girl (Muriel), but if it’s any consolation to you, I fancy that she can look after herself–”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said. But she said it with edge and meaning.

We were on the verge of a quarrel. I said: “I don’t understand.”

“I was thinking of her father.” She went on, with exaggerated reasonableness: “Of course he was in a higher class than your nephew Pat. But shouldn’t you have said that there might be some sort of resemblance–?”

“Nonsense.” This was an old argument. With the gap in age between us, she had felt shut out from parts of my youth. At times she was jealous of the friends who had known me when I was a young man. Francis Getliffe and Charles March – with those she was on close terms. George Passant, she had worked to understand. But Roy Calvert, who was dead, whom she could never know, she could not help believe that I had inflated, had given a significance or an aura that he could not conceivably, in her eyes, have possessed.

“Well, Pat does set out to be a miniature Byronic hero, doesn’t he?”

“Roy Calvert,” I said, “had about as much use for Byronic heroes as I have.”

“But still,” she said, “you do admit that he succeeded in bringing misery to everyone, literally everyone, so far as I’ve ever heard, who had any relations with him?”

I sat without speaking.

“I know you claim that he had a sort of insight. But I can’t convince myself that the spiritual life, or the tragic sense, or whatever they like to call it, is a bit like that.”

Like her, I spoke with deliberate carefulness, as though determined either to take the bite out of my voice or not to overstate my case.

“I’m not sure that nowadays I should see him quite in the same way. But of one thing I am perfectly certain. Of all the men and women I’ve ever known, he was the most selfless. He’s the only one, and he suffered for it, who could really throw his own self away.”

Now we were quarrelling. We had learned, early in our marriage, that it was dangerous to quarrel. If I had been like her, there would have been no danger in it. Her temper was hot: the blood rushed: it was soon over. But with me, usually more controlled, temper, once I had lost it, smouldered on.

Margaret, watching me, knew this bitter streak in me and knew it more acceptantly than I did myself.

“If you say that,” she said, “then I’ve got to take it.”

I accused her of making a concession. I said that neither of us wanted the other to make concessions which were not genuine. Between us there couldn’t be that kind of compromise–

“Perhaps it was not quite genuine,” she said with a difficult smile. “But – what am I to do?”

Somewhere, filtering towards my tongue, were words that would make us both angrier. Suddenly, as though by some inexplicable feedback, I said in a mechanical tone: “Pat was sucking up for an invitation to our party. For both of them.”

Margaret gave a shout of laughter, full-throated, happy laughter.

“Oh God,” she cried. “What on earth did you say?”

“Oh, just that we hadn’t decided whether we were going to give one.”

“It must be wonderful to be tactful, mustn’t it?”

Margaret went on laughing. We were certainly going to give a party, she said. After all (her mood had changed, she was still flushed, but now with gaiety), we had a lot to be thankful for, this past year. My eye. Young Charles’ successes. Maurice’s survival. Her father better. Various storms come through. It would be faint-hearted not to give a party. But one thing was sure, she said. He was not going to bring that girl. Was that all right? Yes, I said, caught up by her spirits, that was completely all right. Without a pause between thought and action, she went to the study, brought back a sheet of paper, and, although it was late, began writing down a list, a long list, of names.

FOR the next four days, Margaret enjoyed planning the party. It had become a token of thanksgiving. Every evening we sat in the drawing-room and added some more names. The list grew longer; we knew a good many people, most of them in professional London, but widerspread than that. We had changed the date to Christmas Eve. This was partly because there was another New Year’s party, to which we felt inclined to go: but also because we calculated that Pat would be back with his family in Cambridge, and so we could invite the Schiffs. That calculation, however, went wrong. Martin and Irene decided to come for the night, and, together with their children, to have Christmas dinner with us next day. Margaret swore: would anything get rid of that young man? But she was in high spirits, the party occupying her just as it might have done when she was a girl. There weren’t enough refusals, I complained. The senior Getliffes couldn’t come, but Leonard could. Others accepted from out of London. There’s nothing like an operation to make people anxious to see one, I said.

Still, it was agreeable, when Maurice had come down from Cambridge and Charles had returned from school, to have the four of us sitting before dinner, talking about this domestic ritual. Maurice had young men and girls he wanted to invite, some of them lame ducks. Charles had school friends who lived in the London area. Throw them all in, we agreed. The age range of the party would be about sixty years. As we sat there in the evening, the week before Christmas, I thought that in contrast to Maurice’s untouched good looks, Charles already appeared the older. He had just won a scholarship, very young: but sometimes, as on the morning he visited me in hospital, he seemed preoccupied. I noticed that, instead of staying in bed late, as he used to do in the holidays, he got up as early as I did, riffling through the letters. I had been older than that, I thought, when I was first menaced by the post. But he was controlled enough to live a kind of triple life: his emotions were his own, but, as the Christmas nights came nearer, curtains not yet drawn at tea-time, black sky over the park, he sat with us teasing Margaret, dark-eyed, ironic, enjoying the preparations as much as she did.

It was the afternoon of 23rd December, about five o’clock. Margaret had not got back from visiting her father, the boys were out. I was, except for our housekeeper, alone in the flat. I had been reading in the study, the light from the angle-lamp bright across my book. There were piles of papers by the chair, a tray of letters on the room-wide desk, all untidy but findable, at least by the eye of memory; all the grooves of habit there. The telephone rang. I crossed over to the far side of the desk. “This is George.” The strong voice, which had never lost its Suffolk undertone, came out at me. I exclaimed with pleasure: I had not seen him for months. “I’d rather like to have a word,” the voice went on robustly. “I suppose you’re not free, are you?”

I replied that I was quite free: when would he like–? “I can come straight round. I shan’t be many minutes.”

Waiting for him, I fetched the ice and brought in a tray of drinks. I was feeling comfortably pleased. This was a surprise, a good end to the year. I hadn’t seen him for months, I thought again, no, not since the April Court. That hadn’t been my fault, but it was good that he should invite himself. He might come to the party the following night, that would be better still; there was something, not precisely nostalgic but reassuring, in going back right through the years. My brother hadn’t really known me when I was in my teens: but George had, and he was the only one, when I was in the state young Charles was approaching now.