The Sleep of Reason (8 page)

Could I have a word with her? George was a lifelong friend; by a coincidence, I should be meeting him in half-an-hour. It was not such a coincidence, though I didn’t tell her so.

Kitty did some more shuffling, then said: “I’ll see if she can come.”

In the time Kitty was out of the room, Mr Pateman had returned to the “diabolical” results of administrative decisions. Then the two young women returned, Cora first. She was tallish, with blunt heavy features, short straight hair; under a plain straight-hanging dress, she was strong-shouldered and stoutly built. I couldn’t see much look of the Passant family, except perhaps a general thick-boned Nordic air. I said that I knew her uncle. She gave an abrupt yes. I said I owed him a lot. She said: “I like George.”

There were a few more words spoken, not many. She volunteered that she didn’t see George much, nowadays. She said to Kitty: “We ought to go and clear things up. The room’s in a mess.”

As they went out, I did not anticipate seeing them again. More people evanescing: it had been the condition of that day. By the side of the two Pateman males, those self-bound men, the girls didn’t make demands on one, not even on one’s attention. True, I felt cold and shut in: but then, the little room was cold and shut in. It was a relief that it was not now so full of people. This “simple home”, as Mr Pateman called it, in one of his protests about Dick’s contribution, pressed upon me. I was growing to dislike the sharp and inescapable smell, strong in the little room, strongest near to Mr Pateman himself. I had now isolated it in my nostrils, though I did not know the explanation, as a brand of disinfectant.

Mrs Pateman was clearing away the tea, Dick – whose manners could not have been regarded as over-elaborate – had gone out, shortly after the girls, and without a word. It was still early, but I could decently leave; I was anticipating the free air outside, when Mr Pateman confronted me with a satisfied smile and said: “Now, we can talk a little business, can’t we?”

Immediately I took it for granted that he was, at last, going to speak seriously about his son. That made me more friendly: I settled in my chair, ready to respond.

“I’m not very happy about things,” he said.

I began to reply, the best practical step was to find Dick a place elsewhere–

He stopped me. “Oh no. I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’ll be all right,” said Mr Pateman. “I’ve done my best for my family and I don’t mind saying, no one could have done more.”

He looked at me, as usual so straight in the eye that I wanted to duck. He wasn’t challenging me, he was too confident for that.

“No,” he went on, “I’m not very happy about
my
position.”

So that was it. That was why I had been invited, or enticed, to the house that evening.

“Do you realise,” he asked, “that those two young people in the next room are both bringing in more than I am?”

I asked what he was doing. Cashier, he said, in one of the hosiery firms, a small one. Curiously enough, that was a similar job to my father’s, years before. The young women? Secretaries. Fifteen or sixteen pounds a week each, I guessed?

“You’re not far off. It’s a lot of money at twenty-two or three.”

Mr Pateman did not appear to have the same appreciation of the falling value of money as my father, that unexpected financial adviser. But I happened to know the economics of this kind of household, through a wartime personal assistant of mine and her young man. Though Mr Pateman could not realise it, that acquaintanceship, in which I hadn’t behaved with much loyalty, made me more long-suffering towards him and his family now.

“How much are they paying you for their room?” I said.

“If you don’t mind,” Mr Pateman answered, throwing his head back, “we’ll keep our purses to ourselves.”

Anyway, I was thinking, he couldn’t extract a big amount from them – even though, as I now suspected, he was something of a miser, a miser in the old-fashioned technical sense. I had been watching his negotiations with the tea table food. Between them, the two young women must have money to spend: they could run a car: it was strangely different from my own youth in this town, or the youth of my friends.

“My position isn’t right,” said Mr Pateman. “I tell you, it isn’t right.” It was true to this extent, that a middle-aged man in a clerical job might be earning less than a trained girl.

“All I need,” he went on, “is an opportunity.”

I had to hear him out.

“What have you got to offer?”

“If I get an opportunity,” he said, with supreme satisfaction, “I’ll show them what I’ve got to offer.”

I said, he had better tell me about his career. How old was he? Fifty last birthday.

“I must say,” I told him, “I should have thought you were younger.”

“Some people,” said Mr Pateman, “know how to look after themselves.”

Born in Walsall. His parents hadn’t been “too well endowed with this world’s goods” (they had kept a small shop). They had managed to send him to a grammar school. He had stayed on after sixteen: the intention was that he should one day go to a teachers’ training college.

“But you didn’t?”

“Why not?”

A very slight pause. Then Mr Pateman said defiantly: “Ah, thereby hangs a tale.”

For the first time that evening, he was dissatisfied with his account of himself. I wondered how often I had heard a voice change in the middle of a life story. A platitude or a piece of jargon suddenly rang out. It meant that something had gone wrong. His “tale” seemed to be that he wanted to make money quick. He had had what he called a “brainwave”. At twenty he had become attached to a second-hand-car firm, which promptly failed.

“Why did it fail?”

“It isn’t everyone who is fortunate enough to have capital, you know.”

Then he had become a clerk in an insurance office in Preston.

“You may be thinking I’ve had too many posts. I was always looking for the right one.”

He had got married (“I’m a great believer in taking on one’s responsibilities early”). Unfit for military service. Both children born during the war.

Another brainwave, making radio sets.

“My ship didn’t come home that time either,” said Mr Pateman.

“What happened?”

“Differences of opinion.” He swept his arm. “You know what it is, when the people in command don’t give a man his head.”

“What would you have done if they had given you your head?”

“They never intended to. They asked me there on false pretences. My schemes never got beyond the blueprint stage.”

A new venture – this time in patent medicines. It looked as though all was well.

“Then we met a very cold wind. And I don’t want to accuse anyone, but my partner came better than I did out of the financial settlement.”

By that time, in his early forties, he had lived in a dozen towns and never made more, I guessed, than a few hundred a year. He descended further, and for eighteen months was trying to sell vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He brought it out quite honestly, but as though with stupefaction that this should have happened to him. Then – what he admitted, with a superior smile, had seemed like a piece of luck. An acquaintance from his radio days had introduced him to his present firm. He had moved to the town, and this house, five years before. It was his longest continuous job since his young manhood.

“And I’m still getting less than my own daughter. It isn’t right. It can’t be right.”

I should have liked to avoid what was coming. Playing out time, I asked if his firm knew that he was considering another move. He gave a lofty nod.

“Are they prepared to recommend you?”

“They certainly are. I have a letter over there. Would you like to read it?”

It did not matter, I said. Mr Pateman gave me a knowing smile.

“Yes, I should expect you to read between the lines.”

I was saying something distracting, meaningless, but he was fixing me with his stare: “I want an opportunity. That’s all I’m asking for.”

I said, slowly: “I don’t know what advice I can possibly give you–”

“I wasn’t asking for advice, sir. I was asking for an opportunity.”

Even after that higgledy-piggledy life, he was undefeated. It was easy to imagine him at the doors of big houses, talking of his vacuum cleaners, impassively, imperviously, not down and out because he was certain the future must come right.

Nevertheless, I was thinking of old colleagues of mine considering him for jobs. Considering people for jobs had to be a heartless business. No man in his senses could think Mr Pateman a good risk. They mightn’t mind, or even be interested in, his odder aspects. But he carried so many signs that the least suspicious would notice – he had been restless, he had quarrelled with every boss, he had been unrealistically on the make.

Still, nowadays there was a job for anyone who could read and write. Mr Pateman was, in the mechanical sense, far from stupid. He had a good deal of energy. At his age, he would not get a better job, certainly not one much better. He might get a different one.

He was sitting with his hands on his knees, his head back, a smile as it were of approbation on his lips. He did not appear in the least uneasy that I should not find an answer. The slack fire smoked: the draught blew across the room: among the fumes I picked out the antiseptic smell which hung about him as though he had just come from hospital.

“Well, Mr Pateman,” I said. “I mustn’t raise false hopes.” I went on to say that I was out of the official life for good and all. He gazed at me with confident disbelief: to him, that was simply part of my make-believe. There were two places he might try. He could possibly get fitted up in another radio firm: I could give him the name of a personnel officer.

“Once bitten, twice shy, thank you, sir,” said Mr Pateman.

Alternatively, he might contemplate working in a government office as a temporary clerk. The pay would be a little better: the work, I warned him, would be extremely monotonous: I could tell him how to apply at the local employment exchange.

“I don’t believe in employment exchanges. I believe in going somewhere where one has contacts at the top.”

He seemed – had it been true before he met me? – to have dreamed up his own fantasy. He seemed to think that I should say one simple word to my old colleagues. I tried to explain to him that the machine did not work that way. If the Ministry of Labour took him on, they would send him wherever clerks were needed. He could tell them that he had a preference, but there was no guarantee that he would get what he wanted.

Anyone who had been asked for such a favour had to get used to the sight of disappointment – and to the different ways men took it. There were a few who, like Mr Pateman now, began to threaten.

“I must say, I was hoping for something more constructive from you,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

“I don’t like being led up the garden path.” His eyes were fixed on mine. “I was given to understand that you weren’t as hidebound as some of them.”

I said nothing.

“I shall have to consider my course of action.” He was speaking with dignity. Then he said: “I expect that you’re doing your best. You must be a busy man.”

I got up, went into the back kitchen, and shook hands with his wife. She could have overheard us throughout: she looked up at me with something like understanding.

Mr Pateman took me down to the passage (the record player was still sounding from the front room), and, at the door, threw out his hand in a stately goodbye.

OWING to the single-mindedness of Mr Pateman, I was a few minutes late for my appointment with George Passant. I arrived in the lounge of the public house where we had first drunk together when I was eighteen, nearly forty years before: the room was almost empty, for the pub was no longer fashionable at night and George himself no longer used it, except for these ritual meetings with me.

There, by the side of what used to be a coal fire and was now blocked up, he sat. He gave me a burst of greeting, a monosyllabic shout.

As I grew older, and met friends whom I had known for most of my lifetime, I often thought that I didn’t see them clearly – or rather, that I saw them with a kind of double vision, as though there were two photographs not accurately superposed. Underneath, there was not only a memory of themselves when young, but the physical presence: that lingered in one’s sight, it was never quite ripped away, one still saw them – through the intermittence of time passing – with one’s own youthful eyes. And also one saw them as they were now, in the present moment, as one was oneself.

Nowadays I met George three or four times a year, and this double vision was still working. I could still – not often, but in sharp moments – see the young man who had befriended me, set me going: whose face had been full of anger and hope, and who had walked with me through the streets outside on nights of triumph, his voice rebounding from the darkened houses.

But, more than in any other friend, the present was here too. There he sat in the pub. His face was in front of me, greeting me with formal welcome. It was the face of an old, sick man.

Not that he was unhappy. On the contrary, he had been happier than most men all his life, and had stayed so. Not that he behaved as though he were ill. On the contrary, he behaved as though he were immortal. If I had been studying him for the first time, I should have been doubtful about guessing his age. His fair hair was still thick, and had whitened only over his ears, though it was wild and disarranged, for his whole appearance was dilapidated. His face was lined, but almost at random, so that he had no look of mature age. His mouth often fell open, and his eyes became unfocused.

He was actually sixty-three. I had tried to get him to discuss his health, but he turned vague, sometimes, it seemed to me, with a deliberate cunning. He spoke casually about his blood pressure and some pills he had to take. He admitted that his doctor, whose name he wouldn’t tell me, had put him on a diet. From what I noticed, he didn’t even pretend to keep to it. He still ate gargantuan meals, somehow proud of his self-indulgence, topping off – in a fashion which once had been comic but was now frightening – a meal larger than most of us ate in two days with four or five cream cakes. He drank as much, or more, than ever. He had always been heavy, but now was fat from his upper chest down to his groin. He must have weighed fifteen stone.