A Coat of Varnish (7 page)

‘When people are afraid, they cease to feel, don’t they? Isn’t that true in war?’

Luria, in spite of his venerable appearance, was too young to have been a soldier in the Hitler war. He thought that that was a grave deficiency for a psychologist; but, then, he tended to think the same of any human activity he hadn’t performed. Humphrey was accustomed to tell him that almost any human activity when you were actually at work inside it inspired less emotion than an outsider could imagine.

‘It wasn’t elegant tonight.’ Luria was in earnest. At times, he could sound pontifical, but now he didn’t. ‘You must have thought about it often – to be sure you have – I have – there isn’t much between us and this sort of mess.’ He was gazing round, as though the mob were still there. ‘We go on fooling ourselves, that’s what I meant a few minutes ago. Especially if we live in a nice pretty cushioned world. Civilisation is hideously fragile, you know that. There’s not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn’t you say?’

Humphrey merely nodded.

‘And the same applies to you and me. And the rest of us. There’s not much between us and our beastly selves. Human beings aren’t nice, are they?’

Humphrey nodded again. It had been, by the standards of the time, just a trivial incident they had been caught in, but Luria’s phrase somehow passed round among their circle and became part catch-phrase, part a kind of jargon joke, the kind of joke they used when they wanted to deny that they were being serious.

They had now stayed in the pub long enough for the sake of normality. They walked along to Eaton Square, on the way to Luria’s apartment. Also for the sake of normality, Luria gave Humphrey more instructions about the financial structure of Tom Thirkill’s operations.

Loseby had amiable intentions and social skill, but it had been a mistake to provide company for his grandmother on that Sunday afternoon. They were meeting in the garden down below her house. A table was prepared for bridge, and round it sat Paul Mason, Humphrey, Loseby and Lady Ashbrook herself. Bottles of champagne stood on another table close by. Humphrey heard Paul call Loseby Lancelot, which seemed another piece of incongruous nomenclature – though they had been at school together, and this actually was one of Loseby’s Christian names.

The men were doing their best to talk as though this were an agreeable summer occasion no different from others, but Lady Ashbrook, despite her self-discipline, was on the edge of losing even her formal manners. As for any attempt at displaying pleasure, she did not seem to have the desire or even the energy to try. She had attended church that morning, just as she had all her life. Humphrey had often wondered, and in her garden was doing so again, whether she really had religious faith. It might have been convenient in a life as talked about as hers to show herself punctilious in at least one kind of piety. He had never heard her make a speculative remark. He would have liked to know whether she had prayed that morning, praying for good news in the coming week, for release from danger, as children pray when they are waiting for examination results. But unbelievers sometimes prayed like that. Humphrey recalled, with a blink of shame, that he had done so himself.

There were intermittences of anxiety as there were of hope. Perhaps that afternoon she had no relief from the thought of the coming week. Or perhaps she had some easement from letting herself get out of temper about the bridge. Herself, she was a very good player. She was partnered by her grandson, who was a very bad one. Paul was passable, but not what she would have expected from anyone of his talents. Humphrey was bad. Not so long before, when she wasn’t under strain, she had been heard to remark – the difference between Loseby and Humphrey was that Loseby thought for hours before playing the wrong card, while Humphrey did so quickly.

Loseby was playing the wrong card often that long, hot afternoon.

‘Really, my dear boy,’ she began to utter, more than once. She was losing money. Not much, for the stakes were low, but she was losing money. After the end of the second rubber she said again: ‘Really, my dear boy.’ That was all she said. It was the signal for the guests to leave.

Loseby was the best of social lubricants, but he couldn’t reduce the level of
Angst
in that garden. He tried producing a mildly scabrous discovery which he had just made. As Paul was saying goodbye, Loseby was reminding them what they all knew, that in this garden and the one next door there was a small back door which led into the adjacent mews. From there it was only a few yards to Eccleston Street.

‘Convenient for sinful purposes. For which there were rather good examples round here.’

Face shining with shameless delight in others’ frailties, and his own, he asked whether any of them had heard of 55 Eaton Terrace, less than half a mile away. That had a garden and a private door into a mews, precisely like this. One could get out through the mews into Chester Row and so unobtrusively home. In the eighteen nineties and later, number fifty-five had been the most elevated brothel in London, organised by the Prince of Wales’ confidants and financed from the royal purse. Presumably eminent gentlemen walked home, or had their carriages waiting at a discreet distance.

‘Had you heard about that, Grandmama?’

For a moment, Lady Ashbrook melted into an astringent smile.

‘Rather before my time, you know. Do you really think I’m a hundred?’

After the bridge party, Humphrey had nothing to fill the day until eight o’clock. He had arranged, as part of Kate’s secret services to her protégée Susan, to take Tom Thirkill out to dinner. Though the two of them had met several times, with Thirkill making demonstrations of cordiality, it had been the professional cordiality of a politician. When Humphrey had sent a note round to Eaton Square he hadn’t received an acceptance for three days. Humphrey understood well enough. Persons living in the public scene might be cordial to anonymous neighbours, but didn’t encourage them. For a man like Thirkill, engagements were for a purpose. Humphrey had no doubt that Thirkill had been making enquiries about him, easy if one had access to Ministers, and was deciding whether the man was any use to him, or alternatively might be a nuisance if he were turned down.

It had been something of an effort to find a place in London to have dinner on a Sunday night. By himself Humphrey lived simply, apart from a taste in wine. His old housekeeper gave him the meals he had been content with as a young bachelor, and alone that night it would have been a cutlet and cheese. If he were going to get anything like confidence from Tom Thirkill, that didn’t seem adequate, and Humphrey booked a table at the Berkeley. The random thought occurred to him, entertaining rich men was always expensive, the more so the richer they became: one somehow performed as though they were entertaining you.

Prompt on the stroke of eight, Thirkill’s car drew up outside the house. Thirkill stepped out, limber and vigorous, giving an impression that he could dismiss trouble because he was happy in his own health. He was personable in an actor’s fashion, not uncommon in politicians, strong facial lines, jaw a shade underhanging. ‘Good evening to you.’ His voice resounded. ‘Where are we going?’

Humphrey told him, was instructed not to trouble about his own car, Thirkill would do the transport.

‘This is very civil of you, I must say,’ Thirkill remarked, as he drove through the quiet and empty streets.

‘I’ve always wanted to have the chance to talk with you,’ Humphrey replied.

‘So have I, so have I.’ It wasn’t the first time that either of them had had that particular exchange, though with different partners.

The Berkeley dining-room was cool after the air outside, not crowded, conversation subdued. As they sat at their table, Thirkill having refused any drink but tomato juice, Humphrey said: ‘Rather different from last night.’

‘What are you getting at?’

‘I was in the pub. Didn’t you see in the papers?’

There had been headlines,
Vandals in Belgravia
. Unfair to Vandals, Humphrey commented, but Thirkill wasn’t interested in reference to fifth-century history.

‘Oh, that,’ he said.

‘It wasn’t pretty.’

‘I think you must accept’ – Thirkill could, without effort, suddenly speak with force, and did so now – ‘that when people get better off they are going to behave worse. That is, by our standards.’

‘By any standards, I would have thought.’

‘Could be. Respect has gone out of the window. But you must accept, the respect isn’t going to come back when people are better off. We may not like it, but there you are. And I’m sure you wouldn’t think so, but that is no reason under heaven for not making people better off.’

It didn’t take him long to order his meal. Humphrey had made a misjudgment. Thirkill was less self-indulgent than he was himself. Soup and a cutlet would have been more than enough for him. Further, he drank very little. One glass of wine, perhaps. Humphrey would have to sink the bottle without further help.

At the same time that he was abstemious about food he wasn’t so about giving disquisitions. He had the gift of making commonplace statements about himself as though he were baring his soul. He had been born just fifty years before, he said. In Birmingham. That didn’t get the worst of the Depression. But it was bad enough. You wouldn’t see what you saw last night. There was more respect. Better behaviour, if people our age have any right to judge. ‘But I tell you, Humphrey (he was already using Christian names), I wouldn’t have that world back in place of what we have now.’ He had been a young accountant in Birmingham, without a penny – that was at the end of the forties. Then there was the first sign of a breakthrough. That was when he had begun to make his money, and had realised that it was his duty, in the long run, to go into politics.
Duty
, said Thirkill, so that his listener couldn’t miss the word.

The thick eyebrows, mobile mouth confronted Humphrey across the table. From most politicians, this would have been a conventional apologia. He wasn’t showing any originality of view; but Humphrey, more than he had bargained for, was being bombarded by an originality of temperament. One mightn’t like Thirkill, or want to do business with him, but it was hard to think that he was negligible. He began a similar bombardment about the future.

‘What is going to happen to us?’ He challenged Humphrey.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean this country, this year.’

‘I can’t pretend to be bubbling with optimism.’

That year, and for years past, none of Humphrey’s friends in private had been bubbling with optimism about the state of the nation, or its economy or, deeper down, of the state of the Western world.

‘There I must take issue with you. We (he meant the Government, and his own Labour Party) can get the finances into shape. We had. We shall. With a bit of luck and good management and the right men in the right places, we ought to get things straight.’

Once again, those remarks could have come from any conventional politician, especially one with ambitions, seeing clearly the necessity for getting one right man into one right place. Politicians had to be optimistic; otherwise they wouldn’t be politicians. In parliamentary societies like this one, the future was as close as their own hopes, and world concern was a very long way distant. They had to live in the present. Thinking ten years ahead, even five, was for spectators, not for them.

Here in the restaurant Thirkill was uplifted by the prospect before him, speaking like any other professional politician but with a temperament that Humphrey hadn’t often met before. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘we shall manage it. The finances will look brighter next year. Our lot can do it. The others can’t. It’ll come out all right in the wash. No one really wants the other lot. Not the fellows who understand finance. Not industry. Not the City. I give you my solemn word.’

Soon Thirkill had other reflections. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Humphrey, I happen to have about the tenth safest seat in the country. My father was a parliamentary agent, he never earned more than £300 in his life, but he taught me most of what I know about politics. Politics is about bread and butter, he used to tell me when I was a boy. So I waited until I could get a seat like mine. Some of the lefty boys in the party don’t like me having it, at all, at all. They’d like to get me. Let them try.’

Suddenly, as between one moment and another, in the midst of the confident, confidential, authoritative voice, had come a tone quite different, so different that for a moment Humphrey might have been listening to another man.

‘I suppose you’ve heard all about these libels that are going round? You know they keep on printing libels about me?’

‘Yes, I did know something.’

‘They come,’ said Thirkill, ‘from some of those boys in the party. I can’t prove it, but I know it. They get a little cash selling gossip round Fleet Street. Some of them don’t even get cash, they just think it’s useful to be in with the journalists. I dare say that you’re not entirely surprised.’

‘It’s fairly common knowledge.’

‘I dare say you wouldn’t be entirely surprised about who these lefty boys are.’

Humphrey was accustomed to persons trying to make him indiscreet about his old profession. He just said: ‘Of course, you must know them personally yourself.’

Thirkill didn’t press further, too full of his complaints and intentions.

‘I can’t get my hands on them,’ he said, in the curious grinding tone which had, minutes before, taken Humphrey by surprise. ‘By God, I should like to. They’re doing their worst for all of us. By God, they’re doing their worst for me. But I can get my hands on these journalists they’ve fed. And their wretched rags and everyone connected with them. I’ve been waiting. It was good to wait until they had overplayed their hands. I don’t mind telling you, it took some patience to wait when you saw what people were thinking. And what your family was going through. But it was worth it. No one had the score right except my lawyers and me. A handful of writs went out on Friday night. They’re going to pay. I’m not a vindictive man, Humphrey, and I wouldn’t say it in any vindictive spirit. But when these fellows have been trying to ruin me I don’t care if I see them starving in the streets.’