A Man Over Forty (3 page)

Guy Palladis was a lapsed scholar who for nearly four years had been Balintore's secretary: his secretary, his business manager, the manager in some degree of his private life, and his faithful friend. He was a young man with enviable connections: his father, a gallant and distinguished soldier – but passed over for promotion because of wilful independence – had been for some years before his death a member of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen-at-Arms; while his mother, the grand-daughter of an Irish peer, was the younger daughter of an eccentric but rich and learned Egyptologist.

Palladis had gone to Eton as an Oppidan Scholar, and left it without further distinction of any academic sort. He went up to Magdalen College, Oxford, with pleasant memories of a hard-won victory over Winchester in the rackets finals, with the coloured waistcoat he had worn as a member of the Eton Society, and with his tutor's outspoken regret for his failure to make use of an exceptionally gifted mind. He excused himself by saying that he had inherited from his father a useful indifference to success; that he remembered his maternal grand-father as a very tiresome example of what uninhibited scholarship can do to a man; and that several generations of absentee Irish landlords had bequeathed to him – in lieu of lost acres –
a habit of indolence and irresponsibility. But as if to assure his disappointed tutors that their assessment of his ability had been sound and judicious, he wrote, while still an undergraduate, an essay on the Merovingian kings Chlotar II and Dagobert I which was published in the
Historical Review
, and excited some very learned controversy.

He read History, but, as he insisted, only for amusement; and was humiliated when he took Second Class Honours. He had tried for a minimal Fourth, to show disapproval of his teachers, but like a natural swimmer had failed to drown.

An uncle who was an amateur physicist tried to interest him in science, but Palladis said, ‘It's too late for that! Even in my lifetime you've changed your ground so often – you're always shifting your postulates and upsetting poor Lavoisier's table of elements – that science seems to me an ephemeral thing; and scientists are so portentous about it that they alienate all sympathy. Philosophy, of course, is in much the same state.'

His mother thought he should go in for politics, but Palladis told her, ‘That's out of the question. I read
Coriolanus
when I was very young – perhaps children shouldn't be allowed to read Shakespeare? – and it shocked me profoundly. And politics haven't changed much, have they? They're far more stable than science.

‘I want to involve myself in contemporary life,' he said, ‘but science and politics are barred: they're too exacting, and to someone of my temperament without reward. I'm still interested in the Merovingians, but they're not contemporary, and while I'm very good at shooting snipe, I recognize that snipe aren't really significant in a social context. So what shall I do? I wish you would give me good advice.'

Though reluctant and manifestly suspicious, he was persuaded to take a job in the City – another uncle was a merchant banker – and to the surprise of everyone who knew him, held it for rather more than two years. His mother was delighted. He had never, in any ordinary way, been a difficult child, for his temper was easy and his mind equable. But his brilliance – in which she believed even more firmly than his tutors at Eton – had teased her with thoughts, some of them extravagant, about what he might do if he applied himself;
and his refusal to do anything at all had naturally worried her. There was, moreover, the physical disability he had incurred in infancy. He seemed unaffected by it, but it was a grave and incurable injury, and without the fortitude to endure it – or ignore it – it could have warped and distained his whole life. But the interests of a merchant banker – or so she imagined – were numerous and compulsive, and a career of ever-growing power and prosperity in the City might do much to reconcile him, or even reconcile him wholly, to the loss of a vital function.

When, after two years, he seemed to have become a happy and diligent young banker, his mother almost forgot her need to worry, and she felt no premonition when, early one afternoon in the third month of his third year in the City, he arrived at her house in Mount Street. She was inexpressibly dismayed when he told her that he had just written to his uncle a letter of resignation, and she could see no sense in the reason he gave her.

‘Within ten years,' he said, ‘I feel sure I could make a lot of money: there's little doubt of that. It's not too difficult if you have some capital to start with, and reliable information to help you. But suppose I made £100,000, or £200,000 – what could I do with it? If I bought an estate my tenants would take the profit and I would pay the taxes. If I bought a yacht, the skipper would make a pass at one of my guests and have to be locked in his cabin, the engineer would get drunk, and I should be left tied up in that boring harbour at Cannes. If I bought a football team the players would all go to Italy, and if I bought a symphony orchestra the Musicians' Union would drive me into a lunatic asylum. No, my dear mother, the only thing you can do with money is to acquire property of some sort, and nowadays property of all sorts is a burden and a nuisance. I want none of it.'

‘Then what are you going to do?'

‘I should like to govern a colony, but now, of course, we have no colonies to speak of, so I shall have to think of something else. And there's no hurry, is there? I'm still quite young.'

A few weeks later he met Balintore at a party in Chelsea
and, as he himself was soon to proclaim, found his
métier
. It was a party that began very respectably, but those whose presence made it respectable left early, and gradually it became rather noisy. Balintore arrived late, and not quite sober. He had been lecturing in Hove for a fee of forty guineas and expenses, paid in cash, of £100; and he was in a mood, to begin with, of expansive geniality. Before long, however, his temper was darkened by too much attention. A group of young people, loudly welcoming his appearance, made it evident that they expected him to entertain them. They penned him in a corner where for a little while a very pretty girl and a large whisky and soda kept him quiet; but then some remark upset him – a remark, perhaps, of no more than ordinary stupidity, but whose stupidity seemed to him offensive – and his voice grew louder.

‘Any fool can make money!' he declared. ‘All he needs is something he can sell to bigger fools than himself, and there's no scarcity of them. Look what I've made today!'

From an inner pocket he pulled an untidy sheaf of £5 notes, and held them up. This evoked more noise, more attention, and Balintore said angrily, ‘There's no lack of money in the country, but there's a lack of poverty, and we need poverty – poverty in the proper places – as well as riches. Poverty makes petty thieves, I know that, but money makes major crooks. It's money, too much money, that turns schoolboys into young thugs. Poverty could make them honest apprentices, and let them learn a useful trade; but give them £10 a week, and at best they grow up into white coolies. White coolies to be duped by some rascally Simon Legree who calls himself a shop-steward!'

The argument became confused, but Balintore stubbornly maintained that youth should exercise its muscles in poverty, and honest youth was too often corrupted by high wages. Trade Unions, he said, had become as mischievous as bygone rotten boroughs, and to emphasize all he said he continued to flourish a fistful of £5 notes.

Then, in a momentary lull, a young man said, ‘You're suffering from a guilty conscience, that's what's wrong with you!'

‘Aren't we all?' said Balintore, and was answered by a chorused ‘No!'

‘Do you know what conscience is?' he asked the very pretty girl who was still beside him.

‘It's what used to handicap the middle classes.'

‘God help you,' he said, and pushed his way rudely to the other side of the room, where there was a bar. There, drinking another whisky and soda, he fell into conversation with Guy Palladis who said, ‘That girl you were talking to is a distant cousin of mine. I once told her it would be a waste of time for her to see an analyst, she ought to consult an anthropologist.'

They remained in conversation for half an hour or more, and a week later Palladis walked from his mother's house in Mount Street to Balintore's chambers in Albany, and began his new life as secretary to a person of contemporary significance.

In several ways he was admirably adapted to such a life. Though Balintore was no longer living with his wife – his second wife, at that time – and Palladis often occupied his spare room in Albany, there was never any hint or suspicion that their relations were improper. Palladis in his childhood, at the age of six or seven, had fallen seriously ill with mumps, and in consequence had never developed a masculine ability. Nothing in his nature, however, had inclined him to a feminine attitude: the strength of his intelligence was such that he had felt no need for the possible compensations of a submissive emotion, and he had grown up, very happily, in a state of untroubled and benign neutrality. His voice was a pleasing mezzo-soprano.

His experience in the City was immediately useful in reducing the disorder of Balintore's finances. In addition to a handsome salary Balintore made a very large income by occasional lectures, by attending public luncheons, by judging beauty competitions, and by opening new dog-racing tracks, dance halls, bowling alleys and bingo parlours; and much of what he earned by these public services was often disguised as expenses, and paid in cash. Palladis handled these sums with a discretion that Balintore had seldom shown, and did what he could to curb his extravagance.

This became advisable when Balintore, having with unnecessary chivalry given his second wife evidence for divorce, married for the third time. Palladis strongly opposed the folly of this alliance, which no one expected to last, but Balintore insisted that he saw in it his last remaining chance of happiness; and had to admit his mistake in rather less than eighteen months.

Again he insisted that he was the guilty party – whether moved by pride or chivalry, none could tell – and regretted his generosity when he counted the cost of paying alimony to three women. Thanks to Palladis' good management he was better off than ever before – Palladis had persuaded him to make some shrewd investments – but he fell into a panic at the thought of his burdens, and complained of nervous exhaustion.

A doctor suggested three weeks in a nursing home, and this restored him to favour with those whose sympathy had been strained by his third divorce. When, almost immediately after his release from a sick-room, he had insisted on keeping the engagement that led to his collapse, his courage and public spirit were warmly approved.

Fortunately for him, Palladis had insisted on going with him to the television studio, and it was Palladis who, at the first hint of Balintore's discomfort, had suggested that a doctor should be called. Within an hour Balintore had been put to bed in the London Clinic, and a bulletin issued to the press which announced that he had had a nervous breakdown, the result of overwork, and his doctors advised a prolonged rest.

A few days later he was removed to the nursing home in Brighton, where he had lately occupied a room, and a final bulletin gave his public the reassuring news that he was suffering only from serious exhaustion, and his complete recovery could be confidently predicted. But he had cancelled all engagements for the next six months.

Guy Palladis took a room at the Royal Albion, and every day spent a couple of hours with his exhausted friend. To begin with – while under the influence of sedatives, and for a day or two longer – Balintore had been quiet and withdrawn, unwilling to speak and apparently unable to tolerate the strain
of listening. He slept long and heavily, and to Palladis it seemed that he must have suffered some physical injury, a shock at least as real as concussion; but the doctors told him not to worry, and one afternoon he went in to find Balintore sitting up in bed reading a green paper-backed novel.

This he hurriedly put under his pillow, as if being caught with a detective story might injure his status as an invalid, and said firmly, ‘I'm better, much better, and I want to have a serious talk with you. Tell me, for a start, what went wrong with me. What's your diagnosis?'

‘The doctors—'

‘I know what they say, it's your opinion I want.'

‘Well, I was worried, and though I know nothing about these things – I mean, about the physiology of them – I thought you might have had a mild thrombosis.'

‘That,' said Balintore, ‘is precisely my own belief! The doctors say no. They say my blood pressure's low, and my arteries are like elastic. But I don't trust them. Not nowadays! Nowadays the doctors have become a pack of civil servants, and civil servants never tell you anything, do they? They may quote a White Paper, but that's as far as they'll go. Well, let me tell you something – something for your own information, I don't want it to go farther – and that is that for some years now I've had a lurking fear of a thrombosis. And that, you'll agree, is a rational explanation of what I meant when I made that otherwise absurd statement.'

‘About being found out?'

‘What I meant, you see, was that I was afraid of suffering or incurring a thrombosis; or, if you like, of my tendency to it being discovered.'

‘Oh,' said Palladis.

‘Doesn't that seem reasonable?'

‘You remember what you said, do you?'

‘No,' said Balintore sharply. ‘I remember nothing – nothing at all – of what I said or what I heard for perhaps five minutes before I collapsed. But one of the nurses – the night nurse, in fact – was watching the performance, and she told me. You can imagine what I felt! Bewilderment to begin with, and I'm still bewildered when I think of it. But worse than that, there's
the appalling embarrassment of it! The embarrassment of knowing that eight million people—'