George Passant (19 page)

‘You haven’t told me,’ I said, ‘who “they” are? Who is mixed up in this?’

‘Jack,’ he began. I smiled, not in amusement but in recognition, for about the whole story there was a flavour of Jack Cotery – ‘and George,’ Morcom went on.

I said: ‘That’s very difficult to believe. I can imagine George being drawn to a good many things – but fraud’s about the last of them.’

‘I don’t know,’ said Morcom indifferently. ‘He may have wanted the money more than usually himself–’

‘He’s a man of conscience,’ I said.

‘He’s also loose and self-indulgent,’ said Morcom.

I began to protest, that we were both using labels, that we knew George and it was useless to argue as though he could be defined in three words; but then I saw Morcom ready to speak again.

‘And there’s Olive Calvert,’ said Morcom.

I did not reply for a second. The use of her surname (for as long as I remembered, she had been ‘Olive’ to all our friends) made me want to comfort him.

‘I should have thought she was too sensible to be let in.’ I made an attempt to be casual. ‘She’s always had a sturdy business sense.’

Morcom’s answer was so quiet that I did not hear the words for certain, and, despite my anxiety, I could not ask him to repeat it.

As we walked away from the restaurant, Morcom tried to talk of indifferent things. I looked at him, when we had gone past the lamp in a narrow street. In the uneven light, faint but full of contrast as a room lit by one high window, his face was over-tired. Yet tonight, just as years before, he would take no pity on his physical state; he insisted on walking the miles back to my flat. I had to invent a pretext to stop on the way, at a nightclub; where, after we had drunk some whisky, I asked: ‘What’s to be done?’

‘You’ve got to come in – and help,’ said Morcom.

I paused. ‘That’s not too easy. I’m very much out of touch,’ I said. ‘And I don’t suppose they’d like to tell me this for themselves. I can’t say you’ve spoken to us–’

‘Naturally you can’t,’ said Morcom. ‘It mustn’t be known that I’ve said a word. I don’t want that known.’

‘In that case,’ I said, ‘it’s difficult for me to act.’

‘You understand that anything I’ve said is completely secret. Whatever happens. You understand that.’

I nodded.

‘You’ve got to stop them yourself. You’ve done more difficult things,’ he said. ‘Without as much necessity. You’ve never had as much necessity. It comes before anything else, you must see that.’

‘You’re sure you can’t take control yourself?’

‘I can only sit by,’ he said.

He meant, he could do nothing for her now. But I felt that he was shutting himself away from release. With a strain that was growing as acute as his own, I begged him to act.

‘It’s the natural thing,’ I said. ‘It would settle it – best. You’ve every reason to do it–’

He did not move.

‘See her when you go back. You can still make yourself do that.’

‘No.’

‘See George, then. It wouldn’t be difficult. You could finish it all in a day or two–’

‘I can’t. There’s no use talking any further. I can’t.’

He suddenly controlled his voice, and added in a tone light and half rueful: ‘If I did interfere, it would only make things worse. George and I have been nominally reconciled for years, of course. But he would never believe I wasn’t acting out of enmity.’ He was smiling good-naturedly and mockingly. Then his manner changed again.

‘If anything’s to be done, you’ve got to do it,’ he said. ‘They’re going to be ruined unless you come in.’

‘I can’t help thinking you’re being too pessimistic,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t believe it’s as inevitable as all that.’

‘They’ve gone a long way,’ said Morcom.

‘It’s possible to go a long way in making dishonest money,’ I said, ‘without being any the worse for it. Still, if I can be any use–’

Then I made one last effort to persuade him to act himself. I looked into his face, and began to talk in a matter-of-fact, callous manner: ‘But I shall be surprised if you’re not taking it too tragically. First of all, they probably haven’t managed anything criminal. Even if they have, we can either finish it or get them off. It’s a hundred to one against anything disastrous happening. And if the hundredth chance came off, which I don’t believe for a moment, you’d be taking it too tragically, even then. I mean, it would be disastrous, but it wouldn’t be death.’

‘That’s no comfort.’

‘I don’t mean it wouldn’t be unpleasant. I was thinking of something else. I don’t believe that being convicted of swindling would be the end of the world for either of us. It’s only ruin – when people crumble up inside, when they’re punishing themselves. Don’t you agree? You ought to know through yourself just now – in a different way. If you went back and protected them – if you weren’t forcing yourself to keep away – you would be happier than you are tonight.’

There was a silence.

‘You know perfectly well,’ he said, ‘that everything you’ve said applies to George. It would be ruin for him. In his own eyes, I mean, just as you’ve been saying. And the others – she’s not a simple person–’ He paused. ‘And there’s more to it than the offence. You’ve got to realise that. It means the break-up of George’s little world. It also means that the inside of the little world isn’t going to be private any longer. You know – that isn’t all high thinking nowadays.’

I remembered what Roy had told me, and what I had gathered for myself.

‘Yes,’ I said.

For a few moments he broke into a bitter outburst unlike anything I had heard from him – against idealists who got tangled up with sensuality in the end. His words became full of the savage obscenity of a reticent man. Then he stopped suddenly.

‘I’m never fair to that kind of indulgence,’ he said, in his ordinary restrained tone. ‘They seem to me to win both ways. They get the best of both worlds.’

Then he said: ‘That isn’t a reason for leaving them alone.’ But he would not let himself help them. I accepted that now, and we discussed the inquiries that I might make. Soon he insisted that he must return to the town by the last train; I remembered that, not long after his arrival, he had agreed to stay the night.

The morning after that visit, I wrote to George, asking if he could stay with me in London: I was too busy to leave. I had no reply for several days: then a letter said that he and ‘the usual party’ were on holiday in the North. I could do nothing more for the time being, and in August, a fortnight after Morcom called, went with Sheila, now my wife, to our own holiday in France.

There I thought over Morcom’s story in cold blood. He had heard something from Olive – that was clear. And still loving her, he could make a trivial fact serve as a flare-up for his own unspent emotion. He wanted to worry about her – and had seized a chance to do it on the grand scale.

That must be true: but I was not satisfied. Then often I consoled myself, as one always would at such a time, by thinking ‘these things don’t happen’. Often I thought, with genuine composure, ‘these things don’t happen’.

In the end I cut our holiday short by a few days, telling myself I would go to the town and set my mind at rest. Across the sea, in the mist of the September evening, I felt the slight anxious ache that comes, lightly and remorselessly – as I noticed after an examination – no, earlier than that, when I was a child – whenever one has been away and is returning home. I was no more depressed than that, no more than if I had been away for a few days and was now (on a cool evening, the coast in sight) on my way home.

GEORGE wrote, when I suggested paying him a visit: ‘We shall be out at the farm that weekend. If you can come over, I’ll organise it immediately. You can meet some of the original party and some of the new blood that we’ve brought on–’

Neither there nor in the rest of the letter was there any symptom of uneasiness. It sounded like George for so long, absorbed and contented in the little world.

On the Saturday afternoon a week after my return, I arrived at Eden’s house. About a year previously, just as I was beginning to earn a living at the Bar, he had sent me a couple of cases, and since then several invitations to ‘stay in your old haunts’. In the drawing-room, where we had argued over Martineau’s renunciation, Eden received me cordially and comfortably. He was in his armchair, lying back in golf suit and slippers after an afternoon walk.

‘You’ve done very well,’ he said. ‘You’ve done very well, of course. But I heard you were off colour last year. You must take care of that,’ he said. ‘You won’t get anywhere without your health. And unless you learn to be your own doctor by the time you’re thirty, you never will afterwards.’

I had always enjoyed his company; he was hospitable and considerate.

‘If you want to talk to your friends while you’re staying here, just consider the study upstairs as your private property.’ He got talking about ‘those days’, his formula of invocation of his youth; and it was later after dinner than I intended when I caught the bus to the farm.

As I walked across the fields, lights were shining from several of the farm windows. George came to the door.

‘Splendid,’ he said, with his hand outstretched. ‘I was wondering whether you’d lost your way.’ In his busy, elaborate fashion he took my coat. ‘I knew you wouldn’t stay any longer at Eden’s than decency compelled you.’ The door of one room was open, and there was a hubbub of voices: a smell of fresh paint hung in the hall, and I noticed that the stand and chairs were new.

George whispered: ‘There are one or two people here you don’t know. They’ll be a bit awkward, of course. You’ll be prepared to make allowances.’ He led the way, and, as soon as we were inside the room, shouted in his loud voice, full of friendly showmanship: ‘I don’t think you’ve all met our guest. He used to come here a few years ago. You’ve all heard of him–’

The room was fogged with smoke and on the air there floated the smell of spirits; some bottles glistened on the table in the light of the two oil lamps, and others lay in the cushions near the radio set. There was the first dazzling impression of a group of unknown faces, flat like a picture without perspective. I recognised Rachel in one of the window-seats, sitting by Roy Calvert, and a girl whom I remembered meeting once.

‘You’ll have to be introduced all round,’ said George from behind, as I went to talk to Rachel. She had aged more than any of us, I was thinking; lines had become marked under her eyes, in the full pale cheeks. Her voice as she said: ‘Well, Lewis!’ was still zestfully and theatrically rich.

As George took me round the room, Roy caught my eye for a moment. I wondered what he was doing there.

I was introduced to a couple of youths on the sofa, both under twenty: a girl and young man in the opposite window-seat to Roy.

‘Then here’s Daphne,’ said George. ‘Miss Daphne Jordan–’ he added a little stiffly; she was quite young, full-breasted, with a shrill and childish voice. George’s manner bore out the rumours that she was his present preoccupation. Her face was plump, square at the cheekbones; her upper lip very short, and eyes an intense brown, sharp and ready to stare up at mine.

‘What are you doing, George?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you give the poor man a drink?’

‘I’m sorry, won’t you have something?’ George said to me, and with a gust of laughter for the girl: ‘I’m always being nagged,’ he said.

I went back to the window, near Roy and Rachel. Roy whispered: ‘Don’t you think Daphne is rather a gem?’ He was a little drunk, in the state when he wanted to exaggerate anyone’s beauty. ‘She is quite a gem,’ he said.

With a deep, cheerful sigh, George sank into the chair opposite the fire. Under the heavy lids, his eyes roamed round, paternal, possessive, happy; Daphne curled up on a hassock by his chair, one of her hands staying on the arm.

‘What were you saying about Stephen Dedalus–’ George said loudly to the young man in the window, ‘before’ – he paused – ‘Eliot came in?’

George was not concealing his pride, his paternal responsibility, in being able to ask the question. It was his creation, he was saying almost explicitly, that these people had interests of this pattern. Half-smiling, he looked at me as the conversation began; he laughed uproariously at a tiny joke.

Then my attention caught a private phrase that was being thrown across the argument, one of the new private phrases, that, more than anything, made me feel the lapse of time. ‘Inside the ring’ – it bore no deep significance that I could see, but somehow it set alight again the anxieties and suspicions which had, in the freshness of arrival, vanished altogether. What had been happening? Nothing pointed to any dealings with money – except the actual material changes in the house. The demeanour of the party had changed from my time; then George, with the odd stiffness at which we had always laughed, was worried if the women drank with us. There was a quality of sexual feeling in the atmosphere, between many of the pairs and also, in the diffuse polyvalent way of such a society, between people who would never have any kind of relation; just as Rachel years ago had not loved, but been ready to love George, so I saw some other flashes of desire through the idealist argument. But that too, as it must be in any close society, was always present; I remembered evenings, four or five years ago, with Olive, Jack, George, Rachel and some others, when the air was electric with longing.

Daphne was laughing into George’s face, after he finished one of his tirades. Clumsily he ran his fingers through her hair. Of all George’s fancies this was the most undisguised. One could not see them without knowing that Roy was right.

I had been there about an hour when there was a noise of feet in the hall, and Olive came in, with Jack Cotery behind her.

At once she came across to my chair and took my hands.

‘It must be years since I saw you,’ she said. Her eyes were full and excited; she was over twenty-eight now, it crossed my mind. Her face had thinned a little into an expression which I could not define at that first glance. As she turned to bring Jack towards me, the strong curve of her hips was more pronounced than when I last met her, the summer she left the town.