Homecomings (22 page)

Further, I had to tell Rose that George had once got into legal trouble, but had been found innocent.

‘In that case we can’t count it against him.’ Rose was showing his most frigid fairness, as well as irritation. He dismissed that subject, it was not to be raised again. But sharply he asked what proofs ‘this man’ had given of high ability. His lids heavy, his face expressionless, Rose listened.

‘It isn’t an entirely convincing case, my dear Lewis, don’t you feel that? It would be much easier for me if you would reconsider the whole idea. Will you think it over and give me the benefit of another word tomorrow?’

‘I have thought it over for a long time,’ I replied. ‘If this job’ – I meant, as Rose understood, the projects such as the headquarters administration of Barford which came in my domain – ‘is done as it needs to be done, I can’t think of anyone else who’d bring as much to it.’

‘Very well, let me see this man as soon as you can.’

Just for that instant, Hector Rose was as near being rude as I had heard him, but when, three days later, we were waiting to interview George Passant, he had recovered himself and, the moment George was brought in, Rose reached heights of politeness exalted even for him.

‘My dear Mr Passant, it is really extremely good of you, putting yourself to this inconvenience just to give us the pleasure of a talk. I have heard a little about you from my colleague Eliot, whom I’m sure you remember, but it is a real privilege to have the opportunity of meeting you in person.’

To my surprise George, who had entered sheepishly, his head thrust forward, concealing the power of his chest and shoulders, gave a smile of delight at Rose’s welcome, immediately reassured by a display of warmth about as heartfelt as a bus conductor’s thanks.

‘I don’t get to London very often,’ said George, ‘but it’s always a treat.’

It was a curious start. His voice, which still retained the Suffolk undertone, rolled out, and, as he sat down, he smiled shyly at Rose but also man-to-man. They were both fair, they were both of middle height, strongly built, with massive heads; yet, inside that kind of structural resemblance, it would have been hard to find two men more different.

Even spruced up for the interview, George looked not so much untidy as dowdy, in a blue suit with the trouser legs too tight. His shoes, his tie, separated him from Rose as much as his accent did, and there was not only class, there was success dividing them. George, never at his ease except with protégés or women, was more than ever fiddling for the right etiquette in front of this smooth youngish man, more successful than anyone he had met.

Sitting down, he smiled shyly at Rose, and of all the contrasts between them that in their faces was the sharpest. At forty-six Rose’s was blankly youthful, the untouched front of a single-minded man, with eyes heavy and hard. George, three years younger, looked no more than his age; he was going neither grey nor bald; but there were written on him the signs of one who has found his temperament often too much to manage; his forehead was bland and noble, his nose and mouth and whole expression had a cheerful sensual liveliness – except for his eyes, which, light blue in their deep orbits, were abstracted, often lost and occasionally sad.

With the practised and temperate flow of a Civil Service interview, Rose questioned him.

‘I wonder if you would mind, Mr Passant, just helping us by taking us through your career?’

George did so. He might be shy, but he was lucid as always. His school career: his articles with a Woodbridge solicitor –

‘Forgive me interrupting, Mr Passant, but with a school record like yours I’m puzzled why you didn’t try for a university scholarship?’

‘If I’d known what they were like I might have got one,’ said George robustly.

‘Leaving most of us at the post,’ said Rose with a polite bow.

‘I think I should have got one,’ said George, and then suddenly one of his fits of abject diffidence took him over, the diffidence of class. ‘But of
course
I had no one to advise me, starting where I did.’

‘I should hope that we’re not wasting material like you nowadays, if you will let me say so.’

‘More than you think.’ George was comfortable again. He went on about his articles: the Law Society examinations; the prizes; the job at Eden and Martineau’s, a firm of solicitors in a midland town, as a qualified clerk.

‘Where you’ve been ever since. That is, since October 1924,’ put in Rose smoothly.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

‘Why haven’t you moved?’

‘You ought to be told,’ said George, without any embarrassment, ‘that I had an unpleasant piece of difficulty ten years ago.’

‘I have been told,’ said Rose, also without fuss. ‘I can perfectly well understand that trouble getting in your way since – but what about the years before?’

George answered: ‘I’ve often asked myself. Of course I didn’t have any influence behind me.’

Rose regarded him as though he wanted to examine his lack of initiative. But he thought better of it, and dexterously switched him on to legal points. Like many high-class Civil Servants, Rose had a competent amateur knowledge of law; I sat by, without any need to intervene, while George replied with his old confidence.

Then Rose said: most countries recruit their bureaucracy almost exclusively from lawyers: our bureaucracy is not fond of them: who is right? It was a topic which Rose knew backwards, but George, quite undeterred, argued as though he had been in Permanent Secretaries’ offices for years: I found myself listening, not to the interview, but to the argument for its own sake: I found also that Rose, who usually timed interviews to the nearest two minutes, was letting this over-run by nearly ten. At last he said, bowing from the waist, as ceremonious as though he were saying goodbye to Lufkin or an even greater boss: ‘I think perhaps we might leave it for the moment, don’t you agree, Mr Passant? It has been a most delightful occasion and I shall see that we let you know whether we can possibly justify ourselves in temporarily uprooting you–’

With a smile George backed out, the door closed, Rose looked not at me but out of the window. His arms were folded on his chest, and it was some moments before he spoke.

‘Well,’ he said.

I waited.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s obviously a man of very high intelligence.’

In that respect, Rose in half an hour could appreciate George’s quality more than his employer in the solicitors’ firm, who had known him half a lifetime. He went on: ‘He’s got a very strong and precise mind, and it’s distinctly impressive. If we took him as a replacement for Cooke, on the intellectual side we should gain by the transaction.’

Rose paused. His summing-up was not coming as fluently as usual.

He added: ‘But I must say, there seems to be altogether too much on the negative side.’

I stiffened, ready to sit it out.

‘What exactly?’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, a man of his ability who just rests content in a fourth-rate job must have something wrong with him.’

A stranger, listening to the altercation which went on for many minutes, would have thought it business-like, rational, articulate. He might not have noticed, so cool was Rose’s temper, so long had I had to learn to subdue mine, that we were each of us very angry. I knew that I had only to be obstinate to get my way. I could rely on Rose’s fairness. If George had been an impossible candidate, he would have vetoed him. But, although Rose felt him unsuitable and even more alien, he was too fair to rule him out at sight.

That being so, I should get George if I stuck to it; for this was the middle of the war, and I was doing a difficult job. In peace-time, I should have had to take anyone I was given. Rose had been trained not to expect to make a personal choice of a subordinate, any more than of an office chair: it offended him more, because mine was nothing but a personal choice. It was wartime, however; my job was regarded as exacting and in part it was abnormally secret. In the long run I had to be given my head. But I knew that I should have to pay a price.

‘Well, my dear Lewis, I am still distinctly uneasy about this suggestion. If I may say so, I am slightly surprised that you should press it, in view of what I have tried, no doubt inadequately, to explain.’

‘I wouldn’t do so for a minute,’ I replied, ‘if I weren’t unusually certain.’

‘Yes, that’s the impression you have managed to give.’ For once Rose was letting his bitter temper show. ‘I repeat, I am surprised that you should press the suggestion.’

‘I am sure of the result.’

‘Right.’ Rose snapped off the argument, like a man turning a switch. ‘I’ll put the nomination through the proper channels. You’ll be able to get this man started within a fortnight.’

He glanced at me, his face smoothed over.

‘Well, I’m most grateful to you for spending so much time this afternoon. But I should be less than honest with you, my dear Lewis, if I didn’t say that I still have a fear this may prove one of your few errors of judgement.’

That was the price I paid. For Rose, who in disapproval invariably said less than he meant, was telling me, not that I might turn out to have made an error of judgement, but that I had already done so. That is, I had set my opinion against official opinion beyond the point where I should have backed down. If I had been a real professional, with a professional’s ambitions, I could not have afforded to. For it did not take many ‘errors of judgement’ – the most minatory phrase Rose could use to a colleague – docketed in that judicious mind, to keep one from the top jobs. If I became a professional, I should have the future, common enough if one looked round the Pall Mall clubs, of men of parts, often brighter than their bosses, who had inexplicably missed the top two rungs.

I did not mind. When I was a young man, too poor to give much thought to anything but getting out of poverty, I had dreamed of great success at the Bar; since then I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense. And, of course, they were not wrong: if a man spends half of his time discussing basketball, thinking of basketball, examining with passionate curiosity the intricacies of basketball, it is not unreasonable to suspect him of a somewhat excessive interest in the subject.

Yet, over the last years, almost without my noticing it, for such a change does not happen in a morning, I was growing tired of it: or perhaps not so much tired, as finding myself slide from a participant into a spectator. It was partly that now I knew I could earn a living in two or three different ways. It was partly that, of the two I had loved most, Sheila had ignored my liking for power, while Margaret actively detested it. But, although I believed that Margaret’s influence might have quickened the change within me, I also believed it would have happened anyway.

Now that I felt a theme in my life closing, I thought it likely that I had started off with an interest in power greater than that of most reflective men, but not a tenth of Lufkin’s or Rose’s, nothing like enough to last me for a lifetime. I expect that I should keep an eye open for the manoeuvres of others: who will get the job? and why? and how? I expected also that sometimes, as I watched others installed in jobs I might once have liked, I should feel regret. That did not matter much. Beneath it all, a preoccupation was over.

As it vanished step-by-step, so another had filled its place. But this other was genuine; I had been clear about it, although I had had to push it out of sight, even when I was a child. I had known that sooner or later I should have some books to write; I did not worry about it; I was learning what I had to say. In trouble, that knowledge had often steadied me, and had given me a comfort greater than any other. Even after Margaret left me, in the middle of the war, when I was too busy to write anything sustained, nevertheless I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It gave me a kind of serenity; it was like going into a safe and quiet room.

After the cold parting with Rose I went to my own office, where George was sitting by the window smoking a pipe.

‘That will be all right, barring accidents,’ I told him at once.

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me,’ said George enthusiastically, as though the manner of his reception by Rose was much more important than the prosaic matter of the result.

‘You’d expect him to be civil, wouldn’t you?’

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me, right from the minute I went in,’ said George, as though he had anticipated being tripped up inside the door.

I realized that George had not speculated on why Rose and I had been discussing him for so long. He was not given to meeting danger halfway; he had been happy, sitting by my window, looking down into Whitehall, waiting for me to bring the news. He was happy also, later that evening, as we walked through the streets under a frigid moon, though not in the way I was. I was happy that night because it took me back through the years to the time when he and I walked the harsher streets of the provincial town, George making grandiose plans for me, his brightest protégé – to the time which seemed innocent now, before I met Sheila, to those years in the early twenties when the world outside us seemed innocent too.

It was unlikely that George gave a thought to that past, for he was not in the least a sentimental man. No, he was happy because he enjoyed my company, my company as a middle-aged man in the here and now; because he had been received politely by an important person; because he saw work ahead on which he could stretch himself; because he was obscurely scoring against all the people who had kept him dim and unrecognized so long; and because, in the moonlit night, he saw soldiers and women pairing off in the London streets. For George, even in his forties, was one of those men who can find romantic magnificence in sex without trappings; the sight of the slit of light around the nightclub door, and he was absent-minded with happiness; his feet stumped more firmly on the pavement, and he cheerfully twirled his stick.