Homecomings (28 page)

He gave a furtive grin, and said: ‘That’s where you come in, my lad.’

‘You want me to talk to them?’

‘No, Lewis, I want you to listen to them. Listening never did any of us any harm, and talking usually does,’ said Bevill, in one of his Polonian asides. ‘Someone’s got to listen to one of those fellows, and you’re the man for the job.

‘You see,’ said Bevill, staring uncomplainingly down at a traffic block, ‘they might trust you, which they’d never begin to do with Rose or me. They’d never get it out of their heads that I was an old die-hard who didn’t understand what they were talking about and didn’t care a kipper for what was bothering them. And I’m not sure,’ said Bevill, with his customary realism and humility, ‘I’m not sure that they’d be far wrong.’

‘Who is it,’ I asked, marking down a tiresome, tricky, but not important date for the following week, ‘that you want me to see?’

‘One of those fellows who write about pictures,’ Bevill replied, pointing intelligently at the National Gallery. ‘His name is Austin Davidson. I expect you’ve heard of him.’

‘Yes, I have.’

‘Somehow he gave the impression, or someone else did, that he knew you. Do you know the fellow, Lewis?’

‘I’ve never met him.’

‘I suppose he’s one of those chaps who makes a painter’s reputation and then gets his share of the takings when the prices go up,’ said Bevill, with a simple contempt that he would not have thought of applying to a politician or even a businessman. But I was not paying attention to that accusation, which was about the last that, from Davidson’s eminence, he could ever have imagined being uttered against himself, casually but in cold blood. Instead, staring down at the pavement artist in front of the Gallery, hearing old Bevill bring out the name of Margaret’s father, I was full of an instantaneous warmth, as though I were completely relaxed and could count, so delectably sharp were they, the leaves of grass on the verges down below.

‘Are you positive you haven’t met the chap?’ Bevill was inquiring.

‘Quite.’

‘Well, I got the impression, if I’m not muddling things, that he gave me to understand, or he may have said so to Rose, that you’d be very acceptable as someone to talk to. And that suggests to me that you’d be able to keep those fellows from making any more fuss.’

The bus started, and Bevill was peering through the window, trying to see the clock on Charing Cross.

‘I needn’t tell you,’ he said cheerfully, ‘not to tell them anything they oughtn’t to know.’

HEARING that Davidson was to be given a private explanation, George Passant stormed with fury.

‘If one of my relations,’ he cursed, ‘had been uncomfortable about the Sawbridge case or any other blasted case, are you going to tell me that that old sunket Bevill would have detailed a high Civil Servant to give them an interview? But this counry doesn’t use the same rules if you come from where I did instead of bloody Bloomsbury.’

It was a long time since I had heard George explode with the radical fervour of his youth.

‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel inclined to tell this man there’s no reason on God’s earth why he should get special treatment.’

I said no.

‘Your proper answer to these people,’ George cried, ‘when they come begging favours, is Doctor Johnson’s to Lord Chesterfield.’

I was not sure what obscure grievance George was hugging on my behalf.

‘Bloody Bloomsbury’: George’s swear-words crackled out with ‘Bloomsbury’ after each one. George’s political passions were still rooted in the East Anglian earth, where his cousins were farm labourers: like most rooted radicals, he distrusted upper-class ones, he felt they were less solid men than reactionaries such as old Bevill.

Then he simmered down and said, with a bashful friendliness: ‘Well, there’s one thing, I’m glad this didn’t happen when you were still thinking about Margaret. It would have been a bit embarrassing.’ He added comfortably: ‘That’s all over and done with, at any rate.’

Two days later, not waiting for his name to be called out, Davidson walked, head bent, across the floor of my office. He was not looking at me or Vera Allen or anyone or anything: he was so shy that he would not glance up, or go through any formula of introduction.

As he sat in the armchair I could see his grey hair, of which a quiff fell over his forehead, but not his face. He was wearing an old brown suit, and his shirt-sleeves were so long that they covered half his hands; but, among that untidiness, I noticed that the shirt was silk. He said, without any preamble at all, self-conscious and brusque: ‘You used to be a lawyer, didn’t you?’

I said yes.

‘How good were you?’

‘I should never,’ I replied, ‘have been anything like first-class.’

‘Why not?’

Despite his awkwardness, he was a man to whom one did not want to give a modest, padded, hypocritical answer.

‘It’s the sort of career,’ I said, ‘where you’ve got to think of nothing else, and I couldn’t manage it.’

He nodded, and then, for a second, looked up. My first impression of his face was how young it was. At that time he was in his middle sixties, but his skin, under layers of sunburn, was scarcely lined – except that his neck had the roughness of an ageing man’s. My second impression was of a curious kind of beauty. Each of his daughters had inherited his fine bones; but Davidson’s face, at the same time delicate and sculptured, had an abstract beauty which theirs missed. His eyes, quite unlike Margaret’s, which were transparent and light, shone heavily – pigmented, deep sepia brown, opaque as a bird’s.

As he looked up, for an instant his face broke into a grin.

‘That’s not entirely to your discredit,’ he said. Soon he was looking at his knees again, and saying: ‘You’re said to know about this Sawbridge business, is that true?’

‘Yes.’

‘You really do know about it, you haven’t just seen the papers?’

I began: ‘I was present when he was first appointed–’ and again Davidson gave an evanescent grin.

‘That sounds good enough. No wonder you’ve got your reputation as a picker. It would be simplest if you told me about it from there.’

So I told the story, from the time Sawbridge entered Barford after three years’ research in an Oxford laboratory: the first suspicion that he was passing information to a Russian agent, as far back as 1944: the thicker suspicion, a year later: the interrogation, in which my brother, who had been his scientific leader, took a part: his confession, arrest and trial.

All the time I was speaking Davidson did not stir. His head was bent down, I was addressing myself to his grey hair, he moved so little that he might not have heard at all, and when I finished he remained immobile.

At last he said: ‘As an expositor, with Maynard Keynes marked at 100, your score is about 75. No, considering the toughness of the material, I put you up to 79.’ After that surprising evaluation he went on: ‘But none of what you tell me is satisfactory – is it? – unless I can get answers to three questions.’

‘What are they?’

‘To begin with, is this young man really guilty? I don’t mean anything fancy, I just mean, did he perform the actions he was charged with?’

‘I have no doubt about that.’

‘Why haven’t you any doubt? I know he confessed, but I should have thought the one thing we’ve learned in the last ten years is that in suitable circumstances almost anyone can confess to almost anything.’

‘I hadn’t any doubt long before he confessed.’

‘You had some other evidence?’

He looked up, his face troubled, stern, and suspicious.

‘Yes.’

‘What was it?’

‘It was intelligence information. I’m not free to tell you more than that.’

‘That doesn’t seem specially reassuring.’

‘Look–’ I started, stumbled over his name and finally said uneasily ‘Mr Davidson’, as though I were going to my first dinner party and was not sure which fork to use. It was not that he was older; it was not that he was a man of liberal principle, disapproving of me; it was simply that I had loved his daughter, and some odd atavistic sense would not let me address him unceremoniously by his name.

When I had got over my stuttering I told him that most intelligence secrets were nonsense, but that some weren’t: some ways of collecting information any government had to keep tight, so long as we had governments at all: this was a case in point.

‘Isn’t that extremely convenient?’ said Davidson.

‘It must seem so,’ I said. ‘Nevertheless it’s true.’

‘You’re certain of that?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

Again he looked at me. As though satisfied, he said: ‘Accepting that, then, I come straight on to the next question. Why did he plead guilty? If he hadn’t, from what you’ve just said, he’d have had you all in difficulties–’

I agreed.

‘Then why did he?’

‘I’ve often wondered,’ I said, ‘and I’ve got no explanation at all.’

‘What I want to be convinced of,’ said Austin Davidson, ‘is that there were no unfair threats – or unfair inducements as far as that goes – before he was tried.’

Once more I did not resent the words, they were too impersonal for that. Instead of replying with official palaver, I was searching for the literal truth. I said that, after Sawbridge was arrested, my first-hand knowledge ended but I thought it very unlikely that anything unfair had been done.

‘Why do you think that?’

‘I’ve seen him since, in prison. And if there had been anything of the sort, I can’t imagine why he shouldn’t complain. It isn’t as though he’s been converted, he’s still a Communist. If he had anything to complain of, I don’t think he’d be excessively considerate about our feelings.’

‘That’s a genuine point,’ said Davidson. I could feel he was believing me, as he continued: ‘Well, I’ve only one more question. Fourteen years seemed to most of us a savage sentence. Was there any influence from government or your official people to suggest that he ought to be made an example of?’

‘On that,’ I replied, ‘I know no more than you do.’

‘I should like to know what you think.’

‘I should be astonished if there were anything said directly,’ I said. ‘The most that can have happened is that judges like all the people round them are affected by a climate of thought.’

Staying very still, Davidson did not speak for some time, until, throwing back his forelock like a boy, he said: ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any more you can tell me, and I’m glad to have found someone who could speak straight.’

He continued: ‘So on the whole you are happy about the Sawbridge business, are you?’

He might have meant it as a formal ending, but I was suddenly provoked. I had not enjoyed defending the establishment: but I was also irked by the arrogance of men of decent feeling like Davidson, who had had the means to cultivate their decent feelings without the social interest or realism to imagine where they led. I spoke sharply, not like an official. I finished up.

‘You ought not to think that I like what we’ve done. Or a good many other things we’re having to do. People of my sort have only two choices in this situation, one is to keep outside and let others do the dirty work, the other is to stay inside and try to keep off the worst horrors and know all the time that we shan’t come out with clean hands. Neither way is very good for one, and if I had a son I should advise him to do what you did, and choose a luckier time and place to be born.’

It was a long time since I heard my own temper running loose. Davidson was looking at me with a friendly and companionable frown.

‘Yes,’ he remarked, ‘my daughter said you must be feeling something like that.

‘I asked her about you,’ he went on casually, and added, with a simplicity that was at the same time arrogant and pure: ‘I’ve never fancied myself at judging people when I first meet them. So I have to find out about them in my own fashion.’

For a fortnight I was immersed in that kind of comfort which is like a luxurious cocoon as one delays before a longed-for and imminent fate, which I had also known after my first meeting with Margaret. I was still not calculating; I, who had calculated so much, went about as though the machine had been switched off; now that I had a card of re-entry into the Davidson family, I still felt the future free.

I still felt so, when I wrote a note to Davidson, telling him I had a little more information about the Sawbridge case, if he chose to call. He did call: he seemed satisfied: afterwards we walked together down Victoria Street. It was a blazing hot day, people were walking in the shade, but Davidson insisted on keeping to the other side.

‘We mustn’t miss a second of this sun,’ he said, as though it were a moral axiom.

He walked with long strides, his head down, his feet clumpingly heavy on the pavement for so spare a man. His shirt-sleeves hung beneath his cuffs, over-long and unbuttoned. Shabby as he was, passers-by noticed him; he was the most striking and handsome figure in the street. I thought how like that shabby carelessness was to Margaret’s.

Suddenly he said: ‘I’m giving a show at my house next week.’ A private view, he explained, for two young painters. ‘Would that interest you?’

‘Very much,’ I said. I said it eagerly, without any guard.

Not looking at me, Davidson lolloped along.

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Do you know anything about pictures? It’s a waste of your time and mine if you don’t, don’t you know.’

‘I know a little.’

‘You’re not bluffing, are you?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I’d better ask you a few questions.’

There and then, in Victoria Street in the sweating sunshine, as we passed offices of consultant engineers, Davidson gave me a brisk viva. Embarrassed, anxious to pass, doing my best, I nevertheless felt a twinge of amusement, as a comparison struck me. To Davidson, whose taste had no use for concealments, this was a matter to be cleared up in the open; it was just a question of whether I was equipped to look at pictures or not; there were no overtones, no other motives, on his side or mine.

It did not occur to him that I was snatching at the chance to meet his daughter again. Yet he was a man who, so I had heard and I had no reason to doubt it, had once been well-known for his love-affairs. Sheila’s father, the Reverend Laurence Knight, had been a faithful husband, living obscurely all his life in a country vicarage: yet, in Davidson’s place, he would have known precisely what I was after, not now, when it was easy to see, but within minutes of our first meeting. Mr Knight, incidentally, would have tantalized me and then found some excuse for holding back the invitation.