Last Things (40 page)

A disinterested observer might have gained a subdued pleasure from the fact that this house, in period, style, structure and market value, was remarkably similar to Muriel’s and only just over half a mile away.

Present at both these meetings were Olly, his two deputies, Muriel, Gordon, Charles and Guy Grenfell. The first of them lasted from 9 p.m. till something like one the next morning, the second rather longer. There was little to eat or drink. Before them was a single topic, the security attack on the bw disclosure, and how to get out of it with the least damage.

It was possible to think, as some of them did in calmer times, that they exaggerated their danger. Perhaps for the first time they were not behaving like experienced operators. If so, I was partly to blame: for my warnings, which had been overstressed and more darkened by pessimism because I was thinking of Charles, had been taken as a precise, almost official, forecast by Muriel and Gordon, and relayed as such to Olly. So that from the beginning they all assumed that lies or stonewalling weren’t going to last them for long: they had as a minimum, to produce a story which admitted some of the truth. That is, that letters about the subcontract had been suspected, and deliberately searched for, and then, as was public knowledge, used.

The story ought to be kept as simple as possible. It ought to involve as few persons as possible. Security might know or half-know more than they could reveal, and would conceivably be placated by an account which was less than complete but was self-consistent.

All this was debated, and often repeated, for they were all under strain, at the first session. It seemed that Muriel played more of a leading part than usual. She wasn’t as creative as one or two of the others, but she was as acute, particularly for this kind of semi-legal argument, as any of them. She also had influence on Olly, so that in the end she brought him round to a solution. It could be very simple. It could be just one person’s private initiative. And that meant one thing. Someone had to take the rap.

That phrase had been used by Olly – who, like other leaders, had no fastidious objections to a cliché – to sum up the first meeting. It would not be difficult to develop a history of how one person became committed to the idea and executed it. Who? It had, in order to agree with the facts which security were known to possess, to be one of the Cambridge cell. In the end, it reduced to one of the three, Charles, Gordon, Guy.

As I had already been told, the real conception had emerged, not only from those three, but from several others, all drawn together in a sort of invisible college or committee of young men. Who carried it through, that is who was present when the offices were invaded and the files searched, I never knew, nor (I was nearly certain) did my source of all this information. Apart from his own denial, I had some reason, circumstantial but strong, to believe that it was not Charles. I was inclined to think that the balance of evidence pointed to Gordon. In any case, it was very largely chance who had been the actual agent. Olly paid no attention to it when, in the second session, he made them come to a decision. Someone had to take the rap. It had to be the one whom the movement could most easily spare. Olly might not be a brilliant young man: possibly he would not be heard of much again. But in that meeting he showed his quality. Not brought into contact with him (I was told that I should be bored) I thought he sounded something like a junior Parnell. Not bright: not specially articulate, but somehow he could stay still and people waited to listen to him.

The one whom the movement could spare. There was no sentiment about the choice. If it fell on Gordon, he would suffer most, being poor and depending on his grants and the prospect of a Fellowship. While Charles was the youngest of the whole party. So far as anyone could see, Olly didn’t give even a token consideration to either of those claims. He cut out what old Pilbrow used to call the personalia. He was cordial and, without making a show of it, ruthless.

None of this was done quickly. Leaders of his type didn’t utter laconic orders out of the side of the mouth. It was a long churning conversation, more like a trade union committee than a meeting of the Stavka. The more astute, though, didn’t take long to see that the result was already determined. Gordon was the last man to sacrifice, Olly led one of his aides into saying: they needed him for the future, he was their best economic brain, probably the best brain all round that they possessed. On a reduced scale there was some similar opinion in favour of Charles. He wasn’t specially popular with Olly: perhaps his ironic tongue, or the fact that some of them thought him unduly lucky, had made enemies. He himself said that he was reasonably dispensable: the consequences, in practical terms, would not be all that important to him. But the majority would not have it. Whether living with Muriel went in his favour or not, it was impossible to make out. All in all, the positives outweighed the negatives, and they said that he was too useful to lose.

So, slowly, talk gradually converging, never pointed, the party came to look towards Guy Grenfell. Just how it was made clear to him that he had to volunteer, remained obscure, even when I was told the story. Almost certainly, there was no direct remark or question. On the other hand, there must have been a number of hints, and not too subtle ones. In his own house, very likely having thoughts of his parents, Guy for a long time managed to avoid seeing them.

It must have been, I thought later, like a drawing-room version of more mortal sacrifices. You couldn’t read the diaries of the Scott expedition without realising that it had been hinted, more than once, to Captain Oates that he ought to go. The solemn issue of morphine pills a few days before. No one I knew who had been in any kind of collective danger, doubted the tone in which that was done. The finale was grand. They were brave men. Actions weren’t the less grand because those who performed them were recognisably like the rest of us.

It took a long time, but Guy brought out his offer. Not in a gallant manner, but with a touch both of truculence and superciliousness. The others responded with relief, but taking it very much for granted. They all knew he had money of his own. They all knew also that he was not a star academic. Charles, who was fond of him and felt he was a richer character than most of them, first repeated his own offer and then acted as impresario in producing enthusiasm for Guy’s. The others crowded round with comradely applause. Courtesies over, they set to work composing a history – where Guy was a solitary figure – which security would find it hard not to accept. They did not break up until that was tested and done.

Security either did find it hard not to accept, or, more likely, for their own reasons were glad to pretend to do so. All that outsiders – including me, at the time – knew was that, suddenly, the fuss about biological warfare disclosures died down. There was an official statement, of a muffled nature, saying that no secrets had been revealed and that precautions about the Official Secrets Act in relation to Government Research Establishments were being enquired into, as a routine precaution. The college issued its own statement saying that, in general principle, contracts from Government departments were not normally undertaken; that the demands of the students for representation had been met: and further that the college and the students had set up a joint committee to examine any further points in dispute.

Some time in July, Charles and Muriel paid us a call, and with meaning but without explanation said that Guy Grenfell would in September be leaving for Harvard and would complete his studies there.

WHEN Muriel asked over the telephone if I ‘could possibly call round’ for a drink, and I said yes, neither of us pretended the invitation was just a casual thought. As before that year, she had chosen Margaret’s evening away from home: arriving at Chester Row, I should have been surprised to find Charles in. At once, as I entered the drawing-room, Muriel apologised blank-faced for his absence. Then she kissed me, not in the happy-go-lucky English fashion, but as though it were a deliberate, an hieratic gesture. Our cheeks parted, and she was standing upright, her eyes not far below mine: I noticed, which I hadn’t before, the first starry lines at the corners, fine and faint on the smooth healthy skin.

She led me to the window seat, where she had been sitting. At the bottom of the window, a few inches were open.

‘Is that too much for you?’ she asked.

‘Not a bit,’ I said, amused by the old-fashioned phrase. Actually, the breath of air was warm: outside it was a beautiful night for late September.

Facing me on the seat she said: ‘I wanted to tell you, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Yes?’

‘We’re fairly certain now that we’re in the clear.’

I nodded. I didn’t ask for evidence. On such a matter, I had confidence in her judgment.

‘We thought of letting you know before this. But he was keeping his fingers crossed a little.’

‘So should I have been.’

‘Would you?’ She looked at me with a flash of interest, as though searching my lineaments for the most vestigial resemblance to my son.

There was a momentary silence. She said: ‘It really is all right, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Excellent.’

As we sat there on the window seat, there was another, and a longer, silence. I was used to her enough by now to feel that this wasn’t the only point of the meeting. Her legs were intertwined, one foot jerking from the ankle. It was rare for her not to have her body, as much as or more than her expression, under complete control.

She said: ‘I wonder if you could possibly bear to have your drinks in the garden? It’s almost nice enough, perhaps. Of course it’s being a terrible nuisance–’

‘Let’s go,’ I replied. She was taking refuge in politeness which didn’t sound like politeness, which might have been mocking. But when I began to move, she leapt up, crossed the room to the sideboard, agile with physical relief. She arranged the tray, and preceded me down the stairs, through her back sitting-room, out to the patio garden. Carrying the tray, she was as poised as a shipboard steward. Some women, I thought, with a figure like hers would have been conscious of it, but that impression she had never given me.

At the end of the garden, table and chairs were waiting under an overhanging rose bush, a bloom or two gleaming out in the twilight. There was a smell, already autumnal, of drying leaves, blended with something less wistful, perhaps – I couldn’t place it – a tobacco plant? She poured out a drink for me, and I sat comfortably sipping. The news was good. Whatever she was intending to say, I was ready to wait. It was getting on for seven o’clock in the evening. In the west, towards the King’s Road, the sky was still luminous. From the houses on each side of Muriel’s, lighted windows were already shining.

Looking at one of them, amber curtains drawn with a chink between them, a standard lamp just visible, for an instant a shape passing across, I felt a curiosity, or something softer like a yearning, which when I was younger I should have thought inadmissible, maudlin and nevertheless undeniable, and which was just as undeniable now. Once, long before, when I was an outsider, gazing at strangers’ windows from the nocturnal streets, it might have been explicable that I should have imagined the hearth glow of homes such as I didn’t have: when I longed for one to return to. Often I had pretended to myself that it was sheer inquisitiveness about others’ lives, trying to feel proud because I wasn’t tamed and was on my own. That wasn’t altogether false. The inquisitiveness was there also. Walking with Maurice on the sombre Christmas afternoon, two or three years ago, I had been oddly gratified – more than the event deserved – as he pointed to lighted rooms in the derelict squares and told me some of the stories that lay behind.

Yet that evening in Muriel’s garden, when curiosity and longing ought both to have been satisfied, I felt the same emotion as I should have felt as a young man. Habits, I had told myself, before this, at a time when I had learned less, lived longer than freedoms. Sometimes they told one more about oneself.

We had been sitting quietly. Muriel gazed up the garden at her own house, so that I could see only her profile, which was becoming softened as the light grew dimmer. Then she said: ‘I’m sorry, but I think you’re misunderstanding me.’ Her tone was clear, but (I thought I heard) not quite composed.

‘What about?’

‘Charles.’

‘What about him?’

‘You won’t see it. But you and I, we’re on the same side.’

‘Are we?’ My voice had become rough and unconceding.

‘I think we are.’

She wasn’t to be beaten down. Her eyes were fixed steadily on me now. She said: ‘You’d like him to make the best of himself, I think you would. And so should I.’

‘We might not agree’, I replied, ‘on what that means.’

‘It means, that we should like him to make the most of his talent. Or wouldn’t you?’ For an instant, she gave a sharp and attacking smile. There was nothing between us, though. Neither age, nor sex, nor subliminal dislike.

‘Of course I should.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid that he may take one risk too many.’

‘You mean, what you’ve just been doing–’

‘No, no, no. We’ve learned something. That’s not the correct way, we shall have to find another method. By the way, I’m not apologising for us. I’m sure he’d be angry with me if I did. And I don’t feel like doing so on my own account.’

‘What is this risk that he’s going to take?’

She shook her head. ‘Haven’t you noticed that he keeps his secrets?’

‘From you?’

‘Oh yes. From me.’

‘What do you know then?’

‘I don’t know. I may be imagining it. You can guess how one does–’ Just then, she lost her crispness.

‘Well, what are you afraid of?’

‘It’s not for tomorrow. It’s not until he’s finished at Cambridge’ (that is, until he graduated in the following June). ‘Then–’

‘Then what?’

‘I think he may be deciding to get away from us all.’

‘Will he leave you?’