The Malcontents (4 page)

‘Of course,’ Mark went on, ‘you’re lucky in one thing. That’s one of the reasons why he chose you, you know. You’re quite different from his mother. She’s the most unusual person in that family. I don’t know what Stephen feels for her. I think he loves her, but she’s scared him off. I don’t believe hers has been a happy marriage. It couldn’t very well, with anyone as much on her own – You won’t be too much on your own for Stephen.’

They had come to the beginning of the comfortable, middle-class suburb, bushes catching the headlights, houses standing back from the broad road. Tess was feeling very fond of him. Yet, it was as innocent being with him as in a childhood friendship, perhaps more innocent than that. She was faithful to Stephen, she was born faithful, and yet she had a half-wish that it was not so innocent. Was she ashamed or not?

As for what he said about Stephen, she hadn’t paid much attention to that. She was certain that she knew Stephen better than he did. Mark’s lack of self-regard, or even his absence of self, that she could respond to: but she scarcely noticed his insight, and there, as it happened, she was wrong.

Soon they turned down a side road towards the Bishop’s house, more comfortable middle-class houses, lights in windows, neat privet hedges defining the front gardens. As they said good night, he laid his cheek against hers, and said: ‘You’ll see, it will be all right!’

He had said that before, early on their way home: it might have been the same reassurance, or another, that he was giving her now.

As Stephen woke, the single bell was ringing. He didn’t wake, as he had sometimes done, into well-being and then become invaded by disquiet: the strain of the night before had ceased, just as when he was walking with his friends. It was like a morning in childhood, the room still dark, no need to get up yet. The bell clanged on, it must be for the early communion, eight o’clock, the communion to which his father went.

It was luxurious, lying in the familiar room, half-awake. An idea about his work entered into consciousness. Neutrons packed together. No, the equations wouldn’t fit.

People spoke and wrote, he had sometimes reflected, not now, there in the twilight between sleep and waking, as though their thoughts all came to them in words. It wasn’t so for him, at least not often. Thoughts of sex were not much like sex itself. Thoughts of sex didn’t come to him in words.

He had wanted to take Tess to bed the night before. There was nowhere to take her in this town. They would have to wait until she came to Cambridge. Pictures of the last time. Waiting in bed, watching her undress. Scampering to him, climbing in, pulling the bedclothes round them. Room colder than this. Face smiling beneath his, eyes going unfocused, rapt. Then he didn’t see her face, just the rough sound of panting, joy, release and sigh, joyful sigh.

The first time, he had trembled until the unconscious took control. He had trembled before, the first time with a girl. Tess had taken it easier than he did. Now all that was past. Just the pictures of expectancy, comfort, lying together afterwards looking at the window, arms round her, the feel of cherished unmysterious flesh.

Other kinds of expectancy. He could hear her voice, as they were talking, one of those nights: ‘We mustn’t have false hopes, either of us, must we?’ Direct, honest voice. But he thought later, when anyone talked of not having false hopes, it meant they had them.

He didn’t know. She was more certain than he was.

Sometimes in her absence, he had tried to form the words, so that when they met, he could explain himself to her. The words never came out as they had been formed. Just as, when he made a picture of them next time in bed, it didn’t turn out like that: as though bodies had their own will.

Now, nearer waking, he was forming the words of what he had to tell the others that afternoon. He mightn’t think in words, but he knew that he was articulate, more than most of them. This time, though, it wasn’t just being able to talk, he had to be precise. There mustn’t be any responsibility left in doubt. Perhaps there had been too much left in doubt already.

Later that morning, when the full peal outside was making the windows shiver, he found his mother alone in the drawing-room. That was like other Sundays: she didn’t go with her husband to matins, his second observance of the day. Bifocals on her fine beak of a nose, she was reading a Sunday paper. With a quick snap, as it might be with a vestigial vanity, she had her glasses off. ‘Hallo,’ she said. Her voice was high and friendly, perhaps indistinguishable from what it had been in youth, sounding like a young woman’s greeting a new young man.

When he sat down in an armchair opposite to hers, she said: ‘How did you like last night?’

‘Nice dinner.’

She grinned. It was a curiously urchin-like grin, incongruous on the handsome face, and from his childhood Stephen had always welcomed it.

‘People do talk round the point, sometimes, don’t they?’ she said.

‘I suppose so.’

‘It used to embarrass me a little, once.’

All his life, Stephen had not heard her make a disloyal remark about his father. Maybe this was as near as she could come. Even now, she seemed to correct herself.

‘Of course, it didn’t take much to embarrass me.’ She gazed at him. ‘Do you ever get embarrassed?’ She asked as though it were an interesting clinical point.

‘Not terribly easily, I think.’

‘Lucky,’ said his mother.

With an air that was at the same time social and oddly youthful, she inquired if he would like some coffee. When he said no, she said, not altering her tone of voice: ‘You’re in a bit of a mess, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, a bit.’ He had no idea how much she knew, or what his father had told her, or on what terms the two of them discussed him.

‘I gathered as much.’ After a pause, she went on: ‘I expect you’ll get out of it, though.’

‘I hope so.’

‘You will. You’re pretty capable at getting out of things.’

It sounded bleak and brittle, it seemed all she had to say, and yet Stephen, without knowing why, found it a support. Casually, she was reflecting: ‘You remind me rather of a man I used to know. He was always walking into the most extraordinary situations. Somehow he always managed to pull himself out.’

‘Who was he?’ But Stephen realized that it was useless to ask. She was scrupulous and gallant about referring to men who had courted her. It was only through his father, who was by no means reluctant to admit that he had won in serious competition, that Stephen had caught hints of admirers, of passionate pursuers, in the past.

‘No. You might have heard of him. He’s done very well. I don’t know what’s happened to him now. I should think that he’s all right.’

Then she asked, once more brittle, straight out: ‘Are any of the others in this?’

‘In what?’ He knew well enough.

‘In this mess of yours.’

‘Yes, they are.’

‘You needn’t worry about Tess. She’s strong. She can look after herself.’

Stephen was, not for the first time, surprised by his mother. She talked so little, gossiped with no one: she missed things which anyone round her noticed: phases of absence, then suddenly her eyes swathed through the darkness like a searchlight beam.

‘What about Mark?’

Stephen replied, as candid as she was: ‘Sometimes I worry about him.’

‘Why?’

‘He’s more – fragile than some of us.’

‘You may be right.’

Then her interest faded as though it had been switched off. ‘Your father,’ as she always spoke of Thomas Freer to Stephen, would soon be coming in from service. This was the only day of the week on which he allowed himself a pre-lunch drink and so she ought to have it waiting for him.

As soon as lunch was over, Stephen made a journey which had become a habit: bus to the park corner, along the route where Mark had driven the night before, a walk into the back streets, Kimberley Road, Ladysmith Road, Mafeking Road, names of the imperial past, forgotten now. It was only a couple of miles from the cathedral, but it might have seemed, if Stephen had been visiting there for the first time, a different town. Not that the streets were squalid: the houses were terraced, built in the early 1900s, red brick, with a yard-long strip (in some of which there was grass gleaming) between the front room and the pavement, and sun-blistered railings in between. The streets weren’t so squalid as that in which Neil St John had been born: and the room where he lived was better than anything he had known at home.

It was their usual meeting place. As Stephen entered, he saw it, and didn’t see it, with blank accustomed eyes: just as his nose was accustomed to the smell of food in the little passage outside. Neil’s landlady lived in the two back rooms and let off what would once have been the main bedroom and the sitting-room. Another student occupied the bedroom, and Neil the ground floor sitting-room. It was there that Stephen was now standing.

Outside, the afternoon was dark, one or two people passing by, close to the railings. In the half-light, the room itself stood bare. A camp bed along one wall, a couple of old armchairs, holes worn in the green velvet, padding showing through; several canvas chairs; a sleeping bag propped against one corner. The only decoration on the walls were posters of meetings. On a single shelf stood text books and pamphlets. Anyone searching through them, and knowing a little about Neil, would have found much that he expected, the standard left-wing literature of the period, Marcuse, early Marx: but he would also find some works not so much in fashion, including a collection of Mayakovsky’s poems and a treatise on Sorel.

The solitary sign of self-indulgence anywhere was a record player standing in another corner. For this room, Neil, whose fees at the university were paid, had to give a large slice, over half, of his student grant, which was £370 a year. Some of his protesting colleagues were protesting that this must be increased: as a sign of solidarity he joined in, but to the core he confessed or explained that that was ‘playing at things’ by the side of ‘the real stuff’.

Most of the others were still to come: but already there, sitting on the bed, was Emma Knott. She greeted Stephen with a flashing smile, and said: ‘Well, you were at it last night, weren’t you?’

‘You know about it, of course?’

‘For Christ’s sake!’ she smiled again, this time at Neil. ‘This is a silly bleeding business!’

Stephen had known her, as he had Mark, since they were children. Her father was a surgeon in the town, and a prosperous one. Their parents were all social acquaintances and she, who was up at St Hugh’s, had also been drawn into the core through Tess as catalyst.

Emma was a strong-boned girl with the build of a tennis player, long back, long thighs. Her face, though, might have been an actress’ she had great deep-orbited eyes, big features, the coarse-pored skin which, as with some actresses, made her look more alluring in photographs than close to. Yet most people thought her good-looking and attractive. Most people also thought that she was a rich, spoilt and reckless girl who before long would marry and settle down and become a natural successor to her own mother and Kate Freer. Emma had a clear notion of such thoughts; they added to her scorn, which was considerable, for the class she had been born into. Much more visibly, or rather audibly, than Stephen or Mark, she had cut herself away: she had picked up as much as she could of Neil’s accent, and that wasn’t only because she was sleeping with him, but because it made her feel closer to the place where she wished to be. For her to have sat through last night’s dinner at the Freers’ would have meant self-denial, not to be contemplated except maybe in the way of cover. Even within the core, she was at home, not with her childhood friends, but with Neil – and that had added to his appeal and had driven her towards him – and also with the poorest of them, Kelshall, ‘little Bernie’.

Mark’s car pulled up outside, and in a moment he and Tess came in. Quick unsecretive glance from Tess to Stephen: ‘All right?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He added that nothing had happened that morning, there was no further news.

Over the railings passed a shock of fair hair, and unobtrusively Bernard Kelshall was among them. He was not specially little, though Emma, affectionately, half-baitingly, called him so. He did not look specially Jewish, though everyone there knew that his parents’ name had once been Kornfeld, and that they had come to the town as refugees in the thirties. He had been born and bred there, and was the only person in the room who spoke like a midland native. His hair was as intractable as a Fijian’s, but otherwise his whole appearance and bearing was subdued. Yet, even among the committed, he made an impression of his own: they talked of him as ‘dedicated’. He did much of the staff-work for the core, and had done more political reading than any of them, which didn’t prevent him being top of his year in the economics faculty.

Stephen was waiting for the last arrival. Meanwhile Neil and Emma broke the news to Bernard Kelshall. They had only to give him the first intimations: he nodded: he had understood.

‘Where is he?’ Stephen broke out, looking again at his watch. It had just gone half past two. They made, the whole group, an obsession of punctuality: if you were touching disorder, you had to keep yourself in order, someone had said: but it wasn’t merely the breach of discipline which was fretting Stephen. For the absentee was the one who troubled them most, and who, to Stephen’s mind as well as Neil’s, though for reasons in which there was a shade of difference, should never have been let in.

The man, Lance Forrester, was not more than five minutes late. ‘Sorry,’ he said, but without being bowed down by chagrin. He was wearing a sweater up to his neck, and chestnut hair down to his shoulders: despite the youth-making effect of his hair, his face was adult, seamed, vulpine, and his glance matey and good-humoured.

‘Now we can start,’ said Stephen.

‘It looks to me as though you had already,’ said Lance, subsiding cross-legged on to the floor. Tess and Mark had sat themselves on the bed, and the others, except for Neil, still standing up, brought chairs so as to cut off half the room.