The Sleep of Reason (17 page)

My hostess, who was both kindly and no fool, was becoming embarrassed. To ease things over, she said to Olive that I had done a good many things in the time between. “I’ve heard of some of the things you’ve done,” Olive said to me, her face implacable.

To start with, I had thought that she was hating me because I reminded her of a past she wanted to obliterate, in which I had, quite innocently, been involved. But that seemed to be the least of it. For suddenly she began to attack me, and soon to denounce me, for parts of my public life. I had been a man of the left. My “gang”, people like Francis Getliffe and the others (she knew a number of them by name, as though she had been monitoring all we said and wrote) had done their best to bring the country to ruin. We were all guilty, and I was as guilty as any man.

If she had merely become conservative, there would have been nothing astonishing in that. It had happened to half the friends, perhaps more than half, with whom I had knocked about in my youth. But she had become fanatically so. And, for the paradoxical reason that I had lived a good deal among politicians, I was all the worse prepared to cope. In Westminster and Whitehall, in political houses such as Diana Skidmore’s Basset, your opponents didn’t curse you in private. Sometimes, at the time of Munich or Suez, one thought twice about accepting a dinner invitation – but I had never, not once, been blackguarded like this. Except, now I came to think of it, by one of my cousins, who, discovering that I had made a radical statement, told my brother Martin that he had crossed my name out of his family Bible.

There was nothing to do. I caught the eye of Vicky, who was standing not far off, made an excuse and joined her group. Then I moved round the pool, from one cordial person to another, cordial myself. They were drinking, so was I, it was like any party anywhere. Except that, when I next encountered Vicky, I said that I didn’t want to stay too long: as soon as we decently could, I should like to slip away. She was enjoying herself, but she nodded. Before half-past eleven, she was driving back into the town. Over the dark fields, the sky was dark at last.

“That wasn’t a success, was it?” she said.

“Not by the highest standards,” I answered.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry to have dragged you away.” She didn’t get enough treats, I was thinking: but she made the most of any that happened to her. She had been happy by the poolside, as though she were a child, fascinated by her first party. Nevertheless, she had witnessed some of the scene with Olive, and she had come away without a question. As I had told Martin, she was a good girl.

Never mind, she was saying, she would be taking her holiday in September, she would be in London with Pat, there would be plenty of parties. She broke off: “Was she always like that?”

“When she was your age, people might have thought she was a lot like you.”

“Oh, that’s not fair!”

“I was going on to say that they would have been dead wrong. Sometimes she seemed to think about others, but I fancy she was always self-absorbed.”

“Of course,” said Vicky in her level tone, “I suppose I am rather conservative. Most doctors are, you know.”

“But you won’t get conservative like that. If you meet Maurice” – I was choosing someone with whom she was friendly – “in thirty years’ time, you won’t tell him he’s the worst man in the world.”

She chuckled, then said: “Was it nasty?”

“No one likes being hated. I’ve known people who pretended not to care–”

“You do have to put up with some curious things, don’t you?”

She said it in her kind, aseptic fashion, and for the rest of the drive we talked about her father. When we came to the suburbs, she had to stop at a traffic light, behind another car. There was a lamp standard on the pavement, brightening the leaves of the lime tree close beside. Quite suddenly, without warning or cause, I had something like an hallucination. The number plate of the car in front, either to my eyes or in my mind, I could not distinguish whether the transformation was visual or not, was carrying different, fewer figures. NR 8150. Those were the figures in my mind. That was the number of Sheila’s father’s car, when we were twenty. She disliked driving and seldom used it. She had driven me in it only once or twice, and nowhere near this road. The car meant nothing to either of us, and I had not thought of its number in all those years. There it was. Vicky was asking me something, but all I could attend to was that number.

It was a trick of memory that seemed utterly unprovoked. At dinner the taste of claret had brought back an instant’s thought of Cambridge, but that was the kind of sensuous trigger-pressing all of us often know. It was possible that I was hyper-aesthetised to some different form of memory after the confrontation with Olive: but it didn’t strike home like that, the scene with Olive had been in the here-and-now, this was as though time itself had played a trick.

Vicky had put a hand on my arm.

“Are you all right?” she was saying.

“Perfectly.”

I was speaking the truth. I had remembered a number, that was all.

Arrests of life,First and Second

SUMMER, autumn, 1963. It was a placid time for us, more so than for a long time past. My name had gone out of the news: Margaret’s father stayed, by what seemed like one of fate’s perversities, in better health and spirits. The world outside was more placid too. Sometimes we talked of South-East Asia, but without the smell of danger. Even suspicious and experienced men, like Francis Getliffe, were allowing themselves a ration of hope.

We turned inwards to the family – and there Margaret had a little to worry about, nothing dramatic, just a routine worry, as she watched her children’s lives. Maurice had failed in his first year examination: by a concession which in abstract justice should not have been granted, he was being allowed back for his second year. He took it with as little pique as ever. When Charles cursed a piece of work he had brought back for the holidays, Maurice said: “Now you realise that you ought to be stupid, like me.”

Then he had gone off for the whole summer to work as an attendant in a mental hospital. It was not a job many young men would have taken, but he was happy. He had the singular composure which one sometimes meets in the self-abnegating. At night, when we were alone, Margaret often talked about him. Ought he to care so little for himself? Wouldn’t it be better if he had more drive, and yes, a dash of envy? She was worrying, but she felt a twisted joke at her own expense. She had come to admire the selfless virtues: and now with her first-born – whom she loved differently from Charles – she was wishing that, instead of trying to be of some good to the helpless, he would think about his future and buckle down to his books.

Yet, when they were together, he was protective towards her. Just as he was protective towards Vicky, the evening that she and Pat spent with us in the flat. It was late in September, Charles had gone back to school, the two of them came for an early drink and stayed to dinner, Maurice had not yet returned from his hospital.

Pat, who knew well enough that Margaret disapproved of him, began making up to her the moment he came in. I found the spectacle entertaining, partly because I had a soft spot for my nephew, partly because Margaret was not entirely unsusceptible. He entered, put Vicky down in one chair, made Margaret keep her place in another while he took charge of the drinks. It was all brisk, easy and practised: and yet, in the serene evening, the mellow light, there was at once a stir and crackle in the room.

He was a shortish young man, shorter than his father, who was himself inches less tall than Charles or me. He had strong shoulders like his father’s, and similar heavy wrists. His hair curled close to his forehead, he had sharp eyes, a wide melon mouth. No one could have called him handsome, or even impressive. When he made a sidelong remark to Vicky, who didn’t show amusement easily, she was laughing with sheer delight.

I observed them as he bustled round with the whisky and the ice jug. She was elated. As for him, his spirits were usually so high that it would be hard to detect a change. Frequently he called her darling, he said that “we” had been to the theatre last night, that “we” were going to a friend’s studio tomorrow. He was using all the emollients of a love affair. She was looking at no one else in the room: while he was sparking with energy to make Margaret like him.

He was sitting between her and Vicky, and I opposite to them, with my back to the light. Eyes acute, he was searching Margaret’s face to see when he drew a response. Her father? Yes, he seemed a little better, said Margaret. “That’s all you can hope for, isn’t it?” said Pat, quick and surgent. Once, when he was brasher, he would have been asking her to let him call on Austin Davidson: but now Pat not only knew her father’s condition, he knew also that she had been exposed all her life to young painters on the climb. With the same caution, he didn’t refer, or pay attention, to the great Rothko, borrowed from her father, on the wall at their back, which from where I sat beamed swathes of colour into the sunset. Pictures, painting, Pat was shutting away: as he leaned towards her, he was leaving himself out of it. He tried another lead. Maurice? Yes, he knew about the hospital. “I’m sorry he missed the Mays” (he was speaking of the examination). “But still, it doesn’t matter all that much, now does it?”

“It’s a nuisance,” said Margaret.

“Aren’t you being old-fashioned, Aunt Meg?” When I heard him call her that, which no one else ever did, I felt he was getting surer. “You all believe in examinations, like my father, don’t you now?”

“Well, he’s got to get through them – if he’s going to do what he wants.”

“But does he want to? Are you sure he does?”

“Don’t you think he wants to be a doctor?” Margaret was asking a question, a genuine question.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that he does. But I’ll bet you this, he’ll find something, either that or something else, that he really wants to do.”

He looked eagerly at Margaret, and spoke with authority. “I suppose you realise that all the people my age think he’s rather wonderful? I mean, he’s influenced a lot of us. Not only me. You know what I’m like. But if I’d stayed at Cambridge, and it wasn’t a tragedy for anyone that I didn’t, you know, he would have been one of the better things–”

“I know he’s kind–”

“I mean more than that.”

For the moment at least he had melted her. Next day she would have her doubts: she was too self-critical not to: and yet perhaps the effect wouldn’t wear off. I was thinking, you can’t set out to please unless you want to please. He had his skill in finding the vulnerable place, and yet this wasn’t really skill. He couldn’t help finding the way to give her pleasure. Men like Arnold Shaw would view this activity, and the young man himself, with contempt. In most of the moral senses, men like Arnold were beyond comparison more worthy. Nevertheless, they would be despising something they could never do.

I was thinking also, how old should I guess Pat to be, if I didn’t know? Certainly older than he was, older than Vicky: but he had, apart from his mouth, the kind of lined, small-featured face which stays for years in the indeterminate mid-twenties. He was taking two drinks to our one, but there again his physical temperament was odd. He showed the effect of alcohol when he had finished his first glass – and then drank hard, and didn’t show much more effect, for hours to come. He seemed to live, when quite sober, two drinks over par: with alcohol, he climbed rapidly to four over par, and stayed there.

They were talking about doctoring.

“I’ve always thought I should have enjoyed it,” Margaret was saying to Vicky. “I often envy you.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Vicky.

“Oh, you must.”

“No,” Vicky persisted with her stubborn honesty. “I don’t think I had a vocation. It’s a job–”

“It’s a job where you’re doing some good, though.”

“You don’t feel that so much if you’re dealing with outpatients nine to five,” said Vicky. “I might have enjoyed being a children’s doctor. Because they’re going to get better, most of them.”

“Maurice’s father was just that. Is just that. Did you know?” I put in. It was easier for me to say it than for Margaret.

“Yes, I should have liked it too,” Margaret said.

“But you don’t need to be too disappointed if Maurice doesn’t, isn’t that right?” Pat turned to her again. “You’re sure you haven’t been guiding him, without meaning too?”

He told her that might be why Maurice couldn’t – really couldn’t, for all his sweetness and good will – force himself to work. Did Margaret believe it? Perhaps she would have liked to. And, though Pat was continuing to efface himself, he would have liked to believe it too. For in secret, and sometimes not so much in secret, he put the blame for his own academic disasters down to his father’s fault. If Martin hadn’t wanted him to be a scholarly success–

As we sat at the dinner table, Pat continued to talk comfortingly to Margaret. I didn’t interrupt. As Margaret knew, or would remember when the euphoria had dropped, I couldn’t accept those consoling explanations: but I didn’t propose to break the peace of the evening. As for Vicky, it was the peace of the evening that she was basking in. Pat was doing well. He was being listened to. They didn’t go to many dinner parties with middle-aged couples. It was all unexacting and safe. It was like a foretaste of marriage.

Happily, Vicky put in another word about child-doctoring. It had improved, out of comparison, since before the war. Children’s health was better in all classes. It was lucky to have been born in the 1950s. Then she mentioned that people a mile or so from my father’s house would next week be escorting their children back and forth from school. A boy of eight had disappeared a day or two before, there was a wave of anxiety going round. “I hope they find him,” said Vicky.

Margaret remarked that once, when Maurice was a child, she had been beside herself when he was an hour late. Then Pat broke in and told her another story of Maurice at Cambridge.