The Sleep of Reason (3 page)

“It’s a bit slippy in winter, you know. But I get here. I shouldn’t be here now if I didn’t, should I?”

That struck him as the most clinching of retorts. He was delighted with it. It set him off chanting loudly: Anyway – the summer – is – coming – anyway – the – spring – is – here.

Then he seemed to feel that he had certain responsibilities for Charles which he had not discharged. He had given him cakes. Was that enough? My father looked puzzled: then suddenly his face shone with preternatural worldliness.

“Young man,” he said, “I want to give you a piece of advice.”

Charles leaned gravely towards him.

“I expect,” the old man said, “your father gives you some money now and then, doesn’t he?”

Charles misunderstood, and was a shade embarrassed. “I’m quite all right for money, thank you very much, sir.”

“Of course you are! Of course you are! I’m going to give you a piece of advice that I gave your father a long time ago.” Now I myself remembered: he had the memory for detail long past that I had seen before in the very old. “I always tell people,” he said, as though he were daydreaming again, this time of himself as the successful financier, deferred to by less experienced men, “I always tell people that you never ought to go about without a few pound notes sewn in a place where you’re never going to lose it. I told your father a long time ago, and I hope he listened to me, that he ought to have five of his pound notes sewn into the seat of his trousers. Mind you, five pounds doesn’t go as far now as it did then. If I were you, I should get someone to sew fifteen or twenty pounds into the seat of your trousers. I expect you can lay your hands on twenty pound notes, can’t you? Well, you do what I tell you. You never know when they’ll come in useful. You just think of me when you find they’ve got you out of a tight corner.”

Charles, his face controlled, promised that he would.

My father exuded content. Charles and I stretched our legs, getting ready to go. When we were putting on our coats, opening the French window so that the evening air struck cold into the stuffy, odorous little room, I told my father that I would drop in during my next visit to the town.

“Oh, don’t put yourself out for me, Lewis,” he said, as though he quite liked my company but even more preferred not to be disturbed. With his beaming innocent smile he waved us out.

Charles and I didn’t speak until we had emerged from the entry back into the road. There was a light, I noticed, two houses along, in what had been our old “front room”.

It had been raining, the sky was bright again. Charles gave me a curious smile.

“Life goes on,” he said.

I took him the longer way round to the bus stop, past the branch library, past the red-brick church (1900-ish, pitchpine and stained-glass windows, scene both of splendours and miseries for my mother), down the hill to the main road. From the grass in the garden patches there came a fresh, anxiety-lifting, rainwashed smell. We were each of us silent, not uncomfortably so, but still, touched by the afternoon.

After a time Charles said: “It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”

“You mean, he wasn’t?”

“No, I didn’t mean that, quite.”

I asked him another question, but he shook his head. He was preoccupied, just as I had been in the middle of the town, and this time it was he who did not want to be pressed.

On the top of the bus, on the way to the railway station, he made one reference to my father’s practical advice, smiled, and that was all. We chatted on the station, waiting for his train: he was going home alone, since I had an appointment in the town next day. As we were chatting, quite casually, the station’s red brick glaring at us, the sulphurous smoke swirling past, just for once that day, memory, direct memory, gave me its jab. I was standing in that station, years before, going to London, nerves tingling, full of hope.

The train was coming in. Charles’ education had been different from mine, but he was no more inhibited than I was, and we hugged each other in the Russian fashion as we said goodbye.

AFTER leaving my son, I took a taxi to the Vice-Chancellor’s Residence. In my youth, there wouldn’t have been such a place or such a person: but in the ’fifties the old College of Art and Technology, where I had once attended George Passant’s lectures, had been transmogrified into one of the newest crop of universities. In fact, it was for that reason that I made my periodical visits to the town. The new university had adopted – out of an obstinacy that derived entirely from its Head – something like a Scottish constitution, with a small executive Court, consisting of academics, local dignitaries, and a representative elected by the students: since I could, by a certain amount of stately chicanery, be regarded as an old member, they had elected me. I was happy to go there. For years I had been free of official business: this was no tax at all, it did not distract me from my work: occasionally, as in those for the next day, the termly agenda contained a point of interest. But I was happy really because I had reached a stage when the springs of my life were making their own resonances clear, which I could hear, sometimes insistently, not only with my family but with people I had known.

In the April evening, the taxi chugged along in the stream of outbound traffic, past the hedges and gardens of the prosperous suburb, the gravel drives, the comfortable bourgeois houses, the lighted windows. These were houses I had walked by as a boy: but to this day I had not often been inside. I knew much poorer houses, like my father’s, where I had been an hour before: and, because of the way things had gone, I had spent some time in recent years in grander ones. But somehow that specific sector had eluded me, and with it a slice of this comfortable, affluent town.

Was that why, as I stood outside the Residence and saw the bright drawing-room, blinds not drawn, standard light by the window, I felt a pang, as though I were an outsider? It seemed so for an instant: and yet, in cold blood, I should have known it was not true. I was still capable of walking down any street, seeing a lighted window, and feeling that same pang, which was made up of curiosity, envy and desire: in that sense, one doesn’t age: one can still envy a hearth glow, even if one is returning to a happy home: it isn’t a social chance, but something a good deal deeper, that can at untameable moments, make one feel for ever youthful, and, as far as that goes, for ever in the street outside.

I went in, and became, as though a switch had been turned, at home. Vicky Shaw greeted me. Yes, my bag had been taken upstairs. Her father was, as usual, working late. I was to come and have a drink.

Sitting in an armchair in the drawing-room (which was not at all magical, soft-cushioned but with tepid pictures on the walls), I looked at her. Since her mother died, Vicky had been acting as hostess for her father, although she had just qualified as a doctor and had a job at the infirmary. She was just twenty-four, not handsome, her face a shade too equine to be pretty, and yet comely: long, slight: fair hair swept back and knotted. I was very fond of her. She did not make me feel – as on those visits, despite the time-switch on the drive outside, I sometimes did – that I was an ageing man with a public face. And also she had the special radiance, and the special vulnerability, of a young woman for the first time openly in love.

I expected to hear something of that. But she was direct and often astringent; there was business to get through first. She was a devoted daughter, but she thought that her father, as a Vice-Chancellor, was a bit of an ass. His enemies were trying to ease him out – that she knew as well as I did. He was giving them opportunities. Tomorrow’s case would be used against him, unless I could work on him. She didn’t have to tell me about it: I had heard from the appellants themselves. A couple of young men had been found bedding a girl each in a room in one of the hostels. The disciplinary committee, which meant in effect Arnold Shaw himself, had next day sent all four down for good. They had appealed to the Court.

“He may get away with it there,” Vicky said, “but that won’t be the end of it.”

Once again, both of us knew. He put people off. They said that he was a shellback, with no sympathy for the young.

“Of course,” she said, “he was wrong anyway. He ought to have told them to go and do it somewhere else. But he couldn’t say that, you know.”

I found it impossible to keep back a vestigial grin. Arnold Shaw could bring himself to say that about as easily as John Calvin in one of his less libertarian moods.

“Why in God’s name, though,” she said, “didn’t he play it cool?”

Did she have to ask me? I replied.

Reluctantly she smiled. She knew, better than anyone, that he was incorruptible: rigid: what he believed, he believed. If everyone else in the country were converted to sexual freedom, he would stay outside the swim: and be certain that he was right.

She put more whisky into my tumbler. She said: “And yet, you know, he was a very good father to me. Even when I was little. He was always very kind.”

“I shouldn’t have thought you were difficult to bring up,” I told her.

She shook her head. “No. I wasn’t all that disciplined.” She broke off: “Anyway, do your best with him tonight.”

I said she mustn’t bank on anything I could do. With a frown, she replied: “He’s as obstinate as a pig.”

There was nothing else useful to say. So, businesslike, she cut off short, and told me who was coming to dinner. It was a small party. The Hargraves, the Gearys – yes, I had met Hargrave on the Court, I knew the Gearys well – and Leonard Getliffe. As she mentioned the last name, I glanced at her. She had the delicate skin common among her own kind of blonde, and she had flushed down to the neckline.

Leonard Getliffe was the eldest son of my friend Francis, whom I had met almost as soon as I first went to London from this town: ever since, our lives had interweaved. But their connection with the university was no credit to me, only to Arnold Shaw. Since Francis gave up being an influence in Whitehall, at the time of Quaife’s failure and mine, his scientific work had gone better than in his youth, his reputation had grown. And, though probably not as a consequence, he had recently been made a life peer. So Arnold Shaw, whose academic standards were as rigorous as his moral ones (and who, incidentally, was by no means averse to titles), had schemed for him to be the second Chancellor of the University: and for once Arnold had brought something off. He had brought something else off too, more valuable to the place: for he had persuaded Leonard, before he was thirty, to take a professorship. Leonard was, in the jargon of the day, a real flier. He was more gifted than his father: he was, so David Rubin and the others said, one of the best theoretical physicists going. All he needed was a bit of luck, they said, talking of luck exactly as people did in more precarious fields: then they would be tipping him for a Nobel prize. He might be more gifted than his father, but he was just as high-principled. He could do his theoretical work anywhere; why not try to help a new university? So, when Arnold Shaw invited him, he had without fuss left Trinity and come.

Vicky was blushing. She met my glance, and her eyes were blue, candid and distressed. It might have seemed that she was pining for him. In fact the opposite was true. He was eaten up with love for her. It had happened a year before, almost as soon as they met, perhaps on the first day. He was begging her to marry him. Her father passionately wanted the marriage: the Getliffes would have welcomed it. All their children were married by now, except Leonard, their eldest and their particular star. The only person who didn’t want the marriage was Vicky herself. She couldn’t respond. She was a kind girl, but she couldn’t see any way to be kind. Sometimes, when she saw him, she felt – there was no repressing it – plain irritated. Often she felt guilty. People told her this was someone of a quality she would never meet again: they told her she was interfering with his work. She knew it. For a while it had been flattering, but that wore off. Once, when I had been staying in the Residence, she had broken out: “It’s not fair! I look at myself in the glass. What have I got to produce this sort of passion? No, it’s ridiculous.”

She had little conceit. She could have done with more, I thought. She wanted to shrug the responsibility off, and couldn’t. She was honest, and in some ways prosaic. But she didn’t seem prosaic when she talked about the man she loved.

She had fallen in love herself – but after she had met Leonard Getliffe. The man she loved could scarcely have been more different from Leonard. I knew him, I knew him better than she did, or at least in a different fashion, for he was my nephew, Martin’s son.

She wanted to tell me. Yes, she had seen Pat last week. In London. They had gone to – she brought out the name of a Soho restaurant as though it were embossed, just as she brought out the name of Pat. We had all done it, I thought: the facts, the names of love are special facts, special names: it made the air bright, even to hear. But it also made the air uneasy.

After all, I was looking at him with an uncle’s eyes, not with those of an adoring young woman. I thought he was an engaging youth, but I had been astonished when she became enraptured. To begin with, he was only twenty, four years younger than she was. True, he was precocious, and she probably the reverse. Yet I had seen my brother, a steady-natured man, but also a possessive father, trying to cope with that precocity. It had taught my brother what fatherhood could mean. Pat’s name wasn’t even Pat. He had been christened after me, but had renamed himself when he was an adolescent. He had rebelled against his first school, and been lucky to survive a second. Martin had managed to get him a place at our Cambridge college: he had given up after a year and gone to London to paint. How he managed to get support out of Martin or anyone else, I didn’t know: but I thought there weren’t many means that he would consider inappropriate. Had he any talent? Here for once Vicky, in the midst of her delight, became half-lucid. “I do hope,” she said, “that he’s as good as he wants to be. Sometimes I worry because he might get bored with it.”