The Sleep of Reason (57 page)

More thanks. At last that party moved towards the hearse, and we to our own cars. My niece said to me, through the hair which obscured half her face: “That’s over, isn’t it, Uncle Lewis?” She might have said it by way of comfort. Charles, who was walking with her, flashed me a hard and searching look, as though I had mismanaged things.

WE were all staying at the hotel which Martin had used during the trial. There were too many of us to go to friends: and in fact, we shouldn’t have chosen to. Without a word passed between us, Martin and I hadn’t wanted to see a person we knew on this last family occasion in the town. Let it be as obscure as the old occasions. The local paper had printed a one-inch paragraph about our father’s death, and that was all.

As our party was walking past the reception desk towards the lifts, Martin hung behind.

“Get down before the rest, for a few minutes,” he said to me, very quietly.

“Where?”

“Oh, the old bar.”

It was the bar, aquarium-lit, in which he had spoken to me with pain and ruthlessness in the middle of the trial. I was down a little before him, and when he entered and we looked at each other, I hadn’t forgotten and knew that nor had he. This time the bar was emptier: it was later, the pre-dinner drinkers had sifted away. Just one single acquaintance called out to Martin: “You here again?” Here again, Martin, affably, impersonally, called back.

The alcove, where we had talked before, was vacant. We sat ourselves there, and I asked him what he would drink. No, he said, the drinks were on him. As he carried them to our table, I watched his face, set, controlled: yet somehow, as I had seen once or twice in his life, it was illuminated from within, like one of the turnip heads in which we used to place candles when we were boys.

“I have a bit of news,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Pat is going to get married.”

“Is he, by God?”

Then I asked, who to: but I thought I knew.

“Muriel. Roy Calvert’s Muriel.”

Martin was so happy that I had to be happy for him. I said, using our own cipher, well, Pat might have done worse.

“He might have done worse,” said Martin, all cautiousness gone. It would have seemed strange thirty years before, I said, to think of his son marrying Roy Calvert’s daughter. Actually (though I didn’t bring it back to mind) he and Roy had never been more than acquaintances. If Roy were alive now, he would have been fifty-three.

“It’s hard to imagine him like that, isn’t it?” said Martin.

“Anyway, you’re obviously glad.”

“I’m very glad.”

The engagement would be announced the following Monday, he said. He didn’t want any mention of it at dinner that night.

“Why ever not?”

He shook his head.

“Whatever could be more natural?” I meant, an old man dies, his grandson gets married: after all that we had said, and felt, in this alcove a few weeks before, we were back in the flow of things. It mightn’t be very grand: there was the splendid, of which we had seen a little, there was the hideous, of which we had seen enough: yet this was neither, it was what we lived in, in order to endure.

“I don’t think Irene would like it,” he said.

Well, I said, he knew his wife better than I did. But didn’t he remember her at the Christmas Eve party, shouting out birth, copulation, children, death, as though that was the biography of us all?

“At that party,” Martin broke in, “you knew what we were in for? About the trial?”

“I had an idea.”

“I only realised later that you must have done.”

He went back to talking of Irene.

“She’s more conventional than I am, you know.”

That sounded strange, after the life she had led. But he was certain. She wouldn’t consider it proper to celebrate an engagement on the day that we had buried our father.

“Also,” he added, “I don’t think she’s too happy about the marriage, anyway.”

In that case, I said, she was pretty hard to please. The girl was attractive: she was said to be clever, not surprising for Roy’s daughter: she had a small fortune of her own. They wouldn’t have to support Pat any further, presumably. Martin, with a brotherly grin, said he had thought of that.

“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t get more obstruction from the other side.”

“The young woman,” said Martin, “made up her mind.”

He added: “But still, Irene doesn’t really like it.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t count. It’s going to happen soon.”

“When?”

“Very soon. In about a month.”

“What’s the hurry?”

Martin smiled. After a moment, he said, off-hand: “Oh, the good old-fashioned reason.” His smile spread, masculine, lubricous, paternal. He gazed across the table. “In any case, it’s time there was another generation.”

He explained, he explained with elaborate detail, that they had been planning to marry weeks before she became pregnant – they were already planning it when we sat in the Gearys’ garden and he warned me about Vicky (whose name had not been mentioned in our alcove that night), and some time before that. All the while Pat had been in some sort of conflict with his father, and still so intimate that Martin knew it all. Again, I thought, it takes two to make a possessive love. Pat might be one of the more undesirable sons, but he wanted his father. Whereas, if Martin had had Charles for a son, he would have been spared most of the suffering, and found that the son had slipped away.

That night in the Gearys’ garden, Martin had – in the midst of all that had gone wrong – been sustained by a kind of content. Talking to me in the alcove, the night after the funeral, he felt more than content, he felt sheer simple joy.

“It will be the making of him,” he repeated. No one could have thought Martin a simple man. What he had been saying to me, over the past weeks, wasn’t simple: it wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t leave him much, or me either. He meant it, he continued to believe it, it was what he had to say. Yet that night he was full of joy, because of one of the simplest of all things.

Series in broad chronological ‘story’ order (see Synopses below for ‘Series order’)

Dates given refer to first publication dates

These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as stand-alone novels

Published by House of Stratus

George Passant In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series Lewis Eliot tells the story of George Passant, a Midland solicitor’s managing clerk and idealist who tries to bring freedom to a group of people in the years 1925 to 1933.

The Light & The Dark The Light and the Dark is the second in the Strangers and Brothers series. The story is set in Cambridge, but the plot also moves to Monte Carlo, Berlin and Switzerland. Lewis Eliot narrates the career of a childhood friend. Roy Calvert is a brilliant but controversial linguist who is about to be elected to a fellowship.

Time of Hope The third in the Strangers and Brothers series (although the first in chronological order) and tells the story of Lewis Eliot’s early life. As a child he is faced with his father’s bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds his career at the Bar hindered by a neurotic wife. Separation from her is impossible however.

The Masters The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins with the dying Master of a Cambridge college. His imminent demise causes intense rivalry and jealousy amongst the other fellows. Former friends become enemies as the election looms.

The New Men It is the onset of World War II in the fifth in the Strangers and Brothers series. A group of Cambridge scientists are working on atomic fission. But there are consequences for the men who are affected by it. Hiroshima also causes mixed personal reactions.