The attic vibrated with politics, chiefly Nicky’s. He was ‘Committee of a Hundred’ rather than Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. He was also an anarchist. He had not been in on the
beginnings of the ‘Committee of a Hundred’, which were already swallowed in myth after only a few months. (The adults might well have claimed this little public event as support for their contempt for history: but what event does not get swallowed in lies and half-truths within weeks?)
It was debatable whether Nicky was political by temperament: he had been sucked into politics by chance. At a meeting in Trafalgar Square (despising politics, he had gone out of curiosity) he had been standing watching the proceedings with a friend when some fascists had started shouting and scuffling. The police, attracted to Nicky’s tall, lively presence, had taken hold of him, laid him on his back and assaulted him. Six of them had kicked him in the privates, punched him in the kidneys, and then bundled him into a van with his coat pulled down over his head in such a way that he would have suffocated, since he had fainted, if someone hadn’t released him. In the police station he had protested his innocence. He was charged with assaulting the police. He had telephoned Mark, who had telephoned a lawyer, who had given the routine advice to plead guilty, because the magistrate always took the word of the police. Young and full of integrity, as he then was, Nicky had refused, and in the court next morning he had pleaded innocence, while a young policeman whom he had not seen before read a statement that he had been kicked and assaulted by Nicky. The magistrate had fined him fourteen pounds, while remarking that he ‘was a young man with an obvious propensity towards violence’.
This experience had pitchforked him straight into aggressive politics. If he had not been middle-class, and brought up to see policemen as a kind of servant, the incident would have had no effect. He had already been arrested half a dozen times and had done a short spell in prison for’sitting down’ outside an American Air Base.
Francis, an old friend of Nicky’s, was prepared to follow his lead in politics. But his early history made politics for him painfully serious: and it was known in the household that in private, he argued with Nicky, thought his political stand over-simplified, and some of Nicky’s associates frivolous.
The girls were violently for the Committee of a Hundred. As Phoebe said:’ Of course. What else? They’ve got to show how much
they hate me somehow, and unless they become Tories what can they do?’
Gwen and Jill had both been arrested plentifully; but had never been charged with anything serious. Much to their chagrin. They complained it was because of their youth, or because their father was a Member of Parliament. The truth was, probably, their particular brand of good looks, still a plump pink and white charm, deceived policemen, like everyone else, into believing they must be innocent of everything. Discriminated against, they worked extremely hard in groups whose main energies went into insulting Phoebe and her associates: for this new resurgence of the left, like every blossoming of the left before it, ran true to the rule that more time must be spent on fighting allies and comrades than the enemy. Phoebe, five or six years after being a criminally treacherous extremist, whose mail was at least half letters containing filth and threats, now discovered she was a milk and water opportunist and a coward.
At first she was humorous about this; then not so humorous-she went for a holiday to Nanny Butts’. Returning from the holiday, she rang up Martha several times a day to complain about her daughters: she said she had headaches, and nausea and could not sleep. Phoebe continued not to believe in ‘psychology’; she believed in a stiff upper lip. But she was having a breakdown nevertheless.
So was Margaret; but in her case the phrase was never used. As Mark had to explain, the upper classes have always accommodated a wide spectrum of eccentricity.
For a couple of years Margaret’s house had continued a centre of agitation about legalizing homosexuality. Her husband John had not been sent to prison, but a couple of his friends were. He had been, people thought, a non-practising homosexual; but now, perhaps because he discovered so much sympathy for his condition, he had a couple of affairs, and even for a time thought of leaving Margaret.
She did not say what she thought about this. Her house continued full of charming people: she had never had any close friends.
Since one good cause leads to another, the people who began to campaign against capital punishment enlisted her, and soon it seemed as if every time one met Margaret, or went to her house,
there was a new petition to sign, or committee to support. Sometimes she remarked, smiling, that she was an old Tory, she was an old die-hard; she had never seen herself as a crusader for causes. But it was not so much of a joke, after all. Secretly she did not understand how she had ever got herself into this position-she had married John, a pleasantly literary gentleman with a lot of interesting friends and a son with a reputation for being clever, and in no time at all she had become a pillar of progress with her name on a couple of dozen letterheads.
It was Graham’s fault. Fault? Was it that she did not really believe in reforming the law on homosexuality, in abolishing capital punishment-and so on? Well yes, of course she did-though homosexuality had never come her way, or not to challenge her, before John; and while it did seem likely capital punishment was old fashioned, it was not a cause she would have chosen to make a stand about. Well-had anyone forced her to choose it? Had anyone put a pistol to her head? No, of course not, but … Why was it that Graham considered it his duty to broaden the mind of the nation in so many different ways? No, no, there was no reason at
all
why he shouldn’t be a television personality; she was proud that she had welcomed television when so many of her class and kind, let alone all the intellectuals, had despised it. ‘Everybody’ now went on television, and watched it. It was just that-well what was it? Nothing that she could put her finger on, or be logical about. (Why did one have to be logical, consistent?) There was just too much of everything-too much, particularly, of Graham. He was always getting married-or nearly, and changing his mind; getting publicly engaged; announcing new programmes which might or might not take shape; starting a new committee; organizing a petition. Yes, yes, she was very fond of him, she was proud of him. He was a dear sweet boy. He was nearly thirty-five-
should η’t he settle down
?
She wished … she had no idea at all what she wished, or what she regretted. Perhaps she wanted an empty house and a silent telephone and a husband who was not like one of her own guests, an asset at a dinner-table or on the lawn among roses, but otherwise not much seen. By her, at least.
She departed for a long holiday to a small ‘unspoiled’ village on the Costa del Sol where she developed a sympathetic relationship with a fisherman who in the summer took tourists for trips in his
boat. He was about forty-five; he was handsome; he had a wife and a family; she discovered herself madly in love by the symptom that she was feeling that her entire life had been misspent. A long confused letter reached Mark; it was discussed between him and Martha. It sounded as if she wanted to be rescued. By Mark? But Mark was not sympathetic. He was angry; he was critical. Certainly she should never have asked Mark-but then, who should she have asked and what did she want? Should Martha go? But with the young people, particularly Phoebe’s daughters, not to mention Paul, in such a simmering state of emotion, she did not want to go. Who? Had Margaret no friends at all? It seemed not. Eventually Patty Samuels went. Margaret liked Patty; Patty admired Margaret. Patty found Margaret living in a room that cost about five shillings a day in the house of a widow and her married daughter; she was eating her meals at a little restaurant where she got a large meal for half a dozen shillings. The fisherman had gone off for an unexplained trip to Valencia. Margaret babbled a great deal about the simple life, and real values and so on. Patty was sympathetic, and listened for a couple of days. She realized that while Margaret was indeed in a bad way, yet it was the kind of breakdown that could easily not be noticed. Margaret was a bit vague, she rambled rather; she was very dependent, but there was nothing startling to see.
Patty brought her home, and stayed with her for a few weeks, while giving it out that Margaret had caught a ‘flu of some kind in Spain. John Patten again went off to stay with his aged mother. Margaret, who knew that her darling, kind Patty must soon leave, kept visiting the house in Radlett Street, looking for love and the family and simple values.
She said to Patty that she adored her grandchildren; but for various reasons, Paul, and the two girls and Francis were at that stage in their lives when they were least likely to adore her. She kept bribing them to go off on holidays, trips, visits to the theatre; was refused, and so she suffered. She suffered abominably, while Patty staying with her, remained loud, calm, humorous and practical. Margaret was not told that the reason why Mark had so little time to see her, much less even than usual, was that Lynda was ‘being silly’ again and that he was coping with it. without the aid of a nurse.
On the floor below Francis, Paul pursued his lonely course. Now, as always, the two had nothing to say to each other. They had been
brought up together; yet in all those years it was doubtful whether they had spent half a dozen hours in each other’s company for choice. They would sit through meals without noticing each other. If someone came into a room where both of them were, reading, or sitting, it was as if both were alone.
Paul, of course, talked about it, easily, volubly: Francis with difficulty. Paul said Francis was still jealous because he was a cuckoo in the nest. Francis said he didn’t think Paul and he were on the same wavelength. The girls and Nicky discussed it all in depth and from time to time tried to involve the two boys with each other: which meant, inducing Francis to descend a floor to visit Paul. The two, very polite, exuding an embarrassed goodwill, sat as it were on stage, watched by other people for signs of the start of a psychological merger or liaison … The fact is, people are very different from each other. They are much more different from each other than anyone likes to admit. Why is it so hard to admit? It is as if, admitting it, means admitting worse, some failure in humanity itself, the death or the delay of some hope for us all. It was noticeable that on these rare occasions when someone-usually Jill and Gwen-had tried yet again to make friends of Paul and Francis, and failed, that everyone was rather subdued, and tended to apologize profusely for small unimportant faults, while Paul and Francis went out of their way to pass each other bread or salt at the table and Paul made jokes about sibling rivalry. And when Paul acquired Zena, so very much on his wavelength, and was no longer painfully and reproachfully alone, with what relief did everyone on the top floor forget about the need, or the duty, to involve Paul.
He had left school. Three months before his O-levels, having done no work of any sort, he had suddenly begun to work frantically. His teacher had said in front of the whole class that with his, Paul’s, brains, there should be nothing to stop him getting ten good O-levels. Paul had then insisted on taking ten O-levels. He had done fairly well on three, scraped through two, and failed the rest. Creditable on the whole, having done so little work; but then appeared the first evidence (or at least it was the first time they had noticed it) of that pattern which was peculiarly Paul’s and would recur in one form or another. He had been let down, or so he felt. It was not his fault that he had done so badly. Not at all. Receiving the news that he had not got ten first-class O-levels, he
sulked, had a tantrum, and then confronted his teacher with:’ You didn’t keep your promise.’ The sheer lunacy of this caused the teacher to interview Mark. The central fact here was that he, like all teachers in state schools, was so overworked that nothing much could be expected of him. He said:’ He behaves as if I’d made a contract with him-something like that! Perhaps you could throw some light on …’
“He said it! He can’t pretend now he didn’t say it, ’ Paul kept repeating. He would not go back to that school, or to any school. He seemed now to believe that he had only promised to stay on for the extra year past the leaving age of fifteen, because he had been promised ten good O-levels. The school suggested Paul could do with a psychiatrist.
Paul had done with several before, but in small doses. Dr Lamb was once again consulted and Paul was interviewed, not by Dr Lamb himself, now so high in the reaches of his profession that he was not available for bad risks, and Paul was that; but by a smaller reputation. But the opinion was that Paul, like Lynda, was simply not suited for therapy. He lacked the necessary basis for it.
What then was that basis? Translated into the language of ordinary living, they were back where they were before: Paul’s absent sense of right and wrong.
He might not have one, but he certainly had something, perhaps a sense of self-preservation? He was always on the watch for what other people thought of right and wrong: was that not enough? On the whole, it was thought not.
Paul inquired when his therapy was to start; and was told that it wasn’t going to. He said, first:’ You aren’t paying school fees for me. I don’t see why you can’t afford analysis.’ He said, next:’ As far as I can make out, I’m too ill to be treated? How well do I have to be before they take me on?’
It became clear that Paul’s
not
having therapy was going to be felt by him as yet another symptom of his abnormality: Mark therefore arranged for him to have some treatment with a less demanding therapist. Paul went twice, and returned saying she was a silly old twit, and he wasn’t going to go again.
He did nothing for a time; stayed in his rooms, watched the television, read a little, and fought with Martha, trailing her around the house to find opportunities of combat.
They usually occurred over food. He ate a great deal.