This was the strangest game that time had played with my sister-in-law. It had played a game with her physically, but that I was used to: she had been a thin, active young woman, and then in her thirties became the victim of a pyknic practical joke: so that, although her face kept an avid girlish prettiness, she had, as it were, blown up like a Michelin tyre man. But that was a joke of the flesh, and this was odder. For only a few years before, as she contemplated her son, she was delighted that he seemed “as wild as a hawk”. She had enjoyed the prospect of a son as “dashing” as the young men with whom she had herself racketed round. Now she had it. And she was less comfortable with it than respectable parents like the Getliffes might have been.
She seemed specially horrified about his debts, though, again oddly, she had no idea how big they were.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” I said. “Perhaps I can help.”
“That isn’t necessary.” For the first time since his son was hinted at, Martin spoke.
Irene looked at him: either she did not choose, or did not dare, to talk any further. In a moment, with a bright yelping cry, she announced that she was tired. “You boys can sit up if you want, don’t mind me,” she said, on her way to the door.
Martin was sitting with his shoulders hunched, his fingers laced together on one knee. His scalp showed where the hair was thinning: between us, in the old grate, gleamed one bar of the electric fire. Behind Martin was a bookcase full of bound scientific journals, photographs of teams he had played for in his athletic days: as I glanced round, in the constrained and creaking quiet, on his desk I noticed the big leather-covered tutors’ register which Arthur Brown used to keep.
Then he began to talk, in the tone of a realistic and experienced man, as though we were talking, not having to explain ourselves, about an acquaintance. He interrupted himself, seeming more deliberate, to light a pipe. It was easy to exaggerate these things, wasn’t it? (He might have been echoing my talk with Vicky.) People grew up at different rates, didn’t they? Young men who were sexually mature often weren’t mature in other ways. And young men who were sexually mature found plenty of opportunities to spend their time. “Most of us,” said Martin, in a matter-of-fact, ironic fashion, “would have welcomed a few more such opportunities, wouldn’t we?”
In an aside, he mentioned my first marriage. When I met Sheila, I was nineteen: if I had known more about women – Martin said, with dry intimacy – I should have been spared a lot.
“In his case” (he did not call his son by name), “it’s the other way round.”
He was looking away from me, with his forehead furrowed.
“I don’t know where I made the mistake. I wish I knew where to blame myself.” Quite suddenly his realism had deserted him. His tone had changed. His voice, as a rule easy and deep, had sharpened. If he had sent his son to a different school – they hadn’t been clever at handling him, they had certainly misunderstood him. If he had never started at the university – that was Martin’s fault. It was just the kind of harking back that Martin must have listened to many times in that room: from parents certain that their young man was fine, that circumstances had done all the havoc, or his teachers, or a particular teacher, or their own blindness, lack of sympathy, or bad choice.
“There’s only one rule,” I said, trying to console him. “Whatever you do is wrong.”
“That’s no use. I’ve got to make sure where I’ve made the mistakes – so that I can get him started now.”
Not only his realism had deserted him, so had his irony. That last remark of mine, which he might have thought to himself, listening to parental sorrows, was just a noise in his ears. For neither I nor anyone else could be any good to him. Irene, who was an affectionate mother, worried about her son, but practically, not obsessively; Martin’s love was different in kind. People sometimes thought him a self-contained and self-centred man: but now, more than in sexual love, he was totally committed. This had been so all through his son’s life. It was a devotion at the same time absolutely possessive and absolutely self-abnegating.
It was possible that Martin might not have been so vulnerable if his own life had gone better. He had started with ambitions, and he had got less than he or the rest of us expected. Here he was, as Senior Tutor, dim by his own standards, and that was, in careeristic terms, the end. Martin was a worldly man, and knew that he was grossly undercast. He had seen many men far less able go much further. To an extent, that had made him wish to compensate in the successes of his son. And yet, I thought it might have happened anyway: it was men like himself, stoical and secretive, who were most often swept by this kind of possessive passion.
It was a kind of passion that wasn’t dramatic; to anyone outside the two concerned, it was often invisible, or did not appear like a passion to all: and yet it could be weighted with danger, both for the one who gave the love and for its object. I had seen it in the relation of Katherine Getliffe’s father with his son. It had brought them both suffering, and to the old man worse than that. It was then that I picked up the antique Japanese phrase for obsessive parental love – darkness of the heart. Nowadays the phrase had become too florid for my taste; nevertheless, that night, as I listened to Martin, it might still have had meaning for someone who had known what he now felt.
I had seen this passion in old Mr March. But I had felt it in myself. I had felt it for one person, and – in his detached moments the reflection might strike him as not without its oddity – that was Martin. Sitting there in his study, we were middle-aged men. Although I was nine years the older, in many ways he was the more set. But when we were young, that wasn’t so; I was deprived of the children whom I wanted, and, less free than I had later become, I transferred that parental longing on to him. Once again, it had brought us suffering. It had separated us for a time. It had helped bring about crises and decisions in his career, in which he had made a sacrifice. As he spoke of his son, I didn’t bring back to mind that time long past: yet, for me at least, it hung in the air: I did not need telling, I did not need even to observe, that this parental love can be, at the same moment, both the most selfless and the most selfish of any love one will ever know.
I couldn’t give him any help. In fact, he didn’t want any. This was integrally his own. When he had brushed off my offer of money, he had done it in a way quite unlike him. Usually he was polite and not over-proud. But this was his own, and I didn’t offer money again that night. The only acceptable help was that I might arrange some more introductions for his son.
At last I was able, however, to talk about Vicky: and he replied simply and directly, more so than he had done that night, as though this were a relief or a relaxation. Did he know her?
“Oh yes, she’s been here.”
“What do you think of her?”
“She’s in love with him, of course.”
“What about him?” I asked.
“He’s fond of her. He’s been fond of a good many women. But still – he’s certainly fond of her.”
He was speaking quietly, but with great accuracy. It struck me that he knew his son abnormally well, not only in his nature but in his actions day-to-day. Whatever their struggles or his disappointments, they were closer, much closer, in some disentangleable sense, than most fathers and sons. It struck me – not for the first time – that it took two to make a possessive love.
“She’s expecting him to marry her, you know,” I said.
“I think I realised that.”
“She’s a very good young woman.”
“I agree,” said Martin.
“I’ve got a feeling that, if this goes wrong, it may be serious for her. I’d guess that she’s one of those who doesn’t love easily.”
“I think I’d guess the same.” Martin added, quite gently: “And that’s not a lucky temperament to have, is it?”
“God knows,” I said, “I don’t blame the boy if he doesn’t love her as she loves him.”
“He’s a different character. If he does love her – I can’t say for sure – it’s bound to be in a different way, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” I said, “I don’t blame him if he doesn’t want to be tied.”
“It might be what he needs,” said Martin. “Or it might be a disaster.”
“I tell you, I don’t blame him. But if she goes on expecting him to marry her – and then at the end he disappears – well, it will damage her. And that may be putting it mildly.”
“Yes.”
“She is a good young woman, and she doesn’t deserve that.”
“I hope it doesn’t happen.”
“And yet,” I said, “you don’t care, do you? You don’t really care? So long as he isn’t hurt–”
Martin replied: “I suppose that’s true.” Since we were speaking naturally, face-to-face, a flicker of his sarcasm had revived. “But it isn’t quite fair, is it? One can’t care
in that way
for everyone, now can one? I’m sure you can’t. You wait till your son has a girl who is besotted on him.”
He gave me a friendly, fraternal smile.
“In any case,” he went on, “whatever do you want me to do?”
“No. I don’t think there is anything you could do.”
“I’m certain there isn’t.”
“But if he’s going to drop her in the long run, it would probably be better for her if he did so now.”
“I couldn’t influence him like that,” said Martin. “No one could.” Again he smiled. “Coming from you, it doesn’t make much sense, anyway. I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen to them. You seem to have made up your own mind. But you may be wrong, you know. Haven’t you thought of that?”
THE afternoon was so dark that we had switched on the drawing-room lights. The windows were rattling, the clouds loomed past. It was the middle of June, and Charles was at home for a mid-term holiday. He lay on the sofa, without a coat or tie, long legs at full stretch. Margaret was out having her hair done: I had finished work, and Charles had just mentioned some observation, he told me it was Conrad’s, about luck.
Of course, I was saying. Anyone who had lived at all believed in luck. Anyone who had avoided total failure had to believe in luck: if you didn’t, you were callous or self-satisfied or both. Why, it was luck merely to survive. I didn’t tell him, but if he had been born twenty years earlier, before the antibiotics were discovered, he himself would probably be dead. Dead at the age of three, from the one illness of his childhood, the one recognition symbol which his name evoked in George Passant’s mind.
Charles had set me daydreaming. When I thought of the luck in my own life, it made me giddy. Without great good luck, I might shortly be coming up for retirement in a local government office. No, that wasn’t mock-modest. I had started tough and determined: but I had seen other tough, determined men unable to break loose. Books? I should have tried. Unpublished books? Maybe. By and large, the practical luck had been with me. On the other hand, I might have been unlucky in meeting Sheila. And yet, I should have been certain to waste years of my young manhood in some such passion as that.
Something, perhaps a turn of phrase of Charles’ or a look in his eye, flicked my thoughts on to my brother Martin. He had been perceptibly unlucky: not grotesquely so, but enough to fret him. If I had had ten per cent above the odds in my favour, he had had ten per cent below. Somehow the cards hadn’t fallen right. He had never had the specific gift to be sure of success at physics: unlike Leonard Getliffe, whose teachers were predicting his future when he was fifteen. Martin ought to have made his career in some sort of politics. True, he had renounced his major chance; it seemed then, it still seemed, out of character for him to make that sacrifice, but he had done it. I believed that it was a consolation to him, when he faced ten more dim years in college: he had a feeling of free will.
But still, he had all the gifts for modern politics. You needed more luck in that career, of course, than in science, more even than in the literary life. Nevertheless, if Martin had been a professional politician, I should have backed him to “get office” as the politicians themselves called it. He would have enjoyed it. He would have liked the taste of power. He would have liked, much more than I should, being a dignitary. And yet, I supposed, though I wasn’t sure, that he didn’t repine much: most men who had received less than their due didn’t think about it often, certainly not continuously: life was a bit more merciful than that. There were about ten thousand jobs which really counted in the England of that time. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that you could get rid of the present incumbents, find ten thousand more, and the society would go ticking on with no one (except perhaps the displaced) noting the difference. Martin knew that unheroic truth as well as I knew it. So did Denis Geary and other half-wasted men. It made it easier for them to laugh it off and go on working, run-of-the-mill or not, it didn’t matter.
Charles said: “You remember at Easter, when we came away from your father’s, what I said? I told you, it wasn’t quite what I expected.”
He had a memory like a computer, such as I had had when I was his age. But his conversational openings were not random, he hadn’t introduced the concept of luck for nothing.
“Well?” I said, certain that there was a connection, baffled as to what it was.
“I expected to think that you’d had a bad time–”
“I told you, I had a very happy childhood.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean that. I expected to think that you’d had a bad start.”
“Well, it might have been better, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure.” He was smiling, half-taunting, half-probing.
“That’s what I was thinking when I came away. I was thinking you might have had better luck than I’ve had.”
I was taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you were a hungry boxer. And hungry boxers fight better than well-fed boxers, don’t they?”
However he had picked up that idiom, I didn’t know. In fact, I was put out. I was perfectly prepared to indulge in that kind of reflection on my own account: but it seemed unfair, coming from him.