I let him in, and took him to the study. Would he have a drink? I hadn’t seen him in full light, I had my back towards him as I heard a sturdy yes. I splashed in the soda, saying that it was too long since we had had an evening together.
Then I sat down opposite him.
“I ought to explain. This isn’t exactly a social visit,” he said.
I began to smile at the formality, so like occasions long ago when he wished to discuss my career and behaved as if there were some mysterious etiquette that he, alone among humankind, had never been properly taught. I looked into his face as he lifted the glass, ice tinkling. He was staring past me; his eyes were unfocused, which was nothing new. His hair bushed out over his ears, in blond and whitening quiffs, uncut, unbrushed. The lines on his forehead, the lines under his eyes, made him appear not so much old as dilapidated: but no more old or dilapidated than when I had last seen him in our traditional pub.
Over the desk, on his right, the window was uncovered, and I caught a glimpse of his great head reflected against the darkness.
It was all familiar, and I went on smiling.
“Well, what’s the agenda?” I asked.
“Something rather unpleasant has happened,” said George.
“What is it?”
“Of course,” said George, “it must be some absurd mistake.”
“What is it?”
“You know who I mean by my niece and the Pateman girl?”
“Yes. “
“They’ve been asking them questions about that boy who disappeared. The one who was done away with.”
For an instant I was immobilised. I was as incapable of action as when I stood at the bedroom window, blinked my eye, and found the black edge still there. That edge: the noise I had just heard, the words: they were all confused.
Without being able to control my thoughts, I stared at George, wishing him out of my sight. I heard my voice, hard and pitiless. Who were “they”? What had really happened?
George, face open but without emotion, said that detectives had been interviewing them: one was a detective-superintendent. “He seems to have been very civil,” said George. Statements had been taken in the Patemans’ house. The young women had been told that they might be questioned again.
“Of course,” said George, “it’s bound to be a mistake. There’s a ridiculous exaggeration somewhere.”
I looked at him.
“There must be,” I said.
“I’m glad you think that,” said George, almost cheerfully.
From the instant I had heard the news, and been frozen, I had taken the worst for granted. With a certainty I didn’t try even to rationalise. Yet here I was, giving George false hope. When, thirty years before, he had faced me with his own trouble – trouble bad enough, though not as unimaginable as this – I had been maddened by his optimism and had tried to destroy it. Here I was doing the opposite. But it was not out of kindness or comradeship. Even less out of gratitude. I couldn’t find a thought for what he had once done for me. Forebodings from the past, linked with this new fact, at the same time incredible and existential, drove out everything else. I wanted not to see him, I wanted to agree with him and have him go away.
I tried to do my duty.
“I suppose,” I said, “I’ve got to ask, but I know it isn’t necessary, you can’t be touched in any way yourself?”
“Well–” George’s tone was matter-of-fact – “they’ve been in on the fringe of our crowd. If anyone wanted to rake up stories of some of the crowd, or me as far as that goes, it might be awkward–”
“No, no, no. Not in this sort of case.” This time my reassurance was honest, impatient.
“That’s what I thought myself.” He spoke amiably but vaguely; he had once been a good lawyer, but now he seemed to have forgotten all his law. He went on: “I ought to have kept more of an eye on them, I grant you that. But the last two or three years, since my health went wrong, I’ve rather gone to pieces.”
He said it with acquiescence, without remorse: as though “going to pieces” had been a vocation in itself.
“What steps have you taken? About those two. What practical steps?”
I heard my own voice hard again.
“Oh, I’ve put them in touch with solicitors, naturally.”
“What solicitors?”
“Eden & Sharples. I didn’t need to look any further.”
Just for a moment, I was touched. Eden & Sharples was the present name of the firm of solicitors where George had been employed, as managing clerk, all his working life. When he was a young man of brilliant promise, they hadn’t been generous to him. Sometimes I used to think that, had they treated him better, his life might have been different. Yet even now, made to retire early, pensioned off, he still thought of the firm with something like reverence. In this crisis, he turned to them as though they were the only solicitors extant. It was misfits like George – it was as true now as when I first met him – who had most faith in institutions.
“Well then,” I said. “There’s nothing else you can do just now, is there?”
That was a question which was meant to sound like leave-taking. I hadn’t offered him another drink: I wanted him to go.
He leaned forward. His eyes, sadder than his voice, managed to converge on mine. “I should like to do something,” he said. “I should like to ask you something.”
“What is it?”
“I told you, I’ve rather gone to pieces. I can’t look after this business. I’m relying on you.”
“I don’t see what I can do.”
“You can make sure – if things get more serious, which is ridiculous, of course – you can make sure that they get the best advice. From the senior branch of the legal profession.” George brought out that bit of solicitor’s venom, just as he used to do as a rebellious young man. But he was more lucid than he seemed. As so often, he both believed and disbelieved in his own optimism. He was anticipating that they would go to trial.
“I can’t interfere. You’ve got to trust the solicitors–”
Once more, George had become lucid. He could admit to himself how the legal processes worked. He said: “I just want to be certain that we’re doing everything possible. I just want to be certain–” he looked at me with resignation – “that I’m leaving it in good hands.”
I had no choice, and in fact I didn’t want any. I said: “All right, I’ll do what I can.”
“That’s very nice of you,” said George.
I had to give him his second drink. He did not say another word about the investigation. For a few minutes he chatted amicably, made his formal enquiry about Charles, and then announced, with his old hopeful secretive restlessness, that he must be off.
When I had seen him to the lift, I went straight into the bedroom, so as to avoid meeting either of the boys. There I sat, neither reading nor thinking, until Margaret returned. She was taking off her hat as she opened the door. At the sight of me she said: “What’s happened?”
I told her, dry and hard.
“This is dreadful.” Still wearing her coat, she had come and put her arms round me.
“I’m sorry for George,” she said.
“I don’t know who I’m sorry for.”
She was listening to each inflexion. Even she could not totally divine why I was so much upset. George was my oldest friend, but she knew that we met seldom and couldn’t really talk. Even so, even if the relation had been closer, George himself was not in danger or involved. It was all at one remove, startling that it should come so near, perhaps–
“You won’t tell the boys tonight, will you?”
“They’ll read it in the papers–”
“Don’t tell them tonight, though.”
She meant, she didn’t want their spirits quenched before tomorrow’s party.
“You’ll find,” I said, “that they can take it. People can take anything. That’s the worst thing about us. Those two will take it. Maurice will take it because he’s naturally good – and Charles because, like us, he isn’t.”
I had spoken roughly, and she frowned. She frowned out of bafflement and concern. Still she could not divine why I was so much upset. Nor could I. I couldn’t have given a reason, either to her or to myself, why this had struck me like another arrest of life. Not so near the physical roots as the blinded eye – but somehow taking hold of more of my whole self, stopping me dead.
Maybe (I tried to explain it as I lay awake, later that night) a physical shock, one could domesticate, it was part of the run of this existence, it wasn’t removed from Margaret and my son, it was in the nature of things. But George’s announcement didn’t happen to one, it didn’t happen even when one heard it and, at the same instant, foresaw what was to come. Nevertheless, I couldn’t reach, any more than Margaret, what I really felt.
Back in our bedroom – hours before the time I lay awake – Margaret was still asking me to keep the news from the boys, at least for a couple of days. Of course I would, I promised. She searched my face, wondering what that would give away. Then I snapped back to this home of ours, and told her she ought to know me better: didn’t she remember times, nearer the bone than this, when I had been able to pretend?
JUST before nine on Christmas Eve, as we sat round waiting, Charles wanted to arrange a sweepstake on the first guest to arrive. Martin, Irene and Pat had been dining with us: Pat, to whom parties were like native air, was making sure that the hired waiters knew their job. Standing in the drawing-room, decorous, empty, expectant, paintings throwing back the light, Margaret, Irene and Martin were taking their first drinks. As for me, I should have to be on my feet for the next few hours: anyway, it was better not to drink that night.
If Charles’ sweep had been arranged, no one would have won it. The bell rang on the stroke of nine: the first guest entered: it was Herbert Getliffe, whom only I knew and whom most of the others had scarcely heard of. He entered, a little dishevelled, his glance at the same time bold and furtive. He was in his mid-seventies by now, years older than his half-brother Francis. When I first entered his chambers (and found myself exploited until I learned the tricks of one of the trickiest of men), most people prophesied that he would be a judge before he finished. Herbert would have prophesied that himself: it was his ambition. But it hadn’t happened. He had, fairly late in life, got on to the snakes instead of the ladders. He might pour out his emotions, but he was pathologically tight with money. That put him on the final snake. For, although it was hushed up, he had been over-ingenious with his income tax returns. After that, no judgeship. He had carried on with his practice until a few years before. He made more money, and, when his wife died, saved it by living in a tiny Kensington flat and inviting himself out to meals with his friends. They did not mind having him, for, though his ambition had failed him, his ebullience hadn’t. As he grew old, most of us – even while we remembered being done down – became fond of him.
With great confidence, he called my wife Marjorie. He seemed under the impression that she was an American. Breathlessly, with extreme gusto, he told her a story of his daughter, who was living “in a place called Philadelphia”. His style of conversation had become more mysteriously allusive: Margaret, who had met him just once before, looked puzzled. Helpfully he explained: “Pa. USA.”
In the morphology of such a party, four people had come in by ten past nine, and then something like fifty in the next few minutes. Expectancy left the rooms, the noise level climbed. I had to walk round, looking after the strangers. An African friend of Maurice’s, lost among the crowd. As I talked about his work, I saw Douglas Osbaldiston, fresh-faced, still young-looking, standing among a group of young women. There were long tables, laid with food and glasses, in each of the bigger rooms: but within half-an-hour a hundred bodies stood round them, more were coming, one had to push one’s way. I couldn’t spend time with my own friends. Lester Ince, who had been drinking before he arrived, introduced me to his new wife, ornamental, a couturier’s triumph. She was full of enthusiasm for any of Lester’s acquaintances, but he was chiefly occupied with hilarity because I was going about with a glass of tomato juice.
In the crowd, the noise, trying to spot the lonely, I put last night’s news out of mind. Yet once – as though it were unconnected – I was thinking, as I introduced Vicky to Charles March, that Christmas Eve was an unlucky night. Why had we fixed on it? There had been one Christmas Eve, at another party, which even now I couldn’t forgive.
I shook hands with Douglas Osbaldiston in the press. Friendly, kind, competent, he asked about an acquaintance: could he help? Was any night a lucky night for Douglas? He was at the top of the Treasury by now, as had been predictable long before. Some of the young people in these rooms thought about him as the high priest – unassuming, yes, but stuffy and complacent – of what they still called “the Establishment”. Early next morning, as on every morning, he would go to his wife’s bedside. The paralysis had, after six years, crept so far that she could not light a cigarette or turn the pages of a book. He had loved her as much as anyone there would ever love.
In the innermost room, one of the opposition front bench, who had attended the scientists’ dinner, was holding court. No, not holding court, for he was as matey and unassuming as Douglas himself. Standing there, listening to the young, chatting, tucking away names in a computer memory.
In another room Monty Cave, who had in July become a Secretary of State, held his own court. It had needed staff-work by Martin, assisted by Pat – who had been amiable to Vicky but became over-conscientious in his party duties – to keep the front benches apart. Not because the two of them were political opponents, but because they were personal enemies. We didn’t want a battle of practised distaste, even though Monty, who was not a favourite with many, would come off worst.
Gilbert Cooke, plethoric, hot-eyed, like a great ship in sail, burst through to me. He was in search of my son Charles, intent on talking about the old school. But when I saw them together, Charles was politely slipping away. Their school was for Gilbert the most delectable of topics of conversation, but Charles did not share that view, especially if there were comely girls close by. For Charles, whatever letter he was waiting for in the mornings, was on the lookout that night. There was a daughter of Charles March’s, shy and pretty, whom he knew I should have liked him to take out. Instead I kept noticing his head close to that of Naomi Rubin, David Rubin’s youngest, who was working in London and who was years older than Charles. She looked bright, nothing like so pretty as the March girl: but she was listening, and I didn’t doubt that he was dissimulating his age.