There were swirls through the rooms as a few people left or others came in late. Caro, who used to be Roger Quaife’s wife, made an entrance with her new husband. It was surprising that she came, for normally she moved entirely in a smart circle with which Margaret and I had only a flickering acquaintance. Her second husband, unlike Roger, came from an ambience as rich and rarefied as her own – though to some that was concealed under the name of Smith. He was cultivated, much more so than Caro, and, of all those I had talked to that night, he was the only one who could identify our paintings.
We were standing in the dining-room, which had at that stage of the party become the central lobby, so congested that I found it hard to direct Smith’s Hanoverian head to a newly-acquired Chinnery, when I heard scraps of a conversation, loud and alcoholic, nearer the middle of the room.
“That’s all we need to say,” Edgar Hankins was declaiming, in the elegiac tone he used for his literary radio talks. His rubbery, blunt-featured face was running with sweat. “That’s all we need to say. Birth, copulation, and death. That’s all there is.”
He was declaiming to, or at least in the company of, Irene. Once, and it had overlapped the first years of her marriage to Martin, she had been in love with him. All that was long since over. She gave a cheerful malicious yelp (was there, out of past history, just the extra edge?), and replied: “‘He talks to me that never had a son’.”
It was true (aside, someone was complaining about quotations from the best authors) that Hankins, who had married after their love affair, had no children. Hankins, with elevated reiteration, answered: “Birth, copulation and death.”
“If you must have it,” cried Irene triumphantly, “birth, copulation, children and death! That’s a bit nearer.”
Hankins went on with his slogan – as though he had reached one of the drinking stages where the truth is ultimately clear and only needs to be pronounced. As I pushed away, seeing someone alone, I heard Irene’s antiphon.
“Birth, copulation, children and death! If anyone leaves out the children, he doesn’t begin to know what it’s all about.”
Quite late, about a quarter to twelve, when the rooms were beginning to thin, Sammikins, in a dinner jacket with a carnation in his buttonhole, walked in. He asked loudly after his sister Caro, who had already left. Their father had died a couple of years before, and Sammikins had come into the title. So he had had to give up his seat in the Commons, which to him, though to no one else, appeared his proper occupation. He told me – or rather he told the room – that he had lost “a packet” at poker an hour or two before. I hadn’t seen him for months: I thought he looked drawn and that the flesh had fallen in below his cheekbones. When I got him to myself, I asked how he was.
“Just a touch of alcoholic fatigue, dear boy,” he said in his brazen voice. But he was quite sober. Apart from me and some of the very young, he seemed the only person present who had not had a drink that night.
Many people in the swirl were well and happy. Some, I knew, were heartsick. With Douglas, from a cause that couldn’t be cured. Others, like Vicky, who couldn’t restrain herself from begging ten minutes alone with Pat, might some day look on at this kind of party, just as the content now looked at her. Leonard Getliffe had been and gone. There must have been others there, not only among the young, who – without the rest of us knowing – were putting a face on things. It was part of the flux. Just as it was part of the flux that, in the public eye, some were having the luck and some the opposite. Douglas, in spite of his organic grief, had reached the peak in his job. The master politician was confident that, before this time next year, he would have reached the peak in his. An American playwright, who had been modestly drinking in a corner, had just had a spectacular success. And there was another success, the most bizarre of all. Gilbert Cooke, who had been fortunate to be kept in the civil service after the war, had managed to become deputy head of one of the security branches. It couldn’t have been a more esoteric triumph: except to Douglas, one dared not mention the name of the post, much less of its occupant. I had not the slightest conception of how Gilbert had made it. For him, who was not able even to suggest that he had been promoted, it was his crowning glory.
Whereas Herbert Getliffe was not the only one for whom the snakes had been stronger than the ladders. Edgar Hankins’ brand of literary criticism, which had been rooted in the twenties, had gone out of fashion. He could still earn a living, one saw his name each week, he still wrote with elegiac eloquence: but the younger academics sneered at him, and in the weeklies he was being referred to as though he were a dead Georgian poet. There was another turn-up for the book (Sammikins, in another context, had just been blaring out those words), the most unjust of all – as though anything could happen either way. Walter Luke had stepped in for half-an-hour, grizzled, crisp. Yes, he had got honours, but what did they mean? Apart from Leonard Getliffe, he had a greater talent than anyone there. But for years past he had thrown up everything to lead the project on plasma physics. Now, so all the scientists said, it was certain that the problem would not be solved for a generation. Walter Luke knew it, and knew – making jaunty cracks at his own expense – that he had wasted his creative life.
At midnight, as I was saying some goodbyes at the hall door, another guest, the last of all, emerged from the lift. It was Ronald Porson. He hadn’t been invited by me – but he was one of those, living alone in bedsitters in the neighbourhood, whom Maurice and the local parson went to visit. The parson had been at the party, but had left some time before to celebrate Christmas mass. I guessed, from the first sight, that I should need some help with Porson, but Maurice was nowhere near.
He came lurching up. In the passage light there was the gleam of an MCC tie.
“Good evening, Lewis,” he said in a domineering tone. I asked him to come in. As we walked into the dining-room, he said: “I was told you had a champagne party on.”
Not quite, I said. But there was the bar over there –
“I insist,” said Porson, “I was told it was a champagne party.”
As a matter of fact, I said, there were lots of other liquids, but not champagne.
“I insist,” began Porson, and I told him that, if he wanted champagne, I would find a bottle. He had come to pick a quarrel: I didn’t mind his doing so with me, but there were others he might upset. Immediately he refused champagne, and demanded gin.
“I don’t like large parties,” said Porson, looking round the room.
“Can’t be helped,” I replied.
He took a gulp. “You’ve got too many Jews here,” he announced.
“Be careful.”
“Why should I be?”
Martin, who had been watching, whispered, “You may need a strong man or two.” He beckoned Sammikins, and they both stood near. Porson was in his seventies, but he could be violent. None of us, not even the clergyman, knew how he survived. He came from a professional family; he had eked out his bit of capital, but it had gone long since. He had once been convicted of importuning. But all that happened to him made him fight off pity and become either aggressive or patronising or both.
“Who is he?” He pointed to Sammikins.
I said, Mr Porson, Lord Edgeworth.
“Why don’t you do something about it?” Porson asked him.
“What are you talking about?”
“Why don’t you do something about this country? That’s what you’re supposed to sit there for, isn’t it?” Porson put out his underlip. “I’ve got no use for the lot of you.”
“You’d better calm down,” said Sammikins, getting hot-eyed himself.
“Why the hell should I? I had an invitation, didn’t I? I suppose you had an invitation–”
Then Maurice came up, and greeted him amicably. “Hallo, young man,” said Porson.
“I expected you’d be in church,” said Maurice.
“Well, I thought about it–”
“You promised Godfrey” (the parson) “you would, didn’t you?”
“To tell you the bloody truth,” said Porson, “it’s a bit too spike for me.” He began, self-propelled onto another grievance, on what “they” were doing to the Church of England, but Maurice (the other’s rage dripped off him), said he would drive him round, they would still arrive in time for the Christmas greetings. Gentle, unworried, Maurice led him out: although the last I saw, looking through the hall towards the lift, were Porson’s arms raised above his head, as though he were inspired into a final denunciation of the whole house.
About an hour later, the crowd had gone, Pat and the waiters had cleared the glasses from the drawing-room, the windows were open to the cold air. Again in the morphology of parties, there was still the last residue remaining, not only remaining but settling down. Edgar Hankins reposed on cushions on the drawing-room floor: so did the playwright: Margaret and I sat back in our habitual chairs. Martin and Irene, since they were staying with us, remained too. Their daughter had gone to bed, Pat had disappeared, but Charles wanted to look as though the night were just beginning. Also fixtures, unpredictable fixtures, were Gilbert and Betty Cooke.
Martin, cheerful, said to me: “Look, you’re about eighteen drinks behind the rest of us. Won’t you have one now?”
I hadn’t been able to tell him about George Passant’s news. It would have been a relief to do so. But now I was tired, sedated by the to-and-fro of people, not caring: yes, I said, I might as well have a drink. When he brought it to me, it was very strong. That was deliberate, for Martin was a vigilant man.
Someone cried “Happy Christmas!”
From the floor Edgar Hankins, who was far gone, raised a dormouse-like head.
“Not the English greeting,” he muttered, fluffing the words.
“What’s the matter?” said Irene.
“Not Happy Christmas. Insipid modernism. Vulgar. Genteel taste. Merry Christmas – that’s the proper way. Merry Christmas.”
Hankins subsided. Gilbert Cooke, with Charles sitting beside him, could at last indulge his insatiable passion for talking about their school. Charles wanted to hold inquiries about people at the party, but was trapped.
For a few minutes Betty and I were in conversation, quietly, with talk all round us. We were fond of each other, we had been for years. In bad times for us both, we had tried to help each other. Her love affairs had gone wrong: she was diffident but passionate, she hadn’t the nerve to grab. We had thought, certainly I had, that she deserved a better man than Gilbert, or at least a different one. Yet somehow the marriage had worked.
That night, as we whispered, she was watching me with her acute, splendid eyes, the feature which, more in middle age than youth, gave her a touch of beauty.
“You’ve had enough,” she said.
I protested.
“Now, now, now,” she said. “I used to notice one or two things, didn’t I?”
I had to give a smile.
“I’ll get rid of them,” she said, glancing round the room. It was the sort of practical good turn which, even in her bleakest times, she had often done for me.
Next morning I woke up early. Through the window came the sound, very faint, of church bells. I stretched myself, feeling well, with the vague sense, perhaps some shadow of a memory from childhood, of a pleasing day ahead. Then, edging into consciousness, suddenly shutting out all else – as sharp, as absolute as when, a few weeks before, I had awakened in well-being and then seen the veil over my eye – was the brute fact. There was nothing to keep away or soften what George had told me; and what I felt as I listened, I felt waking up that morning, as though the passage of hours hadn’t happened, or couldn’t do its work.
Questions Without Answers
A milky blue sky, a bland and sunny afternoon, very mild for the second week in January. There was a blazing fire in the Residence drawing-room, and I was sitting on the window seat. Neither Vicky nor Arnold Shaw had been in the house when I arrived an hour before, but all the matter-of-fact comforts had been arranged, and, looking out at the bright daylight, I did not want to leave them. In fact, I had an appointment with Eden & Sharples, George’s old firm, at half past three.
My old colleagues who had to live the disciplined official life had taught me, not that I was good at it, to cut off my thoughts. Douglas Osbaldiston went each morning to see the wife he loved, able to move only her lips and eyes: he arrived at the Treasury as immersed in the day’s timetable as when he was happy. At times it was better to think of the timetable. I was to call on my father that night. That would be no tax: I had received a letter from him just after Christmas (he had written to me not more than half-a-dozen times in my whole life) saying that he would like to see me.
I had one more thing to do before I went to the solicitors. As soon as the young women were charged, which happened on the last day of December, I had telephoned George, telling him that I would keep my promise, but that in return I needed to know about his health. It sounded harsh, or even irrelevant: George was angry and then evasive: I insisted. I couldn’t explain, but I had to know what I was taking on, and where I could draw the limits: how much responsibility was he fit for himself?
So, in the hall at the Residence, I did some more telephoning. George had at last given me his doctor’s name. He had also undertaken to tell the doctor that I was authorised to enquire.
Over the telephone I heard a jolly, lubricated, courteous voice. Yes, Passant was a patient of his. Yes, he knew about me, of course, but he didn’t remember Passant mentioning my name. I said (George, whom I shouldn’t see till next day, had either forgotten or been deceitful) that I was a very old friend.
“Well, anyway, I’m glad to talk to you.” The voice was forthcoming, relaxed. “He hasn’t any close relations, has he?”
I said that he had two sisters alive, but, so far as I knew, saw nothing of them.
“He’s not as well as he ought to be, you know.”
I asked what was the matter.