At the front door he greeted me with his robust, cordial, impersonal shout. Although he had kept the same lodgings for so long, I couldn’t help but notice that those lodgings had changed for the worse. There was a violent, attacking smell of curry percolating the whole house, reaching inside his own sitting-room. Once he had been looked after by a landlady. When she died, her heirs had split up the house into tiny apartments: George had no one to cook a meal for him, and in his sixties was more uncomfortable than as a young man. I glanced round his sitting-room, littered with papers, pipes, ashtrays, undusted, newsprint on the floor. Like my father, he was having to “make do” for himself. Unlike my father, he didn’t produce a vestige of order, but seemed to imbue the derelict room with an air of abandon or even of intent.
Over the mantelpiece stood a steel engraving of the Relief of Ladysmith, which had been there getting on for forty years before. Since his parents died, a few of his personal documents had accrued to him and been hung round the walls: his Senior Oxford certificate, the records of his solicitor’s examinations (showing him always in the highest class), a photograph of himself when he first qualified, and a diploma stating that he had been incorporated as a member of the Independent Order of Rechabites. I knew the Rechabites from my own childhood; they were one of the teetotal movements that sprang up in the nineteenth century, just as the upper fringe of the working class tried to become respectable; my own Aunt Milly had held high office in the organisation, just as she had in any teetotal organisation within her reach. Once, long ago, after a night when George and I had been racketing round the town, we had discovered that each of us had “signed the pledge” before the age of ten. I was as hilarious as he was, and as determined to celebrate with another drink. But, in cold history, the pubs were already shut.
As I sat down, on the other side of the fireplace in which glowed one bar of an electric fire, I looked into his face. The skin under his eyes was dark and corrugated: that had been so for long enough. I couldn’t be sure that there was any change in him at all, any visible change, that is, from the night before Christmas Eve. He said, in a loud but formal tone: “Well, how do you think things are going?”
I answered: “Worse than anyone could have imagined.”
His reply was automatic: “Oh, I’m not entirely prepared to accept that.”
“You must.”
“You can’t expect me to assume that whatever your set of informants have been telling you–”
“George,” I said, “there have been times when I’ve let you comfort yourself. I may have been wrong, I don’t know. Anyway, this time I can’t.”
I told him that I had had an interview with the superintendent. George interrupted, protesting about “these policemen”. But as so often his optimism, and the lack of it, seemed to coexist in the same instant. When I said “You must listen to me”, he fell silent, his eyes blank.
I told him, just as clinically as I had remembered killings in Maxwell’s office, what the police believed the two young women had done. His face was frowning and deliquescent with pain. Physically, he had always been easily moved: he could be upset by the thought of suffering trivial by the side of this.
When I finished (I was as curt as I could be) he said: “Do you believe this too?”
“Yes. “
George gazed at me with a helpless expression, the sound of his breathing heavy, and said, as though it was all he could find to say: “It’s very bad.”
There were no words for me either. But I could not let him slip, as I had once seen him in a disaster of his own in that same room, into the extreme lethargy which was more like a catatonic state.
After a time, I said: “There’s almost nothing that anyone can do.”
“I’m leaving it to you,” he said.
“I can’t do anything.”
“You’re not backing out, are you?”
I did not reply at once. I said: “No. For what it’s worth, I’m not.”
For an instant his face shone with one of his old, expansive smiles. Then he asked: “Will you go and see her? My niece, I mean?”
I said, as gently as I could manage: “I think that’s your job, you know.”
He replied: “I’m afraid I’m not up to it any more.”
Looking at him, I knew that I had no option. This might be a surrender of his, he might, if forced, still be capable of an effort. But I was obliged to do what I had come for. She must be in the local jail, I assumed. George nodded. I wasn’t certain whether any but relatives would be allowed to visit her. If it could be arranged, I would go.
George thanked me, but as though he took it for granted. Ever since he collected his first group of young people round him, ever since he was to them – which included me – the son of the morning in this town, he had been used to a kind of leadership. Even now he felt it natural that anyone who had been close to him should do as he asked.
There was something I wanted to find out. As if casually, I said: “How well do you know her?”
George’s voice was more animated than it had been that afternoon. “Oh, about as well as some of the others on the fringe of our crowd. She was rather interesting at one time, but then she began to slip out of things. And of course there were always a lot of lively people coming on–”
“What is she like?”
George responded with an air of distraction, even irritation, speaking of someone far away: “She didn’t join in much. I suppose she used to listen. I thought she took things in.”
“Is that all?”
“I didn’t notice anything special, if that’s what you mean. Of course, some time or other she took up with the Pateman girl. Some of the young men seemed to like the Pateman girl, I never could see why.”
“George,” I was speaking with full urgency by now, “you must have talked to your niece, you must know more about them than this?”
He said, suddenly violent: “I refuse to take any responsibility for either of them. You know what I’ve told them. I told them what I’ve told everyone else, that they ought to make the best of their lives and not worry about all the neutered rubbish round them who’ve denied whatever feeble bit of instinct they might conceivably have been endowed with. Do you think I cared if they lived together? Not that I knew for certain, but if they did they were just acting according to their nature. And that’s more than you can say for the people you’ve chosen to spend your time among. I suppose you’re trying to put the responsibility on to me. If they’d never been told to make the best of their lives, they’d have been just as safe as everyone else, would they? None of this would ever have happened to them? I won’t accept it for a single instant. It’s sheer brutal hypocritical nonsense. If that’s all you’ve got to say, I’m not prepared to be attacked any more.”
As his voice died down, I replied: “I didn’t say it.”
After his outburst, he sank back, exhausted, drained.
I went on: “But there is something I ought to say. It’s quite practical.”
“What’s that?” he said without interest.
“The police know a good deal about your group. For God’s sake be careful.”
“How have you heard this?” His attention had leapt up: his eyes were cautious and veiled.
“Maxwell told me.”
“What did he say?”
“He only talked vaguely about corrupting the young. But they’ve been watching you.”
“What do they call corrupting the young?”
I said: “Never mind that. For God’s sake don’t give them the slightest chance–”
When I was a young man, I had failed him by not being harsh enough. Now, too late, I meant to be explicit. After this case, the police would have no pity. They were well-informed. Either he ought to break up the group once and for all: or else it had to be kept legally safe. No drugs (not that I had heard any rumour of that). No young girls. No homosexuality.
George gave a dismissive nod. “I’ll see about it.”
“Do you mean that?”
Once more he nodded.
“You’ve got to mean it,” I said.
“I’m sorry if I’ve got people into a mess,” he replied.
It was a response that seemed extraordinary: inadequate, detached, as though he were not at all involved or had no need to look into himself. All along, perhaps, even when I first knew him, he had been alienated (though at that time we didn’t use the word) from the mainstream of living: now he had become totally so. I had to believe, against my will, that nothing could have changed him. It wasn’t just chance, or the accidents of class and time. There were plenty who had lived alongside him, who thought they shared his hopes – like my brother Martin or me, when we were in our teens – who, whatever had happened to us, were not alienated at all. But George had gone straight on, driven by passions that he didn’t understand or alternatively were so pre-eminent that he shrugged off any necessity to understand them. I was not sure, though I guessed, how he had been spending his later years. He was a man of sensual passion. Of that there was no doubt, he was more at its mercy than most men. But equally it was sensual passion more locked within himself, or his imagination, than most men’s. He was in search, not really of partners, but of objects which would set his imagination alight. But that solipsistic imagination (as self-bound as mine when I was lying in the hospital dark) was linked – and that may have been the most singular thing about him – to a peculiarly ardent sexual nature. And so he had finally come to desire young girls, one after another, each of them lasting just as long as they didn’t get in his imagination’s way. It had meant risks. Yet he seemed to be stimulated by the risks themselves. There had been his disaster, where I had been a spectator, of years before. That hadn’t stopped him. There had been, though I didn’t learn the details until after his death, warnings and near-catastrophes since. In secret, after each one, he seemed driven, compelled, or delighted to double his bets.
It was a sexual temperament which only a man in other respects abnormally controlled could have coped with. That he wasn’t, and – so it seemed – in his later life didn’t want to be. In the past I had thought that, despite his gusto and capacity for joy, he too had known remorse and hadn’t cared to look back at the sight of what he had once been. I had thought so during the time, long before (it was strange to recall, after my last meeting with her), when Olive and I were friendly, and she, who gave none of us the benefit of the doubt, jeered at me for giving it to George. I had believed that she didn’t understand faith or aspiration, that she looked at men as strange as George through the wrong end of the telescope. That was true: and yet her view of George wasn’t all that wrong, and mine had turned out a sentimentality. Curiously enough, it would have seemed a sentimentality to George himself. To borrow the phrase he had just employed, he had lived “according to his nature”. For him, that was justification enough. He wasn’t one who felt the obligation to reshape his life.
Of course
he could look back at the sight of what he had once been. If I – because of comradeship or my own moral needs – wished to invest him with the signs of remorse, then that was my misfortune: even if, as I sat with him that afternoon, it meant the ripping away of – what? part of my youth, or experience, or hope?
I still had an answer to get out of him, though part of it had come through what he hadn’t said.
“The legal line, I take it, will be pretty obvious,” I said. “The defence for those two, I mean.”
“I thought you were suggesting that there wasn’t any,” said George, withdrawn again.
“Oh, it’ll all depend on their state of mind, won’t it?”
Intentionally, I said it in a matter-of-fact tone, like one lawyer to another. But George ceased to be lacklustre, he straightened himself, his voice was brisk with action.
“Of course it does!” he cried. “I suppose everyone realises that, you’d better make sure they do.”
I said, it looked as though counsel would have no other choice.
“Of course, they must be mad,” said George.
“You didn’t say so, when I asked you about them, did you?”
I had said that as an aside, and George took no notice. “Of course, they must be mad,” he repeated, with an increase of vigour.
“What makes you think so?”
“That’s the answer,” George shouted.
“Did you ever see any signs in either of them, which make you think so?”
“Damn it, man,” he said, “I’m not a bloody mental doctor.”
“What sort of signs did you see?”
“I tell you, I’m not a mental doctor.”
I asked: “Why do you think they are mad?”
George stared at me, as he used to when he was young, face protesting, defiant, full of hope.
“I’m assuming they’ve done what you say,” he said. “No sane person could have done it. That’s all.”
“Is it as easy as that?”
“Yes,” he cried. “It’s as easy as that. They’re criminal lunatics, that’s what they are. Only lunatics could behave as they did. They’re nothing to do with the rest of us–”
I had to tell him: “The police don’t think so. They think they’re as sane as any of us.”
George cursed the police, and said: “They’re not bloody mental doctors either, are they?”
“I expect,” I said, “that those two are being watched by doctors all the time.”
“Well,” he said, fierce and buoyant, “we’ve got to bring in our own. I can rely on you, can I, that the lawyers get hold of the right people–”
He went on, as though he had realised the truth from the moment I broke the news; the comforting and liberating truth. He was active as I had not seen him for a long time. Happy again, he went on examining me about the defence.
“It stands to reason,” he cried, “they must be as mad as anyone can possibly be.”
Soberly, firmly, he began to talk about the trial. The committal proceedings wouldn’t take long. He wasn’t going to ask me to come. But when it came to the Assizes, George said, he would have to attend himself.
“It won’t be very pleasant, I accept that,” he said.
He asked, with a half-smile: “Can you be there?”
I said, “What use would that be?”
“I should feel better if you were somewhere round, you know,” he said.