Anyone from outside might have thought that George was morbidly preoccupied with money, miserly in the fashion of Mr Pateman. That was dead wrong. No one had minded about it less, or given it away more lavishly. In that storm of protest, it wasn’t money that was making him cry out.
But he had his streak of practicality, and I had to answer on those terms.
“Are you going to be able to cope?” I said.
“Can’t you work it out for yourselves?”
“You must let us help.”
“No. It’s rather too late to impose upon my friends.”
He had spoken with stiff pride. Then, to soften the snub, he gave his curiously sweet and hesitating smile.
Martin half-began a financial question, and let it drop. There was a silence.
“Well,” said George.
None of us spoke.
“Well,” said George again, like one of the students before the Court, as though he were seeing us off at a railway station. Martin and I, used to his habits in days past, realised that he was anxious for us to go. Perhaps he had someone else to see that night. As we stood up, George said, amiably but with relief: “It was very good of you all to come round.”
Margaret kissed him. Martin and I (it wasn’t our usual way, we might have been saying good night in a foreign country) shook him by the hand.
When Martin stopped the car in front of the Gearys’ house, the drawing-room lights, curtains undrawn, shone out into the front garden: there were other luminous rectangles in the houseproud road. Denis Geary met us at the door.
“Here you are! It’s not so late, after all.”
I had rung up from the Assize Hall to say that they weren’t to wait supper for us, we couldn’t tell when we should be home. Alison Geary was hurrying us into the bright warm room, saying that we couldn’t have eaten much. Margaret replied that she was past eating, but, at her ease as she wasn’t at George’s, added that she was pining for a drink. “It’s ready for you,” said Denis, pointing to the sideboard. They had been preparing for us all the evening. Martin, who was ravenous, tucked into a plateful of cold beef: we sat, not at the table, but in easy chairs round the room; outside the French windows, stars sparkled in the cold clear sky. “That’s better,” said Denis to Margaret, who was now starting on some bread and cheese. “You all looked a bit peaked when you came in. We’d been expecting that,” said Alison. Margaret smiled at them, and gave a grateful-sounding sigh.
We hadn’t been sitting there for long before we told the Gearys about George’s decision. Is he really going? Alison wanted to know. Yes, we said, we were certain that he meant it. Margaret added that he wasn’t fit to go off alone, his physical state was worse than any of us imagined. Denis looked at her; “I’ll see if I can check on that,” he said.
“I don’t think he’ll thank you for it,” I told him.
“I tried,” Margaret said.
George was going, we said to Denis. He didn’t intend to listen to anything that got in his way. I thought – but Margaret believed he could be deceiving himself – that he knew he wasn’t a good life.
“So we can’t stop him, you think?” said Denis, frowning, chafing to be practical. Then he added gently, having seen, more continuously than we had, the whole course of George’s existence: “Perhaps it’s all for the best.”
Soon afterwards he said: “Anyway this town isn’t going to be quite the same without him.”
He said it without any expression on his elder statesman’s face. It might have been a platitude. None of us was feeling genial, no one smiled. But Denis, though he was a very kind man, was not without a touch of irony.
He refilled our glasses. He looked across at his wife, as though they were colloguing. Then, in exactly the same tone, firm and sympathetic, in which he had greeted me on the first night of the trial, he spoke to the three of us: “Now then. You’ve got to put all this behind you.”
For an instant, no one answered.
“All of it,” Denis went on. “The whole hideous business you’ve been listening to. You’ve got to forget it. You’ve got to forget it.”
Very quietly, speaking to an old friend whom he respected, Martin said: “I absolutely disagree.”
All of a sudden, in the bright comfortable room, we were back in the argument – no, it wasn’t an argument, it was at once too much at random and too convergent for that, we agreed more than we disagreed, the dialectic existed only below the words – which I had been having with Margaret for a long time past and with Martin on those nights together during the trial.
It was wrong to forget. We had forgotten too much. This was the beginning of illusions. Most of all (this was Martin, speaking straight to Denis Geary) of the liberal illusions.
False hope was no good. False hope, that you hold on to by forgetting things.
The only hope worth having was built on everything you knew, the facts you didn’t like as well as the facts you did. That was a difficult hope. For the social condition, it was the only hope that would give us all a chance. For oneself–
Was anyone tough enough to look at himself, as he really was, without sentimentality or mercy, all the time?
For an instant I thought, though I didn’t report it, of something that had happened to me during the trial. When Kitty Pateman was being cross-examined, when we all might have expected to forget our own egos, I found myself shutting my eyes, flooded with shame. It was entirely trivial. I had suddenly remembered – I had no idea what trigger set it off – an incident when I was about eighteen. My aunt Milly had just been making a teetotal pronouncement, her picture was in the local paper, and I was talking to some friends. One of them suspected that she was a connection of mine: I swore blind that I had never seen her in my life.
It wasn’t the memory itself that rocked me, now that it returned in the Gearys’ sitting-room. Who hasn’t stood stock-still in the street, blinking away some petty shame which has just jabbed back to mind? No, what shook one was the sheer perseverance and invading power of one’s self-regard. Whenever we made attempts to loose ourselves, that confined us. And yet, in brutal terms, it also saved us to survive.
Reason. Why had so much of our time reneged on it? Wasn’t that our characteristic folly, treachery or crime?
Reason was very weak as compared with instinct. Instinct was closer to the aboriginal sea out of which we had all climbed. Reason was a precarious structure. But, if we didn’t use it to understand instinct, then there was no health in us at all.
Margaret said, she had been brought up among people who believed it was easy to be civilised and rational. She had hated it. It made life too hygienic and too thin. But still, she had come to think even that was better than glorifying unreason.
Put reason to sleep, and all the stronger forces were let loose. We had seen that happen in our own lifetimes. In the world: and close to us. We knew, we couldn’t get out of knowing, that it meant a chance of hell.
Glorifying unreason. Wanting to let the instinctual forces loose. Martin said – anyone who did that, either hadn’t much of those forces within himself, or else wanted to use others’ for his own purpose. And that was true of private leaders like George as much as public ones.
(Were others thinking, as I did, of those two women? Was it true of one of them?)
Midnight had passed. Margaret and Alison were trying to look after each other. Margaret knew that the Gearys were not, like the rest of us, buoyed up by the energy of strain. We were feeling tireless, as one does in the crisis of a love affair, ready to walk all night. The Gearys had had nothing to make them tireless: Margaret said it was time to go to bed. But Alison had a sense that we were getting a curious kind of nepenthe, even when we were speaking as harshly as we could. We weren’t being considerate: at times we should have said that we didn’t mind reawakening our own distress or anyone else’s: and yet, it seemed that we were producing the opposite effect. It was like being made hypocrites by accident. Whatever we said, however hard our voices sounded, just by being together we were creating an island of peace.
No, said Alison, he (Denis) didn’t have to go to school tomorrow. She would make us a pot of tea. To herself, she thought it was good for us to go on sitting there.
We shied off tea, which had been offered to us enough that day. Then Denis ordered us to have another drink. Martin refused, saying he had to drive his car back to Cambridge before the morning. Margaret settled down in her chair, wakeful, but all of us quiet by now.
Denis said: “We can only do little things, can’t we? But we must go on doing them. At any rate, I must. There’s no option. I shall have to go on doing the things that come to hand.”
Martin nodded. They spoke about old acquaintances, whom they had known when they were in the same form together. Denis broke off: “Look here, I’m the Martha of this party. Much more than she is.” He put his hand over his wife’s. “There’s a certain amount of debris to be cleared up. You’d better remind me what I ought to do.” A call on George before he left – he was ticking off: “those Patemans”: inquiries about the prisons. That all?
Then, leaning forward, he surprised us – it came out without any lead at all – by asking what was the name of that old man, who, living in riches, said he felt like a beggar holding out his hand for another day of life. Was that going to happen to us all? When did it begin to happen? He was in his early fifties, but, half-smiling, he wanted an answer. I was the oldest there, but I shook my head.
“I’ve got an uncomfortable idea,” said Denis, “that some day it is going to happen to me.”
The Flow Returning
YOU’VE got to forget it, Denis Geary had said, that night in his house after the trial. But, for at least a couple of prosaic reasons, it wouldn’t have been easy, even if we had been different people: one of those reasons was the result of some activities of Denis himself. He had duly paid his call on George Passant, who had mentioned that, once he left the country – which he did within a week – there was no one to visit Cora. Perhaps it might be arranged for me to do so? It was the most off-hand of legacies. I did not hear a word from George direct, although he had passed on a
poste restante
address.
I got in touch with Holloway prison, and was told that Cora was totally uninterested: she was, by her own choice, living in solitary confinement, and would scarcely speak to the doctors or prison officers. A few weeks later, I had a telephone call from the governor. “Now she says that she wouldn’t mind seeing you some day. It won’t be pleasant for you, but I expect you must be prepared for that.”
It was a bright afternoon late in May as I drove through the low indistinguishable North London streets, which after living in the town so long I had never seen: betting shops, little shabby cafés with chalk scrawls on blackboards outside, two-storey terrace after two-storey terrace, then porticoed houses, oddly prosperous, in sight of the pastiche castle itself. In a public garden the candles stood bright on the flowering chestnuts, but when I got out of the car in front of the jail the air blew bitterly cold from the Arctic, the late spring cold that we were getting used to.
As I was signing my name in the visitors’ book, I should have been glad to get as used to prisons, hospitals, any institutions where the claustral dread seized hold of me: even now, I couldn’t get rid of that meaningless anxiety. The corridors, the stone, the smells: the sight of other visitors taken passively off. By a mistake of my own, I was led to the wrong reception room, something like a café, plastic-topped tables with trolleys pushing between them. It was a general visiting day, the tables were already full, I was wondering if I could have picked out prisoners from the relations who came to see them. Some wearing their remand dresses, blue and pink, as Cora had done in the local jail. As I waited, standing in the corner, I noticed one woman chain-smoking, with a packet of cigarettes in front of her. It looked as though she was determined to get through it before the hour was up.
In a few minutes one of the staff had found me.
“Oh no,” she said, with a commanding smile, like a hospital nurse’s, “we couldn’t let her in here. It wouldn’t be safe.”
With anyone inside for her kind of crime, she was explaining, the other prisoners would try to ‘do’ her. It was as Maxwell had said. Cora was making a rational choice in opting for solitary. It showed that she had thought out how to preserve her own life.
“It’s a headache for us,” said the deputy. “And it’s going to be a headache as long as she’s here.”
Each time they took her out for exercise, it meant a security operation; to the same extent, but in exact reverse, as if she were a prisoner about whom plans were being made for an escape. As for herself, she gave no trouble. She didn’t grumble, her cell was immaculate. Apart from what they had on paper, the prison staff knew nothing more about her.
The deputy, whose name was Mrs Bryden, took me to another block and opened the door of a very small room, perhaps ten feet by six: inside were a table and two chairs, the backs of both chairs almost touching the walls, which were papered but had no decorations of any kind. On the table, curiously dominant, the only other object in the room, stood a single ashtray. “You’ve an hour to yourself,” said Mrs Bryden. “Two officers will be waiting in the corridor outside to take her back.”
The door opened again, and, one of those officers on either side of her, Cora stood in the doorway. She was wearing one of her own dresses, one which she had worn on the first day of the trial. She nodded as Mrs Bryden greeted her and said goodbye to me.
As the two of us sat there alone, I offered her a cigarette, grateful right at the beginning – as in a hospital visit – for anything which got some seconds ticked away.
I had to break the silence.
“You know George has gone away?” My voice sounded loud and brusque.
Again she nodded.
While I was thinking of another opening, she said: “I liked George.”