In Their Wisdom Read online

  Swaffield said: ‘I can stand them.’ He reflected, powerful, relaxed, great mouth up-curved. ‘We’ve done very well. Perhaps you and I had better see what’s the best arrangement now.’ He had spoken across the table to Symington, and Jenny missed the point of the remark, though Symington didn’t. She was thinking about time and certainty.

  ‘How long is this business going to take?’ she cried.

  ‘If it comes to an appeal,’ said Symington, partially responding to Swaffield also, ‘we’ll have to reckon on waiting for another twelve months. At least.’

  ‘Good God Almighty,’ she said. ‘Will this thing go on for ever?’

  ‘Almost for ever,’ said Symington with affection. He not only knew that she could stand the truth but in her own fashion had great endurance. Swaffield knew the same but was feeling benevolent that day and so more than usually interfering.

  ‘I’ll stake you, of course, Jenny. But you’re not to run me in for more than an extra thousand or two. For your pocket money.’

  ‘I can’t do anything like that.’ With him she couldn’t manage to be haughty enough.

  ‘Yes, you can. And you can buy yourself a new dress, you need one.’

  Symington was thinking, as they sat over a delectable meal which no one but Swaffield was enjoying, did this man arouse Angst in everyone? Even when he was at his kindest. He was promising to send Jenny a case of champagne and a case of whisky that afternoon, just to keep her going.

  That same afternoon, in the late edition of the evening papers, there was an announcement that Mrs Underwood’s lawyers had already given notice of appeal.

  15

  The case, or some of those most affected by it, moved into a kind of limbo. Not the judge, of course, who sat placidly in the Law Courts trying other cases, and then went home to Highgate without giving a retrospective thought to this one: nor March and Lander, who were earning their big livings and had their customary dinner together at their club once a week with the Massie case compartmented out of mind. But Skelding and his partners on one side, Symington on the other, still had occasional hours in occasional weeks when they were drafting briefs for the appeal – in the stretches of limbo-like time before it could happen, if there is time in limbo and if there was ever going to be an appeal. For that Symington was, while going through the exercise of preparing for it, simultaneously and much more enthusiastically planning to avoid.

  The more Symington studied the record of the case in Bosanquet’s court, the less positive he was about their chances in a higher one. The time might soon be coming to put out the first feelers towards the other side. ‘Leave them guessing,’ said Swaffield, who had performed more negotiations than most men. ‘The more they want to settle the better. They must be more anxious than we are. Let them worry. Above all they mustn’t get the slightest idea of what we’d settle for.’

  Swaffield had respect for Symington, but he wanted another opinion. With a rich man’s superbity, just as he had once told Jenny that Symington’s was ‘the best firm in London’ for their case and just as he might have shouted for ‘the best man in London’ if he had had a twinge in his chest, so he asked for names, the loftiest names possible, and the papers were being read that August by a former Law Officer of the Crown.

  They involved Jenny in none of this, or more exactly didn’t communicate it. ‘She’s a sensible woman,’ said Swaffield with proprietorial approval, and then went on: ‘She’d damned well better be content with what we can get her, she ought to get down on her knees every day of her life.’ He had involved her, however, in another fashion. Either because he couldn’t resist getting some return on the money he was spending on her, or because he equally couldn’t resist having a protégée under his eye, he had asked her to put in half her time at the charity office. Asked her in his ambivalent manner, and she couldn’t refuse.

  To her own surprise – she had not done any executive work, even on operations as modest as these – she liked it and was good at it. Not so much to the surprise of Swaffield. Just as he had the knack of judging professionals such as Symington, so he had with women like this: functional judgement if you like, not Dostoevskian, but useful to him nevertheless. The job was good for her morale, he thought with self-satisfaction. His motives so often were a welter, undisentangleable, incoherent: possibly bringing about a lift in Jenny’s morale might have been mixed among them.

  Waiting for the law to finish with her, waiting for a future which seemed never to arrive, well, she could get used to that, it wasn’t so different from so much of the sostenuto of her life, often she forgot it altogether. The day after Mr Justice Bosanquet had given his verdict, Lorimer had written her a short awkward note, saying that the House would be sitting late three or four nights a week all through July, they were on the Industrial Relations Bill, and it would pass the time and give him some support if she could ‘drop in’ occasionally, that is if she wouldn’t be too bored. He was copying the form which he had heard Clare use to Swaffield. This she did, and sometimes sat through a couple of hours of the debate, her English soul enjoying the flummery, her debunking mind telling her that the first necessity of the parliamentary life must be an inordinate capacity to put up with boredom, with sheer jaw-aching boredom. Lorimer had spoken truer than he knew, but it would have upset him if she told him so.

  Anyway, though he was the most dutiful of men and voted in each division, he didn’t carry duty so far as to listen much in the Chamber. They spent most of those long night sessions in the bar, and there Jenny wasn’t bored at all. Sometimes a well-known face: usually faces not so well known which she came to be familiar with, such as Schiff’s: the curious relaxed climate which seemed to pervade the place, though she couldn’t define it: a fair amount to drink (she reassured herself that Lorimer was getting a day’s extra expenses each week).

  On the other hand, it was Liz, who, from that first blaze of rage or resolution in the court, wouldn’t adjust herself to limbo or let herself enter it. On the instant, she had promised herself that she wouldn’t sit back, she wouldn’t let time run on, she wouldn’t take delay without end. She would force Julian to marry her. It wasn’t to be borne, hanging on for the case to come to a climax, months ahead, longer than that, maybe a year or two. It wasn’t to be borne, a woman’s life was short, his would go on without change, already she looked her age, more than her age (in that her introspection was morbid). She had to make this man marry her.

  That meant some practical steps. It meant, first of all and most important of all, getting hold of some money. Without that, she was sure that she stood no chance. Liz prided herself on her own kind of realism, cutting away the frills, no nonsense or illusion. She would have been grateful if people told her that she thought like a Norman peasant. And yet, some might wonder whether she was as realistic as all that, with her looks and charm, never winning what she most wanted, while she was pursuing an infatuation for a man others despised. And this was a recurrent situation: she had had a long-drawn-out affair, as desperate on her side, with a man who wouldn’t divorce his wife.

  She believed that Julian would have married her if he had come into the Massie money. He had said so, as definitely as he ever said anything, and though he had hypnotised her before now with clouds of tantalising words, she believed that this time he intended it. Further, she believed – and here was her kind of realism, she thought she was seeing him straight – that Julian would marry her if she could bring him money. So it was for her to produce it. She had little of her own, yet. It had been enough for a bachelor woman, since she earned a fair salary in the employment agency where she worked. Although she wasn’t close to her eldest sister they shared a St John’s Wood flat, and that didn’t cost much. All her life she had lived in a condition where, though she might not have money, there was money around. It was time that she did what she hadn’t done before, and talked to her father.

  He had always been an amiable father. When she was a girl she had thought him charming, he was as
easy mannered with his family as with friends, and yet she could scarcely remember talking to him seriously, at least about her own concerns. She had very little idea of how he planned to dispose of the Hillmorton estate. She did know, what Dr Pemberton had discovered a good deal earlier, that he had made over the Suffolk house and land to her eldest sister. That wasn’t a special surprise. Death duties existed to be out-manoeuvred by families like hers. These transfers were played like one of her hands at bridge or perhaps more like solo-whist, for she had heard of people with five times the property of the Hillmortons boasting that they had divested themselves of all of it, and had reached a state of successful misère, sleeping by sufferance under roofs now owned by their sons or grandsons. It didn’t make any difference to them. The Suffolk home might be in her sister’s name, but their mother still lived there, and didn’t appear to be aware of the change.

  Liz knew, or had noticed, one other thing about her father. He had become, the more so as he grew older, curiously stingy to himself. He might stand you an expensive dinner and many drinks, but after he said goodbye he wouldn’t consider indulging himself with a taxi, but stood patiently waiting for a bus to take him home. As for home, he had none in London. He wouldn’t stay at one of his clubs, having presumably decided that their price had gone too high. When he had to remain in London for the mid-week nights, after sitting at the Lords, to the best of Liz’s information he borrowed a bedroom from her youngest sister, married to a young architect, not yet established, living in a small terraced house in the hinterland behind Talgarth Road.

  However, when Liz went to meet him as they had arranged, he received her like one who enjoyed being hospitable, not only to his daughter but to anyone in the neighbourhood.

  ‘My dear girl! How very nice! It’s far too long since I saw you. Have a drink at once. A large gin and tonic,’ he called out. ‘Isn’t that what you like?’

  This took place in the long drawing-room at Brooks’, about five in the afternoon, a humid July afternoon, jar and grind of traffic, smell of petrol, ascending from St James’s Street below. Liz, who had an interest in her heritage, which she disguised by her sharp sarcastic tongue, might have recalled that some of her ancestors must have sat in that room, probably, if they shared the habits of other eminent Whigs, more than a little drunk: but she was too intent on her mission. She had been uneasy on her way there, not entirely easy now. His kind of imperturbability didn’t make others imperturbable. But yes, he was as usual enjoying providing drinks. She hadn’t been alone with him for months. Maybe he looked a little older, cheeks not so pink and full, but no change in manner, none at all.

  ‘Look,’ she said, ‘I want to get married. I want a bit of help.’

  She said it without any lead in, handsome face set, greenish eyes unblinking, fixed on his. There was the faintest shift in his expression. His old colleagues could have told her that his antennae were wary, he didn’t relish being taken by storm.

  ‘Ah well,’ he said. ‘I hope it’s all right. I do hope it’s all right. Still, you’ve always been able to look after yourself, haven’t you?’

  There seemed no answer to that. Then she was staggered. As from a kindly distance, he enquired: ‘Tell me, is the man anyone I know?’

  Eyes snapping, she burst out: ‘You know perfectly well he is!’

  ‘Do remind me of his name.’

  ‘You know it perfectly well. Julian Underwood.’

  ‘Of course, of course.’ After an appearance of meditation he remarked, under a hooded glance:

  ‘So I gather the result of that curious case – you know, that business about a will – must have been something of a disappointment to you.’

  He had heard, the previous autumn, of Julian’s putative legacy. He had been in court, this June, for several of the sessions. He had chatted with Julian. He was one of the most competent of men. He preserved an excellent memory, which he went on to demonstrate. In the presence of this performance Liz was not so much maddened as lost. She felt that she had never known her father. Façade after façade seemed, with the utmost candour, to be stripped away: just to reveal another underneath. With lucidity, with the kind of detachment with which he baffled political acquaintances, he was giving her his opinion of the case. Naturally, he was a complete ignoramus, but on the whole, though he had heard lawyers, good lawyers, hold, rather strongly, to the opposite view, and with a slight margin of doubt himself, he was inclined to agree with the judge.

  Once more his glance flickered towards her.

  ‘Though I dare say you wouldn’t feel the same?’

  His disquisition had taken some time.

  She said: ‘What I feel about that, is neither here nor there.’

  ‘My dear girl, do have another drink.’ His voice, a public speaker’s voice, surprisingly resonant after his modulated intonation, rang through the room. ‘Another large gin and tonic.’ Then: ‘I’m not sure that I took to – Julian’s mother, not all that much.’

  Liz didn’t comment. She was screwing herself up for another attempt at a breakthrough.

  ‘You’ve known him some time, have you?’ her father said.

  ‘You remember. A couple of years.’

  Sharply, flannelling discarded, he asked: ‘What does he do for a living?’

  ‘He doesn’t do anything for a living.’

  Flannelling, amused smile all back again. ‘My dear girl, surely that’s rather – uncontemporary, I should have thought?’

  He supposed that Julian had means of his own. No, said Liz, telling him again what he already knew, but his mother wasn’t poor.

  ‘He seems to be bright enough.’

  ‘He hasn’t done anything with it so far, has he?’ she replied.

  ‘No doubt he’s nice.’

  She gave him a fierce grin. ‘I shouldn’t say that.’

  At that he didn’t smile back, but his interest sounded genuine: ‘How well do you know him, then?’

  ‘I’ve lived with him since soon after I met him.’

  Hillmorton nodded.

  ‘On and off,’ she went on. ‘I’ve had to chase away other women.’

  ‘It’d be worse,’ he said, ‘if you’d had to chase away boys.’ She smiled, her first real smile since they began to talk.

  ‘Women fall for him, as a matter of fact. I don’t imagine you’d understand why.’

  ‘No one ever does. About anyone else. But if you want to marry the man, it might have been a mistake to live with him, you know.’

  ‘I’ve wanted to marry him all along,’ she replied. ‘More so now.’ She added: ‘I love him. I love him very much.’

  Her father said: ‘I see.’

  Between them those last few minutes there had been a thread of understanding. She assumed – why she couldn’t have told, but in this she was right – that he was invincibly acquiescent about anyone’s sexual life. For an instant, the only one in that conversation, she had a flash of disinterested curiosity about his own. About his past, or even his present. There were stories of a long-standing affair, which her mother had put up with for the sake of politics. There were other stories which might not have reached Liz, not so romantic, of casual pick-ups. He hid so much; whatever had happened, he would certainly hide all that. Soon the thread of understanding became frayed. Liz wouldn’t or couldn’t leave him to musing reflections about her love affair. Instead, she started forcing him again.

  ‘It’s about him that I want you to help me,’ she said.

  He seemed to foresee what was coming. Delicately he began to execute the first of his sidesteps.

  ‘If ever I could, my dear girl – but I can’t imagine what use I can be, I really can’t imagine–’ His voice trailed away.

  She said: ‘There’s the matter of money.’

  ‘Money,’ he said, as though that were a word he had scarcely heard before.

  ‘Anything you were going to do for me later. It might make all the difference if you did it now.’

  ‘There are a
certain number of difficulties I won’t bore you with.’ He launched on one of those explanations designed not to explain, and then suddenly became direct again.

  ‘Even if money were forthcoming – I doubt if you could buy him.’

  ‘It’s worth trying.’

  ‘I must say, I doubt if it is.’

  ‘I know him and you don’t.’

  ‘I can’t help thinking, if you could buy him he might not be worth having.’

  ‘I’m the only one who can answer for that.’

  He said: ‘There’s such a thing as masculine pride, you know.’

  She laughed, freshly, not sarcastically.

  ‘He doesn’t need that to get along, I can tell you.’

  ‘Well. He sounds a remarkably lucky man.’

  ‘He’s a very happy one,’ she said. But she wasn’t letting her father get further away. ‘You can see, I wouldn’t ask you for this money unless I wanted it – badly.’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I’m in a curious position financially, I’m a great deal more powerless than one would think. I’ve been making, or at least I’ve started to make, some rather complicated adjustments.’ He was off on another elaborate façade-stripping expedition in which nothing, or only another façade, was revealed. He moved from exaggerated detachment to exaggerated candour and back again. He used a trick, natural to anyone who had lived in politics, of telling her, under a demand for secrecy, something which she was already well aware of. Which was that the family house and land had some time ago been transferred to Georgiana (her eldest sister). He had, also some time ago, explained to them all, he said, that it was necessary to act on the principle of unequal shares. (When had he explained that, she thought. And if he had, it explained nothing at all.) So he felt for the time being unusually powerless.