In Their Wisdom Page 15

  ‘But you must know,’ she interrupted at last, ‘what you are thinking of for me.’

  ‘These things aren’t as straightforward as they might be.’

  ‘You can make it straightforward if you want.’

  ‘Of course, I wish I could.’

  She had never conceived that a man, any man, let alone her father, could be as elusive as this. Julian was as devious as most people, but when he was being devious it was with some satisfaction of his own in view. But all her father’s tactics seemed quite motiveless; it was like being beaten over the head by a very soft pillow. Yet he was imperturbable. It was she who ought to be taking the moral initiative, but mysteriously it had escaped her and slipped away to him.

  The most she could extract was a promise. A promise given with much outgoingness, and accompanied by a reservation given with the same outgoingness. He promised to consult his lawyers and his accountants. They would examine the entire situation of the family money. This should be done at once, and it was all he could guarantee that night.

  He might have been eluding her in the mind, but he didn’t make any excuse to elude her in the flesh. His manners were still impeccable, she thought with frustration. He was prepared to sit in that elegant gambling room as long as she cared to stay, listening politely, amusedly, yes, affectionately. But she could get no further. Not until she said that she had better go did he mention that there was a whip on in the House.

  Having kissed his daughter goodbye, Hillmorton made his way down the street towards the park and Westminster. It had been one of his favourite walks for half a lifetime. The cloud ceiling was very low, it was a heavy London summer night. He wasn’t thinking of Liz, he had the knack of boxing commitments away. It had been a necessity, or at least a help, in his kind of life. Instead, he was thinking, as he walked across the corner of the park, that people talked of the town becoming more dangerous, but in this part of it you were much more likely to be manhandled a hundred years before. That is, if one could believe the literary evidence.

  Detached reflection as usual soothed him. It was pleasant to arrive at the Lords, but also soothing, being given the comfort of a club, an island of peace. Actually, when he found his friends having a drink before dinner, the place wasn’t up to its highest standards of peace. Committee stage on the Industrial Relations Bill, divisions expected until one or two in the morning: tempers nearer the surface than urbane men liked. Among the thoughtful, there were expressions of disquiet. Someone said, did anyone begin to know how to run their kind of industrial society? Certainly not, said Hillmorton, with his elder statesman’s equanimity. As a rule persons engaged in politics, even in senates such as this, didn’t indulge in long views. Yet, someone else was speculating whether other countries, as they got rid of sheer animal need, would run into the trouble this one had.

  There was something stirring at the nerve ends that night, rather too much like pre-war nights or the time of Suez for Hillmorton’s taste. Still, it was pleasant at dinner-time to find Sedgwick and Ryle, pleasanter still to find the long table full, so that they could sit by themselves, close to one of the incongruous tapestries. That night, with a late sitting predictable, the standard cold supper was laid on. Ryle fetched beef and tongue for Sedgwick, and, watching the uncontrollable hands, would have liked to cut it up. As it was, Ryle carefully stopped pouring the wine when Sedgwick’s glass was only half full.

  Their talk would have been disconcerting to enthusiasts on either side, as disconcerting as if Jenny and Mrs Underwood had overheard their counsel conversing in the park. Sedgwick, despite his disease, was attending today as often that summer, in order to walk through the lobbies till midnight: this was as late as his body would bear it. He would vote for the Labour amendments. Old habits, old loyalties, he couldn’t break at his age. ‘That doesn’t mean,’ he said, ‘that this bill is the greatest outrage since the crucifixion. Which is what people on my side appear to be persuading themselves.’

  Hillmorton, more habituated to political emotion than his friend, having spent his life among it, couldn’t resist the oracular occasion. He didn’t recall any parliament, he said, in which either side – it didn’t matter which – had been a hundred per cent set on a course of action without being utterly and absolutely wrong, and inside a remarkably short time demonstrated to be wrong. This bill was a nice example.

  ‘Our chaps really do think that it’s going to produce a new heaven and a new earth. While anyone with the political intelligence of a newt ought to realise it can’t possibly do any good and may do a finite amount of harm. There’s too much innocence knocking about, and that’s more dangerous than wickedness or anything else.’

  This statement of his own seemed to induce in him a subdued elation. The burgundy was rather good, he said, and ordered another bottle. Further, whatever anyone else suggested, he would do a certain amount for his party, he would stay till the end and vote for their ridiculous bill, but listen to a meaningless debate he would not.

  Liz might have found her father in this mood unfamiliar: and maybe just as unfamiliar when a little later he mentioned her own name. The three of them had moved into the bar, in time enough to secure a corner table, and it was there that Sedgwick, who hadn’t met Hillmorton since the finish of the Massie hearing a fortnight before, asked him a question.

  ‘Was it a surprise?’ he said. In fact, he and other acquaintances of Hillmorton’s were displeased, partly because the gossip writers had begun to throw out hints, having acquired suspicions both of the Swaffield connection and the ‘friendship’ of Julian and Liz.

  ‘I suppose it must have been a surprise to some of them,’ said Hillmorton with statuesque calm. ‘It’s always a bit of a surprise to have a few hundred thousand whisked away from you, shouldn’t you say?’

  Then he added: ‘I’m afraid it’s rather upsetting for my daughter Liz. I had a word with her before I came along, as a matter of fact. She’s tied up with the man who was left the money, don’t you know. I must say, I’m beginning not to be specially keen on the sound of him. I’m rather sorry for her.’

  He had spoken as though with off-hand irritation, but there was more feeling than he had shown to Liz herself.

  ‘I’m very sorry for her,’ said Ryle. Suddenly Hillmorton gave him a glance inquisitive, acute, no longer lazy. But soon he reverted to disinterested observation. ‘It’s very curious, you know, how some of the cleverest women are astonishingly bad pickers of men. Far worse than we are, I think, the other way round.’

  The bar filled up, and a group gathered round them. Hillmorton usually collected an audience there and so, among the cultivated, did Sedgwick. Hillmorton was not undisposed to entertain and talked at large, but Sedgwick, long before it was time for him to leave, fell silent, hearing his speech go slurred, not able to trust his tongue and lips. For Ryle, it was sad to watch that classical mind muffled like this. And afterwards Ryle recalled feeling angry out of proportion when, round eleven o’clock, Hillmorton complained of being tired, saying these sittings were harder to get through than they used to be. Healthy men, thought Ryle, oughtn’t to complain like that in the presence of the ill: it wasn’t like Hillmorton, usually sensitive in these matters.

  Yet Ryle, when he recalled that incident, recalled also thinking, not for the first time, how relaxed this minuscule society of theirs still seemed to him. Much more so than any place he had known. Jenny on visits there had had the same impression, though she couldn’t explain it. Ryle could get nearer. Elderly men, of course, were good at making existence tolerable for themselves, but it was not only, or chiefly, that. It was much more that in the whole House ambition, that is vocational ambition or competitiveness, was as good as spent. A few men there had their private games to play, or private aspirations, but there were only two or three dozen out of hundreds who were still professional politicians, working out the chances of jobs and office.

  A good many more had been professional politicians, but that was safely in the past. N
one of them had reached the top places, but the disappointments, like the ambitions, were over. A few felt that they had achieved less than they started out expecting: perhaps Hillmorton had instants naked to himself when he felt that kind of pang. Some hadn’t got what they expected. But many more, humbler and more easily satisfied, believed that they had got more than they expected. The luck had been kind to them, and that helped make them more relaxed and the climate which surrounded them.

  Now the expectations, like the ambitions, disappointments, bits of luck, were over and done with. The expectations, that is, of striving struggling men. Other expectations, though, remained with them – far more actively than they would have guessed when they were young – and wouldn’t, so it seemed, flicker out until they died. Often they would have been hard put to it to recognise what these expectations were, or embarrassed to confess them. With Sedgwick the hopes were limited and clear, just surcease from being crippled. With Ryle, they were clear too, though he would keep them to himself. Hillmorton was not such a candid soul, and sometimes he had visions of the future, his own future, which he wouldn’t admit to his own mind. Yet, though those visions might be inexplicit or even absurd, he wouldn’t live without them.

  The last pair left the House that night as Big Ben was striking two. They smelt the sprinkle of rain, the settled dust: and, as at any other time in their lives, the smell touched them with wistfulness, a kind of remembering, and hope.

  Part Two

  16

  That summer, Liz was discovering for herself what had been written about, a generation or two before – that all resolutions are taken in a mood which will not last. People thought she had a strong will, but to herself it seemed to operate only in intermittences and often left her limp and unavailing. After her father’s magisterial deployment of the intricate defensive, she heard no more from him through the weeks of August, and wasn’t confident enough to ask again. As for telling Julian that he had to marry her – she couldn’t do it now, whatever resolution she had made, any more than in the past.

  She needed support from somewhere, and it was in that state, more or less carelessly, she telephoned James Ryle. She might have said that he seemed warmer and more forthcoming than most of her father’s friends. She didn’t give it any more consideration than that, and asked, could she come and see him, she wanted some advice.

  Ryle, taken by surprise, pleasurable surprise, fixed an appointment for that same night, and sitting in his drawing-room in Whitehall Court became irked, or perhaps apprehensive, when half past five arrived, the minutes ticked by, and the woman hadn’t come.

  A quarter of an hour late she rang the bell, began apologising in her firm and unapologetic fashion: ‘I’m so sorry, Lord Ryle, there wasn’t a cab for miles–’ But then the meeting disintegrated. Though her assurance wasn’t dented, she had entered fast, as though to make amends, and within fractions of a second glissaded on a mat which slipped on the parquet floor. She cannoned off Ryle, who had been greeting her a foot or so away, and then, elegance all gone, singularly clumsy like a child finishing one of its first walks, she stopped herself with both palms pushing against a looking-glass hanging on the wall. From there she gazed back over her shoulder at Ryle with a smile meaningless, abashed, even fatuous, as of someone who had run to catch an underground train and seen the doors closing in her face.

  Ryle gave his loud unrepressed laugh. She said: ‘Oh dear,’ and for once he saw her face not intent, not so good-looking either. Shortly afterwards Ryle’s son Francis called in to take a book, and saw the two of them, Ryle in one armchair, Liz in another, Ryle smiling, Liz concentrating, remarkably like teacher and pupil. Francis, who had never met her, thought she was a decorative woman, and wondered what was happening, particularly when his father appeared both elated and impatient for them to be left alone.

  Actually what was happening was, on the face of it, simple, just an elderly man listening to a young woman’s confidence. She had imagined that she was going to ask him businesslike questions about her father’s money. She started with one or two, dropped them as though that wasn’t anywhere near the point, and fluidly, spontaneously burst into talking of her conflict over Julian. Often she set out to say the same things as she had told her father – and yet it sounded different in kind. She might have been crying or laughing: her eyes snapped, there was a crackle of devilment about her. Ryle got the impression that she didn’t have close women friends. She talked as though this was the first time she had let her splintered temper, her pining, all break loose.

  ‘How do I get out of it?’ and then, almost as her next words: ‘Can you give me one sane reason why he shouldn’t marry me?’ As to the first question, Ryle said he could tell her all the old recipes, don’t see him, don’t hear about him, don’t write, but he had never known anyone act on them. But that was the only piece of sarcasm he felt like making.

  He didn’t want to intrude, he was listening to her story, picking up fragments, hints which tantalised, explicable only if one had installed a microphone for their bedroom talk. Ryle had made his own observations of Julian during the court hearing. Unwillingly he had smiled at his gibes, unable to recall in all his existence having met a man so cool, so uninfluenceable. He had gathered more about him than Hillmorton had, and liked him less. When Hillmorton in the Lords’ Bar had expressed mild concern and Ryle had echoed it – which the other had noticed – his was more than mild. This man was self-absorbed, not affected by others, but constantly aware of his effect on them and good at using it. He was solipsistic, if you like, no feeling except for himself, but nerves responding to the women round him, sensitive to sensations. That was a powerful combination. It was obvious enough that he basked, cool and sultan-like, in domination.

  But Liz was telling Ryle, or not so much telling him as conveying, something different. Her actual words about Julian were very much those she had used to her father. She was honest and direct, not the person to alter what she thought to be true because she was talking to another man. Nevertheless, without realising she changed her tone. With her father, detached, amused by other people’s sexual tastes, she had spoken as though she scarcely liked her man but was simply in the clutch of an obsessive passion. She didn’t know much about Ryle, but somehow she talked to him as though he were a man of feeling who cared what a man and woman felt for each other, as she felt for this one.

  It was part of her honesty and directness that she often misled herself. She was proud of seeing with clear eyes. Not only with her father, but in her own mind, she found words for a cold view of Julian, not only cold but disparaging. Of course he wasn’t to be trusted. Of course he was mercenary beyond any limit. (And yet, saying exactly the same to Ryle, she added that he was also strictly honest with money, never borrowed from anyone and hadn’t taken a penny from her, except perhaps by letting her pay for a taxi or a meal – and though she had produced the clinical statement, by now she was speaking with urgency, begging Ryle to believe.) Of course Julian never did anything he didn’t want to. Of course he wasn’t any good.

  Those were the clinical statements. That was what she thought she felt. It didn’t take a man as alert as James Ryle to learn that she felt something nearer the complete opposite. What she most deeply felt for Julian – against most of her own utterances, and, it is true, against most of the objective evidence – was close to passionate respect.

  As they talked, excitement in the air, talking about emotion inducing its own emotion, Ryle was learning something else about her. She wasn’t much as she appeared. No, that was being too soft-minded. For nearly all her workaday life, she was as she appeared, positive, decisive as her hard clear profile, not diffident about her own authority. She would have made – possibly was, for all Ryle knew – a good business executive. She was a shade sharper and more domineering with him than most women of her age would be with a man of his. Nevertheless there was a fissure. Underneath, in her longings, there was something not so much tender as abject. She was born to b
e a pushover for a man like Julian, and no doubt that was why he had selected her at sight.

  There had been another love affair on the same pattern, she more loving than loved, surrendering from the beginning, the self-chosen victim. Repetitive patterns tell their own story, Ryle had accepted long ago. What you want is what happens to you. Would he have seen this defenceless quality in Liz if he hadn’t also seen that custard pie scene when she slipped on the mat, and then the smile of absurd humiliation, disproportionate to any such occasion, as humiliated as Adam Sedgwick when in disability he butted against a door? Any indication helped, any indication however silly, Ryle thought later, but in time he couldn’t have missed the rift within her. Only a fool trusted his guesses too far, but of that he was moderately sure.

  Talking about emotion induced emotion. There was a charm for Liz in speaking of the man she loved, analysing her love to another man. Her love in its present state might not be bringing her happiness, but talking of it that evening was very near a happiness, as though telling someone what she wanted made it seem that it was about to happen – or in some timeless universe had already happened.

  It was Ryle, not she, who broke the charm. Abruptly, almost brusquely, he said: ‘You came to find out something definite, didn’t you? Didn’t you mention something about your father’s money?’

  She was surprised, disappointed, thwarted at being cut off short. With a frown, she stared across at the seamed expressionless face.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, go on.’

  She collected herself. ‘I should like some idea of how rich my father is. Do you know?’

  Roughness put aside, Ryle had once more taken on his easy, comfortable, avuncular manner.

  ‘He’s never told me. He’s not the most confiding of men.’