In Their Wisdom Read online

  ‘Haven’t you any idea?’

  ‘I can only guess.’

  ‘Then please guess.’

  That was her peremptory tone. Ryle said that he expected a good deal of the estate was in land. Land had appreciated wildly, but this was Barmecide money. Presumably Hillmorton wouldn’t sell it. Still, if one assumed that his grandfather was well-to-do at the turn of the century, which was almost certain, it was difficult to imagine him being worth less than a couple of hundred thousand in 1900, probably twice as much – then it would have taken consummate mis-management not to be many times richer by now.

  ‘You can work it out for yourself,’ said Ryle.

  That was near enough to Liz’s own estimate.

  ‘Mind you,’ said Ryle, ‘he might possess in theory several million pounds, but he wouldn’t have much of that as disposable cash.’

  ‘But he could afford to detach a slice of it in my direction. He needn’t wait till it’s too late.’

  Liz put in another sharp question. Had Ryle any notion of how her father was leaving his money? None at all.

  ‘You really haven’t heard anything?’

  ‘I said before,’ Ryle replied, ‘he’s not the most confiding of men, now is he?’

  Liz, picking up her gloves, said: ‘I’ve been taking too much of your time, Lord Ryle. Thank you for putting up with me.’

  She hadn’t recovered from being cut off short. She had the ratty air of one who felt she had outstayed her welcome. She gave him a firm, commanding smile. It might have belonged to a different face from the abject one which had moved him an hour and a half before.

  After the hall door had closed behind her Ryle walked across the room, gazed with blank eyes to the lights across the river, and then slumped down on the sofa. It was a let-down, now that she had gone. It had been an impulse – unpremeditated, leaping out of caution – to break it up. They were running into danger. Not for her, she was in enough danger of her own. But for him. It was an idiot’s trick, letting your imagination crystallise over a woman totally involved with another man.

  Yes, attending the court hadn’t been just an elderly acquaintance giving her support. He had thought of her, not trying to interdict himself, in her absence, and that was an idiot’s trick too. Yet for a while, before the thoughts seeped up too often, it had been a pleasure, getting on towards a joy, to recognise the springs of feeling. They could still transform the day. Hillmorton, who was not uninterested, had noticed that something was happening: that was the meaning of his glance during the late night sitting.

  In the let-down Ryle was taking a kind of comfort. This was a classical trap, a touch of comedy for anyone watching from outside. Let the feeling go on crystallising, and there came a point of no return. One didn’t learn much from one’s experience, but one learned a little. He was warned in time, he was managing to stop it. Otherwise he would be in a state of hopeless love, so ridiculous that he couldn’t even admit it, more ridiculous than being hopelessly in love when young.

  He might be congratulating himself too early. When a man has told himself that he has escaped the danger, the danger might already have gripped him too tight to escape at all. That thought didn’t cross Ryle’s mind, or was kept out. He had some faith in his own resources. He was practical, he had an active temperament. He would search round among women who used to be fond of him. That might not satisfy his soul, but it could take away one part of the tension. He ought to have done it before, then he wouldn’t have been so vulnerable.

  It would have been no different if Liz hadn’t been totally wrapped up elsewhere. She would have been much too young, no future for her, not much for him. Had he, without accepting it, been already thinking of her, when he was brooding on women too young for him in this room the autumn before? She wasn’t even really in his taste. Too sharp, too narrow, not free enough. He hadn’t been meeting many women, it was a chance and a pity that she had come along. She wouldn’t have suited him, nor would he have been much good to her.

  In all that he was probably right. There was another reflection which wouldn’t have consoled him. The chances of possible partners whom one met produced a sense of fatality: so ought the chances of possible partners whom one didn’t meet. The division bell had rung just as Ryle was about to be introduced to Jenny Rastall. As it happened, and it was pure chance, they didn’t speak to each other that night, and were not to meet again until it was too late, though they would see each other across a room.

  It was possible that they were, as Ryle’s old mother would have said, made for each other. No one could predict that for certain, there was no one alive who knew them both well, and there was only one test, which they alone could have proved. From their habits, affections, tastes and natures, though, it seems more likely than not that they could have fitted one another: certainly more completely than with anyone they actually found. Which, in his mood that evening Ryle, not a specially sardonic man, would have considered not a specially good joke.

  17

  It was now early October, and Reginald Swaffield was giving one of his dinner parties. He was in his most expansive – his enemies would have said inflated – form. Wearing a purple smoking jacket, he stood in his morning room, which opened off the hall in Hill Street, and gave his own kind of welcome to his guests, barking at them with a mixture of interferingness and blarney, the proportion blended according to his intentions on the guest.

  Since Parliament wasn’t yet sitting, a Cabinet Minister called Haydon-Smith was able to attend: nothing surprising in that, Cabinet Ministers were used to accepting invitations from tycoons. He and his wife were received with a fairly high proportion of blarney, though Swaffield had been known to express judgements on politicians in general which were robust but not over-enthusiastic. One of the top Treasury civil servants, Sir Ernest Packe, got perceptibly more blarney, young and unobtrusive as he was. The Symingtons, being old acquaintances and protégés, got almost none, but Swaffield was immediately giving advice and instructions about Alison’s pregnancy. That debate had at last been settled, and, both of them looking more sumptuous than anyone else in the room, she was three months gone. Jenny, bringing Lord Lorimer with her according to orders, got nothing but a pat and a conspiratorial leer in the direction of her partner. Jenny hadn’t been astonished that Swaffield’s intelligence service had come up with the name of Lorimer. It was like being on the edge of an enormous spider’s web, she grumbled to herself, but the grumble was nominal by now. Sooner than one realised, one ceased to resist.

  They stood round in the morning room, furnished like the great drawing-room above, according to Swaffield’s conception of what a beautiful room should be. They were drinking the first of his statutory two glasses of champagne before dinner. Other guests arrived, the Clares, who were received with slightly more ceremony than the Symingtons, but not much more, being by now part of Swaffield’s empire. Clare remained statuesque, rather like an image of Nordic man or a real-life Baltic baron, but his wife was small, exophthalmic, excitable, and looked as though all this was more stately than she was used to, which was the opposite of the truth.

  Finally, the Schiffs appeared, a quarter of an hour late, so that Swaffield was fretting with impatience and temper. Schiff, however, was the one person in the whole company whom Swaffield admired, and so he was allowed one glass of champagne and given the chance to refuse another. Rosalind Schiff, more expensively jewelled, scented, accoutred than any of the other women, and more alluringly, looked round the room in search of the most interesting man, and moved off towards the Cabinet Minister.

  Swaffield, in spite of his admiration for Lord Schiff, was restless, one foot tapping the floor, dinner being held up, perfect arrangements discommoded. The instant, or a milli-second after, Schiff waved away his second glass, Swaffield was reaching a finger behind him, pushing a button concealed as invisibly as those which Hillmorton had once had in a ministerial office, designed to bring in, and hasten out, visitors on the conveyor belt. />
  This time the butler was brought in.

  ‘Mr Swaffield, dinner is served.’

  All ceremony. Swaffield himself was as ceremonious as a performing animal. The party was led across the hall to the dining room, also on the ground floor, according to the old London practice. Swaffield, still performing, stood at the end of the table while the others studied the placement diagram and sat down. Then Swaffield, continuing to stand, announced with an elfish grin: ‘Thirteen at table. I hope no one’s superstitious. I don’t consider superstitions ought to be encouraged.’

  That was the kind of antic he liked devising, Jenny thought. Possibly there was someone there who didn’t appreciate it. The party settled down to the food, Swaffield’s vibrant voice predominating.

  Almost any commentator in that period, surveying the table, would have acted on a conditioned reflex and mechanically typed it as an establishment dinner. It was nothing of the sort. Commentators had the knack of taking the meaning out of words: perhaps, Lord Hillmorton might have observed, that was why they were commentators. So far as the establishment meant anything, which wasn’t much, no one there belonged to it, not even the Minister, not the Treasury boss, who had a curious oblique function right outside the decision-making groups. Schiff had occasionally offered economic advice to succeeding governments. None of them had taken it. You could say, if you wished, that it was a prosperous dinner. Everyone there, except Jenny and Lorimer, had a five figure income, most far more, but that didn’t give them influence over opinions, much less decisions. As for Swaffield, no inner circle in England would have employed him – unless in war time, when his daimon might have been too strong for them, and he could have carved his way.

  This didn’t imply that he was becoming subdued. He was actually saying: ‘I think I shall always give large dinners in future. Not little ones like this. I don’t call this a dinner. Large dinners, that’s what I shall give. I hope you all agree.’

  Some of his guests in private did not agree. What could you do with a man like this? If they had his millions, they wouldn’t live in a house as hideous as his (this dining room was decorated in his own eye-dazzling style). They would know how to entertain.

  The curious thing was, though they had to admit that the food and drink were passable, they didn’t give him credit for his taste. A gourmet would have realised that both food and wine were as good as in any private house in the town – especially the wine, for Swaffield had the palate of a professional. He had served champagne, as it were contemptuously, for those who didn’t know, and most of them were drinking it. For himself, it wasn’t a drink to go with a dinner, and he kept to a good Pomerol, in which his only company was Sir Ernest Packe. Others scoffed away, under the illusion that vulgarians never learnt.

  It wouldn’t have improved Swaffield’s reputation much, but it might have been subtilised if he hadn’t been one sense short. That is, he had no – or else an extremely abnormal – visual sense. Hence his house. That fitted all that people expected of him. His other senses were both acute and delicate, but they didn’t notice that. It is true, booming away like an emperor that night, he gave them plenty of excuses not to notice.

  As usual with any of his fiestas, there lurked a purpose or purposes beneath. One of the purposes, in the midst of a non-stop allocution, was to arrange his holiday. He had decided that he needed a change, and with dromophilic energy was planning it.

  That meant planning an entire caravanserai, for Swaffield couldn’t bear being alone. Some of the present company knew what it was like to be summoned late at night: if the house was not otherwise occupied (they all suspected that there were visitors unknown to them), then some of his court had to be collected.

  On his holidays the court was once more required. Transport was laid on, he was hectoring the table. His private jet would fly anyone anywhere. He proposed to start in the Dordogne: he had hired a house that afternoon (some there guessed that he wouldn’t rest still three days). There wasn’t a modern airport near, but cars would be available night and day, whenever the jet flew into Toulouse. It remained only to dragoon the Clares, the Symingtons, Jenny, Lorimer, any of the appropriate cherubim within sight. For Swaffield not only needed people round him, he needed people for – what? applause? recognition of debt? reminders of his power?

  Strange, Jenny had thought, now she had seen enough of this process, that a man who would take on the toughest customers alive should need this reassurance. Yet she couldn’t see any other explanation. He didn’t feel fundamentally safe outside his own environment; and his own environment consisted of people whom he was looking after and who had a suitable sense of favours to come. That was the proper environment for a restless man. When he went on holiday, he carried his environment with him.

  At the dinner table, Lady Clare on his right, he shouted down to Clare at the other end.

  ‘You two’ll come, of course, Edward.’ Clare wanted to go: it was a free holiday, and no doubt a luxurious one. On the other hand, he wasn’t practised at coping with such an invitation, which had been given rather like a benevolent employer offering a bonus to a faithful but ungifted employee. Since he had become inextricably entwined in Swaffield’s net, there had been a distinct change of manner towards him.

  He looked along at his wife, and began a kind of impassive havering.

  ‘That would be very nice, of course, but, you know, we have some commitments–’

  ‘Commitments,’ said Swaffield, ‘look after themselves.’

  He suddenly switched to the Symingtons. ‘You two as well,’ he said matily.

  Unlike Clare, Leslie Symington didn’t want to go: unlike Clare again, he had had practice in receiving such invitations. ‘We’d love it,’ he said lustrously, and Alison said the same. ‘But,’ Leslie went on, and she nodded her head. They were conveying enthusiasm, affection for Swaffield, not cupboard love. There was an element of truth in this, for they were easier with him than the others there. Swaffield was a move ahead. Yes, he had thought of the difficulty: they were thinking something might go wrong with the child.

  ‘Three months is a dodgy time,’ he said, giving a knowledgeable impersonation of a midwife, and identifying himself lavishly with the flesh. He had everything provided. There was a competent doctor in the village, already bespoken, guaranteed to be on call. In case of need, two specialists in Toulouse were also bespoken. They could reach her inside three hours.

  ‘You’ll be a hell of a lot safer than you’d ever be in Chelsea. I can’t bear Chelsea,’ he added, as though he would propose to plough it with salt.

  ‘You shouldn’t do all this,’ said Alison, awkward, laughing, touched.

  ‘Do you think I should let anything go wrong?’ he snapped. Then to Jenny: ‘You come. You come. Bring him.’ (He grinned at Lorimer, and contrived to invest the thought with remarkable suggestiveness, which continued in the next unremarkable words.) ‘Quite comfortable. All modern conveniences in all rooms. Nice views from the bedrooms.’

  ‘No, Mr Swaffield,’ said Jenny, in a voice as resonant as his own. ‘I can’t get away now.’

  ‘In Christ’s name, why not?’

  ‘It’s too early. I’ve only been working in the office a couple of months, and I haven’t got things quite straight.’

  Swaffield gave her a fixed eye-protruding stare. But he didn’t say what he might have done, that the job wasn’t all that significant. He was, in his own fashion, too considerate for that. Instead he gazed at Lorimer and said: ‘Tell her she must go. Order her about. Good for her.’

  ‘No, I can’t get away yet,’ Jenny repeated. ‘It would upset the others.’

  ‘She’s right, you know,’ said Lorimer, voice creaking in the effort to articulate. ‘She’s thinking of morale. She’s right, you know.’

  The two of them showed a united front, Jenny sensible, Lorimer disjointed in support. Pressure, bullying, quasi-genial demands from Swaffield, but they didn’t budge, and with an expression more stupefied than angry
he seemed to leave it there.

  They all climbed upstairs to the kaleidoscopic drawing-room. Parties of Swaffield’s, as the well-trained knew, were not expected to split up. The chairs were duly set within eye-range, conversation-range, of a focal point, so that Swaffield could preside over one of his favourite entertainments. There was just time, while drinks were carried round, for a short exchange between Haydon-Smith and Lord Schiff. The Minister had decided that Schiff appeared agreeable, but hadn’t caught his name – it couldn’t be Sheep, it might be Sheean. Shipp? The Minister was a liberal-minded man, in charge of overseas development, and liked dilating on pleasant topics to other liberal-minded men. He proceeded to tell Schiff how much the country owed to the latest wave of Jewish talent. Financiers, entrepreneurs, industrialists, all coming over in the thirties or even later.

  ‘They’ve done more for this country than the old Jewish families, and they did a lot,’ said Haydon-Smith. ‘I really don’t know how we should have got on at all without these clever Jewish gentlemen.’

  Lord Schiff gave a large courteous smile.

  ‘Minister, we think we have something to pay back, don’t you think that’s reasonable?’

  Tactlessness of a tactful operator – Haydon-Smith was filled with ultimate chagrin. He needn’t have flushed, though. Azik Schiff didn’t keep on watch for affronts, he had fewer touchy spots than anyone there.

  Swaffield was dispensing vintage port after dinner – vintage, because he liked being luxurious and also because he had a taste for it. Then he got down to amusing himself. Jenny had seen this happen several times before. His particular diversion was to discuss the affairs of one of his courtiers or dependants in public, just as he had done with hers that evening at the House of Lords. From this he derived a considerable and complicated pleasure. The best game of all was to make someone analyse his or her present love life, especially when it was tinged with sexual misadventure and when the company contained persons who were eminent, shockable and stuffy. It was that which Jenny was anticipating, but it didn’t happen. Perhaps because the dependents present weren’t suitable subjects, or the others weren’t shockable enough, and some of them he had another use for.