In Their Wisdom Read online

  They walked along, not noticing places they knew so well, comfortable enough in this familiar part of the town.

  19

  On evenings that autumn Liz lay in Julian’s bed, darkness pressing against the window, conserving them from everyone outside, giving her the comforting moments, stress cleaned from her forehead. When he had become satisfied, he was kind to her, being a man who was pleasant in the epilogue of sex. His favourite time for sex, to which she had fitted herself, was between tea and his evening meal. Having shown himself unascetic in one domain, he was glad to lie beside her and then wait placidly to show himself ascetic over his supper.

  In due course he liked to watch her get it ready, going naked round the flat, another liking of his, setting out the yoghurt, cheese, garlic and wholemeal bread, and, if he was going to indulge himself, cooking him an omelette. Well, that was all right. She hadn’t expected to produce such a meal for any man, but she took it for granted now.

  That was all right. And yet, her own campaign wasn’t making much progress. There was a little news, some which seemed good, some fretting. She hadn’t dared to try and force Julian, as she had her father. Usually she could trust her courage, but not here. Sometimes she made approaches, so tentative and timid that she despised herself. On those occasions Julian put up a cloud of mystification, but there was nothing about her that he didn’t understand. Often he replied, with a blaze of innocent-looking blissful optimism: ‘Let’s have a little patience. Let’s wait till the business is settled. Then all will come out right.’

  On the spot, in his presence, Liz – and in this she was like other suspicious, jealous persons – was easy to pacify, even easy completely to reassure, much more so than a simpler woman would have been. Away from him, however, the doubts and disbeliefs swam back and there were times when she found herself muttering sombrely: ‘You can lead a horse to the water but–’ Then she would make herself remember what he had said, and become once more loving and happy. Further, she had achieved something, so it appeared, with her father.

  That was her piece of positive news. He had summoned her again, this time to the guest room in the Lords, a couple of days before the community debate. He told her, with considerable weaving and sly probing darts, that he ‘saw his way to making a modest contribution’. Not immediately, but as a gift which would be realisable when he had lived seven more years: if need be, it could be drawn upon two years before that. It might be ‘some slight assistance’ to her to know that this contribution was coming.

  How much, she asked him, straightforward as she couldn’t be with Julian. There Lord Hillmorton weaved and elaborated. There wasn’t a simple answer, it depended on the value of certain securities, it would be a modest addition to her portfolio, it wouldn’t make her rich, but it mightn’t be altogether negligible.

  He seemed to enjoy obfuscation for its own sake and simultaneously to enjoy doing something for her. While he was repeating those themes, James Ryle entered the room and joined them. Suspiciously Liz wondered if this were prearranged, a clinching piece of obfuscation. She wondered also if Ryle had been told of her father’s new arrangement. As it was, confidences languished. Ryle looked at her with more concern than her father did, she thought, but didn’t so much as mention Julian’s name.

  During those autumn weeks Julian was cheerful, which was nothing strange, but secretively cheerful, like a Minister who is holding back a piece of information which will demolish the opposition, or an income tax inspector who has after years of searching found a method of catching a rich man out. Julian was greeting the unseen, that is the future, not exactly with a cheer but with benign approval.

  Straight from the meeting with her father, when she and Julian were lying in bed, she told him – having saved up the news for the peaceful moments – of the financial promise. Julian greeted that with benign approval too. He kissed her (not as he had been kissing her a quarter of an hour before), and said, ‘Clever girl.’ Then he hooted away, and gave her a lecture on the falling value of money – ‘We have to get hedges all the way round, your father mustn’t lose most of this stuff for us, I don’t know how sensible he is.’

  Despite that lack of faith in Lord Hillmorton’s acumen, Julian was gratified. But there was one feature, just one feature, of that autumn with which Julian wasn’t gratified. Nor was Lord Hillmorton. It might have surprised both of them to find a subject on which their minds were at one.

  The trouble, as Lord Clare had indicated at the Swaffield dinner party, was journalists. Families like the Hillmortons had lost their power and functions, but they hadn’t lost their allure for the gossip columns. The name of Lady Elizabeth Fox-Milnes was good for a line or two in several papers. It didn’t take much detective work (a reporter had started it by seeing her beside Julian in court) to connect her with the losing party in the Massie case. Though owing to Julian’s parsimony they so rarely went out together, their names kept being dragged into the press. Julian began to develop the paranoia of one under surveillance. He believed that the Phillimore Gardens block of flats was being watched: or alternatively that the caretaker was in journalists’ pay: or both.

  Lord Hillmorton, to himself blaming Julian for it, also disapproved of this publicity. To Ryle and others close to him, he disapproved with something like rancour. That could have puzzled those who remembered that he was a worldly man and had been a professional politician all his life. But professional politicians, though they lived on publicity, didn’t get inured to it. Most of them became more thin-skinned, not less, as they grew older, and underneath the cordiality distrusted journalists more. And sometimes this was true of some of whom one would have least expected it, some who could give a fair impersonation of Lord Melbourne’s devil-may-care, such as Hillmorton himself.

  Julian disapproved of the publicity with approximately equal rancour. That could have puzzled anyone who knew him, any of his women. It did puzzle Liz, who had the best of reasons for knowing that he was totally shameless. Anything which gave him pleasure, provided it didn’t get in his own way, was a good idea. Yet he was affronted, morally affronted, at sly little paragraphs inferring that he and Liz were living together.

  He had once, ten or so years before, been cited as the correspondent in a divorce case. It didn’t strike him that, with natural justice, he could have been cited in others. This intervention he responded to at the time, and still did, with a deep, shocked sense of moral outrage. It shouldn’t happen to him. Hypocrisy? But Liz had to recognise that there was no one less hypocritical. She thought she understood each change in his expression, and yet she couldn’t understand him at all. She found herself driven back on banal explanations, such as that he didn’t like any public exposure which might give pain to his mother. Even though nothing in Mr Justice Bosanquet’s statement about his mother had (Liz was certain she could read him there) moved him in the slightest.

  That old divorce case had been revived by a journalist. It was moderately scabrous. It had been with the wife of a still-prominent Tory politician. Julian was angry, not only angry, but hang-dog and penitential. Liz had seen him mock-penitential when he had hurt her, but this seemed genuine. She was lost.

  Lord Hillmorton was also angry about that resurrected story, but not in the least penitential. There had been plenty of divorces among those round him, and plenty of marriages (political gossip said his own among them) which had been preserved as a front for the sake of the public game. On the other hand people didn’t get into this kind of scabrous mess, at least not in the open. Lord Hillmorton could bear with anything as long as it wasn’t in the open. Then he was as conventional as the rest, though there was realism in it. It was desirable to keep some kind of decorum. If you didn’t, the whole structure might begin to fall round your ears. He therefore had further reasons, not for disliking Julian – in ultimate privacy he had a soft spot for another devious and unbudgeable soul – but for wishing him to get out of Liz’s life.

  Lord Hillmorton had no means of knowing
that, at this same period and as a consequence of the publicity, Julian had suggested to Liz that, at least in form, he should do precisely that. Perhaps they ought to have a diplomatic break. Perhaps she ought not to come to his flat any more. They could of course meet elsewhere, or they could stop seeing each other until the stories had died down.

  If Hillmorton had overheard that proposition, would he have been soothed? The answer was, of course, no. Hillmorton had seen too many men and women playing this sort of love gambit. Julian genuinely believed that the flat was being shadowed, he even brought himself to identify a man in a mackintosh, walking about outside, hours a day (this was a delusion). So he would have preferred another place to meet.

  Otherwise, in making the proposal, he wasn’t doing much more than enjoy his power over her. Listening to them, Lord Hillmorton would have heard his daughter passionately crying. Hillmorton was not a warm-hearted man, but he wouldn’t have liked the scene: and he would have realised, which was the most relevant point, that neither of them had the slightest intention of parting.

  Mostly, they weren’t quarrelling; Julian was getting his way, she wasn’t crossing him. She picked up something about the legal negotiations, though she heard only at second-hand about any meeting with the lawyers. She gathered that not only Skelding, but also counsel, were against pressing the appeal up to the court itself. What was needed was a decent private settlement, they were all urging – just as Swaffield had been urging Jenny at his dinner party. A decent bargain out of court – compound for that. Each side might be left with twenty or thirty thousand to pay in costs, the kitty was being whittled down. Even so, all sensible persons were talking of a settlement.

  Hillmorton wanted it, no more gossip, no more trouble. Though he didn’t often write letters to his daughter, he wrote one now. Mrs Underwood, so Liz was told by Julian, wanted it. What did he want himself? Money, he said, and she was reassured, and certain that he wanted a settlement too.

  She received one vague intimation from Julian’s mother that the lawyers had collected a piece of new evidence. Apparently the local vicar had called on old Massie shortly before his death. This sounded incongruous, and the lawyers didn’t expect that the Court of Appeal would allow any extra testimony. Still, it might strengthen their bargaining hand, and their morale rose, though Julian’s had been high all along.

  There was another pair who discussed – though the discussion was one-sided – a settlement that autumn. Several nights during the long debates Jenny sat with Lorimer in the Lords guest room, and when the House wasn’t sitting she went and cooked supper for him in his Pimlico flat. She had heard over the telephone from Symington, back from the Dordogne holiday though Swaffield was still on his restless travels, that they were ‘feeling their way’ towards the settlement.

  She was now taking this for granted and told Lorimer so, reminding him of Swaffield’s advice at the dinner and saying that the final share she received didn’t matter much, she would be glad to hear the last of it. As usual, Lorimer was reticent if not mute, and yet she felt, being able to distinguish between his silences by now, that there was reserve inside him, but one which her sharp questions didn’t disinter.

  His flat was, as he had said the first time he took her out, ‘not very grand either’. It was on the ground floor of a narrow fronted 1840ish house in Lupus Street, built during the Cubitt attempt, which didn’t succeed, to make Pimlico smart. Now the house was in decay, and so was Lorimer’s flat. He had one room more than Jenny had herself, a bedroom with a curtained off bath as well as the sitting-room, outside which the traffic swirled along the street. When she first saw that room, the mantelpiece, the glass-fronted bookcase (an edition of Kipling’s stories, some books of Winston Churchill’s, a collection of Thomas Hardy, a few paperbacks, not much else) were gritty with the London dust. She soon made a difference there: just as she made a difference to his food, setting about with eggs and cheese and meat she bought nearby, producing edible dishes not only for his sake, but, since she had a healthy appetite, for her own.

  He had no instinct for comfort. There were no pictures on the walls, just one or two photographs of officers in the desert, a group photograph of a public school she hadn’t previously heard of. He had no money, and, with his straight simplicity, told her he had never had any. In the mornings he taught at a day preparatory school, taught French which, when she heard him utter a few words, made him seem sadder. On Mondays and Fridays, as a rule non-sitting days in the Lords, he took a form by bus to a playing field in the suburbs. This job brought him a little income. The Lords expenses brought him a little too. He had been left a few government securities which he hadn’t known how to reinvest. The two of them were much of a muchness, Jenny told him, and that made him laugh, which wasn’t a common sound. When he did laugh, however, it was whole-hearted, and the bitterness passed away. There was bitterness whenever they talked about the world they were living in. They agreed about it, it gave them consolation to agree, but Jenny viewed it with regret and he with something closer to hate.

  She understood a good deal about him by now. Her first impression, that evening in Soho had, she was certain, been right. In some fashion he was fond of her – that she didn’t expect from anyone, but she couldn’t help but recognise it was true. Still, he was abnormally diffident with women, certainly with her, presumably with any woman. He had been married, he wasn’t a virgin, and yet he was as timid as one, more timid than some male virgins she had met. Jenny knew more about men than most observers would have guessed. David March, speculating about her to his friend Lander in the park, hadn’t been a long way from the mark. Shrewd, active, not giving people the benefit of the doubt, Jane Austen-like – that was how people who liked her were liable to judge her. In fact, Jenny hadn’t lived a life of maximum chastity. She hadn’t had so many opportunities, she had been discreet, but she had made the most of them and often enjoyed them.

  In many ways she was remarkably like her enemy Liz, which was one of the perversities of their situation which they couldn’t know. She might have borne the resemblance of a sister fifteen years older – except that Liz’s eldest sister wasn’t at all like her, and Jenny was. But she was less obsessive and more sensual, and that made her both warmer and wiser. It would have been difficult for Jenny to get into the kind of relation that Liz had with Julian. It wasn’t that Jenny was prouder. In that respect there wasn’t much between them: but Jenny’s body, emotions, nerves, senses, were much more at one. It was only by mischance that she wasn’t a high-spirited and happy wife. No one but a fool, and a conceited fool, James Ryle had been known to observe, doubted the part luck played in one’s life. Ryle was not so cynical as Hillmorton, but like Jenny was in tune with his own nature. It was possible that sheer chance had once more intervened, in preventing the meeting of those two.

  Jenny came to admit to herself, Lorimer might even love her. lf he had made an advance, however diffident, she would have agreed. Out of curiosity, of which she had her share, as well as kinder feelings. Yet she hadn’t encouraged him in that sense, or brought him on – which she would have done, she told herself, tolerating no nonsense, if her feelings for him had been different. Yes, she was beginning to have an affection for him. Yes, she was sorry for him. But (and here her thoughts turned bewilderingly stilted) she told herself that she didn’t begin to love him as a woman ought to love a man. It might have been a Russian heroine thinking or talking. Liz would have received that reflection with jeering scorn, and rephrased it for her in terms more suitable for a stable lad. Liz didn’t wrap things up.

  Yet Jenny wasn’t any more sentimental, knew as much about the sexual life, and had more intuition about it. But then, like a good many realistic people, Jenny had a sense of when not to let her words and thoughts become too sharp, even to herself. It might make her sound less earthy than Liz, which she wasn’t. It was a protection.

  Jenny didn’t mind sounding miffish to herself. No, she didn’t love this man as she wanted to love
someone, But she began to admit another thought. She was coming to believe that he wanted to marry her.

  Jenny didn’t think she could be wrong. At that point her own species of diffidence got between them, prevented her being spontaneous. Men had occasionally wanted to go to bed with her, that was in the nature of things. But men hadn’t liked her all that much, men had certainly not wanted to marry her. Why should they, what had she to offer?

  It occurred to her, and now her diffidence was as morbid as it used to be, that soon she might have money to offer. Looking round this poor flat, she thought that money might solve some of his problems. It was conceivable that he had thought so. It was conceivable – her suspicion was alive, destroying the peace of the moment – that that was why he wouldn’t talk about the settlement.

  So, on more than one evening, she stopped him when he seemed to be starting to confide, or beginning any sort of declaration. It was better for them to stay just where they were. Let them remain static, not break it up. They were lonely people, there was comfort in looking after him, they were company for each other, it was better than loneliness.

  20

  By the middle of November, all Swaffield’s guests had returned. Jenny saw Swaffield himself in the charity’s office looking like a high-powered and sunburnt frog. He had a few words with her, cordial and casual, saying something which implied that he, like everyone else, was taking a settlement for granted. He had ceased to be specially interested. That was last year’s hobby. He didn’t invite her to his house so often. At the moment he was organising an appeal for his charity. This was the newest, grandest crusade, and he expected all his entourage, Jenny included, to be as absorbed in it as he was himself.

  Eleven o’clock one night in November, almost exactly a year after she had received the first letter from him, Jenny was sitting in her room, having not long returned from Pimlico. The cold had been raw and searching on her walk back from the underground, and she thought that it would be pleasant to tuck up in bed.