In Their Wisdom Read online

Ryle sometimes grumbled – rather as Jenny had thought to herself – that to endure the legislative process, either in that House or in the other, you had to be brought up a parliamentarian man and boy. Committee stages, amendments, report, parliamentarians were unborable or appeared so, and Ryle wasn’t. Still, that was how the work got done. On Wednesdays they could talk at large. Someone introduced a general topic and moved for papers (having to withdraw his motion at the end, otherwise there might be embarrassment, since no one knew where, if anywhere, the papers were).

  That particular Wednesday they were talking about conservation. As usual in these debates, one or two speakers had expert knowledge. Ryle was learning something. As usual also, one or two speakers were not specially relevant. One peer delivered a very strong allocution about Eskimo languages.

  To Ryle’s surprise, he had found that Hillmorton was down to speak. As a rule, elder statesmen, like the working politicians they had once been, didn’t take part in such a discussion. Nevertheless, uncharacteristically, Hillmorton chose to make a speech. He also made – even compared with his October utterance on Europe – an uncharacteristic speech. It wasn’t long, but it was curiously sentimental. Hillmorton was speaking in praise of the English countryside, demanding that it should be left, so far as they could contrive it, exactly as it was.

  Now Ryle had heard Hillmorton, when conversing with his normal detachment, remark that that same countryside was every square foot man-made, and that no revenant from as recently as the seventeenth century would be likely to recognise his native spot. Further, Ryle knew for sure that Hillmorton detested the countryside as a place to live in, and had, all the time they had been friends, used any excuse to escape from his home in Suffolk.

  Ryle was thinking, involuted and deeply forested men like Hillmorton seemed to be able to let themselves flood into sentimentality – at any rate in public – as more open characters seldom could.

  After his speech, Hillmorton stayed, according to etiquette, to hear the next one, and then walked out. As he passed Ryle’s place, he said, fingers stroking one of the unicorns on the wooden Bar:

  ‘Have you had enough of this?’

  When they reached the lobby outside, Hillmorton asked if Ryle felt like coming to Brooks’. On the way – this time, as it was early evening, they took Hillmorton’s favourite and nostalgic promenade, walking across the corner of the park – Ryle, still diverted, was gibing at some of the afternoon speeches. Then he referred to Hillmorton’s own.

  ‘New line for you, Hal.’

  ‘You thought so, did you?’

  ‘How much do you believe of all that?’

  Hillmorton’s face was bland in the winter dark.

  ‘How should I know?’

  They walked on, up the Duke of York’s steps, into Pall Mall. Ryle could hear, without looking, that the other man was limping, scuffing one of his feet. He had noticed the same effect during the past week or two, without paying much attention, and without mentioning it. Elderly men, especially elderly men proud of their condition, didn’t welcome being told of minor disabilities. They were on the south, the club-filled, side of Pall Mall: the other was bright, Dickensianly welcoming with the Christmas illuminations, false and also cosy, artificial Christmas trees bedecked with coloured bulbs shining out among guns and fishing tackle.

  Hillmorton made an effort at disinterested observation: ‘Should you say that was jolly?’ he remarked.

  ‘Perhaps it is.’

  ‘In my house, when I was a boy,’ Hillmorton kept up the same tone, ‘we always had roast beef for Christmas dinner. Just roast beef.’

  ‘One-upmanship,’ Ryle commented. ‘Showing that you went back earlier than those vulgar Victorian inventions. Like turkeys.’

  ‘I dare say, I dare say.’

  In the club, in the same long room in which Liz had asked her father for money, Hillmorton ordered drinks and drank his own off fast. Then he limped across to fetch another, dragging his right foot, the toe of his shoe trailing along the carpet. This had become so obvious that Ryle decided it was uncivil not to say a word. He asked, when Hillmorton had regained his chair: ‘Is this sciatica you’ve got?’

  ‘I dare say.’ It sounded another mechanical response.

  The room was about half full, somewhere near the right density, not too full to be oppressive, men drinking as comfortably as themselves.

  ‘Is it painful?’ Ryle was referring to Hillmorton’s leg.

  ‘Not so as one would notice.’

  ‘These things disappear as suddenly as they come.’

  ‘I dare say.’ Hillmorton added with an air of casualness: ‘As a matter of fact, I think I’ve been feeling slightly under the weather.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Oh, nothing to speak of. Just slight malaise.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Ryle asked.

  Either there appeared to be no definable symptoms, or else Hillmorton was dismissing them. Ryle, inquisitive about most things, was not specially so about clinical troubles. But he said, out of duty: ‘Perhaps you ought to see a doctor.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not much good at seeing doctors, don’t you know.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better.’

  ‘We’ll see. If it doesn’t clear up.’

  They had another round of drinks. Ryle was invited to stay for dinner. In the dining room, Ryle, after appreciating that Hillmorton was eating a fair meal, didn’t give any further thought to his health, or to anyone else’s. In fact, he was wondering, and speculating across the table, about something considerably less vital.

  They had each sat often enough at club dinner tables like this, eating a meal like this (that night they had ordered lamb chops and devils-on-horseback). It had sometimes been a soothing way to spend an evening. But how long could these clubs last, Ryle was letting fall a commonplace question among men similar to themselves. The cost of manpower would sink them, no machines in the world were substitutes for human hands, the present-day young would never know what a well-run club could be. Anyway the present-day young weren’t fond of joining them and certainly didn’t use them to dine in. Hillmorton replied with an indifferent offhand remark – perhaps these clubs would follow the American pattern and become luncheon houses pure and simple. Better to close them, said Ryle.

  His old historical curiosity was stirring, as he looked round the agreeable decorous masculine room, decanters on tables, lights beaming off cutlery and peach-fed cheeks. Why did such clubs originate in England? Bourgeois prosperity, of course. No, that was the answer for the nineteenth-century clubs, which meant nearly all of them: but, as it happened, not for this one. The gaming clubs had become domesticated by bourgeois prosperity, though. If resurrected fifty years after death, Charles James Fox and his friends would have found the architecture of this club familiar, but not the company: too staid, too respectable, in some respects too grown-up.

  In English prosperous life – this was another thought of Ryle’s – the clubs a man belonged to told one something. Hillmorton – Brooks’, Turf, Pratt’s. But he had recently resigned from the Turf, one of his economies. Adam Sedgwick – Athenaeum alone. Swaffield – none. Lorimer – at one time the United Services, now resigned. Clare – White’s, St James’s, Carlton, Pratts’. Ryle himself – Athenaeum, Garrick, Beefsteak. If one could read the fine print, those details had a certain eloquence, just as accents had.

  Hillmorton and Ryle didn’t stay late in the club. After a glass of port upstairs, Hillmorton said that he ought to be making his way to his ‘little place’. This reference Ryle didn’t understand, but it meant the bedroom at his youngest daughter’s house. Standing outside the cool façade in St James’s Street (the pair of them looking quite unlike Gillray’s Sheridan and the Duke of Devonshire, outside the same façade) they said good night.

  They wouldn’t see each other until the new year, after the recess, said Hillmorton: he wouldn’t be in the House the next two days. They didn’t shake hands, but Ryle replied: �
��Thank you for dinner, then, and see you in January.’

  Hillmorton walked up the rise and into Piccadilly, going towards the tube station. Ryle turned the other way, down across the park.

  22

  For nearly all of his acquaintances, there was no news of Hillmorton over the Christmas holiday and the start of the new year. Ryle heard nothing. Nor did his daughter Liz, safely cocooned most of those short dark winter days in Julian’s flat. There was one person who did have news, though he was scarcely even an acquaintance. This was Doctor Pemberton.

  Hillmorton, not only evasive out of habit, had been disingenuous when he seemed to answer Ryle’s questions about his health. He was stoical, unusually so, but not as stoical as he pretended. He had not gone to a doctor to be examined, but he had, before that evening in the club, spoken to one of his fellow members on the hospital board of governors. He had spoken as it were nonchalantly. He was having ‘a bit of discomfort’. It was nothing to bother people about, but just possibly it mightn’t be a bad idea to be ‘looked over’ when that didn’t interfere with anything else. He spoke so indifferently that the other man, who knew him only as a public figure, was taken in.

  Ryle would have realised that Hillmorton was shirking being examined, wanting to be reassured, but also wanting to put it off, avoiding the evil eye, frightened. Just as frightened as anyone less trained to hide his feelings. He didn’t confess, any more than he had done to Ryle, that for some weeks past his right hand seemed to be half-numb, and that the numbness wasn’t passing. In private, he exercised the hand a good many times a day, trying to persuade himself that it had more sensation than half an hour before.

  The result of that conversation, as casual as Hillmorton’s own tone, was an arrangement that he should go to the hospital for a check up (if Hillmorton had been free from qualms he might have felt even more distaste for that mechanical little phrase). The arrangement wasn’t hurried. Thus it was Christmas Eve when Hillmorton went to the hospital. That evening, after seven o’clock, the last patient having been dealt with, Dr Pemberton was sitting in his surgery when the telephone rang.

  ‘You’re interested in old Hillmorton, aren’t you?’ This was the voice of his medical contact at the hospital.

  ‘You know I am.’

  ‘He’s been here today.’

  ‘Business or pleasure?’

  ‘No. He’s been gone over by the neurologists.’

  ‘Has he, by God?’

  ‘It doesn’t look too good. I hope this doesn’t upset your Christmas–’

  ‘To hell with Christmas.’ Doctor Pemberton in no circumstances bore much resemblance to Tiny Tim. ‘What have they found?’

  ‘Oh, there’s a mass of tumour on one side of the brain.’

  ‘Which side?’ Clinical question without point.

  ‘Left.’

  ‘What do they think?’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’

  Dr Pemberton didn’t reply. Anyone’s spot diagnosis would be about the same.

  The other doctor said: ‘He must have noticed something before this. He ought to have come in months ago.’

  ‘If it’s what it’s most likely to be, that wouldn’t have made one per cent difference.’

  ‘True enough.’

  Dr Pemberton said: ‘They must be doing the obvious tests?’

  ‘Chest X-ray tomorrow.’

  ‘Why wait that long?’

  ‘Holiday season. Bit of dislocation.’

  ‘Christ Almighty.’ Dr Pemberton uttered a few crisp words about the general efficiency and industriousness of the country.

  ‘Yes. But what you said before – if your man has had it, it won’t make one pen cent difference. Or point one of one per cent, come to that.’

  ‘Someone ought to be sacked. It would encourage the others. Anyway, let me know what happens. I am interested, I told you that.’

  ‘I’ll keep in touch.’

  The other doctor duly kept in touch. The following night, when Pemberton was sitting at dinner with his wife and younger son, he was called to the telephone. He was drinking the single glass of port he allowed himself on festive occasions. That rationing of his alcohol still didn’t come easy to him. He was wearing a paper hat, which didn’t come easy to him either.

  The conversation was short.

  ‘Your man Hillmorton.’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘Two spots on the lung.’

  ‘That ties it up, then.’

  ‘You were afraid of it, weren’t you?’ said the other man. Pemberton thanked him for ringing and said that he must get back to dinner.

  For some minutes, though, he didn’t do quite that. In the hall, antiseptic smelling like all that house, he sat beside the telephone, absently draping his paper hat over it. This meant that Hillmorton would die before long. How long, was anyone’s guess. Pemberton was a careful doctor, not an intuitive one. He had no use for intuitions, anyone else’s or his own. The only guides to be trusted were one’s knowledge and one’s mind. These carcinomas which the hospital had traced must be secondaries: there was a primary somewhere, and they would find that soon enough. That night Pemberton’s speculation – it wasn’t any more than that, but he thought dismissively that it was as good as anyone else’s – was that in about six months Hillmorton would have to go into a nursing home for the last time. After that, he would die in – maybe another year, maybe longer, only a fool predicted the course of terminal cancer.

  Dr Pemberton felt little emotion of any kind, certainly not pity. He would have despised anyone who, in his situation, pretended to feel pity. He scarcely knew the man. All the man had done, in their couple of confrontations, was to humiliate him. Dr Pemberton, not vulnerable to a good many of the human wounds, was vulnerable to humiliation. He hadn’t forgotten and wouldn’t forget.

  This man’s death would bring him some advantages, already imagined and reckoned out. That brought a certain, not excessive, gratification. More satisfying, so far as he was feeling anything, was the warmth, something like a moral warmth, of an injury being disposed of. Dr Pemberton would have considered it hypocritical to pretend.

  Dr Pemberton considered it hypocritical to pretend pity or concern about most deaths. In his experience, people didn’t often feel either. They pretended to, but instead they felt slightly more alive because someone else had died. Most displays of mourning were so many shams. The only human beings whose deaths would move him were his wife and sons – and perhaps someone he had slept with. He had decided that in essence the same was true of all men.

  If people really cared as they pretended about others’ deaths, human life would be unendurable. It wasn’t. Just look at their faces at a funeral. Few men were less religious in spirit than Dr Pemberton, but no one believed more completely that in the midst of life we are in death: and that we bear it more complacently than the most minor upset of our own.

  Dr Pemberton also believed that we are all common flesh. He assumed that no one had told Hillmorton the truth about his condition. He had himself had to tell such news to others. They might put on an act, some made jokes and tried to make it easy for the doctor: but everyone was afraid. Hillmorton would be. Dr Pemberton had heard many people say that they wished to know the truth. So they might, provided it was pleasant. No one wished to know the truth, if it was news of his own death, Any doctor had learned that. Sometimes one had to tell it. But anyone was cowardly when he had to listen, Dr Pemberton was certain. We are all brute flesh, he would be cowardly himself. So, even though he was thinking of Hillmorton whom he hated, perhaps there was a mutter – impatient, pushed aside – of visceral sympathy.

  If he had been attending him as his doctor, he wouldn’t have suppressed that. This was likely to be an unpleasant way of dying. Dying was a messy business anyway, far more often than not. One couldn’t tell with terminal cancer. Not even when they had investigated the primary source of Hillmorton’s, one still couldn’t tell. Sometimes his kind of cancer was merciful
. As a rule it was a more messy way of dying than most.

  That might be the case with Hillmorton. If it were so, Pemberton had a hope. It wasn’t gentle, it was fierce with Pemberton’s usual opinion of his kind. He hoped that Hillmorton had a doctor without any scruple about putting him out. The only pity worth having was practical. The rest was maundering and false. Dr Pemberton had killed a number of sufferers in his time. He wouldn’t have thought much of a man who had done otherwise. To anyone he could trust – which considerably reduced the number of possible confidants – he wouldn’t have softened either the word or the fact. People maundering on the sanctity of life – Dr Pemberton regarded them with more than his normal degree of contempt. They didn’t know what life was like: or what dying was like. Let them watch some ways of approaching certain death. Then, if they could still think of their individual salvation and didn’t do what he had done – well, human beings were miserable creatures and these were more miserable than most.

  As usual, Dr Pemberton became invigorated when he had found extra reasons for being scornful of the species. He picked up his paper hat and returned to the dining room. His wife asked: ‘Oh dear. Do you have to go out?’

  ‘No, no. Nothing like that. Nothing much.’

  The family knew, of course, about his heritage, but for years it had lingered like a vague and distant prospect, not coming nearer, not likely to come nearer. Pemberton would tell his wife the news later that night, but not in the presence of his younger son. Pemberton wasn’t so tough-minded within his family, and he was even worried at the thought of resentment between his sons. After all, this one would get nothing out of it except a courtesy title, which in Pemberton’s view was more of a nonsense and distinctly more useless than the rest.

  So Pemberton sat down, and, though he kept to his own rule, he pressed them each to have another glass of port. They were hearty people who liked their drink as he would have done, and they took these with pleasure and without wondering what the telephone call had meant. Mrs Pemberton was wearing a purple crown and the son a tricorne hat. They were both big and handsome, the son, twenty years old, a couple of inches taller and not many pounds lighter than his father. Pemberton viewed them with benevolence. The son had received a cheque for £20 as a present that day, and Pemberton, who had a passion for instructing, proceeded to give a clear, Christmassy, after-dinner lesson on the principles of short-term investment.