In Their Wisdom Page 24

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  Liz did not realise how often she repeated herself. She was obsessive, of course, in her love: but it came out too in habits on which she didn’t spare a thought. So, when once more anxious and adrift after Julian’s coup at the lawyers’ conference, she was once more engrossed about her father’s money: and once more she telephoned James Ryle.

  It was the call he had awaited so long, telling himself it wouldn’t happen, it oughtn’t to happen. When he received it, he was happy. How foolish could a sensible man be, he thought. He could console himself, though it wasn’t much of a support, that at least he had behaved like a sensible man. He had taken no initiative, and wouldn’t have done. Yet, talking on the telephone, he was happy. Eagerly, more eagerly than he approved of, he invited her to dinner. The Connaught? It was a decent place for dinner, or used to be. Yes, she wanted to talk. Yes, he understood.

  Talk she did. She preceded him through the main dining room while he noticed her quick poised walk, something like an actress’ strut, only possible if you had good muscles. He had secured a table in the corner, and almost as soon as they sat down she was describing the scene in chambers.

  Ryle had begun with small, or even miniature, talk, saying that he used to dine here often in the war, when the American Ambassador had a table by the door. Liz had scarcely pretended to listen. Her manners, which had once been brisk but engaging, had that night completely dropped away. She had once been conscious that men found her attractive, and responded to them. Now she didn’t even recognise that Ryle had feeling for her. The only important thing, the only thing that existed, was how, and why, Julian had ‘turned everything upside down’.

  Ryle was reminded – with sarcasm, not pleasure – of an occasion three or four years before, when his wife was gravely ill and himself worn down and looking for solace. He had asked to dinner a widow who had been intimate with both of them. She didn’t enquire about either, but immediately launched into a monologue, informing him enthusiastically how, by endowing small prizes in schools, she was preserving her husband’s memory. Well, there were plenty of egotisms, all of them hard, but you had to go a long way to find any harder than the egotisms of love.

  ‘Why has he done it? Tell me that?’ Liz demanded.

  ‘Of course, you have to remember that I scarcely know him,’ said Ryle, giving a credible impersonation of a judicious old codger.

  She was thrashing over the possible motives, as she had done obsessively to herself. Some were the same as the two counsel had discussed in their club, with more amusement, with considerably less pride. Through it all, Ryle couldn’t help detect that there was pride, admiration, subjugation, because Julian had prevailed over them all. But why? Money – did anyone care enough about money to insist on a risk like this? Just for the chance, not too good a chance, of getting twice as much.

  ‘I shouldn’t,’ said Ryle. ‘But then I’m not a gambler, I never have been.’

  ‘The point is, is he?’

  ‘You should know, shouldn’t you?’

  ‘I don’t. There are times when I don’t know him at all. After all this while.’

  She broke out, telling Ryle that, since the conference, Julian had been ‘extraordinarily nice’ to her. Nice, what a word, Ryle thought, did she mean tender or ardent or what?

  Then she produced the motive which Lander and March had also played with. Was Julian really trying to make amends to his mother?

  ‘Not very likely, I should have thought,’ said Ryle. ‘What good would it do?’

  It was clear that Liz was jealous of Mrs Underwood, with jealousy of the same nature, maybe not so active, as that – which Liz had been culpably slow to recognise – Mrs Underwood bore her.

  ‘What’s she like?’ said Ryle.

  For the first time that evening she smiled at him, reacting to sympathy.

  ‘She’s not really my favourite woman, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I doubt if she’d be mine.’

  ‘She loves him more than anything in the world, though,’ said Liz. ‘That’s something in her favour.’

  Liz had been drinking more than he did, Ryle observed. He had seen that before: but then women of her age drank more than those he had taken out as a young man. While, though the food was good, she was only pecking at it. Not a good sign, the young Ryle might have considered. There had been one or two women he had been fond of, who had no appetite, and they had been choosy or frenetic about sex. Even that night in the Connaught, opposite this intent handsome face, he recalled that, in the old English marriage service, the wife promised to be ‘bonair and buxom in bed and at board’. Enraptured with this woman he might be, but that didn’t prevent him wondering or doubting.

  At last she produced a motive which wouldn’t have occurred to March or Lander. Was it all to do with her? This was an old fear. Was Julian designing this manoeuvre in order to escape her? Lose everything, and then tell her that he couldn’t possibly marry her or anyone else.

  ‘I don’t think I believe that,’ said Ryle.

  ‘Why don’t you?’ She was looking straight at him. In the shielded restaurant light her eyes, pigmented green in daytime, were full black. Her gaze was fierce, insistent, and suddenly trusting, because this was what she needed to hear. But she didn’t hear quite that.

  ‘We all imagine, don’t we, that when someone we are attached to does something strange, that we’ve come into the calculation. It’s not what I’ve found, more often than not. People are driven by their own wild horses, not by anyone else’s. We’re not as central to anyone else’s doings as we’d like to flatter ourselves.’ (Was that entirely true? Someone else could be central in one’s thoughts, perhaps in one’s actions, in the first grip of addictive love. At the moment, Ryle was about as central to Liz’s thoughts as the waiter who had just refilled her glass.)

  Ryle went on, talking as temperately about personal relations as another sensible man, David March, and coming to a similar conclusion.

  ‘As I’ve said, I don’t know the man. I’m prepared to believe he’s out of the ordinary, nothing makes sense otherwise, but I don’t believe he’s utterly different from the rest of human kind.’

  Liz gave what on another woman would have seemed a sheepish smile.

  ‘So I’m willing to bet a modest sum that whatever’s making him perform like this – which sounds pretty near the confines of lunacy, between ourselves – whatever’s making him perform, is just himself. He may be wanting to cut a dash. After all, he hasn’t done much to justify himself, if you don’t mind me saying so. Or it may be the money. He may have been telling the truth. People do, sometimes, you know.’

  ‘I suppose that’s intended to be a comfort,’ said Liz.

  ‘It’s intended to be what you ought to come to terms with.’

  ‘Right.’ She said, very sharply: ‘Now about my father.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘How much can you tell me?’

  ‘Very little.’

  ‘Have you been to see him?’

  ‘No.’ After a pause, Ryle added: ‘I offered to. But he didn’t wish it.’

  ‘You’re one of his closest friends.’

  ‘So I thought.’ Ryle said it simply.

  ‘How ill is he?’

  ‘Very seriously, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Yes, I had heard that.’

  The extraordinary thing to Ryle was that she seemed to have heard no more.

  ‘How seriously?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve only had a second-hand report.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I don’t want to alarm you–’

  ‘Tell me straight.’

  ‘It sounds like cancer, but I don’t know for certain.’

  She sat, brooding, looking as she would when she was much older.

  ‘I must go and see him,’ she said.

  ‘I think you should. He’ll be bound to see you.’

  ‘I must see him.’

  She didn’t say much else. She had a
glass of brandy, and then another. Ryle felt the years. At his age, brandy was one drink he kept off. He didn’t relish waking up at three in the morning, his heart thumping.

  Liz had accomplished her business and was ready to go, but a relic of politeness kept her sitting beside him. Another relic of politeness made Ryle help her to depart. He saw her into a taxi in Carlos Place. She kissed his cheek, the kind of kiss which men and women in their world exchanged every day of the week, unlike the manners of his youth. It was the only contact he had with her.

  Next day Liz discovered that her father was in hospital, having deep X-ray therapy. He was too tired to see anyone. Shortly he would be returning to her sister’s. He would still be fatigued after treatment, but in a fortnight or so he should be able to receive a visit.

  It was not till late March that Liz, waiting restlessly, heard that he was well enough. Taking a morning off, she drove out to Beryl Road. Ryle, who had thought it extraordinary that she knew so little about her father’s illness, would have thought it even more so that she only once before had been inside her sister’s house. But then, Ryle had no experience of living in a family of strangers. As a rule, amiable and cordial strangers. Her young sister greeted her with pleasure. There was a gap of a dozen years between them, very little life had been shared. But some things didn’t need to be said.

  He seemed better, said her sister, a little better.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Liz.

  ‘No one can be sure,’ said her sister, as firmly as she spoke herself. ‘There might be intermissions, they might go on for some time. No one has much idea.’

  In the small neat living-room (a little Etty over the mantelpiece, which Liz remembered, it must have been extracted from the Suffolk home) Liz, talking of their father, was having another kind of suppressed, subliminal response. At first sight of that Beryl Road house, Adam Sedgwick, used to middle-class space, had thought he couldn’t live there. Not so Liz, who had once been used to more luxurious space. She had a feeling, almost inadmissible, that if she could take Julian there for good and all, this would be her refuge. The narrow room would make them safe.

  She went upstairs with her sister, and then alone into the back bedroom. Her father was sitting in an armchair near the window, reading. She entered and called out. He turned towards her quite quickly and said: ‘My dear girl, how are you?’

  ‘I’m not interrupting, am I?’ She was nervous, more nervous because she had said something so awkward, so imbecile.

  ‘You scarcely could, in the circumstances, could you? But I’m very glad to see you. I was told you were coming, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘More or less defunct. Slightly less defunct than I was a month or so ago. But I need hardly say, that may be wishful thinking.’

  In fact, though she couldn’t know it, he looked appreciably better than during Sedgwick’s visit. His cheeks were no thinner, and the jaundiced tinting was visible only under the lower lids. His manner was different also. Whatever she had expected, she hadn’t expected to find so much of his old urbanity.

  ‘What’s that you’re reading?’ She couldn’t prevent another foolish question coming out.

  ‘To tell you the truth, Paléologue’s memoirs. He was the French Ambassador to old St Petersburg just before the Revolution. It’s a slight comfort, don’t you know, to read about people who are shortly going to be as unfortunate as oneself.’

  He was smiling at her, ready to be detached, discursive. She hadn’t come for this.

  ‘They were also quite remarkably inept. I wonder, I do wonder, whether in the same position our own upper classes would have been quite so inept. I daresay we should. I can’t believe we have been very clever about the miners.’ (This was in reference to the strike that spring, said with an elder statesman’s satisfaction.) ‘But I like to think that a few of us if we’d been in Petersburg might have shown a grain of sense. By the by, the chap Paléologue wrote very elegant French. I’m reading him in French. I had a French governess, you know. Not that I was anything like really first-class at it. I did get sent up For Good occasionally once upon a time. I suppose that at my very best I might have sounded something like a Flemish Belgian, required to speak the other language, more or less educated, but distinctly out of practice.’

  He appeared gratified by the comparison. He gazed at her in his familiar hooded manner and said: ‘My dear girl, what’s your French like?’

  ‘Awful.’

  ‘I don’t suppose we ever had you taught properly. That was very remiss. What a pity. What a pity.’

  ‘How are you? How are you, really?’ she broke out.

  ‘Well, mortality is certain for all of us, isn’t it? It’s slightly more certain for me than it is for some.’

  Her voice became even harder, more intense.

  ‘How are you? I want to know.’

  ‘If you want to know how long I’ve got, I am afraid that I can’t tell you. They don’t tell me, and I suppose I might be regarded as having a certain interest in the subject. The charitable assumption is that they haven’t much notion themselves.’

  Did he realise how his manner was transformed from that in which he had talked to Sedgwick? Of course, he was a good deal of an actor. It was natural for him to put on an act. He was happy doing so, he felt more like himself. Physically this was one of his better days. Perhaps he only spoke as he had to Sedgwick when the metabolic tide was running low.

  He enquired, as though with academic interest: ‘But, my dear girl, why should you specially want to know? I can’t matter to you all that much, I should have thought. That is, once you’ve accepted the fact of my comparatively rapid disappearance–’

  ‘That’s not so easy.’

  Suddenly he smiled at her, with the kind of smile which used to tease her when she was a little girl.

  ‘Oh, there is a point, isn’t there? I ought to have remembered. I have to survive another six years or so before that little gift of mine comes to you in full. You’re right to think of that, it would be stupid not to.’

  ‘Not only that.’ Her expression was dark, blaming someone, herself or him. ‘Not only that.’

  ‘Not only that? But a little of it, wouldn’t you say? You’re not going to pretend?’ He was still teasing her, more affectionate than she was used to. He was looking at her, seeing his daughter’s face afresh. It was a good classical face, not fluid, not easily mobile. Good ivory skin, blood suffusing it now. He would guess that she cried more with rage than with pleading. She wasn’t far from crying at this moment. All his life with women, he had wanted to lighten the moment in which one stood.

  ‘Well, you know, I don’t think you ought to reckon on that money. Six years is a long time in the present situation. Mind you, I’d do it to oblige, but I can’t make any promises. I’d do it for my own sake as well as yours.’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she burst out. ‘I’ve told you, that isn’t all of it.’

  ‘Look here, my girl, we are neither of us particularly sanctimonious, when it comes to the bone, don’t you agree? You’re more like me than you’d prefer to think. I’ve talked a lot of sugar-coated nonsense in my time. I don’t expect you have. But I suggest that we might as well dispense with it now.’

  She forced a smile. The tears had retracted, but while she had been pretending her concern before, she felt it now.

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘It’s very curious, don’t you know,’ he took on his air of pleasurable discursion, ‘how entirely minor pieces of legislation can produce some rather surprising results. In my time, it was quite common to visit elderly relatives and have a lively interest in when they proposed to quit this mortal scene. The sooner the better, since one stood to gain a certain amount of money when they were safely put away. I remember watching the declining years of a very nice uncle of mine. Of whom I was distinctly fond. And from whom I had considerable expectations, which I am glad to say in due course were realised. But even when his demise was as
good as published in The Times, he lingered on for years. I thought that was inconsiderate of him. I don’t want to overpraise myself, my dear girl, but I very much doubt whether I’m enormously more selfish than the majority of the human race. One speculates on how many persons have spent too long a time dying, for the peace of mind of their nearest and dearest.’

  That was a reflection which would have seemed congenial, though he couldn’t know it, to his heir, Dr Pemberton.

  ‘But now,’ Hillmorton said, ‘we have cleverly introduced a new refinement. Owing to our seven-year clause about gifts, which we both happen to be familiar with, don’t we? Now, instead of sitting beside an elderly relative, as I did beside my uncle, with a certain mixture of emotions, including both affection and a desire, possibly reluctant, that he shall shortly depart – we now sit beside an elderly relative, with the same mixture of emotions, except for one trifling change. We now have to desire that he should somehow remain. At least for seven years, or whatever is the term required. Very interesting. Should you say that was an improvement in civility, my dear Elizabeth?’

  He was proud after this piece of exposition, as proud as when he had sat down after a satisfactory speech: not that any speech of his, at any time, in any place, could have been as uncompromising as this. Liz, other feelings dissolved, felt proud too. In her childhood she had always enjoyed him most when he wasn’t on his best behaviour, or when, as she then thought, he was pretending to be bad.