In Their Wisdom Read online

  Hence office, hence the Hillmorton peerage. Hence after five generations the present Lord Hillmorton. In his own nature, even if he had been born in James Ryle’s Newcastle street, he wouldn’t have been easily put down by anyone. Still, it hadn’t been a handicap to come from a family which had forgotten what it was to be socially put down.

  There was one minor oddity, or indication to the contrary. For a while, now damped down, some of them had insisted on being more Whiggish than the Whigs. They had taken over the trick of calling each other by diminutives which were longer than the original Christian names: so that in his childhood Henry Fox-Milnes had to elderly relatives answered to the name of Hallio. In this House men who had been at school with him – hounds of smartness, preservers of a private world – sometimes called him that. Ryle never did. Antiquarianism was all right in its way, men with not much to hold on to held on to a private world, but this was a trifle more than Ryle could take.

  ‘Mr – what did you say – Underwood has been pretty lucky. How much is he getting, do you know?’

  ‘Enough to live on, so I’m told.’

  ‘Do tell Elizabeth I’m very glad.’

  By now the room was filling up, men standing at the bar. Ryle said that it was a fine evening, he would walk home. They went out together, in the corridors red carpet underfoot, on the walls out-of-perspective pictures of the packed House at long-ago debates. With clubbish matiness, clubbish, impersonal, they called out the Christian names of men they passed and heard their own. At the tape machine they stopped and read, as they did by way of routine after a private talk, the news that was being tapped away. Nothing that mattered, on the tape that night.

  3

  In her bed-sitting-room in Barham Gardens, not far from Earl’s Court tube station, Mrs Rastall was getting ready to go out. All was neat, as she was herself; so was her minuscule kitchen, and the bathroom, more precisely a shower room, her main luxury, from which she had just emerged. Once she had lived in opulence different from this, for she was old Massie’s daughter, and was the woman whom the legatees had noticed, unobtrusive, unintroduced, at the funeral service. Not that she pitied herself overmuch because of the switchbacks of fortune. She didn’t suppress her temper and her grievances, as she didn’t consider herself a saint, but self-pity was to be pushed away. She could make do on very little, she had said for years: she had to and she did.

  She was a small active woman getting on for fifty, looking younger, keeping a charm about which she was diffident. This diffidence, had been – though she didn’t see it with the sharp eyes she used on others – a lifetime’s handicap or wound. She wasn’t sentimental about herself, and she didn’t expend sentimentality on those she visited. She visited a number of people, since she spent her days working for a society which looked after the old, some of them not poorer than herself, some surviving on old age pensions, a good many of them shabby-genteel, depressed by what had happened to them.

  She wasn’t paid for this job, the society was a voluntary one. Her visiting district was the area bounded by Gloucester Road on the east, Warwick Road on the west, Cromwell Road and Old Brompton Road, to the north and south. Layabouts, students, drug takers, all came her way, but they weren’t part of her charge, which didn’t start under the age of sixty. Above that limit she knew people in her district as well as any official or priest. It was harsh growing old in poverty and loneliness: that was about as much as one could safely feel, if one was to be any use at all, she sometimes thought, as she went off on her rounds. Loneliness was worse than poverty for most, anyway above the subsistence level, as some even in the 1970S barely were. One couldn’t do much. Perhaps one could do a little.

  This was early November, the week after Hillmorton and Ryle had been talking in the Bishops’ Bar. Two mornings before, she had received a letter which had surprised, and, because she had a capacity for excitement, excited her. It came from the president of her society and read:

  Dear Mrs Rastall,

  If you can make it convenient to call on me here on Thursday evening at 6 p.m. I should be pleased to see you.

  Yours sincerely,

  Reginald Swaffield.

  The ‘here’ of the address was Hill Street, and that must be his private house. She hadn’t a vestigial notion what he could want her for. He couldn’t be dismissing her (she was unconfident enough to have to reassure herself on that): voluntary helpers didn’t get dismissed, and the association had to cling on to any bodies they possessed. She had met him only once, at a large reception, and he couldn’t have remembered her. He was, she had gathered somewhere, one of the biggest of property developers, immensely rich, powerful, emerging from obscurity (though from nothing more mysterious than a small farm in Rutland).

  It was nearly time to leave. She glanced again at the Standard, one of her evening comforts, on her income the only paper she let herself afford. She glanced at the sherry bottle: she liked a drink, but that was another expense, she had to ration herself, and presumably Swaffield would give her something in Hill Street. Hill Street – the logistics of travel needed planning when one used tubes and buses, and Mayfair was awkward. It would mean Green Park and then a walk.

  When she arrived, through the drizzling night, she was let in by a male servant, the first she had seen for a very long time. He lead her up the helix of stairs, wallpaper at the side Regency and striped, startlingly picked out in gold. On the piano nobile, the drawing-room, startling again: glazed chintz curtains, carpets from wall to wall like an optical demonstration in lines, squiggles and dots, more Regency stripes on chair and sofa backs, more stripes, a different species, on the walls: gilt-framed mirrors, chandeliers, crystal lights over a mantelpiece. Mrs Rastall’s gaze boggled and dazzled as she saw amidst the illuminations a short figure moving towards her, arms widespread, saying: ‘Good to see you.’ He was short but square, thick-legged, strong and quick on his feet. Over small features, large dark eyes assertively popped.

  ‘What a lovely house,’ she said, social reflex returning.

  ‘It’s a nice home,’ said Reginald Swaffield.

  She had to suppress a giggle, irreverence (of which she had plenty, subdued though she had come to appear) also returning. It was not a nice home. It was a horrible home. No one with her eye would endure it. She was searching round for an object to praise and saw a piece of porcelain.

  ‘How very pretty!’

  ‘Glad you think so. Sit down, sit down. Have a glass of champagne.’

  She liked the sound of that. Servant entered, her glass was filled, Swaffield’s also.

  ‘I always have a glass of this before dinner. Perhaps two. That’s enough,’ he said, while the servant was still in the room. Swaffield was sitting beside her on one of the Regency sofas. If James Ryle, who had travelled up through layers of society, had been listening to them, he would have known that her voice was still undiluted upper-middle class, clear, unsloppy, not attacking but not a mumble, perceptibly louder than those of the contemporary young. While she, who had travelled down through similar layers, was puzzling about Swaffield’s accent. She couldn’t place it. Actually, the base was midland but overlaid by a veneer of Illinois American. Before the war, he had tried to make a living there, with no success. He had been a poor man in 1945, and the millions, a number of them, had all come since.

  Once they were alone, he didn’t waste time.

  ‘I want to talk some business with you,’ he said.

  ‘What sort of business, Mr Swaffield?’

  ‘Yours.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t any–’

  ‘Oh yes, you have. You’re old Massie’s daughter, aren’t you?’

  ‘Did you know him?’

  ‘No. I’ve heard about him.’ He turned full face towards her, with a hot imperious stare. ‘He left you out of his will.’

  She flushed with anger and embarrassment, but even more she was astonished. In her father’s house she had met plenty of business men, but not anyone like this, w
ho shot information at you as though it was his right to collect it, who produced it as though driven by an incomprehensible passion.

  She tried to find some dignity to shelter behind.

  ‘That’s all over and done with. It’s my concern, I think.’

  ‘Nonsense. What are you living on? I won’t have it.’

  ‘This is my business. Nobody else’s.’

  ‘You’re not capable of looking after it. You’re one of my people, that’s why I sent for you. I’m taking over now.’

  She was affronted in two different ways. She was a proud woman, and had had failures which made her more so. Further, she had a feeling – and this might have been the thorn which went deepest into the flesh – that if she had been younger and prettier she wouldn’t have been treated like this. Somehow failure and resentment and hope were all joining each other, so as to bring the tears humiliatingly near. Her marriage – that disaster had seeped her tiny store of confidence away. Marrying to cherish someone – and then to be left overnight.

  And yet, though she wasn’t sentimental about suffering, she couldn’t stop herself being so about hope. Those who knew her thought she was realistic: in most respects she was, but not about her daydreams. Something wonderful might happen. Not this inflated power-drunk man wanting to look after her income. Patronising her, calling her one of ‘his people’, acting out of charity. That wasn’t part of the daydream. But someone wishing to look after her, just as herself (though her instincts were strong, these dreams were pure) – this she would bow to, there would be no pride then.

  She was shrewd, she often had good judgement. But she wasn’t in a fit state that evening to judge Swaffield right. She had to admit to herself that he was a formidable man. The force that surged out of him, she couldn’t miss. She did miss much of his ability, she wanted to despise him. And, though she wouldn’t have liked him more if she had seen it, she missed altogether the passion to make a personal empire for himself, to run the lives of ‘his people’ and everyone round him, to be the patriarch of something like a family, a great extended family, among whom he was supreme.

  There was another motive for his interference which she saw through almost at once. It was much more obvious, but less decisive than she thought.

  ‘Why did he cut you out?’ Swaffield’s face came closer to hers.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’

  ‘You may not want to, but you’ve got to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t be a fool. You’re not a fool. What had he got against you?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘You’re a kind woman, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know about that.’

  ‘You wanted to be kind to him.’

  In a haze, she felt her will breaking down.

  ‘I don’t think,’ she said, ‘he ever liked me much.’

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I loved him. When he let me.’

  ‘What was the matter with him?’

  She said: ‘Perhaps I disappointed him.’

  ‘You’re smart enough.’

  ‘He’d have preferred someone who did him credit.’

  ‘What do you mean, did him credit?’

  ‘When I was a little girl, he thought that I was plain.’

  ‘That didn’t last,’ said Swaffield, with bullying kindness.

  ‘He told me so.’

  ‘Blast him.’ He added. ‘This doesn’t make much sense.’

  ‘He didn’t approve of my marriage.’ By now she took it half for granted that Swaffield was informed about the marriage. Yes, he knew something. Marriage to a poor man: a clerk in what was then the LCC, and also unavailing, something of a waif. But also, and this presumably Swaffield didn’t know, as egotistic as men came. At least, in retrospect (was she for once making an excuse for herself?) she believed so. Anyway he had left her. That, it went without saying, Swaffield did know.

  ‘Jenny,’ (he even knew her pet name and she listened without resistance) ‘it doesn’t add up.’

  He was exuding anger and energy combined.

  ‘Of course, the old man was gaga his last few years.’

  She didn’t reply, and he attacked her: ‘Wasn’t he?’

  ‘I have no idea. He wouldn’t see me.’

  ‘Of course he was.’

  ‘It’s not so likely. The family lives a long time.’

  ‘I tell you, he was. And that bitch of a woman stepped in. She’s a double-dyed bitch if ever there was one. You’d better be honest. Try and tell me she isn’t.’

  ‘I’ve never met her,’ said Jenny Rastall.

  ‘Then you can believe me. She took her chance. She got him under her thumb.’

  ‘Mr Swaffield, I’ve never met her, but he was my father, after all. He wasn’t an easy touch for anyone.’

  ‘Any gaga old man is an easy touch for a woman like that. You can see what she did with him. Made him leave his cash to that son of hers. Who’s a waster. He’s a gigolo who talks women into bed and has curious tastes when he gets them there. I don’t mind about him. It’s the woman that I’m going to stop.’

  As Jenny sat within a foot of him, the seething of dislike – more spontaneous than dislike, nearer to hatred – was making him happier and more dominant. This was the motive that Jenny couldn’t help but recognise and which, because she understood it, gave her a kind of familiarity or comfort. Though she couldn’t know, she had no means of knowing, that, not so many years ago when Swaffield had first been asked to one of Lord Schiff’s dinner parties, Mrs Underwood had, so he imagined, snubbed him. Mrs Underwood, in Swaffield’s view, behaved as though she were conferring a favour on the Schiffs by eating their dinner. Much worse, he, Swaffield, was becoming eminent as a tycoon – and she had asked him what he did.

  Swaffield did not forget snubs even when, perhaps particularly when, he had invented them. He let them breed, and gained much pleasure from paying them out, the longer afterwards the more triumphant. Jenny didn’t need to have any precise intimation of all that. The nerve showed through. But it was so sharp, it disguised from her a more interesting surgency beneath. She still had no conception what his kind of personal imperialism was like – nor how, if he had had no relation with Mrs Underwood at all, he would nevertheless have been sitting with Jenny on his sofa that night, bullying her and taking charge of her affairs.

  ‘There’s no time to waste,’ he said.

  She didn’t meet the insistent positive stare.

  ‘We’re going to get that will overturned,’ he said.

  She had been listening, mute and astray, resentful at being taken by storm, and yet defenceless, perhaps half-grateful also.

  ‘Undue influence the lawyers will call it,’ said Swaffield. ‘That’s what they’ll go for. It’ll be a good old lawyer’s holiday.’

  She had to make some sort of response, but she wasn’t clear-minded.

  ‘I’m not sure,’ she said, ‘that I want to drag my father’s name through the courts.’

  ‘Nonsense, woman. You can’t afford to be prissy.’ Though he was overwhelming her, he could read her expression and he changed his tone.

  ‘If he hadn’t been past it, he’d have told you to do exactly what I am telling you now. You just think of him before that woman took over. He’d have told you to look after yourself.’

  She was giving a lop-sided sarcastic smile, almost her first that night, and Swaffield wanted to make sure it stayed.

  He said: ‘You won’t be any good to anyone unless you do. That wouldn’t be very clever.’

  He went on: ‘You haven’t been very clever, always, have you?’

  She said: ‘I can’t say I have.’

  Then one of his barking, direct questions.

  ‘How much are you living on?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘How much?’

  She made an effort to sound provided for. ‘I own the lease of my flat.’

  ‘How long for?’

&nbs
p; ‘Ten years.’

  ‘Sensible.’ Swaffield, who could use good manners for a purpose, congratulated her as from one property owner to another.

  ‘Apart from that, what have you got?’

  ‘About £800 a year.’

  His only comment, and a quiet one, was: ‘I tell you, you can’t afford to let those snakes get away with it.’

  There was a pause while he watched her. He went on in a manner brisk and impersonal: ‘Getting down to business. I want you to realise, it won’t be all plain sailing. There’s a sizeable sum in the kitty, and they’re not going to give it away just because we’re making a fuss. Their lawyer is a man by name of Skelding, he’s several kinds of old woman but he’s not an idiot. So we shall have to follow suit. We’ll have to go to a firm who know their business. Robinson and Wigmore, they’re goodish solicitors for this sort of game. They’ll know what counsel to get their tabs on before the others have started.’

  In the same impersonal fashion he added: ‘Of course, I’ll take charge of the expenses. You can pay me back if and when we’re home.’

  He gave her a hard encouraging grin.

  ‘We shall get home all right. They’ve overplayed their hand. If only that bitch hadn’t been so grasping, they’d be sitting prettier. If she’d just seen to it that there’d been a few thousand left to you, then they might have walked away. But she didn’t know where to stop.’