In Their Wisdom Page 4

  Previously Jenny had made one effort of pride about her living standard, and now she made one effort of self-respect.

  ‘I’m very grateful, Mr Swaffield,’ she said, primly, and a little thinly, ‘but I can’t tell you tonight whether I shall want to proceed.’

  Swaffield looked at her with equanimity.

  ‘That’s natural enough.’

  ‘I really can’t.’

  ‘You take a day or two and think about it. Then let me know.’

  He was a good negotiator, with women as well as men. It would do harm to force her. He understood something about her by now and was certain that the decision was already made.

  He had filled her glass again during the conversation, but now, letting her go, he did not try to delay her with another drink.

  Her good night was constrained. His was cordial, not overdone, and to himself relaxed and satisfied.

  4

  Once more in the Bishops’ Bar, the following week, Hillmorton and Ryle were sitting together, this time with one of their closer friends. But they were, as they had often been in the past year, physically embarrassed. The table was shaking, each time Adam Sedgwick put his hand upon it. His glass had already slopped over, when he tried to raise it. There was no way in which they could help him, and he was offended, and hurt more than offended, if they tried.

  It might have appeared that Lord Sedgwick was drunk. To some unobservant persons it did appear so, that night and other nights. Both Houses of Parliament were used to being charitable about drunkenness, and took it as an occupational hazard, rather like long-windedness in debate. However, to anyone who knew Sedgwick or even took a steady look at him, it wouldn’t have occurred as a plausible explanation. The truth was, for some months past he had been, not immobilised but the reverse, with Parkinson’s disease, and it was getting worse.

  Beyond control his hands quavered and fluctuated as he attempted to light a cigarette. The only static area of his body seemed to be the muscles of his cheeks, deadened in a face which had once been both ascetic and humorous. While his right hand didn’t obey, but jolted involuntarily about, with a clumsiness similar to that one sees in very young infants, he didn’t look disquieted or lose his dignity. The other two were more uncomfortable than he was.

  Sedgwick had had a career nearly as eminent as a professional scientist’s could be. Alpha minus, he said, with sarcastic objectivity. He had been one of the founding fathers of molecular biology back in the thirties, before the decisive techniques were ready for him. Whether he would have had the wit to use them if they had been, he had also been heard to say, would fortunately never be known. He had in due course been given a Nobel prize, a little late. He had become President of the Royal Society. He hadn’t made one of the ultimate discoveries, nothing in the class of Crick’s couple, he used to remark, and was impatient if anyone contradicted.

  Hillmorton and Ryle were familiar with all this, and with his personal style. And not only they, but many in the English official strata, were familiar with the Sedgwick group of families. This was something odd, insular, and academic. They had been prosperous and cultivated for a hundred and fifty years. (A great grand uncle of Sedgwick’s, with the identical name, had been a Professor in Cambridge in the 1820s). Wedgwoods, Darwins, Keyneses, Hills, Adrians, Hodgkins, Butlers, a few more. They had intermarried, obsessively and on the whole successfully, though the genes played tricks, negative as well as positive. The standards were austere. Sedgwick was fond of saying that it had its disadvantages to come from a family where, when one got a First, an uncle came up and observed that it was something to know you weren’t altogether a fool. Similarly when one was elected into the Royal Society before the age of forty, if the uncle was feeling unusually complimentary – it seems you’re not totally unrecognised, after all.

  They had stayed in their own enclave, and in English terms had scarcely moved from the upper-middle class. They had never cared for any version of smart society, when that existed. Sedgwick was one of the very few who had, over a century, been appointed to this Upper House, though one or two of them had turned an offer down. They had not had any but the remotest connections with Hillmorton’s relatives: they didn’t go to the same schools, they might have met at Trinity, but, so far as the records showed, there was not a single marriage between the Sedgwicks and their kind and the high Whigs. When the aristocratic country houses had entertained, the Sedgwicks did not go there. Adventurers did: even sometimes outsiders like predecessors of Ryle himself in earlier generations: but not these.

  It wasn’t that they were unsociable. They simply appeared to enjoy their own society. Before his illness, Sedgwick had been good company, someone people were eager to sit beside. Now he was putting up with his illness. But somehow – the more unexpected to those like Ryle who had know him longest – either his intelligence or his nerve had let him down. He had one of the most lucid minds extant, thought Ryle, and his courage wasn’t in doubt, he had proved it on mountains and in war-time projects. Yet he wouldn’t deal with his condition.

  He had been given a new drug called L-Dopa. He had told the others how hopeful he was. They thought that a scientific education might have made him more sceptical, but he was like the simplest of persons with a miracle medicine. It worked on similar cases: he believed, or persuaded himself, that it was working with him. Neither Hillmorton nor Ryle could see any sign of that. Perhaps his speech, which had begun noticeably to slur, had somewhat cleared. On the other hand, his face was now being convulsed by twitches which might have looked like comic grimaces, and took away from its Red Indian distinction. Sedgwick admitted that this was a side-effect of the drug – ‘not specially becoming, I think.’ His hand movements, so far as Hillmorton and Ryle could see, hadn’t become better. They judged that he was deteriorating, though not fast.

  For those who didn’t respond to the drug, there remained a brain operation which had been developed a decade or so before. It ought to give him years of remission and perhaps more than that. It carried some risks: but he had taken risks ten times acuter often in his life, and so had most men of his age. Most men wouldn’t have hesitated for long. They might have had questions when they got into hospital, but they wouldn’t have refused the operation. Sedgwick did refuse it. He persisted in believing that the drug would work.

  The only thing not affected, the others thought, was his mind. It hadn’t lost its edge, or scarcely at all. Sometimes the words were blurred on his lips, but they were still sharp. But, even there, was he becoming repetitive? That afternoon, he was talking about the educational policy of his own party, and they had heard him on this subject before.

  Unlike the other two, he sat on the Opposition benches and took the Labour whip. That didn’t inhibit him from saying that official Labour and TUC statements on education were the most cretinous that had been issued in his time.

  ‘It’s extremely liberating for them to know nothing whatever about it. They’ve no more idea of serious education than you and I have of training ballet dancers.’

  ‘It’ll take some time,’ said Ryle consolingly, ‘before they get what they want.’

  ‘I wish I could believe that. Elitism. That’s the fashionable dirty word. It’s a ninety-five per cent probability that anyone who thinks that elitism is the worst sin in the universe could never have belonged to any reasonable elite if he tried for a hundred years. How does any sane man imagine this country is going to do any real science unless we train a scientific elite?’

  ‘You’re the authority,’ said Hillmorton. Neither he nor Ryle could totally suppress the consideration one showed when speaking to an invalid. ‘But I am pretty sure that we shall go on doing it.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ Sedgwick persisted. ‘If these people manage to make education soft and easy and hygienic, and they may, then in twenty years real science in England will be on the way out. Less than half as good as it is today. It happens to be the one thing we still do well.’

  ‘Your c
olleagues will have to stop them,’ said Ryle.

  ‘They’ve all lost their confidence. They’re shouted down by stupid intellectuals. Stupid intellectuals are the biggest curse we’ve got. Clever intellectuals have their uses.’ (He employed the word clever in the old-fashioned Cambridge manner, as a term of praise.) ‘Stupid ones are no good to man or beast. They’re worse than that. They go about singing in unison, and everyone thinks that that is what the intellectual life is like.

  ‘You know,’ he went on, ‘the intellectual life has got much sillier since I was a young man. The interesting thing is, how much sillier it can get.’

  His stoicism was hard, in health his contempt would have been more relieved. The others wanted to divert him. Cambridge in the twenties – he was a couple of years younger than they were. Who were the real stars, looking back? Who was the cleverest man he had known? ‘Maynard Keynes,’ said Sedgwick, ‘without the shadow of a doubt. Not the greatest, by a long shot. Not the most agreeable. But superlatively bright. No one in that class now.’

  ‘By the by,’ said Hillmorton, trying another diversion, ‘when did you come here, Adam? I’ve forgotten.’

  That esoteric question was heard often in the House. It meant, when did you succeed to a seat or were appointed to one, but it sounded as though the man might have been actuated by a sudden whim, walking down Oxford Street, deciding that, instead of taking a holiday in Italy, he might as well join the Lords.

  Sedgwick said 1966, just after he had finished being President of the Royal. Presumably all future Presidents would be asked, said Hillmorton. At that point Ryle, estimating that Sedgwick was getting ready to leave, got up quickly himself and said good night, while the others were sitting at the table.

  The reason was, he was squeamish about seeing Sedgwick’s run-and-shuffle to the door, bent over at an angle of forty-five degrees, centre of gravity in advance of his feet, like an old-style music hall comedian coming on to the stage. Ryle wasn’t made squeamish by blood, but sometimes he was by the grotesque. A man like Sedgwick oughtn’t to be humiliated by the body in this fashion. It was grim to see him give a smile of shame as, at the end of his run, he butted into a wall.

  Walking past Parliament Yard on his way home, Ryle had, not thoughts, shadows less clear edged than that, intrusions of mortality. Sedgwick wouldn’t be seen in that place much longer. It was a place which kept reminding one that time, other people’s, one’s own, was drawing in. The average age was high, even though there were some young hereditary peers. The median age was much higher. When he looked round from his seat in the Chamber, he didn’t see many people under sixty. As he watched those faces, he knew, with the certainty of a statistician, that some wouldn’t be visible this time next year. Others would know the same, watching the faces on the benches where he sat himself.

  It was a comfort to enter his drawing-room and switch on the lights. Through the stretch of window he gazed with approval at the collar of lamps across the river. He had lived here in Whitehall Court since his wife died the previous year, and he still didn’t take the view for granted, he was still capable of thinking that it was one of the great townscapes. He left the curtains undrawn and sat on the sofa, looking out over the river and letting his reveries shimmer like the reflections on the water. When his elder son appeared punctually and by appointment he didn’t want to be disturbed.

  Ryle hadn’t been close to this son since he was a child, although even now the father worried when he was ill or was flying in an aircraft. Ryle, used to being easy with people, was not so with his own son, and found himself, to his chagrin, becoming overhearty. Why this was so, he couldn’t have said. Francis was an agreeable man of thirty, mildly eccentric, with a quirky sense of humour which his father found irritating. He was a principal at the Treasury, not likely, his father would have guessed, to reach a top job there, but capable enough. He spent a certain amount of time in devising proofs and disproofs of ESP, and this was thought eccentric in Whitehall and was another irritation to his father.

  Ryle pressed a drink on him, feeling, as he so often did, like a noisy hairy Nordic barbarian outraging the sensibilities of a fine-nerved Hindu.

  ‘I wanted to talk to you about the new arrival,’ said Ryle, referring to Francis’ second child, born a week before, and using an arch self-conscious phrase as he would have done to no one else on earth.

  ‘He’s rather fun,’ said Francis. ‘I like very small infants.’

  ‘Do you?’ said his father doubtfully. Yet he had done so himself.

  ‘Original sin?’ said Francis. ‘I think so.’

  At that his father became easier. ‘I think so too.’

  After a pause, he went on: ‘Well. I want to make some arrangement for him. Of course.’

  ‘You’re not to stretch yourself. Really you’re not.’

  ‘It doesn’t make the slightest difference,’ said James Ryle. ‘You know that as well as I do.’

  This time it had been Francis who was over-considerate or self-conscious. He gave a fresh shame-faced smile. He had been through all this before, when his first child was born. James Ryle had immediately set up a trust. He had been utterly unsecretive with his son, not only then but years earlier, about his finances – as he was unlikely to be with Hillmorton or Sedgwick, for there he had become acclimatised, on any question of private money, to a kind of automatic reserve. It hadn’t been simply a flourish to say that Francis knew as much about his father’s money as James Ryle knew himself. He did. He was surprised at how much there was.

  It was all self-made. Comfortable professional jobs over a lifetime, but that didn’t explain it all or nearly all. Histories which had sold well, especially in America, and used as text books. Consultancies with publishers. Investments which had started early, for a poor young man. It had accumulated and been well handled. If he died that night, Ryle’s estate wouldn’t be as large as old Massie’s, but it might be something like half the size.

  For years past he had been deliberately stripping it off. Often he looked less correct, more easy-going than his colleagues, but he could be just as precise an operator. The ideal, he had told his son Francis, was to die leaving nothing at all. Ryle equals nought, that was the formula for a decently calculated death. So there had been gifts with time to spare, trusts for both sons, trusts as the grandchildren were born, discretionary trusts to take care of other relatives and friends.

  All that Francis had been informed of and understood. Frequently, though, he didn’t understand his father. The theory was fine. Ryle talked of benefactions and made them. He didn’t go back on his promises. And yet – there was no concealment, Francis had a clear idea of what was left, and he knew that his father had kept plenty at his own disposal. He wasn’t getting anywhere near the formula for a decently calculated death. Francis would have expected him to be more ruthless with himself.

  That evening, business was soon dealt with. Ryle proposed to do the same for this grandchild as for the first. Primogeniture, he remarked in an aside, was what had kept the upper class intact: but it wasn’t for people like them, they weren’t hard enough. So lawyers were already drawing up a new trust and it remained only for Ryle to live for the prescribed stretch of years.

  ‘That’s nothing for you. You’ll only be, what, seventy-three,’ said Francis.

  ‘We shall see, shan’t we, one way or the other?’

  ‘You’re all right? When did you see your doctor?’ For once Francis seemed not equable but anxious. In that interview it might have been a mercenary anxiety: but it wasn’t, or only a long way behind the simple one. ‘You are all right?’

  ‘So far as I know.’ Ryle was dismissive and brusque. Then suddenly he broke into one of his outbursts, as cheerful, detached, spontaneous, as if he had been with a friend and contemporary, not with his son.

  ‘Why should we go in for this nonsense? Will you tell me that?’

  Francis gave a quizzical puzzled smile.

  ‘I don’t quite follow what you
mean–’

  ‘I mean, spending our energies, such as they are, thinking up financial settlements which are supposed to be useful in the twenty-first century. It’s nonsense. Whatever happens to this boy of yours, do you believe it’s probable that any money we set aside for him now will be the slightest use to him in the year 2000? He won’t be thirty then, I might remind you.’

  ‘Not very probable,’ said Francis. ‘But still, don’t we have to–’

  ‘It won’t be any good to him,’ said Ryle with a loud laugh. ‘I suppose going through the motions is some good to us. It gives us the illusion that things are going on.’

  ‘Haven’t people always needed that?’

  ‘It’s damned silly, but they’ve always acted as though they did.’

  Ryle, still expansive, reflected on the eighteenth-century Venetians. They were looking after their money and their descendants’ money, just as the whole society was coming to an end. There were, said Ryle, some uncomfortable resemblances.

  ‘I’m sure we’re stabler. That is, if you put us in with America and Europe,’ said Francis, who had been trained as an economist.

  ‘Well, you’ll see. Anyway we go on making our nice little dispositions. Perhaps you’re right, perhaps it keeps us from fretting. But it is damned silly, you know. Somehow we can’t catch up with what’s happening. Our emotions are always about a hundred years behind. A week or two ago, I was quite pleased because someone I know in the Lords told me about a daughter of his. She’s going to get married, and the man’s come into some money. I was quite pleased. Why the hell should I be? There’s no sense in it. It’s nonsense. Why should someone like this man who incidentally seems peculiarly worthless – why should he be appointed to live in the state of life that his relatives felt was designed for them a couple of generations ago?’

  ‘I’ll make you a small bet,’ said Francis, ‘that his father-in-law-to-be didn’t feel it was quite so incongruous.’

  ‘The trouble is,’ said Ryle, ‘the young woman is very pleasant. I couldn’t help being pleased.’