In Their Wisdom Read online

  When his son had gone, which was soon afterwards, Ryle was no longer thinking of Hillmorton’s daughter, Julian Underwood, or natural injustice. That evening he had no intimation – and nor had the Underwoods or Hillmortons – that Reginald Swaffield had several days before summoned a partner of Robinson and Wigmore and set him to work. If Ryle had known of that, it would have seemed interesting but remote: for he, staring out over the streaming light paths on the river was daydreaming, with some restlessness, about himself.

  It might have seemed the opposite of his thoughts on mortality, walking home. The truth was, it was very close. He was the reverse of secretive talking of money to his son. But he would have been secretive about this, even if they had been intimate. One couldn’t, he had long ago made it a rule, talk about marriage, much less an ageing man’s sexuality, with those much younger than oneself: not even with contemporaries, if they were recent friends. He needed someone who had known him all his life, and there was none such within call.

  He had had a happy marriage and he wanted something of the same kind again. Sex didn’t cut off clean, as the young liked to think. Maybe it didn’t cut off at all. Some day there would be a last time: but very likely one wouldn’t know.

  It wouldn’t be easy to achieve what he was brooding over. Marriage was a language and a habit and he would have to learn them, and teach them, both again. To be an old man on the prowl, even if one weren’t self-conscious and didn’t feel it – did a healthy man ever feel old, except in moments? – was more ridiculous than one could bear. A woman too young would be no good for him. In the nature of things, it would before long become no good for her.

  When he had wanted something before, he hadn’t been held back, he had known how to act or at least how to put himself in the way of chance happening. Now he didn’t. He wasn’t used to being passive. It was like a regression into extreme youth, with its wild hopes and discontents. So he sat there, in a haze that might have been a youth’s but without the limitless expectations. He had learned his way about, he had been active for so long. Now he didn’t know his way, and sat there daydreaming.

  5

  In Mrs Underwood’s bright, pot-pourri-smelling drawing-room in Victoria Road, she and three others were playing bridge. There was not much else to do. There was nothing more to say: which didn’t prevent, as the game went on, a good deal more being said.

  Round the table, the other three were Hillmorton’s daughter Elizabeth, Julian Underwood and Mr Skelding. The time was five thirty in the afternoon. That morning Mr Skelding had heard that probate in the will had been held up: a caveat had been granted for six months. Six months was a long time, someone had said. Mr Skelding had told them, with unctuous briskness, that they had to assume that there was going to be an appeal against the will.

  All the information, which wasn’t more than the legal exchange, had been given over tea. Since then they had proceeded with the rubber, some of them playing out of habit and discipline. Mrs Underwood was an addict, and the table was appointed with pull-out slides on which the scoresheets rested and which also contained receptacles, as on an aircraft, for glasses. In Elizabeth Fox-Milnes’ glass was gin and tonic. She was black-haired, not showing much resemblance to her father’s handsomeness, but with a kind of apprehensive mobile good looks, green-eyed, clean-featured, forehead carrying a premature line that night. But worry didn’t affect her play. She was a long way the best of the four, although Mrs Underwood was in good practice and, so it appeared, was Mr Skelding, who was absorbing, also as in good practice, his second substantial whisky. The only non-drinker was Julian, who, partnering his mother, put down each card with dash and spontaneity, to be greeted by a frown because dash and spontaneity were not enough.

  On the other hand it was Julian who was in higher spirits than any of them. Both women were depressed, and Elizabeth was having to hold down her qualms. Not so Julian, who wasn’t holding down hilarious outbursts at the oddities of fate.

  ‘There’s nothing as scared as money,’ he said as a hand was being scored, with the air of one who was either financially indifferent or alternatively could have made a fortune on the Stock Exchange. He had said it several times before, and his mother was irritated.

  ‘That’s not the point,’ she said.

  ‘I keep telling you,’ he said, ‘just now there isn’t any point at all. Is there, anyone?’

  Mr Skelding dealt sacramentally and spoke with caution and weight, discreetly satisfied because he was speaking with caution and weight.

  ‘Of course there may be eventualities we can’t provide against. But I hope you have all accepted it after the assurance I’ve given you, everything that can be provided against will be looked after in the next twenty-four hours. In fact,’ he said, as slyly as one coming to the climax of a card trick, ‘a certain amount was set going before I came here this afternoon.’

  ‘Lawyer’s holiday,’ said Julian, not knowing that he was echoing a remark by another authority, Reginald Swaffield himself.

  ‘It’s bound to be done at a high level,’ said Mr Skelding, who wasn’t put off by Julian’s euphoria. ‘We should be very remiss if we didn’t get the best opinion ourselves.’

  ‘I suppose that ought to be consoling.’ Elizabeth’s tone was sharp. She tried to soften it, and addressed Mr Skelding by his Christian name. Struggling with anxiety, her manners were good. She didn’t like some of those in her own family. Her father’s, since he had been a politician and was also affable by nature, were matey: but often enough she had heard relatives patting their own pet names across the room, patting the pet names of absent acquaintances with the same enthusiasm, who simultaneously would consider it fitting to say Mr to someone like Skelding (sitting amongst them, doing them a service), even though they had known him for years.

  ‘Eric,’ she said, ‘I wish to God that the old man had left his daughter something, just to look decent. Then we might have been spared all this.’

  She knew no more than Julian, moments before, that she also was echoing Swaffield. For normally shrewd people, though, at this stage the position was not complex, and minds thought alike.

  ‘It’s going to come out right.’ Julian gave a cry as optimistic as Mark Tapley’s in one of his less depressed moments.

  ‘I think we had better call,’ Mrs Underwood broke in.

  They duly called, Julian again optimistic, and played. Julian and Mrs Underwood went down once more.

  Elizabeth was certain that Mrs Underwood had deliberately stifled her question, and knew why. She was too much disturbed, she wasn’t to be put off. She repeated:

  ‘Eric, aren’t I right? If only she had had a few thousand in the will–’

  Elizabeth caught a glance between Mr Skelding and Mrs Underwood.

  ‘That’s as may be. I really don’t think it’s very profitable to hark back, Lady Elizabeth. We’ve plenty of better things to do, I’m sure you will agree.’

  Mr Skelding had a regard for titles, enjoyed producing them, enjoyed hearing one of their bearers use his Christian name. Nevertheless he was being shifty. Elizabeth hadn’t much doubt that he and Mrs Underwood had been in disagreement, about the will. He was a sensible lawyer. He was likely to have suggested to her that it would avoid some comment if Massie ‘remembered’ his daughter. Mrs Underwood was a sensible woman. It would have been easy for her – if she had been so close to the old man as Elizabeth imagined – to use her persuasions. Had he been obstinate? Or was there another reason? Had Mrs Underwood been afraid of a quarrel with her son?

  Elizabeth believed, though Julian had been secretive, that he had known it all every step of the way. He would have been angry – Elizabeth didn’t believe but knew – at sums of money being unnecessarily dispensed on persons other than himself. Elizabeth also knew for certain that, whatever sense and prudence told his mother, he would win in that kind of battle of wills.

  Elizabeth sat at the bridge table, acute by nature, but also distracted and confused. She loved that
man. She loved him to yearning point. She was in his power. The trouble was that she didn’t trust him, or not with her mind. It had even occurred to her to suspect his extraordinary ebullience and bursts of hope that evening. Did they spring out because this news might give him an excuse to escape their marriage – or at any rate delay it? Procrastination, he loved. Any month or week or even day saved against not being committed – those he hugged to himself. Was that what he was doing now, blissfully outweighing the chance of money switched away? No, Elizabeth, though she was often lost in his mirages and quick change acts, couldn’t think so. Her moves, intentions, desires, were straight lines, and his rarely were: and yet, she knew this much, in the end he looked after himself, few more devotedly, he had an instinct for self-preservation, and money was what one needed to preserve oneself.

  Elizabeth had read somewhere that one couldn’t love without trust. Whoever wrote that didn’t know much, she thought: it must have been an ageing queer. When she let her acid thoughts about Julian crystallise, she said to herself that no one in her senses would trust him. Yet he had been much loved. Look at her own state.

  But there was something else she didn’t see so hard and clear. She had another feeling that later on James Ryle would recognise, but she scarcely could. On the surface she disparaged Julian. He looked like a wicked baby, she sometimes thought, and loved him so that she couldn’t imagine loving any other man again.

  Mrs Underwood was saying to Skelding: ‘You’re getting everything laid on, of course?’

  ‘It’ll take a little while, we can’t rush things,’ he replied, fingertips tented together, expression bestowing security.

  ‘It’s all under control, though?’

  ‘We hope so. We hope so.’

  ‘Everything?’ said Mrs Underwood.

  ‘We shan’t leave anything to chance.’

  Mrs Underwood relaxed, satisfied, beak of nose less evident. She made some acquiescent remark about it all devolving on Mr Skelding and the other lawyers. She gazed brightly round the table, and said: ‘The rest of us will have to be shabbash wallahs. That’s the best we can do.’

  This peculiar observation was incomprehensible to all the others, though it might have reminded some that she had lived in India. She explained that shabbash wallahs were spectators on the touchlines, cheering their side on. That was what they were going to be, she added in a commanding tone.

  Meanwhile Elizabeth had had another suspicion, that Skelding and Mrs Underwood had been talking in code. It sounded as though they were once more in alliance – but this time were they leaving Julian out? It could be that they (or rather Skelding) had learned a lesson, and weren’t giving him advance information about tactics – so that he wouldn’t be able to over-persuade his mother. Elizabeth could work out what one piece of tactics could be. It was obvious. And it was also obvious that Julian wouldn’t like it, would make trouble, and that they were sensible to keep it to themselves.

  Mrs Underwood would feel guilty about it. Everyone thought her brassy, and maybe she was, except that Julian melted her. Elizabeth wasn’t certain whether, facing the truth, she had any liking for the older woman. There was a farcical shadow of resemblance in the way they both clung to Julian, and that prevented any kind of ease. And yet Mrs Underwood was her ultimate support about the marriage, Elizabeth believed, and so, though she might not feel any liking, she sometimes looked at her with the sort of dependence which isn’t far from love.

  ‘I don’t know why we are all making such a fuss,’ said Julian, ‘I tell you, it’s going to come out all right.’

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Skelding imperturbably, ‘you wouldn’t like your legal adviser to take that for granted, you wouldn’t like it very much.’

  ‘I’m sure that things are going to come out all right, they always do.’ He turned, fresh, enlivened, to his mother: ‘Think of the times they have!’

  From her expression that touched memories.

  Julian baited Mr Skelding. ‘People make things too complicated. That’s why they get them wrong. The only point is, we’ve got the will in our favour, and they haven’t. At the end of all the flummery it will come down to that, you’ll see.’

  ‘Oh, my friend,’ said Mr Skelding, for once shocked, ‘that really is much too simple.’

  ‘Oh, my friend,’ mimicked Julian, ‘important things are simple. Otherwise they wouldn’t be important.’

  As they started to play again, Elizabeth was wondering when if ever this rubber would end. And when it did – she was wondering what would happen. He might not choose to take her to his flat. For she never knew when he wanted to go to bed with her. Capricious, fanciful, there as everywhere, there more than anywhere. Among his charms, she had one of her acid thoughts, was a mildly luxurious hypochondria. He had told her recently that an orgasm spent as much energy as a three-mile run. He might indulge himself into believing that.

  At last the rubber did end. Mrs Underwood said hopefully, more as addict than hostess, that there might be time for another. No one responded. The account was reckoned up. Mrs Underwood and Julian had lost £7 between them. Mrs Underwood paid for both. Elizabeth, despondent because she had received no signal from him, watched this happen. She had frequently done the same. He let her pay minor debts for him, though he had refused to borrow money.

  Then, casual, light, natural, came Julian’s voice: ‘Well, if you’ll excuse us, mother, I think it’s time Liz and I went home. She can make me a scrambled egg – can’t you?’

  He gave her his child-like smile. Suddenly she was totally happy, with the happiness outside of time or even of expectancy that might have lifted her when she was a girl, not a woman neither sweet-natured nor gentle, getting on for middle-age.

  6

  Six months is a long time, someone had said. In fact, no one knew for certain what the period of waiting would be, and it was easy to underestimate the resources of English law. So that a number of people had some more experience of waiting, expectancy, anxiety, and hope: and in the process one or two noticed some more of the curious properties of time.

  Time was passing, that was dull, one realised it only when it was over and brought it back to memory, which was itself fallacious. One never realised what the actual flux of time had been like when one was living it: just as James Ryle might recall looking out over the river brooding on his celibacy, and cut off that recollection as though it were framed, like a period in a history text book: while on the actual evening, time had, not surprisingly, flowed on and in due course (and not so long after the brooding) Ryle had roused himself and gone off to have a meal at one of his clubs.

  Time passing at a regulated pace was a nice, platitude-ridden, augustan thought, but it didn’t really happen even to old men. Whether you were young or old, time in a period of waiting showed its relativistic possibilities, expanded or contracted or even stayed still, according to how you were feeling at that moment, how much you loved or dreaded the future, and what you were like yourself. For instance, of the principals connected with the will, Elizabeth distrusted the future most. She believed that the result of these legalities was going to determine her life, one way or the other: and she didn’t trust, and often didn’t wish to know, the answer. So that on a good many nights, having spent hours making plans with Julian of how they would live when his money at last arrived, she would turn into the pillow and wish that this moment would never end. Did time duly stretch out? Sometimes she felt so peaceful just before she went to sleep that it seemed so.

  Jenny Rastall was, on the whole, less transported. She had no one at that time in whom to invest her hopes. She wasn’t frightened of the future, except of loneliness. When she had been through her second crisis of decision – which happened a couple of weeks after the bridge party at Mrs Underwood’s – there were mornings when she scampered off on her visiting round, half oblivious to any prospects from the will.

  Occasionally, seeing a client or patient or charge (she never knew, even to herself, what to c
all them) whom she was fond of, she wished she had money to buy this old lady a present just to keep her interested, perhaps a television set. Then it occurred to Jenny that conceivably she might soon have money, and she felt excited with no misgivings at all. Frequently she woke in the morning, eager with the sense that something good might be coming her way. But that wasn’t a novel feeling. It had come to her so often, cheated her, supported her, however drab her days were being. Maybe now it was stronger, with some realistic chance to think ahead. She enjoyed that, just as a gambler would: she would have been happier gambling than most of the others. She loved the excitement, like a gambler she loved to hope. On the other hand, she never made plans about how she was going to spend her money, if and when it ultimately arrived. Perhaps that wasn’t a contradiction, perhaps that was another tic of hope.

  Julian, who showed a good many tics, did not show that one. He made plans, in detail, of how the money would be spent. So much in detail that both his mother and Elizabeth tried to stop him, terrified that he would be disappointed, Elizabeth terrified for her own sake.

  ‘Tempting fate, that’s what you mean,’ Julian taunted them. ‘Never mind. Fate is what happens to me.’

  Those remarks, his listeners did not find tranquillising. Nor would they have found it tranquillising if they had known that his plans as he had revealed them to his mother, though they sometimes included marriage to Elizabeth, were markedly different from those he revealed to his putative wife: and that both were different from a third, private or executive version possessed by Julian alone.

  If she had known that, Elizabeth would have taken it as she did any fresh piece of dissimulation – at the same time surprised and not surprised, qualm-ridden, maddened, acceptant.

  As for Mrs Underwood, she like Elizabeth was afraid of the results, but not because she might see Julian extract himself from their relation. Though that thought had often worn her down, the old Japanese ‘darkness of the heart’, it was something harder, more self-bound, that now made her angry as much as anxious, less depressed than Elizabeth, simply because she was angry and her self-esteem was fighting for her.