In Their Wisdom Read online

  This matter of the will – it was something she had done herself, the most effective thing she had ever done for her son. Perhaps she had done it for a softer motive (at times she thought it might secure his love, never having learned or being capable of learning that that one could never do – in which she was not different from most of the human race), but this she had forgotten. It had been her doing, and it would be unbearable to have it taken from her in the end. She detested this unknown woman, whom she had never met, with lethal single-mindedness, and anyone who was helping her. Mrs Underwood had forgotten her motive and also anything she had done to get that will achieved. It was now all innocent, all triumphant, all her own action. To have it upset – the adrenalin poured through her, she didn’t turn into her pillow as Elizabeth did. Her will braced her, her will shouted that it would not happen.

  Meanwhile the lawyers were working, more of them than laymen would have expected (Mr Skelding’s decorous and old-fashioned office concealed half a dozen partners and several qualified clerks) and – more so again than laymen would have expected – some of them getting their feelings involved on their respective sides.

  It was not only that they were professionals and wanted to win, though that was true enough. Both Skelding’s firm and their opponents had warned their clients that costs were mounting (they were already round £10,000) and put forward the arguments for settling out of court. That was a minimum responsibility. Otherwise the case had its legal interest and might also make some public noise, of which one or two counsel, already briefed, had a not displeasing premonition. Some young men, who wouldn’t appear in court or even take part in conferences, nevertheless thought they might bite off some internal credit in their offices. But this wasn’t the whole of it. It wasn’t only Mr Skelding who wasn’t quite dispassionate. He himself had managed Mrs Underwood’s legal work for years. After she introduced him, he had taken on Mr Massie’s a couple of years before the old man died, and had drawn up the old man’s will according to her instructions. She might have been more cautious, Mr Skelding didn’t let his criticism go further. He had wanted to keep her confidence, that was what he prided himself on and cherished. Perhaps he should have given stronger advice. Still, she could be headstrong, but she didn’t overstep the guidelines, and he wished her well.

  Nearly everyone in his firm agreed. Some of the seniors, close to the family negotiations, regarded Julian with something near to physical distaste. This was a common masculine response. On the other hand, they tended to like Elizabeth, bitter tongue and all, and those who had been knocked about by passion wanted her to have her man, whatever he was like.

  None of them knew Jenny Rastall, and a good many accepted the rumours that were clustering round her, just as rumours were always accepted (perhaps most willingly) by those who have lived in the world. She was an intriguer, she had been disinherited for financial fiddling or alternatively for unutterably callous behaviour, she was a tool of Swaffield’s. Swaffield’s intervention in the case had become known, and that tightened the solidarity of the Underwood party. To a good many people, whichever side Swaffield was on, the other must be right. He had a capacity for inspiring a kind of charismatic hate.

  With some, though, he inspired passionate energy. Robinson and Wigmore were sophisticated lawyers, especially their chief working partner Symington, but they became as devoted to Jenny’s cause as Swaffield himself. Whatever his other motives, he became convinced that Jenny was a nice and ill-treated woman, and he spread that conviction like a gospel. The lawyers met her, and thought her honourable and unassuming. Few of the rumours about her reached their side and when they did were kicked away. On the other hand rumours about Elizabeth began to circulate, encouraged by Swaffield, who had a voyeur’s delight in sexual scandal. Stories of her and Julian – the enmity or contempt, with a simple change of object, became as strong as in the Underwood party, and the lip-licking more luxurious.

  By the spring of 1971 there were perhaps about a hundred persons who were, some remotely, some as principals, affected by Massie’s will, or at least who had some knowledge of it. Only a few were neutral. Even the outsiders weren’t. Hillmorton might have said sarcastically that, in the parliamentary form, he had an interest in the case: but his friends Ryle and Sedgwick, who had no conceivable interest and were as capable of detachment as most men, seemed not to be capable of detachment about this. Sedgwick was weighed down by his illness, and yet, in ardent and paradoxically unselfish moments, he found himself indignant about Jenny Rastall, whom he was unlikely ever to meet, and impatiently eager for Elizabeth to win.

  That was so with Ryle also. In fact, those level-headed senatorial men (as others thought them) were being infected by clamour as thoroughly as everyone else.

  Most of these participants, but not quite all, belonged to a privileged layer in an old and privileged country. Not quite all – for Jenny Rastall herself wasn’t much luckier than the old people she cared for, though some believed that those who had been born well off, as she had, never completely forgot it and had a kind of protective veil whatever became of them. As for the rest, they were living more comfortably than most people, either then or ever, had been able to live. It was they who had become partisans – showing once more, as though that were needed, that if men had a chance to become partisans, they couldn’t resist taking it.

  Some bits of partisanship had led to deaths in torment. This one was, to put it mildly, milder. And yet, a few reflective people were startled, and then embarrassed, to find that their emotions were getting bound up in a cause, not only minuscule, but which made them feel ashamed or in secret improper. For this was, there was no cover or genteel escape, a matter of money. Not even great sums of money, such as politicians like Hillmorton had once argued about, where sheer magnitude made it fairy arithmetic – but just naked personal money, the kind of money which affected a few day-by-day lives. They had all become curiously prudish about money. At the same time, they were singularly unprudish about sex. Within the human limits, few people were more unprudish about sex than Julian Underwood and Elizabeth and their younger relatives. There wasn’t much that Hillmorton and the rest of his generation didn’t tolerate – and not much, as someone like Swaffield might have discovered about their acquaintances, that hadn’t been performed. Hillmorton and the others knew their own countrymen and wouldn’t have been surprised.

  Almost totally unprudish about sex: more prudish about death than their predecessors: and, as they didn’t like to recognise, far more prudish about money. They didn’t want to talk about it. They didn’t want to face how much they cared and worried about it. They wished to pretend – to themselves as much as to others –that it affected them very little.

  That was an hypocrisy. Like most hypocrisies it had something good in it. They wanted to disguise their motives, because they would have liked loftier ones. The actual facts, however, pointed otherwise. If anyone doubted that, he had only to read letters in the press or listen to the parliamentary debates. When first the news of Massie’s will was broken, Hillmorton and Ryle had been listening to debates on economic policies. Later, as the will was challenged their House, following the Commons, was occupied with the Industrial Relations Bill. A visitor from another civilisation wouldn’t have been illusioned or disillusioned, but he would have picked out one simple theme. Most men thought about money more than they admitted, and badly wanted it. The only thing they wanted more, perhaps, was that other men shouldn’t have more money than themselves: or ideally should have less.

  There was some difference as to how to obtain these natural objectives. There were feelings in common, though. Hillmorton, not a self-indulgent man, would have taken a drop in what was called his standard of living more indifferently than most – provided there were others down on whom he could cast an appreciative eye. In not so different a fashion, trade union professionals, devoted and ailing, would wear themselves out in filibusters against the Common Market, in case the stratum of workers they
used to represent might lose one step up the differential ladder.

  This chase for money became a condition of daily life, as pervasive as fear in a cholera epidemic – but more enjoyable, for though there was fear in the climate, there was also a curious sort of excitement. For some, it wasn’t at all unpleasant to feel ill-done-by about money or to be claiming it. A certain number were immune from this excitement, and they were often those who would have been immune from fear in an epidemic.

  There were plenty of people who were breathing this air and didn’t like it. Often if they were in touch with their own experience they felt shame and self-reproach. The time they spent with income tax accountants – this was a special addiction of the privileged. Income tax accountants as ingenious as theologians finding a way to salvation: which frequently meant saving, and being at the same time lawful about it, not very magnificent sums, such as £400 per annum. Scrupulous persons kept from the Exchequer each penny they could, within the legal limit. They had suspicions, and more than suspicions, that others were not so scrupulous. Scrupulous persons, if they were middle-aged or more, felt that commonplace financial honesty had been on the slide in their own lifetime: just as Jenny Rastall, and an acquaintance she had not yet made, were to say to each other a few months later.

  All this, the same persons sometimes thought in secret, was a symptom of a country in decline. Here they blamed themselves, the shame and self-reproach got harder, but they weren’t being realistic. They were sensitive that the country’s power had evanesced under their eyes. It wasn’t contemptible that they took it to heart, and used it as an explanation for the discontent around them, and their own failures. But as an explanation it wasn’t always or often true.

  When their country had been at the peak of its power, just over a hundred years before (the decline had set in, long before it was visible on the surface), there had been just as much rapacity for money – maybe slightly less manoeuvring, less hypocrisy or façade words. And in their own time, the late twentieth century, there were countries with structures like their own but not yet manifestly on the way down, which in the chase for money, or anything it symbolised, could give them ten yards in a hundred and a beating. This was endemic all over the rich world, and over some of the poor world too. They blamed themselves a bit too much, perhaps so as not to see something more difficult or foreboding. Which was that they couldn’t imagine what might happen to them ten years ahead.

  The trouble was people, any people, people like themselves, couldn’t forget themselves for very long. In the first years of a great religion, or of a revolution, or of a total war, people could forget themselves almost completely, except for their own souls or the vast hope of the future. But not for long. All societies had discovered this, after a revolution. Hence the disappointments of tender-minded men. There wasn’t much stamina of the soul: there was almost infinite stamina of the ego.

  Yet most men, even the disappointed and the most self-bound, still at moments had hankerings after a different life. How to find it? A religion couldn’t be invented. Once a religion wasn’t credible, it didn’t exist. Maybe some of those, now foraging among the money claims, might have found a kind of grace in attempting to wipe out some of the revocable suffering and poverty in the world.

  Jenny Rastall was trying, in her local fashion. The children of people on the other side, Sedgwick’s, one of Hillmorton’s, were devoting themselves outside the country, and had elysian hopes.

  If that were ever achieved, by any means on earth, and if in a couple of hundred years, long after these people were all forgotten, most human beings were living half as comfortably as they had lived – then what? Would they get into the same state? You mustn’t ask, disciples of action would have to say. What are the human limits? The answer oughtn’t to stand in the way of goodwill, but it might. It might prevent the chances – and no one could reckon them, they hadn’t so far been great – of good action.

  7

  Jenny Rastall’s second decision was forced on her as gustily as the first. To an extent she was getting used to Swaffield’s telephone calls – the one word ‘Swaffield’, then an instruction, then, instead of ‘Goodbye’, a final ‘Bless you’ which didn’t sound like a benediction. So, on an afternoon in December, when she picked up the receiver and heard the surname, voice vibrant, she thought she was prepared.

  ‘I have to see you.’

  She asked, when, finding it as always difficult to put him off.

  ‘Six o’clock.’

  She sighed. It was a cold day, she had just returned from a couple of visits, she was looking forward to an evening with a book.

  ‘You are to come to the House of Lords,’ the Swaffield voice went on. ‘Ask for Lord Clare. He’s a friend of mine. I put him on one of my boards.’ Swaffield, not expecting her to reply, told her which door to go to, with the complacency of one who knew his way about.

  ‘Six o’clock,’ he repeated and dismissed her, not even with a blessing.

  Jenny gazed at the silenced telephone with irritation, amusement and, she couldn’t resist it, a flash of excitement. He might be doing things for her, he was the only one, she couldn’t be too delicate – but she still had the touchiness of the unlucky. On the other hand, she found herself grinning, the House of Lords was one up to him, one up as a meeting place even on the Hill Street mansion. How had he managed it? and why? She had never been inside the place herself, and that was why she was excited. It wouldn’t have been in her style to pretend to be superior. She wasn’t an intellectual, she wasn’t given to progressive opinions, she came from her own race and class, she had a soft spot for royalty and for lords.

  More than a soft spot, in fact a vestige of thrill. As she got inside the door and told the attendant she had an appointment with Lord Clare she felt the nerves at her elbow tingle: just as men from families like hers were seen to tremble as they went to receive decorations from the Queen. Jenny was a reasonable woman, and she would have been puzzled if she had reflected on these phenomena.

  When the attendant, large, soldier-like, be-badged, led her into the guest room, which was the bar where strangers were admitted, the man slipped away, for Swaffield advanced on her, mouth wide-smiling, like a magniloquent frog.

  ‘Jenny, I want you to meet Lord Clare,’ said Swaffield, not fussy about the finer points of etiquette.

  The room was large and very bright, tapestries on the end walls, an array of small tables as in a London café, most of them occupied that evening, as many women (Jenny thought, visitors like herself) as men. Swaffield and Lord Clare had established themselves at a table by the window, from which they looked over the river. They had a view suitable for Monet and in a tone, with half a mile of geographical displacement, identical with that from James Ryle’s drawing-room.

  Lord Clare, blond hair swept back, shook her hand with his own left one (the other was covered by a black glove) in a manner assured and at the same time slightly unco-ordinated. He was earnestly polite to Jenny, apologising for the room being so full, explaining that ‘the other side’ had put on a three line whip. The other side, Jenny took for granted, as Tory as he was, would be the Opposition: but she didn’t take for granted much else about him. She glanced at his hand, and thought she remembered that he had done something gallant – not in the German war, she fancied. The name, yes, the name might have some sort of misty aura.

  Jenny preserved her generalised regard for the House she was sitting in, but didn’t know much history. She didn’t realise – though she would have liked it if she had been told – that this was one of the old names, probably the only pre-1660 title in the noisy room. This man was a remote relative of Byron’s Clare, one of the boys whom Byron hankered after, not that that demarcated him clearly from other boys, nor, as far as that went, from miscellaneous girls.

  Lord Clare had another distinction, curious though minor. He was one of the few peers with a territorial title who actually possessed land in (or to be exact in his case, within thre
e miles of) the place from which the title came. Unlike the Hillmortons, who hadn’t owned a house or an acre within fifty miles of the little Warwickshire village for generations.

  Ignorant of these embellishments, Jenny was watching, her eyes alert and concentrated, the man himself and his exchanges with Swaffield. Swaffield hadn’t yet given a hint of why he had brought her there. As a rule, he broke news without preliminaries or warning, and she knew him well enough by now to be suspicious. If he wasn’t being imperious, there was a reason for it. Meanwhile, he wasn’t being imperious with Lord Clare, far from it, and neither was Lord Clare being imperious with him. Jenny, personal irreverence becoming more powerful than institutional reverence, was soon finding a certain beauty in this mutual civility.

  At times, it became even more soothing than that, something like a mutual sycophancy. Lord Clare called Swaffield ‘Reg’, teased him about his tycoon activities, flattered him about the objets d’art in Hill Street, and, politely not leaving Jenny out, invoked her in aid as another of the applauding cherubim. In return, Swaffield slid in admiring references to Clare’s interventions on the board (‘It’s only three years since I put you on, Edward, you picked it up faster than any of them’), his success on a post-war mission (‘He’d have made money anywhere, any time, I tell you,’ Swaffield turned to Jenny. ‘He knows more than I do about things it’s my business to know, and there aren’t many I’d say that of, which is lucky for some of us.’).

  Impatience to hear whatever her own news could be, was damping down. Excitement at the occasion was damping down still more. Irreverence was winning. Two or three men came up, Clare invited them to ‘enlarge the circle’, Swaffield looked disappointed when they said they had to leave. Jenny was coming to two conclusions. The first was that Lord Clare, old-style he might be, elegant in his classical fashion, possibly heroic, was also remarkably enthusiastic about keeping his director’s fees. He must be well off, quite likely rich, but he would sing a good many praises of Swaffield if that meant holding on to what he was paid. The second thought seemed less plausible to Jenny, who wasn’t certain how these institutions worked, and she didn’t find it agreeable – but it didn’t need super-human divination to guess that Swaffield was aiming at a place in that House himself and was using his considerable resources to get one. She hadn’t seen him at the suppliant end before. It wasn’t over-dignified, but he didn’t lose any of his force, his capacity to exude energy – and, though she didn’t wish to recognise it, underneath the brashness his smooth and lubricating subtlety.