The Sleep of Reason Page 8

  It sounded detached; it couldn’t have been less so. She was happy because I was well and not resigned, any more than she was herself. She had always looked younger than her age, and did so still. Her skin remained as fine as Vicky Shaw’s. The only open signs of middle age were the streaks of grey above her temples. I had suggested that, since she looked in all other respects so young, she might as well have them tinted. She had been taken aback, for that was the kind of intervention which she didn’t expect from me. But she said no: it was the one trivial thing she had refused me. She wore those streaks like insignia.

  In some ways she had changed during our marriage: or rather, parts of her temperament had thrust themselves through, in a fashion that to me was a surprise and not a surprise, part of the Japanese flower of marriage. To others, even to friends as perceptive as Charles March or my brother, she had seemed overdelicate, or something like austere. It was the opposite of the truth. Once she had dressed very simply, but now she spent money and was smart. It might have seemed that she had become vainer and more self-regarding. Actually, she had become more humble. She didn’t mind revealing herself, not as what she had once thought suitable, but as she really was: and if what she revealed was self-contradictory, well then (in this aspect true to her high-minded intellectual ancestors, from whom in all else she had parted) she didn’t give a damn.

  Earlier, she used to think that I enjoyed “the world” too much. Now she enjoyed it more than I did. At the same time, in the midst of happiness, she wanted something else. She had thrown away the web of personal relations, the aesthetic credo, in which and by which her father, whom she loved, had lived his life. That was too thin for her: and as for the stoical dutifulness of many of my political or scientific friends, she could admire it, but it wasn’t enough. She would have liked to be a religious believer: she couldn’t make herself. It wasn’t a deep wound, as it had been for Roy Calvert, for she was stronger-spirited, but she knew what it was – as perhaps all deep-natured people know it – to be happy, to count her blessings, and, in the midst of content, to feel morally restless, to feel that there must be another purpose to this life.

  With Margaret, too clear-sighted to fabricate a purpose, this gave an extra edge to her responsibilities. As a young woman she had been responsible, with a conscience greater than mine: now she was almost superstitiously so. Her father, who had been ill for years – she wouldn’t go out at night without leaving a telephone number. Her son by her first marriage. Charles and me at home. Her sister. Margaret tried to disguise it, because she knew her own obsessions: but if she had believed in prayer, she would have prayed for many people every night.

  So she took it for granted that I ought to do my best for Arnold Shaw and Vicky. She took it for granted that I should be as long-suffering as she could be – for after the years together some of my behaviour had shaded into hers, and hers into mine. Further, she was herself involved. She seemed controlled, whereas I was easy and let my emotions flow, so that people were deceived: her loves and hates had always been violent, and below the surface they were not damped down. She was exhibiting one of them now, against my nephew Pat. She thought he was a waster. She was sorry for any woman who married him. Yet, although she scarcely knew Vicky, she believed me when I said that she was totally committed.

  There wasn’t much one could do in others’ lives: that was a lesson I had taught her. But there was no excuse for not doing the little that one could: that was a lesson she had taught me. At the least, I could put in a word for Arnold Shaw. It would be better for both of them if he kept his job. It was worth going to Cambridge, just to get Francis Getliffe’s support, Margaret agreed. We didn’t like being parted, but she couldn’t come, while her father was so ill: for some time past she had been tied to London, and consequently in the last twelve months I had spent only six or seven nights away from home.

  This time I need not stay in Cambridge more than one night – and that I could put off until Charles went back to school. There were a few days left of his holidays, and he was still young enough to enjoy going out with Margaret and me to dinner and the theatre, the pleasant, safeguarded London evenings.

  Those days passed, and I was in a taxi, driving out along the Backs to the Getliffes’ house, within a week of my visit to the Court. So that, by chance, I had completed the triangle of the three towns that I knew best – in fact, the only three towns in England that I had ever lived in for long. The sky was lucid, there was a cold wind blowing, the blossom was heavy white on the trees: it was late afternoon in April, the time of day and year that I used to walk away from Fenner’s. This was the “pretty England” with which I had baited my son, the prettiest of pretty England. Nowadays when I saw Cambridge, I saw it like a visitor, and thought how beautiful it was. And yet, when I lived there, I seemed scarcely to have noticed it. It had been a bad time for me, my hopes had come to nothing, I was living (and this had been true of me until I was middle-aged) as though I were in a station waiting-room: somehow a train would come, taking me somewhere, anywhere, letting my hopes flare up again. But that wasn’t what I remarked first about Cambridge: instead, it was the distractions, or even the comforts, that I had found. One of the most robust of men, who was given to melancholy, told a fellow sufferer to light bright fires. Well, I had had enough to be melancholy about, but what I remembered were the bright fires. There had been times when I didn’t know what was to become of me: yet it had been a consolation (and this was the memory, unless I dug deeper against my will) to call on old Arthur Brown, drink a glass of wine, and get going on another move in college politics. Even if I had been content, I should nevertheless, I was sure, have got some interest out of that powerplay. I enjoyed watching personal struggles, big and small, and I couldn’t have found a better training ground. But, all that admitted, if I had been content, I shouldn’t have become so passionately absorbed in college politics. They were my refuge from the cold outside.

  The Getliffes’ drawing-room was, as usual, untidy and welcoming: perhaps a shade more untidy than it used to be, since now they had half-a-dozen grandchildren. It had been welcoming in the past, even when my relations with Francis had been strained, once when we were ranged on different sides, and again more recently when, led by Quaife, we had been on the same side and lost. It had been welcoming even when he was torn by ambition, when his research was going wrong or his public campaigns had wrecked his nerves. One could see the traces of those tensions in his face to this day, the lines, the folds of sepia flesh under his eyes. But the tensions had themselves all gone. Of my close friends, he had had the greatest and the most deserved success. Quite late in life, he had done scientific work with which he was satisfied. That was his prime reward. The honours had flowed in: he was no hypocrite, and he liked those too. There had never been anything puritanical about his radicalism. On a question of principle, he had not made a single concession: his integrity was absolute: but, if orthodoxy chose to catch up with him, well, then he was ready to enjoy sitting in the House of Lords.

  The stiffness, the touch of formality which looked like pride and which had developed during the worst of his struggles, had almost vanished. Sometimes in public it could recur. I had recently heard some smart young debunker pass a verdict on him. The young man had met him precisely once, but felt morally obliged to dispose of an eminent figure. “He’s the hell of a prima donna, of course, but he does know how to land the jobs.” I hadn’t been infuriated so much as stupefied. Each of us really is alone, I thought. And now I was greeting my old friend and his wife, in their own home, in the happiest marriage I had ever seen.

  I embraced Katherine. She had, with unusual self-discipline, been dieting recently and had lost a stone or two: but she remained a matriarch. When Francis was surrounded by the three married children and assorted grandsons and granddaughters, he became a patriarch. Yet now he and Katherine were smiling at each other with – there was no need to diminish or qualify the word – love. They had been married for well over
thirty years: it had been a lively active marriage, the support – more than support, the inner validity in all his troubles. They had gone on loving each other, and now, when the troubles were over, they did so still.

  It would have been easy, one would have expected, to envy Francis. He had had so much. And yet, curiously enough, he had not attracted a great deal of envy. Nothing like as much as our old colleague, Walter Luke: not as much as I had at times myself. What makes a character envy-repellent? On the whole, the people I had known who attracted the least envy were cold, shut in, mildly paranoid. But none of that was true of Francis, who was – at least in intimacy – both kind and warm. So was she, and they were showing it that evening.

  Though Katherine complained that she hated entertaining, and had given that as a reason why Francis should not become Master of the college (the hidden reason was that he shrank from the in-fighting), this house had, with the years, taken on a marked resemblance to the ground floor of an American hotel. One son and one daughter lived in Cambridge; and they, their children, their friends, their friends’ children, paid visits as unpredictable as those in a nineteenth-century Russian country house. In the midst of the casual family hubbub, the Getliffes took care of others: they knew that Margaret would want news of her son Maurice, and so, along with a party of young people, some of whom I couldn’t identify but who all called Francis by his Christian name, he had been brought in for a pre-dinner drink. By one of the sardonic tricks of chance, it was just that same considerate kindness which had brought ill-luck to their eldest son: for, on a similar occasion, when Leonard first brought Vicky Shaw to see them, they had invited my nephew Pat: and it was in this drawing-room that she had fallen in love.

  In a corner of the room, I was talking to Maurice about his work.

  “I wish I were brighter,” he said with his beautiful innocent smile, as he had said to me before, since for years Margaret and I had had to watch him struggle over one scholastic hurdle, then another. He bore no malice, even though the rest of us found these hurdles non-existent. He was fond of his step-brother, who was a born competitor. Sometimes I couldn’t help thinking – it was a rare thought for me – that he was naturally good. He had been a beautiful child, and now was a good-looking young man. I should have guessed, when I first saw him as an infant, that by now he would appear indrawn: but that had proved dead wrong. He had turned out good-looking in an unusual fashion, as though the world hadn’t touched him: fair, unshadowed, with wide-orbited idealist’s eyes. Yet the world probably had touched him, for those were the kind of looks that at school had brought him plenty of attention. And he would get the same from women soon, I thought. He gave affection very easily: he might be innocent, but he accepted all that happened round him. He liked making people happy.

  Margaret was devoted to him. Partly with the special devotion, and remorse, that one feels for the child of a broken marriage: partly because there was something of her own spirit in him. But none of her cleverness, nor of his father’s.

  I was trying to discover how things were going. He was in his first year. He hoped to become a doctor, like his father. Psychologically, that would be a good choice for him. He wanted to look after others: given the faith which he, like Margaret, didn’t find, he would have made a priest.

  The trouble was, the college had told us that he was unlikely to get through the Mays (the Cambridge first year examinations). I was inquiring what he thought, and which subjects were the worst.

  “I’m afraid I’m pretty dense,” he said.

  “No, you’re not,” I said. I let some impatience show. Often I felt that, just as he accepted everything else, he accepted his own incompetence.

  “You believe I’m doing it on purpose, don’t you?” He was teasing me. He and I had always been on friendly terms. He wasn’t in the least frightened of me: nor, so far as I had ever seen, of anyone else. He had his own kind of insight.

  At last the Getliffes and I were left alone. For once there was no one else present when we went into dinner. Francis, who had seen me spend a long time with Maurice, began talking about him.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, “he isn’t going to make it.”

  “He’s very nice,” said Katherine.

  “He’s not even stupid,” said Francis. “I know, it must be a worry for you both.”

  The two of them were not only loving parents, they took on the duties of parents at one remove. It seemed like a way of giving thanks for their own good fortune. The problems of friends’ children – not only those of intimate friends like us – they spent their time upon. About Maurice, Francis had had interviews with his tutor and supervisors. Francis and Katherine hadn’t known the inside of a broken marriage: but their sympathy was sharp, they could feel for both Margaret and me; in different senses, it made us more vulnerable through Maurice.

  They were sympathetic, but also practical. With a creased, unsentimental smile, Francis said that, come hell, come high water, we had to get the young man through some sort of course. Damn it, he had to earn a living. His supervisors said he didn’t seem to possess any approach to a memory. He couldn’t memorise anything. “I should have thought,” said Francis, “that’s going to make medicine pretty well impossible. The anatomy they learn is sheer unscientific nonsense, but still they’ve got to learn it.”

  He gave me some consolatory examples to tell Margaret, of intelligent people who had nothing like a normal memory, and there we had to leave it, Katherine reluctantly, for she, like all her relatives I had once known so well, couldn’t resist coming back to test an aching tooth.

  The dinner was good. Francis, who had been so gaunt and quixotic right into his mid-fifties, was at last beginning to put on a little weight. I was comfortable with them both, and more than that. But I should have to leave in an hour or two, for I was staying with my brother. It was time to discharge what I had come for.

  “Francis,” I said, “I wonder if you can give a hand about old Arnold Shaw.”

  He had heard most of the immediate story – though neither he nor Katherine were above enquiring about the details of the students’ goings on. I told him that the present issue was effectively settled: it looked as though two or three of the students would be placed elsewhere: and then Shaw would get a confirmatory vote and, in form, a victory. But, I said, it might be an expensive victory. He had had plenty of enemies before. Now there would be more. There might come a point, not too far off, when his position became untenable. Could Francis use his influence as Chancellor? Could he talk to the academics in private? And to some of the dignitaries? After all, he could speak with real authority. He just had to tell them that, in spite of his faults, Shaw was doing a good job.

  Francis had been listening as carefully as he used to listen in Whitehall. He passed the decanter round to me, and watched me fill my glass. He said: “I don’t think I can tell them that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Quite simply, I don’t believe he is.”

  “Oh come,” I said. Incautiously, I hadn’t been prepared for this. “Look, I know he’s an awkward customer, I have to stand more of it than you do, but after all he has put the place on the map.”

  “I don’t believe,” said Francis, “that a man ought to be head of a university if he gets detested by nearly all the students and most of the staff.”

  It was years since I had seen him in action: I had half-forgotten how decisive he could be.

  “Remember,” I said, “that he’s brought in the staff – at least, he’s brought in all of them that are any good.”

  “He is a good picker.” Francis was irritatingly fair. “Yes, that’s been his contribution. But now he’s got them, he can’t get on with them. It’s a pity, but the place will be at sixes and sevens so long as he’s there.”

  He added: “It’s a pity, but he’s cut his own throat.”

  “He’s got some human quality,” I said.

  Katherine broke in: “You said that before. About the other one. And w
e said his wife was appalling. So she was, but I suppose she was attached to him in her own fashion. When he died, it was just before Penelope had her second baby, she stayed with the coffin and they had to pull her away from the grave.”

  For the moment, I had lost track. Who was she talking about?

  “And then she died within three months, though no one troubled to know about her and so no one knew what was the matter. As for Walter Luke, it didn’t do him any harm. He went to Barford and got into the Royal Society and nearly got killed–”

  “No connection,” Francis smiled at her, though he looked as mystified as I was.

  “And finished up perfectly well and got decorated and had another child.”

  She ended in triumph: “You did make a frightful ass of yourself that time, Lewis.”

  That was a phrase her father used to brandish. I had been quite bemused, but now I had it. She was indulging, as she did more often, in a feat of total recall, just as her father used to. What she had been saying referred to an argument about the Mastership in that house, no less than twenty-six years before. It was the candidate I had wanted, Jago, who had died, and his wife after him – but that was not twenty-six years before, only two. When Katherine got going she existed, just as her father had, in a timeless continuum when the present moment, the three of us there at dinner, was just as real, no more, no less, than the flux of memory.

  Francis was slower than I to take the reference. Then he gave her a loving grin, and said to me: “She’s right, you know. You did make an ass of yourself that time.”

  It was true. It had been bad judgment. But, though my candidate had lost, though it was so long ago, Katherine and Francis often liked to remind me of it.

  “Two can play at that game,” I began, ready to try rougher tactics, but in fact Katherine’s performance had taken the sting from the quarrel, and also, realistically, I knew that Francis, once he had taken up his stance, would be as hard to move as Arnold Shaw himself. So when he said that I was now making the same mistake, that I got more interested in people than in the job they had to do, I let it go. It wasn’t without justice, after all. And it wasn’t without justice that he spoke of Arnold Shaw. Something would have to be done for him, if and when he resigned: the university would give him an honorary degree: he could be found a research appointment to help out his pension. That would be better than nothing, I said. Then I mentioned that I had met Leonard, and the three of us were at one again.