In Their Wisdom Read online

  8

  Old Symington was not old. Only Swaffield thought of using that particular appellation about him. This year he was still not forty. He did not look old. He did not even look vaguely paternal or as though administering pastoral care, as Eric Skelding did. At first sight, or more sights after that, not many would have guessed that Symington was the most active partner in a firm of solicitors, one respected in London and whose reputation, thanks to him, was growing: or that he had climbed to that job by merit, leaving school at sixteen, the son of a clerk in a local government office.

  Not that he was unimpressive to look at. On the contrary, he was spectacularly handsome, but not in the fashion of an efficient professional man. Glossy haired, lustrous eyed, pillar-necked, he might in Edwardian days have been taken for a successful actor manager. If all the people involved in the Massie case, close to or remotely, had been collected in one room, he would have been the one to whom eyes kept turning. Hillmorton had remained good-looking, and, in an austere way, so had Sedgwick before his illness struck him. Liz was a sharply pretty woman and Mrs Underwood in her youth had been more than that. Some of the others had the presence which authority and recognition could bring with it, or which helped to produce those effects in the first place. All those physical manifestations were in the normal run of things, you would find something like them in any privileged group anywhere at any time. But you were unlikely to see anyone as picturesque as Leslie Symington. It was a rare gift, probably rarer than Sedgwick’s intellect, certainly rarer than Ryle’s sense.

  Women noticed him, as a matter of course. Some connoisseurs in such matters might have suspected that with those looks he would turn out narcissistic and either wouldn’t be given to sex at all or alternatively would marry a plain woman who wouldn’t interfere with his own glory. Those connoisseurs would this time have been wrong. Symington’s wife was as beautiful as he was, or something near it, and together they gave out an aura or a field of force, that could come from no other origin than married joy.

  On a February evening (there were still three months to go before the Massie case came up) they were sitting in their drawing-room in The Vale, and they were discussing, as they had been on and off for the past year, whether to have another child. It was, as it had been all along, a luxurious discussion, sensual, sexual, child-loving. They already had two children, with their usual good luck (which they knew as well as acquaintances who envied them), a boy and a girl both abnormally handsome, which they didn’t pretend to be surprised at, the boy aged fourteen at Westminster, the girl aged nine at Frances Holland.

  Ought liberal-minded parents to buy private education? They lived in a prosperous liberal circle, and most of their friends thought not. Even the Symingtons, who were a robust couple, were sometimes uneasy, sitting in that comfortable Chelsea room, appreciably less violent on the eye than Swaffield’s drawing-room, white rugs on the parquet floor, tweedish curtains, tobacco-toned chairs in the Hille style, the only primary colours from some diagrammatic paintings on the walls. They might have been comforted if they had heard Lord Sedgwick on modern educational theory, but they would still have had pricks of conscience. Alison had been calming these, since her daughter went to school, by working with mentally handicapped children. That would have sounded priggish, outside their circle: but good works always sounded priggish, and anyway there was nothing priggish about another preoccupation of theirs, which they alone knew. Although he masked it under his sumptuous exterior, Symington was a hungrily ambitious man, and ambitious with a sharp focused aim. He wanted (and this was a liberal cause too) his own junior branch of the law to take its share of judgeships and the rest: he wanted to be one of the first solicitors to become a judge. He and Alison were happy enough, and that would make them happier.

  What about another child? They knew the arguments by heart, had gone over them pleasurably, repetitively. As with most arguments close to the nerve, as with Jenny Rastall’s internal ones, the answer was formed before they admitted it. They were familiar with the risks. She was only a year younger than he was. With a mother that age, the statistics were stark, and they had studied them. The chances of bearing a mongol were becoming too high to be relaxed about – higher than any physical chance one took in the ordinary run of life. Which is a fatality I shouldn’t cope with decently, Symington had said before this. Of course, I should put a face on it, on the surface. So would you. But when we looked at each other – On the other hand, there appeared to be a statistical chance, nothing like so sharp-edged, nothing like so high, of a child unusually bright. Hubris, he had said again that evening. Well, we’ve always gone in for hubris, haven’t we? Others had had the same thought about them, with a different kind of wish.

  As they talked, enjoying themselves though there wasn’t anything new to say, an observer would have noticed the difference from their seniors, such as Adam Sedgwick or Ryle, or from their juniors too. They showed none of the forebodings of the older men. Of course their society was changing round them, but they felt it was, by and large, changing for the better. Anyway their children would get used to it, they would breathe a happy-go-lucky air. In this, they might have missed intimations from certain of the harder-minded young, who would have liked a climate altogether bleaker: but that was something that no one had yet calculated or foreseen.

  Alison loved her husband. She was so happy that evening that she seemed to hear her mother telling her to count her blessings, but she had, as on other evenings, one complaint about him. He was working obsessively, as he had always done. Once it had made his career, but now it could have been tapered off, enough for some free hours. Ambition or no ambition. But it had become an addiction, and it would distress him, and not alter the habit, if she put in a plea. He allowed himself the single drink before dinner, as now, the hour’s conversation. Then dinner, or rather food, for he might as well have eaten charcoal: then back to work until eleven. She had to accept it. It was like being married to a high-class surgeon.

  They had no secrets, and she knew in detail what he would be working on that night. It was policy to keep on terms with Swaffield, and that was why he had from the beginning taken a personal oversight of the Massie business. Later on he had become interested, not just for policy’s sake. Now, and for an evening or so past, he was involved with records of an interview with Massie’s last housekeeper but one. Mrs Underwood had removed her and most of the others who had looked after him, but she had been the housekeeper until three years before he died. What use, if any, could they make of her as a witness? How far was it safe?

  ‘You said,’ Alison remarked, used to sharing his addiction, ‘that she didn’t seem to like Mrs U all that much.’

  ‘That’s the understatement of all time.’

  ‘She got edged out of course.’

  ‘But, I’ve told you, she didn’t seem to like him much either.’

  ‘Nice little family party.’

  In fact, for both of them the Massie household had taken on a kind of anti-glamour, at the same time gothic and prosaic, embossed with the improbability of everyday events. They had had the curiosity, one weekend that winter, to go and inspect the house from the outside. It stood back from a side road, half a dozen miles outside Haywards Heath: from the road, though, they could see nothing except the darkening barrier of pines. Up the drive, quite a long stretch (Symington was making an estimate of how much this land would appreciate in the next decade), until they might have expected a neat reposeful Georgian front.

  They might have expected it, but they didn’t get it. What they got was an assembly of red brick castellation, turning into itself because of trees confining the lawn, looming sombre in spite of the glaring brick. Early city style mansion in Sussex, they thought, period about 1890. It was in one of those downstairs rooms, which had a flourish of windows, none of them matching, French, ogival and in one room casement, that old Massie had lain in the terminal years. According to the housekeeper, Mrs Underwood kept him immobilised in that
room though ‘it wouldn’t have hurt him to go out’. According to the housekeeper again, it was from that room that he shouted at night ‘loud enough to bring the house down’, for someone to go and talk to him.

  It sounded as though he had the night insomnia of great age, though he dozed most of the day. ‘She got on to that. She got on to that before I left. She was ready to talk her head off any night. Mind you, she made up for it in the day time.’ So then, quite soon after Mrs Underwood took to sleeping in that house most nights of the week, he began crying ‘Birdie! Birdie!’, which appeared to be his name for Mrs Underwood. To the Symingtons it had an affectionate ring. Not perhaps to the housekeeper, who repeated it without comment.

  That night-time shouting, the Symingtons accepted as without doubt authentic. But were some of the housekeeper’s other stories authentic too?

  ‘Would Mrs U have been badgering the old chap to marry her – even while that woman was still hanging about?’ said Symington. ‘I still think that’s a bit too hard to take.’

  ‘It’s so hard to take that I don’t see her inventing it.’

  ‘She wasn’t indiscreet, by all accounts, in anything else she did. She may be a harpy but she wasn’t indiscreet.’

  ‘She hadn’t settled the will then, of course.’

  ‘She seems to have been pretty confident that she’d get everything she wanted–’

  ‘She might,’ said Alison, ‘have had a few doubts about that son of hers. She could have preferred to have the money for herself.’

  Alison did good works, she was optimistic about other human beings. She might even think they were perfectible – but not now. When it came to a case like this one, she was as realistic as a lawyer. On that specific point she happened to be overrealistic or at least dead wrong. But her husband listened to her. The housekeeper’s stories were hard to make sense of. Some of them had the strange unpredictable echo of true stories. The old man lying – as he had apparently done long before he needed to – on a camp bed in the downstairs room, lights on all day. Bellowing: ‘Change! Birdie! We must get ready for change!’ He was always talking about change, said the housekeeper, change for them, change for everybody. Once he cried (she reported): ‘It’ll all come right in the end.’ And again, after Mrs Underwood had mentioned that she might speak to the local vicar – he cursed the Church, which was one of his rituals, and said: ‘There’s time enough for that. It’ll all come right in the end.’

  The housekeeper might be over-colouring everything she heard, and yet there could be underneath some basis of truth. She wasn’t clever enough to see that those sayings of Massie’s might be interpreted as proof of something else. On the face of it, they indicated that, within three years of death, he was neither senile nor incapable of resistance. In fact, the housekeeper’s stories were full of the noise of his voice, perhaps slightly crazed, but still booming insistently away. His voice, not the other’s.

  Symington became more dubious about how safely he could use the housekeeper in evidence.

  The plinths of the case had settled themselves long before this. Mrs Underwood had been altogether too decisive, for a sensible woman. That was going to be used. Bringing in her own lawyer, Skelding, not long after the housekeeper was dismissed: getting hold of previous wills with their formulaic beginnings, the old man’s message of disapproval against schools, universities, and the Anglican Church: getting rid not only of domestics but of people who did him any service. She might have been a shade less precipitate. It had been a mistake not to summon Jenny when the old man was at last getting near his death. All that was enough to build the case on. Symington’s chief doubt at this stage came when he picked up suggestions of the old man’s assertiveness, dislikeable self-willed assertiveness, right into his last year.

  Symington had had the curiosity to identify older servants who had known Jenny, when, as a young woman, she was still living at home. He found what his experience had made him used to, but to others might have seemed curiously contradictory impressions. One or two loved her, without knowing anything about Mrs Underwood. Jenny was always kind, she kept your spirits up, she took care of you, she was a very human person. Others were reserved, not speaking their criticisms but not at ease. She liked everything just so, one woman had said, and gave the impression that Jenny had been touchy, and fretting to her own and others’ nerves. That was before she got married, not that that seemed to settle her, from all they heard.

  Before the war, Massie had employed a butler. That old man had developed a vein of preciosity. He reflected on Jenny, and with an air of pride produced the word perfectionist. ‘That’s what I should call her – a perfectionist.’ It was not clear what this conveyed, except perhaps that she had been turned down in a love affair when she was a girl, and had kept hope alive, fending other men off, for years.

  That evening the Symingtons went on to talk about Swaffield, and how he had reacted to the rumour of marriage, old Massie being chased to marry Mrs Underwood.

  ‘Well,’ Leslie gave a large-eyed grin, ‘he couldn’t help getting excited by the idea of Mrs U jumping into bed with the old man the night before he died.’

  ‘He couldn’t think that!’ Alison was grinning as widely.

  ‘Couldn’t he hell. He’d heard of the Bourbons, which was it, Philip V, God knows how!’

  Swaffield was not educated, so far as they had discovered he had read almost nothing: and yet there weren’t many tales of sexual oddity, and even fewer of sexual enthusiasms, that he hadn’t mysteriously acquired.

  Of course, Symington was reflecting, Swaffield would like the story of the marriage-design to be used. It would be a knife in the ribs for Mrs U. But not if the lawyers judged it dangerous.

  In the long run Swaffield could always cut away from his flights of salacious imagination, or even from his vendettas, and do what he was constantly advising Symington, keep his eye on the ball. He knew when to be single-minded. That had been one of his strengths. The ball he was keeping his eye on was simply and solely to win the case. Nothing more, nothing less, though he had no objection to accumulating a little credit on the side.

  The Symingtons were among the few who had a liking for Swaffield – an indulgent liking, but still genuine. Others, many others, hung round him, flattered him, became members of his court, some like Lord Clare for the benefits, some not receiving or having much chance of benefits, but somehow happy to bask in the odour of power. They got satisfaction out of basking there, remained in the ambience as long as he let them, and nevertheless (often not admitting it to themselves) detested him.

  It was singular for these two to like him. True, Symington had profited by a good deal of patronage. Work had flowed to the firm through Swaffield since Symington came to London. For a solicitor on the rise any patron was better than none, even if he did exhibit vagaries of temperament. But that wasn’t the whole of it, not even most of it.

  No, they were ready and willing to go on liking him – although, or because, he had tried to interfere in their marriage. He had, it was a matter of course with his young friends, citizens of his empire, stood them holidays. He had visited them on those holidays, private aircraft touching down, private catechism in hotels, off with demoniac restlessness in forty-eight hours.

  He had wanted to make them confess how they ‘got on’ in bed, how often they made love, how they were going to space out the children, the full late-twentieth-century examination, Kinsey plus Doctor Spock plus Reginald Swaffield. Sometimes he looked disturbed, like a doctor not actually detecting but suspecting a premonitory sign, and appeared to feel that they would be better off with other partners.

  They weren’t so much as harassed. They happened to be on their home ground, and they were invulnerable. They could stand all the prying. In fact, they would have given it back, but that they reserved to themselves. With Swaffield it was more fun, and possibly kinder, to lay trails to set that indomitable detective off in wrong directions.

  When they were alone, they
speculated about him. The obvious answers were not only too simple, they were wrong. He was neither innocent nor impotent. He had been married twice and had children, and that was only the official part of his story. He had more libido than most men, pressed down and running over. Somehow his libido hadn’t found its proper home. Maybe for him there was no proper home.

  This didn’t make them sorry for Swaffield. Overcompassion was a mistake they were trying to avoid. He was a natural force, and they respected him for that. In secret, in their own bedroom, he became an aphrodisiac joke.

  Nearly half-past seven. Dinner time. Then three hours’ work on the papers before they met again.

  9

  Lord Hillmorton was considered by most people to be urbane and civilised, rather better natured than the general run of men in public life. But there was one person who didn’t think so and had some reason for not thinking so. That was his heir, Dr Thomas Pemberton.

  Dr Pemberton was too active and combative a man to indulge himself with fantasies. Day after day his big form hurtled itself through an existence without leisure, more chased by the minutes than most middle-aged men. A round of patients early, examinations for an insurance company in the middle of the morning, private patients between noon and two p.m. (no lunch), instructions to stockbroker two thirty to two forty-five, casts of two shows to inspect for medical condition before teatime, calls to pay on the theatres, back in the Fulham Road surgery between six and seven (passive panel of patients waiting there, frightened of him), a meal with his wife and the son still living at home, more visits five or six nights out of seven, a glance at his favourite reading, that is the Stock Exchange quotations, bed, sometimes not to be left undisturbed.