In Their Wisdom Page 9

He was a powerful man, built like a heavyweight boxer, and he had stamina as well as muscles. Even so, he wasn’t left with much free energy, certainly not for useless psychological speculation which he despised. And yet – he had a capacity for rancour, there were times when disciplined thoughts were broken up and he couldn’t exclude visions of himself in a triumphant denunciation of Lord Hillmorton.

  Lord Hillmorton had seen him twice. The first time was when Pemberton was fourteen years old, and at school – at a school which took in sons of doctors at reduced fees. Pemberton’s father, who had been a GP in Birmingham, had died young ten years before: it had been a coronary, he was as massive as Pemberton himself became, a combination of facts which Pemberton did not, in later years, find heartening. Suddenly Lord Hillmorton wrote to the headmaster announcing that he would like to visit the boy.

  This was during the war. Lord Hillmorton (at that time Henry Fox-Milnes, MP, without a courtesy title except the Hon. for the Hillmorton peerage was a Viscountcy until he himself won it a step up) was already a Minister of State. For the school, not used to eminences, official or social, not used to lords or heirs, it was a good deal of an occasion. Lord Hillmorton walked round the playing fields, inspected the laboratories, talked to the staff and the sixth form, behaved with his usual grace and amiability. Except when he was alone with the young Pemberton, to whom he forced out questions as to how his work was going, but so mechanically that acquaintances would have scarcely recognised his tone of voice.

  If the boy had heard the expression, he would have thought that Lord Hillmorton couldn’t bear the sight of him. Pemberton was not physically self-conscious. He knew already that he had his share of rough masculine good looks. Of an odd colouration, not uncommon in England, dead-pale skin under jet-black hair. But he couldn’t blink away the coldness of this distant relative, the something other than coldness. It rankled, he couldn’t understand it. He was still at a loss, the second and last time he spoke to Lord Hillmorton, nearly ten years later.

  His family had been left with very little money, but he had managed to get scholarships, not to a university but to a teaching hospital. He had done well. He had unusual self-confidence and had decided that most people were feebler and an order of magnitude more timid than he was himself. He didn’t doubt that he could be a success at any branch of medicine. He had – though this was concealed by his abilities both for generalised contempt and for financial bargaining – something of a vocation. At that stage he wanted some money to support him. He needed another couple of years in hospital. He had never made use of being the heir to Lord Hillmorton, except in young man’s boasting (some of his acquaintances didn’t believe him, and he had to buy a second-hand copy of Debrett). Now surely this was the time.

  It was the early fifties, and Hillmorton had become a full Minister, though not yet in the Cabinet. Pemberton was shown into his ante-room, private secretary, girl secretaries, Hillmorton entering from the inner door, a smiling public man, liked by them all, easy with them all.

  But, as soon as they were alone in his office, he wasn’t easy with Pemberton. Without any of his habitual fluidity, without even his courteous evasive wariness, he said: ‘I don’t quite understand–’

  Pushing, wooing, brash, importunate, the young man loomed on the other side of the desk. Not to put too fine a point on it, he said, he required money: another qualification and he was well away. But he couldn’t afford even one more year, unless he got some help.

  ‘What a pity.’

  ‘It would be a pity.’

  ‘I don’t quite understand, though,’ Hillmorton spoke with a mixture of impatience and strain, ‘why you wrote to me.’

  Pemberton gave a smile, forceful, cheeky, such as women found engaging. He said: ‘There is a connection, isn’t there?’

  ‘I suppose you’ve considered, Dr Pemberton, that we’ve all got a set of common ancestors. That sort of connection we all possess with everyone. I’m bound to have it with each person on my staff next door–’ He gazed at Pemberton as from a distance, speaking with academic thinness.

  ‘In my case, though, it’s all on paper. You know that,’ Pemberton said.

  ‘You attach importance to this, I gather.’

  ‘It’s on the record. And we can’t get away from it, there are plenty of people who would think you have some responsibility–’

  ‘I’m sorry, Dr Pemberton. I can’t regard that as decisive. I hope you find some method of continuing with your training. And now, perhaps, if you’ll excuse me–’ Hillmorton was already feeling for a button underneath his desk. The private secretary entered, as polite as Hillmorton in his normal form, and within seconds Pemberton, bitter, furious, mind stormy with plans for revenge and also for another approach, this time victorious, found himself in the Treasury corridor and within minutes in Great George Street.

  Hopes didn’t die quickly in a man as prepotent, as used to bullocking his own way through, as Pemberton, He tried to interview Hillmorton again: letters of refusal from the secretary. It took some time, years rather than months, before Pemberton accepted that he was not going to extract one penny. Rage smouldered. He regarded his relation, his very distant relation, with angry loathing. In occasional reflective moments, he did think that this behaviour was eccentric by any standards. But Pemberton was not much interested in people who got across him when he couldn’t bully, coax or win them over. He didn’t speculate much about why Hillmorton was behaving so, and didn’t worry himself to find an answer.

  The answer was simple. He was Hillmorton’s heir but not his son. Hillmorton hated him, or at least was affronted by his existence – because of that. It wasn’t subtle: it was instinctive: it was primitive, irrational, atavistic. It was utterly unlike, different in kind from, any response of his since he was growing up. No human being had seen anything like it in Hillmorton, except perhaps some women who had known him when he was young. It was the opposite of everything he approved of in the way of human virtues. He admired endurance, good sense, realism, a kind of courage, a kind of irony. In his meetings with his heir, and much more in his thoughts about him, he had exhibited none of these.

  There was no one who could have observed both him and Pemberton. Anyone who had been able to and was fully aware of Hillmorton’s feeling, would nevertheless have thought him still the more urbane and civilised. That wasn’t high praise, because Pemberton didn’t begin to be either. But if you forgot or overlooked this rift in Hillmorton’s temperament, he could be said to be civilised, more so than most men. It might have been more an effort of control and conscious style than of natural goodness, but somehow he had brought it off, which wasn’t a major feat of moral gymnastics, but at least a modest one.

  Pemberton didn’t see any necessity for moral gymnastics. If he had been curious enough to perceive why Hillmorton had shown such meanness, he would have despised him: but not because it seemed savage but because to him it seemed almost the reverse. To Pemberton, caring about who one’s heir was would have appeared as a drawing-room emotion. And Pemberton, who not only despised vigorously but was good at contempt, had considerable contempt for those who indulged themselves in drawing-room emotions. What did it matter who one’s heir was? What did they matter, most of the emotions people wrote books about? If you had been a doctor and lived your life in the presence of the primary emotions, then the rest of people’s worries and hopes were trivial – bits of playing, luxuries you could afford because you had nothing serious on your mind. You needed to be close to people in the fear of death. If his own sons were near death, he would be as passionate as any man: but it didn’t worry him that one presumably some day would get the Hillmorton title, and his favourite wouldn’t. Death is the one thing that is a hundred per cent certain, reflected Dr Pemberton, and gave a thought, not a notably compassionate one, to Hillmorton.

  What in God’s name, he had frequently asked himself and his wife, was the use of a title without a penny coming with it? In earlier days the estates would hav
e been entailed: not now. Pemberton had a knack of picking up financial information, and believed that the property would pass to the eldest daughter, a curious example of purposeless primogeniture. For himself, the bare title, a seat in the Lords, what use was that to a doctor?

  Well, he wasn’t a delicate-fibred man, and he could get something out of it. He thought parliament was a farcical institution and the Upper House the most farcical part of it. But other people didn’t, he would get more respect, which would be ludicrous but could be valuable, he should be able to extract grants. There might still be time to do some research, he was going to make contact with some of the best Americans. No doubt also, directorships would be offered to him. He had far more knowledge of the Stock Exchange than a man like Ryle, spent far more gusto and energy in playing it, and yet puzzlingly hadn’t shown anything like the profits. Still, after all that effort, directorships would seem only just.

  Death was a hundred per cent certain, Pemberton consoled himself. Unless something odd happened (he was unqualmish about his own mortality), Hillmorton, twenty years older, would die before him, and in the foreseeable future.

  As well as having a knack for collecting financial information (he wouldn’t take advice about investments but gave instructions), Pemberton also had the same talent with medical information. For this he was better placed, and the judgements he made of it were appreciably less adventurous.

  About Lord Hillmorton, the information wasn’t exciting and didn’t need conflating with articles in the medical journals. It came from a doctor acquaintance of Pemberton’s who had met Hillmorton at meetings of the governors of one of the London hospitals. He reported, not inquisitive as to why Pemberton should be making these enquiries, that the old boy seemed in the best of form, mental and physical.

  A pity. Pemberton wouldn’t have suppressed the thought if he could. He had seen people waiting at death beds for patients of his to die. He was as conscientious as a doctor could be, prolonged lives as far as his skills let him, and wasn’t unaccustomed to looking at disappointment ill-concealed. It was ridiculous to pretend. Pemberton wouldn’t pretend about anyone else or himself. This robust health of Hillmorton’s was an irritation, a minor irritation, but still enough to make his temper worse. He might have to wait another twenty years. Whatever bit of profit this wretched title might bring him now, it would have vanished by then. He would be in his sixties and too old.

  The big man was a familiar figure at the end of the Fulham Road. Here and there in those streets houses were being smartened up, but not the doctor’s. He lived a life austere, comfortless, hardworking, and enjoyed it. In introspective moments, which were few, he wondered why he had not been more successful. He knew that he was a first-rate professional, more experienced and more in touch with modern medicine than most doctors of his age. Except to those who didn’t like to be overpowered, he was a comfort to his patients – the more so the more they were suffering and the nearer to the extreme conditions.

  Any persons who had been allowed to share his thoughts on peerages, parliament, the follies of the national scene, might have judged that he was a committed radical. They would have been wrong by a hundred and eighty degrees. By his side, not only detached Conservatives like Hillmorton, but also right-wingers, devoted lobby pedestrians such as Clare or Lorimer, were compassionate liberal thinkers, full of warm sympathy for all their fellow men and anxious that their lives should be transformed. Pemberton’s view of his fellow men couldn’t have been lower without being pathological. Perhaps a doctor saw them at their worst. One tried to cure them. Sometimes one felt animal kinship. It was a satisfaction to be some help. But most days Pemberton was in contact, as close as flesh to flesh, with fright, often with cowardice, selfishness, deceit, venality, petty fraud, attempts to cheat him out of drugs, all the shifts of the craving, the stupid and the terrified. For a man as disposed to contempt as he was, the spectacle was not likely to remove it. Life was a poor affair at best, he had thought since he was a boy, human beings were a poor lot. After twenty years of medical practice he believed that he had been right, but a shade optimistic. He fell back on his favourite curse-word of abuse and hadn’t a doubt that anyone who thought more loftily must have lived their entire time in drawing-rooms.

  Ah well, decent kinder people like the Symingtons would have said, he didn’t know anything about the working class. On the contrary. He knew far more about them in the sense of physical contact, touch, hearing, sight, smell, than they did or anyone connected with old Massie’s will. Hillmorton in his political career had met working-class constituents and confronted others as a negotiator across tables in Whitehall. Similarly with Ryle and some of the rest. Whereas nearly all of Pemberton’s patients – not the private ones, from whom he made some money – came from the proletariat of south-west London. When they were ill they were like everyone else, no more admirable, no less, Pemberton thought. When they weren’t ill, he detested them.

  His appetite for contempt was formidable. He used it with enthusiasm on any social group that existed. But it was more undiluted for the working class than for any other, if that were possible. They were shamelessly lazy, almost clinically lazy (that affronted his hard-working soul). They wouldn’t stir themselves to earn an extra pound for their children, except by passively joining a hundred thousand other layabouts in coming out on strike. They couldn’t act as individuals, they were dead wood, they had no concept of the individual life (that affronted his individualistic soul). As usual, he didn’t make his own thoughts softer or less brutal. He merely detested such people.

  When they came to him in illness, they found him understanding and a support. Which was a dispensation of fate that would have gratified Lord Hillmorton, whose sense of irony missed something through not knowing his kinsman. If he had, however, and even if there hadn’t been a barrier of instinct between them Hillmorton would have reacted as others did to Pemberton, and would have dismissed him as a savage.

  Sitting in his bleak surgery, Pemberton, studying the medical journals, totting up his investments, had not the slightest intimation that anything was being decided about one of Hillmorton’s daughters. There his intelligence service didn’t operate. He wouldn’t have been interested if it had told him about the Massie will. That was trivial. What did one more marriage count, among people for whom he cared nothing except to bear a not uncherished grudge? It was to be a year or more before he heard anything relevant about the family and longer than that before he introduced himself to Liz.

  10

  Until that summer neither Jenny nor Liz had been inside a court of law. Julian had, since as a young man he had read for the Bar, with the secret intention of never practising. To both Jenny and Liz, it all struck strange, with the kind of discomfort an apprehensive person feels on entering a sick room or happening on a service in a foreign church.

  In the courtroom, on a midsummer morning, there didn’t seem much to inspire any superstitious dread, yet Liz was feeling something close to that. True, the room, one of the courts nearest to the Strand, was the wrong shape, much too high for its floor space, like a basilica gone mad: but, waiting for the judge, the officials, the barristers, the solicitors, most of the spectators, including Hillmorton, looked comfortable enough. The benches were hard, it was going to be a long trial, trust this judge, someone was chattering, it was going to be hard on the backside. On opposite halves of the room, though separated by only three or four yards, Jenny and Liz were glancing at their solicitors for reassurance.

  There sat Symington, reposeful after a word with the silk in front of him. When she noticed him, even Liz, who wasn’t struck by handsome men, for an instant thought that he was worth looking at. But she and Jenny, in this alike, as in other responses that morning, more than they could know, were feeling as other litigants had often felt. They didn’t enjoy the sight of the lawyers being so jolly among one another. Hadn’t they any nerves? Didn’t they imagine that others might have nerves?

  The silk o
n the Underwoods’ side was porcine, Jenny’s silk was aquiline: they were having a cheerful insulting match, like undergraduates. As though the result of the case didn’t matter to them or anyone else – they weren’t even funny, Liz’s temper was sullen, why did they fancy themselves as humorists? Someone was still complaining about hard benches, as though that were the issue to be decided. At ten thirty precisely, a chime from a church outside could just be heard, an inside door opened, feet shuffled as people stood up, the judge came in, walked along the dais, gave an affable plump man’s bow. Then he settled in his seat, with the air of one not at all impatient, contented to be settled there for a good long stay.

  Mr Justice Bosanquet had, in his own modest realistic view, a good deal to be contented about. He had become a High Court Judge distinctly late, so late that he had resigned himself to being passed over: no earnings to fret about now, and a more serious fret removed by a satisfactory pension at the end. The Family Division was a nice terminal job for anyone like himself, not much of an abstract lawyer, but still inquisitive about people. In fact, he was a shrewd and able man, with more than his share of human interest.

  He had a round face, with small, very bright eyes, and vaguely suggested either a Dickensian philanthropist or a Chinese statesman Chairman Bosanquet. Or, since the Chinese teachers sat on mats, not chairs, the title should really have been translated, matmaster – Matmaster Mao, Matmaster Bosanquet. It would have fitted him. He would have sat on a mat, or on anything else possible to sit on, for any length of time he thought necessary to reach a judgement.

  To those not domesticated to the courts, quick-thinking women like Jenny and Liz, and even to acquaintances such as Lorimer, who dropped in to give Jenny inarticulate support, the entire process seemed oblivious of time – and they felt like that before the end of the first day, not to speak of the days that followed. It was the impression which also damped down strangers, when they first listened to the parliamentary process. Were these people operating in periods of months or years? Or aeons? Or were they merely timeless?