They called it, working.
Yet they might sit all night alone in Lynda’s living-room hardly saying a word, yet listening, trying to be receptive, to be alert. An idea might come out of it; or perhaps not. Or they might sound out this or that word, or phrase, or thought, by letting it lie on the air where they could get a sense of it, a feel, a taste; so that it might accumulate other sounds, words, ideas, like it.’ Sometimes they talked, trying not to talk too rationally or logically, merely letting talk flow, since in the spaces between words, sentences, something else might come in. They did not really know what they were doing, or how, really, they did it. Yet out of all this, material gathered, they began to get glimpses of a new sort of understanding.
They had no word for that either. Talking about it, or around it, they tended to slip back into talking about Lynda’s being mad.
Perhaps it was because if society is so organized, or rather, has so grown, that it will not admit what one knows to be true, will not admit it that is, except as it comes out perverted, through madness, then it is through madness and its variants it must be sought after.
An essential fact was that if Lynda had not been mad, had not tested certain limits, then some of the things they discovered would have frightened them so badly they would not have been able to go on.
Chapter Three
The house continued, if not divided against itself, at least layered in atmospheres or climates. A slight reshuffle: Francis had moved upwards when he had left school; so now, from top to bottom it was Francis, Paul, Martha, Mark, Lynda.
A few weeks before A Levels, Francis came home and demanded ‘a top-level conference’. This was his phrase, (humorous), for such sessions, which might go on, often did, half the night. This time he wanted to know why they wanted him to take the exams. All the commonsensical reasons for doing so having been offered by Mark, Martha, Lynda, while he listened, not without an appearance of judicious thought, he said he proposed to leave school at once. None of them had needed degrees to live their lives by, he said; they all despised examinations and what they stood for; and anyway, he kept meeting people just down from university and who would want to be like that? And there was that ass Uncle Graham, he was the kind of thing universities produced at their best.
He went back to school to pack up his things and come home. They half believed it was all due to examination nerves, and he would take them after all: the teachers said he would pass satisfactorily.
But he came home. He was very moody; desperately gay, then silent. He kept dropping in to his father’s study, but they still could not talk easily; to Martha’s room where, having hung about as if hoping she might say something useful, he proceeded to entertain her with impersonations of his teachers and classmates. Then down to Lynda. He spent hours with her, wanted to take her out to theatres, restaurants; demanded she should buy new clothes. She wasn’t doing justice to herself: everyone said how beautiful she was. Lynda became desperate too: he was treating her like a girlfriend, and she couldn’t understand why, when he had his own girl-friends.
They none of them knew what to do. Having spent nights considering the illogicalities, inconsistencies and the general unsatisfactoriness of the position, the adults gave up: after all, you can’t make a person study. Later of course they were able to see where all these deliberations had been at fault: they had been thinking of Francis as an isolated case. But he was only one of many thousands who decided the education they were offered was not for them. When a young person feeling himself to be alone and helpless fights pressures he believes are almost invincible, the fight is always oblique, desperate, ruthless. (Long ago Martha had made the same decision, had fought with cunning, ruthlessness, desperation, hardly knowing what it was she was doing, except that she was saying, no, no, I won’t.)
Now, through Patty, Francis got himself a job backstage in a theatre where he proceeded to work very hard. He had always worked hard. Within a few weeks of leaving school he was earning (as he took pains to point out) what many men in these islands were expected to keep families on.
They continued to discuss his decision; talked their way into a kind of interim report, which went something like this: it was taken for granted by most people who came anywhere near that house that anything taught in school, except for a few minor techniques, like learning to read, write and use reference books, was a waste of time; that anything learned under the heading of history, or art, or literature, was particularly dangerous, since by definition it couldn’t be true-was necessarily the product of derivative minds representing temporary academic attitudes congealed into temporarily rigid formulae. Anyone who wanted to learn anything, could do so by himself in a library, or with a tutor in a few weeks, instead of the years demanded by schools and colleges. Education in modern societies was primarily an education in conformism. These beliefs, or attitudes, were so deeply theirs it was hardly necessary to state them. They were implicit. From time to time they had been set forth as warnings, or instructions, to Francis in words like these: Well, you’ve got to do it, so just get through with it somehow, get it over with, but don’t take it seriously. In other words, from his family he had been asked to work hard, or at least adequately, while at the same time holding in his mind that what he worked at was unimportant if not dangerous. Saints had been asked to do no less. The school-semi - ‘progressive’ - was as confusing. Like all the dozen or so schools of its kind, it both deplored the examination system and what that stood for; insisted that what it offered its pupils was much higher, better, wider and deeper than any study for examinations could be; yet, because of the’system’ it was forced to spend as much time and effort on pushing its pupils through examinations as did any ordinary school.
These, then, were the lines of the ‘interim report’ - filed and forgotten when they saw how wide a movement it was that Francis had belonged to, without knowing it.
Much later still, Francis came out with an incident that occurred when he was about thirteen, and which, he claimed, was a turning-point for him. Mark could not remember it. Alas, parents so often cannot remember these moments which children carry with them like scars.
Francis had brought home from his new school (the semi-progressive one) some’mock’ examination papers in history and English. Being Francis, he had not taken them to his father, or to Martha, to ask what they thought, but had left them lying on the kitchen table where Mark must see them at breakfast. Mark had taken one look at the English paper and demanded if this was meant as a joke-perhaps it was a parody of some kind? Francis had said nothing, had listened. He had done rather well in this particular paper. Mark had not gone on-apparently he found the paper so ridiculous it wasn’t worth doing more than to say so. The history paper (‘The Ancient World-Egypt, Crete, Greece, Rome’) got the same treatment. Mark subscribed to a magazine that reported archaeological discovery: he told Francis not to waste time on school history. It was after this incident that Francis had dropped English and history as special subjects, and decided to do mathematics, chemistry and biology, areas where he hoped, facts could be eternal truths.
His coming home changed the house. The attic was large, accommodating not only Francis, but also Nicky, who stayed there most of the time: he didn’t get on with his parents. Jill and Gwen might as well have moved in: they were still at school, but were doing badly-on principle, Phoebe claimed.
The attic vibrated with politics, chiefly Nicky’s. He was ‘Committee of a Hundred’ rather than Committee for Nuclear Disarmament. He was also an anarchist. He had not been in on the beginnings of the ‘Committee of a Hundred’, which were already swallowed in myth after only a few months. (The adults might well have claimed this little public event as support for their contempt for history: but what event does not get swallowed in lies and half-truths within weeks?)
It was debatable whether Nicky was political by temperament: he had been sucked into politics by chance. At a meeting in Trafalgar Square (despising politics, he had gone out o
f curiosity) he had been standing watching the proceedings with a friend when some fascists had started shouting and scuffling. The police, attracted to Nicky’s tall, lively presence, had taken hold of him, laid him on his back and assaulted him. Six of them had kicked him in the privates, punched him in the kidneys, and then bundled him into a van with his coat pulled down over his head in such a way that he would have suffocated, since he had fainted, if someone hadn’t released him. In the police station he had protested his innocence. He was charged with assaulting the police. He had telephoned Mark, who had telephoned a lawyer, who had given the routine advice to plead guilty, because the magistrate always took the word of the police. Young and full of integrity, as he then was, Nicky had refused, and in the court next morning he had pleaded innocence, while a young policeman whom he had not seen before read a statement that he had been kicked and assaulted by Nicky. The magistrate had fined him fourteen pounds, while remarking that he ‘was a young man with an obvious propensity towards violence’.
This experience had pitchforked him straight into aggressive politics. If he had not been middle-class, and brought up to see policemen as a kind of servant, the incident would have had no effect. He had already been arrested half a dozen times and had done a short spell in prison for’sitting down’ outside an American Air Base.
Francis, an old friend of Nicky’s, was prepared to follow his lead in politics. But his early history made politics for him painfully serious: and it was known in the household that in private, he argued with Nicky, thought his political stand over-simplified, and some of Nicky’s associates frivolous.
The girls were violently for the Committee of a Hundred. As Phoebe said:’ Of course. What else? They’ve got to show how much they hate me somehow, and unless they become Tories what can they do?’
Gwen and Jill had both been arrested plentifully; but had never been charged with anything serious. Much to their chagrin. They complained it was because of their youth, or because their father was a Member of Parliament. The truth was, probably, their particular brand of good looks, still a plump pink and white charm, deceived policemen, like everyone else, into believing they must be innocent of everything. Discriminated against, they worked extremely hard in groups whose main energies went into insulting Phoebe and her associates: for this new resurgence of the left, like every blossoming of the left before it, ran true to the rule that more time must be spent on fighting allies and comrades than the enemy. Phoebe, five or six years after being a criminally treacherous extremist, whose mail was at least half letters containing filth and threats, now discovered she was a milk and water opportunist and a coward.
At first she was humorous about this; then not so humorous-she went for a holiday to Nanny Butts’. Returning from the holiday, she rang up Martha several times a day to complain about her daughters: she said she had headaches, and nausea and could not sleep. Phoebe continued not to believe in ‘psychology’; she believed in a stiff upper lip. But she was having a breakdown nevertheless.
So was Margaret; but in her case the phrase was never used. As Mark had to explain, the upper classes have always accommodated a wide spectrum of eccentricity.
For a couple of years Margaret’s house had continued a centre of agitation about legalizing homosexuality. Her husband John had not been sent to prison, but a couple of his friends were. He had been, people thought, a non-practising homosexual; but now, perhaps because he discovered so much sympathy for his condition, he had a couple of affairs, and even for a time thought of leaving Margaret.
She did not say what she thought about this. Her house continued full of charming people: she had never had any close friends.
Since one good cause leads to another, the people who began to campaign against capital punishment enlisted her, and soon it seemed as if every time one met Margaret, or went to her house, there was a new petition to sign, or committee to support. Sometimes she remarked, smiling, that she was an old Tory, she was an old die-hard; she had never seen herself as a crusader for causes. But it was not so much of a joke, after all. Secretly she did not understand how she had ever got herself into this position-she had married John, a pleasantly literary gentleman with a lot of interesting friends and a son with a reputation for being clever, and in no time at all she had become a pillar of progress with her name on a couple of dozen letterheads.
It was Graham’s fault. Fault? Was it that she did not really believe in reforming the law on homosexuality, in abolishing capital punishment-and so on? Well yes, of course she did-though homosexuality had never come her way, or not to challenge her, before John; and while it did seem likely capital punishment was old fashioned, it was not a cause she would have chosen to make a stand about. Well-had anyone forced her to choose it? Had anyone put a pistol to her head? No, of course not, but … Why was it that Graham considered it his duty to broaden the mind of the nation in so many different ways? No, no, there was no reason at all why he shouldn’t be a television personality; she was proud that she had welcomed television when so many of her class and kind, let alone all the intellectuals, had despised it. ‘Everybody’ now went on television, and watched it. It was just that-well what was it? Nothing that she could put her finger on, or be logical about. (Why did one have to be logical, consistent?) There was just too much of everything-too much, particularly, of Graham. He was always getting married-or nearly, and changing his mind; getting publicly engaged; announcing new programmes which might or might not take shape; starting a new committee; organizing a petition. Yes, yes, she was very fond of him, she was proud of him. He was a dear sweet boy. He was nearly thirty-five-should η’t he settle down?
She wished … she had no idea at all what she wished, or what she regretted. Perhaps she wanted an empty house and a silent telephone and a husband who was not like one of her own guests, an asset at a dinner-table or on the lawn among roses, but otherwise not much seen. By her, at least.
She departed for a long holiday to a small ‘unspoiled’ village on the Costa del Sol where she developed a sympathetic relationship with a fisherman who in the summer took tourists for trips in his boat. He was about forty-five; he was handsome; he had a wife and a family; she discovered herself madly in love by the symptom that she was feeling that her entire life had been misspent. A long confused letter reached Mark; it was discussed between him and Martha. It sounded as if she wanted to be rescued. By Mark? But Mark was not sympathetic. He was angry; he was critical. Certainly she should never have asked Mark-but then, who should she have asked and what did she want? Should Martha go? But with the young people, particularly Phoebe’s daughters, not to mention Paul, in such a simmering state of emotion, she did not want to go. Who? Had Margaret no friends at all? It seemed not. Eventually Patty Samuels went. Margaret liked Patty; Patty admired Margaret. Patty found Margaret living in a room that cost about five shillings a day in the house of a widow and her married daughter; she was eating her meals at a little restaurant where she got a large meal for half a dozen shillings. The fisherman had gone off for an unexplained trip to Valencia. Margaret babbled a great deal about the simple life, and real values and so on. Patty was sympathetic, and listened for a couple of days. She realized that while Margaret was indeed in a bad way, yet it was the kind of breakdown that could easily not be noticed. Margaret was a bit vague, she rambled rather; she was very dependent, but there was nothing startling to see.
Patty brought her home, and stayed with her for a few weeks, while giving it out that Margaret had caught a ‘flu of some kind in Spain. John Patten again went off to stay with his aged mother. Margaret, who knew that her darling, kind Patty must soon leave, kept visiting the house in Radlett Street, looking for love and the family and simple values.
She said to Patty that she adored her grandchildren; but for various reasons, Paul, and the two girls and Francis were at that stage in their lives when they were least likely to adore her. She kept bribing them to go off on holidays, trips, visits to the theatre; was refused, and so
she suffered. She suffered abominably, while Patty staying with her, remained loud, calm, humorous and practical. Margaret was not told that the reason why Mark had so little time to see her, much less even than usual, was that Lynda was ‘being silly’ again and that he was coping with it. without the aid of a nurse.
On the floor below Francis, Paul pursued his lonely course. Now, as always, the two had nothing to say to each other. They had been brought up together; yet in all those years it was doubtful whether they had spent half a dozen hours in each other’s company for choice. They would sit through meals without noticing each other. If someone came into a room where both of them were, reading, or sitting, it was as if both were alone.
Paul, of course, talked about it, easily, volubly: Francis with difficulty. Paul said Francis was still jealous because he was a cuckoo in the nest. Francis said he didn’t think Paul and he were on the same wavelength. The girls and Nicky discussed it all in depth and from time to time tried to involve the two boys with each other: which meant, inducing Francis to descend a floor to visit Paul. The two, very polite, exuding an embarrassed goodwill, sat as it were on stage, watched by other people for signs of the start of a psychological merger or liaison … The fact is, people are very different from each other. They are much more different from each other than anyone likes to admit. Why is it so hard to admit? It is as if, admitting it, means admitting worse, some failure in humanity itself, the death or the delay of some hope for us all. It was noticeable that on these rare occasions when someone-usually Jill and Gwen-had tried yet again to make friends of Paul and Francis, and failed, that everyone was rather subdued, and tended to apologize profusely for small unimportant faults, while Paul and Francis went out of their way to pass each other bread or salt at the table and Paul made jokes about sibling rivalry. And when Paul acquired Zena, so very much on his wavelength, and was no longer painfully and reproachfully alone, with what relief did everyone on the top floor forget about the need, or the duty, to involve Paul.
The Four-Gated City Page 48