“Yes,” she said, and looked at Harriet again, but then her eyes slid away, and she drank some of her beer, but without much sign of enjoyment.
“So, you want to know what’s going on, Harriet,” Ben said. “Well, I’m here to tell you. Why not? You’ve asked me, so I’ll tell you. The pigs have been watching me—I knew that. Pigs always watch me. I’m one of your interesting cats.”
He laughed again, and finished his beer, and chucked the can in the general direction of the wastepaper basket, not bothering to turn his head to see whether he had missed or not.
“So, after that nice little do up at Brookbank, they come and they tell me they know, they have some real lovely evidence, none of your made-up stuff, some real evidence that I’m a nasty subversive whisper-it-not-in-Gath actual Communist. How’s that, then? So like, I say to them, sure, I’m a Communist, want to see my party card? I’ll show you. Is that such a terrible thing to be in this royal throne of kings, this sceptered isle and the rest of that crap? So they say, no, great, be what you like, as long as you don’t do nothing naughty—like doing something practical about what you believe in.”
“Do something for me, Ben,” Harriet said. “Stop addressing me as though I were a public meeting. I’m getting bored.”
“Oh! Oh! Sharp teeth, your lady Ma has got, Patty! Okay. Okay. They know I started the strike at the power station—pretty good result that, hmm?”
“Not particularly. I didn’t enjoy it much.”
“Who said anything about enjoying it? What sort of yardstick is that? I like you, Harriet, you’re a great gas. And you’re a bloody good scientist—got twice the brain I’ll ever have. But you can be bloody stupid, just like the rest of—”
“Ben, shut up,” Patty said softly, and he looked down at her, and after a moment, took his arm from her shoulders and leaned back against the head of the bed.
“Okay. So, I told ’em I’d organized the strike. That I’d plans for a few more such operations. So they said I’d better get out before I was thrown out. So I’ve decided to go. End of report. Anything else you want to know about what’s happening?”
“You say you’re going?” Harriet frowned. “But I thought—”
“You thought like the pig thought,” Ben said, and now his voice was harsh. “You thought I’d stay here out of some crazy notion of—hell, I don’t know what—honor or something. That I’d be ashamed to lose face by turning and belting the hell out of here before they pick me up. Fuck that for a—listen, Harriet, you may be bloody stupid, but you aren’t moribund, are you? What the hell would any intelligent man do when he’s told he’s been tumbled, and that from here on any efforts he makes will be—I did the intelligent thing, on account of I’m a very intelligent guy. I booked a flight to Montreal. We go from Manchester, tonight. So you needn’t have come, need you? You could have saved yourself the trouble of running pig errands.” He was leaning forward now, redfaced and angry, and suddenly she smiled.
“Dear Ben. Poor dear Ben,” she said softly. “You do feel unhappy about it, at that, don’t you? For all your talk about bourgeois relationships and the expendability of people, and the rest of it, you feel unhappy about the way you treated me. Because you spent some time as a guest in my home, and because I’m Patty’s mother, you don’t like getting me mixed up in your politics and your revolutionizing. Isn’t that true, Ben? Isn’t that why you’re going, as much as anything?”
He stared at her for a long moment, and then he shrugged and smiled again, and once more his face disappeared behind its mask of hair and laughter.
“There’s a clever Freudian-type lady, then! Got it all worked out, all nice and tidy. Well, think as you like, Harriet, my dear common-law mother-in-law. Think what you damned like. I’ll tell you I’m going because I am not about to waste my time getting mixed up in any legal argument, and because my work here is pretty well done, anyway. Your stupid pigs—they think the trouble’ll stop just because they’ve got rid of me? They think the whole cozy rotten edifice you’ve got here on this precious island of yours’ll be safe for another few hundred years on account of they got rid of Wicked Ben, the most revolutionary of men? Jesus, how filled with crap can people’s heads be? It won’t stop, because it can’t. There’s plenty of people left here like me, plenty I’ve taught, plenty who understand what’s got to be done. And they’ll do it, whether I’m here or not, and—what’s the good of talking? Do me a favor, Harriet. Go home. Go home, and leave me to fight it out with Patty—yeah, don’t look like that. You know we fight over you, don’t you? You know we’re going to go on fighting over you and—”
“I’m going with you,” Patty said, and her voice was thin and ugly. “I’ve told you I’m going with you, so there’s no more to say. You don’t have to—”
“No, I don’t have to. No one has to. Ah, shit! What the hell—do me a favor and go home. I’ve had it up to here—” And he threw himself back on the bed, and lay staring up at the ceiling, his beard thrusting sulkily upward.
Harriet stood up, and moving very slowly began to pull on her gloves. Then she looked up at Patty, still sitting in the same hunched position on the bed beside him. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Patty moved petulantly.
“Do me a favor too, Ma. Go home, will you? I never could be doing with a lot of long-drawn-out farewells. We’re going, and that’s all there is to it. You know how it is. There’s nothing else I can do, is there?”
“No,” Harriet said, “there’s nothing else you can do. But I told you I knew that in London, didn’t I? You don’t have to feel so unhappy about it. I’m putting no pressures on you—I never have.”
“No, damn you!” Patty shouted. “You’re not! That’s what makes it so—oh, go home, will you?”
I should want to cry or I should try to beg her to stay here or something, Harriet thought, looking at the bleak misery on her daughter’s face. I ought to, and I can’t. It ought to feel like losing a child, but it doesn’t because my children have been dead long since. Poor young woman. Poor young stranger. Poor dead children.
She turned at the door, just for a moment.
“Goodbye, Patty. Take care of yourself.”
“You too,” Patty said after a moment. “You take care of yourself. You’ll be all right?”
“I told you before, I’m not decrepit. Not quite yet.”
“But you’ll be all right …”
“Yes. I’ll be fine. Goodbye.”
She sat staring into her glass, twisting it from side to side so that the muddy dregs of the wine swirled into patterns, so absorbed that she almost jumped when Theo put his hand out and touched her.
“Hattie, I know you have a certain amount of right to be abstracted, but try to remember I’m here, please! It’s very dispiriting to speak twice to one’s guest and still make no apparent impact.”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry, Theo. I’m being quite abominably ill-mannered. What did you say?”
“I said—oh, whatever it was, even I’ve forgotten it now, so it couldn’t have been all that important. Will you have some pudding or do you prefer cheese?”
“Hmm? Oh, neither, thank you. Just coffee. It was a splendid dinner, and I did appreciate—”
“Stop appreciating, and start being with me. I’d find your company rather than your palpable absence quite sufficient recompense for the provision of your dinner, I assure you.”
She laughed then. “Oh, dear, you are being grand! But at least that proves you aren’t really annoyed. I am sorry—I didn’t mean to go off into a brown study.”
“Deep purple, more like. Why, Hattie?” His voice took on a softer note, and she looked away from him, embarrassed, and he seemed to recognize it, and returned to raillery. “What can ail thee, Dame at arms, alone and palely loitering—it doesn’t sound quite as euphonious as it might, somehow, but the mood is right. What the hell does ail thee? Apart from Patty’s departure, that is. I know that you’ve come to terms with that business, so wha
t else is bothering you? You’ve been walking around surrounded by your subfusc clouds for almost a week, and I for one am finding it exceedingly depressing. Hence, frankly, this expedition to the bright lights and wickednesses of King’s Lynn. I thought perhaps a cordon bleu dinner amidst all this decadent society would unbutton you a little.”
She looked round the small restaurant, at the chubby Norfolk farmers and their well-upholstered wives, the damply eager young men and their giggly girl friends, and laughed a little. “Anyone who really unbuttoned here would cause a riot,” she said. “Try it. Climb on the table and dance a fandango and see what’d happen.”
“Nothing, dear heart, nothing whatsoever. They’d look away, and order some more scampi and sauce tartare and murmur about the weather and the state of the crops, and if anyone did show such ill breeding as to make any direct comment, it’d be to dismiss me as a mere mountebank from Brookbank. And what can you expect from these scientist wallahs, and waiter, bring me another brandy and a pink gin for madam.”
“Probably,” she said, and looked down at her glass again.
But he said at once, “Oh, no you don’t—you’re not going off again. Now, tell me what the problem is. I’ve told you, I’m bored out of my mind by your drooping about the place, and I insist that you pay for your dinner by telling me what it is.”
“There are times when I wonder how much of your interest is based on concern for me, and how much on mere curiosity,” she said with a flash of sharpness. “You can’t bear not to know everything that’s going on around you, even if it’s nothing to do with you, can you?”
“Oh, mere vulgar curiosity is all, I assure you,” he said equably, and she reddened.
“You can make me feel like a complete bastard sometimes, Theo,” she said after a moment. “Of course I know your interest is genuine. I had no right to—”
“Yes you did. Every right. I can’t give you any other sort of emotional relief, can I? If I could, I would. But at least I know I can give you the chance to say what you want when you want to say it, and that can be extremely cathartic. Even more so than active sex, in my experience—defining sex as merely a way of discharging tension that is, rather than in the romantic creative guise. I’m not even sure that there is such a guise, anyway.” He folded his hands on the table, and bent his head to stare at his interlocked fingers. “You could say I’ve been suffering a little this week, watching you getting more and more frustrated as you bottle up your–whatever it is you’re bottling up—and wanting to give you the chance to pop your cork—elegant phrase!—but being kept at arms’ length. I mayn’t be precisely the sighing yearning lover, but my situation has its parallels.”
There was a silence, and then she said, “I told Oscar. Last week, I told him I was going to Whyborne, and the reasons for my decision, and—” she grimaced. “I told him.”
“And what was his reaction?” Theo asked softly.
She felt as though he knew the answer but was forcing her, for some reason of his own, to say it, and the anger that had been simmering in her all week burst upward, and she said furiously, “He did for me what you could never do, and then said it was for the last time, all right?” and then, horror-struck, closed her eyes, feeling the hot color come flooding over her neck and face.
“You see what I mean?” he said after a moment. “That was very cathartic, wasn’t it? Almost orgasmic, you might say. Really, my dear, you underestimate what I can do for you. I may not be precisely able to—um—offer the sort of service Oscar and some of our farming friends here would define as the service a man can and should give a woman, but I have my uses.”
She opened her eyes to look at him, and he smiled at her and shook his head slightly as she opened her mouth to speak.
“Whatever you do, don’t say you’re sorry. If you did then I think I might indeed lose my temper. I might even be reduced to throwing a fit of classical homosexual hysterics, with lots of wrist flopping and head tossing and flouncing. And not only would I like to spare you so unedifying a sight—I’m not sure I’d know how to do it.”
He raised his head and looked around for a waiter, and they sat silently as the man fluttered around them with coffee pots and offers of liqueurs. Then Theo leaned forward and patted her hand.
“All right. That’s over and done with. The embarrassment, I mean. You said it, I heard it, and now we can move into the peaceful post-tumescent phase, hmm? We’ll relax and talk sensibly, and you’ll feel much much better, I promise you.”
“Thank you. I think—I hate to admit it, but I do already.”
“You see? Theo’s Therapy for Threatened—I can’t finish it. Alliteration was never one of my skills.”
“Threatened,” she said. “You chose aptly, there. I am threatened. It’s a—not a particularly agreeable feeling.”
“You said the last time?” Theo said carefully. “Is that what you mean by a threat?”
“It’s a very powerful one,” she smiled at him, knowing it to be with a too bright falsity. “Either I stay here at Brookbank on his terms, or I go and …” she shrugged. “I go.”
“A strange man, our Oscar. He seems to value himself very little.”
“What?”
“Even in my pansy way, I’m capable of love. I value myself too well to offer less to the people with whom … I become involved. Yet Oscar seems able to turn off the taps of his affection very easily, if he can make so—urn—suggest so commercial a basis for the continuation of your relationship. Good God, woman! Surely you must see it’s the end of the road for you two? How can you go on with a man who tries so—?”
“You’re suggesting I undervalue myself too. Maybe I do. Because I could go on with him, even now. Because value myself or not, I damned well understand myself. And I need him. Do you think I haven’t thought about this? I’ve thought about it all week, until I’m stupid with thinking. I’ve thought about George and Gordon and—I’ve thought and thought and thought. And at the end of it, I’m no nearer a decision. I know what I need and I know what I want, but God help me, they’re diametrically opposed to each other.”
“You love him, then?”
“Love? Stupid word. Mawkish word for a mawkish feeling. I don’t know what it is. I just know what I need in a man, and he’s the only one who can provide it. So—” She smiled again, the same falsely bright rictus of a smile. “So!”
“Let’s be logical about all this, Hattie. There must be—” He shook his head and pushed his coffee cup aside to begin making marks on the tablecloth with the tip of his coffee spoon. “Why is Oscar so hell-bent on keeping you at Brookbank that he’d—that he would behave as he has in order to do so? To use blackmail of this order he must be hard-pushed, hmm?”
“I don’t know,” she said wearily. “I just—”
“Rhetorical question, dear. I know why. It’s because you’re his only hope of getting any farther in his own career. Because he dare not lose another good worker as he lost Ross-Craigie. If he does, he’ll find himself relegated in no uncertain terms. Without you, I may safely say, Professor Bell will become just a name on a door at the Department of Science and Technology in Whitehall. They’ll change the Brookbank Establishment head and kick him upstairs into higher-paid uselessness, and well he knows it.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, Theo, don’t be ridiculous! I’m not that important to him! The reverse in some ways. He’s got his own interests that cut right across my lines of work, and well you know it. I’m damned if I’m going to be made into—into some sort of object for people to make deals with and—”
“You already are such an object, you silly creature!” Theo said with real irritation, “Do stop being so tiresomely modest, and use your bloody brain. In scientific terms Oscar’s an also-ran, a second-stringer, and he knows it as well as he knows the sun will rise tomorrow. But with you at Brookbank, the Government will release money to cover your work—Jesus Christ, woman, didn’t that strike business register with you? All that fuss at the Trafa
lgar Square meeting, the public meetings and screechings and television programs going on all over the place still? You’re big—you’re bloody enormous! And it’s only because you won’t face up to it that Oscar’s able to manipulate you the way he does! If you stopped for one moment to think intelligently about yourself, instead of just about your work and your personal relationships, about yourself as a person, as a scientist, then you’d see just what—oh, why do I try? Look, let me spell it out for you. The Government want to settle all this unrest as fast as they can. They want people to feel that this great cancer treatment everyone keeps on about is available to them, not just to the people who can pay for it. The best way to settle the fuss is to pour money into Brookbank, to show the world and his wife that a beneficent British Government is busily arranging that the Berry process shall be used as soon as possible for anyone who needs it. Why do you think Oscar’s been spending so much time in Whitehall since all this began? He’s not getting his arse measured for a seat in a Department office, I promise you!”
“Are you sure? He hasn’t said anything to me about more grant money—”
“I’m damned sure he hasn’t! Why should he, when he’s so certain he’s got you firmly held between his finger and thumb? Look at the way you’ve been behaving all week—depressed as hell, and now I know why—Christ, Oscar must think he’s home and dry. He must know that he just has to twitch the thread, and back you come dancing at the end of it. God, it makes me sick!”
“It makes me sick, too,” she said and her voice was very low. “I don’t enjoy being the way I am. I wish—oh, God, I wish I were totally sexless, just a mind that wanted to work. Then it’d all be so easy. I’d do my work, and to hell with everything else, with George and Oscar and Ben and Patty, the whole lot of them. I wish I were like Catherine.”
“Do you?” He smiled a little. “No, you wouldn’t enjoy being Catherine. She suffers, too, and don’t think otherwise.”
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