In Their Wisdom

by C. P. Snow

  Swaffield sat down beside her.

  ‘How’s your son getting on?’

  ‘Very well, thank you, Mr Swaffield.’

  ‘When’s he going to marry that girl?’

  Like other women when Swaffield put out his full projective force, Mrs Underwood didn’t resist.

  ‘Quite soon, that is we all hope quite soon. Of course, there are a few difficulties, they’re not children, you know–’

  ‘What difficulties?’

  ‘Well, there’s always money, isn’t there? And–’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Sometimes I think, perhaps they’re not certain that they are right for each other.’

  ‘Do you think they are?’

  ‘I hope so, I do hope so.’

  ‘Do you think it’s a good idea?’

  ‘All I can say is, I hope so. He ought to get settled down, naturally. Of course she’s a strong-minded person.’

  When he wasn’t on one of his rampages, Swaffield had more insight than most men. He had learned in a few minutes what Liz only hesitantly suspected, that Mrs Underwood loathed her. There would have been a tincture of that in Mrs Underwood for anyone who took her son away, even though, simultaneously, in principle and in conscience, she was pressing the marriage on. That was commonplace enough. In addition, Mrs Underwood loathed Liz for herself. Probably, thought Swaffield, she didn’t realise how much, or even more admit it.

  Swaffield felt tempted to meddle. These people had stood in his own way, they had done harm to Jenny, of whom he was fond. What was more tempting, Swaffield liked meddling for its own delicious sake. As a rule he did so to increase, in his own view, the amount of enjoyment, in particular the amount of sexual enjoyment, in the world. He wasn’t above doing the reverse. It would be easy to disturb this particular triangle. He hadn’t the free energy for such diversions, but it was agreeable to secrete the thought away.

  ‘He may be getting interested in someone else,’ said Swaffield.

  ‘I suppose it could happen–’

  ‘How do you know he isn’t?’ said Swaffield, getting up to go, leaving her with that obscure warning and encouragement.

  This interval was a long one, somewhat protracted because several performers were walking in the patio. While they were doing so, two highly placed persons, much loftier than Meinertzhagen, were walking together beside the trees. They were discussing the pianist who was to be the next and final performer, one of the most famous then alive. But they were discussing, not his art, but his pay. Or more precisely what it had cost Swaffield to transport him from New York, entertain him and provide his fee. They made estimates, which, though high, were actually slightly lower than the truth.

  ‘I must say,’ said one, ‘the man Swaffield does us pretty proud.’

  ‘If you ask me,’ said the other, ‘it’s very civil of him.’

  If Jenny had heard that, she would have regarded it as a classical English remark and been filled with irreverent pleasure. However, she was soon listening to more music, and filled with a different kind of pleasure. No, it was more than pleasure. Other music moved her in the flesh and the dear mortal world where she was at home. The Bach did that, and transcended it. This was pure joy. She wasn’t trying to define it. She wasn’t thinking that this was how she might have felt once or twice in her lifetime, if she had been religious. She wasn’t noticing the crystalline night – or nearer to earth the faces round her – or the wrapped up figure at her side, whom she had been teasing. She was separate from all of them, part of it all.

  Nevertheless, looking back on those moments – they didn’t last long – with happiness, she recollected them wrong. She believed that the resolve which had been forming within her for some while past, and which had strengthened itself at that party, became settled and clear while she was overtaken by that joy. This wasn’t true. She liked to think so, and she blessed the party for it. Soon after the music had finished, she had returned cheerfully to her resolve again. Just for those moments, though, and it was rare for anyone, not only for children of this world like herself, she had been living where choice and decision didn’t enter, that is outside the domain of the will. Though she would have thought it fanciful, and conceivably have been right, some would have said that she had been lifted out of time.

  29

  Through the late summer Dr Pemberton was receiving regular reports about Hillmorton. They came from his contact at the hospital where Hillmorton had been first examined, for, contrary to his prediction to Sedgwick and his own wishes, that was where he had been moved. He hadn’t been able to argue much, he was only fitfully coherent or capable of a continued effort of will.

  The disease, after the lull in the spring, had gone faster than Pemberton had expected. As he listened to the reports, he thought that it was unlikely to take long now. He followed the progress exactly as he had followed the progress of others in this condition. He had seen it all before. There were one or two curiosities. The brain tumour had grown with untypical speed. Pemberton’s nearest approach to feeling was the reflection that for himself, he would prefer another way of dying.

  The mind, still lucid in March, had all of a sudden deteriorated. That would be hard to take if there was a threshold when the patient realised what was happening. No one likes the prospect of being gaga, Pemberton thought to himself. Paralysis had spread. There wasn’t much the patient could do for himself. He wouldn’t be able to handle his own bedpan. There were many days when the bladder was obstructed. Pain, catheters, the routine performance, the routine nursing. More severe pain in the back and pelvis.

  Whether pain in this kind of terminal illness was actually more extreme than pain such as toothache, Pemberton hadn’t found any scientific method of deciding: but fear made the pain seem more agonising, there was no doubt of that. Pemberton had heard men as controlled as Hillmorton scream, and go on screaming, in precisely this same condition. Analgesics every four hours. Analgesics didn’t give him much help, his nervous system appeared to have unusual resistance. Finally they used one which softened the pain but made him slobbery, merry and giggling like a fatuous cheery drunk.

  Presumably Hillmorton had once had some sort of dignity. This way of dying didn’t leave one any dignity. Fancy giggling on the last stretch. Pemberton couldn’t tolerate his own humiliations, but if he had been in charge, he would have given the same treatment himself.

  Three or four months now, was his estimate. There was some practical office work for him to do. He didn’t propose to waste time about taking the succession, for whatever it was worth. There shouldn’t be any delay. His father had had an amateur passion for genealogy, such as gratified some with – real or imagined – lofty antecedents and no other claim to fame. He had drawn family trees like someone hoping to be admitted to a Hapsburg court. Or alternatively proving that he descended from a woman who had been picked up by the Duke of Wellington.

  These charts Pemberton had had checked by the Debrett staff. There was no doubt anywhere. No senior line had survived. Hillmorton might have hated the thought of such an heir, but he had no doubt that this actually was his heir. In his entry in Who’s Who there was the bare line: Heir. Kinsman Dr Thomas Pemberton, M R CP, FRCS.

  Nevertheless the formalities would have to be performed. Several nights in August and September, after listening clinically to the hospital report, which normally came through once a week, Pemberton went into his surgery and did more office work. He wasn’t given to wasting money, and so the surgery did double duty as his study and he himself did double duty as his own secretary. He wasn’t given to literary exercises, but he was neat and methodical, a hulking figure bent over the desk, writing in a tidy, minuscule italic hand. From those holograph charts he typed, boxer’s hands precise upon the keys.

  Genealogies were collected and placed in dossiers. Entries in Debretts and Burkes were copied out, and cross references supplied. So were photostats of family correspondence and of the birth certificates of his grandfath
er, his father and himself.

  In September all was complete, and one night – he had heard earlier in the week that there was no change in Hillmorton’s state – he first wrote a letter, and then typed it out. It was addressed to the Lord Chancellor at the Crown Office. It read:

  Dear Lord Chancellor,

  I am enclosing documents in proof of my succession to the earldom of Hillmorton etc. as vacated by the late holder whose death has been announced. The documents are self-explanatory and confirm (a) that I am a legitimate male line descendant of the first holder of the Hillmorton titles (b) that all senior male lines springing from that first holder are extinct. I shall be obliged if you will ratify these proofs at your earliest convenience, so that you will feel able to issue to me a Writ of Summons.

  Yours faithfully, …

  Pemberton read the letter with the satisfaction of an author receiving his first set of proofs. Procedure suitably businesslike. He prided himself on being capable of discovering sources of advice for any human situation. He hesitated about the signature. He came into the title the instant the other man died. Should he sign himself Hillmorton, or keep to Thomas Pemberton? Just for once he vacillated. He would have despised anyone else for it, but he had a slight superstitious twinge. With great firmness, at the bottom of the letter he inscribed the name he was used to.

  The one thing he couldn’t inscribe on that letter was the date. That would have to wait. Delicately, with careful fingers, he put the letter, documents, and large envelope into a folder. The folder went into a special receptacle at the back of his files. He slid that layer of his filing cabinet shut, and with an air of accomplishment, of obscure triumph, turned the small key in the lock.

  Within three weeks of that piece of administrative efficiency, his medical acquaintance was saying over the telephone: ‘It must be getting near the finish now.’

  ‘With this kind of cancer one can’t tell for sure,’ said Pemberton.

  ‘One can near enough, this time, I think.’

  ‘Any change that signifies?’

  ‘There can’t be now, can there?’

  ‘He might have gone off earlier. He must have pretty fair vitality.’

  The other doctor said: ‘People often hang on. Longer than you’d think possible. Not the most likely people, sometimes.’

  ‘He’s hung on, it hasn’t done him any good.’

  ‘Of course, he’s not feeling anything now. That last drug really does work, you know.’

  Pemberton did know. The doctors had done what they could, within the orthodox limits. They had helped, so far as the patient could be helped. The giggling way to death. Finally the vegetable way to death. It wasn’t grand. Perhaps it was human. Pemberton had faith in what his mind told him, and his mind told him that that final way was right.

  30

  That same September Jenny was feeling restive and happy, the moods combined and co-existing because she was coming near a point of action. On an afternoon in the week Pemberton heard that last bulletin about Hillmorton, she walked, steps springy as a girl’s (in the midst of death we are in life, some supernatural Dr Pemberton, omniscient about all mondial conjunctions, might have commented), up Philbeach Gardens on one of her visits. Nowadays she paid these after lunch, after getting through her work in Swaffield’s office in the mornings. This was a visit to a favourite old lady, whom she always called deferentially Miss Smith.

  Miss Smith rose to greet her in a bedsitting-room about the size of Jenny’s own, but crammed with bric-a-brac, postcards on the mantelpiece, photographs on the walls, on a what-not small replicas of St Mark’s, St Peter’s, the Taj Mahal, and Cologne Cathedral. Miss Smith, well into her eighties, was straight backed, bright eyed. She had been a schoolmistress, which accounted for most of the photographs and all the postcards. Her tone was high and clear, cultivated (educated rather than upper class, Jenny’s ear told her), nice to listen to.

  ‘How are you, my dear?’

  ‘You’re looking very well,’ said Jenny.

  ‘And how is that trouble of yours?’ Miss Smith never welcomed any sort of protective care, but dispensed it. Jenny, who didn’t approve of self-pity, of which she saw plenty, approved of this – and hoped she would be as tough if she lived as long. By that trouble of Jenny’s, Miss Smith was referring to the appeal. She had followed the whole process with critical vigilance from the beginning.

  ‘Oh, it’s down for hearing at last. This term,’ said Jenny.

  ‘That means before Christmas, am I right?’

  ‘Quite right.’

  ‘Oh, I am glad for you. It will be a relief to get it settled. It’s bound to be.’

  ‘Of course it will,’ said Jenny. She had been told, only recently, that the appeal was coming on and that this particular waiting would soon be over. But it wasn’t that which was making her happy and filling her with a sense of action.

  Miss Smith, who let little slip, had also detected that Jenny had acquaintances in the House of Lords, and wished to talk of them. For two different reasons, Jenny wanted to steer the conversation away. One of these reasons was that Miss Smith had a taste for talking politics and, though Jenny herself was conservative enough, Miss Smith’s politics were not entirely soothing.

  She was living on a tiny private school pension (was she too proud to take her old age pension? Jenny had not dared to ask her). She would be content if some people stayed preposterously richer. That thought delighted her – so long as a large number stayed considerably poorer, if possible a good deal poorer than they had ever been. These desires Miss Smith managed to involve with extreme moral righteousness, and her good nature got lost. All this made Jenny uncomfortable. Those desires were rather too close to her own instincts. She had been forced to listen to other views these last two years. She had heard Symington say that Lord Clare was somewhere to the right of Nicholas I. She couldn’t help accepting that Miss Smith was somewhere to the right of Lord Clare. She and Lorimer couldn’t change much and didn’t want to: but somehow they oughtn’t to be fellow-travellers with Lord Clare.

  It was pleasant to get Miss Smith gossiping about former pupils, safely away from embarrassing topics. On former pupils Miss Smith was the reverse of embarrassing. She was a sharp observer, she was interested in their marriages, children, divorces, love affairs. She was interested in a curiously antiseptic fashion, quite free from prying or any kind of vicarious heat. Rather like someone from another planet, Jenny thought, observing domestic happenings here with intelligence but without feeling or sharing in their kind of mess: rather like Jane Austen, who seemed to Jenny to have as shrewd an eye as anyone could have who didn’t really know what sexual feeling was.

  Jenny had decided that in her long life Miss Smith hadn’t been troubled by really knowing what sexual feeling was. She certainly hadn’t been even in the most sublimated terms a lesbian, as credulous persons might have thought. She hadn’t loved a man. Somehow she had been above, or on the safe side of it all. It hadn’t made her unhappy. Jenny would have judged that she had been happier than most people. Jenny wouldn’t have been, in those conditions: but then she wasn’t Miss Smith, and Miss Smith had told her that there were more ways than one of living a satisfactory life.

  Had Miss Smith been blessed? Was it a great gift, to be born with a temperament like that? As Jenny left Philbeach Gardens, the odd autumn leaf spiralling down to the pavement, those questions, as they had before, flooded among her thoughts. But not for long. Jenny was filled with other thoughts, some agreeable, some uncertain, all pertaining to actions in the near future. Whatever the risks or disappointments might be, Jenny wouldn’t have changed with Miss Smith or anyone else who hadn’t entered the battle.

  On the way home, Earl’s Court Road was scruffy. Again under foot there were a few autumn leaves, and far more scraps, bags, sheets of paper, the ubiquitous London paper. Yet to Jenny that month the sloppy streets through the smells of curry cooking, came a faint aboriginal smell from gardens nearby, the old wistf
ul autumnal smell – had their own promise. No one could have called them glamorous streets, but it was enlivening to be walking there on a September afternoon.

  Jenny was thinking of marriage. She liked to believe, both then and afterwards, that she had made up her mind that night on Swaffield’s terrace, the sound of Bach filling her with joy. It was all of a sudden that night, she liked to believe, that she had known marriage was right for her and Lorimer.

  Like all such resolves, of course, this one had been grounding itself – either known to her or unknown, or sometimes between the two – for long enough. But Jenny had the kind of sense or wisdom which didn’t always have a slavish respect for historical fact. Deciding about marriage was important, and if it was improved by a little gilding, decoration or editing, well, her memory could adapt itself.

  Just as she had the kind of sense or wisdom which knew what not to think about. She had become fond of Lorimer, that she could think about. (Did one become fond of anyone one saw a lot of, when one was lonely? That suspicion was dismissed.) He was absolutely honest, upright, someone to rely on. (She had found him dull, even forbidding when they first met. He didn’t brighten the air, he didn’t inspire her. The less she admitted that, the better. It was the cynical, not the realistic, who took a full look at the worst every instant of the day.)

  It would be nice to have someone beside her at parties. It wasn’t good for anyone’s self-esteem, particularly if one had as little as she had, to go about alone. (He wouldn’t shine, he would be obscure and mute among Swaffield’s stars. That didn’t matter, he had his own presence, she had seen people respecting him, she could hold on to that.) She would enjoy having a title, anyone like herself would be a hypocrite to pretend not to. (If the appeal went wrong they would be poor, very poor – joint income about up to that of a good secretary’s, unless Swaffield helped them out. Still, she was used to being poor. As for being poor and going along to the peeresses’ gallery and having notes addressed to The Lady Lorimer – that would be a distinct improvement, whatever anyone said.)