by C. P. Snow
‘I suppose he didn’t like you not agreeing with him over the case.’
Julian hooted. ‘That’s putting it mildly.’
Mrs Underwood’s firm nose and mouth took on the stern expression of someone wishing to perform a benevolent act.
‘He’s always done his best for me. I don’t like the idea of the old thing being miserable. Can we do anything about it?’
‘You can have him round to dinner now and then, he’d enjoy that. But the only thing that would really make a difference would be if I changed my mind.’
‘Will you?’ She knew the answer. She would have argued if it had been anyone else, but not with Julian.
‘Of course not.’
Julian, who was lightly meditating, went on: ‘Poor old buffer, he’s an awful bore, but he can’t help that. I wonder if he knows how boring he is? But he’s not a bad sort. It’s a pity he’s going to be put on the dust heap.’
He opened his eyes to their widest, and said, with an expression of consternation, discovery, and supreme innocence: ‘Do you know, Mummy, I’ve noticed before, that when anyone gets in my way they tend to come to a bad end?’
‘Really,’ she gave a dutiful frown, ‘haven’t you any feeling at all?’
‘What do you think?’
But her protest, like her expression, was only in the line of duty. Loving him as she did, she believed that he had feeling for her: and if he was callous, callous as an infant, about everyone else, that didn’t make her think that he was defective at the heart, but simply drew her closer, as though they were conspirators.
So that she immediately asked him another question.
‘Have you been thinking about Liz?’
‘I don’t get much chance not to, you know.’
‘I mean, are you ever going to marry her?’
‘If you were me – would you?’
He asked playfully but she took her chance. She said, sounding to herself fair-minded and detached, believing that she was keeping an even balance: ‘I wish I knew. To tell you the honest truth I can’t make up my mind. She has fine qualities, we all know that. She’d be utterly loyal. At least I think she would. But of course, if you did happen to win this appeal, and I’m crossing my fingers every day about that, you’ll have plenty of others who’ll be wondering about you as a very good prospect. Younger girls than Liz. After all, there’s no escaping it, she’s not as young as she was. That might have made her specially anxious to grab at you. I don’t know whether you’ve thought of that.’
Mrs Underwood spoke to her son as though she were instructing an inexperienced boy in the tactics of women. He sat by, face as simple as though he were that same innocent boy, listening to novel wisdom.
‘I’ve sometimes worried a little,’ said Mrs Underwood, ‘about what she would be like if you did marry her. Of course, she had that long affair with Talland, didn’t she? Then she ditched him. She doesn’t seem to have thought about the consequences for Talland’s wife. Or poor Talland himself, in the end. Marriage might make a difference, I know. But if she’s going to he loyal to you, I’d like to have seen her show she can manage it with someone else.’
This was, in literal truth, an entirely distorted account, like history turned on its head or attempts to prove the sanctity of Richard III or the Marquis de Sade, of Liz’s other major love, in which she had felt and behaved almost exactly – dismayingly so if one was predicting her future – as she had with Julian. Mrs Underwood was a truthful person. She was reporting information which had been, unknown to Julian, gently put to her by a not specially reliable source, which was Swaffield. Not for any special purpose. He had sunk his old vendetta. He had talked to her almost casually, it seemed, just to keep his hand in, dipping into a human relation. Sometimes his dips did good, he scarcely cared. The process was its own reward. He had come mildly to like Mrs Underwood but scarcely cared about that either. Once he had made his guess, a good guess, about her feelings for Liz, there was a matrix he couldn’t resist playing with. It took only a little time, it cost him very little energy, he didn’t care much about the result.
‘You really think if I married her that she’d be unfaithful, do you, Mummy?’
‘I don’t want to say that, but could you guarantee she wouldn’t?’
Julian gave a shining smile, ‘It would be rather interesting, I must say. I expect she’d come back, you know, and that would be rather interesting too.’
His mother was lost. Whatever he was imagining, apparently with pleasure, she couldn’t reach. She said: ‘Do you think you will marry her?’
‘You know what I’m like–’
‘Have you made up your mind?’ she asked, not aggressively, quite gently.
‘I never have been able to do that, have I?’
She smiled, she couldn’t help it.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, blank-faced, ‘I wonder if I’ve got a mind to make up, when it comes to the point.’
‘Do you think you will marry her?’ She spoke gently again.
‘That’s a good question,’ said Julian, like a confident lecturer who has just received a more than usually absurd enquiry from the back of the hall. ‘That’s a very good question. All I can say, Mummy, is that I’ve listened very carefully to everything you’ve said. I’m very grateful. You’ve been a model of fairness in all ways. You’ve been absolutely unprejudiced, haven’t you? About me. About Liz. Especially about Liz. I shall bear it all in mind, I can promise you that. Thank you very much.’
32
Dr Pemberton was the first person, apart from the hospital staff, who knew of Hillmorton’s death. It occurred late in October, a couple of days after the opening of Parliament. Pemberton’s doctor friend reported that he had not emerged anywhere near to consciousness for days past.
‘Just as well,’ said Pemberton. He would have said that about anyone in Hillmorton’s condition. If any fool, Pemberton had been known to remark, blathered about last words or goodbyes, he ought to be made to spend his time at death beds.
Well, that was one sort of end. There were now actions for Pemberton to perform. He dated his formal letter to the Lord Chancellor, 27 October, and posted it that same night.
Hillmorton had died on a Thursday afternoon. That was one sort of end. But his world didn’t let their dead depart without the formalities being satisfactorily prolonged. On the Friday morning there appeared a three-column obituary in The Times, an adequate length, judged the connoisseurs in those matters, of whom there were many. The same connoisseurs also judged that he had come out of it pretty well. The obituary said that he had once been spoken of as a future Conservative Prime Minister: perhaps he had never entirely fulfilled the hopes of his admirers, but with his famous detachment he had continued in a life of selfless public service. Ryle reflected that obituaries made everyone sound very much the same, embedded in a porridge of nobility. Perhaps it was as well.
In the same mood, Ryle listened to the valedictory speeches in the Chamber on the following Tuesday afternoon. These were delivered only if the member who had died had once been a Cabinet Minister. They began immediately after the end of question time, and the House was full, decorous, quiet, attentive, quickened by the interest, the suppressed sense of liberation, which sustained elderly men at the news of someone else’s mortality. The leaders of the three parties started off, followed by others who felt impelled to pay tributes, relate their school stories and call him Hallio, or alternatively show their talent for character drawing. Sedgwick, who had forced himself to struggle to his place, didn’t speak. Nor did Ryle, who felt both sombre and more than usually out of tune.
Someone said, with great confidence, that Hillmorton was a born democrat. In his secret heart, Ryle thought, he was about as much so as the Duc de Saint Simon. Several references to the famous detachment. They didn’t know him, they didn’t know when a veil seemed lifted only to reveal another veil, sceptical, amused, and left him in precisely the position where the dullest dimmest representatives
of his class, time and millions, would by instinct stand. How supremely unselfish he was. In fact, he was good-natured and liked to see people happy, provided that didn’t interfere with any concern of his own. Maybe that was as much as one could expect from a public man, or most private men either.
Ryle had been as fond of him as had anyone in those rows of faces. Even while he was dismissing what was said, it was a comfort that something should be said. The formalities had their use: they were formalities which all were practised at, they had the comfort of a ritual, they warmed up the nothingness.
It didn’t matter what anyone said. Though there was just one thing which gave Ryle pleasure. It came from the Leader of the Opposition. He remarked smoothly, courteously, that ‘we on this side, of course, have had our quarrels with the noble lord, Lord Hillmorton, but that doesn’t prevent us sharing equally, quite equally, in the common grief. Of course some of us suffered from his tongue when we, like him, sat in the other place [the House of Commons]. But we always recognised his gifts and his virtues. Above all we always admired his style. As much as anyone in politics in our time, Henry Hillmorton had style. Sometimes I wish that some of us could recapture it.’
Dead true, thought Ryle, and the wish also. Any society needed style. When it went, you never got it back.
Later that afternoon, Ryle saw Adam Sedgwick being helped along the corridor by a badge-attendant. As Ryle joined them, he heard a couple of hearty eupeptic voices behind him. One was saying that it might be time for a drink. The other was agreeing yes, old Hillmorton always went in for a drink at just about this time. With the sublime certainty which those left behind felt about the wishes of the deceased, they assured each other that he would have wanted them to do the same. As usual with those certainties, this didn’t impose inconvenience upon them. Somehow the deceased couldn’t possibly have wanted them to be teetotal for an evening.
In the Bishops’ Bar, side by side with Ryle, Sedgwick managed to steer a glass two-handed to his mouth. He had been remembering Hillmorton.
‘I shall miss him,’ he said. ‘I expect you will too.’
‘Yes. I shall miss him,’ said James Ryle.
That was all that Sedgwick felt inclined to say. The intellectual aristocracy, Ryle had sometimes thought, were no better at coping with emotion than the old landed one. Yet he knew beyond doubt that Sedgwick had had a passionately happy married life, adored by his children. Maybe in earlier days he would have been more candid about his feeling for his friend. That evening, he confessed to Ryle that his disease had produced a psychological effect. More and more he wanted to avoid people, like one with agoraphobia. He even had to force himself to go to his laboratory. The mind was pretty powerless against the body, he said: then broke out irritably, that was silly, they were one and the same thing.
‘Still, it won’t be long now. One way or the other,’ he said.
The little room was filling, there was rollicking laughter from the corner, men milled round, clubbable in their health and the pride of life. To Ryle that evening, the murmur, the bursts of noise, became nagging. It made Sedgwick’s last remark take on an ominous sound.
Not protectively, over-sharply, he asked Sedgwick what he meant. Sedgwick gave an accurate account, without self-absorption but with an air of relief. As he had told Hillmorton on that visit to Beryl Road, he had been trying to finish a piece of work. He had taken it as far as he could: it wasn’t specially important, but it was worth publishing. His kind of science wasn’t an old man’s game anyway, but he had gone on longer than most (for once he showed a flash of vanity, which Ryle hadn’t seen in him before).
The young men would push the work further, here at any rate this country was brimming with talent. As for himself, he had finished.
So now he was going to have his operation. He didn’t tell Ryle, what he had told Hillmorton in extremity, that he had been frightened of it – and that this devotion to his work was, at least partially, a cover or excuse.
Now he had made the choice, he was as businesslike as though no one alive had ever had qualms about surgery. He had been in correspondence with the American surgeon who had invented the operation. One of the English pupils whom Irving Cooper had trained was said to be as good as they came. He would perform. Sedgwick needed a few weeks’ grace, just to prepare this last paper for publication. (Was that another excuse, a final bit of devotion, or delay?). Then he would enter Queen Square just before Christmas. One way or the other, it wouldn’t take long.
Just before Christmas. Like Hillmorton last year. That was a sheer coincidence of date. But Ryle couldn’t break free from the chill, or shake it off. He said anxiously, as though he were the patient, not Sedgwick: ‘Well. What are the chances?’
Sedgwick was quite controlled now. More so than he had been when he had had to give a similar answer to Hillmorton. He spoke with clinical calmness. If it went wrong, it went very wrong indeed. Possibly death. Possibly total incapacity, which was less acceptable. At his age, the probability of those results, added together, was something like two per cent.
Hearing that, Ryle, surprised and for an instant pacified, broke out: ‘That’s good. That’s better than I thought.’
‘Is it?’ Sedgwick gave a tucked-in smile. ‘It’s distinctly worse than the chances we take in most affairs of life, you know.’
But it was Sedgwick who was cheering up James Ryle that evening, not the other way round. As a consequence Ryle was glad to help him downstairs, help him into a taxi, say good night – and then return alone. Ryle couldn’t make himself see reason. The likelihood was that nothing would happen to Sedgwick. Ryle couldn’t believe it. The omens wouldn’t let go of him. It was ridiculous, as though he had been seized by the Roman augurs or the astrological prophecies in that evening’s papers.
Maybe he was vulnerable because recently nothing had gone right for himself or the people close to him. A piece of good public news would be a lift. He read the tape, and as throughout those months the public news was sour. It might have been back in the war, when like other men who wished to think themselves stoical, in secret he was saying to himself, as with an unbeliever’s prayer, we need a victory. When one was reduced to that, however, one believed that all would get darker, and that night, even the corridors – as he walked through them in search of a companion – loomed ominous.
That same evening, Liz, to whom he had let himself write a note of commiseration (the first contact for weeks), was also beset by the future, though in a different fashion. The news of her father’s death, which she didn’t hear until she returned from spending the night with Julian, had made her inordinately unhappy. Curiously, she was filled with remorse. Not that she had any cause to feel remorseful about, except the little bites of guilt (enjoying herself in the treacherous flesh, while he was dying or dead: wishing him to live longer, not for his own sake, but because of the bequest).
In objective truth, she had been loving, like one who didn’t get so much love back. There might have been remorse owing from him. For his misleading ease, the appearance of affection and intimacy, had promised much more than it performed, and this had made her distrustful of him and other men. But it was remorse she felt: and, as with other attacks of remorse, this was shot through with fear. She had done badly. In some way that she couldn’t begin to define, she ought to have given her father more. Underneath all his façades – for those she saw as clearly as his friends did – he had died dissatisfied and disappointed. Somehow, if she had used her imagination and behaved better to him, she could have made a difference.
Those wamblings, which she would have despised in another woman, sounded outside Liz’s character or range – so clear cut, so sharply figured, so concentrated on her own vein of sexual love. Yet the remorse possessed her. It made her afraid that she would pay for what she had or hadn’t done. Somehow it became interlaced with her fears about Julian.
The appeal was now expected early in December. She had lost her judgement, she could not perceive w
hat either result would bring to her, or which to long for. She was possessed by remorse about Julian, close to that which she was feeling for her father. If she had behaved differently, loved him more unselfishly, demanded less, then there would be nothing to be afraid of, and she would be innocent and be given happiness.
This was self-torment. Again in terms of objective truth, it was more absurd than her remorse about her father. She had loved Julian with total surrender, too much for her own need, though not for his. But this kind of remorse wasn’t connected with the truth. Perhaps it contained a kind of vanity. Somewhere, in the scraps of pride she still preserved among her love, it was a sustenance to make-believe that she had done wrong, rather than that she had had it done to her.
Thinking of her father and Julian, the figures indistinguishable as in a dream, perhaps she made the future less pathetic if she took the blame.
That was not altogether so easy to do, since she had not lost her sense or her sharp wits, as particulars of her father’s will began to filter through. It would take months or years to settle the death duties, the lawyers said, as though proud of the complications that a man as clever as Hillmorton could devise. However, as Liz told Ryle, to whom she turned once again, two things were clear enough. First, Hillmorton, that exponent of rationality, had in his will displayed a remarkable lack of it. Money, property, pictures, possessions, there was a great deal, no one could value it yet. In disposing of it Hillmorton had shown a preposterous faith in primogeniture. Even if he had had a son he couldn’t have gone to more extremes (that was the way the English aristocracy had preserved their fortunes, Ryle had once said, but now he didn’t consider that that sociological reflection would be particularly strengthening to Liz).
The Suffolk home, as had been known previously, had been made over to his eldest daughter, but it appeared only as part of a trust. All the rest had been transferred some time before, to this same gigantic trust. From this, his wife and daughters were to be allowed to draw annual sums, quite small sums without even an adjustment for inflation. In the end, the entire resources of the trust were to pass to the first male grandchild – on the death of Hillmorton’s wife, or when the grandson attained the age of twenty-five, whichever was the later.