by C. P. Snow
‘All tied up,’ said Liz, ‘so that it can’t possibly do any good to anyone.’ She didn’t mind him being callous, she said, she had always known he was capable of that. Ryle didn’t comment. Of course she minded. ‘But this is just fantasy. It’s the work of a fool. He wasn’t a fool, was he?’
‘Very far from it,’ said Ryle. He knew that, just then, she wanted to hear him praised.
The second thing was that he had duly made the gift she had wrung out of him. He had kept his promise. The surprise was that it was less than he suggested. It was actually £20,000. This wouldn’t have been an inducement to Julian on the first night they spent together, certainly not now. She didn’t mention Julian’s name, though, talking to Ryle. She had become less self-absorbed, perhaps sharpened by her own stress and not so oblivious of his.
In any case, as Hillmorton hadn’t survived the seven years, his gift would, when the duties were worked out, be worth next to nothing at all.
‘That’s how I come out of it,’ she said. ‘I’m left pretty stripped and stark, shouldn’t you say?’
‘You’ve not been lucky.’
‘I wonder, how many of us have?’
She might indulge in self-torment, but that she hadn’t told him. She didn’t indulge in self-excuse, that he could read for himself. She had the kind of spirit he would have loved if she had been his wife. They exchanged looks in which on his side there was sarcasm and regret, on hers pity. That touch of pity, soon over and not to return, was not the pity which leads to love; but she enjoyed feeling it and it gave her some confidence back.
33
When Jenny moved into Lorimer’s flat she, for once unwilling to tempt fate, was still keeping on her own. She never returned there. That told as much of the story as she would have told, even to herself. In her kind of realism, she knew when not to put sex into words. She might have repeated the saying she had picked up earlier in her life – the worst doesn’t always happen. That had been the advice given her by a derelict acquaintance when her own existence was in one of its bleakest phases. The saying sounded to her grim, realistic, Nordic, and she liked it. In fact, of course, it would have appealed so much only to a nature as sanguine as her own.
The worst hadn’t happened this time. They both of them looked happy. He felt proud that he had made the decision that night in the embankment garden. She was satisfied that she had judged it right. Perhaps something could be inferred from noticing that he was showing signs of cheerful, almost flippant happiness, which none of his acquaintances had seen in him before: whereas Jenny wasn’t so elated, but content and secretly triumphant.
She hadn’t expected wonders, and didn’t get them. She was much too sensible to believe excited virgin tales about the inhibited: how they were marvellous, irrepressible, when once set free. That wasn’t true of anyone she had met. It certainly wasn’t true of Jarvey. But yes, and this she did believe, most people were capable of enjoying themselves, with a little coaxing: and that turned out, equally certainly, to be true of him. There the happy side of her nature was kind to them both. Because he enjoyed himself, so did she.
She discovered something about him which she didn’t know, didn’t know because there were things you could discover only in bed. It wasn’t that he was suddenly transformed into a wit or a verbal charmer. Speech came a little easier perhaps, not much. But he had, and this was the discovery, a remarkable capacity for joy. Not passion, no: that was ordinary enough: but joy, yes. That this had come to him, that here he was with someone he trusted and who was fond of him, who made everything light-footed and took anxiety away, so that at last he knew what it was like to live as man and wife – could he get joy out of a bread-and-butter assurance such as that? She was certain that he did. Joy out of the simple prospect of the night together: joy as they lay afterwards in bed.
Jenny had long ago perceived that he had always felt cut off from other men. With a touch of mute arrogance, with much more shrinking and humility. Somehow it was wonderful for him to have found his way back into the mainstream. She could understand that, but she was amazed that it so continuously lit him up. Humble he might be, but sometimes he surveyed her as though he were a pasha, or modestly modelling himself on Julian Underwood.
A month after she had installed herself in Pimlico, it was he who insisted on marriage.
‘That’s what I really meant,’ he said. ‘You know, when I started things off that night. Down by the river.’
‘Did you?’
‘But you didn’t get it right. So I took advantage of you, didn’t I?’
He spoke with the complacency of a seducer. Jenny obediently smiled. She had no guilt. No harm had been done to a living soul. He was better off, and so was she.
He insisted not only on marriage, but on making a fuss about it.
‘I don’t want us to look ashamed of it, do you? May as well come right out with it. Proper announcements. Take place shortly. We won’t go to a register office. We’ll have it in the Chapel. That’s the way to do it, you know.’
There she was surprised again, as well as pleased. Religious service? She was sure that he believed no more than she did. Was this something he wanted to do for her? No, it was a signal about himself. She was more grateful because of that.
The engagement was duly published in The Times, the week after Hillmorton’s death. ‘The engagement is announced, and the marriage will shortly take place, between Lord Lorimer, M C, of 127 Lupus Street, London, SW1 and Mrs Jennifer Rastall, of 42 Barham Gardens, SW5.’ That was all right, thought Jenny, as she read the paper. But she hadn’t been born in her class for nothing, and she reflected (just as she and Lorimer had felt obliged to remark, the first time they went out together), humorously, but not entirely so, that the addresses didn’t look very grand.
Congratulations over the telephone, piled up in letters which she had to collect from the deserted flat. More than she had received ever before in her life. That was pleasant. It was pleasant to be invited with Lorimer to parties. At one of these, with her acute directional hearing, in which respect, if in no other, she resembled Swaffield, she picked up two youngish women discussing the engagement, and to her delight using the same egregious phrase in which Lorimer had originally proposed.
‘Two elderly people joining forces, I should say, shouldn’t you?’
‘Right.’
‘Just for company, of course.’
‘Of course.’
This time Jenny’s reflections were entirely humorous. To the puzzlement of the man speaking to her, she broke into a wide, toothy, unprovoked grin.
At this stage, early November, there was a complication. Lorimer might have insisted on the marriage, but Swaffield insisted on taking charge of the wedding. Jenny had to do some domestic diplomacy. Lorimer hated Swaffield, said he despised him, was jealous of him. He was rancorous at the thought of a rich man amusing himself with their wedding. He told Jenny that he wouldn’t stand it. On the other hand, Jenny wasn’t going to stand the loss of Swaffield. She was more prudent than Lorimer, they might both need Swaffield for jobs. She counted pennies more than Lorimer and neither of them had any. Swaffield assumed that he would pay for all.
It was no use battering at Lorimer with practical arguments. So she told him (which was also in part true) that she felt obligations to Swaffield, that she couldn’t snub him just when her luck had turned, that she had to show some sort of honour and pay off her debt. Even if no one noticed that they themselves happened to be the pair getting married. This was the tone Lorimer had no answer to. She had to use his decency against him, and, she was acceptant enough to think, this wouldn’t be the last time.
Thus, on the first of December, at eleven in the morning, Swaffield, carnation in his buttonhole, monkey-like in morning suit, stood to give her away in the Crypt Chapel, and Swaffield was providing the reception afterwards.
The Chapel, embedded below the old Palace of Westminster, was small. It was also venerable. A good many people in the cong
regation were accustomed to think of their country as venerable and the places they saw round them. Much of that was an illusion. There was little standing in London which had been built before the eighteenth century. As it happened, much of that existed in their particular Westminster corner. The Abbey across the road, and St Margaret’s (relatively juvenile). But the Houses of Parliament themselves had been created after a nineteenth-century fire, as a great confident nineteenth-century gothic fantasy. Scarcely anything was left that, say, the younger Pitt might have cast a cold eye on – except the dark and freezing Westminster Hall, suitable for State trials, some cellars, and this little Chapel.
That morning candles were blazing towards the vaulted roof, something like a scene out of the film of Ivan the Terrible, gilt gleaming off the pillars, gleaming off the medallion of Judas in the east wall: the whole picture was Kremlin-like, said knowledgeable peers, much to the puzzlement of visiting Russians.
The Chapel used to be arctic before the heating engineers got to work. That morning it was uncomfortably warm, the more so because it was uncomfortably packed. Jenny was incredulous and didn’t accept the obvious explanation – for her diffidence still stayed with her, and she didn’t imagine that she was popular. Many of her clients had turned up, old people making their way by underground. Even older people, such as her Miss Smith, had had to afford the taxi fare. That meant a week’s pinching, but Miss Smith was glowing with approval, as though this was a proper and natural occasion for a protégée of hers. Nearly all the Swaffield entourage had come, and the staff at the charity office.
As for Lorimer, he was an obscure backbencher, but, just as you didn’t let anyone’s death pass without a modest demonstration, so you didn’t let a marriage either. If you lived in an enclave, you made the most of it. Everyone felt warmer when you closed the ranks. Members of his own party attended, who knew him only walking through the lobbies. The Government whips were there, bonhomous, well turned out, shining faced, They were exchanging cheerful words with peers from the other side. Several of those had come – out of good nature (one or two observant eyes had noticed for years a sad-looking man, silent, often alone in the bar), general social emollience or just a desire for a party and a drink.
Bishop Boltwood took the service. He was a high Anglican, but his Church didn’t mind overmuch that both parties had been married before, and divorced. If the Church did, the Bishop didn’t. He might have the exterior of a Lancashire comedian, but he was shrewd and had formed his opinion of these two. They had been ill-treated. He was in favour of marital happiness. If anything he could do would help them, he would do it. So, short-legged, sturdy, authoritative, he rolled out in his firm, not specially stately, voice the old and specially stately English words.
Soon it was done. Muriel Calvert, who was sitting with her mother and stepfather, might have been commenting at that point – the irrevocable happened altogether too early on. However, the Bishop was not done. More stately words of the ritual, and then he felt it desirable to add some of his own.
‘Jennifer and Jervis,’ he said, ‘some of us in this place know you both, and we want you to believe, as we believe, that you have the best of your lives before you. You are going on an adventure…’ The Bishop, a warm-hearted man, was not notably economical in speech. He developed this figure. Sardonic and hard-baked persons, and there were a number of those present, went off to the reception remarking that he made it sound as though they were off on a stiff trip of Amazonian exploration.
Jenny, who thought of herself as hard-baked and to whom tears didn’t come easy, found herself irritatingly near to them. For the only time since she had decided on marriage. She found herself irritatingly and absurdly thinking that she had never had much of a father and that this peculiar little Bishop, who was younger than she was, might have been better than most.
She soon recovered, and she had some need to. They arrived at a big room at ground level, tables set for the party, awnings stretched over the terrace, a door open on to the swirling mist outside. For December, the morning wasn’t cold. The mist wasn’t the old London fog, by this time obsolete. It was the thick, grey, anti-cyclonic mist, no harm to anyone except to transport, shutting them all in, making them feel safe and cherished, like children looking out of the windows of their house, not needing to go outside on a raw winter day.
The walls of the long room were polished, and now that there were a hundred people in it the sound reflected clashingly in all ears. The trays of champagne were going round. One or two of the guests, glasses in hand, were walking out on the terrace, with the air of those accustomed to compulsory expeditions from country houses.
From the moment they entered, Swaffield had monopolised Lorimer and Jenny.
‘That went O K’ He said it as though he had done it all.
‘Very nice,’ said Jenny.
‘Don’t worry about next week.’ This referred to the appeal, which was down for the following Thursday.
‘We’re not counting on anything,’ she said.
‘You’d better not.’ (She thought that this was cool, with the memory of certain ferocious advice.) ‘You’ll manage somehow.’
Lorimer had drunk two glasses of champagne and was less affronted by Swaffield than he had been.
‘I got her to marry me, didn’t I?’ He was becoming argumentative. ‘I shouldn’t have done that if we couldn’t manage, should I?’
‘Shouldn’t you?’ Swaffield gazed at him without excessive interest.
Then he said: ‘You won’t get much of a honeymoon.’
He meant, they couldn’t go away until after the appeal. He couldn’t resist – not that he tried to – the familiar note, proprietorial, private detective-like, ineffably salacious.
‘Plenty of time for that,’ said Jenny, who was now as imperturbable against this specific probe as either of the Symingtons.
Then Swaffield put his arm round her and took her away from her husband.
‘This is all right, is it?’ he asked.
‘Of course it is.’
‘I’m glad you fixed it up, my girl. I’m glad something’s gone better for you. You deserve it.’
For the moment, his manner was kind. It was also – she might be imagining it – vaguely chagrined, or even wistful. He had what others envied, power and money and his eventful life, including his roster of sleeping partners. She had envied him herself. For the moment, though, in reverse he seemed to be envying an unspectacular marriage.
She returned to Lorimer and moved on his arm into the middle of the room. Men, engulfing canapés, merry with champagne, kept coming to them. In Jenny’s visits to the guest room, the peers she had talked to were middle-aged and staid. Some of these were quite young and not so staid. Congratulations. Praise.
‘Lady Lorimer, you’ve made a difference to him, you really have.’
‘He looks pretty well on it, doesn’t he, Lady Lorimer?’
They had a knack of talking about him as though he wasn’t there. Lorimer towered above her, decorously shy, with a fixed smile at the same time shame-faced and gratified. One man, so bald that she couldn’t guess his age, introduced himself and gave a name which to her meant nothing. Later she discovered that he was an eminent physician. He had small, bright, abnormally piercing eyes: ‘I want to tell you that I think this is a very good idea. I’ve been worried about your husband. Just on inspection. It’s a risk for anyone to live so much alone.’
She was taken aback at how forthcoming some men could be, yes, how inquisitive, how they inspected her or perhaps liked to bring her into the party.
She had to do her duty, going off alone to talk to her clients, most of them overawed by the noise, the assured conversation round them, the uninhibited parliamentary voices, the place itself. She was, as usual, at home with them, made them have another drink (one or two dignified old ladies were showing the effects of their first), told them that she had expected to be ejected from the place when she was first invited there, but had enjo
yed it when she got back to her bedsitter. So would they.
Even Miss Smith had to struggle to preserve her customary air of patronage. She took refuge in acquiring information. Could her dear Jenny, now her dear Lady Lorimer, tell her about the titles in the room? Jenny did her best, which, since Lorimer didn’t have so many acquaintances, was not a good one. Where was Lord Clare, whom Miss Smith had heard her mention? No, he wasn’t there. (Not smart enough for him, Swaffield had been thinking meaningfully, and stored another note in his elephantine memory. For reasons of his own Swaffield had hired the room and the reception, not through Clare, but through Azik Schiff.) Then by a piece of luck Jenny noticed someone she did know, one of the whips, good at parties anyway, heritage modestly historical, though not so much so as Clare’s. She attracted his attention. He turned his on to Miss Smith, and she was happy.
It was only a little later that Jenny had a curious, perverse experience, which she couldn’t deny but of which later she was ashamed. She was elated: the lights in the room seemed more brilliant, with the mist closing in: looking out of a window, she couldn’t see across the river, no Lambeth, just the nacreous comforting and guarding swirl. Suddenly she felt more anxious about the appeal than she had ever been before. It was as crude as though, now she had something, she wanted more, much more, she wanted the lot. Here she was, being fêted, safely married, approved of, content: and she found that, just as when one dread had been cleared away then another flooded in to fill the vacuum in the mind (as Ryle knew too well all through those months), so it was with what one desired. She wouldn’t have said, judging herself, that she was grasping, certainly not mercenary: yet now she wanted all, which that last will snatched away from her, she wanted the money, she wanted to be well off. If she won in the Appeal Court, she wouldn’t be rich, like a number of those in this room. But she and Lorimer could live in modest style. She wanted that.