In Their Wisdom

by C. P. Snow

  About that time, about two in the afternoon, as Jenny was recovering her spirit, another lawyer was not comforting himself with the serenity of those in court. This was Skelding. He had retired more completely than he had intimated to the Underwoods, and nowadays went to his office only for a couple of days in midweek. That Friday, he was getting used to his new routine at his home in Wimbledon. Not so satisfying as giving wise old man’s warnings to his favourite clients, preferably well-connected: but habit was something, habit was better than nothing.

  He was a widower, and he had an old housekeeper who gave him pleasant English meals, not too large for an ageing man who took care of his health. Breakfast at nine, later than it used to be. The Times took up an hour or two. Then a little reading, though he had never had time to read and seemed to have lost the knack. This particular Friday he had the vicar of his parish church in for an early lunch. Skelding had become a churchwarden, and that took up a desirable amount of time. The vicar departed, Skelding was just retiring for an hour’s sleep (that was another new habit) when the telephone rang. It was from the office, to tell him that Julian Underwood had won the appeal.

  None of Skelding’s clients, who had seen him in professional form, would have believed his state just then. He was angrier than Jenny, at least as desolated, and more betrayed. He had given advice, which he was certain was right in law and in common prudence. It had been sneered at, and they had gone on regardless. Now they had won.

  Skelding was unlike Swaffield in more ways than one, including some which Skelding would have been too proper to mention. He was not given to haranguing empty rooms. But this once, just like Swaffield after he had been genteelly threatened, Skelding couldn’t help talking aloud to his chintz and flowery drawing-room.

  ‘There’s no justice in this world,’ he said. He repeated: ‘There’s no justice in this world.’

  A very old habit asserted itself, much older than the rituals he was soothing himself with now. He went to his study, and wrote a stately letter of congratulation to Mrs Underwood, as he had always written to clients all through his practice. It was a very stately letter: the old formulae flowed off the pen, there was no need to alter them. He addressed and stamped the envelope. He would post the letter on his walk – another bit of the new ritual – after tea. A moment’s hesitation? Should he write to Julian? Habit, discipline, etiquette weren’t strong enough. Be damned if he would.

  Mr Skelding performed his duty, with that small exception. Simultaneously Jenny was performing hers, cooking Lorimer an omelette: they lived as simply as they had begun, and she remarked, with resilience flooding back, they might as well face it, they would go on living simply. She was putting on a show of cheerfulness, partly for his sake, partly, perhaps mainly, because it wasn’t in her nature to relapse. After all, she hadn’t been overoptimistic, any more than when she left her flat to live with Lorimer: as then, she had taken out a bit of insurance that was like a small-scale model of the Treasury operations, and made what she could – nothing exalted – in the way of contingency plans. First thing next week, she would have to talk to Swaffield. He must have heard the verdict by now. He hadn’t telephoned. Nor had anyone else. She was letting herself go with semi-cheerful semi-sarcastic gibes. The telephone didn’t ring when you had been beaten. If they had won, they would have been answering it all afternoon. Although she didn’t know it, she was echoing one of old Hillmorton’s quips about politics: when you’re out you’re out, and no one is interested in you any more. Lorimer didn’t utter, but gave her a grim gratified smile. One of the things he loved in her was that she understood failure, its climate and results: he had had enough of that for one life.

  The following week, Jenny had to dip further into her resilience: she went to the office on Monday morning, tried to see Swaffield, was told that he was busy all day. Probably he would also be busy on Tuesday. Jenny told herself (and realistic people didn’t find these truths any more endearing than the rest of us) that, when someone tried to do you a good turn, and it went wrong, he invariably felt you were to blame and couldn’t bear the sight of you. However, when Swaffield did consent to make an appointment, though he was far from intimate, he was also businesslike, as though he were interviewing a somewhat disappointing, but nevertheless deserving, member of his staff. He would give her a full-time job (that meant eliminating her visiting round, which she so much enjoyed). This would bring in an income, not a big one, about as much as an executive class civil servant – enough to live on. And Lorimer? That was part of the contingency plan, that was urgent. She was intent on getting him out of his pathetic teaching job. She had already tried to persuade Swaffield that Lorimer could be useful in another charity, looking after ex-officers. After all, he was one himself. He wasn’t used to office work, but he would take infinite pains. (If she had received her father’s money, her first priority was secretly to subsidise the charity, and even more secretly to install him there.) She had even, when she was in favour with Swaffield, played on his feelings, saying that this would set up Lorimer’s self-respect. That had been – she thought as she did it – a mistake. Swaffield didn’t like Lorimer, since, with his active antennae, he knew that Lorimer didn’t like him. Yet Swaffield still had a fondness, an irritable fondness, for Jenny. Yes, he would do what he could. Lorimer couldn’t expect to earn much; it might contribute to the housekeeping.

  Finally, Swaffield would help them to buy a house.

  ‘You can’t go on living in that slum, my girl.’ That was the first time, in the Wednesday interview, that he had reverted to the old bullying, proprietorial, lurkingly amorous tone. Swaffield had never been inside the Lupus Street flat, but it was like him to have investigated it. Perhaps through one of his spies: just possibly, by himself, on one of his night-time prowls. He would get them a mortgage.

  ‘Nothing grand, the sort of place I used to live in. As much as you can manage.’ That was the total of Swaffield’s proposal for the Lorimers.

  It wasn’t generous, but it was fair. It was a little better than Jenny expected, and considerably better than she had feared. She had forgotten that Swaffield, despite all his diablerie, when it came to action wasn’t at the mercy of his impulses. She was a competent woman, and he was prepared to have her around. It wouldn’t do his own plans any harm to have a humble, and passably loyal, peer and peeress in his entourage. Further, he had a curious reason for a little benevolence. If he had been compelled to pay the whole costs, he wouldn’t have felt it. Still, like other rich men, he enjoyed saving money, and the Appeal Court order had saved him a good many thousand pounds. So, though he wasn’t displaying it, he felt good-natured towards Jenny. And perhaps, whatever had happened, he had enough solidity, underneath the mercury of his character, not to let her sink.

  That was settled on the Wednesday morning. The previous Friday, just after the appeal, while Jenny was wondering and planning how she was going to live, there was a celebration elsewhere. It was a singular celebration, since one of the three present was as distracted, just as unsure of how she was going to live, as Jenny herself. Mrs Underwood hadn’t tempted fate by ordering lunch in advance, and so it took time for the cook to produce a meal. But in Victoria Road Mrs Underwood lived in modest luxury, and there was pâté de foie gras and caviar, not often eaten, reserved for occasions such as this. Not that there had ever been an occasion such as this, she said happily, as they sat in the drawing-room, spreading pâté on hot toast, drinking champagne.

  ‘I don’t mind waiting for luncheon, do you?’ she said, showing a good steady healthy elderly woman’s appetite for food and drink. ‘We’ll go in when they’re ready, what does it matter now?’

  Liz was drinking hard, eating less. Julian had condescended to take half a glass of champagne, breaking his abstinence: he refused the pâté de foie gras, which had ill effects on the liver. He said, not with triumph but with seraphic equanimity: ‘I always knew it would be all right.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Liz asked, voic
e edged and barely steady.

  ‘Oh, clairvoyance. Plus a little common sense.’

  ‘You couldn’t know. No one else did.’

  ‘I always told you, didn’t I?’ he said, sweet-tempered.

  He said: ‘I told you right from the beginning. I told those damned fool lawyers too. Just as well I did.’

  That was incontrovertible. His record of optimism was immaculate.

  ‘I couldn’t have done it,’ said his mother, with love, with something like reverence. ‘I do admire your nerve.’

  ‘I think I must get that from you.’ He was as flattering as when he first met one of his women: as, Liz thought, when he first met her.

  He was lying on the sofa, as he now did, as one of his principles, in any unoccupied moment when in this house or his own apartment.

  His expression clouded.

  ‘Of course, I don’t like that business of the costs. That was monstrous. If March had been any good at all, he would have made trouble. He ought to have done. He ought to have done.’

  ‘Oh,’ said his mother, ‘don’t spoil it now.’

  She was brave enough to scold him. He broke into a cheeky, then penitential grin.

  ‘All right. All right. I won’t.’

  He said: ‘I always knew it would be all right. Darling, that’s what.’

  The two women were watching each expression on his face. They had been doing so since they left the courts. They had been anticipating the same thing, or the same indication: one with fear, one with anxious hope. But now the fear was diminishing, so was the hope. They had expected some mention, playful, oblique, sultan-like, whatever he chose, Liz was ready for anything – of marriage. It hadn’t happened, not by the shade of an intonation. He appeared deliberately to elect not to be alone with her. When for an instant his mother had gone into the dining room to consult the housekeeper, he had even asked Liz – politely, casually – to go and help.

  His mother was watching him with devotion, voracity, increasing triumph. The hostility was not far from the surface now. She was even confident enough to ask: ‘What’s the first thing you’re going to do with the money?’

  ‘Dear Mummy, I’ve told you.’

  ‘What did you tell me?’

  ‘Long, long ago.’

  ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  ‘I’m going to buy a ham.’

  ‘What?’ Liz cried out.

  ‘A ham.’

  There was hate in the room. She had let herself admit Mrs Underwood’s long before this, and now it was triumphant she returned it. She gazed at the babyish happy face on the sofa, and felt all the yearning craving love – and another kind of hate. She had once heard James Ryle, in one of his moods, tell her that happiness didn’t come from virtue, not from effort, certainly not from merit, but was a grace.

  If that was so, she felt with bitter longing, that grace had been granted to Julian, and in the delicacy-laden room she looked at him with hating love.

  36

  While others whom Dr Pemberton wished to dismiss from his mind were assimilating, or trying to adjust to, the result of the appeal, he had a different preoccupation. To his surprise, almost to his consternation, he couldn’t make himself professionally objective about a piece of surgery. A proper doctor – it was a lifetime maxim of his – didn’t worry about operations in advance. It did no good. One knew the chances. So did the surgeon. So did the patient. It was weak to worry. And yet he found himself doing so about Adam Sedgwick’s operation.

  Shortly after the conversation in the tea room, on his second day in the Lords, Pemberton had written a letter. He took unusual pains about it, and for him it was an unusually polite letter, signed in his new style. He explained to Sedgwick that he was the former Hillmorton’s heir and that he had just taken his seat. He was a working physician, he said, and gave his qualifications. He had a motive for this, and in a first draft stressed that he had passed his Membership at the earliest possible age. Then he had unfamiliar qualms, and rewrote the letter. He had heard that Sedgwick wasn’t well. Could he call on him, and (Pemberton bit down his pride) revive a family acquaintance?

  From Sedgwick’s Cambridge home, Pemberton was told that there was an operation arranged for Tuesday 2 January. Sedgwick was going into the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square the week before, and Pemberton was welcome to visit him there.

  Thus, a couple of days after Christmas, Pemberton drove into the Square, which from other calls at that hospital he knew well enough, though he didn’t notice the peeling plane trees, the Georgian façades, the gaunt but temperate London winter scene. Unlike James Ryle, Pemberton wasn’t borne down by omens. Last Christmas, paper-hatted, he had heard the news of old Hillmorton, not that that had afflicted him. This Christmas, again paper-hatted, he had been anticipating his visit to Sedgwick. No connection, for a hard-baked, rational man. The only connection was one which aroused his habitual contempt for the working population. The laziest brutes on earth. The whole country had gone into a stupor for ten days, just like the year before. Pemberton had been making enquiries. He had discovered the name of the surgeon and had (once again smothering pride in a practical cause) telephoned him. The operation should have been performed this week, but owing to the holiday season it had had to be postponed till next.

  Brooding on slackness, Pemberton was taken upstairs in the old hospital to Sedgwick’s room. Pemberton was immune to hospital smells, or the air of suppressed anxiety or calamity surrounding him. Only laymen felt that. He was as indifferent as an airline pilot walking through the aisle on a rough flight. A hospital was a hospital. Just as Sedgwick’s private room was a hospital private room, no more, no less: chest of drawers, a couple of chairs, a table, vases of chrysanthemums, bowls of fruit.

  Pemberton had seen many such, and was blind to it now. But he wasn’t blind to Sedgwick, who was sitting in one of the chairs, wearing a new grey suit – incongruously new for a patient in hospital. Pemberton wasn’t interested in male tailoring either. He was searching the face for clinical signs: in passing it was a fine and intelligent aquiline face, but the point was, typically Parkinson imprinted, standard form, pretty far gone. By this time, Sedgwick’s intake of the drug had been reduced, so that the facial grimaces weren’t so violent, but they still happened, giving the effect of an entirely unexpected hilarious smile, as it might be a Japanese giving one news of his brother’s death. He had his fingers locked in his lap, so there for the moment Pemberton could observe nothing.

  Sedgwick didn’t get up, but said: ‘Lord Hillmorton?’

  ‘Lord Sedgwick?’

  In that exchange, neither of them felt like Stanley and Livingstone at Ujiji. Sedgwick had lived all his life in the English extremes of formality and informality, and Pemberton, though he might be a rough customer, was getting used to it.

  ‘I knew your relation very well,’ said Sedgwick.

  ‘I didn’t. Scarcely at all.’

  Sedgwick was fine-nerved. He didn’t pursue that particular line of talk. For an instant, though, he made Pemberton impatient with another one. Sedgwick began speculating, as to whether anyone who had the money, such as himself, ought to be able to buy a private room in a hospital. He did so in a detached manner, seeming to imagine that the other man had orthodox left-wing opinions, or asked the orthodox left-wing questions of the day, as the Symingtons might have done.

  ‘Nonsense,’ said Pemberton.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Sheer nonsense,’ said Pemberton. ‘A man like you needs all the comfort he can get. If anyone tries to stop you, they’re the sort of people who’d reduce the whole show to indistinguishable lumps of porridge if they could.’

  ‘You’re slightly out of touch with modern thought, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘To hell with modern thought. Look, we haven’t time for this now. How are you?’

  This was coarse, and more brutish than Sedgwick was normally confronted with, distinctly unlike the manners of the former H
illmorton. Though Sedgwick couldn’t know it, Pemberton had never possessed any medical manners, which had sometimes counted against him. However, Sedgwick was sick, he wanted to talk about his sickness, this man was a doctor, even a brutish doctor was someone to talk to, better than no one. Further, he was soon asking the right questions.

  How much of the drug had they been giving him? Sedgwick gave the amount.

  That was a lot. It would have improved his speech (from the first words Pemberton had picked up the slurring, but in fact Sedgwick’s speech was more distinct than it had been twelve months before) but had produced the twitches in his face. With his passion for instruction Pemberton explained that the doctors had to keep a balance between the two effects, one positive, one negative. Whatever the operation did, it couldn’t improve his speech: they hadn’t learned how to touch the speech centres.

  ‘Yes. I’ve been picking up a certain amateur knowledge of the subject, you know.’

  Pemberton gave a rough chuckle. Between hectoring from him, sardonic flicks from the other, they seemed to have established a common language.

  ‘Now what about the movements?’ Pemberton asked. ‘Walking must be difficult.’

  It had been so for months? It must be marche à petit pas?

  Yes, it had been petit pas. Sedgwick was grateful for the technical phrase, less humiliating than the thing itself. Surprisingly, Pemberton’s words sounded more like French than his own. Which side had been affected? The right.

  ‘Try and touch my right hand with yours.’

  Pemberton, totally outside the case, was taking a great deal on himself, but that came naturally. It didn’t occur to Sedgwick that it was odd for a G P to be so well briefed about this disease. But Pemberton, who read nothing but medical literature, hadn’t minded reading more.