by C. J. Driver
“I think I may know something about your dealings with him,” I said carefully.
“Really? How?” He looked at me sharply from tired eyes.
“A policeman I know told me the story about the breakdown, you know, when he went into that church …”
“Really,” said Henderson. “They still remember, do they? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. They shouldn’t talk about it though, should they?”
“It was off the record; I only mentioned it because I was talking to you.”
“All right,” Henderson smiled. “I’m hardly discreet myself.”
“Do many people think they’re God?” The question came out almost without my meaning it to; I suppose it had been nagging away in my mind for some time, and now I had the chance to ask it, my curiosity took over from my will.
“Well, some people think they are; not many say it in public. Some people get to think they’re … oh, Hitler, or Napoleon, or Joan of Arc, or Jesus, and sometimes God.”
“What do you do?”
“Cure ’em,” Henderson smiled ironically. “If you can. Talk to them until they realise they’re just Joe Bloggs of Orpington, or Bob H. of Hampstead. Or try to turn their ideas round a little, so they think they’re God inside them and don’t go saying it in public. It may be lousy theology, but it’s adequate psychiatry. At least they can go on living outside institutions.”
“What causes it?”
“Sometimes I think it’s not having any power at all, wanting to change the way things are but not seeing how to, not being able to. But you can’t really talk about it in the abstract; you’ve got to look at the individuals …”
“And you can’t tell what caused John to do that?”
“I wouldn’t, even if I could—even if I was allowed to, I mean. Most of the time we’re in the dark; we’re dealing essentially with what’s unknown anyway. Some times you fix things and don’t even know what you’ve fixed, or why; all you can see is that the actions change …” His voice tailed away and we stood silent for a moment or two; I was musing on my own dark places and he … well, I don’t know where he was.
“Are you glad you got him acquitted?” he said suddenly out of the silence between us. “I mean, for his sake, not just for your reputation or whatever it is you barristers have?”
“Yes, I’m glad. He puzzles me, intrigues me, makes me very angry too some times. In short,” I smiled at Henderson, “I don’t know. But I’m at his party.”
“Yes,” said Henderson. “I know. He makes me angry too, but he’s got charm enough to cure anger very quickly. What do you think will happen to him?”
“From the law’s side, you mean?” I asked. Henderson nodded. “Oh, it does depend entirely on what he does. On my side we start with action, then worry about motive. I would have thought predicting his future was more your line than mine. What do you think?”
Henderson looked at me very carefully before he answered. “I think he’s a very remarkable young man.”
We must both have stood there looking across the room at John, and our looking must have caught his notice, because he looked back at us, waved, and came across the room, leaving his acolytes to do what they wanted.
“Hello, Mr. Psychiatrist, Mr. Lawyer,” he said. “You’re both looking very serious. Aren’t you enjoying yourselves? Or are you discussing something profound, like me perhaps?”
“We were talking about you,” said Henderson. “It’s your party.”
“Am I interesting?” John laughed. “You were staring, anyway. What are you drinking, Tom?” I handed the glass to him; he held it up and sniffed. “Ugh,” he said, “I can’t stand whisky. You too, I suppose, Bob. How you can drink this stuff …” he shuddered in a way which was only half-mocking. “If you’re interested, there’s some pot next door; good pot, none of your Moroccan stuff, genuine Afghan.” I shook my head and Henderson said, “Come on, John, leave us with our middle-aged vices.”
“I’ll get you some more whisky,” said John, taking our glasses and going to the drinks table.
Henderson turned to me. “Puritanism rampant,” he said. “Strange, isn’t it?” Then he looked at his watch. “And when I have drunk this next one, I must go home. Believe it or not, my first patient is coming at seven tomorrow morning; he’s a house-painter, but he’s been using his ladders to climb into bedrooms to steal women’s underclothes. It’s me or the courts for him; so he comes to me each day before he starts work and we have a chat about this and that. I think I’m probably keeping business out of your hands.”
“We’ve got villains enough without fetishists too.”
“And political activists?”
“More and more of them these days; law and order, you know. At least we try them.”
“If you didn’t, they might be more effective, in the long run at least,” said Henderson; once again, seriousness invaded the irony.
John brought back our drinks, Henderson gulped his down, then said good-bye to John and me before going to find Tella. “We’ll meet again, I expect, Tom Grace,” he said.
*
I stayed on at the party after Henderson had gone, guarding the whisky as if it had been my own. Tella kept a kind eye on me, always making sure that my glass was full and that I had someone to talk to. First it was Lester, who had been one of those fined at the trial: I can’t remember what we talked about but knowing Lester better now I guess it was left-wing politics. He was one of those nervously thin young men, ginger-bearded and with the obligatory frizz of uncombed hair around his intense face. In some ways I suppose Lester was the most clever of the Free People. He had a cruel and cold mind, like a mathematician’s almost, one that has got hold of a set of axioms—in his case, that capitalism is always evil, that the working class will eventually triumph, that imperialism is the last stage of capitalism, that revolution will be led by workers but guided by intellectuals, and all the rest of it, down to the subversion of the Russian Revolution by the bureaucrats, and has constructed on them a system which no wit can shake. Radicalism was his substitute for feeling; and sometimes I sensed he may even have hated John Buckleson for his warmth. If John had ever become the Leader of the People, Lester would have made a most efficient Leader of the Secret Police; indeed, when he comes out of prison, and if the revolution does come in his lifetime, he will probably be just that. I would not fancy being Minister of Justice with Lester at my heels.
Lester went away—when he discovered I was not a dialectical materialist he lost interest in me very quickly—and Tella, when she saw me standing alone, brought another young man to talk to me. “This is Andy Caister,” she said, holding his arm. I hadn’t noticed him before, but I felt immediately I knew his face; he was a tall, good-looking young man, with wide-set eyes and the muscled throat of an athlete, almost a beautiful young man I suppose, if it had not been for the strange and tense watchfulness in him I sensed even then.
“Haven’t I seen you before?” I asked. I was sure I had.
“I was in court today.”
I wouldn’t have seen him in the gallery; no, if I’d seen him before, it had been before. “No,” I said. “Before that. Your face is very familiar.”
Caister said nothing, simply watched my face. I struggled to remember, searching through my memory, taking up face after face and examining it. Did this face fit any situation? Did it associate with any other face? But it was no good; I couldn’t remember and, at the time, it didn’t seem important. It was annoying in a niggling way, because I pride myself on remembering faces and names, but you see so many people in London that perhaps my recognition was only of a brief moment in an Underground train or on a street.
“Andy’s our practical man,” said Tella. “He’s the one who can fix you a cheap place to live, who knows how to get a doctor at three in the morning, who knows how to hire warehouses for a commune, how to get permission for demonstrations. Aren’t you, Andy?”
“We all talk too much and don’t do anything,” s
aid Caister.
“Don’t say that to the five who were in the dock today,” I answered teasingly. “Were you arrested at the demonstration?”
“No,” said Tella. “He was with me; he rescued me really, didn’t you, Andy?”
“Very practical,” I said. “What did you do?”
“I just got Tella away.” Caister looked away from us; it could have been shyness.
“He took me by the arm and we sort of ducked through the police cordon. I thought they were going to stop us. But they didn’t. It was very clever of Andy.”
“You sound like a useful man.” I looked at him again. “I have this extraordinary feeling I’ve seen you before. I’m sure I must have.”
“It’s not mutual,” Caister shrugged what I took then to be his lack of concern; he must have been worried in fact, because if he was any good at his job he too ought to have remembered when I had seen him. But I never had the chance to ask him if he had remembered me. He was in his way a good actor, was Andrew Caister.
We stood talking for a little longer, while Tella went off to make something for her guests to eat. John Buckleson was going round the room, pulling various of his followers out of their groups—Lester slipped out of the room, then O’Brien whom I hadn’t met but who had been pointed out to me, then some others whose names I did not know. John finished his round of the room by stopping between Caister and me. “Sorry, Tom,” he said, “I’m going to take Andy away from you; I want to have a chat to him and some of the others about something.”
“Very mysterious,” I said.
“Join the Free People, Tom, and I’ll invite you too; we could do with a legal brain.” Was he mocking me? Or was he being serious? I assumed the first. “Could you support my wife and children in the way to which they are accustomed?” I asked.
“There’s an old answer to that,” he said; he was serious now, there was no mistaking, though I didn’t then understand what he meant. But John didn’t amplify his remark; he and Caister went out of the room and I heard them and others trooping up the stairs to the upper part of the flat.
There didn’t seem anyone else who wanted to talk to me; Tella’s smooth friends were talking to each other, and most of the Free People had gone away. I finished my whisky and was about to slip away without saying good-bye to anyone when Tella came back, carrying a large tray of sandwiches.
“Hello, Tom,” she said. “Where’s everyone? Has Andy deserted you?”
“I think John’s called some kind of council of war. I think you’d find them if you went upstairs. Aren’t you in the inner councils of the Free People?”
“Have a sandwich,” she said, thrusting the tray at me. I took one, and Tella handed the tray over to one of her bright friends for distribution to his bright girls.
“I said, aren’t you in the inner councils of the Free People?”
“We don’t work like that, Tom; anyway, even if we did, I wouldn’t be. I’m quite useful when it comes to money, but I don’t like politics much. I had too much of it in South Africa.”
“John told me the Free People have communal funds. Is that so?”
She smiled. “In a way, yes. We do have some kind of system where everyone gives a bit of their income”—if for John it was salary rather than wages, for Tella it was income rather than salary—“for the funds; but it’s a matter of choice really, there’s no compulsion, and anyway I’ve got more money than the rest of them put together.” She was oddly delighted; pleasure in her wealth was another part of the naive sophistication I had recognised earlier. “So I look after the funds; and honestly it’s easier just to write cheques myself than to chase people for their share. I’m very lazy really.”
“Does John know?” I asked. “About where the money comes from?”
“Oh, John doesn’t care about money; for him it’s just something which has to be found when you need it. I do the finding.”
“But even then you aren’t in the inner councils?”
“You keep saying that; I told you, we don’t work like that. Things just happen. We’re all equals in the Free People. That’s what is so lovely about it.”
“How nice,” I said. I could not help the sarcasm, though I immediately regretted it. But Tella answered simply, “It is.” She’s no ironist, Tella; things are what they appear to be.
So, to match her own naïveté, I asked, “Are you in love with John?” But I was wrong to think naïveté would extend to that, for she put her head back and laughed at me. “What a question,” she laughed, “what a question. I suppose I am, in some sense or the other, and on and off. I don’t want to own anyone; and anyway John’s not ownable. We understand each other; and sometimes I’m in love with him.”
“Are you ownable?”
“No, not really.” She was treating my questions as seriously now as they had become serious for me, almost without my realising it. “I’ve tried living with people, and it just didn’t work out after a week or two. I want … not the big things, but the ordinary ones to happen the way I want. I couldn’t bear to live with the rest of them in the commune; I don’t mind going there for a day or two, but I’ll always keep a place like this, so I can get away. Anyway, it’s a useful crash-pad.”
“John doesn’t actually live here?”
“No, of course not.” Tella came close to me and tilted her dark olive-skinned face up at me. “What are you asking me, Tom? John doesn’t live here—we don’t work things like that.” She smiled confidentially. She was close enough for me to see tiny beads of sweat on her upper lip; I could feel a muscle down my cheek twitching slightly. There was nothing more to be said. We knew where we were, and there was no need to demonstrate it.
“Who else do you want to meet?” she said after a while.
“No one. I must get back to the hotel.”
“You can’t go before John comes back.”
“Well, how long will that be? I’ve got to work tomorrow, and it’s getting late.”
“He won’t be long. Have some more whisky. And come and talk to my other friends.”
*
John and his fellow conspirators emerged ten minutes later, just when I was beginning to think I could not bear another minute of Tella’s bright and friendly nonentities with their expensively casual clothes and night-time hippydom. Making polite noises, I deserted them and set off for John; but someone else got there before I did, and stood firmly in front of John so he could get undivided attention.
If there is anyone in the world I have cause to hate, it is James Bowland. Yet I cannot bring myself to hate him, even now; I feel about him what I might feel about a bad painting or a silly book—a certain annoyance at the waste of time and effort, a certain pity at the pretension, a certain sympathy for the distress. Somehow, he never fitted together as a person; with some of the Free People, when they used their jargon of ‘like’ or ‘dig’ or ‘scene’ or ‘it’s a gas, man’, I felt at least it had some reality for all its inadequacies; it was the best language they knew, or if it was false it was because the roles they were playing were false. John himself never bothered with that kind of language, never sought the safety of meaning nothing; others needed the language to protect themselves from the failure of their own language: but Bowland was different. I never felt the aggressively Americanised hip-talk was his own in any sense of success or failure, but then I never sensed he talked from his own centre—it was almost as if he hated his own language, or hated himself. For sure it was a strange made-up dialect he spoke, a mixture of the Red Dawn of the People’s Revolution and hip-talk, like, man, you know, it was anything except his own scene. And his real scene? Well, in the end he was completely mad, unfit to plead, confined to Broadmoor for the rest of his natural days. Paranoid schizophrenic or, as John put it, Bowland was muddled. Like, man, a victim of left deviationism. Or childish trauma. Or both, man.
I didn’t know any of that as I stood behind his stocky frame and tried to catch John’s attention; but I could hear the language
even then. He was attacking John, apparently for having allowed himself to be acquitted. “Man,” he said, “that was a really bad scene, that court business. Man, you’re a traitor to the working class and the cause of the revolution.”
John was very gentle with him. “Come on, Jiminy, play it cool …”
“I don’t dig all that shit, man. I don’t dig it. You go into a court and you plead not guilty and have all the trappings of bourgeois justice, and you are accepting the terms of the capitalists. You’re a lackey of the imperialists, John Buckleson.”
“Be fair, Jiminy; I’m not going to do anyone any good locked up in gaol.” His voice was as gentle as Bowland’s was shrill. But that did not do anything to take the edge off the criticism, and in a strange way the very risibility of the terms Bowland used made the attack more difficult to cope with: for in a sense the accusation was classic and correct. How can a revolutionary ever justify his use of reactionary institutions to protect his own freedom? But there was a note of hysteria in Bowland’s attack which went beyond reason; later, when I learned more of his history, I understood: then I thought only that he was drunk or high.
Eventually, when John had given up trying to justify himself and simply let the tirade flow round him, Bowland went away, muttering dark things about ‘revisionist sell-outs’. I took his place in front of John.
“I hope you are not going to give me a lecture too, Mr. Lawyer,” he said; he was trying to joke, but I could see there was hurt. John was never any good at accepting criticism from whatever source; everything was always utterly personal to him.
“What was that about?”
“Oh, Jiminy gets like that; he gets muddled.”
“Jiminy …?”
“James Bowland—Jiminy’s his nickname. Jiminy Cricket, you know.”
I didn’t, so John told me. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked. “He sounded pretty hysterical.”