by C. J. Driver
“That’s marvellously specific, Bob—a vision with one’s feet on the ground …”
“Oh, it’s so easy to be cynical, Tom. It’s so easy to look at the Free People and say, ‘Millenarian nonsense they’ll grow out of’ …”
“You say that yourself.”
“Yes, of course I do; it’s obvious. But why we need people like John is that they know both about the visions and about having one’s feet on the ground so that you don’t get knocked over by the first anti-visionary bully who comes along. I’m not one of those—not like John. I’m like a garage mechanic; I can tinker with the engine a bit, but I’m no designer, not like John could be.”
“But if you’re right, it isn’t just the adulation of the publicists that will hurt him, but the adulation of the Free People, those kids you call them. They’ll harm him just as much.”
“In a way, yes; they may harm him. They may take him the wrong way … Take this Freedom Congress they are planning …”
“What’s that?” I interrupted. I hadn’t heard anything about it.
“Oh, John and some other left-wing youth are planning a sort of united-front meeting—they have got hold of the Roundhouse and they’ve got hold of some speakers. It’s going to be a sort of orgy of pop and politics.”
“It sounds alarming.”
“I think they’ll probably enjoy it, though God knows I’ll avoid it. John made noises about my coming to talk about … what was it? ‘Psychiatry and Mass Society’”—he pretended to shudder—“I couldn’t imagine anything worse.”
“Are you going to talk?”
“No bloody fear. It’s that kind of sidetrack I want John to avoid.”
“Why?”
“Because it goes nowhere. At least the Free People live together in a commune. No, these kids need to do, not talk about doing; that’s why John is special. Don’t you think so too?”
But I was not committing myself, even to Bob Henderson in private. I knew about the City of the Millennium, and I knew that John knew too, knew it publicly where I knew it privately. In some ways I suppose I did not want the City to be a public possession; I wanted to keep it for my own spirit’s emigration from the place of separations that time and class and State imposed on me. What held me to John was the knowledge that he understood my City at least as well as I did; but what held me away from him—and from Henderson—was my terror of the road that led there. It was there that Bob was blind; he saw ends, and knew John would find the means if he needed to—but he did not see the means at all.
*
If Henderson feared the adulation for John’s sake, Wynstanley feared it for its own sake. He loathed the Free People, but not as much as he loathed John Buckleson. If Henderson distinguished John the leader from his following, Wynstanley identified John with his following, and blamed John from what they were. Their instant socialism was a bastard of his own breeding: and he wanted legitimacy, because for him getting change was slow, hard, slogging work, not a theatrical performance in an empty warehouse.
John’s regular visits to me in chambers didn’t help. Matthew didn’t say anything directly to me, but eventually Jamie Macqueen mentioned the displeasure. Strangely enough, Jamie was one of John Buckleson’s fans, or rather he told me that his wife and children were. I suppose they watch television more than I do. Sometimes when John arrived before I got back I would find him standing talking to Jamie in the clerks’ office. So when Jamie said to me, “By the way, Mr. Grace, I don’t think Mr. Wynstanley is all that pleased about your visitor—he looks very black when he sees him, and he muttered something to me about confidential documents,” I knew that Jamie wasn’t just being bitchy and I went in to see Matthew; I don’t like being on bad terms with people like him.
“No,” he said, leaning back from his crowded desk, “no, I don’t like that young man—or his confounded Free People, who are free only because of the taxes people like us pay. I can’t understand what the hell you are doing with them.”
“They interest me.”
“They bore me; they are all so bloody naïve. Do you think they have any answers at all? Politics—real politics—is bloody hard, slow, heart-breaking work, the kind that got a decent social security system, without which these kids would be nothing, nothing at all.”
“I don’t think they offer much cure; but as symptoms they are interesting.”
“A bunch of middle-class kids living on handouts from their parents and on what they can scrounge from the State? They’re not even a symptom—if you want something real to do, why don’t you start defending some of those in trouble with the Industrial Relations Act? You’ll see a real symptom there: a government so weak it relies on the Opposition for its only ideas, a trade union movement that has a lot of time for trade and bugger-all for union. You’re wasting your time with Buckleson and that lot, Tom; and I could use you. You know what it’s really like to be working-class and you know the law. How the hell can I talk for working people? I’m Winchester and Balliol; if I were a Tory I’d be a Minister, the Prime Minister’s righthand man. And what are you doing? Flirting with silly little anarchists in silly uniforms.”
“I’m not working-class any more, Matthew; I’m bourgeois through and through, as much as you are. You should see my house, Matthew; I’m almost a landowner. I have one point eight acres of hillside all of my own.” Alison might hold the deeds; she might even own the house; but the land was mine, and the owl’s hooting, and the vixen’s howling, and the quiet places under the pine trees.
“No, Tom, you don’t belong there. That’s an aberration; just like the Free People lark is.”
“You sound like a schoolmaster, Matthew.”
“Do I? Sorry. Am I being hectoring? My wife says I always do that when I’m tired. And, God, I am tired. I need a holiday. It’s a rough time at the moment. There’s no sense of centre anywhere; not in either of the parties, not in the government, not in the country. Just everyone milling about, fighting his own battles. But there, I’ve no right to take out my political worries on you. But I still don’t like Buckleson.”
“I don’t expect you to,” I said. “Would you rather I told him not to come to chambers?”
“Good God, no; that’s none of my business at all.” I nodded, and he smiled. “Oh, perhaps you’re right, after all, Tom; I mean to get on with your job and to find amusement in the peripheral, the oddities, and not try to change things …” and he tapped the desk in front of him, as if it were there that all change lay. “And now I must go back to my boring, slogging work.”
“Why don’t you have a holiday?”
“I can’t; I’ll be better after the week-end. Anyway, holidays won’t change the way things are. I tell you what,” he said, looking up suddenly. “You get Buckleson to assassinate the Prime Minister and get a change of government. That would cure a lot of my present ills.”
“I don’t think he’d be much of an assassin,” I said as I left.
“You never know,” shouted Matthew down the passage after me.
Nor did I know, then at least. It was hard to explain to a man like Matthew Wynstanley what it was about the Free People that was special. I knew as well as he did they were what the communists call an adventure, what Matthew himself called an aberration. They sponged off a State they affected to despise. They claimed to be tolerant when they tolerated no arguments but their own. They claimed to be political but regarded political organization as a waste of time. They claimed God was dead but spoke the language of religious mania. They called usury a heinous sin but did not wish the State to own the means of production. They claimed to speak for the workers but despised the workers for their concern with money. They claimed to be classless but were almost without exception the sons and daughters of the wealthy. They claimed to be open to all but regarded people over thirty as almost subhuman in their progress to death.
Above all perhaps, their paradox was in their language. While they claimed that commerce and capital and advertising ha
d devalued language (to the extent that they could call a blank page a poem, or claim that a man who painted ‘Fuck War’ on his forehead was making a political statement), yet the language they actually used was one of constant cliché, constant abstraction. They never talked; they verbalised. In the finalization was the verbalisation …
Yet it was even more complicated than that, because as their own language became uglier and uglier and more and more jargon of misunderstanding and cloudiness, so their need for visionary rhetoric grew greater and greater. Where I thought they should have looked for a pure hard dialect, they chose a language as impure as silence itself, a Newspeak born of Doublethink and No-Thought-At-All. Yet John himself loathed the jargon; and they followed him because he could provide them with a rhetoric which was in utter contrast with what they spoke and seemed to think. In that he was their hero; but—as even in those days I was beginning to understand—he was also their victim, because he could give them visionary rhetoric and nothing else. It couldn’t change the world for them. That was where Henderson was wrong: he saw the hero and not the victim. He expected John to give England thoughts as well as speeches—to give what the Free People called ‘a programme’—but he could only give them a vision made of words, until the words ran out. In other words, verbal experiences by themselves have an insufficient capacity for the formulation of personalized concepts of sociological and economic change. You can’t eat words, nor can you shoot them from guns. And it wasn’t me who said that; it was John himself.
*
I could not have explained all that to Matthew Wynstanley, let alone Bob Henderson, in those days. Only afterwards did I begin to see the flaws in the structure; then I had only a dream or two, and the dreams were not only separate from the rest of me but were counter-balanced by other dreams where there were no Utopian cities.
I learned some of the notion of perfection from John himself, perhaps most of all during the week-end he and Tella came to spend in Wealdridge with us. It was almost wholly a disaster, except for that hour or so when John talked—of town-planning, I suppose it was, though I prefer to call it the City.
Why was the rest such a disaster? Was it that Tella had bullied John into accepting the invitation, or that the way Alison and I live reminded him of the home he had escaped from? I didn’t know much about his family then—indeed, it was the most shadowy part of what I knew—but it may have been that. Or else was it simply hatred of what he had rejected, not only in the past, but for the future as well?
We expected them for lunch on Saturday. When at two they had not arrived, Alison fed the girls. At three I said I would wait no longer for my food. At half past four they arrived. Neither of them made any excuse—Tella’s car had not broken down, there had been no crisis in the commune, they had not stayed in bed all morning, no watch had stopped. Tella had all the arrogant sophistication of the rich and John … well, he made it clear from the start that the week-end was Tella’s idea, not his. His mood was clear from the moment he stepped out of the hired car and said, “Christ, this place is cosy, isn’t it?” His white uniform was crumpled and dirty.
“Yes,” I answered, choosing to take his remark as a compliment. “You can’t see the house from the road at all, and you can’t see the neighbours’ houses, and you have to look hard down there,”—I pointed down the hillside to the slow sweep of the weald where it spread out below us—“to see any other houses at all.”
“No people at all; just an idyll perched on a hillside … I think it’s beastly,” said John, and shuddered; how was I to know if the shudder was genuine or acted?
“I think it’s super,” said Tella bravely.
“You would,” said John fiercely. “All of you, you judge happiness by how far you can exclude other people from it.”
There was no answering that. I waited for a moment or two while Tella took her handbag from the car, then said, “Well, you’d better come inside and meet Alison and the girls.”
*
“How do you do?” said Alison. “Tom’s told me so much about you.” Which wasn’t true; I had simply told her that John Buckleson was the young man whom I had got acquitted and who was a friend of Bob, and that Tella was his girlfriend. Tella went forward and kissed Alison on the cheek. “Hullo,” she said. “We know Tom so well we feel we should know you just as well.” That was untrue, too.
“Hi,” said John, and turned away to look out of the large windows which face out over the weald. If he had been only sixteen, it would have been gauchely rude.
“Perhaps you’d like tea after your journey,” said Alison after a moment or two.
“There wasn’t much traffic,” Tella answered, “but we would love tea. I’ll help you.”
“There’s no need.”
“But I want to,” and she went into the kitchen with Alison, leaving John still staring out of the windows, and me to watch John. We could hear the women chattering in the kitchen, and down on the second lawn I could see the girls playing near their garden hut. It was a good day, clear-skied, and the hillside protected us from the wind.
Without turning round, John said suddenly, “It really does make me sick, the way people won’t live together properly; all this business of having a house of your own where no one else can intrude—a sort of adoration of private life, private values, private marriage, private children, private property, all romantic crap.”
“It’s the only way some of us can survive in England now.”
“Some of us …” John mimicked my voice harshly, “us being who, and some how many?”
“What do you want me to do? Pull this place down and move to a flat in Camden or a semi-d. in Camberwell?”
“In the end that’d be better.” John turned round now. “All this unfaced brick, open fire, a coy mixture of Swedish and Victorian, curtains from patterns in the Design Centre, rugs from Spain and—oh daring, Mr. Lawyer—from Morocco. Very tasteful, if you don’t mind my saying so.”
“Alison chooses the furnishing,” I said disloyally.
“Predictable,” John answered. “But she’s got ‘super taste’, hasn’t she?”
“So have you, judging by your ability to place things so accurately.”
“Oh shit,” he said. “I know this room; you could take up any single thing in this house and put it in a room in Richmond or in Shitsville, and it would be in ‘super taste’ still.”
“Your idea of furniture is a blanket over the window, a packing case and a sleeping bag on the floor; from Milletts in the West End.” My voice was as harshly sarcastic as his had been rude.
“Fuck off, Mr. Lawyer,” John swore at me. He threw himself down in an armchair and stretched his legs as far as he could. I sat too, and so we stayed until Alison and Tella came in pushing a trolley laden with tea-things. I stood up to help.
“Want some tea, John?” said Tella.
“No, you know I can’t bear the stuff. Isn’t there coffee?”
“I’ll make some,” said Alison quietly. “Tella, will you pour for yourself and Tom? And Tom, will you call the girls? I think they’re in the garden.”
I went out on to the terrace and shouted. Though they answered immediately, I stayed out there.
When I brought the girls in, John was still stretched gloomily in his armchair and Tella, flushed and angry, was pouring tea.
“Hullo,” said Sarah, going to shake hands with first Tella and then John. Nell stood her ground near the door and said nothing; she does not give herself lightly, my Penelope.
“Hullo,” said Tella. “You’re as pretty as your mother.”
Nell nodded.
“Hi,” said John without any enthusiasm.
“Aren’t you going to say ‘Hullo’?” said Tella to Nell, who shook her head.
“She’s shy,” Sarah explained with all the wise superiority of her seven years.
“Not,” muttered Nell.
“Here’s your coffee, John,” said Alison, putting a small tray next to his chair. I noticed th
at after one sip he drank no more. I think Alison noticed too, though she said nothing to me.
Dinner was no better. Tella and Alison chattered bravely, and John and I sat silent. Tella had helped both the girls, had read them a story, had helped Alison in the kitchen. She seemed to put off her Chelsea self as easily as she changed from being one of the Free People to a wealthy young expatriate from Africa, and she was very charming; though it seemed as false as plated silver in the atmosphere that John’s mood created, at least it tinkled bravely. I had done my best to get John out of his mood; I gave him a drink, but he was not interested; I turned on the box, but he tried the three channels, then turned the thing off; I tried a Mozart record, and he walked out of the sitting-room on to the terrace, but when I went out there with him, he came back inside.
Eventually Alison fled, pleading a headache. Tagging on to her excuse I went upstairs with her. When we were in the bedroom I put my arms round her and said I was sorry. She said nothing, just rested her head against me. “Are you all right, love?” I asked.
“I really have got a headache—and I can’t bear that young man. He’s loathsome, he really is. I can’t believe he’s a friend of Bob Henderson.”
“He is, but he doesn’t usually behave like this. I’m sorry I asked him down.”
“Oh, that South African girl is nice; I don’t know how she puts up with him though.”
“I think she’s in love with him.”
“She won’t be for long if that’s how he behaves.”
“I said I was sorry for inviting them.” I could not help the edge which came into my voice.
“Don’t be. I know he means something to you.”
“Does he?”
“Well, he seems to.” She smiled suddenly. “But I do hope you get over this business soon, Tom.”
“You want me back as your thoroughly bourgeois husband?” I teased her.
“No, just as my husband …”