It was a great temptation to build on this insubstantial link, to cast Jeffrey in permanence as the lover of my girl. I told myself I must not behave like that. The boy had his own life to live; I must not impose on him; the young (as the French say) cannot live with the dead. And similar stifling truisms.
So, in an uncertainty and distress which was, I think, mutual, we had, after Marigold’s memorial service, drifted apart again. I had been quite unprepared to find him at Humphrey’s that night. But it only occurred to me afterwards that the well-intentioned obtuseness on Humphrey’s part which this indicated had set the tone for the evening.
Some three hours later Jeffrey and I set off together again from the same doorstep. Humphrey and Carmen (such was her name) stood entwined, a tableau of marital happiness, in the lighted doorway, waving us off with glad cries of ‘See you again very soon!’ I was returning to my aunt, reluctantly – though less reluctantly than I would now have accepted a bed for the night from Humphrey and Carmen. Jeffrey, too, had refused pressing offers of a bed, claiming a friend elsewhere in the city.
We trudged for a while in silence. Was the boy as depressed as I thought he was, or was I attributing to him the sickening heaviness of my own heart? I slid a glance at him. In response he said with cutting enunciation:
‘Women like that make me feel I want to go and have a bath.’
‘Oh come on.’ Feebly, half indulgent uncle, half brisk head master: ‘She’s not as bad as that.’
‘Oh yes she is,’ he said, with a bitter passion I had not quite expected from him, ‘She’s just as bad as that, and you know it, Tom, so don’t pretend … Her queening it there among Laura’s furniture, surrounded by muckage … Christ, my own Ma and her gin bottles is bad enough, but at least she doesn’t have china doggies everywhere and open packets of biscuits and soft-porn historical novels. Carmen’s like some great dirty bird sitting on a nest of regurgitated fish-pellets.’
‘If you mean those fish-cakes and chips she eventually produced for supper –’ I was momentarily entertained, in spite of myself, by the cruel aptness of Jeffrey’s description.
‘I partly mean that – I loathe people who can’t be bothered to cook and who pride themselves on it – but I mean, oh for Christ’s sake, the whole squalid set-up. And Humphrey sitting in the middle of it with his paws up, wagging his tail – ‘‘Go on, admire us, aren’t we spontaneous and lovely?’’ – Yuck.’
‘I know.’ I was really too depleted to argue. After a long silence, I said:
‘But I think you attribute too much affectation to Carmen, you know. She didn’t strike me as particularly conceited. Just a simple, self-centred soul who’s thrilled to have landed Humphrey as a husband and is letting the world know.’
‘You’ll be telling me any minute that she means well.’
‘So she does. But of course I do entirely agree with you really. I loathed the evening too.’ Naïvety should not come across as a vice. And yet it does. I thought of my Aunt Madge too, but did not have the heart to mention her now.
‘All that about her brother who’s quite mad and such a hoot –’ (vicious impersonation) – ‘and whom we must meet.’
‘I know. And that long, coy story about a dog peeing on her shoes …’
We walked on further. At last, with the biting humour now gone from his voice, Jeffrey said heavily:
‘The trouble is, the worse we think of her the worse we have to think of old Humphrey for marrying her.’
‘I was thinking that myself.’ I was also thinking this was probably still harder for the boy than it was for me. Humphrey was merely – merely? – one of my oldest friends, whereas to Jeffrey he had been a father figure, a substitute for Jeffrey’s own absent and undutiful parent.
‘I can’t understand it myself,’ I said. ‘He used to be so – fastidious.’ As I uttered the word I felt it was not quite right; I ploughed on: ‘I mean discriminating. Not intellectual, quite, but almost the archetypal decent cultured man of his background. He has changed. It’s daunting, baffling really … Did you hear that conversation about music?’
‘I did.’
Humphrey had never been musical as Laura was and, though educated by her, his taste had remained unambitious. Nevertheless the four of us in the old days had enjoyed Mozart or Brahms together and the occasional opera. I had hardly been able to believe my ears when I had, this evening, heard Humphrey joining in enthusiastically as Carmen extolled as ‘marvellous’ the numbingly mediocre score of a musical currently running in London.
‘That vulgar bilge,’ said Jeffrey, implacable in contempt.
‘Oh come on, Jeff.’ (It was awful, I confusedly felt, to be talking like this.) ‘I didn’t quite mean that. Lots of reasonable people do enjoy musicals. I find the change odd, but I don’t think we can indict the poor chap just for that, just for – well, widening his tastes.’
‘I didn’t get the impression he knows whether or not he likes that sort of musical hogwash at all,’ pursued Jeffrey keenly. ‘He wasn’t using any judgement, just suspending it. It’s that nauseating ‘‘darling, they’re playing our tune’’ attitude to music. Oh, it’s common enough, I know. But I just didn’t expect it from him.’
We walked again in silence. I reviewed the look of fatuous adoration Humphrey’s crumpled face had worn as Carmen had regaled us with her merry trivia, his over-eagerness to praise the slovenly meal she had eventually dished up, his ready collusion with her image of herself as a vital, fascinating person. Carmen, though not particularly young, was considerably younger than he was – even, as I reminded myself firmly, as Ann is considerably younger than I am. Vital, Carmen might be considered, I supposed, in a dark, curly way. She was rather too large all over for my taste – too tall, too bosomy, with too many teeth and too bright a trailing scarf round her thick healthy neck. But I could see how another man than myself might be attracted to her, yes particularly a man who, for many years, had been cut off from association with a whole body, with plumpness and sleekness and energy and, yes, sheer animal health … And because Humphrey had incontinently married Carmen, this passion must be given the name of ‘love’ and cherished by him as such.
But perhaps it was indeed love, by all identifiable measures, just as much as his feeling toward the infinitely finer Laura for all those years had been? The objects might be utterly different, but there was no reason to suppose that the quality of the emotion was. I did not want to reason like this: it devalued retrospectively his dedication to Laura. But Jeffrey’s scathing remarks about Humphrey’s musical tastes, or rather his lack of taste, had set up a reverberation in my mind. ‘Darling, they’re playing our tune’ indeed. Perhaps he had always been like that, really; it was simply that in the past the tune called by the woman was different.
‘When I think how he used to be,’ said Jeffrey after another long silence. ‘I mean, he never set the Thames on fire, but he used to be – oh, interested and concerned about things. Good causes and so forth. Environmentalism. Preserving Venice. You know. And look at him now with that female sow – ‘‘Another drink, darling? … Gosh, aren’t these bickies good … Gosh, did we tell you what happened on our honeymoon? … Are you warm enough, darling – Oh yes, darling, lovely and warm, just the two of us, aren’t we wonderful … And bugger the rest of the globe.’’ No moral agenda to life at all.’
‘Sows are always female.’ However much I agreed with him, I objected to the raw priggishness of his tone. I felt exhausted, too much so to order my thoughts properly; I said hesitantly:
‘Marriage to a different person must always change one a bit, I suppose. Or just marriage in itself, to anyone. Different bits come to the fore, others go into abeyance … You marry a world, not only a person. We aren’t lone stars.’ I was talking almost at random, in the murk of my own preoccupations. ‘You’ll see what I mean yourself, one day,’ I finished Iamely.
‘I shall never marry,’ he said, as if it were a foregone conclusion.
Well, we w
on’t go into that, I thought. Marigold’s name had remained unspoken all evening, but I must not assume it was relevant anyway. Jeffrey would in any case, I thought, have a long and complex road in life to travel. The knowledge that he had barely started out on it, with all his restless energy, and his human deprivation which this evening had only deepened, exhausted me further.
‘I know you were fond of Laura,’ I said helplessly. ‘So was I.’
But Jeffrey, now his mind was working on Humphrey, was not to be lulled by this acceptable thought.
‘Oh – fond,’ he said dismissively. ‘Yes, she was OK. I mean, she tried to be a ‘‘good aunt’’ to me and I always respected her. But I didn’t like her as much as Humphrey.’
‘No?’
‘Well she was a bit of an old prune, wasn’t she?’ he said casually. ‘Even before her MS got so bad. And awfully sort of pleased with herself for behaving so bravely. That was it, you see – Humphrey thought she was so marvellous and went round telling everyone so, so we were all suckered into thinking it must be true. At least, I was when I was a kid, and I rather think you and Simone were … Marigold never liked her much.’
‘Didn’t she? I didn’t realize. Oh.’ And all those presents … I longed to hear more, now Marigold’s name had been spoken, but would I enjoy hearing it with Jeffrey in such a bitter mood?
‘Nope. She didn’t. I remember her telling me that one day at the mill-house when we were about sixteen. She thought Laura was very dominating. Funny, I’ve only just remembered that. I ought to have thought of it before. It all fits, doesn’t it?’
‘I’m afraid it does. Oh dear. Yes. Laura did rather run Humphrey, even from her wheelchair. She made him what he was, I suppose. I never knew him before he met her. And now we’re complaining that Carmen has made him into something different.’
‘He always was a bit of a wanker,’ said Jeffrey. ‘We should have expected it, after all.’
His tone suggested that was his last word on the subject, his verdict on my lifelong friend. I was unwilling to let him get away with that.
‘I will offer you another explanation,’ I said after a bit.
‘Well – please offer it,’ he said when I still remained silent. In the end I said:
‘Humphrey looked after Laura devotedly for years. Yes, I know devotion and besottedness are two sides of the same coin, but she needed him to and he did. You saw him do it. And I’ve come to suspect that, contrary to popular belief, an experience like that doesn’t necessarily do a chap any good.’
‘You mean that it doesn’t necessarily make him into a more deeply wonderful human being himself,’ said Jeffrey nastily.
‘That’s just what I mean. It – it deforms life, all that sort of thing. I’m wondering if Humphrey was somehow strained beyond his proper capacity by all those years of devotion and restraint and being good, and has now, when it’s all over, just – collapsed.’
‘You don’t mean physical collapse. Or even emotional.’ Jeffrey’s ability to apply himself carefully to any suggested idea had always been one of his better features. ‘You can’t mean that, because he’s full of beans. You mean a sort of collapse of integrity?’
‘Yes. Yes, I suppose so. Something like that. Overstrain in the moral fibres, let’s say.’
‘System overload.’
‘Is that what you’d call it with computers? Yes.’
‘Well that’s just a general term. There might be a closer analogy …’ Jeffrey pondered, his own system fully engaged. ‘There’s something called Deadly Embrace,’ he said.
‘That meant to refer to Carmen?’ I could feel my own system collapsing into a feeble levity.
‘Ha, ha. Or Laura, come to that? Both of them, and that might be the point … No, actually, Deadly Embrace – well, it’s a bit complicated to explain, but its effect is that opposing demands within the system make it impossible for a bit of information to be accessed by either side. No advance can be made, no further development; the program just blocks itself.’
‘It might fit,’ I said uncertainly. I tried to visualize, in general terms, what was being blocked, the things we cannot afford to let ourselves know. If I had those, by definition I could not perceive them … Jeffrey too seemed daunted by the prospect of translating his recondite metaphor back into the terms of the human mind. He sighed.
‘Well. As you say, poor old Humphrey.’ He suddenly stopped and turned to face me in the dark.
‘I think we must have walked past your turning,’ I said.
‘I don’t know. I’m not fussed. Tom, can I ask you something?’
‘Ask away,’ I said easily, but my heartbeat increased and I found myself illogically thinking: Marigold. Something about Marigold.
‘Do you feel that – that everything you’ve been through may have affected you like that?’ he said.
After a long interval – so long, I suppose, that even Jeffrey lost his nerve and began to peer at me in the dark to see what had happened to me, I said:
‘Do you think I have been – blocked. Or weakened?’
‘No. Not at all. You seem to me just the same. It was just – the way you spoke about it.’
‘Well I’m not the same,’ I said, after another long silence.
‘No?’
‘No.’
He did not ask any more, but after a few yards I said:
‘I thought – up to a few months ago, I thought – that the rest of my life would just be a sort of – retreat. In your electronic terms, a different, smaller program. Or a different circuit. A leftover life to make the best of and maybe harvest something from after all. But now – I’m not sure.’
After another long pause, I added obscurely:
‘I think something else may be surfacing.’
‘I’m not quite sure what you are saying,’ said Jeffrey, humbly, for him, and suddenly sounding young and almost scared.
‘No, nor am I, that’s the trouble.’ What the hell was I saying?
After a while I tried again. ‘You used the phrase ‘‘collapse of integrity’’. Before we got sidetracked onto computers.’
‘Did I? Oh yes – about Humphrey. Don’t you agree with me, Tom?’
‘Well yes, as a matter of fact I do, in Humphrey’s case. But what I wanted to say is … One doesn’t always know for oneself where integrity lies. You get used to the idea that it lies in a particular direction, in a particular set of values. But then one day you wake up to the possibility that actually there’s something quite other you ought to be doing. Something special to be undertaken. That perhaps there is – you’re not quite sure.’ Was that what I really wanted to say? If so, I had only just formulated it.
‘I’m still not entirely with you,’ Jeffrey persisted, eager as ever for intellectual debate. But I had had enough. We were passing the corner pub where I had sat and drunk whisky hours earlier. It was shutting, an ejected customer was being sick by a railed garden. I smelt vomit and stale beer and soot and wet old leaves; such smells might have recalled nostalgically the Birmingham of my childhood, but that Birmingham had gone, vanished under motorways years ago, and the amalgam in the night air merely seemed like the suffocating deposit lying on my heart.
Whatever I had hoped in the train coming north, there was to be no uncritical retreat into the past for me, no refuge there. I wanted and expected nothing now from friend or relative. Marigold had been gone more than five years, I would soon be an old man. Jeffrey was a young one with his alien life still to make, and I would have no stake in it. I sent him on his way to the dark heights on the far side of Waverley Station.
Then I turned my steps towards Morningside, hoping to God that Aunt Madge would by now be oblivious in her soft bed and that I could enter without encountering her.
I came back to London filled with that generalized discomfort that the Anglo-Saxon races call ‘guilt’.
I remembered that long-ago conversation with Jacquou, in which he had pointed out to me that the French language does n
ot encourage its speakers to label their unease ‘guilt’ – that the French are more apt to diagnose grief, pain, nausea, boredom, or simply to evoke ‘the human condition’. Yes. But, being English after all, in spite of everything, a multiform guilt is what I felt as my train trundled, late and grubby, into Kings Cross.
Who did I imagine I was, to sit in judgement on everyone else’s subterfuges for coping with the human lot, and what did I expect? I had sided with Jeffrey in despising my old friend whose life seemed to have become so silly and self-indulgent; but I had been no better pleased, had I, by my aunt’s impulse toward Something Beyond All This? If my own standards were so exacting, what had I better to offer?
I remembered confusedly that I had had a disagreement recently with Lewis Greenfield too, nagging him to divulge facts I had originally said I did not want to know: Lewis, for whose combination of high principles and decent cynicism I had always had regard. Then, worse, had been my row with Ann about Melvyn Baines.
I was conscious of having said awful things to her about the wretched man. I did not exactly think that the charges I had made were unfounded, but I knew that in condemning Baines, and what he stood for, I had been making an oblique attack on some of Ann’s own values. So I wanted to indict Ann as well, did I? For what – for naïvety, for lack of stringency, for being the product of an unfortunate era of teacher training and popular sociology? … For not, for God’s sake, being brilliant? Just for not being my own generation?
I knew Ann to be one of the kindest, most reasonable, painstaking people there are. What more could I decently expect or want, now? It wasn’t her fault she was not Simone. Or Marigold. Or Marigold.
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