As if by Magic

by Angus Wilson

  “Then I shan’t charge profitable rents. I shall charge what would have been profitable twelve years ago. And I shan’t raise them in the future.”

  “You mean,” said Roddy loftily, “houses for ordinary people.”

  “Don’t insult my tenants to be,” she said, “There’ll be all kinds of people I suppose. The people who need or want to live in them. I shan’t know them, so I can’t tell you what kinds. But, at least, I shan’t stand away from them and call them ordinary. And they won’t be cadgers either. I’ve seen enough of that on beaches, cadging and violence. But don’t you see, Roddy, it’s all I can do to fight the Sir Judases, the bullies. Just to use their weapons, their market prices against them and all the other wicked rubbish. I haven’t any creative gifts like Hamo, and I don’t want to create Utopias or chaos, and I can’t grasp the helpless of Asia, that’s beyond me. But this is where I do have power and I’m going to use it.”

  “In private patronage. And you’ve always contradicted when I said how like your mother you are.”

  “No. Not private patronage. Private subsidy. Slowly, but I hope effectively, by such little power as I’ve got, to betray the whole filthy system from inside, to erode it as much as I can.”

  “Like Rahab betraying Jericho.”

  “You know I don’t know the Bible things. Who to, anyway?”

  “The children of Israel.”

  “Well, surely theirs is always the right side.”

  “They thought so.”

  “Well, then . . .”

  “Millionairess! It’s such an old gag. James and Shaw and almost everybody else have used it.”

  “Yes, I’m quite aware, Roddy, that I’m a fictive device. But I intend to make something real of the enormity.”

  “I believe,” said Rodrigo, starting to lick the beads of sweat from the back of her neck, “that I think your side’s right. Only I’m too cowardly for such an endless and continual fight. Look how I deserted you at Avebury.”

  “Oh, that! You had your job to think of. It was silly and selfish of me to have involved you.”

  “But I’ve liked being involved since. Only it would be much better for us if we were married. We could really plan. And for Oliver.”

  “Would it?”

  “You think I want to keep my job. To have this soft life. I do, of course. But I don’t want to trade on you.”

  “You don’t. You never have. It’s quite the other way. If it hadn’t been for your organizing in these last months . . . But it’s got to stop, Roddy. You must start to read for the law like that partner of Sir Judas suggested. Your mother’s right. Working with me is gradually alienating all those City men who’d taken to you when you worked for the old bully. Who knows, when you’re a barrister you may represent me against some monster corporation that’s after the same hideous property block as I’m after? But I shouldn’t think so. I think you’ll become an M.P. and practise your Tory Democracy. You will set out to give opportunity to able and aggressive young men to become so rich that they can afford to spare something for the hopeless. But I warn you, I shall be fighting you, trying to undo the accretion of great wealth by the bullies, looking after the interests of those who haven’t yet fallen upon hopeless days.”

  He rolled on top of her, kissing her neck, her cheeks, putting his tongue in her ears, kissing her breasts, and then, excited by her passivity, biting, until, when he had finished and rolled back on his own pad, her right shoulder and ear were bleeding. She lay smiling, staring up at Highgate’s hottest sky.

  “You see,” he said, “you like bullies, really.”

  She sat up and stared at him. “No,” she said, “No, I don’t. I know now.”

  It was clear she meant both the bites and all else that Rodrigo had to propose.

  He took it all as a joke. But it wasn’t. He accepted her support while he ate his dinners at Inner Temple. And when again he begged to offer marriage in return, she again refused. What sort of a wife for a leading young P.P.S. would a conventional subverter like her make? He would do better with a recognized bohemian, a jet-set hippie. And it was true, as she became more absorbed in her schemes, more given to taking Zoe and Oliver on holidays round England to see good low-cost housing projects advised by the architectural critic, Prothero Blair, who’d been at school with Roddy; to Denmark, because she wanted to look at the terrace houses of Utzon and Jacobsen, and on to Stockholm to see the Gröndal estate; to Israel, because she hoped to meet Moshe Safdie; best of all to Italy, where the Olivetti housing was almost an excuse; more ordered in her life under the discipline of the extremely expensive, highly recommended man and wife who ran the house for her, so her figure filled out and her clothes became more costly but less fantastic. Hamo would never have seen in her now the ragged match-selling boy he longed to chum up with. She was every bit the young unmarried matron.

  On the evening of the day that the demolition of Langmuir House began, she took the three generations out. They saw a revival of Shaw’s Candida which touched each of them a little too closely in different ways. But they took the edge off it by a quiet supper at the Savoy Grill. When they got back to Highgate the telephone was ringing. The three older ladies trooped automatically into the big room where Oliver lay asleep. There later, Alexandra joined them.

  “It was Ned. He’s going to the ashram at Pondicherry. He wanted me to go too. It was a temptation. To give up all the money, I mean, for a bit. To try to make myself believe in his mimes. That’s how he’s going to support himself there. By teaching mime. People in ashrams all want that. And he thinks The Mother may have something for him.”

  Zoe laughed. Alexandra turned on her fiercely.

  “And so she may have. Just because one Swami was a fraud, and we don’t know that he was, doesn’t mean this, even pulling down disgusting buildings and putting up good ones, is all there is. I’m sorry,” she added, touching Zoe’s arm, “Anyway, you’ll be pleased. I’ve said I wouldn’t go. I can’t be everywhere at once.”

  “I should hope not indeed with this young man to think of,” Lady Needham said, pointing to Oliver who was sleeping happily with his thumb in his mouth.

  “Yes,” the Little Mam chimed in, “there’s where the future of this wretched world lies.”

  “I know,” Zoe said meditatively, “that people don’t fuss any longer about thumb-sucking, but it does worry me. Psychologically more than anything else. One has to think so far into the future with children.”

  Alexandra banged her hand violently on the low bed-rail, but Oliver slept too well to be woken.

  “Stop it,” she cried, “all of you We’ve had enough of Forster’s harvest predictions. Things may have turned sour for all of us, but we must not heap it all on him. He needs a father,” she added in a casual tone as though she were making a shopping list. “If one could only find one that wasn’t on the side of either the bullies or the scroungers. Come on, let me give you all a drink before you go home.”

  Each of the older ladies looked, in her own way, sad. But they didn’t glance at each other. They loved Alexandra, and more still Oliver, too much, to be in conspiracy.

  Alexandra led the way out of Oliver’s room like a hostess leading the women out at a dinner party. Or, she suddenly thought to herself, Mrs. Bennet leading in Jane and Lizzie and her other daughters to the ball-room. These silly, unfair, self-mocking, bookish thoughts that rushed into one’s head! She was not a selfish, bossy, foolish woman like Mrs. Bennet! Damn English Literature! Damn the past and the future! I have enough to do making something of the present. But neither the past nor the future were escapable. She saw it clearly. “Abracadabra!” she said aloud, so that the older women did, at last, exchange worried glances. But she knew that no magic spells could solve her problems.

  —oOo—