“Not very well,” I said.
“No.” He stopped at some traffic lights. We sat staring in front of us, a small impassive man in a Foreign Office hat and I who admired him. “He seems to be suffering from a disease that is quite common nowadays,” he said; “A lack of purpose.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And a very understandable one.”
“Do you think so?”
“I hope I understand. I know that if I were a young man now I should find it difficult to know what to do.”
“What would you try to do?”
“The same as before, probably. But that is no good for Peter.”
“No,” I said. The traffic lights changed and we proceeded sharply.
“I think that in many ways it is my fault,” he said. “I tried to bring up my children on the theory that it is best for them to be left alone.”
“Surely you were right,” I said.
“Was I? I don’t know. When you reach my age you will realize that it is a highly dangerous position to be left alone.”
“But it is like free will, you have got to risk it.”
“Well,” he said. We shot across Bond Street. The road was thick with American limousines. “About free will, you know, I have a suspicion that we deceive ourselves.”
“There are instructions?”
“More than that. I feel that perhaps some canvassing goes on behind the scenes. String-pulling. Fiddling. To be a good father one must be as crafty as the devil.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,” I said.
He turned to me so that his cigarette-holder jutted straight towards my nose. “Tell me,” he said, “are you in the habit of despising the older generation?”
I laughed foolishly. “That was a bad habit,” I said.
“Ah!” he said. We brushed remorselessly through a curtain of pedestrians. “A habit that goes with the complaint. And you believe in freedom. Freedom from conventions, controls, and the claims of parental authority.”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the claims of love?”
“The claims,” I said, “yes.”
“Rubbish!” he said. We sped down Regent Street. “I don’t believe you for a minute.” I laughed again. “But I know that that is what Peter believes,” he said.
He pulled up near Piccadilly Circus. “Look here,” he said, “are you doing anything for half an hour?”
“No,” I said.
“Then would you like to have a drink at my club? It is only just across the road.”
“I should like it very much,” I said.
“Right,” he said. We swerved out from the pavement and a bus shrieked to a standstill. “You see how crafty I am. I have no appointment.” We dodged the cursing traffic. “Another intolerable deceit of the older generation. But then, of course, you did not have an appointment either.”
In the club there was a room like a railway station. We sat in ageless leather chairs. “It is true,” he said, “that this place is rather appalling. Is that why you despise us?”
“I don’t,” I said.
“That’s cheating.” He nodded as an old man passed him. “I gather you think us mad.” The old man came up to him and they whispered at each other fiercely. Their heads pecked strangely like puppet birds. When they had finished he said, “It is interesting talking to you. Peter won’t talk.”
“I don’t think you’re mad,” I said.
“That is because you are older than Peter, then. When you are older still you will realize why we act like we do. Not all of us, of course. But you will see that it is difficult to do any better.”
“Do you despise us then?”
“Oh no. I only look on you with slight alarm. It seems to me that you are obsessed with the Garden of Eden. You insist on trying to recreate it and at the same time insist on making the original mistakes. I do find that alarming. But despicable, no.”
“Can we help making the original mistake?”
“I don’t think you can. I think it goes inevitably with Gardens of Eden.”
“Then what should we do?”
“I think, since we are talking in these terms, that you should read your bible. Isn’t it something about getting it within you? You mustn’t despise the bible, you know, although it may strike you as peculiar.”
“It does,” I said.
“Yes, but still, you must translate it. It is, after all, not a text-book. You have to learn the language before you can understand what it means. The trouble with Peter is that he either translates it into someone else’s terms or else he despises it. He will not trouble to learn the language.”
“It is very difficult to have faith,” I said.
“Why yes, of course.”
“You agree then?”
“If you say so. If you don’t want it.”
“But that’s what Peter wants.”
“And he can’t get it. So that’s that.”
“He thinks that you want to have him psychoanalysed,” I said.
“Does he? That was a chance remark of his mother’s, which resulted in a slight misunderstanding. It is no good being psychoanalysed, either, unless one wants to be.”
There was a silence for a while. I began to imagine what he wanted. “In fact,” I said, “in order to get results, someone has to be as crafty as the devil.”
“As many people as possible,” he said.
“I don’t trust that,” I said. “Not unless the people are very sure of what they are doing.”
“There can be, so to speak, limited objectives. It can do no harm, I am sure, to act simply upon what of course must be a genuine regard.”
“A regard for Peter?”
“Yes. And I know for certain that he has a regard for you.”
“Has he?”
“Yes. And he is not lavish with his respect. There are few people, I feel, who can influence him.”
“There was. . ” I began.
“There was someone whom he respected? Yes, I believe there was, and now there is no longer. You will have noticed, perhaps, that that is part of the trouble.”
I had noticed. I remembered Marius in the square with Peter running beside him, a moonlight night with emotion gone wrong, Marius as Mephistopheles and Peter as Faust. It had been a holiday beneath the statue that we had none of us understood. And now there was retribution. “I had noticed that,” I said.
“You see,” he said, “there is something in this century that is inimical to children. Peter is still a child. We have talked about the chasm between generations, but it is really not that, it is simply a difference in ages. My generation were children once, at the beginning of the century, and it is interesting to remember us. We were mostly killed in the war. There was an obsession with death when I was young just as now there is an obsession with futility. Then it was active and now it is passive; that is the only difference. We all of us arrive at that age when destruction becomes a mania of the soul — the age when we cease against our will to be children.
“Have you ever read the letters of young men at the beginning of the first world war? They are extraordinary reading. I mean the young men who, like myself and Peter, were brought up with every material advantage. I do not speak for those whose childhood was a material struggle, for their problems were different. My generation, the generation of Edwardian children being brought up in Edwardian luxury, came to an age at which they wanted to die. They said so, in their letters. They were children, and they did not know how to grow up, so they went to war to absolve themselves from the responsibility. There they found what they wanted. They said so. The war was a release, a fulfillment of childish continuities. They lived as children and they died as children, and I think they were glad.”
“It was not the same in this war,” I said.