‘I’ve been right before now,’ he said. ‘So it won’t be much satisfaction.’
In his negotiations Lufkin made much use of the charged silence, and we fell into one now. But it was not my tactic that night to break it; I was ready to sit mute as long as he cared. In time he said: ‘We can assume they’re going to hopelessly underestimate their commitment, and unless someone steps in they’ll make a mess of it. The thing is, we’ve got to save them from themselves.’
Suddenly his eyes, so sad and remote in his hard, neat, skull-like head, were staring into mine, and I felt his will, intense because it was canalized into this one object, because his nature was undivided, all of a piece.
‘I want you to help,’ he said.
Again I did not reply.
He went on: ‘I take it the decisions about how this job is done, and who makes the hardware, are going to be bandied about at several levels.’
Lufkin, with his usual precision and realism, had made it his business to understand how government worked; it was no use, he had learned years before, to have the entrée to cabinet ministers unless you were also trusted by the Hector Roses and their juniors.
‘I’m not prepared to let it go by default. It’s not my own interests I’m thinking of. It’s a fourth-class risk anyway, and, so far as the firm goes, there’s always money for a good business. As far as I go myself no one’s ever going to make a fortune again, so it’s pointless one way or the other. But I’ve got to be in on it, because this is the place where I can make a contribution. That’s why I want your help.’
It sounded hypocriticaclass="underline" but Lufkin behaved just as he had to Bevill the previous New Year’s Day, not altering by an inch as he talked to a different man, just as stable and certain of his own motives. It sounded hypocritical, but Lufkin believed each word of it, and that was one of his strengths.
For myself, I could feel a part of me, a spontaneous part left over from youth, which sympathized with him and wanted to say yes: Even now the temptation was there — one that Lufkin had never felt. But, since I was a young man, I had had to learn how, in situations such as this, to harden myself. Just because I had to watch my response, which was actually too anxious to please, which wanted to say yes instead of no, I had become practised at not giving a point away: in a fashion different from Lufkin’s, and for the opposite reasons, I was nearly as effective at it as he was himself.
That night, I still had not decided whether I ought to throw in my influence, such as it was, for him or against him.
‘I can’t do much just yet,’ I said. ‘And if I tried it would certainly not be wise.’
‘I’m not sure I understand you.’
‘I’ve been associated with you,’ I told him, ‘and some people will remember that at the most inconvenient time. You can guess the repercussions if I overplayed my hand—’
‘What would you say, if I told you that was cowardly?’
‘I don’t think it is,’ I said.
For his own purposes, he was a good judge of men, and a better one of situations. He accepted that he would not get further just then and, with no more ill grace than usual, began to talk at large.
‘What shall I do when I retire?’ he said. He was not inviting my opinion; his plans were as precise as those he sent to his sales managers, although he was only forty-eight; they were the plans such as active men make, when occasionally they feel that all their activity has done for them is carve out a prison, In reality Lufkin was happy in his activity, he never really expected that those plans would come about — and yet, through making them, he felt that the door was open.
As I heard what they were, I thought again that he was odder than men imagined; he did not once refer to his family or wife; although I had never heard scandal, although he went down to his country house each weekend, his plans had been drawn up as though she were dead.
‘I shall take a flat in Monaco,’ he announced briskly. ‘I don’t mean just anywhere in the principality, I mean the old town. It isn’t easy to get a place there for a foreigner, but I’ve put out some feelers.’
It was curious to hear, in the middle of the war.
‘Whatever shall you do?’ I said, falling into the spirit of it.
‘I shall walk down to the sea and up to the Casino each day, there and back,’ he said. ‘That will give me three miles’ walking every day, which will do for my exercise. No man of fifty or over needs more.’
‘That won’t occupy you.’
‘I shall play for five hours a day, or until I’ve won my daily stipple, whichever time is the shorter.’
‘Shan’t you get tired of that?’
‘Never,’ said Lufkin.
He went on, bleak and inarticulate: ‘It’s a nice place. I shan’t want to move, I might as well die there. Then they can put me in the Protestant cemetery. It would be a nice place to have a grave.’ Suddenly he gave a smile that was sheepish and romantic. In a curt tone, as though angry with me, he returned to business.
‘I’m sorry,’ he put in as though it were an aside, ‘that you’re getting too cautious about the Barford project. Cold feet. I didn’t expect yours to be so cold.’
I had set myself neither to be drawn nor provoked. Instead I told him what he knew already, that at most points of decision Hector Rose was likely to be the most influential man — and after him some of the Barford technicians. If any firm, if Lufkin’s firm, were brought in, its technicians would have to be approved by the Barford ones. Lufkin nodded: the point was obvious but worth attending to. Then he said, in a cold but thoughtful tone: ‘What about your own future?’
I replied that I simply did not know.
‘I hear that you’ve been a success at this job — but you’re not thinking of staying in it, there’d be no sense in that.’
I repeated that it was too early to make up my mind.
‘Of course,’ said Lufkin, ‘I’ve got some right to expect you to come back to me.’
‘I haven’t forgotten that,’ I said.
‘I don’t understand all you want for yourself,’ said Lufkin. ‘But I can give you some of it.’
Looking at him, I did not know whether it was his harsh kindness, or a piece of miscalculation.
22: Mention of a Man’s Name
WAKING, I blinked my eyes against the light, although it was the dun light of a winter afternoon. By the bedside Margaret, smiling, looked down on me like a mother.
‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.
It was Saturday afternoon, the end of a busy week; the day before, Barford’s future had been settled, and, as Lufkin had forecast, we had got our way. Soon, I was thinking, lying there half-asleep in Margaret’s bed, we should have to meet Lufkin officially –
‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.
I said that I ought to get up.
‘No need.’ She had drawn an armchair up to the bed, and was sitting there in her dressing-gown. She stroked my forehead, as she said: ‘It’s not a sensible way to live, is it?’
She was not reproaching me, although I was worn out that afternoon, after the week’s meetings and late nights, dinner with Lufkin, dinner with the Minister. She pretended to scold me, but her smile was self-indulgent, maternal. It was pleasure to her to look after anyone; she was almost ashamed, so strong was that pleasure, she tried to disparage it and called it a lust. So, when I was tired and down-and-out, any struggle of wills was put aside, she cherished me; often to me, who had evaded my own mother’s protective love, who had never been cared for in that sense in my life, it was startling to find her doing so.
Yet that afternoon, watching her with eyes whose lids still wanted to close, letting her pull the quilt round my shoulders, I was happy, so happy that I thought of her as I had at Lufkin’s, in her absence. For an interval, rare in me, the imagination and the present flesh were one. It must go on always, I thought, perhaps this was the time to persuade her to marry me.