“Well …” says Felicity.
“No, you keep quiet! I’m not having you running yourself down all the time! So — you listen in silence; and you casework them; and you set up case-conferences about them; and you refer them to other agencies; and you work up your notes on case-handling for the journals.”
Howard stops walking up and down, and looks out of the window. He has just seen that the ultimate aim of the caseworker must not be to casework at all, but to get his cases to face up to caseworking themselves. He has a vision of the caseworker as becoming increasingly abstract, first not commenting, then not even uttering sympathetic noises, finally not even listening; merely a benign presence disposing to good.
Howard is becoming something of an expert on the theory of social work, in fact; Rose is doing it, too. She never stops doing it. She’s always nervously brushing the hair out of her eyes and saying that she can’t come out with Howard because she has to go and see a client.
“To hell with the client,” says Howard, catching her hand and smiling at her. (They are standing on some windy street corner, say.)
“No, I have to,” says Rose, taking her hand away and frowning.
He catches her other hand.
“He’s appearing in court tomorrow,” she says. “Honest.”
“Which one’s this?” asks Howard, taking a strand of her hair and wrapping it round his finger. “The one who chopped up his wife and married her sister? Or is this the lady with the subnormal twins by her paternal grandfather?”
“I hate your making a joke of it,” says Rose, pulling her hair away.
Howard makes a series of appalling little kissing noises.
“It’s someone who’s lost his job,” says Rose, “and he hasn’t got anywhere to live.”
He leans forward and kisses her cheek. She leans her elbow against his shoulder, and her head on her fist, and inspects his face from a distance of twelve inches, frowning. (They’re sitting at the corner of a teashop table, say.) She runs her finger slowly along his chin, as if inspecting it for dust.
“He’s nowhere to sleep tonight,” she says.
“How terrible!” says Howard, brushing his knuckles gently against her eyebrows.
“It is terrible.”
“Ghastly.”
“I must ring round and …”
He kisses her lips.
“This isn’t right,” she says.
“No …”
“We’re behaving badly.”
“Yes …”
The intimately invading pressure of another body against one’s own, from neck down to knees! (Because they are standing just inside the door of her room, say.)
“But this really is bad,” she says. “When my client has nowhere to … and other people are …”
Heaping handfuls of flesh; scooping handfuls of each other, seized libidinously just anywhere, just anyhow! (Because they are stumbling backwards over a precipitation of hasty, inside-out clothes, say.)
“Wouldn’t it be terrible to be bad?” he says to her right hip. “You’d never know what a relief it was to stop being good.”
~ ~ ~
“Great.” says Phil. “This is very helpful. Keep going.”
“Well, I simply laughed at him,” says Howard. “I said to him, ‘But no one’s going to go up the mountains! No one’s going within ten miles of them!’”
Howard is telling Phil about his conversation with Charles Aught. Phil is making notes on it for his man programme.
“God, it’s handy having you around!” says Phil, scribbling as fast as he can. “This is just the kind of thing you waste months reconstructing under laboratory conditions — the difference in reaction between when you think you’re morally right, and when you think you’re factually right. So let me just check. First you laughed at him?”
“That’s right.”
“How?”
“Oh, a sort of astonished laugh. Ha-ha! Something like that.”
“And then you said: ‘But no one’s going to go up the mountains!’ Just like that? No repetitions? No sort-ofs?”
“I don’t think so.”
“This is a most astonishing contrast with the moral response, you see. Only a minute or two earlier you were saying things like: ‘It’s just a sort of a, a sort of a, a, a, a question of as it were sort of behaving sort of, well, for want of a better word, decently, sort of thing.’ And now here you are getting out one, two, three … nine words in a row without any defensive byplay at all.”
“Exactly. But we had got onto a subject I do happen to know something about. I don’t know much about most things, but I do know whether people will be going up the Alps or not.”
Phil makes a note.
“May I just ask you one more question?” he says.
“Shoot.”
“Just say if you’d prefer to knock off.”
“No, no. It really gives me a kick to be of some use like this.”
“Well,” says Phil, “do you remember that time when we were undergraduates, and we hitch-hiked to Rome?”
“Yes,” says Howard, puzzled. “But what’s that got to do with it?”
“And on the way we went through Switzerland?”
“Yes. But …”
“And in the youth hostel in Interlaken we met an American called Todd?”
Howard thinks.
“The man with the beard?” he asks.
“That’s right,” says Phil. “A curly black beard.”
“The one who used to hollow out the inside of a baguette for breakfast, and fill it up with condensed milk, and lower it into his mouth like a sword-swallower?”
“That’s right.”
Howard laughs. “That was the lunatic who insisted we climbed the Eiger with him,” he says, “and the clouds came down, and we lost the path, and we almost walked over the top of a thousand-metre cliff, and …”
His voice trails away. The smile fades from his face. He gazes thoughtfully at a spot about half-way up the wall, blinking slowly.
Phil makes rapid notes.
“Good,” he says. “Well done. That’s nice. I like the blinking. I shouldn’t have thought of the blinking.”
Howard has the feeling that the floor is dropping away beneath his feet, as if he is in an express lift.
His voice sounds as if it is attempting to name the floors as he passes them.
“Oh, I see…” he says. “Oh, heavens, I don’t think that’s got anything to do with it…. I mean, we only got half-way up…. The fact that three halfwits without even a rope tried to … Well, all right, everyone knows that there are going to be a few fools who insist on trying to break their necks…. You’re always going to get some tiny minority you can’t take into consideration….”
Phil notes it all down.
Howard falls and falls. It’s the kind of sensation that people pay money to suffer in fair grounds. To think that this abyss of revelation was waiting inside himself all the time!
“I see what you mean,” he says at last. He makes little humorous concessive noises in his throat, to admit his mistake. He adopts his familiar ape walk, with knees bent outwards and fingers trailing, to express his wry awareness of having boobed. He is at his most Howard-like, his funniest and most lovable. You can create a good impression on yourself by being right, he realizes, but for creating a good impression on others there’s nothing to beat being totally and catastrophically wrong.