I was startled. Even now, she did not know when she was beaten.
“What do you think I could say?”
“Can’t you just tell them that they’ve got to open this business all over again?”
Her eyes were wide open. She looked like a woman making love. She was so fervent that it was uncomfortable to be near her.
“I shall have to think whether there’s anything I can do,” I said.
By then Howard was on his way towards us, and she did not speak any more.
As the door closed behind them, Margaret remarked, “Of course there isn’t anything you can do.”
“Of course there isn’t,” I said.
“He hasn’t got a leg to stand on, has he?”
“Less than that, I should have thought.”
We sat down, neither of us in good spirits, and held hands. “No one,” I said, “could call that a particularly agreeable party.”
“Anyway,” said Margaret, “you’re not required to see them again.”
I said no.
Margaret was smiling.
“I must say, I thought you got pretty rough with him.”
“I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”
“That’s not quite all, is it?”
I smiled. We knew each other’s intuitive likes and dislikes too well.
“I can’t pretend,” I said, “that he’s exactly my cup of tea.”
“Whereas, if he hadn’t done what he unfortunately has done, you wouldn’t be surprised if I thought he’d got a sort of integrity, would you?”
We were laughing at each other. The fret of the evening was passing away. We were reminding each other in the shorthand of marriage that, when we made mistakes about people, they were liable to be a specific kind of mistake. As a young man, I had been fascinated by, and so had overvalued, the ambivalent, the tricky, the excessively fluid, and even now, though they no longer suggested to me the mystery of life as they once did, I had a weakness for them. I saw value in Tom Orbell, for instance, that others didn’t. Certainly not Margaret, whose own weakness was the exact opposite. The moral roughneck, the mauvais coucheur, often seemed to her to have a dignity and elevation not granted to the rest of us. She was not taken in by the fluid, but on the other hand, just because a character was not fluid, was craggy in its egotism, she was likely to think it specially deserving of respect. If, as she said, grinning at her own expense, Howard had come to us with different credentials, I could easily have imagined her regarding him as a man of fine quality.
“I grant you that he’s not two-faced,” I said. “But what’s the use of that, when the one face he has got is so peculiarly unpleasant?”
5: A Party for a Purpose
DURING our parting from Laura Howard, when she was demanding that I talk to my brother, we had not told her that we were spending Christmas in his house. In fact, we arrived there on Christmas Eve, and after dinner Martin’s wife and I were for a few minutes alone in the drawing-room. Or alone, to be more exact, in a room of which the drawing-room was only half: for Irene had invited some of the Fellows and their wives for wine and cheese at nine o’clock, and she had already furled back the bronze doors between drawing-room and dining-room. Yes, bronze doors: the house, before the college acquired it, had been a piece of luxurious modernist building of a generation before. Now it was divided into two sections, and let out to college officers. By the standards of the ’50s, Martin’s section, which was the larger one, was sizeable for a professional man’s house.
The children were all in bed, their boy and girl, Margaret’s son by her first marriage, and ours. Margaret was upstairs: Martin was uncorking bottles in the kitchen: Irene and I sat alone on opposite sides of the fire. She had been asking me about my work, and presumably I gave a heavy reply, for she broke out with a yelp of glee: “The trouble is, Margaret doesn’t make fun of you enough!”
If one had just heard her voice without seeing her, one would have guessed that she was a very young woman, mischievous, light, high-spirited. Actually, as I glanced across the fireplace, I saw a woman in the early forties, looking much more worn than her husband. She had always been tall and big-framed, but recently her shoulders had rounded and she had put on weight; not only had her bosom got full and shapeless, but she had thickened through the middle. By contrast to this body, comfortably slumped into middle-age, her face seemed thinner and fined-down; the skin of her cheeks had lost its bloom, and underneath the make-up there was a faint, purplish undertint. And yet, it was still a reckless face. Some men would still find her attractive. Underneath full lids, her eyes were narrow, treacle-brown, disrespectful and amused.
Nevertheless, when Martin came in with a complaint, she was not amused, but dead serious. Where was the specimen he had picked up yesterday on Wicken Fen? Who could have moved it? Martin was for once off-balance. There was a distraught, hare-like look in his eye. As a small boy he had been more of a collector than any of us. Now the addiction was coming back. Was it because he was reconciling himself to not making a go of academic physics? Was that why he concentrated so much on his pupils, and then in his spare time went of in search of botanical species? Anyway, he was methodically ticking off the English flora. That night he thought he had lost one: he was showing the signs of phobia of loss.
Worried, active, Irene started from her chair and went out with him. Within three minutes she was back.
“That’s all right,” she said, her expression relieved and earnest.
“The trouble is,” I said maliciously, “you don’t make fun of him enough.”
Irene giggled, but she did not really think that it was funny. She broke out: “But how do you think he is?”
“Don’t you know?”
“I think so,” she said honestly, “but I’m never sure.”
I nodded. He was a secretive man: people, even those nearest to him, thought him cautious, calculating, and capable of being ruthless.
“I don’t believe you need worry,” I said. “I fancy he’s pretty happy.”
“Do you?” She shone with pleasure.
“I should be surprised if he wasn’t.”
“I must say,” she cried, “I should like to bring off something for him.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wouldn’t it be good if he could get something?”
For a second, I was surprised at her. She was no fool. She knew that, after throwing away the chance of power, even if he had thrown it away for a qualm or set of qualms that she did not share or understand, he must have times when he would like the chance back again. So, with the energy she had once scattered on her own adventures, she was now not only longing, but working, for him to get another kind of job. It was mildly ironic, when one thought how, as a young woman, she had shocked the bourgeois, to find her set on seeing him a cosy, bourgeois success. She had closed her mind to what she used to think of as “the big world”: she wanted him to climb in the college’s little one.
“That’s what this is in aid of,” she said, pointing to the glasses in the dining-room.
She was doing it without hypocrisy. She did not possess in the slightest degree the gift, so desirable in the life of affairs, of being able to keep the right hand from knowing what the left is doing. Her right hand knew, all right. Shamelessly, innocently, she wanted to help push him up the college ladder and install them both in the Lodge before the end.
When I realised what she was up to, I thought she was pitching her hopes far too high. The Mastership, the Vice-Chancellorship — her fancy was making pictures of them, just as it used to make pictures of the dashing ideal lover when she was a girl. But Martin had no chance at all of ever becoming Master. She was not cut out for politics, she did not know when to hope and when not to hope. The most she could expect for Martin was that, if Arthur Brown were elected next year (which I still could not believe was on the cards), Martin might get the senior tutorship. That was his ceiling, so far as the college was concerned. Then I remembered Laura Howard’s sneer, that Martin was planning to step into Brown’s shoes. Was that true, I wondered? I had seen my brother’s command of tactics when he was spending his time in the corridors of power. Why should I think he was committed to Francis Getliffe? Why should not Martin be preparing to come in on Brown’s side, incidentally freeing an agreeable niche for himself?