What were Martin and Skeffington doing? I asked her. Martin was “plugging on”. She did not complain of the way he was handling the tactics. To her, men were good or bad. Skeffington and Martin, who had been bad men the first time she came to our house, had now been transformed into good. When she trusted, she trusted absolutely. But she wanted “to put on some more pressure”. One waverer had decided not to vote for re-opening: they were now four short of a majority. Who was against, of the people I knew, I asked? The old men and the reactionaries, she said with passion (whether she started with any politics I could not tell, but she had taken over her husband’s), Arthur Brown, Winslow, Nightingale of course. One or two — such as Gay, because he was “too old to understand”, and Crawford from magisterial neutrality — would not vote either way, but that was equivalent to voting against. The “young reactionaries”, like G S Clark and Lester Ince, were flat against. So was Tom Orbell. As she mentioned his name, Laura swore and Margaret joined in. Abusing him, they made a united front — “Blast the fat snake,” said Margaret.
Francis Getliffe? I asked. Laura cursed again. “He’s still sitting on the fence.” She gave an account, second-hand from her husband, with the pained, knowing smile of the innocent being cynical, of how one can never trust people who pretend to be liberal. They were always the worst. It seemed hardly tactful of her, since she was disposing of Margaret, Martin, and, Skeffington apart, their entire side.
Meanwhile Margaret was frowning, not because Laura was being heavy-footed, but because Francis was a favourite of hers. Of my old friends, he was the one she respected most.
While Laura was with us, Margaret did not ask me anything direct. I could see that she was anxious for Laura to go. Once or twice Laura missed her cue. Then Margaret promised to ring her up during the week, and at last we were alone.
I had gone to the window, and was looking down on the road, over the centre of which the vapour lamps were swinging in the wind. A bare and lurid glimmer reached the trees opposite, but it was too dark to make out the fringes of the park. As I stood there, Margaret had put her arm round me.
“This isn’t going too well, is it?” she said.
“Well, it looks as though it might take some time.”
“Is that fair?”
“I should have thought so.” I was being evasive, and we both knew it. She wanted us to be loving, but she was too much committed to stop.
“No,” she said. “Doesn’t it look as though it might go wrong?”
“Everything that can be done is being done, you needn’t worry about that. Martin knows that place like the palm of his hand.”
“But it can go wrong, can’t it?”
“However do I know?”
Just for an instant, she smiled at me, the smile of marriage, the smile of knowledge. Then, with all her ardour, she broke out: “Do you feel like taking a hand yourself?”
She knew, just as well as I did, that I should be cross, should feel trapped. She had known that, when she let Laura stay there, so that I was plunged into the middle of it. She knew, better than I did because she had struggled with it, how I disliked a choice forced upon me, not approached by myself “in my freedom”. Now she had done precisely that.
The choice was there. Left to myself I could have blurred it. I wasn’t unused to living with situations which were morally ambiguous, or aspects of myself that I didn’t specially like. I didn’t have so much self-regard as Martin, and thus I hadn’t so much compulsion to make a gesture. I had lived for a long time in the corridors of power. It was a condition of living there that the gestures were not made. Most of my colleagues, the men who had the power, would not have considered interfering about Howard. They would have said it wasn’t the business of anyone outside the college. They were not cynical, but they kept their eyes on the sheet of paper in front of them. They were not in the least cynicaclass="underline" they believed, quite humbly though comfortingly for themselves, that “the world was usually right”.
I was too much of an odd man out to believe that. In fact, doing so seemed to me one of the less dramatic but most dangerous of all the temptations of power. Yet I had lived that disciplined life for nearly twenty years. Perhaps I was the last person to see the changes it made, just as one doesn’t see the changes in one’s own face, and then, in a photograph, notices an ageing man — can that be me?
I could fairly think to myself that I had no responsibility about Howard. It just was not my business. If I did as Margaret was pressing me, some of my old friends would resent it, because I was being a busybody. They would resent it more, incidentally, because I was being a busybody on the opposition side. I was not likely to be in Arthur Brown’s confidence again. That would be a sacrifice, nothing like so heavy a one as Skeffington risked in the line of duty, but still a sacrifice. Why should I make it, when I had lost any taste for exhibition that I ever had, when I plain disliked even the prospect of being thought officious?
If I had added up the arguments, there would scarcely have seemed any in favour. True, I was inquisitive, acutely so, and my inquisitiveness was not weakening: the only way I could satisfy it in this business was to get right inside. Also I knew, and I knew it with the wreckage and guilt of part of my life behind me, that there were always good, sound, human, sensitive reasons for contracting out. There is great dignity in being a spectator: and if you do it for long enough, you are dead inside. I knew that too well, because it was only by luck that I had escaped.
As I stood there, though, gazing down on the road, Margaret’s arm round me, I was not searching down into my experience. I was merely aware of a kind of heavy vexation. I was thinking, I had met few people who, made aware beyond all self-deception of an inconvenient fact, were not at its mercy. Hypocrites who saw the naked truth and acted quite contrary — they were a romantic conception. Those whom we call hypocrites simply had a gift for denying to themselves what the truth was. On this occasion, that was a gift which I did not possess.
I said to Margaret, ungraciously, that I would think it over. She had heard me say, often enough, that choices never took as long to make as we pretend: the time was taken in finding the reasons to justify them. She was watching me, face averted, looking out into the dark. She knew precisely what was going on. She knew that I was fretted and sullen because she had not let me evade, or put off, the choice — and that I was not willing to admit to her that it was already made.
12: The Stare of Delusion
THERE was another result of the disciplined life, I thought when I was in a better mood, as well as its temptations. It was a week before I could manoeuvre even a day or two free in Cambridge. So far as leisure went, I was living my life backwards: while Martin and the others in the college were no more tied than I had been as a young man.
On the Thursday afternoon following Laura’s visit, Martin, to whom I had telephoned, had arranged for us both to meet Howard at his school. My train was late: the taxi slithered through the wet streets, the shop windows already spilling pools of light on to the pavement; through the streets of Romsey town, in which I could not recall, in my time at Cambridge, having been before, which seemed as remote from the collegiate Cambridge as the town where I was born. The school was right at the edge of the suburb: as the taxi drove up, there outside the gates, in the February murk, stood Martin.
He wanted a word about some questions we should ask Howard. While the rain drizzled on us, we agreed how to try it. Then we started to push our way through crowds of children, rushing and squealing into the corridor, just set free from the last lesson of the afternoon.