‘What about the Poles?’
‘They’re practically all gone. I’ve worked myself out of work.’
‘Why not come back to the English Department? Guy needs help.’
‘Oh!’ Clarence sighed. She could visualise his face drawn down with guilty dejection as he said: ‘I loathe teaching. And the students bore me to tears.’
‘Then what are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know. I might get some decoding at the Legation.’
‘I thought you despised the Legation and everyone in it.’
‘One has to do something.’
Clarence, keeping his distance as they walked on the narrow path, was putting up a show of detachment from her; an unconvincing show. From sheer need for distraction she was tempted to make a gesture to regain him, but she did nothing. A romantic, he was never likely to be content with the prosaic companionship which was all she had to offer.
They were approaching the park gate and could hear the traffic of the main road. Clarence slowed his pace, unwilling, now that he had started talking, to leave the park’s encouraging cover for the interruptions and buffetings of the street.
Sighing again and saying reflectively: ‘I don’t know!’ he let his thoughts wander into the metaphysical byways that skirted his self-pity and self-contempt. ‘How much easier life must be when one has that little bit of extra something that tips one to the manic rather than the depressive side.’
‘You think it’s just a matter of chemistry?’
‘Well, isn’t it? What are we but a component of chemicals?’
‘Surely something more.’
Not wanting to leave the particular for the general, he said: ‘The truth is, I’ve been frustrated all my life. I’ll die of it. But I’m dying already. The beginning of death is ceasing to desire to live.’
‘Oh, we’re all dying,’ Harriet answered him impatiently.
‘Some of us are alive – anyway, for the moment. Look at Guy!’
They both looked ahead at Guy whose white shirt could be seen glimmering through the darkness. His voice came to them. He was on to his favourite subject – the sufferings of the peasants, the sufferings of the world. Sufferings, Harriet thought, that would remain long after Guy had talked himself into his grave. Catching the word ‘Russia’, she smiled.
Clarence had caught it, too. On a high, complaining note of inquiry, as though the question had never occurred to him before, he asked: ‘What is the basis of his love affair with Russia?’
She said: ‘I think it’s the need to put his faith into something. His father was an old-fashioned radical. Guy was brought up as a free thinker, but he has a religious temperament. So he believes in Russia. That’s another home for little children above the bright blue sky.’
‘In fact,’ said Clarence, ‘he’s simply what the psychologists call “a rebel son of a rebel father”.’
This idea was new to Harriet. She might consider it later but was not prepared to let Clarence dismiss Guy so easily. She said: ‘There’s more to it than that,’ and there probably was more to it. When Guy was growing up the mills and mines were idle. The majority of the men he knew, his own father among them, had been on the dole. He had watched his father, a skilled man, highly intelligent, decline and become, through despair and the illness brought by despair, unemployable. He had resented this waste of human energy and became absorbed in the politics of the wasteland and the welfare of the wasted.
Mildly scornful, Clarence went on: ‘And David’s another one. They both imagine that life can be perfected by dialectical materialism.’
She said: ‘David is more realistic, and probably more rigid.’
‘And Guy?’
‘I don’t know.’ It was true, she did not know. She had discovered, but still could not elucidate, the resolute impracticability of Guy’s way of life. She said: ‘I told him once that when I married him, I thought I was marrying the rock of ages. I pretty soon found he was capable of absolute lunacy. For instance, he once thought of marrying Sophie just to give her a British passport.’
Harriet’s tone of criticism at once caused Clarence to change his attitude. He said reprovingly: ‘Still Guy is not like most of these left-wing idealists. He doesn’t just talk, he does things. For instance, he visited the political prisoners in the Vacaresti jail. Quite a risky business in a country like this.’
‘When did he do that?’ Harriet asked, alarmed.
‘Before the war. He took them books and food.’
‘I hope he doesn’t do it now?’
‘I don’t know. He doesn’t tell me.’
He did not tell Harriet either. She realised he resented her intervention in his activities and could be secretive. She felt resentful, too, thinking that when he was out of the flat – which he often was – he might be up to anything.
‘He’s an idealist, of course,’ Clarence said.
‘I’m afraid he is.’
‘You’re becoming critical of him.’
‘It’s not that I’m no longer grateful for his virtues, but they extend too far beyond me. He’s too generous, too forbearing, too easily called upon. People feel they can call on him for anything, but he’s always somewhere else when I need him.’
‘Yet what better could you find?’
She did not attempt to answer this question. Her feeling was that she had been taken in, and too easily: perhaps because he was so unlike herself. In early adolescence she had been skinny and charmless. Feeling unwanted, she had been both aggressive and withdrawn, so her aunt had nagged at her: ‘Why can’t you make yourself pleasant to people? Don’t you want them to like you?’ Whether she wanted it or not, she soon learnt not to expect it. When she did make an effort to please, it seemed to her she aroused not liking but suspicion. Being unsuccessful in the world herself, she had to find someone who would be successful for her. And who better than Guy Pringle, that large, comfortable, generous, embraceable figure? But she should have recognised warning signs. There was, for instance, the fact that he had so few possessions. She had put this down to poverty, but quickly discovered that when he was given anything he promptly lost it. She began to suspect that he saw possessions as a tie. They revealed too much. They defined their owner and so limited him. Guy was not to be defined or limited or held in fee.
There was, she admitted, an emotional shyness about him, but his elusiveness came from a deeper cause than that. And yet, as Clarence had asked, what better could she find? She envisaged a creature similar, but dependent; someone she could compass; her own possession; a child, she supposed. That might be permitted one day, but Guy insisted that at the moment their circumstances were too insecure for children. Was that a reason or an excuse? After all, children were possessions. They, too, defined and limited their possessors.
Meanwhile, Clarence was saying: ‘I believe in Guy. I think you’re lucky to have found him. He has integrity, but I suppose that’s the trouble. You’re trying to destroy it.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’re filling him with middle-class ideas. You make him bath every day and get his hair cut.’
‘He has to grow up,’ Harriet said. ‘If he hadn’t married me, he’d probably have wasted his life as a sort of eternal student, living out of a rucksack. I think he was probably thankful for an excuse to compromise.’
‘That’s just the point. One is corrupted by compromise. And respectability is compromise. Look at me. I went to an expensive school where I was flogged like a beast. I wanted to revolt and I dared not. I wanted to fight in Spain and I dared not. I could have entered any profession I chose: I chose nothing. That was my revolt against my own respectability – and it led to nothing. I compromised with respectability and was corrupted.’