“I did not raise objection,” Azik said. He added, putting a finger to the side of his squashed and spreading nose: “Remember, I am a Jewish papa.”
I told him, I sometimes felt I should have made a pretty good Jewish papa myself. But some of our thoughts were in parallel, and one at right angles.
“Your brother’s is a good family, I should say,” said Azik.
I would have disillusioned him, if it had been necessary. But it wasn’t. He knew as well as I did that the Eliots were not a “good family” in the old continental sense. He knew precisely where we came from. But he meant something different. Azik saw, much more clearly than most Englishmen, what the English society had become. It was tangled, it was shifting its articulations, but in it men like Martin had their place.
I asked Azik whether he had seen much of Pat.
“Ach, he is very young,” said Azik, with monumental good nature and a singular lack of interest. Our thoughts still did not meet. Azik began to speak, quietly but without reticence, about money, Muriel’s money. “I have to be careful, my friend. Mu will have something of her own when she is twenty-one.” Calvert (as Azik always called Roy) had not had much except a big allowance: but what he left had been “tied up” for Mu. “He was a very careful man,” said Azik with a kind of respect. “However, that is chicken feed.” Azik, totally unprudish about money, unlike most of my rich English acquaintances, told me the exact sums. “But Calvert’s father, no, that isn’t such chicken feed.” Rosalind had been bequeathed a life interest in half of it; the rest was in trust for Muriel, and would come to her next year. “Fortunately, she has her head screwed on.”
Before we parted, Azik could not resist explaining to me how different his own dispositions were. “I have made over a capital sum to Rosalind with no strings attached. So she can walk out on me tomorrow if she can’t stand me any longer.” He gave an uxorious chuckle. As for David, well, need anyone ask? Though I did not need to ask, Azik insisted on telling me of a magniloquent settlement.
After another instalment of the Absurd, we returned for the second interval in the private room. This time, seeing that Pat had reappeared and was once more close to Muriel, I went straight to them.
“Hello, Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, treacle-brown eyes wide open and cheeky. “Who’d ever have thought of seeing you here?”
“Daddy would have hated it if you weren’t here, you know that, Sir Lewis,” said Muriel, precisely. She was utterly composed.
I asked them how they liked the play. Muriel smiled, lashes falling close to her cheeks. Pat began: “I suppose we can’t communicate, at least that’s the idea, isn’t it?”
Yes, that was the idea.
He looked at Muriel. “But I can communicate with you sometimes, can’t I?”
“I think,” she said, “I can communicate with Daddy.”
For a moment, I had cursed myself for mentioning the play. It was true that for two acts it had been expressing non-communication: but at the end of the second, as though for once human beings could make themselves clear to one another, there had been a lucid, and in fact a lyrically eloquent description of fellatio. I had been with Pat in company where he would have found this an occasion too hilarious to resist. But no, now he was holding his tongue: was he being protective towards her, or was it too early to frighten her?
I watched her, her eyes meekly cast down. She did not appear to be in need of protection. She was so composed, more than he was. I knew that Rosalind, like other mothers whose own early lives had not been unduly pure, had taken extreme care of her. She hadn’t gone unsupervised, she had had to account for any date with a young man. And yet I should have guessed — though I wouldn’t have trusted any of my guesses about her very far — that she was one of those girls who somehow understand all about the sexual life before they have a chance to live it.
“Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, “are you open on New Year’s Eve this year?”
This time he was really being brash. I had to answer that I had been pretty much occupied that autumn, we hadn’t made up our minds. That was, in literal terms, true. But Margaret and I had got into the habit of asking our families and close friends for New Year’s Eve: neither of us had suggested breaking it. The point was, he was begging for the two of them — as though Vicky, who had been invited the year before, could be dropped, or as though they might all have an amicable time together.
“I think,” put in Muriel, quick, sure-footed, “Daddy said that we’re having dinner with you soon, aren’t we?” (She meant Azik, Rosalind and herself.)
Yes, I said.
“That will be nice.”
Pat looked at me, as though he would have liked to wink. He wasn’t used to anyone as cool as this — who could, so equably, declare his proposition closed.
As Margaret and I were given a lift home in one of the diplomatic cars, acquaintances beside us, we couldn’t have our after-the-play talk. In the lift, going up to our flat, she was silent, and stayed so until she had switched on the drawing-room lights and poured herself a drink. She asked if I wanted one, but her tone was hard. Sitting in the chair the other side of the fireplace, she said: “So that’s the way it is!”
Her face was flushed: the adrenalin was pouring through her: she was in a flaming temper.
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean.”
“I haven’t any idea.”
“You have,” she said. “Your nephew. What does he think he’s up to?”
“How should I know?”
“It’s intolerable,” she cried. I was thinking, yes, she was kind, she took to heart what Vicky might go through: but also Margaret was no saint, she was angry because she herself had, at intervals, been taken in by Pat. I was getting provoked, because of the disparity we both knew between Margaret’s kind of temper and my own. I had to make an effort to sound peaceful.
“Look here, I don’t know much about this girl (Muriel), but if it’s any consolation to you, I fancy that she can look after herself—”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said. But she said it with edge and meaning.
We were on the verge of a quarrel. I said: “I don’t understand.”
“I was thinking of her father.” She went on, with exaggerated reasonableness: “Of course he was in a higher class than your nephew Pat. But shouldn’t you have said that there might be some sort of resemblance—?”
“Nonsense.” This was an old argument. With the gap in age between us, she had felt shut out from parts of my youth. At times she was jealous of the friends who had known me when I was a young man. Francis Getliffe and Charles March — with those she was on close terms. George Passant, she had worked to understand. But Roy Calvert, who was dead, whom she could never know, she could not help believe that I had inflated, had given a significance or an aura that he could not conceivably, in her eyes, have possessed.
“Well, Pat does set out to be a miniature Byronic hero, doesn’t he?”
“Roy Calvert,” I said, “had about as much use for Byronic heroes as I have.”
“But still,” she said, “you do admit that he succeeded in bringing misery to everyone, literally everyone, so far as I’ve ever heard, who had any relations with him?”
I sat without speaking.
“I know you claim that he had a sort of insight. But I can’t convince myself that the spiritual life, or the tragic sense, or whatever they like to call it, is a bit like that.”