ON the Saturday morning in our drawing-room, Margaret was asking me about my father. A beam of sunlight edged through the window behind me, irradiated half a picture on the far wall, a patch of fluorescent blue. It was all easy and peacemaking. Yet it felt unfamiliar, that I wasn’t catching the bus down to the Assize Hall.
I had returned very late the night before, and we hadn’t talked much. Yes, I told her now, Martin and I had been to visit the old man (actually, we had gone straight from that tea-time with George). He had complained vaguely that he wasn’t “quite A1”: but, when we asked what was the matter, he either put us off or didn’t know, saying that “they” were looking after him nicely. “They” appeared to consist of the doctor and a district visitor who came in twice a week. My father spoke of her with enthusiasm. “She goes round all the old people who haven’t got anyone to look after them,” he said, expressing mild incredulity at the social services. We had told him that it was his own fault that he hadn’t someone to look after him, it was his own mule-like obstinacy. But he scented danger, with an old man’s cunning he suspected that we were plotting to drag him away. He wouldn’t budge. “I should curl up my toes if anyone shifted me,” he said. His morale seemed to be high. Incidentally, he had with fair consistency called Martin and me by each other’s names: but he had done that in our childhood, he was no more senile now than when I last saw him.
Margaret gave a faint smile, preoccupied as to whether we ought to leave him there, how far had we the right to interfere.
Just then Charles, still on holiday, entered in a new dressing gown, smelling of shaving soap. Over the last year he had suddenly become careful of his appearance. He said hallo, looking at me with scrutinising eyes. He didn’t remind me of his warning, but I hadn’t any doubt that he had searched the papers each day. And his forecasts had proved not so far from the truth. There had been references to my presence at the trial, some just news, a few malicious. An enterprising journalist had done some research on my connection with George Passant. He had even latched on to Gough’s casual comment the day before. “Venusberg trial – Lewis Eliot again with boyhood friends.”
Not waiting for Charles to be tactful, I asked if he had noticed that.
He nodded.
“Well?” he said.
“One gets a bit tired of it. But still–”
Margaret gave a curse. I didn’t tell him, but he certainly knew that it was true for me, that no one I had known, including the hardest political operators, ever quite got used to it. Instead I said (using reflectiveness to deny the here-and-now, the little sting), that this kind of comment, the mass media’s treatment of private lives, had become far more reckless in my own lifetime.
Charles was not much impressed. This was the climate which he had grown up in and took for granted.
“Have you done any good?” he asked.
I thought of George at tea the day before.
“Very little,” I said. “Probably none at all.”
Charles broke into a broad smile. “Anyway, we’ve got to give you credit for honesty, haven’t we?” He teased me, with the repetitive family gibes. Margaret was laughing, relieved that we hadn’t reverted to our quarrel. Why did I insist on getting into trouble? Even when I wasn’t needed? Fair comment, I said, thinking of George again.
I hadn’t seen Charles at all the night before, and he hadn’t had a chance to enquire about the trial itself. At last he did so. What was it really like?
I looked at them both. I repeated what I had said to Margaret, just before going to sleep.
“It’s unspeakable.” Then I added: “No, that’s foolish, we’ve been speaking about it all the week. But not been able to imagine it.”
I didn’t want to talk to him as I had done to Martin: perhaps I should have been freer, if it hadn’t been for the sexual heaviness that hung over it all. True, there wasn’t much, in verbal terms, that I could tell Charles: he had listened for years to people whose language wasn’t restrained, and I was sure the same was true with him and his friends. But together we didn’t talk like that. There was a reticence, a father-and-son reticence, on his side as well as mine, when it came to the brute facts, above all the brute facts of this case.
So I said, it had been appalling to listen to. Like an aeroplane journey that was going wrong: stretches of tedium, then the moments when one didn’t want to believe one’s ears. I couldn’t get it out of my experience, I told him.
“I haven’t had as much of it as you have,” said Margaret. “But that’s true–” she turned to Charles.
Once more, as with Martin, I was remembering Auschwitz. To these two, I did not need to say much more than the name.
A couple of summers before, when the three of us had been travelling in Eastern Europe, I had left Margaret and Charles in Krakow, and had driven off to the camp with an Australian acquaintance. We had walked through the museum, the neat streets, the cells, in silence. It was a scorching August day, under the wide cloudless Central European sky. At last we came to the end, and were walking back to the car. My acquaintance, who hadn’t spoken for long enough, said: “It’s a bastard, being a human being.”
Often this last week, I’d felt like that, I said to Charles. I was certain that his Uncle Martin had as well.
Charles was silent, regarding me with an expression that was grave, detached and unfamiliar.
After a few moments, I went on: “Did you know,” I said, “that there was a medieval heresy which believed that this is hell? That is, what we’re living in, here and now. Well, they may have had a point.”
Charles gazed at me with the same expression. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. Then in a hurry, as though anxious not to argue, trying to climb back upon the plane of banter, he asked me, why was it that unbelievers always knew more about theological doctrine than anyone else? However had I acquired that singular fact? He was being articulate, sharp-witted, smiling, determined not to become serious himself again, nor to let me be so.
After tea the following afternoon, when I was in one of the back rooms, Charles called out that there was someone for me on the telephone.
Who was it? He wouldn’t say. Soft voice, Charles added – slight accent, North Country perhaps.
I went into the hall, picked up the receiver, asked who was there, and heard: “This is Jack.”
“Jack who?”
“The one you’ve known longest.”
“Sorry,” I said, unwilling to play guessing games.
“It’s Jack Cotery,” came the voice, soft, reproachful. “Are you free, Lewis? I do want to see you.”
I was extremely busy, I said. All that night. I shouldn’t be at home the following day.
“It is important, it really is. I shan’t take half-an-hour.” Jack’s tone was unputoffable, wheedling, unashamed, just as it used to be.
“I don’t know when.”
“Only half-an-hour. I promise.”
I repeated, I was busy all that night.
“You’re alone now, aren’t you? I’ll just come and go.”
He had hung up before I could reply. When I rejoined Charles, he asked who had been speaking. A figure from the past, I said. A fairly disreputable figure. What did he want? “I assume,” I said, “that he’s trying to borrow money.” Why hadn’t I stopped him? Charles enquired, when he discovered that Jack Cotery was coming round. Irritably I shook my head, and went off to assemble a tray of drinks, reminded of how – with pleasure – I had done the same for George, that evening the previous December.
As soon as I heard the doorbell ring, I went and opened the door myself.
“Hello, Lewis,” breathed Jack Cotery confidentially.
I had seen him last about ten years before. He was my own age to the month: we had been in the same form at school. But he was more time-ravaged than anyone I knew. As a young man his black hair was glossy, his eyes were lustrous, he had a strong pillar of a neck: he had only to walk along the street to get appraising glances from women, to the envy of the rest of us. Now the hair was gone, the face not so much old as unrecognisably lined, still a clown’s face but as though the clown hadn’t put his make-up on. Even his carriage, which used to have the ease of someone who lived on good terms with his muscles, had lost its spring. But his glance was still humorous, giving the impression that he was making fun of me – and of himself.
I led the way into the study, put him in the chair where George had sat when he first broke the news.
“Will you have a drink?” I said.
“Now, Lewis.” He spoke with reproach. “You ought to know that I never was a drinking man.”
In fact, that had been true. “I’m a teetotaller nowadays, actually,” said Jack, as though it were a private joke. “Also a vegetarian. It’s rather interesting.”
“Is it?” I said. I turned to the whisky bottle. “Well, do you mind if I do?”
“So long as you take care of yourself.”
Sitting at the desk, glass in front of me, I looked across at his big wide-open eyes.
“Shall we get down to business?” I said. “There isn’t much time, I’m afraid–”
“Why are you so anxious to get rid of me, Lewis?”
“I am pretty tied up–”
“No, but you are anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you?”
He was laughing, without either rancour or shame. I couldn’t keep back some sort of a smile.
“Anyway,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you?”
“That isn’t the right question, Lewis.” Once more, he seemed both earnest and secretly amused.
“What do you mean?”
“The right question is this: Is there anything I can do for you?”
Once I had had some practice in learning when he was being sincere or putting on an act: although, often, he could be doing both at once, taking in himself as well as me. It was a long while since I had met anyone so labile, and I was at a loss.
“I’ve been following this horrible case, you see,” Jack went on. “I’m very sorry you are mixed up in that.”
“As a spectator.”
“No, Lewis, not quite that. Remember, I knew you a long time ago. I understand why you had to go–”
“Do you?”
“I think I do. Trust your old friend.” He put a finger to the side of his nose, in a gesture reminiscent of Azik Schiff talking of millions or of Jack himself, in old days, thinking how to make a quick pound. “You weren’t able to forget how George used to shout at us at midnight outside the jail. And we used to walk down the middle of the tramlines, later on at night, when the streets were empty, dreaming about a wonderful future. So when the future came, and it turned out to be this, you thought you had to stand by George. You weren’t going to let him sit there alone, were you?”
“That’s rather too simple,” I said. Also too sentimental, I was thinking: had he always made life sound softer than it was?
“You see, Lewis, you’re a kind man.” That was more sentimental. I wanted to stop him, but he went on: “I’ve heard people say all kinds of things about you. Often they hate you, don’t they? But they don’t realise how kind you are. Or perhaps they do, and it makes them hate you more.”
“I wish I could believe you,” I said. “But I don’t. I strongly suspect that, if I’d never existed, no one would have been a penny the worse.”
“Nonsense, man. I’m an absolute failure, aren’t I?”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“I do. I’m no use, if you put me up against the people you live among now. But I can see some things that they wouldn’t see if they lived to be a thousand. Perhaps because I’ve been a failure. I can see one or two things about you. I tell you this. You’ve lived a more Christian life than most of the Christians I know.”
It was my turn to say nonsense, more honestly than he had done. It was an astonishing statement, ludicrous in its own right, and also because Jack, when I knew him, took about as much account of Christianity as he did of Hamiltonian algebra.
“Oddly enough,” he said, “that’s what I came to tell you. Just that.”
It was possible – I was still suspicious, but of course I wanted to believe – that he was not pretending and had come for nothing else. A little later I discovered that he had made a special journey from Manchester – “on the chance of catching you”. It would have been more sensible, I said, to have rung up or written. “You know,” said Jack, “I always did like a bit of surprise.”
Perhaps it had been nothing but an impulse. But he had come to hearten me. Once or twice, when we were young men, he had taken time off from his chicanery or amours, to try to find me a love affair which would make me happier. The tone was the same, he liked bringing me comfort. That afternoon, I might have wished that the comfort was harder and nearer the truth – but none of us gets enough of it, we are grateful for it, whatever its quality, when it comes.
In his soft and modulated voice, Jack was talking, sadly, not nostalgically, about our early days. “No, Lewis, we all did each other harm, I’m sure we did. I was a bad influence on George, I know I was. And he wasn’t any good for me. Of course, you didn’t see the worst of it. But you suffered from it too, clearly you did.”
He said, eyes wide open, as when he was playing some obscure trick: “You know, I began to realise something, not so long ago. I thought – look here, I shouldn’t like to die, after the life I’ve lived.”
After a moment, I mentioned that, the summer before, I had met his first wife, Olive. He said: “Would you believe it, I’ve almost forgotten her.”
I knew that he had married again, and asked about it.
“No,” said Jack. “I extricated myself; some time ago.”
Just for an instant, his remorseful expression had broken, and he gave a smile that I had often seen – shameless, impudent, defiant. Or it might have been an imitation of that smile.
“Have you got anyone now?”
“I’ve given all that up.”
“How long for?”
“Absolutely and completely,” said Jack. “For good and all. You see, I’ve taken to a different sort of life.”
He explained that nowadays he spent much of his spare time in church. He explained it with the enthusiasm that once he used to spend on reducing all human aspirations down to the sexual act – and with the same humorous twitch, as though there was someone behind his shoulder laughing at him. How genuine was he? Sometimes one could indulge one’s suspiciousness too much. Would there be another twist, was this the end? Of that I couldn’t guess, I didn’t believe anyone would know the answers, until he was dead.
“Let’s be honest,” said Jack. “I didn’t just come to tell you you’d lived a Christian life. There’s something else–”
Right at the beginning, I had been counting on a double purpose. Now it came, and the laugh was against me.
“I think you ought to be a Christian – in faith as well as works. I really do.”
He asked, had he overrun his time? Could he have a few more minutes? I hadn’t expected that afternoon to end with Jack expending all his emotion trying to convert me. The old arguments flicked back and forth. The old theological questions. Then Jack said, you’d find it a strength, Lewis. You’d find it made this hideous business easier to take. Strangely, that was what I had said myself to Superintendent Maxwell. But now, as I replied to Jack, I did not believe it. Faith did not mean that one acquiesced so quietly, did it? Surely it was deeper than that? Believers had to confront these extremist questions: nothing I had read of them suggested that they were any more reconciled. I should have respected them less if they had been.
At last Jack went away. I offered to introduce him to my wife and son, but he reminded me, with a not quite saintly grin, how pressed I was for time.
When I joined Charles in the drawing-room, he said: “Well, how much did he want to borrow?”
“As a matter of fact,” I said, “the subject didn’t crop up.”