There were times when Ryle couldn’t repress asking Hillmorton a question about Liz just for the pleasure, or the mirage satisfaction, of mentioning her name. He knew that he could only get evasive exercises in reply, and he knew too by now that Hillmorton had his own private entertainment because his old and sensible friend was not behaving like an old and sensible man.
Ryle didn’t excuse himself: though in fact, apart from those questions to Liz’s father, he didn’t commit other follies in action, even if some filtered through his mind. He had once given Liz advice on this same topic: he must have been one of the few men, it occurred to him, to follow his own advice himself. Yet, sitting in his drawing-room at Whitehall Court, he sometimes felt the spring of the nerves when the telephone rang: only to find that it was his stockbroker or accountant.
Still, he was learning, late in life, what less stable men discover earlier; that any expectation, even a frustrated one, is – at any rate in its first stages – better than none. His spirits were higher than the year before, when he was at peace, anticipating nothing. A couple of days before the Christmas recess he was settled in his place in the Chamber, listening with some approach to content as fellow members expressed themselves.
Ryle sometimes grumbled – rather as Jenny had thought to herself – that to endure the legislative process, either in that House or in the other, you had to be brought up a parliamentarian man and boy. Committee stages, amendments, report, parliamentarians were unborable or appeared so, and Ryle wasn’t. Still, that was how the work got done. On Wednesdays they could talk at large. Someone introduced a general topic and moved for papers (having to withdraw his motion at the end, otherwise there might be embarrassment, since no one knew where, if anywhere, the papers were).
That particular Wednesday they were talking about conservation. As usual in these debates, one or two speakers had expert knowledge. Ryle was learning something. As usual also, one or two speakers were not specially relevant. One peer delivered a very strong allocution about Eskimo languages.
To Ryle’s surprise, he had found that Hillmorton was down to speak. As a rule, elder statesmen, like the working politicians they had once been, didn’t take part in such a discussion. Nevertheless, uncharacteristically, Hillmorton chose to make a speech. He also made – even compared with his October utterance on Europe – an uncharacteristic speech. It wasn’t long, but it was curiously sentimental. Hillmorton was speaking in praise of the English countryside, demanding that it should be left, so far as they could contrive it, exactly as it was.
Now Ryle had heard Hillmorton, when conversing with his normal detachment, remark that that same countryside was every square foot man-made, and that no revenant from as recently as the seventeenth century would be likely to recognise his native spot. Further, Ryle knew for sure that Hillmorton detested the countryside as a place to live in, and had, all the time they had been friends, used any excuse to escape from his home in Suffolk.
Ryle was thinking, involuted and deeply forested men like Hillmorton seemed to be able to let themselves flood into sentimentality – at any rate in public – as more open characters seldom could.
After his speech, Hillmorton stayed, according to etiquette, to hear the next one, and then walked out. As he passed Ryle’s place, he said, fingers stroking one of the unicorns on the wooden Bar:
‘Have you had enough of this?’
When they reached the lobby outside, Hillmorton asked if Ryle felt like coming to Brooks’. On the way – this time, as it was early evening, they took Hillmorton’s favourite and nostalgic promenade, walking across the corner of the park – Ryle, still diverted, was gibing at some of the afternoon speeches. Then he referred to Hillmorton’s own.
‘New line for you, Hal.’
‘You thought so, did you?’
‘How much do you believe of all that?’
Hillmorton’s face was bland in the winter dark.
‘How should I know?’
They walked on, up the Duke of York’s steps, into Pall Mall. Ryle could hear, without looking, that the other man was limping, scuffing one of his feet. He had noticed the same effect during the past week or two, without paying much attention, and without mentioning it. Elderly men, especially elderly men proud of their condition, didn’t welcome being told of minor disabilities. They were on the south, the club-filled, side of Pall Mall: the other was bright, Dickensianly welcoming with the Christmas illuminations, false and also cosy, artificial Christmas trees bedecked with coloured bulbs shining out among guns and fishing tackle.
Hillmorton made an effort at disinterested observation: ‘Should you say that was jolly?’ he remarked.
‘Perhaps it is.’
‘In my house, when I was a boy,’ Hillmorton kept up the same tone, ‘we always had roast beef for Christmas dinner. Just roast beef.’
‘One-upmanship,’ Ryle commented. ‘Showing that you went back earlier than those vulgar Victorian inventions. Like turkeys.’
‘I dare say, I dare say.’
In the club, in the same long room in which Liz had asked her father for money, Hillmorton ordered drinks and drank his own off fast. Then he limped across to fetch another, dragging his right foot, the toe of his shoe trailing along the carpet. This had become so obvious that Ryle decided it was uncivil not to say a word. He asked, when Hillmorton had regained his chair: ‘Is this sciatica you’ve got?’
‘I dare say.’ It sounded another mechanical response.
The room was about half full, somewhere near the right density, not too full to be oppressive, men drinking as comfortably as themselves.
‘Is it painful?’ Ryle was referring to Hillmorton’s leg.
‘Not so as one would notice.’
‘These things disappear as suddenly as they come.’
‘I dare say.’ Hillmorton added with an air of casualness: ‘As a matter of fact, I think I’ve been feeling slightly under the weather.’
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing to speak of. Just slight malaise.’
‘What does that mean?’ Ryle asked.
Either there appeared to be no definable symptoms, or else Hillmorton was dismissing them. Ryle, inquisitive about most things, was not specially so about clinical troubles. But he said, out of duty: ‘Perhaps you ought to see a doctor.’
‘Oh, I’m not much good at seeing doctors, don’t you know.’
‘Perhaps you’d better.’
‘We’ll see. If it doesn’t clear up.’
They had another round of drinks. Ryle was invited to stay for dinner. In the dining room, Ryle, after appreciating that Hillmorton was eating a fair meal, didn’t give any further thought to his health, or to anyone else’s. In fact, he was wondering, and speculating across the table, about something considerably less vital.
They had each sat often enough at club dinner tables like this, eating a meal like this (that night they had ordered lamb chops and devils-on-horseback). It had sometimes been a soothing way to spend an evening. But how long could these clubs last, Ryle was letting fall a commonplace question among men similar to themselves. The cost of manpower would sink them, no machines in the world were substitutes for human hands, the present-day young would never know what a well-run club could be. Anyway the present-day young weren’t fond of joining them and certainly didn’t use them to dine in. Hillmorton replied with an indifferent offhand remark – perhaps these clubs would follow the American pattern and become luncheon houses pure and simple. Better to close them, said Ryle.
His old historical curiosity was stirring, as he looked round the agreeable decorous masculine room, decanters on tables, lights beaming off cutlery and peach-fed cheeks. Why did such clubs originate in England? Bourgeois prosperity, of course. No, that was the answer for the nineteenth-century clubs, which meant nearly all of them: but, as it happened, not for this one. The gaming clubs had become domesticated by bourgeois prosperity, though. If resurrected fifty years after death, Charles James Fox and his friends would have found the architecture of this club familiar, but not the company: too staid, too respectable, in some respects too grown-up.
In English prosperous life – this was another thought of Ryle’s – the clubs a man belonged to told one something. Hillmorton – Brooks’, Turf, Pratt’s. But he had recently resigned from the Turf, one of his economies. Adam Sedgwick – Athenaeum alone. Swaffield – none. Lorimer – at one time the United Services, now resigned. Clare – White’s, St James’s, Carlton, Pratts’. Ryle himself – Athenaeum, Garrick, Beefsteak. If one could read the fine print, those details had a certain eloquence, just as accents had.
Hillmorton and Ryle didn’t stay late in the club. After a glass of port upstairs, Hillmorton said that he ought to be making his way to his ‘little place’. This reference Ryle didn’t understand, but it meant the bedroom at his youngest daughter’s house. Standing outside the cool façade in St James’s Street (the pair of them looking quite unlike Gillray’s Sheridan and the Duke of Devonshire, outside the same façade) they said good night.
They wouldn’t see each other until the new year, after the recess, said Hillmorton: he wouldn’t be in the House the next two days. They didn’t shake hands, but Ryle replied: ‘Thank you for dinner, then, and see you in January.’
Hillmorton walked up the rise and into Piccadilly, going towards the tube station. Ryle turned the other way, down across the park.