AT six o’clock, in the Howards’ flat, as I listened to them talking to an Indian, I was preoccupied by the news which I had had no chance to break. If it had been good news, I would have somehow slipped in a word. Did they know that? They were both, Howard especially, more anxious than when they waited in Martin’s room in April. Howard had taken two stiff drinks in a quarter of an hour.
The Indian, whose name was Pande, had been in the room when I arrived. He had a small, delicate, handsome head; by the side of the Howards he looked quiveringly fine-nerved. He was drinking orange-juice while the rest of us drank whisky. Laura was trying to persuade him to sign some protest. He was too polite to say that he did not want to, too polite even to change the conversation. As Laura got up to fill a glass, I noticed that she was pregnant. With her strong, comely figure, she carried the child lightly; she might be already six months gone. She saw my glance, and gave, to herself, not to me, a smile that was a mixture of triumph and pudeur.
“You must see–” she said to the Indian, standing over him.
Very politely, Dr Pande did not quite see. I was thinking, he would have called himself progressive, as they did: but he was nothing like at home with them. They were too positive. With his nerves, at least, he would have been more at home with a quiet reactionary, like G S Clark. Once more the useless rat race of anxiety went on in my mind: what words exactly had Brown used? Could they mean anything but their obvious meaning, that he had decided against us and that we had lost? Was he warning me that it was no use trying to move him that night?
The Howards, though they had not swerved from trying to persuade the Indian, kept slipping glances in my direction, making attempts to read my face. But they were so tough and disciplined that they stopped themselves trying to hurry Dr Pande out.
Howard was replying to one of his expressions of doubt.
“That’s all very well. But objectively, it’s holding up things. We haven’t got time for that.”
Howard was a shade less pertinacious than his wife. Soon he was telling Pande that he needn’t add his signature until next day. Pande gave a sigh, and with a jubilation of relief, looked round him.
“This is a jolly luxurious flat!” said Dr Pande.
“You’ll sign tomorrow?” said Laura.
“I will talk to you. Perhaps on the telephone,” said Dr Pande, as, very light, very ectomorphic, he went out of the room.
We could hear his footsteps down the stairs. They looked at me.
“Is it all right?” asked Laura.
“No,” I said. “I’ve no comfort to give you.”
Laura flushed with shock. For the first time I saw tears in her eyes. While Howard stood there, his mouth open, not putting a face on it, not aggressive, for once undefiant. But I did not feel protective to either of them. For him I felt nothing at all, except a special kind of bitter irritation. It was the kind of irritation one feels only for someone for whom one has tried to do a good turn and failed: or for someone for whom one has tried to get a job, and who has been turned down.
Laura recovered herself. What had happened? I told them there had been a division on the Court. That was as far as I felt like going or could safely go. Howard pressed me for names, but I said that I couldn’t give them. “Damn it,” he said, “are you an MI5 man?” It seemed to me that he was capable of believing that literally.
The Court would issue its finding the next day, I explained. Laura was back in action. So it wasn’t all settled? So there were still things that might be done?
“Are you doing them?” she cried.
I said that I was doing all I could think of. I did not tell them that I was seeing Brown that night. Their hopes were reviving, despite anything I said. I repeated, I didn’t believe anything I could do was relevant now: I had no comfort to give them.
As soon as I left their flat and got down into the street, I felt an anger which couldn’t find an outlet, a weight of anger and depression such as made the brilliant summer evening dark upon the eyes. I was not angry for Howard’s sake: he remained more an object of anger than its cause. I didn’t give a thought about injustice. No, the thought of Howard, the thought of Laura, the thought of seeing Brown, they were just tenebrous, as though they had added to my rage, but were looked at through smoked glass. There was nothing unselfish, nothing either abstract or idealistic about my anger, nothing in the slightest removed from the frets of self. I was just enraged because I hadn’t got my way.
Slowly I walked by St Edward’s Church and out into the Market Place. I bought a newspaper, as automatically as one of Pavlov’s dogs, at the corner. I went into the Lion, drank a glass of beer, and was staring at the paper.
A thick, throaty voice came from over my shoulder.
“Why, it’s the man himself!”
I looked up and saw Paul Jago, heavy, shabby, smiling.
He asked me to have another drink and, as he sat down beside me, explained that his wife had gone off to a sick relative. It was a long time, he said, since he had walked about the town alone in the evening, or been into a pub. He was studying me with eyes which, through the thick lenses, were still penetrating, in the lined, self-indulgent face.
“Forgive me, old chap,” he said, “am I wrong, or are you a bit under the weather?”
The quick sympathy shot out. Even when he was at his most selfish, one felt it latent in him. Now it was so sharp that I found myself admitting I was miserable. About the Howard case, I said.
“Oh, that,” Jago replied. Just for an instant his tone contained pride, malice, an edge of amusement. Then it softened again. “I’m rather out of touch about that. Tell me about it, won’t you?”
I did not mind being indiscreet, not with him. I did not even rationalise it by thinking that, as a Fellow entitled to a place on the Court, he had a right to know. I let it all spill out. It seemed natural to be confiding in this ageing, seedy man, with the wings of white hair untrimmed over his ears, with the dandruff on the shoulders of his jacket. Yet we had never been intimates. Perhaps it seemed more natural just because he was seedy, because he had allowed himself to go to waste, had made a cult of failure and extracted out of it both a bizarre happiness and a way of life. It was not only his sympathy that led me on.
He soon grasped what had happened in the Court. His mind was as quick as his sympathy, and, although he had perversely misused it for so long, or not used it at all, it was still acute. About Getliffe’s statement and Nightingale’s answers the day after, he asked me to tell him again.
“I want to be sure,” he said. He gave a curious smile.
It was after half past seven, and I had already told him that I was calling on Brown at nine. He invited me to have dinner at an hotel. When I said that I didn’t want much of a meal, he humoured me. He went back with me to the college, where we called at the buttery and, like undergraduates, came away with loaves of bread, a packet of butter and a large slab of cheese. In my room, Jago greedily buttered great hunks of crusty loaf. At the same time, his eyes lit up, he listened to me repeat in detail what Nightingale had said the day before and what Brown had said that day.