The effect of sleeping on a troublesome idea is, as every sound man knows, to flatten it a bit. One puts it, like a crumpled pair of trousers, under one’s mattress, and oh! the difference when one brings it out next morning. If one is lucky. But then sound men are lucky.
Next morning, in the ordinary light of day as contrasted with the dazzling night of Harry’s imagination, I saw that Robert simply could not be intending to leave me in the lurch. In my opinion, though not in his, Robert had many faults; but lack of responsibility for his friends was not among them. I had been momentarily swept off my feet by one of Harry’s ballons d’essai – it suddenly occurred to me that if one ever actually saw a ballon d’essai, it would probably look like Harry.
So I got up that Monday morning feeling refreshed by the weekend and looking forward to my work. I did not want my job to disappear. I liked it. I was fascinated by it. Also it kept me from starving.
Robert and I were employed in a department of government that got scientific research done on a big scale. Large numbers of scientists and engineers were involved; and looking after those we had, together with trying to lay our hands on more, was a task and a half. During the war, when anybody who could do a job well got a chance to do it, Robert had taken that task and a half upon himself with great success – and, I should like to add, with my devoted assistance.
If you know the Civil Service only in peace-time you would expect such a task to fall to the lot of the department’s establishments division. Though our department had a perfectly competent establishments division, with a brace of perfectly competent Under Secretaries at its head, Robert had got agreement after the war for continuing his job as head of a separate, semi-autonomous directorate. Though his directorate was closely linked with our establishments division, and one of their Under Secretaries was technically Robert’s boss, we were, well, not of them. Robert, as a novelist, was a creative artist: there was indeed more than a touch of creative art about his Civil Service set-up.
The set-up had obvious advantages for us, but it required hypnosis to make any advantage for our establishments division obvious to that division. Many of them asked themselves how Robert managed it. In the first place he was a man of hypnotic personality. In the second, he had made himself a pretty high reputation and none of his immediate seniors was anxious to take the responsibility of losing him to the Service. Nevertheless, at the end of 1949, when the Service had shaken down to something more like its pre-war regular self – had shaken down far enough for many a regular Under Secretary to have completely forgotten that he was in his present post through irregular entry or promotion during the war – the touch of creative art about our present set-up was becoming over-apparent. And one has to remember that although Mankind has always had Art about the place, there is no evidence that Mankind could not have got on without it. My job of interviewing scientists and engineers and making decisions about their futures was one that quite a few people in our establishments division would have liked. And I have to admit that I had only Robert to hypnotize them into agreeing it were not better so. You see why it was very important indeed to me that Robert should not resign for the time being.
All the same, when I set off for work that Monday morning, Harry’s question was not high on my list of things to talk to Robert about at lunch-time. I was thinking mostly – and not unnaturally, if it comes to that – about Sybil. It was a bright November day and I strode down Putney Hill cheerfully singing under my breath. After all, I had come to Putney to start life afresh. Something brought the tune of ‘Sweet Lass of Richmond Hill’ into my mind, and I tried to fit in words to denote myself.
‘Brave Lad of Putney Hill’ commended itself insistently because it was so obvious. Yet its Housemanesque ring, I thought, was so wrong. I was neither young nor bucolic, and offhand I could not recall any occasion that had shown me to be brave. I passed the traffic lights and the Zeeta café, and noticed the usual haze drifting up from the river. The buses flashed a particularly inviting red, while their bile-shaded luminescent posters were more evocative than ever of nausea. Suddenly I caught sight of myself in Marks & Spencer’s window, and my unconscious mind got the better of me:
‘Smart Chap of Putney Hill!’
Unbidden – I would certainly have turned my back on them had I known they were coming – the words attached themselves to the tune, and the image of a Smart Chap attached itself, horribly, to me. It was not what I thought I was trying to look like at all. ‘I don’t look like a gentleman,’ I thought. ‘All well and good, because I’m not a gentleman. But a smart chap! … There are all sorts of other things one could look like. But no, not that!’
I passed Marks & Spencer’s pretty quickly, I can tell you. And it was with relief that I heard a high-pitched, honeyed voice calling behind me:
‘Joe!’
It was Harry, overtaking me. We often met at this time of day and travelled to work together.
‘You’re looking very dapper this morning,’ he said.
I did not reply. I simply did not reply. And on the way to London we discussed neither my appearance nor the question of Robert’s plans for getting out of the Civil Service. We read our newspapers. But all the same, he did, merely by his presence, provoke my concern. I decided that I would put the matter higher on my list of things to say to Robert at lunch-time after all.
Robert and I usually had lunch together and we usually went to a tea-shop. Practically all our colleagues went to our canteen, with an air of loyally all keeping together – as if they were not together enough in their offices! – and in the canteen chewed over indiscriminately, but with apparent satisfaction, a mixture of bad cooking and office shop. Robert and I frequented a café where there was not the slightest likelihood of our meeting any of them.
Our behaviour was, of course, completely contrary to the Social Ethic, which tells you to be as other men are. Now in my experience men are more tolerant than they are often made out to be. They do not mind your not being as they are. What they will not tolerate is its showing. And here I must point out a great difference between Robert and me. When Robert and I sloped off at 12.45 to our tea-shop, something showed in me. There was no doubt about it. But in Robert? Did our colleagues realize that if I had not been there he would guilefully have excused himself from chewing over toad-in-the-hole and shop? They did not. That is the way life is.
I will tell you about me. At the end of the war, when Robert set up his directorate, we had been asked if we would care to be made permanent civil servants. In two minds, but politely, I had filled up a form I was given for the purpose. And in due course I got a reply, Roneo’d on a slip of paper of not specially high quality, measuring about four inches by six, and beginning thus:
MISC/INEL
Dear Sir,
The Civil Service Commissioners desire me to say that having considered your application for admission, etc …
And ending thus:
They must, therefore, with regret declare you ineligible to compete and cancel your application accordingly.
Yours faithfully,
It was a mistake, of course. Of course it was a mistake. I got an immediate apology from someone higher up the hierarchy than anyone I had had an apology from before. But was it a mistake? Had something showed already?
MISC/INEL. Miscellaneous/Ineligible, it stood for. The letter I thought I might, as a literary artist taking on the style of a petty official, have invented. But not MISC/INEL. That was beyond me. That was the invention of an artist in his own right: it had the stamp of uncounterfeitable originality, the characteristic of striking through to a deeper truth than its creator comprehended. MISC/INEL. It could not be a mistake. Through that slip of not very high quality paper, measuring about four inches by six, I saw my epitaph, composed by a delegated member of the company of men and inscribed on everlasting, distinctly expensive marble.
Here lies the body of
JOSEPH LUNN
Who though admittedly
A Great Writer A True Friend
A Perfect Husband and Father
Must in The End be classed
MISC/INEL
Actually the MISC/INEL letter settled my flirtation with permanency. My two minds about becoming a permanent civil servant became one, and that one said No. I asked myself what on earth I had been thinking about. I wanted to be a writer. If it came to that, by God, I was a writer. The battle that I referred to earlier, the battle for the day when I would be nothing else but a writer, was on.
So much for that. Back to the story –
‘Give my regards to Robert,’ said Harry, as I got out of the bus – and then, never short of a ballon d’essai, he loosed off: ‘Not forgetting Annette, of course.’
He wanted to know whether Robert was going to marry Annette or not. I said: ‘Sure, I will,’ in an American accent.
When I got to the office, there was Robert sitting on the edge of my desk, reading a proof-copy of my next novel. He glanced up as I came in and I saw that his face was pink.
‘This is very good,’ he said, although he must already have read the book five times. He had a characteristic muffled, lofty intonation that gave enormous weight to everything he said, but the pinkness of his complexion gave evidence of something other than weight. Robert was prudish, but that is not to say he was not just the faintest bit lewd. He shut the book, and looked at me with eyes that were sparkling. ‘It’s very good indeed.’
If that is not the sort of literary comrade-in-arms you want, I would like to know what is. What a friend! And what a book he was reading!
‘How was Sybil?’ he said.
‘Very well.’ He glanced away, through the window – not that he could see anything through it, as it faced on a dreary well: modestly Euclidean, I have always felt that an internal circumference, so to speak, would be shorter than an external one; yet our office-architect had contrived to put at least twice as many windows looking inwards as outwards.
Robert said: ‘We went to the Zoo,’ in a tone which stressed the cultural, rather than the erotic nature of the expedition.
‘Oh,’ said I, ‘we stayed in.’ I let it go at that.
There was a pause for reflection, very satisfactory reflection.
Robert, sitting on one haunch, was swinging his foot to and fro. He looked like Franklin D. Roosevelt. I am sorry to have to say, within the space of describing three of my friends, that two of them looked like world-figures, and I will not do it again with any of the others. But it would be absurd for me to let Sybil’s resemblance to Marlene Dietrich stop me saying Robert looked like F.D.R., because he did. F.D.R. without the gap teeth. Robert had a massiveness of body and of head that nevertheless gave the impression of a certain lightness. Like the best kind of cake, he was big without being heavy.
It was the same with Robert’s temperament. Essentially he was a man of gravitas. His temperament was massive and complex, deep-sounding and made for great endurance. From the time when I first got to know him, when he was my Tutor at Oxford, I had sensed his gravitas. Yet it was gravitas leavened, I am happy to say, by extraordinary wiliness and charm, and by the occasional flash of unpredictable private fun that put you in mind of a waggon-load of monkeys – than which, incidentally, Robert was much cleverer. Much. Robert was as clever as, if not cleverer than, a waggon-load of high civil servants.
It will be apparent to you that I was still in the attitude towards Robert of an undergraduate bowled over by his Tutor, an attitude causing constant irritation to my nearest and dearest, but a source of great satisfaction, not to mention use, to me.
On we go. But not very far. My telephone rang. It was our P.A. (short for personal assistant) saying our Senior Executive Officer wanted to speak to me. While she was putting him through, Robert said:
‘Who is it?’
I told him. ‘He’s got on to me because he wanted to speak to you and you weren’t in your room.’ I held out the receiver towards him. ‘You can speak to him here.’
‘He probably wants you in any case.’
I hesitated at this display of extra-sensory perception. He who hesitates sees the other man nip gravely out of the room before he can get another breath.
The day’s work had begun. I had some people to interview, and Robert had his usual Monday morning commitment, which was a conference with the Under Secretary, Murray-Hamilton, who was technically his boss, and Murray-Hamilton’s Assistant Secretary, Spinks. (Perhaps I ought to explain the titles. In the worlds of commerce and industry, your secretary is your subordinate: in the Civil Service, not on your life. Rating in the hierarchy goes up thus: Assistant Principal, Principal, Assistant Secretary, Under Secretary, Deputy Secretary, Secretary!)
I was glad to be in my own shoes and not in Robert’s. By a mischance that was tiresome to say the least of it, Murray-Hamilton and Spinks strongly disapproved of me. The last thing I would have proposed for my own good was a morning with those two: I did everything I could to keep out of their way. Yet I say this with some ambivalence of feeling. I disapproved of Spinks – ‘Stinker Spinks,’ I called him to myself – but there was nothing remarkable about that as he was pretty thoroughly disliked by everybody in the department. On the other hand I approved of, even liked Murray-Hamilton. He was first-rate at his job and furthermore he had – what was unusual among senior civil servants – a brooding, reflective look … I had not the faintest idea what he was brooding or reflecting about, but I felt drawn to him by his look.
When I met Robert at lunch-time, he did not show signs of having spent the morning with marked enjoyment. He sauntered along the Strand beside me in an abstracted mood, and at a street corner he bought an Evening News, which he began to read as he walked along. The pavement was crowded and he covered the rest of the journey by a sort of ‘drunkard’s walk’, bouncing obliquely off passers-by. The morning sunshine was dimmed by now, and a thin mist, very November-like, seemed to be clinging round the roofs of the tallest buildings. We went into our tea-shop and ordered our usual ladylike snack.
Throughout the meal Robert read his newspaper, so I got no opportunity to refer to any of the topics I had waiting. And when finally he put it down – Robert did not fold up a newspaper when he had finished with it: he just quietly dropped it over the arm of his chair – I saw the heavy, thoughtful look he usually wore when he was irritated or displeased.
‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.
‘Nothing of any particular interest.’
I watched him, waiting. His large, light grey eyes appeared to be focused on his cup of coffee and he was frowning. Suddenly he said:
‘Actually there is.’ And then he looked away from me. ‘I’m fed up with being sniped at by these people.’
He meant Murray-Hamilton and Spinks. I said:
‘What about?’
He turned to me.
‘You.’
There was a pause.
‘What have I done now?’ I said.
Robert promptly leaned over and picked up his newspaper again.
‘Just general,’ he muttered in a tight-lipped way that indicated he was not going to say anything else.
He started to read again.