Sitting in his corner of a pew, he thought: You wanted to be safe: you are safe. You have your safe job. And that is all you have. All you are.
That same evening Gregory rang him up and asked him to come and see him at home. ‘I want to talk to you.’
Lambert hesitated. He was in no mood to watch his friend trying on his laurels. In the end, because he was restless and one occupation was as good as the next, he went.
Gregory took him directly to his own room. ‘How do you think it went?’
‘The Memorial Service? Oh, very well. You made an excellent speech.’
‘D’you think so? I was very nervous.’
‘No one would have guessed it. You did wonderfully well.’
‘I was very fond of him, you know.’
Lambert thought bitterly: When were you not fond, sincerely, of a really powerful friend? ‘You can be satisfied with what you said about him this morning.’
‘I’m glad.’ There was a silence, filled so far as Lambert was concerned with impatient exasperated thoughts. Gregory went on: ‘I didn’t ask you here to talk about my speech. Something quite different. Tell me — what’s your opinion of the Institute?’
Lambert was not sure what he wanted. Praise? A tribute to himself as its Director? ‘How can I have any opinion?’ he said roughly. ‘You haven’t done anything yet. Obviously, with all that money to play with, and your fantastically lively brain and imagination, you’re going to do a magnificent job. But…’
‘Yes?’
Lambert was saying what he truly believed. At the same time he wanted maliciously to start a crack in his friend’s happiness. ‘When are you going to find time to write? A show of this size can’t be run in the intervals of writing a novel. Are you going to give all that up to become the dedicated administrator?’
‘Ah.’ Gregory smiled at him with the greatest sweetness and a touch of his old mischief. ‘Exactly what I wanted to discuss…. Would you care to become Deputy-Director? We could have fun as well as do a good job. Wouldn’t it amuse you to be the richest patron of other writing chaps, and painters and the rest, since the Medicis? Think it over, won’t you?’
Even in this blinded moment Lambert noticed the flattery of that ’other’, and thought: This is how he seduces people. Then gratitude, excitement, love — yes, love — swept him out of his born prudence. This was not one of the offers you tap to see whether it sounds hollow.
‘I don’t need to think,’ he said quickly. ‘I’ll take it.’
‘Good.’ Gregory got up to fetch a paper lying on his desk. As he passed Lambert he laid a hand on his shoulder for a second. ‘Now I’m completely happy.’
Lambert held himself back from the weakness of blurting out the story of the writers’ committee which had just rejected the richest patron since…. He laughed and said, ‘The truth of the matter is I’m bored, I’ve had my bellyful of being a good little civil servant, the chance you’re giving me is a godsend; I’ll do my damndest not to disappoint you.’
‘You couldn’t,’ Gregory said simply. ‘I know you as well as I know myself.’
‘A godsend,’ Lambert repeated.
‘This paper… take it away with you. I’ve made a few notes — your salary — three thousand. Is that enough? You’ll get some expenses, too, of course.’
‘My dear fellow, I’d have taken less!’
Gregory laughed at him. ‘That’s not like you…. I am happy, you know, Lambert. It wouldn’t be half the fun without you.’ A strangely gentle look came over his face. ‘D’you remember that day at Liggett’s when you dragged me from those four louts?’
‘Yes. Why?’
‘I hope you’re going to enjoy this. I’ve always wanted to give you something, you know.’
Lambert stumbled over a roughness in the pavement. Jerked back to the moment, to the dust and warm used air of a September day in London, to a perspective of yellow houses facing a canal, he thought: He did that. Gave me a position, influence, a status, I should never have got for myself.
Obliquely, as on the day of Richard Rutley’s Memorial Service, he had a sense of discomfort. That it was Gregory who had stretched a hand down to pull him up was queer and vaguely disquieting. They had started climbing together, with everything in his favour, yet Gregory had far out-climbed him. Far.
His affection for Gregory, his gratitude, had not lessened in ten years of working with him. Nor had that hardly perceptible point of disquiet and amazement.
No getting away from it, he told himself sharply, he’s the better man, his mind infinitely livelier than mine, more inventive, bolder. Add his looks and the way people fall for him. And his kindness. It’s only right he should be eminent and better known, and have a K offered to him.
And he refused it! he thought. My God, why?
Chapter Four
Some clever fellow should write a book on the fall and rise of London districts. When did that handsome square drop into disrepute and the fretful hands of boarding-house keepers? Why? And who came into this charming neglected Georgian terrace, saw the charm under the grime, and began rescue work? Lambert Corry’s house, facing a stretch of the Regents Park canal, had been the second, not the first, rescued in just such a terrace, which was foundering when it caught the eye of a fashionable painter. The Corrys were looking for a house at the time — Lambert had been at the Rutley Institute for two years, and felt safe. The very moment Penelope read in Vogue that Henry Wimmer R.A. had bought a house on a neglected part of the canal she saw that this was the time; as fast as she could — she was at the hairdresser’s and had to wait for her hair to dry — she ran to look at another dilapidated house in the same terrace and bought it, cheap. Even before the work of restoring it was finished, other houses had been bought, at much higher prices, and the little colony, nicknamed New Amsterdam, founded. The house was now not only charming, worth a deal more than it cost, but it was Penelope Corry’s triumph, the triumph of her spirit and quick wits and sense.
Lambert rarely entered it without pausing for a moment in half-conscious pleasure. This evening he halted deliberately and turned a shoulder on it to be able to see both the blackened water of the canal and the newly-painted face of the house. He was admiring it, and he was also asking himself what, during his walk, when he ought to have been thinking usefully, had churned the past in him. There was a point of disturbance, at a great depth, centred somewhere in his body. He disliked uncertainty, disorder. At last it struck him — Gate, that old freak Paul Gate: meeting him last night was like seeing a ghost, or turning up a bundle of letters from a dead woman. Gate was responsible. And now that he had placed it the disturbance changed and became a pleasant sense of excitement or crisis. He was vividly aware of himself standing there, outside his own house, at a particular moment in his life, expectant of something, he had no idea what. He thought: I’m fifty, I’ve done damned well for myself and mine: have I done everything I’m going to do, got everything owed me?… This might be the moment when something better was about to offer itself to him. No man need be finished with himself at fifty, if he has learned to be supple as well as steady and prudent. At this moment he felt himself capable of a leap. Only remains, he thought, to know which way to turn before leaping.
A little astonished — what the devil had got into him? — he went into the house, and upstairs.
The door of the bedroom was ajar, and as he came in his wife said, with a trace of sharpness,
‘You’re late. Had you forgotten it’s Thursday?’
‘No. Don’t fuss yourself, I’ll be ready.’
She was at the dressing-table, making up, and he removed himself to the bathroom. From the glass over the bowl, he could see her, and a corner of the big handsome double bed, their first extravagant purchase, a modern copy of the eighteenth century, to which the long fitted wardrobe and the other pieces had been made to conform. The room suited her plump prettiness. Watching the movement of her arms as she smoothed her hair over her ears, he thought:
Who’d know she was anything like forty-eight?
She was standing up when he came to take his dinner-jacket from the wardrobe, and he gave her an affectionate tap on the bottom. She started and smiled. Did Gregory ever smack his wife’s bottom? The very idea was ludicrous. One thing I do better than he does, he thought. Did they, even at the first, ever share a bed? The most fleeting of memories, less than a shadow, sprang and disappeared in his mind: the first night, twenty-nine years ago, Penny and he both virgins and as awkward as posts, but something he said made her laugh and they managed not to disappoint each other too badly. No complaints, he thought. A sensible, half-joking, good-humoured habit wore longer than anything else — if anything else existed outside novels. He refused to believe that it did, but since he had never touched any other woman he could not be dead sure. One life one woman, he thought. Well, why not? What’s wrong with that? It satisfied me and saves a lot of trouble. She’s a good girl, he thought warmly. A good marriage. We’ve both put a lot into it. She more than I…. He thought briefly of his son, of the agonisingly difficult birth, after twenty childless years, Penny thirty-nine, a bad age to have a first child. Even now he could not recall it, and her calmness and courage, without shuddering. That alone, he thought, with simplicity, would keep me faithful. That and kindness and goodwill on both sides, and being able to rely on her. No trouble to be faithful, not a bit of it.
‘Hook me up the back,’ Penny said.
‘Stand over.’
‘Do I look all right in this dress?’
‘Magnificent. You look magnificent.’
Gregory’s wife, like his marriage, he thought, may be more elegant, but I’ll be damned if mine isn’t the better bargain of the two. And genuine. What’s more, all Beatrice has she was given. But what Penny is, she has made herself — by shrewdness, by hard work, by her own wits…. An acute mind, prettiness, and next to no education, that had been Penny when he married her. In a surprisingly few years she had educated herself, purging her accent, reading hungrily, like a dry sponge taking up water, to the point where she could not only discuss their work with writers, but they sometimes took her advice; she had an influence. The truth is, he thought jauntily, she has something better than good taste — she knows what will go. A real gift, by God.
‘I’m ready,’ he said. ‘I’ll slip upstairs and see Timothy.’
‘No, don’t,’ Penny said quickly, ‘don’t go in, he’s asleep. You might wake him, and he was over-tired.’
He felt a familiar anxiety. ‘You’re sure he’s all right?’
‘Yes, of course.’ She looked at him. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t know if it was anything more than tiredness?’
‘If I just looked in…’
‘Better not… What have you been doing today? You’re late.’
‘I had to go and see Gregory at home — he wasn’t in the office today. We talked about the Conference.’
‘Why wasn’t he in the office?’
He allowed himself to grin. ‘Tired.’
‘Ha,’ she said bitterly, ‘if you weren’t always in the office slaving there all hours, he couldn’t be tired every time he wants the day off.’
‘Let’s be fair,’ Lambert said, ‘he was working on the Conference. He has a great many ideas and they’re all pretty startling. It’s going to be a grand show.’
‘You mean that his lordship is going to show himself off to the greatest advantage, and go up another notch.’
He felt sorry he had given Gregory away to her. Considering all he has done for me, he thought sharply, I should be more careful…. Not that he was annoyed by her resentment of Gregory: it sprang, he knew, from her loyalty to himself. And there might, when all was said and done, be something a little excessive about his own gratitude. I’m a damned good organiser, he thought, and — say what you like — the dear old boy needs that…. For a second he thought again, with a twinge of anger, of Gate. Sycophantic old ass.
‘Was anyone else there?’ asked Penny. ‘Did you take Diana with you?’
‘No.’ He grinned. ‘I made her hopping mad this morning. She thought I was trying to make fun of Gregory. She blazed.’
‘I suppose he sleeps with her.’
‘I’ll swear he doesn’t. Not that she’d object, she’s an immoral young piece.’ He gave a snirt of laughter. ‘She gave me one look the day she came to us, realised it was no use trying to seduce me, and hasn’t taken any interest in me since…. Talking of lordships, I didn’t tell you, did I, that Gregory was offered a knighthood and refused it.’
His wife stared at him with a hard brightness. ‘He refused?’
‘Yes. Told them to take it away, it was irrelevant to a writer.’
‘Do you believe he really was offered it?’
‘I’m certain he was.’
‘Well —’ she shrugged her shoulders — ‘he’s right, it’s quite irrelevant, but it surprises me that he refused. With his vanity.’
She would like it to be Sir Lambert and Lady Corry, he thought quickly. When shall I qualify for a K? When, if ever?
‘Who is coming this evening?’
‘The usual.’
‘Is old Arbor coming?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Ah, good. Splendid.’
Penny shrugged again. ‘I prefer the young and unfashionable among our friends.’
‘Ah, yes.’
He admired this new attitude of hers. Only a year or two ago she would not have spoken of old Arbor with this negligence. Ten years ago he had been a prize, a show-piece. One of her first catches. She had persuaded him to buy a house in the colony. After all, he reflected, the old boy is still important, still a big name. Besides, I like him and I should be damned sorry if he stopped coming to our Thursdays.
Penny’s Thursdays. The crown of years of hard work planting, weeding, watering her… he paused to let his derisive under-self slip in its word… her salon. Then thought hardily: But why not call it a salon? It was as decent a word as the next. Call it what you please, it was her triumph, entirely. The fruit of her shrewdness, her intelligence, her ruthless cutting out of failures and bores. It had been given a fillip when he became Director of Rutley but, already flourishing, it scarcely needed it. Its success was no accident. From the very start, Penny had had a strategy, built on the theory that for all their pumped-up contempt the young want to meet the established, and the old take a nervously morbid interest in their supplanters. My ancients and moderns, she called them — but not to their faces. In spite of the devotion she professed for the young and unknown, she took infinitely more trouble with her wines and food when one or more of her guests was as blatantly celebrated as Arbor. She was not foolishly generous…. Lambert wondered briefly: Why the devil do the ancients come? Not because they need a meal. They admire Penny; they like us — but what really brings them here is fear. Fear, envy, curiosity about the others, the hungry not-yet-arrived, Penny’s young protégés, for whom she works with frenetic loyalty and immense adroitness and good sense, pushing them, singing their praises….
‘Oh, there’s something I should warn you about,’ Penny said. ‘Tom Elder is coming — and he’s in trouble.’
‘Again?’ He felt rising in him the irritation and boredom that Elder and Elder’s dreary troubles always started. ‘What’s the matter now?’
‘He needs money — more than ever. That daughter of his has left her appalling husband at last, and landed herself and her two brats on Tom, and he will have to keep them as well as find the money for her to start divorce proceedings. He rang me up this morning and talked to me about it for at least twenty minutes.’
Her husband frowned. Elder had always been the odd man out in their circle. It puzzled Lambert now how he had ever come to belong to it. There had, he supposed, been a moment when Elder looked like becoming an established poet. But poetry, unless you strike an original attitude of some sort, is not a living, and Elder kept himself and his wife alive by writing reviews and ghosting other m
en’s books. He has absolutely no talent for selling himself and his brain, Lambert thought irritably, and why the devil should it be my or anyone else’s business to help him out?… If people spoke of Elder they always gave him credit for honesty and integrity, the virtues of a moth-eaten writer. He got what he deserved — respect and neglect.
‘My dear girl, I hope you told him to let his daughter look after herself — it’s a mistake to do everything for people. The girl’s probably as feckless as he is himself.’
‘Feckless?’
‘What else do you call a man who can’t turn his brains into money for no better reason than that he’s too bloody honest? If he chooses to get married, and incur obligations, he has no right to so much honesty. Call it honesty. I call it egoism and incompetence.’
‘You’re very severe,’ Penny said, smiling.
‘I’m being sensible. If Tom Elder prefers neglect and poverty to making a success of himself, why should he grumble when he gets them?’
Penny said mildly, ‘It’s his daughter he’s anxious about now.’
‘He’s probably making far too much fuss. We’ve only got her word for it that her husband isn’t fit to live with; before you know where you are she’ll have gone back to him.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You don’t know,’ Lambert said as patiently as he could. ‘In any case, my dear, it has nothing to do with us. Why look for trouble? You’ll get no thanks for it. If it’s serious, keep out. If — as I’m pretty sure — it’s not, why let Tom try to make use of you?’
‘You couldn’t find him a job in the Institute?’
‘Did you suggest that to him?’ he asked sharply.
‘Of course not.’
He felt relief. Penny was sensible, but the most sensible of women is not always capable of grasping the principle of wise living: the man who needs help — through his own fault — is not worth helping, since obviously he is no good (or he wouldn’t be where he is) and, equally obviously, can make no return: in trying to help him all you do is waste part of your personal influence, not bottomless.
The Road from the Monument Page 8
