His feelings were, all, on the most superficial plane. Never, he would never again feel deeply about Gregory — never feel more than he could afford to feel: that the poor chap deserved to lose his position and be punished. Yes, poor old chap, he thought, lightly.
His own conscience was blessedly clear. God knows, he thought, I did my best for him. Account closed.
Blount came back into the room. Speaking from the doorway to Pulmer, he said, ‘You’ll lunch with me, won’t you?’
‘I shall be delighted.’
‘Good.’ Blount moved with his graceful heron-like gait, quick and languid at once, towards the table. He glanced at Pulmer, and the priest walked obediently to a window, parted the thin curtains and looked out, blinking his prudent eyelids in the light.
‘That passed off very well,’ Blount said in an indifferent voice.
‘Of course it did,’ Lambert said. He allowed himself the briefest of smiles. ‘I didn’t expect any trouble.’
‘Oh, you didn’t?’ Blount looked at him with curiosity and a little distaste. ‘I doubt — if Lady Grosmont had been here — that we should have come off so lightly. Even now she may give us trouble.’
‘There are more ways of killing a cat than choking it with butter,’ Lambert said, nose on one side, mouth twitching a little, ‘but butter isn’t bad.’
‘The lady you’re talking about is very used to giving her orders.’
As you are, damn you, thought Lambert. He passed his hand over his face, and said quietly, ‘Perhaps you’d better deal with her.’
‘Yes, I think so,’ Blount said with an insolence for once unintentional. ‘For the time being the only thing we need worry about is the Conference. Don’t hesitate to call on me for advice, help, anything I can do. I haven’t the faintest fear that you’re not equal to it, to the whole thing, but keep in touch with me. There are a few points…’
‘I will,’ Lambert said easily.
He felt less confidence than he had pumped into his voice. He was not — he knew it — perfectly safe. At the same time he felt reasonably certain that if he handled the Conference well — and why not? — they would be reluctant not to confirm him in his chair. He had three or four months. Time in which to cajole, to flatter — articles in the London Letter praising the two writers? — to impress both Board and Conference Committee with his singular efficiency and intelligence. He looked Blount in the face.
‘I shall pay as splendid a tribute as possible to our late Director,’ he said.
‘When? Where?’
‘In my speech at the Conference.’
‘In your… yes, yes, why not? Very suitable.’
Chapter Nine
When he left Rutley House, Gregory turned without thinking to the left, away from his own house, and walked towards Piccadilly and across it in heavy sunlight into Green Park, that friendliest of London’s West End parks (not the most charming, which is St. James’s), to Pall Mall, and the broad avenue at the back of Whitehall. He was walking with eyes half-closed against the blistering light: its violence and the intense heat had a curiously distorting effect on the great buildings of our blood and state; walls and columns wavered, lopsided, as if crumbling into a grey dust. He reached the Embankment: all the benches were filled by lolling puppet-like bodies, arms and legs dangling: he had trouble in finding a place to sit, but found it at last and sat for a long time, vacant eyes on the river which seemed to slide past in one block of oily transparence, the colour of green olives: from behind, from the road, came an odour of petrol, dry leaves, asphalt; sometimes, a long way down the river, towards the docks, far away and muted, a ship’s whistle.
Disconnected phrases rose in his mind, like the dark bubbles pitting the surface of the river. What have I lost? More, far more than Lambert imagines he took from me this morning…. Idiot. As if — supposing I’d wanted to keep it — I’d have given in to him without struggling…. The idiot . . For years — years — I’ve wanted power. More than I wanted anything? Perhaps… Power to move people for their good, of course, he mocked himself. To be admired, praised, respected. And it was all a colossal fraud, barely a line of truth in it: I’ve been fooling myself. Whatever else I’ve done, the first person I deceived was myself, only myself. What a farce. My uncouth narrow-minded father was a good seaman, but I…
He had a sudden avid impulse to go and look at the London his father knew. The only London he had known — since never, not on any of the voyages when his ship came to London, did he visit the centre: the farthest point he touched was still a long way east, in Fenchurch Street, where his owners had their London office.
He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. He stood up, and as soon as he moved felt the heat press all its weight on him. He hesitated a minute, then decided to go on. Possibly, somewhere in that end of London he himself had never seen, he might cross the ghost of a younger, but no doubt already shabby captain — James Mott had had nothing but scorn for ships’ officers who took pains to be well-dressed: he called them monkeys — hurrying, head poked forward, on some errand to do with his last or next voyage. Always alone: he was reserved and suspicious, with few friends and, since he married late in life, after the years when it was usual for a captain’s wife to sail with him, he never had his wife along. He preferred being alone.
Fenchurch Street, on Saturday afternoon, was almost empty. He walked it from end to end without a sign, not the ghost of a sign, being made to him by a doorway, a shop-window, to warn him that the tall hurrying badly turned-out figure had paused here an instant to rest his long-sighted gaze, pale and reflective, on binoculars or a chronometer…. A name returned shyly, from his fourth or fifth year. Tidal Basin. That must be where the ship docked, he thought. Absurd to think of going there.
He went in a slow dirty train which stopped at station after dingy station before he got out at what might have been any poor quarter of a small shipping town: hot deserted streets, flat-faced houses, small shops: the backs of long sheds and hangars — entrance forbidden — threw a narrow strip of shadow as torrid and airless as the sunlight which passed a suffocating hand on these ugly little streets where the phantom he was pursuing had sunk without trace, as if lost at sea.
He was too exhausted to go on walking. Again without thinking, unless it was his body which had remembered a name as mysteriously as it had remembered Tidal Basin, he turned, crossed the empty road, took a side-street, and stopped at a narrow house, its windows covered by yellowing lace curtains, calling itself Carey’s Hotel. He went in, paid a night’s rent for a bedroom on the first floor, locked himself in and fell across the bed without glancing at it.
For four hours he slept heavily, without stirring. When he opened his eyes again the light outside was less violent. He lay still for a minute, feeling his mind empty and his body cooler and less tired. Turning his head, he looked at the quilt into which he had been pressing his cheek — and got up hurriedly.
At ten o’clock, when he came out of the tube station at Oxford Circus, he stepped into a furnace. In a heat scarcely less stifling than at noon, a crowd flowed sluggishly past the lighted windows of the big stores, men carrying their jackets, half-clothed women pulling at the arms of sleepy brats, silent or whimpering: not a ripple of gaiety; the pressure of the heat seemed to have numbed in them even that bored docility which, by the greatest good luck, kept them going from morning to night and night to morning. He had meant to pick up a cab here, but none came: he started to walk home, making his way slowly against the current setting east. An acid breath of sweat, of stale scent, of weariness, came from it, the breath of an urban crowd, used heavy women, slack-bellied men, young clerks and their girls, louts with sallow cheeks and voices of cracked brass, here and there a dreaming face or a thin graceful body slipping like a soap-bubble across the surface of the stream. Not a soul in this fermenting mass of human beings would know his name if he shouted it, and neither he nor Pulmer nor any of the eminent writers and scholars who formed the Board of Trustees of
the Rutley Institute of Arts had ever said a word to them that might give their short lives a meaning. And what, indeed, did give them a meaning, or dignity, except the fact that they had been born and would all one day die? He had thought once that death was what gave life its dignity, the act of death putting all other human acts and lusts in their place. What nonsense! A silly play with words. Nothing to these millions. And nothing to him. Nothing.
He let himself into his house as noiselessly as possible — and drew a deep breath of relief, thankful that William had not heard him. There were moments — this was one — when William’s devotion, as genuine as it was cunning, irritated him more than the old fellow’s surliness. The truth is, I’ve never really got used to having servants, he thought smilingly.
His room was in darkness, blinds down and curtains drawn over the windows, and pleasantly cool. He turned on a single lamp, the one on his writing-table, and looked round him with the sense of estrangement and chill that follows a long journey. The ray of light picked out only a few objects, the tooled spine of a book, the handles of an old bureau, the flank of a jade horse gleaming in the depths of a recess between the crest of a Chinese bird and a miniature in which only a patch of pure vermilion stood out from the blurred rest. My room, he thought. The cocoon of my faked life. He felt a weariness which had very little to do with the miles he had walked on hot pavements or the hours spent in the stale air of trains and tubes.
It was nearly half-past eleven. Glancing down, he caught sight of a pile of letters, the day’s post, laid on his table. It had been there when he went out in the morning, leaving it untouched. He had no more patience to spare for it now than then, but he picked an envelope from the top of the heap, noticing with a flicker of interest the Danesacre postmark, and opened it.
It was from Edgar Liggett, son of the Dr. Liggett he recalled as a thick-jowled handsome old rascal with hard eyes and fingers like rods.
DEAR GREGORY MOTT,
(If your old association with this school allows me a measure of familiarity.) I conceive it my duty to let you know that your old master, Paul Gate, has died. Yesterday, of a stroke. I must say the best possible end, since he had to go some time. Funeral on the 24th. I don’t for a moment suppose that you want to attend, I understand that you are quite a busy man these days, but you may wish me to say that you were represented, or to send a suitable floral tribute to your old friend and, if I am not mistaken, benefactor….
‘No, you are not mistaken,’ Gregory said. The mockery in his one-sided smile was more for himself than for the shrewd Yorkshire impudence with which the writer of the letter had picked his words.
He began to walk up and down the room. ‘Forgive me,’ he said. He stood still. Why am I so anxious about myself? he thought coldly.
He would go to the funeral on the 24th. The day after tomorrow. Out of respect — but only partly out of respect. Partly to throw the insolent fellow’s words in his surprised face. He had no feeling for Danesacre, no wish to commit the folly of returning to a place which existed only in his past, in the salt-filled brightness of an early sun. But it was where he had started, and since he was seeking judgement — judgement, not acquittal — he could very properly begin his search there, at old Gate’s grave. Why not?
A ghost of his self-regarding irony returned for an instant to lay him open. Ass that you are, he judged you that night.
There was something he had to do before setting off anywhere. With angry reluctance, he sat down at the table and took out the manuscript of the novel he had been writing, on and off, for nearly four years. It was three-quarters finished; he reckoned that he had well over a hundred thousand words in the three fine smooth-leaved manuscript books under his hand.
Am I going to read all this? he asked himself, with a derisive smile.
On a sudden impulse he switched off the lamp, and felt his way across the room to a window. Pulling up the blind he opened it, wide.
He stood in the darkness, looking out on what could have been a fair-ground in the last hours before it packs up. Buses and long-distance coaches lined the road. At the other side, near the stone drinking-trough, the coffee stall that came here every night in summer was doing good business. People stood round it in groups and sat, a long row of crouched bodies, on the low stone coping at this side of the Park fence: women, shirt-sleeved men, couples fallen slackly against each other, their faces and the girls’ bare arms turned the same corpse-grey by the virulent light inundating the road and tarnishing the lower branches of the trees. The young black prostitute was there, pacing her accustomed few yards in pale skirt and jacket, pale hat, head turned over her shoulder like a goose as she walked, yellow handbag swinging. In the exhausted un-moving air voices rose straight up like flames. There was a smell of damp leather, which must come from all those feet shuffling on the littered pavement.
Something brushed his mind for a moment, a sense of the infinite weakness of all these people — even the cruel and violent — and of all human beings, including his wife, including Lambert, including Lambert’s avidly ambitious wife; all struggling, in a sweat of fear, greed, hope, fumbling tenderness, to make a place for themselves. And a sense of their courage of blind moles. In each of them, a naked quivering creature lived and would die in the same impenetrable solitude. What he felt was not pity. It might be only the first weak start of a much simpler and humbler feeling — the feeling of a brother.
He went back to the table, switched the lamp on again, and began reading.
He read for what seemed a short time, turning some pages after less than a glance, reading others with a severe attention, but when he looked at his watch again it was twenty minutes to three. The blood at the back of his head seemed to have concentrated itself into a hard knot of veins. Turning the lamp off, he went back to the window.
The coffee stall was still serving a score of idlers. Only the street-lamps remained alight, like reflections in water flowing between the black cliffs of buildings rising against a less dark sky. Not a breath of coolness. The people standing round the stall had a touch of the grotesque, as though the saner among them had already gone home to bed. There were four thin-legged women in what seemed a summer uniform of street-walkers, full skirts, thin blouses, and long thin wide scarves; a negro, very well turned-out, in pale grey; another in an absurdly long overcoat and bowler hat; a girl in tight colourless sweater and the tightest and narrowest of black trousers which stopped short at the bulge of her calf. The dozen or so sitting on the low wall now included a tramp, so hopelessly gone in sleep that he was only a shapeless heap of rags, the colour of earth.
The black girl had gone — with or without a client.
Suddenly one of the tarts laughed, standing close to the coffee stall with the black hole of her mouth widely open, head thrown back; with equal suddenness a youth in a white shirt, lurching against her, knocked her flat in the roadway: making an impatient gesture, the owner of the stall stepped over her to reach a customer: picked up and dusted by one of her friends, she hurried away down the road alone, crying and waving her arms; the others took their cups of coffee to the wall and sat down there in the ghastly light, crossing their thin legs. Three young men with guitars and skiffle objects joined the group at the stall; they played, badly and monotonously, and sang in high falsetto voices: the girl in the tight half-trousers and the negro in overcoat and bowler hat danced, their arms wrapped loosely round each other and their bottoms pushed out and jerking from side to side like captive balloons, and a thin young negress in black, with a long brown scarf, walked quickly and beautifully past, looking straight in front of her, as if she were alone and walking in an empty street.
Turning from the window, to go back to the manuscript he had left open at a page near the end, he realised that the room was no longer entirely dark. No need to turn a light on to decide that his great novel on the theme of death was so much eloquent nonsense. Death is a little thing, a little low door, leading to all or nothing. In neither case impor
tant.
He began to tear the leaves out of the three strongly-bound books, and then to tear them across and across, a few at a time, dropping the pieces into the wastepaper-basket at the side of the table.
His eye was caught by a passage on one of the pages he had barely glanced at, and he stopped to read it through. It was nothing important, the description of a room in which a man was standing reading a letter, a few sharp precise details, no emotion, not a trace, but abruptly the room was there, and the man, and his hand holding the letter, and the letter itself, with the inescapable force of the thing known. His mind made a sudden jump — pain, anguish, delight. Ah, that’s it, he thought; that is what matters — to see, touch, taste, smell, and know that which exists.… He hesitated — then folded the page and pushed it into his pocket, and went on with his labour of destruction. It took a long time, twenty or more minutes, since the paper was thick as well as smooth. When he had finished his fingers ached, and he felt angry and uncertain. He sat down, closing his eyes.
Even if death is the end, he thought, really the end, if we are only a flicker between two nights, God is still the one thing worth attention…. The only thing worth attention — this God he had spent his life falsifying and using, and now craved as a child craves bread: the child may know nothing about the nature of bread; it feels hunger; it feels that there is, somewhere, a something that will quiet its hunger: it cries and cries — even if contemptuously told: There is no bread.
At this moment he remembered what the young airman, Harriet’s son, had told him: that when he was dying of thirst in North Africa he hadn’t thought about drinking, only about water, his senses and his imagination obsessed by a single image, a single cry…. It struck Gregory that he himself, his mind and body, had become in the same way, with the same agony, a cry for God. He was alone, completely denuded, stripped now of his last rag of support, confidence, companionship, belief. At last he could see into himself — and see what was left to him. Only this thirst. This craving devoid of any trace of hope.
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