The taxi chugged through the afternoon traffic, south-west across London. I was so angry that I did not know why I was going there. I had lost touch with my own feelings. Guilt, concern, personal fates, public ends — I hadn’t the patience to think of any of them. Nothing except pushing the taxi on.
At last, after the driver had made false shots, trying squares, places, mews, we drove up a street all of tall terraced houses, shabby, unpainted. In front of one, I looked at the slips of cardboard by the bells. The other names were handwritten, but against the top floor bell was a soiled visiting card: Mr R Porson, Barrister-at-Law.
Empty milk bottles stood on the steps. Inside the door, which was on the latch, letters and newspapers lay in the unlit hall. I climbed upstairs. On the second landing the door of a bathroom opened, the only one, it seemed, in the house. I went up to the top floor and knocked. A thick, strident voice answered, and I entered. Yes, it was the man I used to know — twenty years older, more than half drunk. He greeted me noisily, but I cut him short by giving him the telegram.
‘Did you send this?’
He nodded.
‘Why?’
‘I wanted to cheer him up.’
In the attic flat, which had a skylight and a high window, Porson peered at me, ‘What’s the matter, old boy? You look a bit white. I insist on prescribing for you. What you need is a good stiff drink.’
‘Why did you send this?’
‘The poor chap hasn’t got long to go. It’s been all over the papers,’ said Porson. ‘I’ve got a great respect for him. We don’t breed men like him nowadays. He’s a bit different from all these young pansies. So I wanted him to know that some of us were thinking about him. I wasn’t prepared to let him go out alone.’
Fiercely he cried out: ‘Well, is there anything the matter with that?’
He lurched back into his chair. He said: ‘I don’t mind telling you, I don’t run to telegrams unless I have to. Four bob. But I thought it was the least I could do.’
‘What in Heaven’s name,’ I shouted, ‘do you imagine it was like for him—’
He was too drunk to understand. I was shouting for my own benefit alone. In time I gave it up. There was nothing to do. I accepted his drink.
‘Well,’ he said, examining me with a critical, patronizing air, ‘from all I hear, you haven’t done so badly, young man. I’ve always insisted you’d have done better, though, if you had listened to me more in the old days.’
‘What about you?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got a great many talents. You know that as well as anybody. Somehow they haven’t done as much for me as they should. There’s still plenty of time to pull something off. Do you realize,’ he said in a threatening tone, ‘that I’m only sixty-two?’
He had gone many steps down hill since I last saw him before the war. This tiny room, furnished with a divan bed, a table, one easy chair and one hard one, showed still the almost pernickety, aunt-like tidiness that I remembered, but it must have been the cheapest he could find. Even then, the rent must have come out of his bit of capital. So far as I knew, he had done no work for years. On the mantelpiece he kept a picture of Ann March, his symbol of unrequited love, his princesse lointaine. There were also photographs of two young men. In himself he looked broken down, his face puce, flecked with broken veins. The tic down his left cheek convulsed it more than ever. Yet at some moments he appeared — in his expression, not only in his spirit — much younger than he was, instead of older: as though unhappiness, discontent, frustration, failure, drink, had been a preservative during which time stood still, as it could not for luckier and stabler men. All his old hatreds came boiling out, just as fresh as they had always been — the Jews, the Reds, the Pansies. He was particularly violent about the pansies, much more so than in the past. I couldn’t pretend that Lord Gilbey was any of those things, could I? ‘He’s a man after my own heart, I insist on that,’ he cried belligerently. ‘Do you understand why I had to send a personal message? Because if you don’t now, my boy, you never will.’
The outburst died down. He seemed glad to have me there; he took it without surprise, as though I had seen him the day before and had just called in again. In a tone both gentle and defiant he said: ‘You may not believe it, but I’m very comfortable here.’
He went on: ‘There are a lot of young people round this neighbourhood. I like the young. I don’t care what anyone says against them, I like the young. And it’s very good for them to have an older man with plenty of experience to come to for advice.’
He was impatient for me to meet them. But we had to wait until the pub opened, he said. He was restless, he stumped over to the whisky bottle several times, he kept looking at his watch. As the afternoon light edged through the high window, he got to his feet and gazed out.
‘Anyway,’ he said loudly, ‘you can’t deny that I’ve got a nice view.’
Porson’s acquaintances came to the pub at the corner of his street, where he installed us both at the crack of opening time. They were mostly young, not many over thirty. Some of them were living on very little; one or two might have some money from home. There were painters there, there were one or two writers and schoolteachers. They were friendly, and gave Porson what he wanted. They made him a bit of a figure. They treated me amiably, as though I were someone of their age, and I liked them. It might have been a sentimentality, the consequence of my abortive anger and this resurrection of the past in Porson, an old acquaintance become not more respectable, but considerably less so. It might have been a sentimentality, but I was speculating whether there was a higher proportion of kind faces there than in the places I nowadays spent my time. It might have been a sentimentality, and probably was. But theirs was a life which, if one has ever lived it or been close to it, never quite relinquishes its last finger-hold upon one. I could think of contemporaries of mine, middle-aged persons with a public face, who dreamed a little more often than one would think likely of escaping back to places such as this.
Some of the people in that pub seemed to live in a present which to them was ideal. They could go on, as though the future would always be like this. It was a slap-happy March evening. They kept standing Porson drinks. I was enjoying myself: and yet, at the same time, I was both softened and shadowed. I knew well enough what anyone of political insight would say, whether they were Marxists, or irregulars like Roger Quaife, or hard anti-communists from the Partisan Review. They would agree about the condition, though they fought about the end. They would say that there was no protest in this pub. Not that these people shared Porson’s fits of crazed reaction. They had good will, but except for one or two picked causes, they could not feel it mattered. Nearly everyone there would have joined in a demonstration against hanging. Otherwise, they shrugged their shoulders, lived their lives, and behaved as though they were immortal. Was this their version of the Basset house-party, which also talked as though there would never be a change again?
They would have had no use for Roger Quaife. To them, he would be part of an apparatus with which they had no connection, from which they were alienated, as completely as if it were the governing class of San Domingo. So was he alienated from them. How could he reach them? How could he, or any politician, find a way through?
They were not going to worry about Roger Quaife, or the scientists, or the civil servants, or anybody else who had to take a decision. They did not thank anybody for worrying about them. Yes, there were unhappy people in the pub, now it was filling up. A schoolmaster with an anxiety-ridden face, who lived alone: a girl sitting at the bar, staring with schizoid stillness at a glass of beer. For them, there were friends here prepared to worry. Even for old Porson, drunken, boastful, violent, a little mad.