Soon I was shaking my fingers to restore the circulation while he looked at me with sombre-eyed Schadenfreude. I had asked for whisky with plenty of ice, and had got it: the glass was so thin that my hand had become numbed with cold. Just then, one of the embassy counsellors came towards Rubin, looking for him, not drifting in the party’s stream. Although he knew me well, his manner was constrained. After a few cordialities, he apologized and took Rubin aside.
For an instant I was left alone in the ruck of the party. Over the heads of the people nearby I could see the flaxen hair of Arthur Plimpton, the young American who was going round with Francis Getliffe’s daughter. I caught his eye and beckoned him: but before he could make his way through the crowd, Rubin and the diplomat were back.
‘Lewis had better hear this,’ said Rubin.
‘It’ll be all over town in an hour or so, anyway,’ said the diplomat.
‘What is it?’
‘I don’t know whether you’re in the picture already,’ he replied, ‘but your people and the French are going into Su-ez.’
He pronounced the name in the American manner, with time accent on the second syllable.
I was not occupied with phonetic niceties. I cursed. Both of them were used to me as a man with an equable public face. Suddenly they had seen me lose my temper and were uncomfortable.
‘Didn’t you expect it?’
From the summer onwards I had heard forecasts and thought they were irresponsible. ‘Good God Almighty,’ I said, ‘don’t you think I believed that we had the faintest residue of sense? Do you think any sane man would have taken it seriously?’
‘I’m afraid you’ve got to now,’ said the diplomat.
Just then Arthur Plimpton joined us. He greeted the other two, then looked at me and asked straight out: ‘Is there anything wrong, sir?’
‘Yes, Arthur, there is. We’ve gone off our blasted heads.’ He was a great favourite of mine. He was a craggily handsome young man of twenty-three. When he got older, the cheekbones would protrude and the bright blue eyes sink in: he already looked harder than an Englishman of the same age. He was capable, arrogant, and had a pleasant touch of cheek. He was also considerate, though at that moment the most he could think of doing was reach me another drink.
Within half an hour, he and David Rubin had drawn my wife and me away from the party and had established us in a pub in St John’s Wood. They were surprised, I realized as I became cooler, that we were so much outraged. But they were both kind and tactful men. They wanted to see us happier. For a time they kept off the evening’s news, but finding that made us more preoccupied, Arthur, the younger and more direct, plunged in. He asked what was worrying us most.
Margaret burst out, ‘What isn’t?’
Just for a second, Arthur smiled.
Her eyes were bright, she had flushed down her neck. Then he realized that she was more violent, more intransigent, than I was.
‘They’ve learned nothing and they’re no good,’ she said. ‘I’ve never liked playing along behind them, and I wish we never had!’
‘All I hope,’ said David Rubin, with a sad, sardonic smile, ‘is that if you must do something immoral, you manage to make it work.’
‘How can we bring it off?’ I cried. ‘What century do you think we’re living in? Do you think we can hold the Middle East with a couple of brigade groups?’
‘I don’t know how this’ll go over in our country,’ said Arthur.
‘How will it?’ I said angrily.
Rubin shrugged his shoulders.
I said: ‘Countries, when their power is slipping away, are always liable to do idiotic things. So are social classes. You may find yourselves in the same position some day.’
‘Not yet,’ said Arthur, with confidence.
‘No, not yet,’ said David Rubin.
Margaret and I were humiliated, and the others went on trying to cheer us up. When I had glimmers of detachment, which was not often that night, I thought that their attitudes were diametrically opposite to what one might expect. David Rubin was a man of deep and complex sophistication. His grandparents had been born in Poland, he had no English genes in him at all. Yet it was he who loved England more uncritically, which was strange, for he was one of the most critical of men. He did not like being patronized by English pundits, but he still had a love-affair with England, just a little like that of Brodzinski, who was a scientific enemy of his. He loved the pretty, picture-book England — far more than Margaret and I could have loved it. And at first sight surprisingly, far more so than Arthur Plimpton, who was as Anglo-Saxon as we were, who had the run of Basset and Diana Skidmore’s smart friends, who knew the privileged in our country as well as his own, and who had no special respect for any of them.
If Arthur had been an English boy, I should, when I first met him a couple of years before, have been able to place him within five minutes. As it was, it was apparent that he was well-off. But it had taken Diana to enlighten me that that was putting it mildly. Diana did not show enthusiasm for the idea that he might marry Penelope Getliffe. Diana considered that marriage with the daughter of a scientist, however eminent, would be a come-down. She was laying plans for something more suitable.
Despite, or perhaps because of, all this, Arthur was not over-impressed by England. On that night of Suez, he was full of idealism, genuine idealism, damning the British Government. I distinctly recalled that when he spoke of capitalist enterprises, particularly of methods of adding to his own fortune, he showed an anti-idealism which would have made Commodore Vanderbilt look unduly fastidious. Yet that night, he talked with great hope and purity.
It heartened Margaret, whose nature was purer than mine. Myself, I was discouraged. I was remembering the outbursts of idealism that I had listened to, from young men as good as this one, back in my own group, in a provincial town, when our hopes had been more revolutionary than Arthur could have believed, but still as pure as his. I fell silent, half-hearing the argument, Arthur and Margaret on one side, David Rubin on the other, Rubin becoming more and more elaborate and Byzantine. I was signalling to Margaret to come away. If I stayed there, I should just become more despondent, and more drunk.
There was one glint of original sin, as Arthur saw Margaret and me getting ready to go. He might have been talking with extreme purity; but he was not above using his charm on Margaret, persuading her to invite Penelope to stay at our flat, and, as it were coincidentally, him too. I supposed he was trying to get her out of the atmosphere of the Cambridge house. But I was feeling corrupt that night, and it occurred to me that, like most of the very rich people I had known, he was trying to save money.
15: Self-defence
On the Sunday afternoon, Margaret and I walked down, under the smoky, blue-hazed autumn sky, to Trafalgar Square. We could not get nearer than the bottom of the Haymarket. Margaret was taken back, high-coloured, to the ‘demos’ of her teens. For her, more than for me, the past might be regained; she could not help hoping to recapture the spirit of it, just as she hoped that places we had visited together in the past might always hold a spark of their old magic. She was not as possessed by time lost as I was, yet I believed she could more easily possess herself of it. The speeches of protest boomed out. We were part of a crowd, we were all together. It was a long time since I had been part of a crowd, and, that day, I felt as Margaret did.