‘I wanted you to hear—’
‘That’s what it boils down to isn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘Well, my answer is short and simple. I wouldn’t pay Cooke in washers.’
It was no use. Implacable, tied up in his anger, as rude as I had seen him, he cut me short.
When I reported the answer to Gilbert, he said: ‘That’s burnt it.’ His face flushed, he went on: ‘I never ought to have let him get the smallest blasted bleat from my direction, I never ought to have let you go near the man. There it is!
‘Well,’ he said defiantly, ‘I’d better make sure that the chaps here want me. I’ve always said that in business you’ve either got to be a tycoon or a born slave, and damn it, I’m not either. I once told P L that.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Offered me a three-year contract.’
On his disappointment Gilbert put a dashing face; when he turned it towards me it was still pursed with comradely malignance. I fancied that, whether I brought him good news or bad from Lufkin, he would not have relented. He had so often relished letting slip a piece of gossip, but he was relishing even more holding on to one.
Before I could search for another link with Margaret there happened what at the time seemed a wild coincidence, a thousand-to-one against chance. One Saturday morning, thinking nothing of it, I was rung up by old Bevill, who, after a period of what he himself described as ‘the wilderness’, had returned to Whitehall as chairman of the atomic energy project. He was just off to the country for the weekend, he said: he had a ‘little job’ he wanted to ‘unload’ on to me: would I mind going with him as far as Charing Cross?
In the circumstances, I thought he might have risen to a taxi: but no, Bevill stood at the bus-stop, briefcase in hand, bowler hat on head, getting a modest pleasure out of his unpretentiousness. At last we mounted a bus, the top deck of which was empty, so that Bevill, instead of waiting until the platform at Charing Cross, was able to confide.
‘I’m being chased, Lewis,’ he said, looking over his shoulder to make sure no one was coming up, and somehow giving the impression that he was really on the run.
‘Who by?’
‘People who always know better than anyone else,’ the old man replied. ‘I don’t know about you, Lewis, but I don’t like people who’re always positive you’re wrong and they’re right. Particularly intellectuals, as I believe they’re called nowadays, or else have the impertinence to call themselves. The nigger in the woodpile is, they can make a hell of a lot of noise.’
‘What do they want?’
‘Do you remember that fellow Sawbridge?’ The question was rhetorical; old Bevill, my brother, and the Barford scientists, Hector Rose, and I were not likely to forget Sawbridge, who had not long since been sent to jail for espionage.
The bus in front of us disappeared out of Whitehall with a swishing scarlet flash: we were stopped at the traffic lights, and Bevill stared up at Nelson’s statue.
‘Now that chap up there, he was a different kettle of fish from Sawbridge. You can’t make me believe he would have betrayed his country.’ In action, the old man could be as capable and cynical as most men: in speech he could be just as banal.
‘You can’t make me believe he would have had any use for intellectuals,’ Bevill went on darkly. ‘Kicked them in the pants, that’s what he would have done.’
As we curved round Trafalgar Square, Bevill told me that some people unspecified were asking ‘silly questions’ about the trials of the atomic spies: why had they all pleaded guilty, why were the prison terms so long?
‘Long,’ said Bevill. ‘If you ask me, they were lucky to get away with their necks.
‘But I tell you, Lewis,’ he went on, more like his patient political self, ‘some people are asking questions, all in the name of civil liberties if you please, and we don’t want any more questions than we can help because of the effect on our friends over the other side. And so it may be a case where a bit of private conversation can save a lot of public fuss, even if it does seem like eating humble-pie.’
He gave a furtive grin, and said: ‘That’s where you come in, my lad.’
‘You want me to talk to them?’
‘No, Lewis, I want you to listen to them. Listening never did any of us any harm, and talking usually does,’ said Bevill, in one of his Polonian asides. ‘Someone’s got to listen to one of those fellows, and you’re the man for the job.
‘You see,’ said Bevill, staring uncomplainingly down at a traffic block, ‘they might trust you, which they’d never begin to do with Rose or me. They’d never get it out of their heads that I was an old die-hard who didn’t understand what they were talking about and didn’t care a kipper for what was bothering them. And I’m not sure,’ said Bevill, with his customary realism and humility, ‘I’m not sure that they’d be far wrong.’
‘Who is it,’ I asked, marking down a tiresome, tricky, but not important date for the following week, ‘that you want me to see?’
‘One of those fellows who write about pictures,’ Bevill replied, pointing intelligently at the National Gallery. ‘His name is Austin Davidson. I expect you’ve heard of him.’
‘Yes, I have.’
‘Somehow he gave the impression, or someone else did, that he knew you. Do you know the fellow, Lewis?’
‘I’ve never met him.’
‘I suppose he’s one of those chaps who makes a painter’s reputation and then gets his share of the takings when the prices go up,’ said Bevill, with a simple contempt that he would not have thought of applying to a politician or even a businessman. But I was not paying attention to that accusation, which was about the last that, from Davidson’s eminence, he could ever have imagined being uttered against himself, casually but in cold blood. Instead, staring down at the pavement artist in front of the Gallery, hearing old Bevill bring out the name of Margaret’s father, I was full of an instantaneous warmth, as though I were completely relaxed and could count, so delectably sharp were they, the leaves of grass on the verges down below.
‘Are you positive you haven’t met the chap?’ Bevill was inquiring.
‘Quite.’
‘Well, I got the impression, if I’m not muddling things, that he gave me to understand, or he may have said so to Rose, that you’d be very acceptable as someone to talk to. And that suggests to me that you’d be able to keep those fellows from making any more fuss.’
The bus started, and Bevill was peering through the window, trying to see the clock on Charing Cross.
‘I needn’t tell you,’ he said cheerfully, ‘not to tell them anything they oughtn’t to know.’
36: Reading-lamp Alight in a Peaceful Room
HEARING that Davidson was to be given a private explanation, George Passant stormed with fury.
‘If one of my relations,’ he cursed, ‘had been uncomfortable about the Sawbridge case or any other blasted case, are you going to tell me that that old sunket Bevill would have detailed a high Civil Servant to give them an interview? But this counry doesn’t use the same rules if you come from where I did instead of bloody Bloomsbury.’
It was a long time since I had heard George explode with the radical fervour of his youth.
‘I suppose,’ he said, ‘you don’t feel inclined to tell this man there’s no reason on God’s earth why he should get special treatment.’
I said no.
‘Your proper answer to these people,’ George cried, ‘when they come begging favours, is Doctor Johnson’s to Lord Chesterfield.’
I was not sure what obscure grievance George was hugging on my behalf.
‘Bloody Bloomsbury’: George’s swear-words crackled out with ‘Bloomsbury’ after each one. George’s political passions were still rooted in the East Anglian earth, where his cousins were farm labourers: like most rooted radicals, he distrusted upper-class ones, he felt they were less solid men than reactionaries such as old Bevill.