This incongruity struck Bevill as remarkably funny, and his bald head flushed with his chortles: he was content to stand in the hall without inserting himself into the grander circles of the party. But there were others who were not: the main room upstairs was packed with immiscible groups, for Gilbert and Betty had invited guests from all the strata they had lived among. There was Lord Lufkin and some of his court, from Gilbert’s business past: acquaintances from Chelsea before the war, the radicals, the ill-fitting, the lumpen-bourgeoisie.
There were a good many Civil Servants, among them Hector Rose, for once at a disadvantage, abnormally uncomfortable and effusively polite, detesting the sight of any society except in the office and the club. There was George Passant, moving about alone, with that expression unfocused, reverie-laden, absently smiling, which at this time more and more came over him in the proximity of women. There were Gilbert’s relatives, many of them soldiers, small-headed, thin, gravel-voiced. There were Betty’s, the younger women talking in the curious distorted Cockney of their generation of the upper-class, huddled together like a knot of scientists at the British Association anxious not to be interrupted by camp-followers.
In all those faces there was only one I looked for. Soon I discovered her, listening but not participating at the edge of a large circle, her eyes restlessly looking out for me. As at her father’s, we met alone in the crowd.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘I wish I could have brought you,’ I said.
‘I was touching wood, I didn’t like to ask for you.’
She was excited; as she lit a cigarette, there was a tremor in her fingers.
‘Who have you been talking to?’
‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that.’ She was laughing, not only with excitement, but at herself. Even now that she was grown-up, she was still shy. If this had been an ordinary party, not a cover for the two of us to meet, she would still have had to brace herself to cope: though, when once she had started, she revelled in it.
‘We’re here, anyway, and that’s lucky,’ I said.
‘It is lucky,’ she replied with an active restless smile.
I was just telling her that soon we could slip away downstairs and talk, when Betty herself joined us.
‘Lewis, my dear. Won’t you wish me luck?’
She held out her arms, and I kissed her cheek. Then, bright-eyed, she glanced at Margaret.
‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ said Betty.
‘You have,’ I was putting in, when Betty went on: ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but will you tell me who you are?’
It sounded at best forgetful, it sounded also rude, for Betty’s manner to a stranger was staccato and brusque. Yet she was the least arrogant of women, and I was at the same time astonished by her and upset to see Margaret wilt.
‘My name,’ she said, with her chin sunk down, ‘is Margaret Hollis.’
‘Oh, now I know,’ cried Betty. ‘You used to be Margaret Davidson, didn’t you?’
Margaret nodded.
‘I’ve heard my husband talk about you.’
With the same heartiness, the same apparent lack of perception, Betty went on with meaningless gossip, not caring that Margaret and I were looking strained. Yes, her husband Gilbert was a friend of Margaret’s sister Helen, wasn’t he? Yes, Gilbert had spoken about Helen’s husband. At last Betty broke off, saying to Margaret: ‘Look, there are some people here who I want you to meet. I’ll take you along straightaway.’
Margaret was led off. I had to let her go, without protecting her. It was a bitterness, known only to those in illicit love, not to be able to be spontaneous. I was reckoning how much time I had to allow before I could take her away.
Meanwhile, myself at a loss, I looked round. Gilbert, high-coloured, was surveying his guests with bold, inquisitive eyes. They were the collection of acquaintances of half-a-lifetime; I expected his detective work was still churning on; but I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.
So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered, and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of scepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except for catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by Civil Service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were now as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese Court. And I did not believe that I was seduced by literary resonances when I imagined that Betty Vane’s and Thomas Bevill’s relatives were behaving like Guermantes.
Just as the men of affairs had fractionated themselves into a group with its own rules and its own New Year’s Day rewards, just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks in a way that to old Bevill, who was grander than any of them, seemed rank bad manners, and what was worse, impolitic. But old Bevill belonged to a generation where the aristocracy still kept some function and so was unselfconscious: in his time it was far more casual, for example, where you went to school; when he told his anecdote about Percy Vane, the school they were both attending was not Eton; yet it was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors.
Looking round their wedding party, I could not shake off a cliché of those years, this was the end of an epoch; I should have liked the company of those who could see one beginning.
A twitch at my arm, and Betty was glancing up at me.
‘All right?’ she said.
‘Are you?’ Angrily, I wanted to ask why she had been rude to Margaret: but once more I had to calculate.
‘Yes, my dear.’
‘I never thought of this happening to you.’
‘I can manage it,’ she said. It was not just her courage and high spirits: she meant it.
She broke off sharp: ‘I’m sorry I had to cart her off. But people were watching you.’
‘Does that matter?’ I replied blank-faced.
‘You ought to know.’
‘What do you expect me to know?’
‘So long as you realize that people were watching you.’
‘I see.’
‘That’s all I can do for you now,’ said Betty.
She was, of course, warning me about her husband. It removed my last doubt that she might not know him right through, and on her account I was relieved. She was too loyal to say more, perhaps this was the one crack in her loyalty I should ever see, and she only revealed it because she thought I was running into danger. She had done me so many good turns; I was touched by this last one.