‘What is the matter?’
‘Your nephew.’
Muriel had told her the story that afternoon. Pat was having other women, certainly a couple since the marriage, with the baby due in the New Year. It was as matter-of-fact as that.
‘He’s a little rat,’ said Margaret.
With the lights of Park Lane sweeping across us, I remarked: ‘You can’t do anything.’
‘You mustn’t defend him.’
‘I wasn’t–’
‘You want to, don’t you?’
I had never been illusioned about Pat. And yet Margaret was reading something, as though through the feel of my arm: an obscure male freemasonry, or perhaps another kind of resistance she expected, whenever her judgments were more immediate and positive than mine.
We didn’t say much until we were inside our bedroom.
‘It’s squalid,’ said Margaret. ‘But that makes it worse for her.’
‘I’m sorry for her.’
‘I’m desperately sorry for her.’
Her indignation had gone by now, but her empathy was left.
‘I know,’ I said. I asked how Muriel was taking it.
‘That’s a curious thing,’ Margaret gave a sharp-eyed, puzzled smile. ‘She seems pretty cool about it. Cooler than I should have been, I tell you, if you’d left me having Charles and done the same.’
A good many women would have been cooler than that, I told her.
She burst out laughing. But when I repeated, how had Muriel reacted, her face became thoughtful, not only protective but mystified and sad. In her composed, demure fashion, Muriel had been evasive about her husband during previous visits; this time she had come out with it, still composed but clinical. Not a tear. Not even a show of temper.
‘What do they think they’re playing at?’ said Margaret. ‘He wasn’t in love with her, we never believed he was. He was after the main chance, blast him. But what about her? It doesn’t make sense. She must love him, mustn’t she?
‘After all,’ she went on, ‘she’s only twenty-two.’
A silence.
Margaret said: ‘I don’t understand them, do you?’
She was upset, and I tried to comfort her: and yet for her it was no use being reflective or resigned. For, though this mess was quite far away from her – it wasn’t all that dramatic or novel, and Muriel was no more than a young woman she knew by chance – it had touched, or become tangled with, some of her own expectations. None of us had expected more from all the kinds of love than Margaret. With her father, those afternoons as she sat by him in his loneliness, she had felt one of them finally denied: and with her sons also, as she grew older, there was another kind of isolation. Maurice passive, gentle, but with no flash of her own spirit coming back: Charles, who had spirit which matched hers, but who responded on his own terms. She had invested so much hope in what they would give her: and now, despite her sense, her irony, she sometimes felt cut off from the young. That was why Pat and his deserted wife became tokens for her: they made romantic love appear meaningless: all her expectations were dismissed, as though she belonged to another species. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell her, but I did no good. Unlike herself, so strong in trouble close to hand, that night – on the pretext or trigger of an acquaintance’s ill-treatment – she felt lonely and unavailing.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you’ll feel different when Carlo (our name for Charles) is back.’
‘What will he be like then?’ she said.
She asked, would he understand the situation of Pat and Muriel better than we did. Neither of us could guess. It was hard to believe that he had much in common with either.
7: Fair-mindedness
ON the afternoon of Christmas Day, Margaret and I were sitting in our drawing-room, along with Maurice, who had the day off from his hospital. Over the Park outside, the sky was low, unbroken: no rain, not cold, a kind of limbo of a December day. We had put off the Christmas meal until the evening, since my brother Martin and his wife and daughter were driving down from Cambridge. No newspapers, no letters, a timeless day. I suggested that we should go for a walk: Margaret looked at the cloud cover, and decided that it wasn’t inviting. Maurice, as usual glad to oblige, said that he would come with me.
We didn’t go into Hyde Park, but instead turned into the maze of streets between our flat and Paddington. Or rather I turned that way, for Maurice didn’t assert himself, and happily took what came. It wasn’t that he was a weak character: in his own fashion, he was a strong one; but it was a fashion so different from mine, or my own son’s, that I was no nearer knowing what he wanted, or where his life would go. Since he came to me, at the age of three, when I married Margaret, he and I had always got on welclass="underline" there hadn’t been the subliminal conflict of egos that had occasionally broken out in my relation, on the surface ironic and amiable, with young Charles. Sometimes it seemed that Maurice didn’t have an ego. I had been concerned, because it made Margaret anxious, about his examination failures. I had also been concerned, because I was enough of a bourgeois born, about whether he would ever earn a living. Which had a certain practical interest, since otherwise I should have to go on supporting him.
He walked at my side, face innocent, good-looking, not feminine but unhardened for twenty-one. As usual, he was unprickly free from self: yet, I had often wondered, was that really true? It was the puzzle that one sometimes met in people who asked very little for themselves. They cared for others: they did good works and got nothing and claimed nothing: they had no rapacity or cruelty: so far as human beings could be, they were kind. Nevertheless, occasionally one felt – at least I did – that underneath they had a core more impregnable than most of ours. Somehow they were protected. Protected as some men are by shields of vanity or self-regard. Certainly Maurice made one feel that he was in less danger than any of us. Maybe it was that, more than his kindness, which made him so comfortable to be with.
Under the monotone sky, the high houses, also monotone, similar in period to the one where the Roses were living, more run-down. In the square, neon signs of lodging houses. Church built when the square was opulent (a million domestic servants in London then, and the slum-poor nowhere near these parts), Christmas trees lit up outside. Sleazy cafés on the road to Paddington station. A few people walking about, slowly, in the mild gloom. A scrum of West Indians arguing on the pavement. Christmas decorations in closed shops. Here and there on the high house-fronts lighted windows.
Once or twice Maurice reminded me of stories which he had told about those streets, for he knew them well. In his holidays he used to join a friend of his, the vicar of a local parish, on pastoral visits, making a curious, unsolemn and faintly comic pair, the vicar stout, be-cassocked and birettaed, Maurice as thin as a combination of the idiot prince and a first-class high-jumper. It was their way of enjoying themselves, and they had been inside many more rooms in the Paddington hinterland than the vicar’s duty called for. Yes, some of the sights weren’t pretty, Maurice had reported, unshockable: you could find most kinds of vice without going far. Also most kinds of suffering. Not the mass poverty of the thirties, that had been wiped out. But alcoholic’s poverty, drug addict’s poverty, pensioner’s poverty. Being poor when you’re old, though, that’s not the worst of it, Maurice had said. It’s being alone, day after day, with nothing to look forward to until you die. For once (it had happened one night when he returned home, a couple of years before), Maurice had spoken with something like violence. Genteel poverty behind lace curtains. A lucky person had a television set. If anyone feels like being superior about television, when they’re old they ought to live alone without one. You know, Maurice had gone on, they look forward to seeing Godfrey (the vicar) and me. I suppose one would if one were alone. Of course we can’t do much. We can just stay talking for half an hour. Anyway, Godfrey isn’t much good at conversation. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.