She read, eyes acute but without expression. Then she broke out, ‘He seems very well and cheerful.’ She looked at me with delight: she knew that I, like everyone in the family, was fond of Maurice. As for her, her face was softened, love shining through, and a curious kind of pride, or even admiration.
The letter, which was several pages long, came from nowhere more remote than Manchester. Maurice was working as an assistant in a mental hospital. Without complaint. Without self-concern – though, as he had done it before in vacations, he knew there weren’t many more menial jobs. It was that lack of self-concern which Margaret admired, and might have wished for in herself and hers. Yet there was a twist here. For the truth was, she didn’t really like it. All her family were clever, people who might denounce life’s obstacle race and yet, as it were absent-mindedly, contrived to do distinctly well at it. Maurice, her first child, whom she loved with passion, happened to be a sport. As a child, he had looked as though his temperament was going to be stormy: and then in adolescence (the only boy I had ever seen change that way round) he became more tranquil than any of us.
He was not in the least clever. He had that summer failed his examinations, for the second year running, at Cambridge. She had hoped that he might become a doctor, but that was out. Maurice himself accepted it with his usual gentle amusement. He thought he ought to try to be as useful as he could. ‘I don’t know much,’ he had said, talking of the hospital, ‘but I suppose I can look after them a bit.’
In secret, Margaret was distracted. She knew that his friends, as mystified as she was, were beginning to believe that he was one of nature’s innocents or saints. But could you bear your favourite child to be one of nature’s saints?
Meanwhile, I had been reading the postcard from Charles, her son and mine. He was not at all innocent, and he was extremely able. He looked older than his half-brother, though he was still not seventeen. He had had a brilliant career at school, and had decided, independent, on his own, to spend a year abroad before he went to Cambridge. He was writing from Bucharest. ‘Romanian is interesting, but I’d better economise on languages if I’m going to have one or two good enough. People won’t talk Russian here; and when they do aren’t usually very competent. Plum brandy is the curse of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, standards of primness – behind closed doors – markedly and pleasingly low.’ It reminded me of the postcards I used to receive from another bright young scholar, Roy Calvert, a generation before.
‘Well,’ I said, after Margaret had passed over Maurice’s letter, ‘you pay your money and you take your choice.’
I was pretending that I was more detached than she was. She knew better.
For herself; Margaret couldn’t help remembering Charles as an affectionate small boy. Now he was as self-willed as we had been. In the past she had imagined the time when her sons were grown up, and nothing but a comfort. She said, realism deserting her, ‘If only each of them could give the other a little of what he doesn’t have.’
She was harking back to them, reading Maurice’s letter again (would he look after his health?), as we picked our way through the rest of the mail. Five or six days of it. The ordinary professional letters. An invitation from the Lester Inces for the following weekend. A note from the wife of my nephew Pat, married that summer, child expected in January, hoping to see Margaret. Invitations to give lectures. Letter from a paranoid, asking for help against persons persecuting her by means of wireless messages. Two lines on a postcard from old George Passant, sent from Holland. Agenda of a meeting.
That was all. Nothing exciting, I said. That was the last thing we wanted, said Margaret, as we went in to eat at leisure, by ourselves.
We had arrived back on Tuesday. The next Monday morning we were again returning home, this time in a train, autumn fields bland in the sunshine, no shadow over us: in fact, in contented, mocking spirits, amused by the weekend. For we hadn’t been able to resist the Inces’ invitation. Margaret’s sister had been willing to stand in for another week, I was glad of a little grace before I started a new book. More than that, we had been inquisitive. The young took up our attention now, and it was a relaxation to have a look at middle-aged acquaintances.
In fact, it turned out fun to see Lester Ince installed in his second avatar, in his recently established state. It was, as it had unrolled before our eyes those last two days, a remarkable state. He had run off – or she had done the running off – with an American woman who was not merely rich, but, as her friends said, rich-rich. They had raced through their divorces in minimum time, and they had simultaneously been looking for a stately home. They had found it: one of the most famous and stateliest of homes: nothing less than Basset. Basset, where Diana Skidmore used to perform as a great hostess, and where Margaret and I, though nowhere near the smart life, had sometimes been among the guests. But that had been in the fifties, getting on for a decade ago (this was 1964), and Diana had got tired of it. No one seemed to be certain why, but, just as decisively as she once talked to ministers, she announced that she had had enough, and closed the house within a month. She was reported to be living, quite simply, in a London flat, seeing only her oldest friends. Basset had stayed empty for several years.
Then came the Inces. They had heard of it: they inspected it: they bought it. Together with associated farms, tenantry, trout streams, pheasant-shooting and outspread acres. Basset had become more opulent, so the knowing ones said, than ever in its history; Margaret and I had regarded it all, that weekend, with yokel-like incredulity, or perhaps more like American Indians confronted with the twin miracles of Scotch whisky and firearms. In my less stupefied moments, I had been trying to work out how many hundred thousands of pounds they had spent.
Lester Ince as landowner. Lester Ince in a puce smoking jacket, at the head of his table in the great eighteenth-century dining-room, ceiling by Thornhilclass="underline" Lester pushing the decanter runners round, after the women had left us. Well, one had to admit, there were considerable bonuses. The food in Diana’s time had always been skimpy, and usually dim. Not now. There used not to be enough to drink. Lester Ince, who remained a hearty and a kindly man, had taken care of that.
Still, it seemed a slight difference of emphasis away from the Lester Ince who was a junior fellow of my old college only ten years before. He had written a highly regarded work on the moral complexities in Joseph Conrad: but his utterances, almost as soon as he was elected, had been somewhat unexpected. He had surveyed his colleagues, and decided that he didn’t think much of them. Francis Getliffe was a stuffed shirt. So was my brother Martin. The best college hock Lester firmly described as cat’s pee. The comfortable worldliness of Arthur Brown was even less to his taste. ‘I should like to spill the crap about this joint,’ someone reported him saying in the combination room: at that stage, he had a knack of speaking what he thought of as American demotic.
As a result of this kind of trenchancy, he became identified as one of the academic spokesmen of a new wave. This was protest. This was one of the voices of progressive opinion. Well, there seemed a slight difference of emphasis now.
To a good many, particularly to those who couldn’t help finding leaders and then promptly losing them, the conversation at Basset that weekend might have been disconcerting. This used to be one of the major political houses. A number of ministerial careers had been helped, or alternatively hindered, in Diana Skidmore’s drawing-room. It was possible that policies – though did any of us know how policies were really made, in particular the persons who believed they made them? – had at least been deviated. Basset was not a political house any longer. But, in spite or because of that, it had become far more ideological than it had ever been. Diana’s Tory ministers hadn’t indulged much in ideology: the Inces and their friends were devoted to it. The old incumbents didn’t talk about the Cold War: now, there were meals when the Basset parties talked of nothing else.