11: Replica of a Group
IT was getting on for a month later, on an afternoon when Margaret was taking her turn to visit Austin Davidson, that Azik Schiff rang up: would I call round at his house, he wanted (using an idiom known only to Azik) to include me in the picture. High summer in Eaton Square, trees dense with foliage, leaves dark under the bright sun, car bonnets flashing. The major rooms in Azik’s house were on the second floor, a kind of piano nobile, and there in the long drawing-room, standing in front of his Renoir, Azik greeted me. He gave his face-splitting froglike smile, called me ‘my friend’, put his arm round my shoulders and conducted me to a sofa where Rosalind was sitting. Then there was conferring about whether it was too late for tea, or too early for a drink. Both of them, Azik in particular, were making more than their normal fuss of me, trying to wrap me round with warmth.
When we were settled down, welcomes insisted on, Azik put his hands on his thick thighs, and said, like one at home with negotiations: ‘Lewis, my friend, you are not a principal in this matter. But we thought you ought to be informed.’
‘After all, you’re his uncle, aren’t you?’ Rosalind said appeasingly, but as though raising an unnecessary doubt.
I said, I had heard so many rumours, I should be grateful for some facts.
‘Ah, it is the young who have been talking.’
‘Not to me,’ I said.
‘Your son is a fine young man.’
I explained, I hadn’t a clear idea what he had been doing.
‘It makes no difference,’ said Azik. ‘It is all settled. Like that–’ he swept his arm.
‘She’s as obstinate as a pig, she always was,’ said Rosalind.
Azik gave a brisk businesslike account. Nothing had affected Muriel. Not that that was different from what I had expected: I imagined that she had stayed polite and temperate all through. While others had been arguing with her, giving advice, making appeals, she had been quietly working with her solicitor. The Chelsea flat had been sold (‘at a fair price’, said Azik): she had bought a house in Belgravia, and moved into it, along with child and nurse, the day before. The transaction had gone through so fast that Azik assumed that it must have been started months ago.
‘Remember, my friend, she is well provided for. She is independent with her money. We have no sanctions to use against her. Even if we were sure of our own ground.’
All of a sudden, Rosalind went into a tirade, her face forgetting the gentility of years and her voice its dying fall. She began by being furious with her daughter. After all her, Rosalind’s, care. Not to be able to keep a man. To get into a mess like this. No gratitude. No consideration. Making her look like an idiot. But really she was being as protective, or as outraged at not being able to be so, as when her daughter was a child. Rosalind’s sophistication had dropped clean away – her marriages, her remarkable talent for being able to love where it was advantageous to love, her climb from the suburbs of our native town to Eaton Square, her adventures on the way, all gone.
She had forgotten how she had campaigned to capture Muriel’s father, who, when one came down to earth, had not been much more stable with women than Pat himself. As for Pat, Rosalind felt simple hate. Twister. Gigolo. Expecting to be paid for his precious–. Rosalind’s language, when she was calm, could be slightly suggestive, but now there was no suggestion about it. One comfort, he had got what was coming to him. Then he went whining round. Rosalind began to use words that Azik perhaps had never heard, and that I hadn’t since I was young. Mardy. Mardyarse. How any child of hers, Rosalind shouted, could have been taken in by a drip like that – .
‘She has to make her own mistakes, perhaps,’ said Azik, in a tone soothing but not quite assured, as though this violence in his wife was a novelty with which he hadn’t had much practice.
Rosalind: Who was she going to pick up next?
Azik: We have to try and put her in the way of some nice young men.
Rosalind: We’ve done that, since she was seventeen. And look what happens.
Azik: We have to go on trying. These young people don’t like being managed. But perhaps there will be a piece of luck.
Rosalind: She’ll pick another bit of rubbish.
Azik: We must try. As long as she doesn’t know we’re trying.
The dialogue went on across me, like an argument in the marriage bed, Rosalind accusing, Azik consolatory. It wasn’t the first of these arguments, one felt: perhaps the others, like this, faded away into doldrums, when Azik, still anxious to placate his wife, had time to turn to me.
‘There is something I have already said to Martin,’ he told me. ‘Now I shall say it to you, Lewis, my friend.’
I looked at him.
‘I should be sorry if this business of these young people made any break between your family and ours. I must say, I should be sorry. It will not happen from our side.’
He spoke with great dignity. Uxorious as he was, he spoke as though that was his decision, and Rosalind had to obey. Loyally, making herself simmer down, she said that she and I had known each other for thirty years. On the other hand, I was thinking, I should be surprised if she went out of her way to meet Martin in the future.
Just after I had replied, telling him that I felt the same – I should have had to return politeness for politeness, but it happened to be true – young David ran into the room. He was a handsome boy, thin and active, one of those genetic sports who seemed to have no resemblance to either of his parents, olive-skinned. His father looked at him with doting love, and the boy spoke to both of them as though he expected total affection, and gave it back. He was just at the age when the confidence between all three was still complete, with nothing precarious in it, as though the first adolescent storm or secret would never happen. At his school his record was as good as Charles’ had been at the same age, six years before. In some ways, I thought, this boy was the cleverer. It was a triumph for Rosalind, much disapproved of by persons who regarded her as a kind of Becky Sharp, to produce for Azik when she was well over forty a son like this.
As for me, watching (the bonds between the three of them were so strong there wasn’t really room for an outsider there) the happiness of that not specially Holy Family, I couldn’t have found it in me to begrudge it them. But I was thinking of something else. When they had been talking of Muriel, Rosalind had behaved in what Austin Davidson would have called an uncivilised fashion: in fact he would have thought her strident and coarse, and had no use for her. While Azik had been showing all the compassionate virtues.
Well, it was fine to be virtuous, but the truth was, Rosalind minded about her daughter and Azik didn’t. To everyone round them, probably to his wife, possibly even to himself he seemed a good stepfather, affectionate, sympathetic, kind. I had even heard him call himself a Jewish papa, not only in his relation to his son but to his stepdaughter. One had only to see him with that boy, though, to know what he was like as a father – and what he wasn’t to Muriel. Of course he was kind to her, because there weren’t many kinder men. He would do anything practical for her: if she had needed money, he would have been lavish. But as for thinking of her when she was out of his sight, or being troubled about her life, you had just to watch his oneness – animal oneness, spiritual oneness – with his son.
If that had not been so, if his imagination had been working, working father-like, on her behalf, it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t have been more cautious about Pat. At the time (it had happened so quickly, we had all been puzzled that Pat came to know Muriel) I had thought he was taking Pat very easily. Yet Azik was no fool about people. He just wasn’t truly interested, neither in Pat nor in the girl herself. If it had been a business deal, or even more anything concerned with Azik’s son, Pat would never have slid inside the house. As it was, he got away with it: until he discovered, what no one had imagined, that the young woman was more ruthless than he was.