Which began to have other consequences we hadn’t expected. As soon as they knew of Muriel’s resolve, Charles, Maurice and other friends of theirs had been working to bring about a reconciliation. There was a feeling, a kind of age-group solidarity, that Pat had to be helped. He was living in his father’s house in Cambridge; occasionally he came to London, and we heard that he was lent money by some of the young people. Nevertheless, as the summer went on, he was – as it were insensibly – pushed to the edge of their group. One didn’t hear any of them say a harsh word about him: but one ceased to hear him much talked about at all. Whereas Muriel one always saw, when, as occasionally they did, they invited older people to their parties.
Muriel’s own house was modest but smart, the house of a prosperous young married couple, except for the somewhat anomalous absence of a husband. But, instead of entertaining there, she went to the bed-sitting-rooms in which most of that group lived, such as Nina’s in Notting Hill. There seemed to be about a couple of dozen of them drifting round London that summer. Charles, waiting to go up to Cambridge, was the youngest, though some of the others had been at school with him. Young men and girls sometimes called in at our flat for a drink. They were friendly, both with an older generation and each other. They didn’t drink as much as my friends used to at their age: there were all the signs that they took sex much more easily. Certainly there didn’t appear to be many tormented love affairs about. A couple of the girls were daughters of my own friends. I sometimes wondered how much different was the way they lived their lives from their parents’ way: was the gap bigger than other such gaps had been?
Often I was irritated with them as though I were the wrong distance away, half involved, half remote: and it was Charles’ self-control, not mine, which prevented us from quarrelling. He was utterly loyal to his friends and when I criticised them didn’t like it: but he set himself to answer on the plane of reason.
All right, their manners are different from yours: but they think yours are as obsolete as Jane Austen’s. If they don’t write bread-and-butter letters, what of it? It is an absurd convention. If (as once happened) one of them writes on an envelope the unadorned address Lewis Eliot, again what of it?
He wouldn’t get ruffled, and that irked me more. Take your friend Guy Grenfell, I said. They had been at school together. Guy was rich, a member of a squirearchical family established for centuries. He might grow his hair down to his shoulders, but once, when he came to an elderly dinner party, he behaved like the rest of us, and more so. Yet when he was in the middle of their crowd, he appeared to be giving a bad imitation of a barrow boy. Was this to show how progressive he was?
Charles would not let his temper show. Guy was quite enlightened. Some of them were progressive…
I jeered, and threw back at him the record of Lester Ince and his galère. They were just as rude as your friends. Look where they finished. I brought out the old aphorism that when young men rebel against social manners, they end up by not rebelling against anything else.
We shall see, said Charles. Angry that I couldn’t move him, I had let my advocacy go too far: but, still, there were times when, unprovoked, I thought – are these really our successors? Will they ever be able to take over?
Those questions went through my mind when, one day in July, I received the news of George Passant’s death. It had happened weeks before, I was told, very near the time that I had been having that family conference with Azik in Eaton Square. In fact, so far as I could make out the dates, George had had a cerebral haemorrhage the night before, and had died within twenty-four hours. This had taken place in a little Jutland town, where he had exiled himself and was being visited by one of his old disciples. Two or three more of his disciples, faithful to the last, had gone over for the funeral, and they had buried him in a Lutheran cemetery.
It might have seemed strange that it took so long for the news to reach me. After all, he had been my first benefactor and oldest friend. Yet by now be was separated from everyone but his own secret circle in the provincial town: while I, since my father’s death, had no connections in the town any more. There was nothing to take me there, after I resigned from the University Court. It wasn’t my father’s death that cut me off, that was as acceptable as a death could be: but after the trial there were parts of my youth there that weren’t acceptable at all, and this was true for Martin as well as for me. Some of those old scenes – without willing it, by something like a self-protecting instinct – we took care not to see. I still carried out my duty, George’s last legacy, of visiting his niece in Holloway Prison. Occasionally I still had telephone calls, charges reversed, from Mr Pateman, but even his obsessional passion seemed not to have been spent, but at least after a year to be a shade eroded.
So far as I could tell, there had been no announcement of George’s death, certainly not in a London paper. He had been a leader in a strange and private sense, his disciples must be mourning him more than most men are mourned, and yet, except for them, no one knew or cared where he was living, nor whether he was alive or dead.
I heard the news by telephone – a call from the town, would I accept it and reverse the charges? I assumed that it was Mr Pateman, and with my usual worn-down irritation said yes. But it was a different voice, soft, flexible, excited, the voice of Jack Cotery. I had seen him only twice in the past ten years, but I knew that, though he had a job in Burnley, he still visited the town to see his mother, who was living in the same house, the same backstreet, whose existence, when we were young and he was spinning romantic lies about his social grandeur, he had ingeniously – and for some time with success – concealed. Had anyone told me about George, came the eager voice. He, Jack, had just met one of the set. The poor old thing was dead. Jack repeated the dates and such details as he had learned. Until George died, there was someone with him all the time: he knew what was happening, but couldn’t speak.
‘I don’t know what he had to look forward to,’ Jack was saying. ‘But he loved life, in his own way, didn’t he? I don’t suppose he wanted to go.’
To do Jack credit, he would have hurried to tell me the news, even if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. But that he had. The last time he visited me, he had been trying to convert me to organised religion. Now, over the telephone, he couldn’t explain, it was very complicated, but he had another problem, very important, nothing bad, but something that mattered a very great deal – and it was very important, so, just to come out with it, could I lend him a hundred pounds? I said that I would send a cheque that evening, and did so. After what I had been listening to, it seemed like paying a last debt to the past.
Guy Grenfell and other companions of Charles were in the flat, and as I joined them for a drink I mentioned that I had just heard of the death of an old friend. Who, said Charles, and I told him the name. It meant nothing to the others, but Charles had met George year after year, on his ritual expeditions to London. Charles’ eyes searched into my expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But, though he had never told me so – he was too considerate for that – I was certain that in secret he had found George nothing but grotesque. Diffidence. Formality. Heartiness. Repetitive questions (‘Are you looking after your health?’). Flashes of mental precision. Slow-walking, hard-breathing figure, often falling asleep in an armchair, mouth open. Once, coming in drunk, he had fallen off a chair. That was what Charles had seen, and not many at his age would have seen more. He could not begin to comprehend the effect that George had once had on me and my first friends.