The irony was, that the ‘freedoms’ George – and all the other Georges of his time – had clamoured for, had more or less come true. The life that Charles’ own friends were leading was not that much different from what George had foreshadowed all those years ago. A lot of the young men and girls in the Earl’s Court bedsitters would have fitted, breathing native air, into George’s group. Gentle. Taking their pleasures as they came. Not liking their society any more than George had done. Making their own enclaves. The passive virtues, not the fighting ones. Not much superego (if one didn’t use older words). The same belief, deep down, that most people were good.
That would not suit Charles for long, any more than it had suited me. And yet it had its charm. It seemed at times like an Adamic invention, as though no one had discovered a private clan life before. That was true even with the more strenuous natures among them, like his own. It might have been true, I thought, of Muriel.
So much so that when – some weeks after the news about George, to whom I didn’t refer again – I told Charles that his friends went in for enclave-making, just as much as the bourgeois they despised, he didn’t like it. Once more he felt curiously protective about the whole circle, more so than I remembered being. But he was still not prepared to quarrel and he suspected there might be something in what I said. He had also seen more subsistence poverty than any of us. All over the advanced world, people seemed to be making enclaves. I thought that wasn’t just a fantasy of my own. The rich like Azik and some of our American friends; the professionals everywhere; the apparently rebellious young; they were all drawing the curtains, looking inwards into their own rooms, to an extent that hadn’t happened in my time. The demonstrations (that was the summer when the English young, including Charles’ friends, started protesting about Vietnam), the acts of violence, were deceptive. They too came from a kind of enclave. They were part of a world which, though it could be made less comfortable, or more foreboding, no one could find a way to shake.
Charles listened carefully. This wasn’t an argument, though I had touched on the rift of difference between us. Since he had left school and gone on his new-style grand tour, he had been released, happy and expectant. Inside the family, we had no more cares, possibly less, than most of our own kind. It had been an easy summer, with time to meet his friends and our own. Except that we had to be ready for the death of Margaret’s father, we had nothing that seemed likely to disturb us, not even an examination or a book coming out.
‘How many of your prophecies have gone wrong?’ said Charles, without edge, with detachment.
‘Quite a few.’
‘How right were you in the thirties?’
‘Most of the time we (I was thinking of Francis Getliffe and others) weren’t far off. Anyway, a lot of it is on the record.’
‘In the war? What did you think would be happening now?’
I paused.
‘There I should have been wrong. I thought that, if Hitler could be beaten, then things would go much better than in fact they have.’
‘I hope’, said Charles, ‘that you turn out wrong again. After all, some of us might see the end of the century, mightn’t we?’
He gave a smile, meaning that he and his friends by that time would only be middle-aged.
12: Result of an Offer
THE Lords were having a late-night sitting, Francis told me over the telephone (it was the last week in October), a committee stage left over from the summer. He would be grateful if Margaret and I would go along and have supper with him there, just to help him through the hours. Yes, we were free: and it was conceivable that Francis wanted more than sheer company, for one of the political correspondents (not our enemy of the spring) had that morning reported that Lord Getliffe had been called to Downing Street the day before. The same correspondent added with total confidence that S––, the old Commons loyalist who had been given the job when Francis previously refused it, would be going within days. He was being looked after – a nice little pension on one of the nationalised boards.
It sounded like inside information. Just as Hector Rose and my old colleagues used to ask in Whitehall, often with rage, I wondered however it got out. Possibly from S–– himself. Politicians, old Bevill used to say, were the worst keepers of secrets. They will talk to their wives, he added with Polonian wisdom. He might have said, just as accurately, they will talk to journalists: and the habit seemed to be hooking them more every year, like the addiction to a moderately harmless drug.
As we came out of Westminster Underground, the light was shining over Big Ben, there was a smell – foggy? a tinge, or was one imagining it, of burning wood? – in the smoky autumn air. Francis, waiting for us in the peers’ entrance, kissed Margaret and led us up the stairs, over the Jonah’s-whale carpets, straight to the restaurant; we were rescuing him, he said, the parliamentary process could be remarkably boring unless you were brought up to it, man and boy. In fact, he was already occupying a table, one of the first to establish himself, though some men, without guests, were walking through to the inner room. Under the portraits, under the tapestries, taste following the Prince Consort, I noticed one or two faces I vaguely knew, part of a new batch of life peers. Not then, but a little later, when we were settling down to our wine and cold roast beef, there came a face that I more than vaguely knew – Walter Luke, grizzled and jaunty, saying ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Lew,’ as he passed on. It would have been a fair reply that, a short time before, no one would have expected to see him there. But here he was, as though in honour of science – and, because there already existed a Lord Luke, here he was as Lord Luke of Salcombe.
Francis, who had always been fond of Walter Luke, was saying, once he had got out of hearing, that no one we knew had been unluckier, no one of great gifts, that was. If things had gone right, he would have done major scientific work. But all the chances including the war, had run against him. After all of which, said Francis, he got this curious consolation prize.
Yet he had seemed in highish spirits. As the room filled up, no more divisions till half past eight, most people seemed in highish spirits. Greetings, warm room, food, a certain amount of activity ahead, the kind of activity which soothed men like a tranquilliser. For an instant, I recollected my conversation with Charles in the summer. Enclaves. Perhaps it was right, it was certainly natural, for any of us to hack out what refuges we could, some of the time: none of us was tough enough to live every minute in the pitiless air. This was an enclave in excelsis.
As the noise level rose, and no one could overhear, I asked Francis if he had seen the paragraph about him that morning.
‘I was going to tell you about that,’ he said.
‘How true is it?’
‘Not far off.’
I asked: ‘So S— is really going?’
‘To be more accurate, he’s actually gone.’
‘And you?’
‘Of course, I had to say what I did before. I had to tell him I’d made up my mind.’
That was what I expected.
The Prime Minister had been good, said Francis. He hadn’t pressed too much. But after S—, he needed someone with a reputation abroad. Francis added: ‘I think you’d better make up your own mind, pretty quickly.’