All this was objective, and I didn’t need so much as mention it to Margaret. Nor the other reason against, which was more compelling than with Francis. He had his research to do, and I had my writing. He had the assurance that any good scientist possessed, that some of what he had done was right (it was no use quibbling about epistemological terms; in the here-and-now, in Francis’ own existence that was so). No writer had that assurance: but, exactly as his work was a private comfort, no, more than comfort, justification, so was mine. And – this was a difference between us – I had more to finish than he had, perhaps because I had started later. I had never liked talking about my books, and should never have considered writing anything about my literary life. I had had my joys and sorrows, like any other writer. In fact, most writing lives were more alike than different, which made one’s own not specially interesting, except to oneself. After all, the books were there.
However, quite as much as ever in my life, as much as in the middle of the war, this preoccupation remained with me. It had been steady all through, it hadn’t lost any of its strength. In the middle of the war, I had been a youngish man, I hadn’t the sense of losing against time. I had been too busy to write anything sustained, but I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It had been like going into a safe and quiet room. If I took this job, I could do the same, but I wasn’t youngish now. I should have liked to count on ten years more to work in.
Ten years with good luck. Margaret knew that was what I was hoping for. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about my lifespan. She did say that this would mean time away from writing. Francis, she forced herself to say, had talked about a year or two in office: and he had said that he couldn’t afford a year or two. She didn’t ask a question, she made the statement in a flat, anxious tone, the lines deep across her forehead.
Yes, in every aspect but one, Francis and I were in the same situation, or near enough not to matter. So that the answer should also be the same. There was just one difference. I should like to do the job. I should enjoy it. It was that, precisely that, which Margaret hated.
She had been utterly loyal throughout our married life. She had tried not to constrict me, even when I was doing things, or showing a vein within myself, which she would have liked to wipe away. It wasn’t that she thought that I was an addict of power. If that had been so, she felt that I should have acquired it. And she had learned enough by now to realise that this job I had been offered carried no power at alclass="underline" and that the more you penetrated that world, the more you wondered who had the power, or whether anyone had, or whether we weren’t giving to offices a free will that those who held them could never conceivably possess.
Nevertheless, she would have liked me to be nowhere near it. Her own principles, her own scrupulousness, couldn’t have lived in that world, any more than her father’s could. She despised, as much as he did, or his friends, the people who got the jobs, who were ready to scramble, compromise, muck in. She couldn’t accept, she resented my accepting, that any society under heaven would need such people. She was put off by my interest, part brotherly, part voyeuristic, in them – in the Lufkins, the Roger Quaifes, even my old civil-service colleagues, who were nearer in sympathy to her. When I told her that they had virtues not given to her father’s friends, or to her, or to me, she didn’t wish to hear.
‘It’s all second-rate,’ she had said before, and said again that night.
Here was I, out of spontaneity (for, though I had trained myself into some sort of prudence, I was still a spontaneous man), or just for the fun or hell of it, ready to plunge in. I should even have enjoyed fighting a by-election: but that wasn’t on, no government with a majority of three could risk it. Anyway, if I said yes, I should enjoy making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords.
To her, who loved me and in many ways admired me – and wanted to admire me totally – it seemed commonplace and vulgar. As our tempers got higher, she used those words.
‘That’s no news to you,’ I said.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘In your sense, I am vulgar.’
‘I won’t have that.’
‘You’ve got to have it. If you mean that I’m not superior to the people round us, then of course I’m vulgar.’
‘I don’t want you to behave like them, that’s all.’
The quarrel went on, and I, because I was not only angry but raw with chagrin (on the way home, I had been expecting a bit of applause, ironic applause maybe: she spoke about temptation, but she might, so I felt, have granted me that this particular temptation didn’t come to all that many men), was having the worst of it. I betrayed myself by bringing up an argument which in my own mind I had already negated: the necessity for action, for any halfway decent man in our own time. I even quoted Hammarskjöld at her, though none of us would have used his words. She looked at me with sad lucidity.
‘You’ve been sincere in that, I know,’ she said. ‘But you’re not being sincere now, are you?’
‘Why not?’
‘Because this isn’t real, as you know perfectly well. It isn’t going to be any use, and if it were anyone else you’d be the first to say so.’
Since that was precisely what in detachment I had thought, I was the more angry with her.
‘Well,’ she said at last, without expression, ‘I take it that you are going to accept.’
I sat sullen, keeping back the words. Then I crossed over to the sideboard and poured myself a drink, the first either of us had had since I returned. Once more I sat opposite to her, and spoke slowly and bitterly (it was a conflict that neither of us had the language for, after twenty years).
I said, that if anything could have made me decide to accept that night, it was her argument against. But she might do me one minor credit: I hadn’t lost all my capacities. It would be better to decide as though she had said nothing whatever. There were serious arguments against, though not hers. I should want some sensible advice, from people who weren’t emotionally committed either way. There I was going to leave it, for that night.
It was already early morning, and we lay in bed, unreconciled.
13: Advice
AS we were being polite to each other at breakfast, I repeated to Margaret that I should have to take some advice. She glanced at me with a glint which, even after a quarrel, wasn’t entirely unsarcastic. One trouble was, I had made too many cracks about others: how many times had she listened to me saying that persons in search of advisers had a singular gift for choosing the right ones? That is, those who would produce the advice they wanted to hear.
No, I said, as though brushing off a comment, I thought of calling on old Hector Rose. He knew this entire field of government backwards: he was a friendly acquaintance, not even specially well disposed: he would keep the confidence, and was as cool as a man could reasonably be.
Margaret hadn’t expected that name. She gave a faint grin against herself. All she could say was that he would be so perfectly balanced that I might as well toss up for it.