He let out a kind of diminuendo of his old brazen laugh. His voice was weak but unyielding, as he said: ‘Inoperable cancer, dear boy.’
I couldn’t have disentangled my feelings, it was all so brusque, they fought with each other. Affronted admiration for that special form of courage: sheer visceral concern which one would have felt for anyone, sharpened because it was someone of whom I was fond: yes (it wouldn’t hide itself, any more than a stab of envy could), something like reproach that this apparition should break into the evening. Up to now I had been enjoying myself, I had been walking back with content, with streaks of exhilaration: and then I saw Sammikins, and heard his reply.
Could I do anything, I said unavailingly. ‘You might give me an arm to the lift,’ he said. ‘It seems a long way, you know.’ As I helped him, I asked why I hadn’t been told before. ‘Oh, it’s not of great interest,’ said Sammikins. The irritating thing was, he added, that all his life he had drunk too much: now the doctors were encouraging him to drink, and he couldn’t manage it.
I was glad to see the lift door shut, and a vestigial wave of the hand. When I returned to the library, Whitman, who was not insensitive, looked at me and asked if something had gone wrong.
An old friend was mortally ill, I said. I had only heard in the last few minutes.
‘I’m very sorry about that,’ said Whitman. ‘Anyone close?’
‘No, not very close.’
‘Ah well, it will happen to us all,’ said Whitman, taking with resignation, as we had all done, the sufferings of another.
He ordered more drinks, and, his ego reasserting itself, got back to his plea, his warning, his purpose. Politics (he meant, the profession of politics) was a closed shop, he insisted, his full vigour and eloquence flowing back. Perhaps it was more of a closed shop than anything in the country. You had to be in it all your life, if you were going to get a square deal. Any outsider was bound to be unpopular. I shouldn’t be being fair to myself unless I realised that. That was why he had felt obliged to warn me, in my own best interests.
I found myself sinking back into comfort again, my own ego asserting itself in turn. There were instants when I was reminded of Sammikins, alone in a club bedroom upstairs. Once I thought that he too, not so long ago, had been hypnotised by the ‘charm of politics’, just as much as this man Whitman was. The charm, the say-so, the flah-flah, the trappings. It made life shine for them, simply by being in what they felt was the centre of things.
Yet soon I was enjoying the present moment. It began to seem necessary to go on to the attack: Whitman ought to be given something to puzzle him. So I expressed gratitude for his action. This was an exceptionally friendly and unselfish act, I told him. But – weren’t there two ways of looking at it? In the event, the unlikely event, of my ever having to make this choice, then of course I should have to take account of all these warnings. I was certain, I assured him, that he was right. But mightn’t it be cowardly to be put off? In that way, I didn’t think I was specially cowardly. Unpopularity, one learned to live with it. I had had some in my time. One also had to think of (it was time Whitman was properly mystified) duty.
No, Whitman was inclined to persuade me that this was not my duty. He would have liked me to stay longer: there were several points he hadn’t thoroughly explained. He gazed at me with impressive sincerity, but as though wondering whether he could have misjudged me. As he saw me into a taxi, he might have been, so it seemed, less certain of my intentions than when the evening began.
14: End of a Line
ON the Friday morning I said to Margaret that the forty-eight hours would be up that night, and I should have to give my answer.
‘Do you know what it’s going to be?’
‘Yes,’ I said, in a bad and brooding temper.
She was not sure. She had seen these moods of vacillation before now. Perhaps she had perceived that I was in the kind of temper that came when one was faced by a temptation: saw that it had to be resisted: and saw, at the same time, that if one fell for it one would feel both guilty and liberated. But we were not in a state for that kind of confidence. I was still resentful because she had been so positive, still wishing that I could act in what the existentialists called my freedom. The only comment that I could take clinically had been Hector Rose’s: Hector had his share of corrupt humanity, but not in his judgment: and this was a time when corrupt humanity got in the way. He was, of course – as in lucid flashes I knew as well as he did – dead right.
Yet still, though I had made up my mind, I acted as though I hadn’t. Or as though I were waiting for some excuse or change of fortune to blow my way. I took it for granted that Margaret couldn’t alter her view, much as she might have liked to, for the sake of happiness.
The only time when we were at one came as I told her about Sammikins. She too had an affection for him, like mine mixed up – this was long before his illness – of respect, pity, mystification. He had virtue in the oldest sense of alclass="underline" in any conceivable fashion, he was one of the bravest of men. And his gallantry, from the time we had first met him, in former days at Basset, had been infectious. Since when we had learned more, through some of our police acquaintances, about his underground existence. Pick-ups in public lavatories, quite promiscuous, as reckless in escalating risks as he was in war. He had been lucky, so they said, to keep out of the courts. Sometimes, without his knowing it, his friends, plus money and influence, had protected him. When he came into the title, he hadn’t become more cautious but had – like George Passant chasing another kind of sensation – doubled his bets.
‘What a waste,’ said Margaret. Strangely enough, before he was ill, he might in his strident voice have said that of himself but not so warmly.
When we had ceased to talk of Sammikins, I became more restless. I went into the study and started to write the letter of refusal which I could as well have drafted on the Wednesday night. But I left it unfinished, staring out over the park, making a telephone call that didn’t matter. Then I went and found Margaret: it might be a good idea if I went to Cambridge for the night, I said.
Temper still not steady, I asked her to call Francis at his laboratory. I was showing her that it was all innocent. While she was close by, I was already talking to Francis – I should like to stay in college that night, no, I didn’t want to bother him or Martin, in fact I should rather like to stay in college by myself. Perhaps he would book the guest room? Francis offered to dine in hall – yes, if it wasn’t a nuisance. No, don’t trouble to send word round to Martin, I shall see him soon anyway. Nor old Arthur Brown, this wasn’t a special occasion. But young Charles – if he would drop in my room soon after hall? Francis would get a message round to Trinity. ‘There,’ I said to Margaret. ‘That ought to be peaceful enough.’
Autumn afternoon. The stations paced by: the level fields, the sun setting in cocoons of mist. From the taxi, the jangled Friday traffic, more shops, brighter windows, than there used to be. When I entered the college, the porter on duty produced my name with a question mark, ready with the key, but not recognising me by sight.
As I crossed the court, I recalled that, when I was first there, at this time of year there would have been leaves of Virginia creeper, wide red leaves, squelching on the cobbles and clinging like oriflammes to the walls. Since then the college had been cleaned, and these first court walls were bare, no longer grey but ochre-bright, looking as they might have done, not when the court was built (there had been two facades since then), but in the eighteenth century.