He meant, why had I wanted to dine in hall. I couldn’t have given a coherent answer: it wasn’t sentiment, it had something to do with the confusion of that day.
Francis asked me to let him know when the decision was made.
‘Oh, it is made,’ I said.
‘Good,’ said Francis, and added that he had better leave me alone with Charles. ‘He won’t give you any false comfort.’ Francis broke into an experienced paternal grin before he said good night.
A hard rap at the guest room, Charles punctual but interrogatory. ‘Hallo?’
I thought that he felt he was being inspected: it was his first term, and though he had made himself a free agent so early he was cagey about being visited or disturbed.
‘This is nothing to do with you, Carlo,’ I said.
‘Oh?’
‘It’s entirely about me. I wanted to tell you the news myself.’
‘What have you been doing now?’
‘Nothing very sensational. But I’ve just sent off a letter.’
He was watching me, half-smiling.
‘Refusing a job’, I went on, ‘in the Government.’
‘Have you, by God?’ Charles broke out.
I explained, I should have to make a telephone call later that evening. They wanted to receive an answer that night, and the letter would confirm it. But Charles was not preoccupied with administrative machinery. Of course – he was brooding in an affectionate, reflective manner – it had always been on the cards, hadn’t it? Yes, it could have been different if I had been an American or a Russian, then perhaps I might have been able to do something.
‘Still,’ he said, ‘it isn’t every day that one declines even this sort of job, I suppose.’
He said it protectively, with a trace of mockery, a touch of admiration. He was still protective about my affairs, bitter if he saw me criticised. And he also felt a little envy, such as entered between a father and son like us. But, when I envied him, it was a make-believe and a pleasure: when he envied me, there was an edge to it. I had, for better or worse, done certain things, and he had them all to do.
‘I’m rather surprised you did decline, you know,’ said Charles. ‘You’ve chanced your arm so many times, haven’t you?’
There was the flash of envy, but his spirits were high, his eyes glinting with empathetic glee.
‘I’ve always thought that was because you didn’t have the inestimable privilege of attending one of our famous boarding schools,’ he said. ‘There’s precisely one quality you can’t help acquiring if you’re going to survive in those institutions. I should call it a kind of hard cautiousness. Well, you didn’t have to acquire that when you were young, now did you? And I don’t believe it’s ever come natural to you.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
So he was, though very few people would have thought so.
I was thinking, when he was looking after his friends, or even me, he could show much sympathy. When he was chasing one of his own desires, he was so intense that he could be cruel. That wasn’t simply one of the contradictions of his age. I expected that he would have to live with it. That evening, though, he was at his kindest.
‘So I should have guessed that you’d plunge in this time,’ he said, with a cheerful sarcastic flick. ‘And you didn’t. Still capable of surprising us, aren’t you?’
‘That wasn’t really the chief reason,’ I played the sarcasm back.
‘For Christ’s sake!’ he cried, by way of applause. ‘Anyway, not many people ever have the chance to say no. I’m going to stand you a drink on it.’
We went out of the college and slipped up Petty Cury towards the Red Lion, just as before the war – especially in that autumn when the election of the Master was coming close and we didn’t want to be traceable in our rooms – Roy Calvert and I used to do. Neither Charles, nor undergraduates whom he called to in the street, were wearing gowns, as once they would have been obliged to after dusk: but they were wearing a uniform of their own, corduroy jackets and jeans, the lineal descendants of Hector Rose’s morning attire, that reminder of his youth.
While I sat in the long hall of the pub, Charles rejoined me, carrying two tankards of beer. He stretched out his legs on one side of our table, and said: ‘Well, here’s to your abdication.’
I was feeling celebratory, expansive and at the same time (which didn’t often happen in Cambridge) not unpleasantly nostalgic. It was a long time since I had had a drink inside that place. It seemed strange to be there with this other young man, not so elegant as Roy Calvert, nothing like so manic, and yet with wits which weren’t so unlike: with this young man, who, by a curious fluke, had that year become some kind of intimate – in a relation, as well as a circle, mysterious to me – of Roy Calvert’s daughter.
After a swallow of beer, Charles, also expansive, though he had nothing to be nostalgic about, said: ‘Daddy’ (when had he last called me that?), ‘I take it this is the end of one line for you, it must be.’
‘Yes, of course it must.’
‘It never was a very central line, though, was it?’
I was trying to be detached. Living in our time, I said, you couldn’t help being concerned with politics – unless you were less sentient than a human being could reasonably be. In the thirties people such as Francis Getliffe and I had been involved as one might have been in one’s own illness: and from then on we had picked up bits of knowledge, bits of responsibility, which we couldn’t easily shrug off.
But that wasn’t quite the whole story, at least for me. It wasn’t as free from self. I had always had something more than an interest, less than a passion, in politics. I had been less addicted than Charles himself, I said straight to the attentive face. And yet, one’s life isn’t all a chance, there’s often a secret planner putting one where one has, even without admitting it, a slightly shamefaced inclination to be. So I had found myself, as it were absent-mindedly, somewhere near – sometimes on the fringe, sometimes closer in – a good deal of politics.
When had it all started? This was the end of a line all right. Perhaps one could name a beginning, the night I clinched a gamble, totally unjustified, and decided to read for the Bar. That gave me my chance to live among various kinds of political men – industrial politicians, from my observer’s position beside Paul Lufkin, academic politicians in the college (as in that election year 1937, fresh in my mind tonight), and finally the administrators and the national politicians, those who seemed to others, and sometimes to themselves, to possess what men thought of as power.
Charles knew all that. He thought, if he had had the same experience, he would have gone through it with as much interest. But he didn’t want to discuss that theme in my biography, now being dismissed for good and all. He was occupied, as I went to fetch two more pints, with what lessons he could learn. We had talked about it often, just as on the night he returned home in the summer. Not as father and son, but as colleagues, fellow students, or perhaps people who shared a taste in common. Many of our tastes were different, but here we were, and had been since he grew up, very near together.
Closed politics. Open politics. That was a distinction we had spoken of before, and stretched out in gawky relaxation Charles came back to it that night. Closed politics. The politics of small groups, where person acted upon person. You saw it in any place where people were in action, committees of sports clubs, cabinets, colleges, the White House, boards of companies, dramatic societies. You saw it perhaps at something like its purest (just because the society answered to no one but itself, lived like an island) in the college in my time. But it must be much the same in somewhat more prepotent groups, such as the Vatican or the Politburo.