I didn’t like her. I never had: and, now that I had seen a little more, I didn’t like her any better. She might be easier to love than to like: but, if that was what she induced, it was a bad prospect for her and anyone who did love her so. If I had been younger, I should have shied away.
Yet, in a curious sense, I respected her. Of course, her attraction had its effect on me as on others. But though that sharpened my attention, it didn’t surround her with any haze or aura. She was there, visible and clear enough, not specially amiable, certainly not negligible. She was not much like anyone I had known. The links one could make with the past didn’t connect with her. She was there in her own right.
Earlier on, as we climbed up and down the house, and again when she talked about the programme of action, she had mentioned Charles. Almost precisely as he had mentioned her, when it would have been artificial, or even noteworthy, not to do so.
Now, shortly after she had switched on the reading lamp, which, throwing a pool of light upon the desk, also lit up both our faces, she asked a question. It was casual and matter-of-fact.
‘By the way, do please tell me, what is Charles going to do?’
‘What ever do you mean?’
She was smiling. ‘Please tell me. I’m fairly good at keeping quiet.’
I said: ‘I’m sure you are. But I’ve no idea what you mean.’
‘Haven’t you really?’
I shook my head.
She was still smiling, not believing me. To an extent, she was right not to believe.
‘Well then, do forgive me. What is he going to do about his career?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea.’
‘But you must have.’
‘I’m not certain that he has himself. If so, he hasn’t told me.’
‘But you have your own plans for him, haven’t you?’
‘None at all.’
She gazed at me, showing her scepticism, using her charm.
‘You must have.’
‘I’m not sure how well you know him–’
Her expression didn’t alter, she was still intent on softening me.
‘–it would be about as much use my making plans for him as it would have been for your father. But I haven’t the faintest desire to, I haven’t had since he was quite young.’
I told her, when he was a child, I watched his progress obsessively from hour to hour. Then I dropped it, determined that I wouldn’t live my life again in him. Fortunately, now that I could see what he was really like. I didn’t tell her, but now for me he existed, just as she did, in his own right. Embossed, just as persons external to oneself stood out. Like that, except perhaps for the organic bonds, the asymmetry that had emerged for moments in the hospital bedroom.
‘That’s very splendid,’ said Muriel, ‘but still you’re not quite so simple as all that, are you?’
‘I’ve learned a bit,’ I said.
‘But you haven’t forgotten other things you’ve learned, I can’t believe it. I’ve heard my father say’ (by that she meant Azik Schiff, whereas a few minutes before I had been thinking of Roy Calvert) ‘that you know as much about careers as any man in England.’
She went on: ‘You won’t pretend, I’m sure you won’t, that you haven’t thought what Charles ought to do. And whatever it is, you know the right steps, you can’t get rid of what you’ve done yourself, can you?’
‘I might be some use to one or two of his friends,’ I said. ‘Such as Gordon Bestwick. But not to him.’
‘You’re being so modest–’
‘No, I know some things about him. And what I can do for him. After all, he’s my son.’
She said: ‘You love him, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I love him.’
She was totally still. Sitting there, body erect in the chair, she seemed not to have moved an involuntary muscle, except for the play of smiles upon her face.
I wanted to say something emollient. I remarked: ‘I’ve told him, I shall make him financially independent at twenty-one. That’s the only thing I can do.’
Suddenly she laughed. Not subtly, nor with the curious, and not pleasing, sense of secret intention which she often gave: but full-throatedly, like a happy girl.
‘It really is extraordinary that that’s still possible today, isn’t it? Talk about justice!’
‘My dear girl, it would have seemed even more extraordinary forty-odd years ago, when I was Charles’ age, if someone had done the same for me.’
I explained that, until my first wife died, I had received exactly £300 which I hadn’t earned. And even that made a difference. Muriel was not in a position to talk, I told her, waving my hand to indicate the house in which we happened to be sitting. But now she didn’t resent being reminded about being an heiress. Somehow that exchange, singularly mundane, about riches, poverty, inherited wealth, had made us more friendly to each other.
Not at the instant when I heard her question about Charles, but soon after, I had realised that this was the point of the meeting. For some reason which she was hiding or dissimulating, it was to ask about his career that she had taken pains to get me to her house alone. Not for the sake of information, but to face me and what I wanted. Why she needed that so much, was still a mystery to me.
There was lack of trust on both sides, or something like a conflict or a competition, as though we were struggling over his future. I suspected that she intended to keep him close to their group, cell, movement, whatever they cared to call it: she had power over a good many young men, maybe she had power over him. I didn’t know whether she felt anything for him. Did she assume that I was playing a chess game with her, thinking some moves ahead to counter hers? If so, I thought, she was overrating herself.
Yet Muriel had faced me. Though there was nothing to struggle about, we had been struggling. Underneath the words, precise on her side, deliberately offhand on mine, there had been tempers, or feelings sharper than tempers, not hidden very deep. Now we were quieter.
‘He is very unusual,’ she said without explanation.
‘In some ways, yes.’ I had heard that opinion from his friends, as well as from her: it struck them more than it did me.
‘So it matters what he does.’
‘It will probably matter to him.’
We weren’t crossing wills: this was all simple and direct.
‘He is very unusual,’ she repeated. ‘So it might matter to others.’
‘Yes, if he’s lucky, so it might.’
28: Two Parties
CAMBRIDGE in May. Margaret and I walked through the old streets, then along Peas Hill, where in winter the gas flares used to hiss over the bookstalls. The gas flares would have looked distinctly appropriate that afternoon, for a north-west wind was funnelling itself through the streets, so cold that we were bending our heads, like the others walking in our direction: except for one imperturbable Indian, who strolled slow and upright, as though this was weather that any reasonable man would much enjoy. The clouds scurried over, leaden, a few hundred feet high. It was like being at Fenners long ago, two or three of us huddled in overcoats, waiting for ten minutes’ play before the rain.
Soon Margaret and I had had enough of it, and turned back. Cambridge in May. It was so cold that the early summer scents were all chilled down: even the lilac one could scarcely smell. We were staying with Martin (I had come up, as I promised Charles, to have a look at his friend Bestwick), and we hurried back to the tutorial house. There in his drawing-room we stood with our backs to the blazing coal fire, getting a disproportionate pleasure from the wintry comfort and the spectacle of undergraduates haring about in the wind and rain below.