There was something else about him, quite minor, which interested me. His voice was pleasant, his tone was confident but unaggressive, but he hadn’t made any audible attempt to change his accent or his manner. If I hadn’t known his home town, I should still have guessed that he came from Birmingham or somewhere near. There were the intrusive g’s, ring-ging, hang-ging, which I used to hear when I travelled twenty miles west from home. In my time those would have gone. Except for the odd scientist like Walter Luke, people of our origins, making their way into the professional life, tried to take on the sound of the authoritative class. It was a half-unconscious process, independent of politics. Bestwick hadn’t made any such attempt. Yet he was a man made for authority. The social passwords had changed. Again it was a half-unconscious process. Perhaps he took it for granted that there wasn’t an authoritative class any more, or that it existed only in enclaves, bits and pieces. Curiously enough, I thought, that might not make things easier for him.
Just then Nina came up, smiled at me through her hair, and whispered to Gordon Bestwick. ‘When the party’s over, we’re all going to the Eagle. Is that OK for you?’
‘Fine,’ said Bestwick, and she slipped away. His eyes followed her, and he called out: ‘Mind you wait for me.’ It sounded masterfuclass="underline" was it as relaxed as when he talked to me?
I had not been told that those two knew each other. On the other hand, he must have been aware that she was a relative of mine. That might have made me more tolerable, I wasn’t sure. Anyway, when I said that Charles must bring him to stay with us at the end of term, he was eager, and less certain of himself than he had been at any time before.
Half an hour later, out at the Getliffes’ house, the level of comfort rose again. When we moved into the dining-room, the long table was not set for so many places as it often was: only for nine, which slightly took away from the normal resemblance to a Viking chieftain’s hall, that resemblance which was responsible for Charles naming it the Getliffe steading. We were used to the sight of Francis at one end of his table presiding over a concourse. That night, as it happened, besides Margaret and me, there were only Martin and Irene, who had followed us out from the college, the Getliffes’ second son Peter and his wife, and their elder son, Leonard. Francis was pushing decanters round, gazing down the table with an expression of open pleasure, just faintly tinged with saturnine glee. Everyone there knew each other. Martin and he had, after a good many years of guarded and respectful alliance, at last grown intimate. While Martin, before he and Francis became specially friendly, had long been fond of the Getliffe sons. And there was, as often in that house, something to celebrate. Leonard had been offered a chair in Cambridge, and one that even he, at the top of his profession, was pleased to get. How far he had recovered from his unrequited love, I didn’t know, and probably Francis didn’t. But he wasn’t migrating to Princeton after all, and Francis and Katherine, who liked their dynasty round them, were happy. Peter, settled in a university job, Ruth, the elder daughter, married to another don, now Leonard, persuaded to come back. That left only their youngest, Penelope, who was pursuing an erratic matrimonial course in the United States.
In the warm candlelight – one could hear windows rattling in the wind – Katherine was saying: ‘It’s funny, your Charles being so high (she put her hand below the table) and ours grown up.’
‘He’s taller than I am, dear,’ I replied, ‘and just about to take Part I.’
‘No! No! I meant, when you brought him here and Margaret put her foot in it, and that woman from Leeds thought you were a clergyman.’
Katherine was proceeding by free association: that was an occasion something like sixteen years before, though all the details were lost, certainly in my memory and Margaret’s, probably in that of the woman from Leeds, and were preserved only in Katherine’s. If you wanted to live outside of history, to dislocate time, then Katherine was the one to teach you: but, it happened very rarely, for once that total recall had slipped. At the time of this incident, Charles would have been about two. If so, Leonard, their oldest, had barely left school.
I pointed this out to Katherine, who expostulated, wouldn’t admit it, laughed, was disconcerted like an avant-garde American confronted by an example of linear thinking. Katherine’s thinking, I told her, was far from linear: then had to apologise, and explain with labyrinthine thoroughness (for Katherine didn’t easily subside) what the reference meant.
That led, transition by transition, to the party from which Margaret and I had come. Yes, we had been mixing with the local avant-garde: or the protesters: or the new left: or the anarchists: or the post-Marxists: they had all been there, all they had in common was the Zeitgeist, they wanted different things, they would end up in different places.
‘Oh well,’ said Francis, ‘that has happened before.’
I corrected myself, hearing him take it so facilely. Perhaps I had spoken like that too. I said that for some purposes, just at present they were at one.
Up and down the table, the others argued with me. There was one feature of that family party; on most issues, either of politics or social manners, we were, with minor temperamental shades, pretty well agreed. Irene had taken on most of Martin’s attitudes: Katherine had always been ready to believe that her husband was usually right. That wasn’t true of Margaret, certain of her own beliefs, which weren’t quite mine; she would have fitted better in an age when it was natural to be both liberal, or Whiggish, and also religious. Still in terms of action she was close to the rest of us.
As for the young Getliffes, there seemed next to nothing of the fathers-and-sons division. Even that family couldn’t invariably have been so harmonious: but certainly on politics they spoke like their father, or like other radicals from the upper middle class – not so committed as he had been, perhaps, but independent and ready to take the necessary risks. They were scientists like Francis, and that gave them a positiveness which sometimes made Margaret, and even me, wish to dissent. Nevertheless, those shades of temperament didn’t matter, and on the likely future and what ought to be done – the future of fate and the future of desire – there wouldn’t have been many dinner tables that night where there was less conflict.
Such conflict as did emerge was on a narrow front. The young Getliffes, both in their early thirties, were more cut off from Charles and his society, more impatient with them, than the rest of us.
‘It’s all romantic,’ said Leonard Getliffe at one point. ‘I’m not a politician, but they don’t know the first thing about politics.’
‘That’s not entirely true,’ I said.
‘Well, look. They think they’re revolutionaries. They also think that revolution has something to do with complete sexual freedom. They might be expected to realise that any revolution that’s ever happened has the opposite correlative. All social revolutions are puritanical. They’re bound to be, by definition. Put these people down in China today. Haven’t they the faintest idea what it’s like?’
That was a point I had to concede. I was thinking, yes, I had seen other groups of young people dreaming of both their emancipation and a juster world. That was how George Passant started out. Well, all, and more than all, of the emancipation he prescribed to us had realised itself – in the flesh – before our eyes. And we had learned – here Leonard was right – you can have a major change in sexual customs and still leave the rest of society (who had the property, who was rich, who was poor) almost untouched.
‘The one consolation is’, said Martin, ‘human beings are almost infinitely tough. If you did put them down in China, they’d make a go of it. I suppose if we were young today, we shouldn’t be any worse off than we actually were. They seem to find it pretty satisfactory.’