His voice was light throughout. Perdita’s voice, on the telephone, had been heavier, full of anxiety: almost as if Roger had shifted his cares to her.
Two weeks later, at the end of the course, he came as he had promised to the training centre to drive Willie back to St. John’s Wood. His high spirits seemed to have lasted. Only, his eyes were sunken and the pouches dark.
He said, “Did they teach you anything here?”
Willie said, “I don’t know how much they taught me. All I know now is that if I had my time over again I would have gone in for architecture. It’s the only true art. But I was born too early. Twenty or thirty years too early, a couple of generations. We were still a colonial economy, and the only professions ambitious boys could think of were medicine and law. I never heard anyone talk of architecture. I imagine it’s different now.”
Roger said, “Perhaps I fell too readily into old ways, the charted path. I never asked myself what I wanted to do. I still can’t say whether I have enjoyed what I’ve done. And I suppose that has cast a blight on my life.”
They were driving beside the low red houses. The road seemed less oppressive this time, and not so long.
Willie said, “Is the news as bad as Perdita suggested?”
“As bad as that. I consciously did nothing wrong or unprofessional. You could say this thing crept up on me from behind. I told you how my father died. He had looked forward to that moment of death, or that time of dying, to tell the world what he really thought of it. Some people would say that is the way to go, to save the hate up for that moment. But I thought otherwise. I thought I never wanted to die like that. I wanted to die the other way. Like Van Gogh. At peace with the world, smoking his pipe and hating no one. As I told you. All my life I have prepared for this moment. I am ready to run down the beanstalk and take an axe to the root.”
WILLIE TOOK UP the letter to Sarojini again.
… perhaps if you get to Berlin I might find some way of getting round the law and coming to be with you. What nice months they were. But this time I think it would be nice if I could do some architecture course, which is what I should have done in the beginning. I don’t know what you will think of this. You might think I am talking like an old fool, and I probably am. But I cannot pretend at this age that I am making my way. In fact, every day I see more clearly that here, though I am a man rescued and physically free and sound in mind and limb, I am also like a man serving an endless prison sentence. I don’t have the philosophy to cope. I daren’t tell them here. It would be too ungrateful. This reminds me of something that happened at Peter’s magazine about a month after I went there. Peter picks up lame ducks, as I think I told you. I was one, and it didn’t worry me. It rather pleased me. One day, when I was in the library on the top floor, doing my eternal checking, to keep the editress quiet, a man in a brown suit came in. People here have a thing about brown suits — Roger told me. This man greeted me across the room. He had an exaggerated drawling accent. He said, “As you see, I am in my brown suit.” He meant that he was either a worthless person or a defier of convention, perhaps both. In fact, he was a damaged man. The brown suit spoke truly in his case. It was a very rich bitter-chocolate brown. A little while later that same morning he came and sat directly in front of me on my table and said, with the weariest drawl, “Of course, I have been to prison.” He said prison instead of jail, as though it was smarter. And he spoke that “of course” as though that fact about him was well known, and as though everybody should do a spell in prison. He was quite alarming to me. I wondered where Peter picked him up. I meant to ask Roger, but always forgot. It is terrible to think of these people who look all right carrying their hidden wounds and even more terrible to think that I am one of them, that that was what Peter saw in me.
He stopped writing and thought, “I mustn’t do this to her.” And he put off finishing the letter until things became clearer to him.
IT WAS THEN, when the property caper was beyond mending or glossing over, that Roger began to talk to Willie, not of that calamity, but of the other, that had befallen his outside life. He didn’t do so all at once. He did it over many days, adding words and thoughts to what had gone before; what he said wasn’t always in sequence. He began indirectly, led to his main subject by scattered observations that he might have kept to himself before.
He talked of socialism and high taxes, and the inflation that inevitably followed high taxes, destroying families and the idea of families. This idea of families (rather than the family) passed on values from one generation to the next. These shared values held a country together; the loss of those values broke a country up, hastened a general decline.
To Willie this talk of decline was a surprise. He had never heard Roger talk of politics or politicians (only sometimes of people with politics), and he had grown to think Roger was not interested in the passing political scene (being in this like Willie himself), was a man of inherited liberal ideas, a man rooted in this liberalism, concerned with human rights all over the world, and at the same time at ease with his country’s recent history, going with the flow.
He saw now that he had misread Roger. Roger had the highest idea of his country; he expected much from its people; he was, in the profoundest way, a patriot. Decline grieved him. Talking now to Willie about decline, with the view at the end of the sitting room of the late-summer garden, tears came to his eyes. And Willie thought that those tears were really for his situation, that that was what he had been talking about.
He talked, obsessively, of the wedding of Marcus’s son, and did not appear to be linking this to what he had said about the idea of families. He said, “Lyndhurst aimed well. He aimed at what the Italians call ‘a spent family.’ A family with nothing more to offer, but still a family of name. Marcus would be very particular about that kind of thing. I am trying to imagine Marcus walking around the tents and marquees holding his white grandchild’s hand and acknowledging the scrutiny of the guests. Would it be scrutiny alone, or would it be applause? Times have changed, as you know. Would he be in a top hat, you think, and a grey morning coat? Like a black diplomat from some chaotic country going to the palace, in a rare moment of clarity, to present his credentials. He definitely would want to do the right thing, Marcus. Will he bow to the crowd, or will he just look preoccupied, chatting to his grandchild? I will tell you something. In the lunch interval during a cricket match at Lord’s cricket ground — not far from here, I should tell you — I once saw the legendary Len Hutton. He wasn’t playing. The great batsman was old, long retired. He was wearing a grey suit. He was walking around the ground, at the back of the stands, as if for exercise. He was really doing a lap of honour at Lord’s, where he had so often opened the innings for England. Everyone in the ground knew who he was. We all stared. But he, Len Hutton, appeared not to notice. He was talking to another elderly man in a suit. What they were talking about seemed to be worrying them both. Hutton was actually frowning. And that was how he walked past, looking down with his famous broken nose and frowning. Would Marcus be like Hutton, preoccupied on his lap of honour? In his fantasy that was how he wanted it to be. On the King’s Road, holding his white grandchild’s hand and minding his own business while the crowd stared. But at the wedding of his son he wouldn’t be on the King’s Road. He would have to acknowledge the guests. I imagine the old folk of the once-great family on one side, and Marcus’s son and his buddies on the other. It would be like a carnival. But Marcus would manage it beautifully, would make it appear the most natural thing in the world, and it would be lovely to see.”