Miss Smythe said, ‘My dear, I think you’d better not.’
‘Really I must be taking him away. It’s been very good of you.’ I tried to keep the spots well in view. I said, ‘I’m very sorry if I offended you at all. It was quite by accident. I don’t happen to share your religious beliefs.’
He looked at me with surprise. ‘But I have none. I believe in nothing.’
‘I thought you objected…’
‘I hate the trappings that are left over. Forgive me. I go too far, Mr Bridges, I know, but I’m sometimes afraid that people will be reminded even by conventional words -good-bye for instance. If only I could believe that my grandson would not even know what a word like god had meant to us any more than a word in Swahili.’
‘Have you a grandson?’
He said gloomily, ‘I have no children. I envy you your boy. It’s a great duty and a great responsibility,’
‘What did you want to ask him?’
‘I wanted him to feel at home here because then he might return. There are so many things one wants to tell a child. How the world came into existence. I wanted to tell him about death. I wanted to rid him of all the lies they inject at school.’
‘Rather a lot to do in half an hour.’
‘One can sow a seed.’
I said maliciously, ‘That comes out of the Gospels.’
‘Oh, I’ve been corrupted too. You don’t need to tell me that.’
‘Do people really come to you - on the quiet?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Miss Smythe said. ‘People are longing for a message of hope.’
‘Hope?’
‘Yes, hope,’ Smythe said. ‘Can’t you see what hope there’d be, if everybody in the world knew that there was nothing else but what we have here? No future compensation, rewards, punishments.’ His face had a crazy nobility when one cheek was hidden. ‘Then we’d begin to make this world like heaven.’
‘There’s a terrible lot to be explained first,’ I said.
‘Can I show you my library?’
‘It’s the best rationalist library in South London,’ Miss Smythe explained.
‘I don’t need to be converted, Mr Smythe. I believe in nothing as it is. Except now and then.’
‘It’s the now and thens we have to deal with.’
‘The odd thing is that those are the moments of hope.’
‘Pride can masquerade as hope. Or selfishness.’
‘I don’t think that has anything to do with it at all. It happens suddenly, for no reason, a scent… ‘
‘Ah,’ Smythe said, ‘the construction of a flower, the argument from design, all that business about a watch requiring a watchmaker. It’s old-fashioned. Schwenigen answered all that twenty-five years ago. Let me show you… ‘
‘Not today. I must really take the boy home.’
Again he made that gesture of frustrated tenderness, like a lover who has been rejected. I wondered suddenly from how many death-beds he had been excluded. I found I wanted to give him some message of hope too, but then the cheek turned and I saw only the arrogant actor’s face. I preferred him when he was pitiable, inadequate, out of date. Ayer, Russell - they were the fashion today, but I doubted whether there were many logical positivists in his library. He only had the crusaders, not the detached.
At the door - I noticed that he didn’t use that dangerous term good-bye - I shot directly at his handsome cheek, ‘You should meet a friend of mine, Mrs Miles. She’s interested…’ and then I stopped. The shot had gone home. The spots seemed to flush a deeper red and I heard Miss Smythe say, ‘Oh, my dear,’ as he turned abruptly away. There was no doubt that I had given him pain, but the pain was mine as well as his. How I wished my shot had gone astray.
In the gutter outside Parkis’s boy was sick. I let him vomit, standing there wondering, has he lost her too? Is there no end to this? Have I now got to discover Y?
8
Parkis said, ‘It really was very easy, sir. There was such a crush, and Mrs Miles thought I was one of his friends from the Ministry, and Mr Miles thought I was one of her friends.’
‘Was it a good cocktail party?’ I asked, remembering again that first meeting and the sight of Sarah with the stranger.
‘Highly successful I should say, sir, but Mrs Miles seemed a bit out of sorts. A very nasty cough, she’s got.’ I heard him with pleasure: perhaps at this party there had been no alcove-kissing or touching. He laid a brown-paper parcel on my desk and said with pride, ‘I knew the way to her room from the maid. If anyone had taken notice of me, I should have been looking for the toilet, but nobody did. There it was, out on her desk; she must have worked on it that day. Of course, she may be very cautious, but my experience of diaries is they always give things away. People invent their little codes, but you soon see through them, sir. Or they leave out things, but you soon learn what they leave out.’ While he spoke I unwrapped the book and opened it. ‘It’s human nature, sir, that if you keep a diary, you want to remember things. Why keep it otherwise?’
‘Did you look at this?’ I asked.
‘I ascertained its nature, sir, and from one entry judged she wasn’t of the cautious type.’
‘It’s not this year’s,’ I said. ‘It’s two years old.’
For a moment he was dashed.
‘It will serve my purpose,’ I said.
‘It would do the trick as well, sir - if nothing’s been condoned.’
The journal was written in a big account book, the familiar bold handwriting crossed by the red and blue lines. There were not daily entries and I was able to reassure Parkis - ‘It covers several years.’
‘I suppose something must have made her take it out to read.’ Is it possible, I wondered, that some memory of me, of our affair, had crossed her mind this very day, that something may have troubled her peace? I said to Parkis, ‘I’m glad to have this, very glad. You know, I really think we can close our account now.’
‘I hope you feel satisfied, sir.’
‘Quite satisfied.’
‘And that you’ll so write to Mr Savage, sir. He gets the bad reports from clients, but the good ones never get written. The more a client’s satisfied, the more he wants to forget; to put us right out of mind. You can hardly blame them.’
‘I’ll write.’
‘And thank you, sir, for being kind to the boy. He was a bit upset, but I know how it is - it’s difficult to draw the line over ices with a boy like Lance. He gets them out of you with hardly a word said.’ I longed to read, but Parkis lingered. Perhaps he didn’t really trust me to remember him and wanted to impress more firmly on my memory those hang-dog eyes, that penurious moustache. ‘I’ve enjoyed our association, sir - if one can talk of enjoying under the sad circumstances. We don’t always work for real gentlemen even when they have titles. I had a peer of the realm once, sir, who flew into a rage when I gave him my report as though I were the guilty party myself. It’s a discouraging thing, sir. The more you succeed the more glad they are to see the last of you.’
I was very conscious of wanting to see the last of Parkis and his words woke my sense of guilt. I couldn’t hurry the man away. He said, ‘I’ve been thinking, sir, I’d like to give you a little memento - but then that’s just what you wouldn’t want to receive.’ How strange it is to be liked. It automatically awakens a certain loyalty. So I lied to Parkis, ‘I’ve always enjoyed our talks.’
‘Which started, sir, so inauspiciously. With that silly mistake.’
‘Did you ever tell your boy?’
‘Yes, sir, but only after some days, after the success with the wastepaper basket. That took away the sting.’ I looked down at the book and read: ‘So happy. M. returns tomorrow.’ I wondered for a moment who M. was. How strange too and unfamiliar to think that one had been loved, that one’s presence had once had the power to make a difference between happiness and dullness in another’s day.