‘I think you ought to leave it alone, now,’ I said.
‘How?’
‘You ought to have nothing more to do with the Sawbridge affair.’
‘I can’t do that,’ said Martin.
‘It’s given you all you expected from it.’
‘What did I expect from it?’
‘Credit,’ I said.
‘You think that’s all?’
‘You would never have done it if you hadn’t seen your chance.’
‘That may be true.’ He was trying to be reasonable, to postpone the quarrel. ‘But I think I should also say that I can see the logic of the situation, which others won’t recognize. Including you.’
‘I distrust seeing the logic of the situation,’ I said, ‘when it’s very much to your own advantage.’
‘Are you in a position to speak?’
‘I’ve done bad things,’ I said, ‘but I don’t think I could have done some of the things you’ve done.’
We were still speaking reasonably. I accepted the ‘logic of the situation’ about Sawbridge, I said. I asked a question to which I knew the answer: ‘I take it the damage he’s done is smaller than outsiders will believe?’
‘Much smaller,’ said Martin.
Led on by his moderation, I repeated: ‘I think you should leave it alone now?’
‘I don’t agree,’ said Martin.
‘It can only do you harm.’
‘What kind of harm?’
‘You can’t harden yourself by an act of will, and you’ll suffer for it.’
On the instant, Martin’s control broke down. He cried out: ‘You say that to me?’
Not even in childhood, perhaps because I was so much the older, had we let our tempers loose at each other. They were of the same kind, submerged, suppressed; we could not quarrel pleasurably with anyone, let alone with one another. In the disagreement which had cut us apart, we had not said a hard word. For us both, we knew what a quarrel cost. Now we were in it.
I brought out my sharpest accusation. Climbing on the Sawbridge case was bad enough — but climbing at Luke’s expense, foreseeing the mistake that Luke’s generous impulse led him into, taking tactical advantage both of that mistake and his illness — I might have done the rest, but if I had done that I could not have lived with myself.
‘I never had much feeling for Luke,’ he said.
‘Then you’re colder even than I thought you were.’
‘I had an example to warn me off the opposite,’ he said.
‘You didn’t need any warning.’
‘I admit that you’re a man of strong feeling,’ he said. ‘Of strong feeling for people, that is. I’ve had the example of how much harm that’s done.’
We were standing still, facing each other, at the corner where the street ran into Piccadilly; for a second an association struck me, it brought back the corner of that other street to which Sawbridge walked in a provincial town. Our voices rose and fell; sometimes the bitterest remark was a whisper, often I heard his voice and mine echo back across the wide road. We shouted in the pain, in the special outrage of a family quarrel, so much an outrage because one is naked to oneself.
Instead of the stretch of Piccadilly, empty except for the last taxis, the traffic lights blinking as we shouted, I might have been plunged back into the pain of some forgotten disaster in the dark little ‘front room’ of our childhood, with the dying laburnum outside the windows. Pain, outrage, the special insight of those who wish to hurt and who know the nerve to touch. In the accusations we made against each other, there was the outrage of those bitter reproaches which, when we were at our darkest, we made against ourselves.
He said that I had forgotten how to act. He said that I understood the people round me, and in the process let them carry me along. I had wasted my promise. I had been too self-indulgent — friends, personal relations, I had spent myself over them and now it was all no use.
I said that he was so self-centred that no human being mattered to him — not a friend, not his wife, not even his son. He would sacrifice anyone of them for his next move. He had been a failure so long that he had not a glimmer of warmth left.
There were lulls, when our voices fell quiet or silent, even one lull where for a moment we exchanged a commonplace remark. Without noticing it we made our way down the street again, near the corner where (less than half an hour before) Martin had said goodnight, in sight of the door out of which we had flanked old Thomas Bevill.
I said: What could he do with his job, after the means by which he had won it? Was he just going to look on human existence as a problem in logistics? He didn’t have friends, but he had colleagues; was that going to be true of them all?
I said: In the long run he had no loyalty. In the long run he would turn on anyone above him. As I said those words, I knew they could not be revoked. For, in the flickering light of the quarrel, they exposed me as well as him. With a more painful anger than any I had heard that night, he asked me: ‘Who have you expected me to be loyal to?’
I did not answer.
He cried: ‘To you?’
I did not answer.
He said: ‘You made it too difficult.’
He went on: I appeared to be unselfish, but what I wanted from anyone I was fond of was, in the last resort, my own self-glorification.
‘Whether that’s true or not,’ I cried, ‘I shouldn’t have chosen for you the way you seemed so pleased with.’
‘You never cared for a single moment whether I was pleased or not.’
‘I have wanted a good deal for you,’ I said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘You have wanted a good deal for yourself.’
Part Five
Two Brothers
39: Technique Behind a High Reward
I did not attend Sawbridge’s trial. Like the others of the series, it was cut as short as English law permitted; Sawbridge said the single word ‘Guilty’, and the only person who expressed emotion was the judge, in giving him two years longer than Smith had forecast.
The papers were full of it. Hankins wrote two more articles. Bevill said: ‘Now we can get back to the grindstone.’ I had not spoken to Martin since the night in St James’s Street, although I knew that several times he had walked down the corridor, on his way to private talks with Bevill.
It was the middle of October, and I had to arrange a programme of committees on the future of Barford. Outside the windows, after the wet summer the leaves were turning late. Rarely, a plane leaf floated down, in an autumnal air that was at the same time exhilarating and sad.
One morning, as I was consulting Rose, he said: ‘Your brother has been colloguing with Bevill a little.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘I wondered if you happened to know.’ Rose was looking at me with what for him was a quizzical and mischievous glance.
‘Know what?’
‘My dear chap, it’s all perfectly proper, nothing could possibly have been done more according to the rules. I rather reproach myself I hadn’t started the ball rolling, but of course there was no conceivable chance of our forgetting you—’
‘Forgetting me?’ I said.
‘I shouldn’t have allowed that to happen, believe me, my dear Eliot.’
I said: ‘I know nothing about this, whatever it is.’
‘On these occasions,’ Rose was almost coy, the first time I had seen him so, ‘it’s always better not to know too much.’
I had to persuade him that I knew nothing at all. For some time he was unusually obtuse, preferring to put it down to discretion or delicacy on my part. At last he half-believed me. He said:
‘Well, it’s a matter of reckoning your deserts, my dear Eliot. The old gentleman is insisting — and I don’t think there will be anyone to gainsay him — that it’s high time you had a decoration.’