Yet each night we became fretted as we waited for the telephone to ring. And, there was no denying it, we found ourselves showing a streak of miserliness, as though we were being infected from the other end of the line. It was ridiculous. Margaret had never counted shillings in her life. We spent more on cigarettes in a week than those reverse charges could possibly amount to. Nevertheless, with the experience of the trial only a few weeks behind us, we scrutinised our telephone bill with indignation, calculating what was the cost of Mr Pateman.
39: A Young Man on His Own
A few days after my visit to the prison, Charles and I were sitting under a weeping willow on the riverbank. It was a fine afternoon, and I had gone down to his school to settle what he should do during the next academic year. Not that there was much to settle, for he had made up his mind months before. He had cleared off all the examinations, and it was time to go. The only issue remaining was not when, but where. He wouldn’t be seventeen for a good many months, and he had to fill in three terms before he went to the university. He was taking the chance to start off on his travels, and it was some of those plans that we had been discussing.
“You might even write a letter occasionally,” I said.
He grinned.
It would have seemed strange in my time, I said, to be going off on one’s own at his age. In fact, among my friends, it would have been not only strange, but unimaginable. Of course, we didn’t have the money–
“Do we really grow up faster, do you think?”
“In some ways, yes, you do.”
I added: “But, for what it’s worth, I wanted to get married before I was twenty.”
“Who to?”
“My first wife.”
“You didn’t marry her for six — or was it seven — years afterwards, did you?”
“No.”
“If it had happened when you were twenty — what would it have been like?”
“It couldn’t have been worse than it turned out.”
Charles gave a grim, saga-like smile, similar to his uncle’s. But I was thinking that, though he knew the facts of my life with extreme accuracy, he didn’t know how torn about I’d been. He wouldn’t have believed that I had gone through that long drawn out and crippling love. He saw me as balanced and calm, a comparatively sensible ageing man. Sometimes I was amused. I permitted myself to say: “You haven’t got the monopoly of temperament in this family, you know.”
It was easy to talk to him, as to Martin, on the plane of sarcasm. As we sat there, I mentioned the telephonic activities of Mr Pateman. “You’ve brought it on yourself,” said Charles, operating on the same plane. An acquaintance of his sculled by, and Charles gave an amiable wave — rather like, since he was leaving so soon, Robin Hood gazing on the exploits of the budding archers. When the swell had passed, the river was mirror-calm, the willow leaves meeting their reflections in the water. It was something like an afternoon with C L Dodgson, I said to Charles, and went on to tell him that I had talked to Cora Ross in Holloway.
“Haven’t you packed all that up by now?”
“Not quite.” I added, sometimes it seemed that I never should.
He leaned forward, confronting me.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”
“This is an incident. If it hadn’t been for sheer blind chance, it wouldn’t have been an incident that mattered to you. All along, you’ve given it a significance that it doesn’t possess.” He was speaking lucidly, articulately, but with force and something like antagonism.
“I could have found other incidents, you know. Which would have affected me in the same fashion.”
“That’s because you are looking for them,” said Charles. “Do you remember, that weekend I was at home, you were breathing hellfire and damnation about Auschwitz? I disagreed with you then. You noticed that, did you? And I still disagree with you.”
“Auschwitz happened.”
“Many other things have happened. Remember, Auschwitz happened years before I was born. I’m bound to be interested in what’s happening now—”
“That’s fair enough.”
“Of course there are awful things. Here and now. But I want to find them out for myself.”
“Retracing all our mistakes in the process.”
“That’s not fair enough.” He said it politely, but as though he had been thinking it out alone and his mind had hardened. “I don’t think I’m easily taken in. My generation isn’t, you know. We’ve had to learn a fair amount.”
“It’s curious how you talk about ‘your generation’,” I said. “We never did.”
He wasn’t distracted. “Perhaps that’s because we know that we have a difficult job to do. You don’t deny that, do you?”
I said, that would be the last thing I intended.
He was referring to his friends by name. As a group, they were abler, very much abler, than those I had known as a boy. Some of them would take the world as they found it: become academics, conventional politicians, civil servants: that was easy enough, they had no problem there. But one or two, like himself, were not so content. Then what do you do? “We should like to find something useful. Perhaps I ought to lower my sights, but I don’t feel inclined to, until I’ve had a shot. And I don’t think it would be very different, even if I hadn’t got you on my back—”
He threw in that remark quite gently. I said that he could forget me.
He said, still gently but with a flick of sarcasm, that he would do his best to. That was the object of the exercise.
No, not really the object, just the first condition, he corrected himself. He wanted to throw in his weight where it would be usefuclass="underline" and he wanted to be sure it was his weight and no one else’s.
It had the ring of a youth’s ambition, at the same time arrogant and idealistic, mixed up with dreams of happiness. Some of it sounded as though it had been talked out with friends. Most of it, I thought, was solitary. He seemed spontaneous and easy-natured, but he kept his secrets.
He said that he had no more use for “doctrines of individual salvation” than I had. (I wondered where they had picked up that expression?) Any of those doctrines was dangerous, he said: they nearly always meant that, either actively or passively, one wished harm on to the world. Of course, he wanted for himself anything that came. What did he want? He was imagining something, but kept it to himself. He returned to saying that, whatever he found to do, it was going to be hard enough: so he couldn’t afford to carry any excess luggage with him.
“I want everything as open-ended as it can be, isn’t that right?” he said. “I don’t want to set limits yet awhile. Limits about people, I mean. So that’s why I can’t take this trouble of yours as tragically as you do. Do you mind that?”
All I could answer was to shake my head. I was sure by now that he had come to this meeting resolved to make his declaration: once he had got it over, he was in high spirits. Cheerfully he stretched himself, sucking a stem of grass. It was almost time, he said, for us to move off into the town for tea. “Tea’s not much good to you, is it?” he said. “Well, afterwards we’ll go to a hotel and I’ll stand you a Scotch. Just to celebrate the fact that this is the last time you’ll have to come down to this establishment—” he spread out a hand towards the river, the fields, the distant towers across the meadows.