“I have a bit of news,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Pat is going to get married.”
“Is he, by God?”
Then I asked, who to: but I thought I knew.
“Muriel. Roy Calvert’s Muriel.”
Martin was so happy that I had to be happy for him. I said, using our own cipher, well, Pat might have done worse.
“He might have done worse,” said Martin, all cautiousness gone. It would have seemed strange thirty years before, I said, to think of his son marrying Roy Calvert’s daughter. Actually (though I didn’t bring it back to mind) he and Roy had never been more than acquaintances. If Roy were alive now, he would have been fifty-three.
“It’s hard to imagine him like that, isn’t it?” said Martin.
“Anyway, you’re obviously glad.”
“I’m very glad.”
The engagement would be announced the following Monday, he said. He didn’t want any mention of it at dinner that night.
“Why ever not?”
He shook his head.
“Whatever could be more natural?” I meant, an old man dies, his grandson gets married: after all that we had said, and felt, in this alcove a few weeks before, we were back in the flow of things. It mightn’t be very grand: there was the splendid, of which we had seen a little, there was the hideous, of which we had seen enough: yet this was neither, it was what we lived in, in order to endure.
“I don’t think Irene would like it,” he said.
Well, I said, he knew his wife better than I did. But didn’t he remember her at the Christmas Eve party, shouting out birth, copulation, children, death, as though that was the biography of us all?
“At that party,” Martin broke in, “you knew what we were in for? About the trial?”
“I had an idea.”
“I only realised later that you must have done.”
He went back to talking of Irene.
“She’s more conventional than I am, you know.”
That sounded strange, after the life she had led. But he was certain. She wouldn’t consider it proper to celebrate an engagement on the day that we had buried our father.
“Also,” he added, “I don’t think she’s too happy about the marriage, anyway.”
In that case, I said, she was pretty hard to please. The girl was attractive: she was said to be clever, not surprising for Roy’s daughter: she had a small fortune of her own. They wouldn’t have to support Pat any further, presumably. Martin, with a brotherly grin, said he had thought of that.
“To be perfectly honest,” I said, “I’m surprised you didn’t get more obstruction from the other side.”
“The young woman,” said Martin, “made up her mind.”
He added: “But still, Irene doesn’t really like it.” He shrugged. “That doesn’t count. It’s going to happen soon.”
“When?”
“Very soon. In about a month.”
“What’s the hurry?”
Martin smiled. After a moment, he said, off-hand: “Oh, the good old-fashioned reason.” His smile spread, masculine, lubricous, paternal. He gazed across the table. “In any case, it’s time there was another generation.”
He explained, he explained with elaborate detail, that they had been planning to marry weeks before she became pregnant — they were already planning it when we sat in the Gearys’ garden and he warned me about Vicky (whose name had not been mentioned in our alcove that night), and some time before that. All the while Pat had been in some sort of conflict with his father, and still so intimate that Martin knew it all. Again, I thought, it takes two to make a possessive love. Pat might be one of the more undesirable sons, but he wanted his father. Whereas, if Martin had had Charles for a son, he would have been spared most of the suffering, and found that the son had slipped away.
That night in the Gearys’ garden, Martin had — in the midst of all that had gone wrong — been sustained by a kind of content. Talking to me in the alcove, the night after the funeral, he felt more than content, he felt sheer simple joy.
“It will be the making of him,” he repeated. No one could have thought Martin a simple man. What he had been saying to me, over the past weeks, wasn’t simple: it wasn’t comfortable, it didn’t leave him much, or me either. He meant it, he continued to believe it, it was what he had to say. Yet that night he was full of joy, because of one of the simplest of all things.