Of course, I was saying. Anyone who had lived at all believed in luck. Anyone who had avoided total failure had to believe in luck: if you didn’t, you were callous or self-satisfied or both. Why, it was luck merely to survive. I didn’t tell him, but if he had been born twenty years earlier, before the antibiotics were discovered, he himself would probably be dead. Dead at the age of three, from the one illness of his childhood, the one recognition symbol which his name evoked in George Passant’s mind.
Charles had set me daydreaming. When I thought of the luck in my own life, it made me giddy. Without great good luck, I might shortly be coming up for retirement in a local government office. No, that wasn’t mock-modest. I had started tough and determined: but I had seen other tough, determined men unable to break loose. Books? I should have tried. Unpublished books? Maybe. By and large, the practical luck had been with me. On the other hand, I might have been unlucky in meeting Sheila. And yet, I should have been certain to waste years of my young manhood in some such passion as that.
Something, perhaps a turn of phrase of Charles’ or a look in his eye, flicked my thoughts on to my brother Martin. He had been perceptibly unlucky: not grotesquely so, but enough to fret him. If I had had ten per cent above the odds in my favour, he had had ten per cent below. Somehow the cards hadn’t fallen right. He had never had the specific gift to be sure of success at physics: unlike Leonard Getliffe, whose teachers were predicting his future when he was fifteen. Martin ought to have made his career in some sort of politics. True, he had renounced his major chance; it seemed then, it still seemed, out of character for him to make that sacrifice, but he had done it. I believed that it was a consolation to him, when he faced ten more dim years in college: he had a feeling of free will.
But still, he had all the gifts for modern politics. You needed more luck in that career, of course, than in science, more even than in the literary life. Nevertheless, if Martin had been a professional politician, I should have backed him to “get office” as the politicians themselves called it. He would have enjoyed it. He would have liked the taste of power. He would have liked, much more than I should, being a dignitary. And yet, I supposed, though I wasn’t sure, that he didn’t repine much: most men who had received less than their due didn’t think about it often, certainly not continuously: life was a bit more merciful than that. There were about ten thousand jobs which really counted in the England of that time. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that you could get rid of the present incumbents, find ten thousand more, and the society would go ticking on with no one (except perhaps the displaced) noting the difference. Martin knew that unheroic truth as well as I knew it. So did Denis Geary and other half-wasted men. It made it easier for them to laugh it off and go on working, run-of-the-mill or not, it didn’t matter.
Charles said: “You remember at Easter, when we came away from your father’s, what I said? I told you, it wasn’t quite what I expected.”
He had a memory like a computer, such as I had had when I was his age. But his conversational openings were not random, he hadn’t introduced the concept of luck for nothing.
“Well?” I said, certain that there was a connection, baffled as to what it was.
“I expected to think that you’d had a bad time—”
“I told you, I had a very happy childhood.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean that. I expected to think that you’d had a bad start.”
“Well, it might have been better, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure.” He was smiling, half-taunting, half-probing.
“That’s what I was thinking when I came away. I was thinking you might have had better luck than I’ve had.”
I was taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you were a hungry boxer. And hungry boxers fight better than well-fed boxers, don’t they?”
However he had picked up that idiom, I didn’t know. In fact, I was put out. I was perfectly prepared to indulge in that kind of reflection on my own account: but it seemed unfair, coming from him.
“I should have thought,” I said, “that you fight hard enough.”
“Perhaps. But I’ve got to do it on my own, haven’t I?”
He spoke evenly, good-temperedly, not affected — though he had noticed it — by my own flash of temper. He had been working it out. I had had social forces behind me, pressing me on. All the people in the backstreets who had never had a chance. Whereas the people he had met in my house and grown up among — they had been born with a chance, or had made one. Achievement didn’t seem so alluring, when you met it every day. He was as ambitious as I had been: but, despite appearances, he was more on his own.
I was talking to him very much as nowadays I talked to Martin. Sometimes I thought he bore a family resemblance to Martin, though Charles’ mind was more acute. Yes, there was something in what he said. I had made the same sort of observation when I met my first rich friends. Katherine Getliffe’s brother Charles — after whom my son was named — had felt much as he did. The comfortable jobs were there for the taking: but were they worth it? Books were being written all round one: could one write any good enough? I was twenty-three or more before I met anyone who had written any kind of book. “And that,” I observed, “was a remarkably bad one.”
Charles gave a friendly grin.
When I first went into those circles, yes, I had comforted myself that it was I who had the advantage. For reasons such as he had given. And yet — I had had to make compromises and concessions. Too many. Some of them I was ashamed of. I had sometimes been devious. I had had to stay — or at any rate I had stayed — too flexible. It was only quite late in life that I had been able to harden my nature. It was only quite late that I had spoken with my own voice.
“But all that,” said Charles, “kept you down to earth, didn’t it?”
“Sometimes,” I said, “too far down.”
“Still, it has come out all right.” He insisted: “It’s all come out more than all right, you can’t say it hasn’t?”
“I suppose I’m still more or less intact,” I said.
He knew a good deal about what had happened to me, both the praise and blame. He was a cool customer, but he was my son, and he probably thought that I was a shade more monolithic than I was.
“Don’t overdo it,” he said.
“I thought I should have a placid old age. And I shan’t.”
“Of course you will in time. Anyway, do you mind?”
I answered: “Not all that much.”
“The important thing is, you must live a very long time.”
That was said quite straight, and with concern. His smile was affectionate, not taunting. The exchange was over. I said: “Of course, if it will make things easier for you, I can disown you tomorrow. I’m sure you’d get a nice job in the sort of office I started in.”
We were back to the tone of every day. The clouds outside the window were denser, Margaret had not yet come in. Charles fetched out a chess set, and we settled down to play.
Not that afternoon, perhaps at no moment I could isolate, I realised that there was another aspect in which I was luckier than Martin. Anyone who knew us in the past, in the not-so-remote past, would have predicted that, if either of us were going to be obsessively attached to his son, it would be me. I should have predicted it myself. I was made for it. All my life history pointed that way. I had deliberately forewarned myself and spoken of it to Margaret. But, though I was used to surprises in others’ lives, I was mystified by them in my own. It hadn’t happened.