I said that I couldn’t stay long. I wanted only to finish up this business of his son. I hadn’t heard until that day that he had been accepted by — (the neighbouring university). That completed the story, and they ought to consider themselves fortunate.
“No,” said Mr Pateman, not angrily but in a level, reasonable fashion. “I can’t be expected to agree with that.”
“I do expect you to agree with that.” I had come to break this tie. To be honest, I didn’t mind a quarreclass="underline" but I wasn’t getting it.
“Well then, we shall have to agree to differ, shan’t we?”
“Your son,” I said, “is a remarkably lucky young man. If he were here — by the by I have not had a word from him about his news — if he were here I should tell him so. He might have been thrown out for good. As it is, this is exactly like going on at the university here as though nothing had happened.”
“Ah,” Mr Pateman smiled, an all-knowing patronising smile. “There I have to take issue with you. Do you realise that this place is twelve miles away?”
“Of course I do.”
“How is he going to get there?”
I muttered, but Mr Pateman continued in triumph: “Someone is going to have to pay his fare.”
I stared at him blank-faced. With a gesture, he said: “But I’ll grant you this. It’s not so bad as Scotland. No, it’s not so bad as Scotland. So we’d better let bygones be bygones, hadn’t we?”
He was victorious. For the moment, he was sated. I thought — not then but later, for on the spot I was outfaced, deflated, like one working himself up to a row and finding himself greeted with applause — how people say comfortably that persecution never works. Read a little history, and you find that persecution, more often than not, is singularly effective. The same with paranoia. You might think it was a crippling affliction: live some of your life, and you find that paranoia too, more often than not, is singularly effective. Certainly the streak possessed by the Patemans, father and son, had won them, in this business, what they wanted. It also made Mr Pateman that evening feel powerful as most of us never do. Paranoia of that kind is only placated for an interval, and then, like sexual jealousy, starts up again. But while it is placated, it — again like sexual jealousy — gives a reassurance which is utterly possessing, as though all enemies were conquered or annihilated, a reassurance of non-enmity that those of us who are not paranoid will never know.
Before I left, Mr Pateman favoured me with his views on civil servants. It was no thanks to me, but he was enjoying some new “brainwave” about a move for himself. He reiterated, he couldn’t remain a cashier much longer. “I’m like a bank clerk shovelling money over the counter and not having any for himself.” But he had listened to me enough to visit the Employment Exchange. As he had foreseen, he said with satisfaction, they had been useless, totally useless.
“You know what civil servants are like, do you?”
I told him I had been one, during the war and for years later.
“Present company excepted.” He gave a forgiving smile. “But you’ve had some experience outside, you ought to know what civil servants are like. Rats in mazes. You switch on a light and they scramble for the right door.”
I said goodbye. Mr Pateman, standing up and squaring his shoulders, said that he was glad to have had these talks. I asked if the new job he was thinking of was an interesting one.
“For some people,” he said, “every job is an interesting one.”
He volunteered no more. His lips were complacently tight, as though he were a cabinet minister being questioned by a backbencher of dubious discretion.
Sitting in the Residence drawing-room, a few minutes to go before dinner, I told Vicky that I had had a mildly punishing day. “Poor old thing,” she said. I didn’t say anything about Leonard Getliffe or the Pateman parlour, but I remarked that it was bleak to miss my customary drink with George. She shook her head: she didn’t know him, he was just a name from the town’s shadows.
“Anyway,” she said, “you might meet another old friend tonight.” She asked — would I let her drive me out into the country, for a party after dinner? Would that be too much for me? What was this party, I wanted to know. Parents of friends of hers, prosperous business people, not even acquaintances of mine. “But they want to collect you, you know. And it’d be a bit of a scoop for me to produce you.” Vicky gave a cheerful grimace. She had a tendency, characteristic of realistic young women, to find any symptom of the public life extremely funny. I found that tendency soothing.
Before she had time to tell me who the “old friend” was, Arnold Shaw joined us, beaming with eupeptic good humour. “Excellent meeting today, Lewis,” he said. He was feeling celebratory, and had opened one of his better bottles of claret for dinner. At the table, the three of us alone, he did not once refer to the controversy. It was over, in his mind a neat, black, final line had been drawn. He talked, euphorically and non-stop, about the October congregation. Arnold loved ceremony, protocol, anything which distinguished one man from another. If the President of the Royal Society came to receive an honorary degree, should he, or should he not, on an academic occasion, take precedence over a viscount who was not receiving a degree?
As he propounded this intricate problem, Vicky was smiling. She was still amused when he went on to what for him was the fascinating topic of honorary degrees. Here he took great trouble, and, as so often, received no credit from anyone, not even her. If a university was going to give honorary degrees at all, he had harangued me before now, it ought to be done with total purity. He would make no concessions. As so often, no one believed that he was a pure soul. Yet he had done precisely what he said. No local worthies. No putative benefactors. No politicians. Men of international distinction. No one else.
“I’m glad you mentioned the man Rubin,” he said to me. David Rubin was an American friend of mine, and one of the most eminent of theoretical physicists. “I’ve made enquiries. They say he’s good. No, they say he’s more than good.”
“Well, Arnold, the fact that he got a Nobel prize when he was about forty,” I said, “does argue a certain degree of competence.”
Arnold let out his malicious chuckle.
“Leonard Getliffe thinks a lot of him. And that young man isn’t very easily pleased.” He was glancing meaningfully at his daughter. “I always know I shall get an honest opinion from Leonard on this sort of business. Yes, he’s absolutely honest, he really is a friend of mine.”
His glance was meaningful. So, in a different sense, was mine. I hadn’t told Vicky about my conversation with Leonard: now I was glad that I hadn’t; it would have done no good and turned her evening sour. I sipped at the admirable wine. Why was Arnold so innocent? Hadn’t he noticed the abstentions from the Court? Why were he and Leonard so pure? Under the taste of the wine, a vestigial taste of blackcurrants — a vestigial reminder of a worldly man, unlike those two, a man nothing like so pure, Arthur Brown, looking after his friends in college, giving us wine as good as this, years ago.
As soon as we had settled in her car and Vicky was driving up the London Road, out of the town, I asked who was the old friend? The old friend I was to meet?
“They didn’t want to tell either of you, so that it would be a surprise.”
“Come on, who is it?”
“I think her name is Juckson-Smith.”
“I’ve never heard of her,” I said.
“They said you used to know her.”