“I decided it was right to go. Before there was any risk of being a liability to my people. Not that I wasn’t still at my best, or I should have got out long before.” He sat there skull-faced, still youthful-looking for a man in his late seventies. He delivered himself as though indifferent to his audience, completely absorbed in his own drama, projecting it like something of transcendental importance and objective truth.
“What do you imagine happened?” It was the kind of rhetorical question no one could answer, yet by which men as experienced as Rubin and Francis Getliffe were hypnotised.
“Nothing happened.” Lufkin answered himself with stony satisfaction.
He went on: “I made that industry.” It sounded gigantesque: it was quite true. He had possessed supreme technological insight and abnormal will. He had made an industry, not a fortune. He had more than enough money for his needs, but he had nothing to spend it on. By the standards of his industrial colleagues, he was not a rich man. “I made that industry, and everything inside it. I used to tell my people, I am your best friend. And they knew, I was their best friend.”
Heads, hypnotised, were nodding.
“What did they do?” Silence again. Again Lufkin answered himself. “Nothing.” He spoke with greater confidence than ever. “When any of my managers retired, the whole works turned out. When my deputy retired, the whole organisation sent a testimonial. What did they do for me?”
This time he didn’t give an answer. He said: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”
He repeated: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”
When we joined the women, it was only minutes before Margaret spoke to Vicky and Arnold Shaw and took me off to bed. Alone in our room, I said to her: “Paul Lufkin is lonely.” I was wondering, how used were the others to this singular display of emotion? Horizontal fission, we used to call it. Lufkin sincerely believed that he wasn’t hurt. And yet, even he must realise at least that he felt lost. After great power for forty years, power all gone. After a lifetime of action, nothing to do. Once he had talked of retiring to Monaco. Now, so far as I knew, he lived in Surrey and came to London once a week for the committee of a charity. “Paul Lufkin is lonely,” I said.
“He’s not the only one,” said Margaret.
I asked what she meant.
“Didn’t you realise that Vicky was waiting for a telephone call all night, poor girl?”
In the solipsist bubble in which I had gone through that day, I had scarcely noticed her.
“Did she hear?”
Margaret shook her head.
“That nephew of yours. I’m afraid he’s throwing her over, don’t you think so?”
“It doesn’t look good.” I was sitting on the bed, just having taken off the eyepatch. I was trying to speak about Vicky, but the black edge cut out the light, the orange fringe was giddily swimming, and I let out that complaint only for myself.
13: Homage to Superstition
THE next morning, tea trays on our bed, Margaret sketched out the day’s timetable. There was a train just after one, we could be in London in a couple of hours: that would bring us to the hospital before tea. The less time I had in the dark, the better, I said. I knew that I should have to lie on my back, both eyes blindfolded, to give the retina hours to settle down.
When I had agreed to Margaret’s programme, I said: “In that case, I think I’d like to see my old father this morning.”
For an instant, she was caught open-mouthed, her looks dissolved in blank astonishment. Her own relation with her father had been so responsible. She had sometimes been shocked by mine. She had never seen me in search of a father, either a real one or a surrogate, in all our time together. She gazed at me. She gave a sharp-eyed, intimate smile and said: “You know, it isn’t much more than having a few teeth out, you do know that?”
It sounded like free association gone mad, but her eyes were lit up. To others I seemed more rational than most men; not to her. She had lived with a streak of superstitiousness in me as deep as my mother’s, though more suppressed. She had watched me book in, year after year, at the same New York hotel, because there I had heard of a major piece of luck. She had learned how I dreaded any kind of pleasure on a Tuesday night because one such evening I had enjoyed myself and faced stark horror on the Wednesday morning. Sometimes, in fact, I infected her. She wasn’t sorry, she was relieved, to hear this atavistic desire of mine. It might be a longish operation, Margaret had said: there was a shrinking from unconsciousness which was atavistic too. She, as well as I, wasn’t disinclined to make an act of piety, to make this sort of insurance for which one prays as a child. The fact that it was an incongruous act of piety might have deterred her, she had more sense of the fitness of things, but she took me in my freedom, and didn’t wish it to deter me.
So, by the middle of the morning, she had said our goodbyes, and we were driving out through the backstreets along which, the preceding spring, I had walked with Charles. The cluster of shops, the chapel, the gentle rise. When I was a boy, cars didn’t pass those terraced windows once a day; and even that morning, when the university Daimler stopped outside Aunt Milly’s old house, there were curious eyes from the “entry” opposite.
I led Margaret in by the back way. Passing the window of my father’s room, I stood on tiptoe but could see only darkness. When I went up the steps to the French window, I found the room was empty. We returned along the passage. I rang at the familiar front door (pulling the hand bell, perhaps it was still the same bell, as when I came back one night, late from a school debate, found our own house empty and rang Aunt Milly’s belclass="underline" there was my mother pretending to laugh off a setback, lofty in her disappointed pride). The bell jangled. After a time footsteps sounded, and a middle-aged man in his shirt-sleeves opened the door. I had seen him before, but not spoken to him: he was always referred to by my father as Mr Sperry. He was called my father’s “lodger”, though he occupied the entire house except for the single room.
I told him my name and said that I was looking for my father. Mr Sperry chuckled. He was long and thin, with a knobbly Adam’s apple and a bush of hair. He had a kind, perplexed and slightly eccentric face. I thought I remembered hearing that he was a jobbing plumber.
“I expect the old gentleman’s doing his bit of shopping,” he said.
“When do you think he’ll be back?”
Mr Sperry shook his head. “It’s wonderful how he does for himself,” he said. He had the most gentle manners: but it was clear that, though he had occupied the house for ten years, he didn’t know much about my father, and was puzzled by what little he did know. “I can’t tell you when he’ll be home, I’m sure. Would you care to come in?”
I exchanged a glance with Margaret. I said we hadn’t many minutes, there was a train to catch, we’d just hang about outside for a little while. That was true: and yet, kind as Mr Sperry was, he was a stranger, and I didn’t want to sit in childhood’s rooms with him.
Standing outside the car, Margaret and I smoked cigarettes. It would be bad to miss my father now. I kept looking along the road to the library, down the rise to the chapel. Then Margaret said: “I think that’s him, isn’t it?”
I was watching the other direction. She was pointing to a tiny figure who had just turned into sight, by the chapel railings.
She wasn’t certain. Her eyes were perfect: she could make out that small figure as I could not: but she couldn’t be certain because, owing to my father’s singularity, she had met him only twice.