Now all the evidence was in — except what the two said when they went into the box themselves.
“That won’t make much difference,” I said.
“Whatever she says, it can’t do her any good,” George replied. He lifted his eyes and gazed straight at me.
“What are her chances, then?”
After a moment, I answered: “Things might go either way.”
George shook his head.
“No. That’s too optimistic. You’re going in for wishful thinking now.”
I felt — and it was true of Martin also — nothing but astonishment, astonishment with an edge to it, almost sinister, certainly creepy. We had heard George hopeful all his life, often hopeful beyond the limits of reason: now on that afternoon, the trial coming to its close, we heard him reproaching me.
There was another surprise. His manner — one could have said, his mind and body — had totally changed since lunchtime, only three hours before. Then he had been lolling about in a state of hebetude, getting on for catatonic, as helplessly passive as a good many people become in extreme strain. Now he was talking like an active man. In the hot room the sweat was pouring down his cheeks, his breathing was heavy, beneath his eyes the rims were red: but still he had brought out reserves of fire and energy, which no one could have thought existed, seeing him not only that morning but for months past, or even years.
“You’re being too optimistic,” he said, with something like scorn mixed up with authority. “I can’t afford to be.”
“George,” said Martin, “there’s nothing you can do.”
“Nonsense,” said George, with an angry shout. “The world isn’t coming to an end. Other people have got to go on living. Some of them I’ve been responsible for. I don’t know whether I’m any further use. But I’ve got to go on living. What in God’s name is the point of telling me that there’s nothing I can do?”
Martin said, he meant that there was nothing George could do for his niece.
Still angry, George interrupted him: “If they send her to a hospital, then I suppose there’s a finite possibility that they’ll cure her, and I shall have to be on hand. That’s obvious to either of you, I should have thought. But as I’ve told you—” he was speaking to me as though I were a young protégé again — “that’s the optimistic plan. It’s over-optimistic, and that’s being charitable to you. If they send her to jail—”
I said: “I agree, that may happen.”
“Of course it may happen,” he said harshly. “Well, in that case, I don’t expect to be alive when she comes out.”
Was he recognising his state of health? If so, it was the first time I had heard it.
“So I’m afraid that I should have to regard her as dispensable, so far as I am concerned. She won’t be out while I’m alive. There are other people I shall have to think about. And what I ought to do myself. That means a second plan.”
Neither Martin nor I could tell whether this was make-believe. He was talking with the decision, buoyed up by the thought of action, such as he used in his days of vigour. He was also talking like the leader which — in his own bizarre and self-destructive fashion — he had always been. When he said that Cora was “dispensable” (just as when he did not so much as mention Kitty Pateman’s name, since she was no concern of his), he was showing — paradoxically, so it seemed — a flash, perhaps a final one, like the green flash at sunset, of the quality which made people so loyal to him. For a leader of his kind needed gusto, and he had had far more than most men: needed generosity of spirit, and no one that I knew had lavished himself more: needed a touch of paranoia, to make his followers feel protective: needed something else. And the something else, when I was young, I should have called ruthlessness. That was glossing it over. It was really more like an inner chill. By this time, I had seen a number of men whom others without thought, as it were by instinct, looked upon as leaders. Some in prominent places: one or two, like George, in obscurity and the underground. Of these leaders, a few, not all, attracted loyalty, sometimes fanatical loyalty, as George did: and they were alike in only one thing, that they all possessed this inner chill. It was the others, who were warm inside, more plastic and more involved, who got deserted or betrayed.
33: Revenant
ON the Saturday morning in our drawing-room, Margaret was asking me about my father. A beam of sunlight edged through the window behind me, irradiated half a picture on the far wall, a patch of fluorescent blue. It was all easy and peacemaking. Yet it felt unfamiliar, that I wasn’t catching the bus down to the Assize Hall.
I had returned very late the night before, and we hadn’t talked much. Yes, I told her now, Martin and I had been to visit the old man (actually, we had gone straight from that tea-time with George). He had complained vaguely that he wasn’t “quite A1”: but, when we asked what was the matter, he either put us off or didn’t know, saying that “they” were looking after him nicely. “They” appeared to consist of the doctor and a district visitor who came in twice a week. My father spoke of her with enthusiasm. “She goes round all the old people who haven’t got anyone to look after them,” he said, expressing mild incredulity at the social services. We had told him that it was his own fault that he hadn’t someone to look after him, it was his own mule-like obstinacy. But he scented danger, with an old man’s cunning he suspected that we were plotting to drag him away. He wouldn’t budge. “I should curl up my toes if anyone shifted me,” he said. His morale seemed to be high. Incidentally, he had with fair consistency called Martin and me by each other’s names: but he had done that in our childhood, he was no more senile now than when I last saw him.
Margaret gave a faint smile, preoccupied as to whether we ought to leave him there, how far had we the right to interfere.
Just then Charles, still on holiday, entered in a new dressing gown, smelling of shaving soap. Over the last year he had suddenly become careful of his appearance. He said hallo, looking at me with scrutinising eyes. He didn’t remind me of his warning, but I hadn’t any doubt that he had searched the papers each day. And his forecasts had proved not so far from the truth. There had been references to my presence at the trial, some just news, a few malicious. An enterprising journalist had done some research on my connection with George Passant. He had even latched on to Gough’s casual comment the day before. “Venusberg trial — Lewis Eliot again with boyhood friends.”
Not waiting for Charles to be tactful, I asked if he had noticed that.
He nodded.
“Well?” he said.
“One gets a bit tired of it. But still—”
Margaret gave a curse. I didn’t tell him, but he certainly knew that it was true for me, that no one I had known, including the hardest political operators, ever quite got used to it. Instead I said (using reflectiveness to deny the here-and-now, the little sting), that this kind of comment, the mass media’s treatment of private lives, had become far more reckless in my own lifetime.
Charles was not much impressed. This was the climate which he had grown up in and took for granted.
“Have you done any good?” he asked.
I thought of George at tea the day before.
“Very little,” I said. “Probably none at all.”
Charles broke into a broad smile. “Anyway, we’ve got to give you credit for honesty, haven’t we?” He teased me, with the repetitive family gibes. Margaret was laughing, relieved that we hadn’t reverted to our quarrel. Why did I insist on getting into trouble? Even when I wasn’t needed? Fair comment, I said, thinking of George again.