George gave her a shifty, defiant smile, and said: “Oh, if I’m not up to the mark, I shall get in touch with some of you.”
Had he thought of where he might be going? Of course, what did she take him for? For the first time that night, George broke into laughter, loud laughter. For days past — perhaps when he had been absent from the court, and perhaps, I now suspected, for a longer period than that — he had been making logistic plans, like the administrator he might have been. It would take him no time at all to “clear up his effects”. He didn’t propose to stay in England. He had never travelled much: as a matter of fact, apart from a weekend in Paris and a few days in Ostend, he had not, in sixty-four years, travelled at all. Yet, it was one of his schematic hobbies, he knew the geography, railways, timetables of Europe far better than the rest of us.
“Well, now I’ve got a bloody good chance to look round,” he cried.
He intended to start in Scandinavia, for which he had a hankering, because he had once met a Swede who looked remarkably like himself.
“I’m sorry to nag,” said Margaret. “But, before you go, do ask your doctor. You know, you’re not very good at taking care of yourself, are you?”
“I shall be all right.”
“Or let us find you a doctor in London, won’t you?”
“You’re not to worry about me.”
He answered her with childlike impenetrable obstinacy: nothing was going to stop him now.
Margaret, used to her father and the sight of illness, thought it was kinder to say no more. Then Martin and I, almost at the same instant, mentioned money. Up till then, the grudges, bad luck, resentments of a lifetime had been submerged: all of a sudden, they broke through. Of course he was bound to be short of money. After that ineffable firm (Eden & Sharples, and George’s curses crashed into the room) had fobbed him off with his miserable pension. Seven hundred and fifty a year; that was all he received for a life’s work. When he had saved them from their own contemptible incompetence. If it hadn’t been for him, they would have been extinct long ago! Seven hundred and fifty a year. In exactly one year’s time, he added, with savage, mirthless hilarity, he would get his old age pension. Then he would have nearly a thousand a year. The glorious reward for all his efforts in this mortal life!
Anyone from outside might have thought that George was morbidly preoccupied with money, miserly in the fashion of Mr Pateman. That was dead wrong. No one had minded about it less, or given it away more lavishly. In that storm of protest, it wasn’t money that was making him cry out.
But he had his streak of practicality, and I had to answer on those terms.
“Are you going to be able to cope?” I said.
“Can’t you work it out for yourselves?”
“You must let us help.”
“No. It’s rather too late to impose upon my friends.”
He had spoken with stiff pride. Then, to soften the snub, he gave his curiously sweet and hesitating smile.
Martin half-began a financial question, and let it drop. There was a silence.
“Well,” said George.
None of us spoke.
“Well,” said George again, like one of the students before the Court, as though he were seeing us off at a railway station. Martin and I, used to his habits in days past, realised that he was anxious for us to go. Perhaps he had someone else to see that night. As we stood up, George said, amiably but with relief: “It was very good of you all to come round.”
Margaret kissed him. Martin and I (it wasn’t our usual way, we might have been saying good night in a foreign country) shook him by the hand.
When Martin stopped the car in front of the Gearys’ house, the drawing-room lights, curtains undrawn, shone out into the front garden: there were other luminous rectangles in the houseproud road. Denis Geary met us at the door.
“Here you are! It’s not so late, after all.”
I had rung up from the Assize Hall to say that they weren’t to wait supper for us, we couldn’t tell when we should be home. Alison Geary was hurrying us into the bright warm room, saying that we couldn’t have eaten much. Margaret replied that she was past eating, but, at her ease as she wasn’t at George’s, added that she was pining for a drink. “It’s ready for you,” said Denis, pointing to the sideboard. They had been preparing for us all the evening. Martin, who was ravenous, tucked into a plateful of cold beef: we sat, not at the table, but in easy chairs round the room; outside the French windows, stars sparkled in the cold clear sky. “That’s better,” said Denis to Margaret, who was now starting on some bread and cheese. “You all looked a bit peaked when you came in. We’d been expecting that,” said Alison. Margaret smiled at them, and gave a grateful-sounding sigh.
We hadn’t been sitting there for long before we told the Gearys about George’s decision. Is he really going? Alison wanted to know. Yes, we said, we were certain that he meant it. Margaret added that he wasn’t fit to go off alone, his physical state was worse than any of us imagined. Denis looked at her; “I’ll see if I can check on that,” he said.
“I don’t think he’ll thank you for it,” I told him.
“I tried,” Margaret said.
George was going, we said to Denis. He didn’t intend to listen to anything that got in his way. I thought — but Margaret believed he could be deceiving himself — that he knew he wasn’t a good life.
“So we can’t stop him, you think?” said Denis, frowning, chafing to be practical. Then he added gently, having seen, more continuously than we had, the whole course of George’s existence: “Perhaps it’s all for the best.”
Soon afterwards he said: “Anyway this town isn’t going to be quite the same without him.”
He said it without any expression on his elder statesman’s face. It might have been a platitude. None of us was feeling genial, no one smiled. But Denis, though he was a very kind man, was not without a touch of irony.
He refilled our glasses. He looked across at his wife, as though they were colloguing. Then, in exactly the same tone, firm and sympathetic, in which he had greeted me on the first night of the trial, he spoke to the three of us: “Now then. You’ve got to put all this behind you.”
For an instant, no one answered.
“All of it,” Denis went on. “The whole hideous business you’ve been listening to. You’ve got to forget it. You’ve got to forget it.”
Very quietly, speaking to an old friend whom he respected, Martin said: “I absolutely disagree.”
All of a sudden, in the bright comfortable room, we were back in the argument — no, it wasn’t an argument, it was at once too much at random and too convergent for that, we agreed more than we disagreed, the dialectic existed only below the words — which I had been having with Margaret for a long time past and with Martin on those nights together during the trial.
It was wrong to forget. We had forgotten too much. This was the beginning of illusions. Most of all (this was Martin, speaking straight to Denis Geary) of the liberal illusions.
False hope was no good. False hope, that you hold on to by forgetting things.
The only hope worth having was built on everything you knew, the facts you didn’t like as well as the facts you did. That was a difficult hope. For the social condition, it was the only hope that would give us all a chance. For oneself–
Was anyone tough enough to look at himself, as he really was, without sentimentality or mercy, all the time?
For an instant I thought, though I didn’t report it, of something that had happened to me during the trial. When Kitty Pateman was being cross-examined, when we all might have expected to forget our own egos, I found myself shutting my eyes, flooded with shame. It was entirely trivial. I had suddenly remembered — I had no idea what trigger set it off — an incident when I was about eighteen. My aunt Milly had just been making a teetotal pronouncement, her picture was in the local paper, and I was talking to some friends. One of them suspected that she was a connection of mine: I swore blind that I had never seen her in my life.