Jack, a faded, larger, softer version of what he was seeing, waited.
Joseph said: 'I hear you have got religion.'
'The opium,' said Jack, in a formal considering way, 'of the people. Yes. If that's what it is, I have got it.'
Jack felt particularly transparent, because of his son's forceful presence. He knew that his posture, the smile on his face, were expressing apology. He already knew the meeting was doomed to end unpleasantly. Yet he was looking for the words to appeal to his son, to begin the 'real' talk that they should be having.
Joseph said: 'Well, that's your business.' He sounded impatient: having raised the subject, or at least used it as an opener, now he was saying that his father's processes were of no interest or importance. 'You've been following the Robinson affair?'
Jack could not remember for a moment which affair that was but did not like to say so.
‘We have to pay the defence lawyer. And there's the bail. We need at least three thousand pounds.'
Jack did not say anything. It was not from policy, but inadequacy, yet he saw his son beginning to make the irritable movements of power, of confidence, checked and thwarted. It crossed his mind that of course his son saw him as powerful and confident, and this it was that accounted for the aggression, the hostility, the callousness. Into Jack's mind now came sets of words framed rhetorically; since this was not how he was feeling, he was surprised. "Why does it have to be like this, that more hate is used on people of the same side, thus preventing us ever from uniting in a common front, preventing us from bringing down the enemy?' These were words from the imaginary conversation with Joseph that he so often indulged in: only now it did strike him that he never had fantasies of a personal relationship — of their going for a holiday together for instance, or just spending an evening, or walking for and hour or so. 'Can't you see,' the inner rhetoric-maker was continuing, 'that the vigour of your criticism, your iconoclasm, your need to condemn the past without learning from it, will take you relentlessly to stand exactly where your despised elders stand now?'
It suddenly occurred to Jack, and for the first time, that he had repudiated his past. This so frightened him, leaving him, as it must, by himself out in the air somewhere, without comrades and allies — without a family — that he almost forgot Joseph's presence. He was thinking: For weeks now, ever since the old man's death — before even? — I've been thinking as if I have abandoned socialism.
Joseph was saying: 'I don't have to tell you what the conditions are like in that prison, how they are being treated.'
Jack saw that the 'I don't have to tell you' was in fact an admission that in spite of everything he said, Joseph saw him as an ally. 'You've come to me for money?' he asked, as if there could be another reason.
'Yeah. Yeah. That's about it, I suppose.'
'Why do you have to be American?' Jack asked in sudden real irritation. 'You're not American. Why do you all have to?'
Joseph said, with a conscious smile: It's a mannerism, that's all.'
Then he looked stern again, in command.
Jack said: 'I'm one of the old rich lefties you were publicly despising not long ago. You didn't want to have anything to do with us, you said.'
Joseph frowned and made irritable movements which said that he felt that the sort of polemic which abused people not standing exactly where he stood was rather like breathing, a tradition, and he genuinely felt his father was being unreasonable in taking such remarks personally. Then he said, as if nothing better could be expected: 'Then I take it it is no?'
'No,' said Jack. 'I am sorry'
Joseph got up; but he looked hesitant, and even now could sit down — if Jack said the right things. If he could push aside the rhetorical sentences that kept coming to his tongue: how should they not? — he had spent many hours of fantasy ensuring that they would!
Jack suddenly heard himself saving, in a low, shaking, emotional voice: 'I am so sick of it all. It all just goes on and on. Over and over again.'
'Well,' said Joseph, 'they say it is what always happens, so I suppose that ought to make us feel better.' His smile was his own, not forced or arranged.
Jack saw that Joseph had taken what he had said as an appeal for understanding between them personally: he had believed that his father was saying he was sick of their bad relations.
Had that been what he was saving? He had imagined he was talking about the political cycle. Jack now understood that if in fact he made enough effort, Joseph would respond and then... He heard himself saying:
'Like bloody automatons. Over and over again. Can't you see that it is going to take something like twenty years for you lot to become old rich lefties?'
'Or would if we aren't all dead first,' said Joseph, ending the thing as Jack would, and with a calm, almost jolly smile. He left, saying: 'The Robinson brothers are likely to get fifteen years if we don't do something.'
Jack, as if a button had been pushed, was filled with guilt about the Robinson brothers and almost got up to write a cheque there and then. But he did not: it had been an entirely automatic reaction.
He spent a few days apparently in the state he had been in for weeks; but he knew himself to have reached the end of some long inner process that had proved too much for him. This interview with his son had been its end, as, very likely, the scene in the attic had been its beginning? Who knew? Who could know! Not Jack. He was worn out, as at the end of a long vigil. He found himself one morning standing in the middle of his living-room saying over and over again: 'I can't stand any more of this. I can't. I won't
He found the pills and took them with the same miserable determination that he would have had to use to kill something that had to be killed. Almost at once he began to sleep and the tension eased. He no longer felt as if he was carrying around, embodied in himself, a question as urgent as a wound that needed dressing, but that he had no idea what the language was in which he might find an answer. He ceased to experience the cloying sweetness that caused a mental nausea, a hundred times worse than the physical. In a few days he had already stopped seeing his wife and daughters as great dolls who supplied warmth, charm, sympathy, when the buttons of duty or habit were pressed. Above all, he did not have to be on guard against his own abhorrence: his fingers did not explore masks on his face, nor was he always conscious of the statements made by his body and limbs.
He was thinking that he was probably already known throughout the Left as a renegade; yet, examining the furniture in his mind, he found it not much changed.
It occurred to him, and he went on to consider it in a brisk judicious way, that it was an extraordinary thing that whereas he could have sat for an examination at a moment’s notice on the history, the ideas and the contemporary situation of socialism, communism and associated movements, with confidence that he would know the answers even to questions on the details of some unimportant sect in some remote country, he was so ignorant of religious history and thought that he could not have answered any questions at all. His condition, in relation to religious questions, was like that of a person hearing of socialism for the first time and saying: 'Oh yes, I've often thought it wasn't fair that some people should have more than others. You agree, do you?'
He decided to go to the British Museum Reading Room. He had written many of his books there. His wife was delighted, knowing that this meant he was over the crisis.
He sent in his card for books on the history of the religions, on comparative religion, and on the relation of religion to anthropology.
For the first few days it seemed that he was still under the spell of his recent experience: he could not keep his attention from wandering from the page, and the men and women all around him bending over books seemed to him insane: this habit of solving all questions by imbibing information through the eyes off the printed page was a form of self-hypnotism. He was seeing them and himself as a species that could not function unless he took in information in this way.