The committee diminished by the absence of Duncan and Jean, and (as Gerard now reflected) fundamentally altered by the disappearance of Gerard’s father, would on this occasion consist of Gerard, Jenkin, Rose and Gulliver Ashe. Matthew’s presence had prevented outbursts of emotion, for instance from Rose and Gulliver, who indulged their indignation more informally elsewhere, and had contributed to the policy of calm indecisive laisser-faire favoured by Gerard. Matthew represented tradition, live-and-let-live, altogether a more casual scrutiny of what was supposed to be going on. He refused to see any point in making a fuss or anything much to make it about. Although Gerard was in charge, and he was in charge, his father, politely deferred to by all, had largely determined the atmosphere. Now, he thought, it’ll be gloves off. Both Rose and Gull, for different reasons, wanted blood, they wanted a skirmish, a clarification, a show-down. How obsessed they had all become about that book! When it eventually appeared it would probably be a small matter, a damp squib. A possible tactic, and this had occurred to Gerard more than once, would be to send Jenkin as the ambassador. Jenkin, occasionally, actually met Crimond at meetings and discussions. Jenkin always (and as Gerard knew, conscientiously) reported these ‘sightings’ to him, and Gerard, with equal delicacy, did not ask for details. He knew that the connection was slight, though this did not prevent him from being annoyed by it; and he did not want to send Jenkin now, formally, to see Crimond in case such a meeting might make or strengthen a bond between them. He wanted to keep this matter in his own hands. Rose would wish this too; yes, Rose positively wanted him to confront Crimond. Was he then to see himself as riding into battle carrying Rose’s favour upon his lance? The image reminded him of Tamar. That at least was something he had done well. Duncan had come to the fireworks party and would, he believed, come to the Reading Party. That was Tamar’s doing, good for Duncan and good for Tamar too. Duncan, who felt too ashamed and defeated to talk frankly to Gerard, might find relief in talking, not necessarily about his ‘problem’ but about anything, to Tamar whom he would not regard as a judge; and Tamar, who was certainly unhappy, would be cheered by a sense of being trusted. The prospect of his own sortie pleased Gerard not at all. What he feared most was a flaming row, after which, if he had behaved intemperately or irrationally, he would feel ashamed and discredited and connected with Crimond by bonds of remorse and indecision and sheer intense annoyance. If there was a row Gerard would feel, such was his nature, compelled to attempt to make peace: negotiations which would probably land him in yet messier and more remorseful situations. Gerard hated muddles and any consciousness that he had behaved badly. Also, he did not want to have to think so much about Crimond. He had a quite different problem of his own which he wanted to think quietly about, involving a new course of action upon which he would soon have to decide.
‘I’m sorry to keep repeating myself,’ said Gulliver, ‘but I don’t see why we should keep paying out money every year to support a book that we passionately disagree with, which we aren’t allowed to look at, which he may have abandoned ages ago, which perhaps never existed at all!’
‘Oh come,’ said Jenkin, ‘of course it exists, Crimond isn’t a cheat, Gerard saw some of it once –’
‘A hundred years ago!’ said Rose.
‘The point is,’ said Gerard, ‘that we can’t ditch Crimond. We said we’d support him and there it is, we made a promise.’
‘The point is,’ said Rose, ‘that it’s not the book we said we’d support. I think it never was. Crimond misled us. Crimond is not the man we thought he was. He believes in violence and he believes in lies. He says in one of those pamphlets that truth may have to appear as a lie – and that we are sick with morality, that morality is a disease to be got over!’
‘Rose, he meant bourgeois morality!’ said Gerard.
‘He said morality. And he admires T. E. Lawrence.’
‘So do I,’ said Gerard.
‘He supports terrorists.’
‘It’s hard to define terrorists,’ said Jenkin, ‘we agreed earlier that violence is sometimes justified –’
‘We’ve been into all that!’ said Gulliver.
‘Don’t defend him,’ said Rose, ‘I’m not going to help to finance a book that excuses terrorism. We’d all be blamed later for that, people would think he represented our views.’
‘I don’t think Crimond meant –’ said Jenkin.
‘How do we know what he meant?’ said Gulliver, ‘he wraps it up so. Rose is right, he can’t distinguish truth and falsehood.’
‘Those are old things,’ said Gerard, pointing to some pamphlets which Gulliver had discovered and brought with him as ‘evidence’.
‘It was a phase he went through –’ said Jenkin.
‘How do we know that?’ said Gulliver to Jenkin. ‘What he thinks now may be even crazier. And why don’t we know what he thinks now? Because he only lets his stuff out to the initiated! You seem to believe he’s some sort of dedicated hermit! Of course he belongs to a highly organised underground movement!’
‘It’s true that he writes things which are circulated privately,’ said Jenkin. ‘He doesn’t publish in the ordinary way any more. Someone showed me a recent thing, quite short –’
‘And was it as pernicious as these ones?’ asked Rose.
‘I don’t know whether pernicious is the word, it certainly wasn’t less extreme – but it expressed some deep ideas. Rose, he’s a thinker, the activists attack him for not caring about the working class!’
‘All right, it’s his ideas we don’t like!’ said Gulliver. ‘Ideas do things too, as you know perfectly well! Of course he’s not a Stalinist, he belongs to some sort of mad Trotskyist-anarchist group, smash the nearest thing is their creed, any sort of chaos is a form of revolution!’
They had been arguing now for nearly an hour. Everything about the argument upset Gerard. Rose and Gulliver were both surprisingly venomous, they seemed to be consumed by personal hatred for Crimond. Gulliver detested Crimond because (and Gull had told Gerard this) Crimond had once snubbed him savagely at a public meeting. But he also hated what he took to be Crimond’s theories, and was speaking from the heart in defence of ardently held political convictions. Gulliver, riffling his dark oily hair back with his hand and opening his golden brown eyes defiantly wide and expanding the nostrils of his aquiline nose, looked spirited, distinctly younger and more interesting. At one point Gerard smiled at him and received a signal of gratitude from the brown eyes. Gerard then felt guilty and thought, I must help that boy, does he blame me, I hope not. Rose’s emotion (she was quite flushed with indignation) Gerard attributed not only to strong political principles, especially concerning secret societies and terrorism, but also to her belief, of which he had often been made aware but on which he had never commented, that Crimond was Gerard’s enemy and might some day do him harm. Also involved were Rose’s deep feelings about Jean, Rose felt anger with, and fear for, her life-long friend and blamed Crimond for both of these distressing sensations. Gerard had not discussed this matter with her either. Is Crimond my enemy? Gerard wondered. It was an unpleasant idea. Gerard had also been upset, during the argument, by Jenkin’s quiet determination to excuse Crimond. It was some time since Gerard had had a really detailed discussion of politics with Jenkin. He had always assumed that their views on this matter more or less coincided. Supposing he were now to discover, and feel obliged to pursue, some really serious and disturbing difference of opinion? This possibility of a damaging breach was instantly transformed in his mind into the image of Jenkin somehow defecting to Crimond. But this was, must be, unthinkable. Gerard was more immediately annoyed by the aggressive atmosphere in which he was being driven to go and ‘have it out’ with the rascal.
They were sitting at the round rosewood table in Rose’s flat which overlooked a little square garden enclosed by railings. Between bare branches of trees, before Rose had pulled the curtains, the lighted windows of houses opposite made a pattern of golden rectangles. Sn
ow was still slowly falling. It was now after five o’clock and the lamps were on in Rose’s sitting room. It was warm in the flat and their overcoats and umbrellas, now dry and unfrozen, were piled upon the Jacobean chest in the hall. Rose’s flat was comfortable, a bit shabby, full of a miscellany of things which had come from her maternal grandfather’s house in Ireland. The ‘fine’ stuff, the Waterford glass, the Georgian silver, the pictures by Lavery and Orpen, Rose had given to her cousins in Yorkshire after Sinclair’s death, at a time when she felt dead herself and wanted to throw away all the things that might have lived in her brother’s house and belonged to his children, to strip herself of all those insidious small reminders, the terrible details, leaving but one great comprehensive pain. That had been before she had found herself, so miraculously, in bed with Gerard. We were suffering from shock, she thought, we were broken and not put together, we were half made of wood like puppets not quite changed into real people. It was something not quite real and for him, she felt, forgettable like a dream. Did he remember, she even wondered? If only it, that, could have happened earlier – but it couldn’t – or later – but it didn’t. It was several years before Rose really wanted to acquire anything, even clothes, for herself. Her remaining pieces of furniture, mainly from Ireland where she now had no close relations, were handsome enough but un-looked-after, imperfect, damaged, scuffed, stained, even broken. The mahogany sideboard was scratched, the Davenport lacked a foot, the rosewood table had wine-glass, rings, the Jacobean chest in the hall upon which the thawing coats were enjoying the warmth of the central heating had lost a side panel which had been replaced by plywood. Rose had once meant to have the bathroom carpeted and the curtains cleaned. She had meant to have the furniture ‘seen to’, but she kept putting it off because her life always seemed so provisional, a waiting life, not settled like other people’s. Now it was probably too late to bother. Neville and Gillian, the children of her cousins, the heirs, sometimes chided her for not having the table properly French polished and the chest restored. The young people cared about these things. They would be theirs one day.
‘I wonder if he’s actually mad,’ said Rose.
‘Of course not,’ said Jenkin, ‘if we get obsessed with his Schrecklichkeit and simply call him crazy we won’t think about what he says –’
‘He’s on the side of the evil in the world,’ said Rose. ‘He’s a bully, and I hate bullies. He’s dangerous, he’ll kill someone.’
‘Rose, calm down. We were all Marxists once –’
‘So what, Gerard – and I wasn’t! He’s a conspirator. I don’t believe he’s a solitary thinker, or that he belongs to some dotty little group – I think he’s a dedicated underground communist.’
‘I’m not just blindly defending him,’ said Jenkin, ‘I don’t know exactly what he thinks, if I did I’d probably hate it, but we must find out. He’s gone on thinking about it all and we haven’t, we must give him that –’
‘That’s a damn silly argument –!’
‘Shut up, Gull, let me talk. Crimond has worked, he’s tried to put something together. He believes, or he believed, that he could make some sort of synthesis –’
‘The book that the age requires!’
‘And we didn’t just laugh at him in those days.’
‘There can be no such book,’ said Gulliver.
‘All right, if we think that now, we should ask ourselves why! We’ve lost a lot of confidence since then. Our heroes, dissidents who fight tyrannies and die in prisons, are enabled by history to be soldiers for truth. We are not – I mean quite apart from not being brave enough, we aren’t martyred for our opinions in this country. The least we can do is try to think about our society and what’s going to happen to it.’
Gerard murmured, ‘Yes, but –’
‘Crimond says it’s the end of our society,’ said Rose. ‘He said he wanted to destroy “that world”, meaning our world.’
‘I don’t see what stops us from being heroes too,’ said Gull, ‘except bloody cowardice of course.’
‘I think Crimond is a lone wolf,’ Jenkin went on, ‘I think he’s really a romantic, an idealist.’
‘Utopian Marxism leads straight to the most revolting kinds of repression!’ said Gull. ‘The most important fact of our age is the wickedness of Hitler and Stalin. We mustn’t tolerate any stuff which suggests that communism is really fine if only it can be done properly!’
‘Don’t be cross with me,’ said Jenkin. ‘I was going on to say that at least Crimond’s sort of Marxism is utilitarian, he cares about suffering and poverty and injustice. It’s like the Catholic church in South America. Suddenly people begin to feel that nothing matters except human misery.’
‘He wants to destroy our democracy and have one-party government,’ said Rose, ‘that’s scarcely the way to fight injustice!’
‘Rose is right,’ said Gulliver. ‘Democracy means you accept disagreement and imperfection and bloody-minded individualism. Crimond hates the idea of the individual, he hates the idea of being incarnate, he’s a puritan, he’s not a bit romantic, he’s something new and awful. He praises horror films because they show that behind cosy bourgeois society there’s something violent and disgusting and terrible which is more real!’
‘I think it’s time to adjourn this meeting,’ said Gerard. ‘We’ve talked enough, everyone’s said what he thinks several times over –’ Jenkin was looking upset, Rose as if she might burst into tears.
‘We ought to have it out with him,’ said Gulliver, ‘at least someone should. Bags I not.’
‘And not me,’ said Jenkin.
‘Gerard must go, of course,’ said Rose.
‘All right, I’ll see him,’ said Gerard, ‘at least we’ve decided something.’
‘Who’ll have a glass of sherry?’ said Rose.
They all got up. Jenkin said he must go at once. He looked at Gerard and a telepathic message passed between them to the effect their neither was cross with the other. Gulliver, who was less telepathic and was feeling excited and pleased with himself, hung around and accepted a second glass of sherry.
‘Perhaps we could pay Crimond to go and live in Australia!’
‘Poor old Australians!’ said Rose.
‘I wish it was as easy as that,’ said Gerard.
‘By the way,’ said Gull, ‘Lily Boyne said she’d like to join our little cosa nostra. She’s not a fool, you know, and she has the right sort of views. I meant to say earlier but I forgot.’
‘I should have thought the right sort of views would make her keep away!’ said Rose.
‘Well, you know what I mean. Anyway, since she said it I pass it on.’
‘Hang it,’ said Gerard, ‘I forgot to mention about Pat and Gideon wanting to muck in.’
‘It’s not a moment for new recruits,’ said Rose, ‘not till we know where we are.’ She looked at her watch and Gulliver soon said he must go. ‘Gulliver, Gerard says you’ll be able to come to the Reading Party, I’m so glad, and I’ve asked Lily too. Let us know your train and we’ll pick you up at the station. Oh, and bring your skates.’
‘Skates?’
‘Yes, with luck the water meadow will be frozen.’
After Gulliver had gone they sat down on either side of the electric fire which occupied the fireplace.
‘How odd about Lily wanting to join,’ said Gerard.
‘She wants to be part of the family,’ said Rose.
‘Are we a family? Well, we must look after her too.’
‘Gull got quite excited. He’s a nice boy.’
‘Yes, and good-looking.’
‘Gerard. When you see Crimond. Be careful.’
‘Of course I will. However cool I am, I bet he’ll be cooler! Why, Rose, you’re crying!’
Gerard got up, drew his chair near to hers, and put an arm round her shoulder. Her face was flushed and her wet cheek when he touched it was hot. As he drew her head down to this shoulder and felt her cool hair against his chin he rememb
ered the grey parrot which would now be asleep in its cage.
‘Did you sleep well?’
‘Yes, did you?’
‘Yes, very well.’
Duncan said, ‘Why do people always ask other people whether they slept well, meaning simply did they sleep? One may sleep continuously and have a terrible night. There is good and bad sleep.’
‘You mean dreams?’ said Rose, who was standing at the door.
‘I mean sleep.’
No one felt inclined to pursue the matter or to enquire which kind Duncan had had.
The first two speakers were Gull and Lily, and the time was breakfast time on Saturday, the guests’ first breakfast at the Boyars Reading Party, and for Lily and Gull, who were new to the house, their first Boyars breakfast ever, and their first real view of the scene, inside and out, since, like the others, they had arrived for dinner, in the dark, on the previous evening.
Rose had of course arrived earlier in the day, not really to supervise anything, since her elderly servant Annushka, the ‘young girl’ in the photograph which Duncan had showed to Tamar, had made all the usual immaculate preparations. This servant, the daughter of a gardener, originally ‘Annie’, had been given the affectionate diminutive by Sinclair when, as a child, he had emulated his great-great-grandfather by going through a Russian phase. It was this same ancestor who had invented the name ‘Boyars’, for no very clear reason. Why not ‘Czars’, Sinclair had complained. Rose thought the name derived from Tolstoy via ù sont les Boyars?. Rose came early just to breathe the air, to look about, to put on her Boyars persona, and to wonder, as she always did, why she did not come here oftener.
Gull and Lily had arrived together by train, Tamar by another train, all met at the station by Rose. Duncan had arrived by himself by car, Gerard had driven Jenkin down as usual. Patricia and Gideon who seemed to think they had an open invitation had, to general relief, announced that it was their time for being in Venice. In fact for reasons nobody bothered to penetrate they hardly ever visited Rose’s house.