“After old Frank Crewe died, you carried that show,” said Garson. “You and nobody else. And we know it, even if the others don’t——”
“It sticks out a mile,” said Treves; and then, perhaps feeling that he hadn’t done himself justice, added: “A hundred miles.”
“I’m surprised George Hathon can’t see what a hole you’d leave if you went. Silly fat old twerp! If he hadn’t ratted this afternoon, Selby would never have swung it like that. What’s the matter with Hathon? You’re supposed to be friends, aren’t you, Charles? Is he gaga?”
“Not a bit,” said Ravenstreet carefully. It was rather an effort to go on talking; his weariness was astonishing. “George is still using that old head of his. He knows that if there are to be no more big new developments on the production side, no chances to be taken there, if it’s only a matter of ticking over nicely with the possibility somewhere of cutting costs, then Selby’s necessary and I’m not. Of course he doesn’t want me to go, and buying me out will be a great nuisance. But he’d rather I went than Selby did.”
“Which means,” said Garson with a look at Treves, “that very soon, even if we sweat our guts out on the job, he’d rather we went than Selby did. If you go, we’ll be on our way out shortly.”
Ravenstreet didn’t like this. He made a gesture with his cigar, to stop Treves chiming in, and then, after the tiny interval of silence necessary to secure their attention, he was able to reply mildly. “That doesn’t follow, you know. The fact that you always supported me won’t worry Selby, now that he’s got what he wants. And you’re too useful to him, as he knows very well.” He looked at Garson. “You’ll be Production Manager.” He turned to Treves. “You’ll be Sales Manager.” He finished his brandy and waved away an offer of more. “I’m convinced that is what’ll happen. But if you’d like me to say something pretty strong to George Hathon, I’ll do it. In some ways,” he continued rather slowly, “you’ll be better off if I’m clean out of the whole thing. While I’m still around, Selby will see you as part of the Ravenstreet faction, so to speak. If I’ve gone, then he can take you on your own merits, and he’s not a fool, he knows he needs you both on the production and sales sides. So stop worrying, boys, and stop giving me any reproachful looks.”
“I didn’t know we were, Charles,” said Garson apologetically. “But it never occurred to me you might clear out altogether. Though I can see you may have had enough of the old show—and of course you’ll be in the money if you sell your stock. But I’ll tell you now, I never thought you’d let Selby beat you like that. Neither did young Philip here. Even when we were warning you, we thought you’d pull something out of the bag at the last minute.”
“‘Watch the old maestro’, we told each other,” said Treves, with the air of a man who had lived and suffered greatly.
“Now why didn’t you, Charles?” Garson persisted. “What happened?”
“Selby’s fairly smart,” said Treves, “but he’s no wizard of industry. How did he do it?”
They were looking at Ravenstreet, who spent a moment or two removing the ash from his cigar as if he were performing an important experiment. “You were my young men,” he began slowly, “and I’m sorry if you feel disappointed. The answer is, I think, that Selby was playing a game that I can’t play, not having that sort of mind, and don’t want to learn to play. If the Company had been facing a crisis; if something new had to be designed, tried out, put into production, rushed to the Government or hurried on to the market, ten Selbys couldn’t have taken it away from me. But things aren’t like that any longer. So I suppose I didn’t really care: Selby could have what he’d schemed for. He’s the type that succeeds now; not the maker; the manipulator. It’s his world, and he’s welcome to it. I was bored—probably a bit tired too, after all the crises I had seen the Company through. Perhaps it’s the old story—incentive——” He checked himself. He was talking too much, and perhaps with a nasty mixed flavour of bitterness and self-pity creeping into it; and anyhow it was unfair to these two, who couldn’t sell out as he could, to suggest that what they were doing was not worth doing. They had plenty of incentives to keep going with New Central Electric. He had better keep his own lack of them to himself. “No,” he told them, “I’ve said as much as I want to say.”
They had plenty to say, often both at the same time. He pretended to be in the talk but only listened properly when appealed to; he was a long way from this boozy noise and heat and fuss, somewhere in a little dark room turning over his thoughts like coins in his pocket. These famous incentives, for instance. The obvious—Money? He’d have more to enjoy by selling out than if he worked dawn to dark, seven days a week; thanks to a system of taxation sanctioned by both Labour and Tory Governments. (And lucky to be an industrialist, with some shares to sell, and not a surgeon, an architect, a schoolmaster, an artist!) The Company? It was changing too fast to demand any loyalty. Most of the men he’d enjoyed working with, on any level, had gone. Queen and Country—service of? They had not been heard from; no calls had gone out for Sir Charles Ravenstreet, and no reason why they should. Justifying one’s existence? He had always believed that spending money was not enough, that a man ought to pay something of himself for the goods and services he demanded. But that was something else, didn’t really come into this checking up of incentives.
Somewhere round about there, Peggy Garson came bouncing in and made them go into the drawing-room, where Mavis, who had been designed for just this effect, brightened up like a touched-off firework and was at once, in her own phrase, “madly gay”. While the husbands and wives did some of that merry wrangling which somehow is never as merry as it ought to be, Mavis gave Ravenstreet a chance to be madly gay with her, rosy-golden, opulent, gorgeous, a rich blur rather than a person, as they sat on the corner settee. This time she mixed in a Guide-to-West-End-Amusements act with her Slave-to-Caliph performance, so that it only needed an occasional word from him to keep her going. This was fortunate because now he felt rather sleepy as well as bored and weary. But Mavis, it seemed, was by no means a complete fool. She suddenly stopped her prattle.
“You’re not really interested, are you?” She used a different tone, gave him a different look. “You just couldn’t care less, could you? Now please, be truthful.”
He made an effort, beginning with a smile. “All right. I’ve had a longish day and rather too much to drink. And if I’ve been looking blank, that’s why.”
“You haven’t been looking blank—I don’t think you could, you haven’t that sort of face, too alive, not puddingy enough. If you want to know, you’ve been looking miserable.” She laughed rather wildly. “And I’ve been trying so hard. You mightn’t believe it, but I’m terribly conscientious. If I’m asked out specially to do something, like being gay for you, then I must do my best. I can’t just take and give nothing, like so many girls. Really, I mean it. And it can be an awful nuisance, let me tell you. It means a lot of men are out, as far as I’m concerned, except for lunch or a cocktail. Do you want to go? Of course you do, poor man! Well, you’re supposed to be taking me home—I live in Knightsbridge, which isn’t too far for you, I gather—so if I say I must go, then you can go.” She jumped to her feet, and at once began yelling apologies and thanks to the Garsons.
She was rather quiet in the cab, letting him do most of the talking, chiefly about the Garsons and Anne and Philip Treves. When they arrived outside the block of flats in Knightsbridge, she asked him in for a drink but didn’t seem surprised or disappointed when he refused, pleading a fairly early start for the works in the morning. But she kept him a few moments in the entrance hall, again suddenly dropping her gorgeous-creature manner. “I haven’t a card, but here’s somebody else’s with my telephone number scribbled on the back. Do call me when you feel like it, even if you only want to look in for a drink. I’ll tell you now. I thought from Anne’s description—she hasn’t a clue, that girl—you’d be a huge bore, but of course you’re not, anything but. Unlike most me
n one meets, you’re much more attractive than you think you are, which at least is a nice change. Now remember, Sir Charles, won’t you—about giving me a ring any time you feel like it. ’Bye.”
Less sleepy now than he had been during the last hour at the Treves’, he half-regretted as he drove away that he had not accepted her invitation to go up for a drink. Her obvious sexuality did not tempt him; he was too old and perhaps not old enough for that; but behind her glitter and bosh was that suggestion of a depth of life which was the chief fascination of woman, especially to a man who had known little of it for years and now found himself cold and empty, homeless in a world growing more and more alien. Dismissing the thought of Mavis, he considered this world, which had just rejected him, with a semi-blind cold fury, in part perhaps the result of the drink that was even now turning to acid in his belly. Frank Crewe, his boss and afterwards his father-in-law, had once praised Charles Ravenstreet for having some fire in his belly. Well, now Frank was dead and almost forgotten; Maureen was dead but a reproachful ghost, because their marriage ought to have worked and didn’t; the smooth accountancy boys had taken over New Central Electric to turn it from a pioneer enterprise into something that ought to be taken over by the ten-cent stores; and here he was, no longer Charlie Ravenstreet to anybody, on his way to a club bedroom with acid in his belly. . . .
CHAPTER TWO
‘Sepman Eighteen’
During the weeks that followed, when he was quietly tidying himself out of New Central Electric, Ravenstreet lived in a region he had never known before, somewhere on the edge of things. Familiar scenes, situations, characters, presented themselves to his eye and ear: the Midland works, his house in Warwickshire, the Victoria Street office, his club, other men’s clubs, board rooms and offices and restaurants and bars here and there; all as he had known them for years, yet not the same now, thinned and flattened out and bleached, no longer solidly real: film scenes, radio features, from the life of a middle-aged industrialist. He might almost have been some other man dreaming recurrently that he was an electrical engineer. On the other side of the edge, waiting for him to peer into it late at night or early in the morning or whenever he was alone and the show of work and play had stopped, was illimitable unpopulated darkness, a Greenland night; and only his continuing heartbeats kept him from disappearing into it. Moving along this edge, doing whatever the day demanded or the night offered, grimly observant (for he was not without fortitude) he noticed much that had escaped him before. He found he was attending a comedy, a show that would have been very funny indeed if there had been life outside the theatre instead of darkness and dissolution.
He was surrounded, he saw, by an immense cast of comic characters, not intentionally absurd but becoming so because without knowing it they were fixed in routines. He couldn’t be angry at Selby and George Hathon, even when he caught them trying to cheat him over the purchase of his stock, because they were so idiotically busy being Selby and George Hathon. Garson and young Philip Treves, who were duly promoted, ought to have annoyed him because, in spite of their earlier protestations, they very soon showed him that he was of diminishing account; but he felt no annoyance because he saw quite clearly that they weren’t free agents, as they imagined themselves to be and as he would have to imagine too if he was to blame them, but were merely reacting automatically, going through their parts as Garson and young Philip Treves. A wife, a son or daughter, a mistress, a close friend, might have broken this spell; but no such relationship existed for him. He had friends of course, but in this harsh dry light their friendship dwindled into mere routine good-fellowship, an exchange of jokes, food and drink, paltry confidences. They were only the fellows closest to him on a kind of sleep-walking tour. Acquaintances, roaring chaps, many of them, seemed hardly more than puppets, sharply droll yet sad too: he could almost see the strings jerking them while they boasted what they would do and wouldn’t do. A whole group of such fellows, loaded down with pompous self-importance as they so often were in clubs and bars, offered an uproarious marionette show, hour-long farces ending with the taste of wormwood.
As his work slackened off, he tried, as he had never had to try before, to amuse himself, spending more and more time in London. The final price agreed for his stock came to well over two hundred thousand pounds, free of tax, so that he felt rich for the first time in his life. (A man needs some leisure to feel rich, and now he had it.) He could afford to indulge his tastes, but discovered he had no tastes. The sporting life, which takes most money and time from men of his sort in England, didn’t attract him. Golf and some occasional rough shooting were all he wanted in that direction. He wasn’t without an eye for a picture and an ear for music; he had an acquaintance with some of the famous old stuff in both these arts; but the moderns, who offered him a chance of becoming a patron, mostly made him feel like a hungry man served with a plateful of sawdust and broken glass. During the long evenings in the country, all the longer because he was leaving the works much earlier, he unwrapped and sampled the books he had ordered lavishly in town, but, apart from a few autobiographies and records of adventure, they failed to please him. These new writers either did something rather badly that older writers had done well or they tried to do something that didn’t seem to him worth doing, were trivial, small-minded, cliquish, fancy boys and girls not writing for solid men of the world. Some of the most highly-praised seemed to whine like neurotic curates.
For the most part, however, he tried to amuse himself in the West End as most of his richer business acquaintances did, and frequently of course he was in their company. He dined and supped in fashionable restaurants, saw the shows that everybody was supposed to see, and occasionally looked in at a night club—not a good move to keep the darkness away for it could seep through into these places. It was the midget world of the illustrated weeklies, and it sparkled more in their pages than it did when he was observing it. Sometimes the cameraman caught him, so that he was able to stare at his long dark face—a woman had once told him he looked like Charles the Second after a haircut—appearing either startled or extremely bored. He was no puritan and had no prejudice against these amusements as such, but he didn’t find them amusing, except as further and even more sardonic demonstrations of routine behaviour, slavery to habit, mechanical reactions. Now and again a few lovers would light up the scene, there might be a young man genuinely celebrating, a glimpse of great talent, a hint that a man might be a free spirit; but all these were rare; mostly it was a wheezy merry-go-round, a jig of clockwork figures, without the vitality of life or the dignity of death.
After hesitating several times he called up Mavis Westfret, who invited him at once to a cocktail party, which she was giving jointly with a friend at the friend’s house in Kensington. She gave him no chance to refuse or to suggest some alternative meeting, so he went along, though he disliked cocktail parties. The house in Kensington was filled almost to bursting point with people he didn’t know and didn’t particularly want to know: gay gorgeous girls with plenty of men round them; angry girls who couldn’t find their escorts; middle-aged women prowling hungrily from room to room in search of possible celebrities; young men who were trying to look like their Edwardian grandfathers but lacked the Edwardian confidence; and chaps with long chins and bristling moustaches who still gave the impression that they had just knocked off from the Battle of Britain or El Alamein. The place was horribly overcrowded and hot; if they had been prisoners of war instead of prisoners of pleasure, there would have been protests to the Swiss Red Cross. When at last he found Mavis, she pushed him through the mob, up a short flight of stairs, into some sort of cubbyhole that had in it a telephone, two pairs of skis, rubber waders and waterproofs, and a rickety chair. She told him to hold the fort while she brought some whisky. She was prettily dressed but looked too hot, damp, shiny. “Here we are now,” she cried, returning with the whisky. “And don’t look so miz. Are you hating it? You are, aren’t you?”
“Well, I don’
t like cocktail parties. They happen too early in the evening. The time’s wrong, the drink’s wrong, the food’s wrong. It’s my belief too that members of the cocktail-party classes ought to be working at this time of day. We ought to slack off during the afternoon, as most of the human race does, and then start work again and go on until dinnertime. After that, parties should begin. No, the cocktail party is a damnable institution, and nothing’s gone right with the world since it imposed itself on us.” He smiled at her. “Thank you for rescuing me—and for this drink.”
“When are you coming to see me? Or to take me out if you’d rather? Look—somebody’s given me tickets for the Second Night of a play that’s opening next week. Come with me, then we can have supper afterwards. Right? Wonderful!” She told him the night, the time and the theatre; and they agreed not to put on evening clothes. “Would you like to run away? Of course you would, this very minute. And I ought to be bashing about or Dot’ll be screaming for me. I organise these parties for her—she’s filthy rich. Did you meet her? You’d loathe her—no brains at all and never stops talking at the top of her voice. How do I look? No fishing, plain truth.” He gave her the plain truth. “Oh well—Dot or no Dot, I must do my face. Thursday then? Marvellous!”
Several days later he lunched with Sir Edwin Karney at George Hathon’s club where they had first met. At the time it seemed merely one of a dozen such engagements, hospitality given without friendship, and it was only afterwards that he realised its importance. Karney was a good host, anxious to please but not too anxious, and talked easily and well in that unexpectedly deep and soothing voice. Nevertheless, he didn’t make Ravenstreet feel at ease. Those high square shoulders, the long face that always seemed several inches too low down, the eyes in oil—no, Ravenstreet couldn’t take to the chap. And he was wondering what was behind this lunch. There must be something, as Hathon had suggested there might be. After a few references to the New Central Electric, there was some probing, done with surgical neatness, into Ravenstreet’s state of mind, financial position, plans if any. But even by the time they had gone into the smoke room for coffee, Karney had not come out with anything. They were interrupted here by a large rosy fellow who was introduced as Major Prisk. He wore country clothes, which looked startling in that club, had a vaguely hearty alcoholic manner and shrewd little eyes, like a calculating pig.