That afternoon she wrung out the duster, unusually restless and nervous even for her.
‘I’m worried about you,’ she said.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘You mustn’t burn the candle at both ends.’
I asked what she meant, but I had a very good idea. Marion, like most of the girls in the group, came from a respectable lower-middle-class home, and their emancipation had still not gone far. So Marion and the others were shocked, some of them pleasantly shocked, at the gossip they heard of our drinking parties and visits to Nottingham. The gossip became far more lurid than the facts – Jack saw to that, who was himself a most temperate man – and George and the rest of us acquired an aura of sustained dissipation.
I was not displeased. It was flattering to hear oneself being snatched from the burning. I tried to pare off the more extravagant edges of the stories, but Marion wanted to believe them, and I should have had to be much more wholehearted to persuade her.
‘You mustn’t wear yourself out,’ said Marion obstinately.
‘I’m pretty good at looking after myself,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe it,’ said Marion. ‘Anyway, you mustn’t waste yourself. Think of all you’ve got to do.’
She was watching me with her clear, bright eyes. She must have seen a change in my expression. She knew that I was softened and receptive now. She gave up twisting the duster and put it in its box. In doing so she knocked down a piece of chalk, and cried, ‘Oh, why do I always upset everything?’ Her eyes were lit up with gaiety, and she leaned against the desk. Her voice was still decisive, but it was easy to confide.
‘Tell me what you want to do. Tell me what you want.’
My first reply was: ‘Of course, I want to see a better world.’
Marion nodded her head, as though she would have given the same answer. We were sufficiently under George Passant’s influence to make such an answer quite unselfconsciously. We were children of our class and time, and took that hope as unchallengeable. That afternoon in Marion’s schoolroom in 1923, both she and I expected it to be fulfilled.
‘What do you want for yourself?’ asked Marion.
‘I want success.’
She seemed startled by the force with which I had spoken. She said: ‘What do you call success?’
‘I don’t mean to spend my life unknown.’
‘Do you want to make money, Lewis?’
‘I want everything that people call success. Plus a few requirements of my own.’
‘You mustn’t expect too much,’ said Marion.
‘I expect everything there is,’ I said. I went on: ‘And if I fail, I shan’t make any excuses. I shall say that it is my own fault.’
‘Lewis!’ she cried. There was a strange expression on her face. After a silence, she asked: ‘Is there anything else you want?’
This time I hesitated. Then I said: ‘I think I want love.’
Marion said, her voice emphatic and decisive, but her face still soft with pain ‘Oh, I haven’t had time for that. There’s too much else to do. I wonder if you’ll have time.’
I was too rapt to attend to her. Just then, I was living in my imagination.
Marion contradicted herself; and said ‘Oh, I suppose you’re right. I suppose we all want – love. But, Lewis, I wonder if we mean the same thing by love?’
I was living in my imagination, and I could not tell her the essence of my own hope, let alone come near perceiving hers. I had confessed myself to her with ardour. I began to inquire about what she would teach that afternoon.
That winter I found the days in the office harder than ever to bear. At night I drank with George, stood at coffee stalls, sat in his room or my attic, tirelessly walked the streets until the small hours, while we stimulated each other’s answers to the infinite questions of young men – man’s destiny, the existence of God, the organization of the world, the nature of love. It was hard to wake up, with the echoes of the infinite questions still running through my head, to get to the office by nine and to stare with heavy eyes at the names of fee-paying children at one of the secondary schools.
Mr Vesey did not make it easier. He considered that I was living above my station, and he disapproved intensely. He had heard that I was seen in the London Road one night, excessively cheerful with drink. He had heard also of my political speeches. Mr Vesey was outraged that I should presume to do things he dared not do. He said ominously that the life of his clerks out of hours was part of his business, whatever we might think. He addressed the office in characteristically dark and cryptic hints: how some people deliberately drew attention to themselves, either by sucking up to authority or by painting the town red, with only one intention, which was to discredit their superior and obstruct his promotion.
He was watching for a chance to report me. But here his mania for promotion made him cautious. He knew that I was in favour higher up. He realized he must have a cast-iron case, unless he were to lose his reputation for ‘knowing his men’. He would rather sacrifice his moral indignation, let me go unpunished for a time, than make a false move. ‘One doesn’t want to drop a brick,’ said Mr Vesey cryptically to the office, ‘just when
they
must be realizing that certain things are overdue.’
Of course, it made him dislike me more. The story of my relation with Mr Vesey became a good one with which to entertain the group but it was not so funny during the monotonous, drab, humiliating days. Dislike at close quarters can be very wearing, and it does not console one much if the dislike shows on a comic face. I used to look up from my desk and see the enormous spectacled eyes of Mr Vesey fixed upon me. I could not make myself impervious to the thought that I had become an obsession within him, part of his web of persecution. When I described him to George and the rest, he was a trim spectacled figure, crazed with promotion-fever, keeping in the public eye; but in the office, where I spent so many desert hours, he became a man, a feeling and breathing man, who loathed me, every action I performed and every word I spoke.
Sitting in the office on winter afternoons, looking out into the murk of Bowling Green Street, I was angry that I had delayed taking George’s help, even by a week. I was paying for my pride. Very soon I was ready to humble myself, apologize, and ask his advice. It was early in twenty-four, not more than a couple of months after his first approach. But I was spared having to eat my words: George had been considering his ‘mistake’, and he was not prepared to let me waste more time. He got in first. Stiffly he said, one night, with the formality that came over him when he was feeling diffident about expressing concern or affection: ‘I propose that we adjourn to my place. I want to make some points about your career. I don’t feel justified in respecting your privacy any longer. I have certain suggestions to make.’
This time I fell over myself to accept.
It was not until we had reached his lodgings, and settled ourselves by the fire, that George began with his ‘suggestions’. It surprised people that he, one of the most turbulent of men, should sometimes behave so punctiliously and formally, as though he were undertaking a piece of delicate official diplomacy. That night he propitiated his landlady into making us a pot of tea, propitiated her because she was truculent and did nothing for him. George lived among the furniture of an artisan’s front room; all he contributed were pipes, a jar of tobacco, a few books, documents from the office, and sheaf upon sheaf of foolscap.
We drank our tea. At last George thought it was a fitting time to begin.
‘Well,’ he said, firmly and yet uncomfortably, ‘I propose to start on the basis of your legacy. I assume that I should have been told if the position had altered to any material extent.’
Aunt Za’s will had taken a long time to prove, and I had often thought how inevitably my mother would have seen the sinister hand of Uncle Will. But in fact I had actually received the three hundred pounds a few weeks before.
‘Of course you would have been told,’ I said. ‘It’s still there.’
‘The sum is three hundred pounds?’ asked George unnecessarily, for his memory was perfect.
‘Less what I owe you,’ I said.
‘I don’t intend to consider that,’ said George, for the first time hearty and comfortable. With money, he was lavish, easy, warm-hearted, and prodigal. At the end of each month, when he received his pay, he had taken to asking if he could lend me a pound or two. ‘I don’t intend to consider that for a minute. Three hundred pounds is your basis. You’ve got to use it to establish yourself in a profession. That’s the only serious question, and everything else is entirely irrelevant.’
‘I’m not going to disagree.’ I smiled. I was on tenterhooks, excited, vigilant.
‘Excellent,’ said George. ‘Well, I expect other people have made suggestions, but unless you stop me I propose to present you with mine.’
‘If other people had made suggestions,’ I said, ‘I should probably have got a move on by now. You don’t realize how you’ve altered the look of things,’ I went on, with spontaneous feeling – and with a hint of something he wanted to hear mixed in the feeling, for that too came just as naturally.
‘I don’t know about that,’ said George, and hurried on with his speech. ‘I can’t see that there is any alternative to my case. (
a
) You’ve got to establish yourself in a profession. (
b
) You insist that you haven’t any reasonable contacts anywhere, and (
c
) I haven’t any influence,
of
course
. With one exception that I regard as important, and that is obviously Martineau. Which brings up the possibility of my own profession and my own firm. (
d
) It goes without saying that you’d become an incomparably better solicitor than most of the bell-wethers and sunkets who disfigure what I still consider a decent profession for a reasonable man. I can tell you here and now, from what I’ve seen of your work, that you would pass the examinations on your head, if you only follow my old maxim and work when there is nothing else to do. If you manage three hours’ work a night before you come out for a drink, there will be nothing to stop you. (
e
) Your basic sum of three hundred pounds is enough to pay the cost of your articles, even if Martineau can’t manage to get you in free. I can’t be expected to answer for other professions, but I haven’t been able to think of another where you won’t have financial difficulties. (
f
) Martineau can be persuaded to let you serve your articles in our firm, which would be very convenient for all concerned.’ George leant back in his chair with an expression seraphic and complacent. ‘I’m afraid I can’t see any alternative,’ he said contentedly. ‘Everything points to your becoming articled to the old firm of Eden and Martineau. I propose you give the egregious Vesey a parting kick, and get your articles arranged in time for the spring. That’s my case.’ He stared challengingly at me. ‘I should like to hear if you can find any objections.’
‘How much would it need? What would it cost?’
George answered with mechanical accuracy. No one was ever more conversant with regulations.
‘If there’s any snag,’ said George, ‘I should expect you to look on me as your banker. I don’t see how you can possibly need more than a hundred pounds on top of your basic sum. Somehow or other, that will have to be found. I insist that you don’t let a trivial sum affect your decision.’
I tried to speak, but George stopped me with a crashing, final shout: ‘I regard it as settled,’ he cried.
But I did not. I was touched and affected and my heart was thumping, just as I was affected all my life by any kindness. For another to take a step on one’s behalf – it was one of the most difficult things to become hardened to. And I was attracted by George’s proposal. It was a way of escape, a goodish way compared with my meaningless and servile days in the education office. With George’s praise to bolster me up, I did not doubt that I should make a competent solicitor. As my mother would have said, it would be ‘better than nothing’ – and, sitting in George’s room, excited, touched by his comradeship, avid with the drawing near of my first leap, I thought for a moment how gratified my mother would have been, if she had seen me accept his suggestion, become a solicitor, set up in a country town, make some money and re-establish the glory of her Wigmore uncle when she was a girl.
I was softened and mellow with emotion. In the haze of George’s tobacco my head was swimming. Through the haze, George’s face, the mantelpiece, the framed diploma hanging over the whatnot, all shone out, ecstatically bright. For the first time, as though my sight had sharpened, I read some words in the diploma. Suddenly I was seized by laughter. George looked astonished, then followed my finger, started across the room at the diploma, and himself roared until the tears came. For it was a certificate, belonging presumably to his landlady’s husband, which testified to a record of ten years’ total abstinence – it was issued by one of Aunt Milly’s organizations.
Yet, all the time, I was wondering. At bottom I was warier than George, shrewder, far more ambitious and more of a gambler. If I was going to take this jump, why not jump further? – that question was half-formed inside me. George was not a worldly man, I realized already. Outside the place where chance had brought him, he did not instinctively, know his way about. I never forgot the first night we talked, when George stood in the dark street and cursed up at the club windows; for him, it was always others who sat in the comfortable places, in the warm and lighted rooms.
With delight I accepted his invitation to take me to the next of Martineau’s ‘Friday nights’ – ‘To carry out our plan, which I regard as settled, in principle,’ said George complacently. Yet there might be other ways for me. Even that evening, with the excitement still hot upon me, I found time to ask some questions about a barrister’s career. Not that I was contemplating it for a moment myself, I said. Becoming a solicitor might be practicable: this was not. But, just as a matter of interest, how well should I cope with the Bar examinations? George thought the question trivial and irrelevant, but said again that, with three or four years’ work, I should sail through them.