Daniel Martin (42 page)

‘China?’

He looked at me as if he were a judge examining, over the glasses he did not actually wear, some outrageous proposition from an inept young counsel.

‘China remains to be seen, my friend. What I say is certainly true of the West. Of Europe and America.’

‘But I don’t see, if at least half Britain thinks more equality is desirable, how it can be stopped from having its way except by force, of course.’

Now I had made a faux pas, and the demon showed a flash of malicious delight, hidden under a pretended ruefulness, at the error.

‘I must disclaim the least desire to be a colonel a la grecque.’

‘I didn’t meant to suggest that.’

But I had, and he knew it. He declined more brandy. ‘This country’s last chance of waking out of its coma is very rapidly disappearing. That is all.’

‘Is this a general feeling at Westminster?’

He gave a puff at such simplemindedness.

‘There’s only one general feeling at Westminster. That independence must be stamped out at all costs. The New Holy Trinity is constituted by the three Chief Whips. That’s why this whole issue, which in a sane country would dominate election debate, is very carefully pushed into the background. The policymakers in all three parties are in complete agreement on that. Heaven forbid that we should ask the electorate to stop and think about anything central in their lives. Beyond money, of course.’

There was a silence, then he gave me a more natural smile, as if I shouldn’t take him too much at face value. ‘I can assure you my views are regarded as electoral poison by most of my colleagues.’ He glanced at Andrew. ‘Including our mutual friend, I’m afraid.’

Andrew murmured, ‘Rather an ambitious fellow, that.’

‘So I understand. Well. Good luck to him.’

‘And you really think it will end in a bloodbath?’

‘I think the notion that we shall all obediently queue up for a place in the Marxist paradise is based on a fallacy about the British. Of course we’re very good at enjoying deprivation when faced with a Hitler—an external threat. My own guess is that we shall lose our sangfroid when it is imposed from inside. It will suddenly dawn on countless people, and by no means just on middleclass liberals like yourself, that they’ve been flagrantly led up the garden path. I have no doubt they will be extremely frustrated and very angry. And at the same time they will by then be faced with a very considerable apparatus of state repression of dissidence. I rather doubt if the ethos of the cricket-field will see us through that.’

The door opened from the drawing-room, and Caro was standing there with a smile on her face. She held up a hunting-crop.

‘I am commanded to show this.’

Fenwick threw up his hands in mock dismay. ‘My dear, you make the most charming whipper-in. Especially as your father was just about to defeat me on all counts.’

I left the room with a feeling of absurdity of an almost calculated nonsense. The port, the brandy, the eighteenth-century room in the candlelight around us generations of squires must have held forth like that, worlds going to pot… with less reason, yet surely with more conviction than Fenwick. He had been so patently playing games, outlining his case with no more apparent personal involvement than if it had been some brief he had taken on in the course of his other profession and was explaining to two juniors. I found it vaguely humiliating. There was some echo of the old rotten borough days, that he should be allowed, however peripherally, to decide our communal fate; and not because of his political and black-milleniary beliefs, but because of his seeming indifference to their real import. It was very much as if they amused him far more than they alarmed him.

In some profound way, behind all his reasons and his experience, he was no more than an egotist, he had what I had always detected, and loathed in Conservative philosophy, at least on the ground, embodied in its individual adherents; the belief that the fortunate must at all costs be allowed to retain their good fortune. It remained despite the talk of meritocracy, of the pseudo-biological plea Fenwick himself had advanced, despite all the leftward shifts in his party since 1945; always this fanatical rearguard determination, like that of a dog being dragged towards a kennel, not to give a selfish inch out of the status quo. Perhaps, like all politicians, he had devilment, been not very seriously trying to pick up a vote; or did it out of and to kill a boredom. But I should have liked him better. Perhaps listened harder if I had detected the faintest tinge of real despair or bitterness in his voice. At least Andrew had turned this surviving a huge historical and social change into a matter of personal challenge… still a game perhaps, but where the stakes were very real.

In Fenwick I sensed a far worse apathy than the one he had accused me of—if I was indifferent to the outcome of the ‘war’, he no longer cared that he had lost it; and I could only assume that that was because he knew he would not personally have to pay its indemnities. He had had his rich and enjoyable private and professional life, and nothing could take that away now. The cynicism I had suspected as regards his daughter—that he was sacrificing paternal common sense to a title—merely reflected this. He was closed off, and self-content; and it seemed to me that his kind of intelligent Tory, with so handsomely more than enough intellectual equipment and experience to see that there was more to conservatism than a rabid selfishness, and yet who demonstrated it more profoundly than the most blinkered and stupid ordinary member of his party, was doubly repulsive. At heart he simply believed in what he was; and the system was secondary.

I didn’t of course analyse my dislike of him in such detail at the time. But I didn’t forget that evening, not least because, although I remained enough of a liberal to despise his pessimism, I knew there must seem, to someone like Jane, a psychological similarity between us; a shared malice of defeat… for all that I hid mine better. At least I came out of the room and the argument with a need to declare a dissociation. I knew it as soon as we were back with the women. I had collected my coffee and took it across to where Jane was sitting just far enough away to be out of earshot of the others if we spoke in low voices.

‘Have you settled the future of the world?’

‘Civilized life in this country has twenty years left at most. You’ll be delighted to hear.’

‘Encouraging news.’

‘From the horse’s mouth.’

‘I wish I’d been there.’

‘I’ll give you the full details tomorrow.’ I gave her a look. ‘Then you can tell me where I join as well. And speed the day.’

She was smiling. ‘I’m glad it wasn’t all in vain.’

‘I wouldn’t mind if he was just a plain old-fashioned reactionary. But he’s Pontius Pilate into the bargain.’

‘Anthony rather liked him. He had a thing about barristers. Professional jealousy, I suppose. The way they’re prepared to argue for anything. At a price.’

‘Is that a gentle hint that people in glass houses…?’

She gave me a quick look, half amused, half concerned.

‘No.’

‘I’m not doing a glamour job on Kitchener.’

She stared across at the others, who were looking at a painting by the coffee-table; her voice dropped a little.

‘Please don’t turn me into a prig, Dan. I feel quite enough of a social leper as it is.’

‘You shouldn’t have such powers of intuition.’

‘A belief in which is a prime symptom of male chauvinism. Or so Roz tells me.’

‘I’ve had that from Jenny McNell. I remain unconverted.’

‘Shame on you.’ But then, as if to kill this polite fencing, she glanced round to the far end of the room, where Paul and Penny were leaning over a table playing some game. ‘Paul has a favour to ask.’

‘What’s that?’

‘His term project’s on ancient field-systems. There’s some famous complex of the things in Dorset.’

‘Go that way tomorrow? Fine.’

‘If it isn’t… he has worked it all out on the map. If you could bear leaving a little earlier than we planned.’

‘Let’s. It’s prettier by that route, in any case.’

‘He’s so absurd. Apparently we passed right by some other place he wanted to look at on our way here yesterday.’

‘Shall I go and talk to him about this place?’

‘That would be kind.’

Penny and he were doing a huge jigsaw. Paul was embarrassed still, but there was an effort to sound grateful that the trip was on. He went away to find a map and a sheet of paper on which he had worked out an itinerary, with mileages carefully noted. He showed me some paperback on the subject, with an air-photograph of the site. It was ‘very important’, he told me, with an odd mixture of aggressive defiance, professorial authority and doubt whether I would be in the least interested. I saw some ox-plough ridges in the illustration, and told him one of the Thorncombe pastures still showed them; and for the first time I existed in his eyes. How wide were they, were they straight or curved… and when I told him there was an early nineteenth-century deed-map of the farm knocking about somewhere, when it was much larger, and with all the old hedge-lines marked, I had clearly begun to make a conquest; or at least found the key to the ‘little monomaniac’ Jane had spoken of. I was saved from too long a lecture by Nell and Jane herself, who came to pack the two children off to bed. There was a discussion about the changed plans. Then the two kids trooped off to say their goodbyes and disappear.

The Fenwicks left soon after eleven, and we talked about them. Andrew seemed to think he had been ‘putting it on’ for my benefit; and revealed that there was little love lost between Fenwick and their own much younger local M. P. Nell thought he considered himself a failure, fatally split between his two careers, too close to too many who had become judges or got cabinet posts not to be secretly soured. We didn’t discuss his end-of-the-world prognosis for Britain.

Then Caro stood and said she must go to bed, she felt so tired, although I suspect ‘so tactful’ would have been more accurate. The four of us sat on round the fire into the small hours, discussing her, and Barney, then Paul’s problems and ‘moods’. It was all done very equably and reasonably, and even much more frankly, as regards Caro and between Nell and myself, than ever in the past. The always inherent animosities seemed genuinely allayed, we managed to talk about her as another human being, not a potential tug-of-war rope; and we even agreed on a joint policy of not countenancing any closer contact with Barney ourselves. Jane’s shrewdness and Andrew’s common sense helped, of course.

There came a silence. Nell was sitting on a stool, her back against a settee in which Andrew lay sprawled and already very nearly asleep. Jane had kicked off her shoes and was curled up in an armchair on the other side of the fireplace. Now she received a look from her sister.

‘Well. That just leaves one last family problem.’

‘No thanks.’

‘Jane, as we’re all being so terribly sensible and understanding, I don’t see why you shouldn’t make a contribution.’ Jane contemplated her, then smiled and shook her head. ‘I know we’re very square and quite delicious to provoke and… come on.’

‘Come on where?’

‘Own up.’

‘To having a mind of my own?’

‘That you aren’t sure.’

‘All I’m sure of at the moment is that I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘We worry about you. All the time.’ She nudged Andrew’s leg. ‘Don’t we, Andrew?’

His eyes opened, but he spoke to the ceiling.

‘Constant topic of conversation.’

‘I’m flattered. But unmoved.’

‘I promise not to argue.’ Jane drew a breath, and half flicked a glance towards where I was sitting. She was wearing an evening shirt and a long skirt, both rather severe, very muted patterns and colours compared to those the other women had worn. ‘And you’ve told Dan. So don’t pretend it’s all a great secret.’

‘It’s because I’m not pretending that I don’t want to talk about it, Nell.’

‘You’ve decided?’

‘Not yet.’

Nell stared at her a moment, as if she were not her fool, then invoked my help.

‘Dan, don’t you think she’s mad?’

‘I think if she must, she must.’

‘You sound just like Andrew.’ She gave Jane another resentful look. ‘It’s so ridiculous. You’ve got more brains than all the rest of us put together.’

‘Perhaps I have. On this.’

‘You don’t even dress like a lady Marxist.’ Jane smiled. ‘Let alone speak like one.’

‘I find that rather cumbersome to travel with.’

‘Because you see through it.’

‘Some of it.’

‘Then why?’

‘Because a clumsily expressed truth remains a truth?

‘You might at least think of your poor children before you become the laughingstock of Oxford.’

‘I think a great deal about children. And the world they’ll have to live in.’

‘The dear old salt-mines?’

Jane smiled again, and held her tongue. I watched her stare into the embers of the fire; and felt a certain sympathy for Nell’s exasperation with this withdrawal into the gnomic and sibylline. I received some of the accusation in her eyes.