George Passant (10 page)

In the first pages he showed me, Jack played very little part; there was a word in August:

I am still enjoying the fruitful association with Jack Cotery as much as ever. I have never been so lucky in my friends as I am now.

Then the idea of helping Jack came into the forefront of the diary, and continued there for weeks. There were descriptions of days which I remembered from another side: our first telling him the news, his attack on the committee (written with curious modesty), the visit to Nottingham, his resolve to find money for Jack.

Jack’s flattery, however, he mentioned, to my surprise:

We must perhaps remember that Jack is not completely impartial just now, though I should repudiate the suggestion if it were made…

And the opposition by his mother, he described a little oddly:

But there was one thing which astonished me, more than it should have done, since, when I myself rejected George’s advice about becoming a solicitor, there must have been similar entries about me. I knew that he had been angry at Jack preferring to experiment in business instead of accepting George’s scheme of the law. Until I read George’s entries, though, I could not have realised how he felt deserted, how deeply he had taken it to heart.

Then, a week later, there came the last entry he showed me that night:

I REACH EQUILIBRIUM ON THE COTERY BUSINESS

FRIDAY, SEP. 28

The Firm of Eden & Martineau

THE winter was eventful for several of us. Olive, as she had foreshadowed that Saturday night at the farm, told Morcom that she could not marry him; she began to spend most of her time at home, looking after her father. Morcom tried to hide his unhappiness; often, he was so lonely that he fetched me out of my room and we walked for hours on a winter night; but he never talked of his own state. He also tried to conceal something else which tormented him: his jealousy for Jack Cotery. It was the true jealousy of his kind of love; it was irrational, he felt degraded by it, yet it was sharp and unarguable as a disease. Walking through the streets on those bitter nights, he could not keep from fearing that Jack might
that very moment
be at the Calverts’ house.

Although Morcom was older than I was, too much so for us to have been intimate friends, I understood something of what he was going through, for it was beginning to happen to me. In time, I lost touch with him, and never knew what happened to him in later life. Yet, though I was closer to the others that year, he taught me more about myself.

Meanwhile, Jack himself had plunged into his business. One bright idea had come off: another, a gamble that people would soon be buying a cheap type of valve set, engrossed him all the winter and by spring still seemed to be about an even chance.

But George remained cheerful and content, in the middle of his friends’ concerns. He was sometimes harassed by Jack’s business, but no one found it easier to put such doubts aside; the group occupied him more and more; he spent extra hours, outside the School, coaching me for my first examination; he was increasingly busy at Eden & Martineau’s.

The rest of us had never envied him so much. He was sure of his roots, and wanted no others, at this time when we were all in flux. It was not until the spring that we realised he too could be threatened by a change.

On the Friday night after Easter, I was late in arriving at Martineau’s. Looking at the window as I crossed the road, I was startled by a voice from within. I went in; suddenly the voice stopped, as my feet sounded in the hall. Martineau and George were alone in the drawing-room; George, whose voice I had heard, was deeply flushed.

Martineau welcomed me, smiling.

‘I’m glad you’ve come, Lewis,’ he said, after a moment in which we exchanged a little news. George stayed silent.

‘Everyone’s deserting me,’ Martineau smiled. ‘Everyone’s giving me up.’

‘That’s not fair, Mr Martineau,’ George said, with a staccato laugh.

Martineau walked a few steps backwards and forwards behind the sofa, a curious, restless mannerism of his. ‘Oh yes, you are.’ Martineau’s face had a look at once mischievous and gentle. ‘Oh yes, you are, George. You’re all deciding I’m a useless old man with bees in his bonnet who’s only a nuisance to his friends.’

‘That simply is not true,’ George burst out.

‘Some of my friends haven’t joined us on Friday for a long time, you know.’

‘That’s nothing to do with it,’ said George. ‘I thought I’d made that clear.’

‘Still,’ Martineau added inconsequently, ‘my brother said he might drop in tonight. And I’m hoping the others won’t give us the “go-by” for ever.’ He always produced his slang with great gusto; it happened often to be slightly out-moded.

The Canon did not come, but Eden did. He stayed fairly late. George and I left not long afterwards. In the hall George said: ‘That was sheer waste of time.’

As we went down the path, I looked back and saw the chink of light through the curtains, darkened for an instant by Martineau crossing the room. I burst out: ‘What was happening with Martineau before anyone came in? What’s the matter?’

George stared ahead.

‘Nothing particular,’ he said.

‘You’re sure? Come on–’

‘We were talking over a professional problem,’ said George. ‘I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything else.’

Outside the park, under a lamp which gilded the chestnut trees, I saw George’s chin thrust out: he was swinging his stick as he walked. A warm wind, smelling of rain and the spring earth, blew in our faces. I was angry, young enough to be ashamed of the snub, still on edge with curiosity.

We walked on silently down to the road where we usually parted. He stopped at the corner, and I could see, just as I was going to say an ill-tempered ‘Goodnight,’ that his face was anxious and excited. ‘Can’t you come to my place?’ he said abruptly ‘I know it’s a bit late.’

Warmed by the awkward invitation, I crossed the street with him. George broke into a gust of laughter, good-humoured and exuberant. ‘Late be damned!’ he cried. ‘I’ve got a case that’s going to keep me busy, and I want you to help. It’ll be a good deal later before you get home tonight.’

When we arrived in his room, the fire contained only a few dull red embers. George, who was now in the highest of spirits after his truculence at Martineau’s, hummed to himself, as, clumsily, breathing hard, he held a newspaper across the fireplace; then, as the flames began to roar, he turned his head: ‘There’s something I’ve got to impress on you before we begin.’

He was kneeling, he had flung off his overcoat, one or two fair hairs caught the light on the shoulders of his blue jacket; his tone, as whenever he had to go through a formal act, was a trifle sententious and constrained (though he often liked performing one).

‘What are you going to tell me?’ I said, settling myself in the armchair at the other side of the fire. There was a smell of charring; George’s face was tinged with heat as he crumpled the paper in the grate.

‘That I’m relying on you to keep this strictly confidential,’ he said, putting on a kettle. ‘I’m laying you under that definite obligation. It’s a friendly contract and it’s got to be kept. Because I’m being irregular in telling you this at all.’

I nodded. This was not the first of the firm’s cases I had heard discussed, for George was not always rigid on professional etiquette; and indeed his demand for secrecy tonight served as much to show me the magnitude of the case as to make sure that I should not speak. It was their biggest job for some time, apart from the routine of conveyancy and so on in a provincial town. A trade union, through one of its members, was prosecuting an employer under the Truck Act.

Eden had apparently realised that the case would call out all George’s fervour. It was its meaning as well as its intricacy that gave George this rush of enthusiasm. It set his eyes alight and sent him rocking with laughter at the slightest joke.

As he developed the case itself, he was more at home even than among his friends at the Farm. There, an unexplained jarring note could suddenly stab through his amiability; or else he would be hurt and defensive, often by a remark which was not intended to bear the meaning he wove into it. But here for hours, he was completely master of his surroundings, uncriticised and at ease; his exposition was a model, clear and taut, embracing all the facts and shirking none of the problems.

George himself, of course, was led by inclination to mix with human beings and find his chief interest there. There is a superstition that men like most the things they do supremely well; in George’s case and many others, it is quite untrue. George never set much value on these problems of law, which he handled so easily. But, whatever he chose for himself, there was no doubt that, of all the people I knew in my youth, he was the best at this kind of intellectual game; he had the memory, the ingenuity, the stamina and the orderliness which made watching him arrange a case something near an aesthetic pleasure.

As he finished, he smacked his lips and chuckled. He said: ‘Well, that reduces it to three heads. Now let’s have some tea and get to work.’

We sat down at the table as George wrote down the problems to which he had to find an answer; his saucer described the first sodden circle on a sheet of foolscap. I fetched down some books from his shelves and looked up references; but I could not help much – he had really insisted on my coming in order to share the excitement, and perhaps to applaud. On the other side of the table George wrote with scarcely a pause.

‘God love us,’ George burst out. ‘If only’ – he broke into an argument about technical evidence – ‘we should get a perfect case.’

‘It’ll take weeks,’ I said. ‘Still–’ I smiled. I was beginning to feel tired, and George’s eyes were rimmed with red.

‘If it’s going to take weeks,’ said George, ‘the more we do tonight the better. We’ve got to get it perfect. We can’t give Eden a chance to make a mess of it. I refuse to think,’ he cried, ‘that we shan’t win.’

In the excitement of the night, I forgot the beginning of the evening and the signs of a quarrel with Martineau. But, as George gathered up his papers after the night’s work, he said: ‘I can’t afford to lose this. I can’t afford to lose it personally – in the circumstances,’ and then hurried to make the words seem innocuous.

MOST nights in the next week I walked round to George’s after my own work was done. Often it was so late (for my examination was very near, and I was reading for long hours) that George’s was the only lighted window in the street. His voice sounded very loud when he stood in the little hall and greeted me.

‘Isn’t it splendid? I’ve got another argument complete. You’d better read it.’

His anxiety, however, was growing. He did not explain it; I knew that it must be caused by some trouble within the firm. Once, when Martineau was mentioned, he said abruptly: ‘I don’t know what’s come over him. He used to have a sense of proportion.’ It was a contrast to his old extravagant eulogies of Martineau, but he soon protested: ‘Whatever you say, the man’s the only spiritual influence in the whole soulless place.’