The Book and the Brotherhood (18 page)

‘You feel we should help him positively, aggressively if necessary?’

‘If we could think how.’

‘Gang up on Crimond and beat the hell out of him? He’d like it, he’d play the victim and then take a terrible revenge.’

‘Of course I don’t mean that sort of stuff! He wouldn’t like it and we couldn’t do it.’

‘I wasn’t serious.’

‘Well,
be
serious.’

‘We can hardly go and fetch Jean away by force. You were saying something about Tamar last night, but I didn’t get the hang because Rose came in.’

‘Rose is terribly upset about Jean.’

‘Is she seeing Jean?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘I don’t see why she shouldn’t –
we
have to defend Duncan –’

‘She’ll do what we do.’

‘But about Tamar – you seemed to think that
she
could somehow bring Jean and Duncan together again?’

‘It’s an intuition. Tamar is a remarkable person.’

‘Couldn’t Rose do it?’

‘She’s too connected. She hates Crimond. And she and Jean are so close, or were. Jean would hate above all things to be proved wrong by Rose.’

‘I see what you mean. Tamar used to see a lot of Jean and Duncan. I remember you said they ought to adopt her! But I don’t fancy involving Tamar, she’s so young.’

‘That’s her passport, they couldn’t see her as a judge. She’s got a special integrity. Out of that unspeakable background –’

‘Or because of it.’

‘She has seen the abyss and stepped away from it, stepped firmly in the other direction – oh how firmly she steps!’

‘She’s in search of a father. If you see yourself in that role –’

‘Absolutely not. I just thought I’d suggest –’

‘Don’t burden her too much. She has a very high regard for you. She’d worry terribly if she wasn’t able to do exactly what you wanted. I expect she’s got enough worries.’

‘I think something like this might be just what she needs, a task, a mission, to be a messenger of the gods.’

‘You see her as a sort of virgin priestess.’

‘Yes. Are you joking?’

‘Never in the world – I see her like that too. But look – supposing someone were to say that surely in these days women often leave their husbands for other men and bystanders don’t think this is something intolerable they’ve got to stop at all costs. Why is this case different? Is it because Duncan is like our brother, or because Crimond is exceptionally awful, or –?’ Jenkin here gave Gerard a wide-eyed look which meant that he was putting something out simply for clarification; they had been arguing since they were eighteen.

‘Storms gather round that man. Someone could get hurt.’

‘You think Duncan might try to kill Crimond? Duncan can bide his time, but he’s violent and fey too.’

‘No, but he might have a sudden irresistible urge simply to see Crimond, to argue with him even –’

‘And Crimond might kill him, out of fear, or hate –?’

‘Men in the wrong hate their victims.’

‘Or by accident? You think it’ll end in single combat? Or
Crimond might kill Jean, or they’d jump off a cliff together, or –?’

‘He likes guns, you remember at Oxford, and Duncan said he was in some rifle club in Ireland, it’s hard luck on him he missed the war, he’d have been dead or a hero, that would have been his
aim
–’

‘I think you’re too obsessed with Crimond’s awfulness. He’s a romantic.’

‘We forgive romantics.’

‘An
âme damnée
then.’

‘We forgive them too. Don’t make excuses for him, Jenkin!’

‘You want your Crimond to be as bad as possible!’

‘He likes dramas and ordeals and tests of courage, he doesn’t care if he destroys people because he doesn’t care if he destroys himself –’

‘He’s a utopian thinker.’

‘Precisely. Unrealistic and ruthless.’

‘Oh come – He’s courageous and hard-working and indifferent to material goods and he really cares about deprived people –’

‘He’s a charlatan.’

‘What is a charlatan? I’ve never understood that concept.’

‘He doesn’t care about deprived people or social justice, he doesn’t go anywhere near the real working-class struggle, he’s a self-obsessed theorist, he makes all these things into ideas, into some passionate abstract web he’s weaving –’

‘Passion, yes. That’s what attracts Jean.’

‘She’s attracted by the danger – by the carnage.’

‘A Helen of Troy complex?’

‘She likes cities to fall and men to die because of her.’

‘You are too unkind,’ said Jenkin. ‘Crimond is a fanatic, an ascetic. That’s attractive enough –’

‘For you perhaps. I think you see him as some kind of mystic.’

‘Remember how we all once saw him as the modern man, the hero of our time, we admired him for being so dedicated, we felt he was more real than we were –’

‘I never felt that. What I do remember was, when someone
said he was an extremist, he said, “One must have the support of the young.” That’s unforgivable.’

‘Yes,’ said Jenkin, and sighed. ‘Still, I’ll never forget seeing him dance that evening last summer.’

‘Like Shiva!’

‘Weaving his passionate web!’

‘Precisely. Crimond’s stuff is just a fashionable amalgam, senseless but dangerous – a kind of Taoism with a dash of Heraclitus and modern physics, then labelled Marxism. The philosopher as physicist, as cosmologist, as theologian. Plato did a good job when he threw out the preSocratics.’

‘Yes, but they’re back! I know what you mean and I don’t like it either. But aren’t we now mixing up two separate problems?’

‘You mean his private morals and his book. But they aren’t separate. Crimond is a terrorist.’

‘That’s how Rose sees him. All the same, he knows an awful lot and he can think. The book may be a great deal better than the slapdash provocative opinions he sometimes utters.’

‘Has he shown it to you?’

‘No, of course not!’

‘Do you plan to meet him?’

‘I don’t plan, I just don’t run a mile! We’ve got to see him sometime to ask him about the book.’

‘Yes, yes, I’m going to call the committee, we’ll have to see him –’

‘We must get the style right.’

‘I think “tone” is the word. You say “ask about the book” – but there’s nothing we can do except curse privately that we’re all spending our money year after year to propagate ideas we detest!’

‘It’s a dotty situation. Jean could support him, but of course he wouldn’t – and it doesn’t alter our obligation.’

‘I’m certain he doesn’t touch a penny of Jean’s money.’

‘Has the book changed or have we? The brotherhood of western intellectuals versus the book of history.’

‘You’re talking his language. There is no book of history, there is no history in that sense, it’s all just determinism and
amor fati.
Or if there is a book of history it’s called the
Phenomenology of Mind
and it’s out of date! Or do you think we’ve really given up? Come, come, Jenkin!’

‘“What by nature and by training we loved, has little strength remaining, though we would gladly give the Oxford Colleges, Big Ben, and all the birds in Wicken Fen, it has no wish to live”.’

‘Don’t quote that at me, dear boy. You don’t think it or feel it.’

‘Perhaps it is not only our fate but our truth to be weak and uncertain.’

‘You think we are in Alexandria in the last days of Athens!’

‘I certainly don’t think we have the right to give away the birds in Wicken Fen, they don’t belong to us. May I have another glass of wine?’

‘It’s your wine, dolt, I gave it to you!’

Gerard stood up as if to go, and Jenkin rose too, looking up at his tall friend and rumpling his wispy strawy hair.

Gerard said, ‘Why the hell does Duncan have to
lose
all the time, why is
he
the one that falls in the river! I wonder what really happened in Ireland –’

‘I think we shouldn’t wonder so much,’ said Jenkin, ‘sometimes we try to think in too much detail about other people’s lives. Other people’s consciousness can be so unlike our own. One learns that.’

Gerard sighed, recognising the truth of this, feeling the inaccessibility to him of Jenkin’s consciousness. ‘What were you up to at that summer school, Jenkin, you’re not going over to God, are you?’

‘Sit down.’ They sat down again and Jenkin filled the two glasses. ‘I just like to know what’s happening.’

‘In Liberation Theology? In South America?’

‘On the planet.’

They were silent for a moment, Jenkin hunched up, pulling in his short legs, becoming almost egg-shaped, Gerard elongated, his legs outstretched, his arms hanging, his tie undone, his dark hair every way.

‘I hate God,’ said Gerard.

‘“He who alone is wise wants and does not want to be called Zeus.” Heraclitus wasn’t altogether a disaster, you know.’

Gerard laughed. He reflected how much, in the many years that had passed, he had defined himself by his difference from his friends, differences felt in that degree of detail which is obtained by continuous careful talking. In a way, their lives together had been quite like their childish hopes. Yet also he was increasingly conscious now of that loneliness of human beings to which Jenkin had referred.

‘If he does or doesn’t want something it implies he exists.’

‘You ought to write about Plotinus and St Augustine and what happened to Platonism.’

‘What indeed. Levquist said I was rotted by Christianity!’

‘You think you’re on a ladder going up, and you
do
go up.’

‘You think you’re on a road going on, and you
do
go on.’

‘We all do that, there’s no merit in it.’

‘You live in the present. I can never find the present.’

‘Sometimes I wish I could give up metaphors and just think.’

‘Think what?’

‘What a rogue and peasant slave I am.’

‘That’s a metaphor. I hate all that Christian praise and blame. And yet –’

‘You’re a puritan, Gerard. You blame yourself for the lack of some ideal terrible discipline!’

‘I remember
you
said that we’re all sunk in the illusions of egoism like in a big sticky cream cake!’

‘Yes, but I don’t mind too much. Why destroy the healthy ego? It does a job. You’re making me feel hungry. Will you stay for supper? Please do.’

‘No. I think there’s a human task. You think there are human fates. Maybe that way you learn more.’

‘Oh I don’t know. While you were talking I was picturing the Berlin Wall. It’s white.’

‘I know it’s white.’

‘It’s like what I think of evil. One must think of it. Perhaps all the time. In oneself too. Start from where one is.’

‘You always mix things up,’ said Gerard. ‘The Berlin Wall
is not where
you
are. It’s true that we can’t imagine virtue much above our own level except as pure loss. But one must try to think about being good, not just shedding contrite tears and rogue and peasant slave stuff. That’s just self-gratification!’

‘You can’t by-pass where you are by an imaginary leap into the ideal!’

‘All right, but it’s better to
have
an ideal, rather than just trudging on and thinking how different we all are!’

‘You’re so self-reliant,’ said Jenkin. He said this casually because he was tired of this abstract talk which Gerard liked so, and because he wanted Gerard to stay to supper but was not sure there was anything in the larder above the macaroni cheese and fish cake level. One of the supermarkets might still be open. He’d have to go out and buy more wine anyway. Then he realised how much Gerard would resent being called self-reliant.

‘Self-reliant!’ Gerard rose again and picked up his overcoat off a chair.

Resigned, Jenkin also rose. ‘You won’t stay to supper?’

‘No, thanks. I’ll try to fix that committee meeting.’

‘What about Pat and Gideon?’

‘I won’t have them on the committee, I’ve told them it won’t do. They want to contribute anyway, I’ve told them they can’t. I’ve told Gull he mustn’t pay either now he’s unemployed. I suppose all this ought to be discussed. Oh hell.’

‘Pat and Gideon can’t be pro-Crimond.’

‘They aren’t. They just want a finger in the pie. Gideon finds it all amusing.’

‘He’s in London?’

‘Yes. He’s trying to buy a Klimt.’

‘I imagine you don’t want a taxi?’

‘No, I’ll walk. I love this fog. Goodbye.’

As the front door closed behind Gerard, Jenkin returned into the aloneness which he valued so much. He leaned
against the door with a positive thrill of solitude. He had wanted Gerard to stay. He was now also glad that he had gone. Jenkin had once said, a remark which Gerard remembered, that he would never marry because that would prevent him from being alone at night. Now there was supper to think of, and what was on the radio (he had no television) and Gerard to think of, always an interesting subject. Then supper to be (quickly) prepared and (slowly) eaten. Jenkin believed one should attend carefully to food while eating it. There was the wine to be finished too. A radio talk (if short), some music (if classical and familiar). Then he might read some Spanish poetry and look at the map and think about his jaunt at Christmas.

He turned off the gas fire in the sitting room and carried the wine bottle and two glasses to the kitchen, returned for the green tumbler and the maple leaves and turned out the light. He put the green tumbler upon the tiled shelf above the sink which he kept clear for such purposes. As he put it down he said, ‘There you are!’ Jenkin felt happy; but there was a flaw in his happiness. He felt, he intuited, that his life was about to change in some way he could not yet determine. The thought of this veiled change was alarming, also exciting. Perhaps it was just, though this was much, a feeling that it was time to stop schoolmastering. Would he then be, like Gerard, wondering what to do with his thoughts? No, he could never be like Gerard or have, in that sense, thoughts. He was certainly not going over to God as Gerard had professed to fear. It was as if some large white blankness were opening before him, not a dead soiled white like the Berlin Wall, but a radiant live space like a white cloud, moist and warm. What would he be doing this time next year, he wondered. So it was as close as that, his new and different future? He had said nothing to anybody, not even to Gerard.