The Malcontents (8 page)

‘It might be me.’ Mark looked at him with bold, affectionate eyes, catching precisely the tone in which Stephen had replied to Neil St John.

Stephen said: ‘It might be. But I tell myself it isn’t.’

Mark was left with a smile, but the discomforting smile that isn’t shared. To him, that answer had been totally unexpected: he had perceived much about his friend, but not that he had been going through one of those states, almost emotionless, in which everything seemed as likely, or unlikely, as anything else. In Neil’s room Emma had not been the only person who was staring open-eyed with the brilliance of suspicion. Even with Tess: there had been an instant, repudiated now, not to be remembered, when Stephen – it flashed on him like an illumination, not different in kind from an illumination of sense – wondered. Meeting her gaze, candid and devoted. Could she have had a motive – perhaps a loving one?

That dismissed, he had had, among other thoughts (though they were not so much thoughts as coronas of suspicion), one of Mark. Only half an hour ago, driving through the free night streets. He had remembered Mark acting at random, walking out of an examination because it was all too stupid: acting as though he didn’t care about past or future, just moved by pure free will. He had often shown a strength of resolve, and no one could tell where it came from.

For the first time in his life, Stephen had been plunged into one of those paranoias, paranoias of secrecy, which come to some, perhaps to most, in crises, especially in claustrophobic crises: when one can read anything into anyone around one, including those one has loved for a lifetime: when one has no faith in one’s instinct or one’s mind, or when they seem not to exist.

With an effort he had controlled himself. How much an effort he had made, Mark, trying to reach him across the smeared and shiny table, did not realize. As it was, he felt compassion for what the other man was going through: and also, but that he was used to, respect for the nature underneath.

‘No,’ said Stephen roughly, as though cutting off someone else’s useless thoughts. ‘We must find out who it is.’

For Mark, it would have seemed silly, and also unfeeling, to mention Tess’ name. Or to make more jokes about themselves. The sooner they had some ground solid beneath them, the less helpless they would be.

‘So there are four possibilities,’ said Mark, with flat common sense. ‘Just four.’

Stephen gave a nod of recognition. After a moment, he said: ‘That includes Neil. Is he a possibility?’

‘What do you think?’

‘Could anyone act as well as that?’

‘Whoever it is,’ said Mark, ‘someone is acting pretty well.’

Yet each of them found it difficult, or perverse, to concentrate a suspicion upon Neil. They didn’t so much like him: he was a colleague and ally, not a friend: but in two years they had never seen – not even Mark, so observant of people round him – the slightest sign of deviating from his commitment. In fact, that was for some the forbidding thing about him. And also both Stephen and Mark were with Neil at a moral disadvantage. It was an old story, which other middle-class young men, taking part in a rebel movement, had known long before they did. In a sense, they were lucky: but they were also on their own: they had only their own will or conscience to impel them: while Neil – so they felt and so did he – had the force of his own people behind him. When he talked about the poor there was nothing artificial about it. He could harangue them about class hatred, and it wasn’t pretended: it was the hatred that he felt for their own class. In theory they had learned, long before they met him, that you could change nothing without the Neils and the masses for whom the Neils were speaking. Were the Neils really speaking for the masses? In detachment that might appear romantic. When they met Neil in the flesh, it seemed true. Stephen, much less than Mark, wasn’t at all humble: but there was no doubt that, working in their cause alongside Neil, he had sometimes felt more humble – or more awkward, with an outsider’s inferiority – than he had ever done.

It was the same with ‘little Bernie’. Bernard, much colder and more intellectual than Neil: he didn’t talk about any personal suffering, yet he must have had it. In this home town of Stephen’s and Mark’s, there had never been many Jews, nor, so far as the two of them knew, much anti-semitism. They could only guess what it was like to be a poor Jew in the local back streets. Had he had his share among ‘the insulted and injured’? He gave no sign of it. Except by being so impregnably on the side of those who were. Stephen and Mark were thinking at the table (at the next one, drivers had been cursing, not at them, not at anything in particular, but so that they heard ‘fucking’ as often as at a smart artistic party) – he was acting from an experience different in kind from theirs, perhaps richer, more firmly based. Stephen could not allow a realistic suspicion about him, any more than about Neil. Occasionally Mark, less consistent than his friend, found a thought drifting back (could one rule out anyone?), but both of them found their attention narrowing, to the two whose origins were like their own.

Emma? Lance? Emma – they couldnt believe it, except, as happened at moments, when universal suspiciousness flashed bright again. Not Emma. They had known her since she was a little girl. She could do almost anything, said Stephen, but not this. She could go to bed with anyone, and had with a good many.
But not this
. Mark, arguing against his intuition, said she might be getting tired of not conforming, she might be trying to find her way back. ‘I don’t believe that,’ said Stephen. ‘Do you?’ Mark shook his head. No, she might hanker after the past, in the long run, but it wouldn’t stop her. She’d be prostrating herself in front of progressive heroes, until her life’s end. To Stephen that sounded over-fanciful, but he said something simpler. She was an honest girl. Whatever she did, she didn’t lie. She had her own code. It might be a curious one, but she abided by it. She was a hundred per cent honest.

‘Yes,’ said Mark in complete acquiescence. ‘Which seems to leave Lance.’ In fact, except in fugues, it had been Lance of whom Stephen had been thinking all that night. He was no good, he said with savageness. It had been folly, blinding folly, ever to let him in. Stephen blamed himself. Lance was a layabout. All he wanted was sensation. They ought to have known that from the start.

It rang strange to hear themselves speak bitterly of a companion: not only of one of the core, but even of an acquaintance of their own age, they hadn’t spoken like this. They could plan violent things, they could take risks: but among themselves they were curiously gentle in passing opinions, loth to criticize. But now that pattern, that protective and tender prudishness, had broken.

‘Why would he do it?’ asked Mark.

‘Does that matter?’

‘He could be looking for another sensation, that might be enough.’

Stephen was not ready to discuss his motives. He had to be seen tomorrow – no, today, for it was already two o’clock in the morning. Other people had to be talked to: some of these arrangements had been settled with Tess, and now Mark would take on others: they must have the whole operation clear by the afternoon: Stephen himself – as he had all along intended – would, in the morning, interrogate Lance. Yet even the clarity of decision, the prospect of action – Mark, himself borne up, was observing with concern – hadn’t settled his friend. Stephen’s voice had been firm, but the resonance had gone. Once more he was staring down at the formica, and the skim of milk on the cold coffee.

Even Mark, who was no sort of coward, had to screw himself up to intrude. ‘It needn’t be so bad,’ he said, half as though it were a question. Under the bleak light, the two heads, fair and dark, the two faces, one unlined and one indrawn, faced each other across the table.

‘If you mean what we’re in for ourselves,’ said Stephen, ‘that’s the least of it.’

He said it as if brooding to himself, with something like tired contempt. He might have been deceiving himself, or softening the truth. It was often the simplest and most selfish thoughts which weighed the most. Professionally, Stephen could have thought, he would live this one down. A decent scientist wasn’t going to be put out of action for ever. But he had never lived with a scandal. He didn’t know what it would be like. Perhaps he was more frightened than he recognized.

Still, there was something else. Mark was searching for it.

‘You’re not worrying about Lance, are you? Or whoever else it is. He doesn’t matter. He’s not worth worrying about. One person’s not worth worrying about.’

It was not what Mark expected, but all of a sudden, as though a key had been turned, Stephen began fervently to talk.

‘Are any of us worth worrying about? Is he any different from the rest of us? I mean, from the rest of blasted human beings. You know, there are times when it looks as though everything is a nonsense. Quite likely, humanity is a nonsense. Do you see any answer to that? Men are just clever animals. Not all that clever, but the cleverest that have appeared so far. Just clever animals, with no good in them.’

Stephen was speaking to someone whom – though he had never said so – he thought good.

‘Is this man any worse than the rest of us?’ Stephen’s eyes, dark and penetrating, didn’t leave the other’s. ‘We’re cruel like animals. We’re worse than they are, because we get enjoyment out of it.’

For an instant, Mark’s expression lost its innocence, and he interrupted: ‘I think there’s something worse than that, those who are cruel without feeling anything at all.’

Stephen rushed on: ‘My father talked to me this evening. As you know. I tell you, I was cruel to him. Quite needlessly. There was no good in either of us. He was as bad as I was. That doesn’t make it better, don’t you see?’

Stephen added more slowly: ‘He doesn’t believe in anything. He goes to his cathedral, and he doesn’t believe a word of it. Or perhaps he cheats himself with words. If they didn’t cheat themselves, could anyone believe? Any faith you like. Most of the questions men have asked since they learned to talk haven’t any meaning. If we haven’t learned anything else this century, we’ve learned that. What does man live by? We’d all like the answer to that. But I ask you, does it mean anything at all?’

Mark’s face, which during some of Stephen’s outburst had been shadowed with pain, regained its radiance. He said: ‘When you talk of your father not believing, aren’t you talking of yourself?’

‘Maybe.’ Stephen replied with indifference, as though he were for the moment spent.

‘But you do believe in something, you know. I can tell you what you live by, if you want.’

Stephen did not utter.

‘Why have you been doing what you have?’ Mark said. ‘You needn’t have. You could just have sat pretty and let everything go by. Very few people have had all the luck you’ve had. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You weren’t ready just to enjoy your luck. So you’ve got into danger and you’ll pay the price.’

Mark gave a fresh smile: ‘Well, would one of your clever animals have done that? I don’t care what you’ve done it for. Or where the motive comes from. “Killing your father”, as they say, or from anywhere else. It’s the same with the rest of us. We haven’t been content with what we’ve got. And that’s something to build on. Have you ever asked yourself, why you got mixed up in this at all?’

Stephen hesitated, and then answered awkwardly: ‘I suppose I should say I don’t like seeing intolerable things. If there’s a chance of shifting them. Perhaps it’s a distaste for injustice, if you like.’

‘It’s more than that. It’s a kind of love.’

Mark spoke without inhibition. And Stephen became uninhibited as he answered: ‘No, I doubt that. I wish it were true. I haven’t much love to spare. I wish I had.’

Now it was Mark who was fervent: ‘But, don’t you see, whatever you call it, there is enough to build on. There will be enough people who aren’t content. For all sorts of motives, I give you that. Not all love. But there’ll be enough to eliminate the intolerable things. It won’t go smooth, perhaps we shan’t see the best of it. We shall need some martyrs. There’ll be plenty of those. Perhaps Neil would make a martyr, if he got rid of this chap. But it will all happen. Somehow or other we shall finish off the worst things.’

‘Now you really do have faith,’ said Stephen, speaking with unusual intimacy, and a touch of envy, to his friend.

‘Oh,’ said Mark casually, ‘I should have made a decent religious, once upon a time.’

Late as it was, they didn’t wish to sleep. There would be time for a few hours in bed before their missions in the morning, said Stephen: time for one more coffee – was it their fifth or sixth? – before they left. Then, with his obsessive concentration, Stephen came back to a first thought: who had it been? were they sure it was Lance? why should he, or anyone else, have done it?

‘As for that,’ said Mark, ‘I can think of several reasons, can’t you? Sheer nihilism. There’s plenty of that about, but usually it’s a pretty name for something cheaper. Like getting on the right side, meaning the side that’s going to have the power for quite some time. Or just a liking for money.’

Mark was thought of as an idealist: but no one could have been more unsentimental than that. He continued: ‘No, don’t let’s go in for psychological double-talk. Ten to one it’s as simple as that. There’ll always be those who can’t resist. Never mind. I keep telling you, there is enough to build on. You mustn’t stop believing that.’

The following morning, Tuesday, about half past nine, Tess arrived in the largest of the students’ common-rooms. She had, before breakfast, telephoned Neil to make an appointment: this was her part of the division of labour, agreed on with Stephen and Mark not so many hours ago. At that time in the morning, the room was already half full of students, giving the illusory impression that they had been sitting there for days and were unlikely to move. It was a spacious room, broken up by columns, furnished with leather sofas and deep reclining armchairs, altogether more luxurious than students at that university would have known in a previous generation or than Stephen and Mark had ever found at Cambridge. It could have been a concourse in the VIP section of a peculiarly lavish airport. Although it might be luxurious, however, it didn’t show a sign of old-maidish tidiness, or any other sort of tidiness. Someone was using a transistor radio in the middle of the room, and no one thought of objecting: on the floor were scattered loose pages of the morning’s newspapers. From where Tess was sitting, she could see a copy of
Le Monde
. It might not have been that day’s, she wasn’t curious: they were all used to the European papers flowing into the room, and no one inquired if they were ever read, or by whom.