The Malcontents (9 page)

On time, Neil pushed through the translucent doors. Behind him came Emma, taller than he was, moving in her rangy athletic stride. Her Tess had not reckoned on: she had a moment’s setback, she had been preparing to speak to the man alone. She made herself settle down. This wasn’t the time to show impatience, there wouldn’t be a worse time.

They drew up chairs close to hers, near to the window, in an aquarium-like corner of the room.

‘What do you want?’ Neil began, even less conciliatory than usual, as though he sometimes made too many concessions to fine manners.

‘I think we ought to talk a bit, don’t you?’

‘Is there anything to talk about?’

‘Well, there might be, mightn’t there?’ Less than any of them, Tess was not put down by Neil’s force. Unlike some other women (Emma was not the only one) she did not find him attractive: her own taste, which she was too young to define but which she knew well enough, was for men finer-nerved and subtler on the outside, however hard they were as one went deeper: which really meant only one man, for she had chosen him already, and though she might have talked in generalities, she wasn’t moved by anyone else. That set her free to deal with Neil as a comrade: and yes, that morning, as a suspect.

‘It can’t do any harm to talk, anyway, can it?’ she said in a firm but gentle manner.

‘Oh, cut it out,’ Emma broke in. ‘We shall soon know who this bleeder is.’

‘Shall we?’ Tess asked, in the same gentle tone.

‘What are you getting at?’ In reply, Neil’s tone was nothing like gentle. ‘Do you mean, he’ll come and bluff it out this afternoon.’

‘That’s what I should do if it was me. Wouldn’t you?’ She gazed at him, not at all a piercing or even an investigating glance, her eyes warm, chestnut-brown with a trace of amber flecks.

‘I don’t know what the hell I should do.’

Emma said: ‘I should cut my throat.’

‘He won’t do that,’ said Neil.

They sounded defeated, more so than on the previous evening. And they sounded lost, as though they didn’t know where to look. If that wasn’t genuine, it was a masterly piece of dissimulation. Yet, Tess had to tell herself, as Mark had told Stephen a few hours before, whoever had done this had to be good at dissimulation.

Whatever their own condition was, she was certain of one thing. They didn’t suspect her. They weren’t even pretending to, which, if either or both were guilty, they presumably might have done. Or perhaps they were more ingenious than that. Quietly, she got them talking about the question which, if they were innocent, must be as insistent, as brilliant in their heads as it was in hers. Who was it? There they differed. That could have been another piece of dissimulation. Or else they could have been arguing, without any settlement, all through the night.

In a rough and grating voice, Neil took an impersonal line. Whoever had done it, he said, must have access to one of two channels. One was to ‘respectable’ people in the city – the people who were out to ‘get’ them. That would have been possible for the ‘bourgeois characters’ in the core. ‘Any of you could have dropped a word in the right quarters, it would be as easy as filling in the pools. That goes for all the rest except Bernard. They’re the ones who could have done that particular operation as quick as kiss your hand. Leaving you out of it. Well, I’m ready to leave out Stephen and Mark. They’re not exactly my cup of tea, but they didn’t do this. That would be ideological nonsense.’

As Tess listened, she felt dislike in return for the equivalent dislike which, underneath the words, was simmering towards Stephen, but she also felt something like admiration for the strength and detachment of his mind.

‘No, if it went that way, it was Lance, he’s the one.’

But there might be a second channel, Neil went on, obsessively. He began to inform her about the operations of MI5. In fact, he knew nothing at first-hand about the security services; it was unlikely that anyone in that room had ever met an agent, or that the Bishop had, or even Thomas Freer. Nevertheless, Neil had read a good deal about secret police. He had a conviction, half paranoid, half intellectually worked out, that he understood them. If MI5 or ‘anyone else in the same blasted filthy business,’ wanted to penetrate them, what would they do? ‘Obviously, they’d pick an agent provocateur or a double agent or an informer, or whatever you fucking well like to call him.’ That was how it was done, Neil had no doubts. Who would they pick? As a rule, it would be someone of ‘good family’ (Neil brought out the phrase with violence), who talked the same language as themselves, whose loyalties they could rely on. ‘I bet all these organs are packed stiff with chaps like the Freers and the Robinsons and Uncle Tom Cobley and all.’ That was how the CIA were recruited, Neil informed them. And that would lead back to Lance by another route. But suppose that the people here were a bit cleverer. Neil’s smile wasn’t a smile, it was bitter and grim. ‘What about slipping down a couple of layers below the beautiful bourgeoisie? Getting hold of someone right out of a different drawer.’

He stared at Tess: ‘Well, there’s only one who meets the specification. What about a nice Jew-boy from the working class? Little Bernie. That would be clever of them. It might be overestimating them, but that’s where they’d look if they were up to their job.’

It was all curiously abstract, despite his detestations, despite even the atavistic jeer from the Catholic slums. There was no indication that he had any feeling against Bernie, or even that he really distrusted him or believed in his own chain of reasoning.

Still, that name seemed to have come between him and Emma during the night. She couldn’t take it. She’d as soon believe it of her own brother, she said. Sooner, because her brother had been born on the wrong side – while Bernie had had everything against him from the start, he was the sort you wanted, he wasn’t just a hanger-on as she was herself.

‘I haven’t much use for plushy hangers-on,’ she said, expression bold, spreading out strong arms.

‘You’ve got plenty of use for the workers, though, haven’t you?’ Neil gibed at her.

‘Of course I have.’

‘You don’t credit that the workers can rat as well as your crowd. My girl, I shall have to introduce you to some of the chaps at home. It’s time you learned the facts of life.’

Listening, Tess could hear exchanges that sounded like a worn tape, as though they had gone over them times before and hadn’t anything new to say. That was how they must talk to each other, meeting head-on, without any softening or give, a kind of masochistic sparring. Emma passionately respected him, in her own fashion – she had proclaimed it herself. She adored him yet he hadn’t ground down her opposition or even made her doubt. No, she insisted, more vehement than he was, they’d been ‘sunk’ by someone she’d known all her life. ‘It’s one of the hangers-on. I tell you, we’re a no-good lot. You’d better stick to the workers in future.’

She was caring less than any of the others about her own fate. She didn’t seem specially protective about Neil: he would survive and so would she, and this might be a rehearsal for the future. Did she ever like mothering him, Tess had a random thought. Perhaps if he was ill. She’d be realistic, she’d do her duty.

She added to her scorn for the hangers-on, the bourgeois contingent. ‘I’ve known Stephen longer than you have,’ she said to Tess, ‘ever since we went to the same frightful kindergarten. I don’t want to say anything against him to you,’ she went on, with the righteousness of one about to do just that, ‘but he’s been no good to us. No, I don’t mean he’s done it, of course he hasn’t, but we should have been better off without him. He might make a respectable spectator, with moderately decent opinions, so long as he could keep his private income.’

‘That’s not fair,’ cried Tess, blushing down to her neck.

‘You’ll find out whether it’s fair or not.’ Emma looked at Neil. ‘If you’d been in charge and we’d kept the others out, we should never have got into this mess. I tell you, it’s not Lance who’s sold us–’

Once more the worn tape, the repeated conversation, tired words coming out as in a scene gone over.

‘Lance’s several kinds of a shit, but he’s not that kind of shit,’ she said.

‘You’ve got nothing to go on,’ said Neil, echoing her mechanical and listless tone.

‘It must be Mark,’ said Emma, emphatically, knowing that it came as no surprise to Neil, indifferent to Tess. But Tess was astonished. It came easier to make some defence of Mark, after being aphasic over Stephen, but yet what she said sounded to herself fatuously limp.

‘Oh, it’s not Mark. He’s sweet.’

‘If that’s being sweet,’ said Emma, ‘give me a bit of sour.’

Tess found herself hurt, angry, baffled, trying to speak in Mark’s favour, as though she were explaining the colour blue to a couple born blind. Neil wasn’t so much as interested: he brushed off Emma’s accusation, but because ‘the man hadn’t got it in him’: he was an amiable do-gooder who (and here he supported Emma) never ought to have been involved: but he hadn’t done any harm, and could be forgotten. While Emma, with the histrionic force of which she was capable, and also with the respect for solid virtue of the family she had renounced, piled on the charges: he was irresponsible: he didn’t stick at anything: he didn’t even apply himself to a professional career: he wasn’t serious about a job.

It was the most pointless of psychological discussions, and Neil soon got tired of it.

‘Well, we’re not getting any further,’ he said, and, with the rudeness that had become part of his style, got up and left Tess without a goodbye. Emma, who had come to copy that same style, did likewise.

Tess sat there in the corner, flushed, hating them for what they had said of Stephen (and also of Mark, for mysteriously that had wounded her as much), feeling that she had hated them all along. Nevertheless, she hadn’t lost touch with what she came for, and she could separate her own responses. Despite Neil’s contemptuous parting words, Tess knew that she at least had got some distance further. She was by now certain that neither of those two had done it. She was, as often, trusting her own judgement. She was quite sure that Emma, whom she now thought of with open dislike, was innocent in all she said: innocent if detestable, and she and that man were close together. A pair as close together, Tess was convinced with her own kind of wisdom, lived in complicity: neither could have kept a secret, not of this magnitude anyway, from each other: it would be unthinkable that she and Stephen could. That pair might in the future do things, and do them together, which Tess couldn’t tolerate: but they hadn’t done this.

Whether that was a relief to her or not, she couldn’t have said, or perhaps have admitted to herself. Instead, she was taken over by another thought, or something like a wish. It was vaguer than her thoughts of Stephen, but it included those, and gave her some of the same well-being. Although she didn’t know it, it happened to many in any kind of danger. When all this was behind her – as she thought, it seemed as though it already was – she had a sense of how promising and rich her life could be. She felt, tingling within her, a fulfilment of all she could do with it: nice things, good things, all blended with pleasures to come. This was a moment of mercy such as a prisoner felt before trial. To her, it was utterly fresh and uplifting, as fresh as – in her childhood not so long before – a moment before sleep, when she was looking forward to her birthday next morning.

For a while, all trouble was done with and over. She didn’t even bring to mind that there were the next twenty-four hours to ride through, and longer than that.

When Tess was listening to those two in the common room, Mark was walking with Bernard Kelshall in the university garden. Mark had fixed that meeting place because he was as security-conscious as any of them: it was safer to talk in the open air. Even so, Mark was soothed at being in a garden – though it was January, only the English grass to impress the eye, the green of the soft damp weather. Still, for Mark any garden was better than none. Not that he was a horticulturist; in this one, maintained by the botany department, he couldn’t in summer have named one flower in ten. But Mark, so easy with all people, men and women, often got out of their way: he spent much time alone, he sat about for hours, sometimes in sight of foliage, before he went and expended energies on a friend.

He wasn’t tired that morning, although he had had only four hours’ sleep: he would have been glad, though, to be strolling in that place alone.

As it was, he was devoting himself to Bernard. Mark was using his own spontaneity to loosen some in the other, but without producing much of a response. Bernard was composed and civil, as Mark had found him all through their acquaintanceship: the stabs of pessimism, just discernible at last night’s meeting, didn’t show themselves again. As Mark looked down at the intelligent face, under hair as blond as his own, there was nothing forthcoming there. All he said was considered, as though he had hardened himself and become implacable.

‘Well,’ Mark tried again, ‘what’s going to happen this afternoon?’

‘That’s out of our control.’

‘Perhaps there’ll be a vacancy in the party.’

‘Perhaps.’

‘That would tell us–’

‘It’s not significant,’ Bernard interrupted, quietly, in a manner half-academic, half-fanatical.

‘It’s significant to the rest of us.’

‘No. The damage is done. For serious purposes, it doesn’t matter if we never find out who did it.’

‘We all want to.’

‘It’s trivial,’ Bernard continued in the same cool tone. ‘There’s never been a movement in history which didn’t have its traitors. We’ve had ours, and it’s going to finish us temporarily. That’s all. The only lesson is, how to avoid it in the future.’

He reflected and said: ‘No, that isn’t the only lesson. It isn’t even the main lesson. We’re amateurs, and we have to become professionals. We’ve got to rethink what we’re aiming at. This was wrong from the beginning. When we get the purpose right, we shall recruit the correct cadres.’

Bernard proceeded, as calmly as though he were at a seminar, without either deference or patronage, to give a lecture on revolutionary theory. Mark was astonished, no, more than that, for the moment disoriented. It wasn’t that he was unaccustomed to theory. He had listened to plenty of it, and had taken part, long sessions in Cambridge, long sessions in this town. Himself, though he was intellectually as capable as Bernard or Stephen, he had no great taste for it. Still, it was what their minds were digging into. But now, that morning, walking in the garden–