Daniel Martin (41 page)

I didn’t very much, though she was more interesting than her English equivalent. She showed a fashionable Manhattan background and a solid Wasp frame of values in an aura of Anglo-American high society; good looks, she must have been in her mid-thirties; and though the accent had almost disappeared, she retained a characteristic transatlantic female insistence putting even Nell in the shade on getting her fair share of any conversation. That is, over her fair share. She was shallowly cultivated in the arts, and perhaps aware of it. All her value-judgments were like a snip-snap of scissors; as if, if she did not diminish all she saw, she might seem passé. She had faintly porcine features, a delicate white pig. Every so often the M. P. gave her veiled, somehow speculative looks, like a man with a new pet. She was a common enough type, of course; I knew Californian equivalents on the fringes of the higher echelons of the movie world. Such people had always seemed to me peculiarly un-American, far more in love with the foibles and manias of caste than with the Republic. The present lady did nothing to change my view; she had simply emigrated to where she had the British caste system to play with as well.

Her much older husband interested me a good deal more. He still had a handsome mane of grizzled hair and enormous bushy eyebrows over penetrating grey eyes; and he was very obviously not short of savoir-vivre. He gave a pleasant impression of quizzing everyone he spoke to, being amused by them—and assessing them pretty shrewdly at the same time. Before dinner I saw him sit by Jane, and overheard something about Anthony; and watched him thaw out any hostility she may have felt towards him on other grounds some story, and she threw back her head, genuinely amused.

I was sent off into a corner with him myself soon after that, and delivered a short alphabet of production company hazards. Fenwick was concerned not only as the father of the potential bride but as an old friend of the lordling’s mother. The young man was very evidently hell-bent on entering the visual demimonde, and the names of one or two well-known fashion photographers he went about with were held out as proof of his artistic bent held out with a dry inquiry, as I imagine in court the Queen’s Counsel might have pretended to support a dubious precedent in order to demolish it later. I suggested that stashed young aristocrats had been every conman’s delight since time began; and received instant agreement. It was very soon clear that I was teaching, in spite of the deference shown to my opinions, a grandmother to suck eggs; Fenwick knew all about the folly of production without distribution guarantees, and the rest. The only slight mystery to me was that with all his knowledge of the world he had not guessed that this latter-day Marmaduke was very probably laying every starlet and model he could put his hands on and that the daughter would be eventually happier in a nunnery. But that was hardly in my brief. I already sensed a blind spot in Fenwick’s intelligence; or perhaps it was just a profound cynicism.

The dinner went agreeably. Fenwick was a good raconteur, even against himself; and he had a tiny touch of that rare quality, demonstrating a gift for being a shade sharper, more contradictory, more outrageous than normal convention permits. It was based on a supreme self-confidence, on the certainties of a man who had lived and mixed a lot, but it was lightly, self-mockingly worn. I heard him reproaching poor Caro for having forsaken the country for ‘the worst den of iniquity in the Great Wen’ (‘The great what?’); but with the gentle astringency of an old hand at amusing young women. All reference to politics was fastidiously avoided; the Fenwicks must have been warned to keep off the subject… or perhaps already knew. Jane had met them before at Compton, it seemed.

I received my due ration of that inevitable lionizing every professional in the film business comes to dread—the endless naive questions about the technicalities, the pricked ears and fatuous smiles when yet another star’s name is dropped, like a swine before pearls but even that was more intelligently done than usual. The conversation moved on to my present job, the Kitchener script. I talked a little about him, though in that company I played down the folly-of-imperialism line and concentrated more on the psychological enigma. Fenwick had listened to this in silence, but now he smiled across at me.

‘I met him once. Shook hands. I was seven years old.’

‘Good Lord—where was this?’

‘At Taplow, the Desboroughs? Just before the war, in 1914. He had the most extraordinary eyes. Very pale blue, and a terrifying squint. They toned it down in the famous poster. Enormously tall. Like meeting a skyscraper.’

‘Did he say anything to you?’

Fenwick cast me as his seven-year-old self; gave me a severe look under the shaggy eyebrows. “Always look people in the eyes, my boy”. I must have been staring at his boots. You know Osbert Sitwell’s description of him?’

‘The godlike thing?’

‘I can vouch for that. Tremendous physical presence. Like a magnet, one couldn’t look at anyone else.’

‘You still have an admiration for him?’

‘As a magnificent beast. As a general… I remember once hearing an obiter dictum from Winston on the subject.’ He put on a creditable Churchillian voice. “The hero of Omdurman would rather have kissed his Satanic Majesty’s arse than contemplated the smallest strategic decision”.’ We laughed, and Fenwick pinched his nose, then countermanded too much humour with a raised finger. ‘Mind you, I can also remember the shock of his death in 1916. Of course no one knew the mess of it he’d been making behind the scenes. I was at prep school. We were solemnly hauled out of class, all the staff, even the maidservants, I can recall one of them bursting into tears… the headmaster… the dreadful news, as if nothing now stood between us and the Prussian hordes.’ I made a quick mental note of that, it might be a way of doing a scene. Fenwick leant back, a hand reached out to the base of his glass of Burgundy. He moved it an inch; a judicial adjustment, but in something more than the glass’s position. He smiled up at me. ‘I wonder if we’re capable of judging men like Kitchener any more. His faults weren’t really the essence of it, you know. Like dear old Montgomery’s. I suspect it’s because he wasn’t credible as a person, even as a general, that he did become so credible as a national symbol. A badge. The whole nation wore him for those first two years of the war.’ He raised the bushy eyebrows, and warned me. ‘And you may find someone who can act him. But you’ll never find that presence… that emblematic quality.’

‘We are very aware of the problem. We’re toying with the idea of Max von Sydow the Swedish actor? We’d have to dub his voice, of course.’

We wandered off to acting and casting; Churchill, where Fenwick felt interpretations based on him had failed; and then to other things.

Finally Nell was on her feet. The gentlemen were to be left, it seemed, though she tried to lessen the ridiculousness of this old ritual by pointing down the table at Andrew.

‘Twenty minutes. Or I shall come and pull you out by the scruffs of your necks.’

‘Yes, marm.’

Paul went with the women, and I was left with Andrew, Fenwick, and a decanter of port; and at last, politics. The subject had been banned for Jane’s sake, not mine. Andrew had moved down from his end of the table and taken a chair beside Fenwick, making him the tacit focus. But I had his lazily probing look; and the sense of a question that might have been asked earlier.

‘You still a socialist, Dan?’

‘I think I need prior notice of that.’

Fenwick said, ‘I should think so too.’

But Andrew persisted.

‘By vote.’ I smiled across at Fenwick. ‘Hardly out of faith in all its elected members.’

‘My dear fellow, we all have that problem. Or rather, the country has it.’

‘The credibility gap?’

His sceptical grey eyes examined me.

‘I think electoral blindness is a more accurate phrase.’

‘In what way?’

Again Fenwick had two fingers splayed across the base of his balloon-glass of brandy—he had refused the port—revolving it a little. He looked up at me. ‘People like you? Highly intelligent chaps with their heads in the sand?’ It was said half-jocularly, and not at all as a challenge—even faintly as if he were disinclined to broach the subject.

‘I’d like to know what I’m blind to.’

‘Mobocracy?’

‘Strong word.’

‘All the signs are there. Contempt for us poor boobies who have to represent you, for democratic process, for law—for anything that gets in the way of having one’s cake and eating it.’ He folded his arms, leant back a little. ‘In my view it’s not even a party matter any more. The only difference is that my lot some of us say that the situation is suicidally dangerous. And your side pretend it isn’t have to, to keep their masters quiet. But they know.’

‘The unions?’

‘They too have their masters.’

‘Under the bed?’

That amused him. ‘Very much in it, I should have thought.’

‘But any remedy must seem like witch-hunting?’

He glanced with a hint of reproach at Andrew beside him, as if he wished he hadn’t plunged us into the topic; then gave me a rather more serious look, as if my presumption was involved as well but he would give me the benefit of the doubt for the time being.

‘I’m speaking very much off the record, among friends, after an excellent dinner.’ He paused a moment. ‘I see it like this. I don’t believe in delaying inevitable confrontations. You two are too young, but I watched the ostrich game being played all through the Thirties by my own party, among others. My generation paid the bill for all that. Hoping for the best.’ He eyed me with a sort of sardonic benevolence. ‘If you don’t believe in parliamentary democracy and social order and a modicum of free enterprise, very well, you may sit back and enjoy the spectacle of the country sliding into chaos and an eventual bloodbath. But if you do have some belief in those things, however circumscribed by a no doubt admirable concern for the less privileged—then I’m bound to suggest you’re supporting the wrong party.’ He raised a quick hand. ‘Some good men, of course. Both on the Front Bench and behind. But they have less and less say. Once the cards are down, I give them as much chance as the moderates when Robespierre and his disciples set up shop.’

‘There’s surely still some way to go before… ‘

‘I think that theory will serve as an excellent epitaph on the tomb of the British. Here lies a nation who believed itself exempt from time.’

‘Are you saying the process can’t be reversed? It’s too late?’

‘My dear man, the history of this century is one of increasing madness. If one stands for reason in public affairs, one can stay sane only by assuming that the game is fixed. I see very little hope indeed of reversing the process, as you put it. And most certainly not when people like yourself and you are indisputably in the educated majority these days are apparently content to stand by and watch the worst happen.’

I took the decanter that Andrew pushed to me. ‘You don’t see a curtailment of free enterprise as the inevitable price of a fairer society?’

‘Ah. Then perhaps you can tell me what is fair about a society in which there will be no freedom at all?’

‘But that’s like saying a nuclear holocaust is inevitable. It’s possible, it may even be probable but present reality is surely choices?’

I realized I was getting the same sort of look as his wife earlier during the dinner.

‘Very well. Let that be conceded. 1984 may never come. But my guess is that in twenty years’ time, it may well be less, this will no longer be a free society. Your party will have been blown aside like thistledown. Mine won’t even exist. If Parliament survives in some form, it will be only as a rubber stamp. All the power will be in other hands. You may if you wish regard me as a nervous old passenger who has the presumption to warn the captain and crew that their seamanship does not satisfy him. But I see no purpose in doing that after the Titanic has struck. And if you think our present ship of state is being properly navigated and conducted… well.’

He gave a little shrug. His voice, though still light, had grown obscurely sarcastic, as if this Tony Lumpkin and the film-world fellow had to be taught the realities of life.

Andrew said, ‘I wonder if the dear old proles really have that sort of energy.’

‘With respect, Andrew, that is supremely irrelevant. Their future masters have got the energy. It’s the apathy among those who ought to know better that I find so distressing. In both parties, alas.’ He gave me a dry smile. ‘I’m certainly not attaching all blame to you.’

‘Nor to some much-needed social progress, I hope.’

Now I was being impertinent. ‘I accept virtually all that has been done by both parties since the war to better the lot of the underprivileged. The sick, the needy… of course.’ He tapped the table. ‘What I won’t accept is the levelling down—the treating of all talent, energy, self-sacrifice, hard work, as a crime. I will not accept that a universal norm of impoverished mediocrity is conducive to social health. Why should you be paid the same fees as a writer ten times your inferior? Why should Andrew here be denied a fair reward for all the improvements he has made on his estate? What you socialists seem incapable of realizing is that dragging everyone down to the same level is not only a chimera, a genetic impossibility, quite apart from anything else—but counterproductive. It doesn’t help the bottom half of society. Absolute justice will always be a myth, because life is fundamentally, unfair. But it is unfair for a purpose.’ I tried to speak, but the hand was raised again. Forgive me. But put all politics on one side. No form of life can survive on the basis of enforced equality. That is a biological fact. The whole of evolution depends on the freedom of the individual to develop in his own way. All history, human and natural, demonstrates that again and again.’