Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

Blainey said quietly: ‘May I ask a very personal question?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Are you protecting him, or are you really in ignorance?’

‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’

‘You were distraught last night because you were afraid I should stay up too late and perhaps drink too much—’

‘I assure you I never—’

‘Why not be frank about it? You thought your father was to blame for keeping me there, talking and drinking—and of course he was. But you also thought—or at least the thought crossed your mind—didn’t it?—that he was DELIBERATELY doing all that?’

‘I—I don’t know that I ever—actually—or if I did it was—’

‘All right, have it the way you want. It’s what I thought, anyhow.’

‘That he—was—doing it—DELIBERATELY?’

‘Yes. I’ve seen people in his condition before. It’s a sort of dementia. Didn’t you notice his arguments? For all their fluency, there was no logic in them—they just went round and round—his mind racing like a slipping clutch. If the brain had a temperature his would have been at fever heat.’

‘But I still don’t see—’

‘Well, never mind. You’re a diplomat, as you said—you’re trained not to see what you don’t want to see—or else to pretend not to see what you do see.’

Charles said heavily, after a pause: ‘Yes, it’s that. I’m sorry I wasn’t frank. I’ve known he was like it for a long time. Is there anything one can do?’

‘Not much, I should think, at his age. Though I’m no expert in that field… Well, here’s the station.’

They talked of other matters on the platform and just before the train left Charles thanked him again, but rather sadly. He had learned nothing new about Havelock, but to hear it in words, clinically and for the first time, was a blow. When he got back to the house his mingled emotions, which included intense relief and a resurgence of happiness, also included a deeper sympathy with his father than he could remember. He did not quite know why that was. He found Havelock at his desk in the library pasting another insert into the Oxford Book of English Verse.

‘Hullo, Charles. Splendid news about Jane, I hear. Great fellow Blainey —how wise you were to have him!’ He swung round, book in hand. ‘Listen to this—a parody on the well-known poem by Landor…

I strove with none, not even with my wife, You never saw me drunk or heard me swear; I never could get near the fire of life, So if it sinks or not, why should I care?

Not bad, eh? I amuse myself with this sort of thing when I feel in the mood. Of course some of them come out a bit naughtier than that… But —er—well, I didn’t FEEL naughty this morning. I was too anxious about Jane.’

Jane’s baby, a boy, was born in a London nursing home, and as Blainey had forecast, all went well. Charles was ecstatic, and about the same time (as if to cap his good fortune) he was offered a European post so situated that it was natural for him to serve on one of those intermittent Balkan boundary commissions that never settle anything more than a few years before a major war unsettles everything. Charles had made himself an expert on this particular locality, and it was easy for him to consider the work he did on the commission the most valuable he had yet performed, as well as a likely stepping-stone to further promotion.

Jane had agreed that after he settled down to Legation work again she would join him with the baby, and this she did, for it was a pleasant city and healthy except at the height of summer.

Those were the years when (as Blainey might have said) a diplomat’s training not to see what he did not want to see came in handy, for they were the years between Ethiopia and Munich.

Charles and Jane were now experienced in the diplomatic world. They could begin ‘When we were at So-and-So’—to match anyone else’s stories with one of their own, and they had known several First Secretaries who had since become Ministers, and many Second Secretaries who had since become First Secretaries, and thus down the ladder. They were learned in the personal mythology behind the names in the Foreign Office List, and since they knew exactly how to behave to everybody (including visiting monarchs, local Foreign Ministers, and distinguished travellers) they could take quite a load off a Minister’s or an Ambassador’s shoulders, especially if he were old or slack, and Charles’s new chief, Sir Morley Considine, was inclined to be both. The doyen of the corps, he was a charming relic of the old school whose gallantries were famous and sometimes a little foolish. There was a yarn that he had once had a Third Secretary transferred because he did not spring quickly enough to open the door when the ladies left the table at a dinner party; a footman should have been there to do it, but his negligence was no excuse for a Secretary’s lapse. Sir Morley was, however, comparatively lenient with another Secretary who left the keys of the Chancery on a park bench where, by a remarkable coincidence (as Sir Morley always said), they were found by a distant relative of Sigmund Freud (though Sir Morley never explained just in what the coincidence consisted).

They named the boy Gerald, after a Gerald Anderson in the seventeenth century who had become governor of a West Indian island (perhaps the most officially illustrious of all the Anderson ancestors); and Gerald spent most of his first two years in this foreign capital where he was admired and petted by women of all nationalities and nursed by a Frenchwoman who many an afternoon pushed him in a pram along a mile of tree-shaded boulevard to a kiosk where an old Italian sold citronnade. The old Italian would also touch and admire him, the swarthy mustachioed face beaming down so much more notably than his mother’s or his father’s or his nurse’s that quite possibly it made a faint smudge on the first blank page of the child’s memory.

After Munich even diplomats could see ahead; they knew at least that war would come, and might come suddenly. For this reason Charles, who had sent Jane and Gerald back to England during the September crisis, was not anxious that Gerald should return, though Jane flew back and forth several times, leaving the child with her sister in Cheshire. It was a cluttered family arrangement, but the year that succeeded Munich was a cluttered year. Towards the end of it (in July 1939) Charles took leave, and was in London when war broke out.

Thirteen years later Charles sat in a Paris taxi on Gerald’s seventeenth birthday, and he no more knew where the taxi was going than where the world was going, but he supposed to the devil in one form or another. He could only indulge a mild hope that, if the taxi took him to where Gerald was, the form of the devil would be found agreeable, even if deplorable. For Charles had long since discovered that he was not really a moral man, in the too strict sense of the word, and that most of his qualms were no more than shrinkings of taste or expediency.

The taxi squealed to a halt so suddenly that he thought at first it must be to avoid some accident. But no; the driver was merely pointing to a destination. ‘Rocher’s!’ he snapped. ‘Voilŕ!’

Charles, catapulted from reverie, bestowed the fare and a handsome tip (a certain lavishness in this case being justifiable) while he blinked at the vari-coloured neon lights with which Rocher’s, whatever it was, announced itself both to the passer-by and to the approacher from a distance. Rocher’s… Certainly no place that he could remember… ‘Rocher’s,’ he muttered, sizing up the neighbourhood. There was nothing particularly wrong with the neighbourhood, or right either; it was just a part of Paris he did not think he recognized. ‘You saw him go in THERE?’