Richard Gordon: THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

The news of death never seems to come singly, or perhaps the first blow makes us more sensitive to the others. I reached London the week before Christmas, where I had booked a room at a small hotel in Cavendish Square. Among my waiting letters was a telegram sent the day before from Budleigh Salterton, saying that my mother was 'seriously ill'. By the time I arrived there, she was dead. She had just turned sixty and had suffered a stroke. 'She was so loyal, so devoted and so hardworking,' the old lady kept repeating in a heartbroken voice. 'One simply doesn't find servants like that any more.' My mother left me Ј200, the savings of a lifetime. It was useful to buy a second-hand prewar car. My only emotion was a ghost of the liberation I felt so guiltily on the death of Rosie.

I had a lonely Christmas, but I hate obligatory jollity. In the New Year I won my expected job at Arundel College, Senior Lecturer with the old professor only three years to go. I should be 37 when I succeeded to the chair, exactly the age when Florey had burst into Oxford. I had decided that, like Florey, I should set my staff searching out unfinished lines of research. But for the cure of cancers, not infections. That was the next exploration for man's restive mind.

I never had so much confidence in my science and myself as that New Year of 1946. Perhaps the Millennium being enacted by Mr Attlee's government had something to do with it. But cancer is still uncured. And I ended up as a professor as futile and frustrated as most of the others. My divorce was more permanently rewarding. I consulted a jolly, chubby, bearded solicitor just released from commanding a submarine, who peppered his advice with expressions about surfacing, crash diving and depth charging. 'There are three times the petitions as before the war,' he said with satisfaction. 'Couples who married in the Forces discover a terrible shock, living together for longer than a fortnight's leave at a time. Without the duty-free cigarettes and drinks, too. Got another target in your periscope?'

The following week I opened my Times to find that Sir Edward Tiplady was dead. I telephoned Archie, who seemed insistent that I join Elizabeth and himself at the funeral.

It was a dull and drizzling afternoon at a crematorium on the edge of a vast estate of little red-brick council houses at Shepherd's Bush. I went by Underground in my new utility suit. I arrived as Lady Tip in a mink coat was stepping out of Sir Edward's angular 1935 Rolls Royce. She had spent most of the war living in Claridge's Hotel, with several exiled kings and Alexander Korda.

Archie was looking gaunter and gloomier than ever, Elizabeth lovelier. She wore a smart black costume, the straight skirt reaching half way down calves in black nylon stockings, her dark hair in a small round black hat with a deep frill of stiff black muslin. The Packers were there, but said nothing about Clare, though I saw how they were bursting to. I barely remembered what my first wife looked like, until I found among my mother's effects a small photograph album annotated in her copperplate hand with the dates of unmemorable outings. It struck me how happy I looked, but perhaps I was obliging the camera

Archie offered me a lift in their small car, elaborately excusing his use of official petrol by some imminent meeting in the Ministry. 'I happened to come across one of your reports from Germany on industrial intelligence. Not at all badly done,' he observed to me, I thought most condescendingly. 'Cripps, Dalton and Bevin are very interested in that particular exercise, I hope you realize. I had a special meeting with them at the Board of Trade last August.'

'How are you enjoying revolutionizing the country?'

'I'd be enjoying it much more if my ulcer didn't play me up. It's all tremendously hard work. But tremendously exhilarating. This time we're setting methodically about building a just and equal society in Britain, instead of shouting vaguely about "A Country Fit For Heroes To Live In", like Lloyd George.'

'You don't seem to have got very far yet,' I told him. There was continued rationing of everything from bacon and butter to soap and shoes, a scarcity of everything else, and nightly gloom from street lights left unlit to save electricity.

'Of course we have. We've already the date for nationalizing the coal mines,' he told me, sounding offended.

He was dropping Elizabeth in Belgrave Square. 'Come in and have a cup of tea,' she invited me. Archie did not seem to object. 'Don't forget we're dining with Mummy at Claridge's,' she instructed him, as he drove off.

The flat was undamaged, and much as I remembered it from the beginning of the war. 'Do you know who poor daddy called in when he had his heart attack?' Elizabeth asked me. She entered the kitchen at the back, still with her frilled hat on. 'Lord Horder. He wouldn't have anyone else.'

'Your father was immeasurably good to me.'

She lit the gas under the kettle. 'At heart he was a pansy, wasn't he?'

'Yes.'

'Did he make advances towards you?

'Not physically. He would never have dared. And it would have repulsed him. He was far too sensitive.'

'I thought that pansies had just as much sexual drive towards each other as men and women?'

'That's true. But there're a number of men who love women and find physical sex repugnant.'

'Hand me that teapot, there's a darling.'

'Archie's left us alone in the flat? Without even a servant on the watch?'

'Why shouldn't he?'

'Isn't that typical of Archie. He always does what he thinks he should, rather than what he wants. It's a form of self-honesty, I suppose. And that's so much rarer than honesty towards other people.'

'It's why he became a socialist. Because he thought he should. He could have fulfilled himself much better by spending his money as dutifully as any other millionaire.'

'It's why he let me play the parasite on him so long. And kept that awful man Watson.'

'Very _cordon noir,_ wasn't he? Did you know that Watson was a crook? He'd done the most awful things, killed someone and escaped with his neck. He learnt how to cook in prison. I wonder what happened to him?'

'Probably got a job as catering officer in the Army.'

She laughed, pouring steaming water to heat the silver pot. 'It's why Archie married me. Because he saw it as exactly what he _should _do, as the best thing for both of us.'

'To save you from the unspeakable disgrace of marrying the butler's boy?'

'You should never have let me get away with it. You should have carried me off and married me when we escaped from France. I'd have gone willingly, darling, honestly.'

'I shied away because I was afraid of being hurt. Surely you of all people can understand how I grew up with an inferiority complex? It's kept me from a lot of delicious things in life. Perhaps even from claiming the fame for discovering penicillin.'

'I hope you don't take sugar? We've used all the ration.'

'You've never been happy with Archie, of course?'

'Not really.'

'If you would really have married me in 1940, why were you such a bitch to me before the war?'

'I was frightened. Don't forget, I'd grown up with you as unattainable to me as I to you. Then my mother bolting, and realizing that my father was a pansy. I felt insecure, so I played the bitch. A lot of girls do that. Women appear to be unfeeling, when they're only frightened of their feelings. During the war I wasn't frightened of anything at all. It was the same throughout the country, wasn't it? Everyone had something more important to think about than their complexes. All the madhouses were empty.'

'When's Archie likely to be back?'

'Hours. Poor dear, he thought he would spend every day bringing justice and light to the world. Instead, he passes all his time in a beastly office at the Elephant and Castle, arguing over details of pensions and things with lawyers.'