The Road from the Monument Read online

  In Gregory’s second year at Sheffield the sea-captain died. He was seventy-nine. His miserable pension died with him. It turned out that there was less than fifty pounds in the bank. Gate borrowed from Forbes — three hundred pounds. Whoelse would have lent it to him? It took him more than twenty years to pay it back, pound by squeezed-out pound, but it saw the boy through his course, to his degree.

  In the desert of my life, Gate thought, a spring of pure splendour. How, how what the imbeciles I live among would call my folly has been justified! A son of the body may disappoint, wound, betray. (Not, he reminded himself swiftly, that old Mott was in any danger.) A son in the spirit, never.

  He peered again at the photograph. It was a photograph of the Director of the Rutley Institute of Arts. Edgar Liggett, if he had even heard of it, would have asked, grinning, why a multi-millionaire should chuck away his money to buy paintings and manuscripts for the public, endow grand opera, support archaeologists, send young men, and by exception young women, to paint, write, research, in countries of their choice. He would grin a great deal more irreverently if anyone told him that Gregory Mott, writer, was a finer person than Gregory Mott the holder of a well-paid job.

  ‘Ah, but he is,’ Gate said aloud.

  Yet — he could admit it now — he had been obscurely disappointed in the great novel — one novel in six volumes — with its energy, elegance, urbanity, and its hero moving from witty atheism to faith, from, you might say, Voltaire or Russell to — who is our best-reputed lay believer? — T. S. Eliot? The truth is, he thought drily, I can’t feel that a novel, even his, is a serious work…. After the final volume, Gregory wrote to him — his letters were affectionate, but always short — ‘I’m trying to bring off something that will please you. Wait…’ He waited five years. Then he received A Man Sought by God. It was a reasoned and passionate recall to faith: his joy as he read it half suffocated him. His monument, he told himself, my son’s monument — whatever cynics say about it. Let them say, he thought with his flickering old smile, let them say.

  And I, I, he thought, have had my infinitesimal part in it.

  Twenty-seven years is a long time to live without once seeing the human being whose existence is your world, your life.

  Gregory left Danesacre when he was twenty-three — in 1929 — after two years of teaching in a night-school. He chose it deliberately, to have time to write — but the malicious eyes common in Danesacre saw him as ‘a bit of a crackpot, not likely to get far.’ Then something like a miracle happened. He inherited what seemed to Gate a large sum of money. He left Danesacre at once and had never lived there since.

  Seeing him off at the station, smiling, waving his shabby hat, Gate knew that he would never see his ‘son’ again.

  He kept Gregory’s books on the only shelf in his room. Since no one ever came there no one had seen them — or the long affectionate inscriptions on the title page. (Do I wish they had been seen? he derided himself.) A Man Sought by God opened on a paragraph he had marked: he had a solitary man’s habit of marking and commenting his books.

  As were the Three Kings, we are travelling, with no chance to turn back, towards an event. For them in their alert simplicity it was in the same moment a Birth and a death, the death of the only civilisation they knew. For us today it can be a birth only, or a death only, the birth or re-birth of a spiritually-centred world which looks on war and cannibalism with an identical horror, or universal death, the wiping-out of all life in an atomic war or by the corrosive effects on human bodies of preparing for it, or by some accident of these, strictly speaking, insane preparations. It cannot, as less than two thousand years ago it was, be both death and birth.

  He turned a number of pages and stopped at another of the underlined passages.

  A single question is worth our asking: Were we well-advised to get rid of God? Without Him are we less cruel — the gas-chambers, the torture rooms? — less anxious, less afraid — the approach of nuclear war? — less sick-nerved, tormented, bored, greedy, restless, bewildered, than we were? Briefly, are men without God kinder, happier, freer? The answer is set down plainly in any newspaper.

  In every generation a few men are intellectually self-supporting, able to live, calmly, face to face with the derisiveness and the absurdity of being a man. The remaining millions are not, and never will be. Never. By no possible evolution of the human brain. Was it, then, sensible to take God the Father from these pitiably dependent children?

  He laid the photograph out of sight in its drawer. In the same shallow drawer he kept the eighteen letters he had had from Gregory during twenty-seven years — something less than the four or five a year he had just been boasting of — single sheets of paper covered in fine writing, beautifully legible. With them was the card inviting him to Gregory’s wedding: he had married, in 1941, Beatrice Louisa Anne Blount, only daughter of Lady Louisa Ellerton and the late etc. etc.

  As he struggled to close the drawer, the note-case he had been given fell out of his pocket. He picked it up and for the first time looked to see what had been put inside. Fifty pounds. Five brand-new ten-pound notes.

  He knew exactly what he was going to do with the money.

  Chapter Two

  His happiness was so sharp that he walked about in it with infinite care, like a woman afraid of waking a sleeping child. His whole life lay shrivelled behind him, a scrap of paper he had crumpled and thrown away. What purpose had it served except to lead him, exalted, trembling a little, to this moment when he stood in the bedroom of a dingy London hotel, making himself ready to dine with the man who was more than his son? In the lowest possible voice he thought: My son in God.

  He finished brushing his jacket, and walked, avoiding the lift, of which he was very nervous, downstairs to the hideous lobby. Meekly obeying a notice in his room, he handed his key to the clerk. She glanced at him with some compassion. Old, small, shabby, with his air of almost feminine timidity, he looked so little capable of getting himself anywhere safely.

  ‘Would you like the porter to get you a cab?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, no, thank you.’

  ‘Do you know your way about London?’

  ‘Thank you, I have a map.’

  He would have been astonished to hear that anyone saw him as a pitiable figure.

  He was in a state of intoxicated happiness, still. He had arrived the night before, very late, with every sensation of a traveller touching land after a long voyage. The imprudence of spending money — all the money, except his old-age pension, he had in the world — on this trip, and the joy of behaving recklessly, gave him an illusion of unlimited energy. He woke with it, as though during sleep he had got back a younger self. As he dressed he avoided glancing at his ruined old body. After breakfast he set out to walk about London. He walked for a long time, without any sense of fatigue. It was a cool lively day, with enough September damp in the air to draw a soft finger over his face. Immense white clouds followed each other across the sky, and the perpetual change from sunlight to shadow deepened the feeling of instability he had, a joyful instability. He thought: I have never been happier.

  He had the impression of meeting, head on, a rushing surging force: it rose in the trees moving their branches in streets and squares and in Hyde Park, in every quiver of a leaf, in cranes, in chimneys belching smoke, in the torrent of cars, lorries, buses, in pigeons, in young girls, in a tramp older and more decrepit than any human being he had ever seen, in the great buildings running to the horizon, forests of houses, swarming across mile after mile, endless perspectives, wide, narrow, straight, twisting, each street fermenting with its own life — a great fountain of life springing towards the sky which itself was never still. After a time he had another impression — of a patience, active, like that of an ant-hill. It was different from the patience of Danesacre: that was slower, deeper, older. The excitement there, he thought, comes from outside, from voyages, from old and — except in the blood — forgotten invaders, a deep strong thread,
finer, subtler, more lasting than the excitement of these streets. He wondered whether Gregory were at all conscious of the difference.

  After a time he began to be, not tired, but sated. Luckily, no one spoke to him. He was not at ease with strangers.

  Gregory had invited him, if he felt like it, to come and see over the Institute that afternoon. He found Rutley House easily enough, a big house in Park Lane, imposing outside, even more imposing — intimidating — inside. He ventured into the entrance hall — black and white marble, chandeliers, paintings, a Maillol, an Epstein — with a glimpse through a pillared opening of another immense room. He knew that upstairs, if he could have seen himself walking up the magnificent staircase, there were lecture rooms, a theatre, a concert room, a library of first editions and manuscripts, heaven knew what else — as well as Gregory himself. A young woman advanced towards him from one of the rooms at the back of the hall. His courage failed: he turned and fled. In any case, he said to himself when he was outside, since I am going to dine with him in his own house, it will be better to see him there first. Much better.

  He fingered Gregory’s letter. He knew it by heart… a small intimate dinner: my wife, her brother, two close friends. One of them — Lambert Corry — you know already…

  He had a clear memory of Lambert Corry as a very young boy, thin, sallow, sharp-featured — apart from his intelligence, the very last person he would have expected Gregory to care for. Yet they were the closest possible friends, inseparable at school. They left for the university the same day — different universities…. It gave Gate an unkind pleasure to reflect that not a single person in Danesacre would, then, have laid a bet on Gregory; the odds were so obviously and heavily in Lambert’s favour: not only was he the sounder scholar, less erratic and harder-working, but he had money behind him; he went to Oxford and in due course into the civil service. An infinitely more respectable and promising start than Gregory’s in a night-school in Danesacre. But Gregory had out-run him. Far, far.

  Lambert was now Deputy-Director of the Rutley Institute. It was Gregory who appointed him.

  Gregory’s house was within easy walking distance of Rutley House — on the north side of Hyde Park — a tall white-fronted house of a certain age and charm. Gate was shown into a drawing-room on the second floor, an immense room, the width of the house. It might have abashed him, if he had seen anything in it except Gregory. He thought foolishly: He has aged. Then he saw that it was the same face. The same fine profile and pale lips, curving and flat. He had kept his young looks and added a masculine dignity, carrying his head — it still seemed a little too large — well on a spare strong body. His voice had changed least. Joy filled Gate, an almost stupid tenderness and gratitude.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ Gregory said warmly.

  ‘It’s you, is it?’ Gate croaked.

  Gregory smiled. ‘Yes, it’s been too many years. I’m glad you’ve come, at last.’

  ‘I’m very happy.’

  ‘Not more than I am. I hoped you would look in this afternoon.’

  ‘Rutley House? No. Too grand. I did put my nose in.’

  ‘If I’d known when you were coming, I would have come downstairs and waited for you. My room isn’t quite so grand.’

  Gate felt a trace of stiffness in him behind the charm exercised as simply as always, simply and naturally. Could he be feeling shy, too? There could be no doubt he was pleased, and moved. Not as Gate was moved — that would not have been possible or natural.

  ‘No,’ Gate said. ‘I wanted to see you here, at home.’

  Looking round, he had an impression of almost inconceivable luxury. He noticed details: two long yellow sofas facing each other at the ends of a fireplace so elaborate in its decoration that he was reminded of an altar; rugs and a carpet that even his ignorance knew must be priceless; great looking-glasses, a number of paintings, the carved figures and foliage of a bureau. There were five very long windows. The view from them struck him. In the early dusk, towers and domes, shadowy, the colour of heliotrope, floated above the mist stretched along the other, the south side of the Park; in this light, trees had the gleam and stillness of metal; from the roof of a vast building in Park Lane, a little beyond Rutley House, a crane like the antenna of a gigantic insect explored a desert of saffron and pigeon-grey clouds. The vermilion of a row of telephone kiosks at the other side of the street made a gash in the dun half-light: behind them grey honeyless swarms clung to the speakers gesticulating inside the entrance to the Park. A ceaseless traffic noise, surf rolling against rocks, was audible through the closed windows, with torn rags of singing, and the whining voice of a hawker.

  Gregory touched his arm. ‘Now you must talk to my wife. Beatrice, this is my oldest and very dear friend. You know everything about him and what I owe to him and his kindness to a little nobody, but you can’t know how much.’

  ‘I did very little,’ Gate said.

  ‘My husband doesn’t think so, and I’m sure he’s right.’

  ‘I wasn’t able to do a great deal.’

  ‘You did far more than anyone else,’ Gregory said.

  She looks very much older than Gregory, thought Gate. How old is she? Not more than three or four years older. Say, fifty-three…. Young, she might have been handsome. She had a fine pointed nose, eyes of a deep rather staring blue, from which she looked fixedly, as though trying to pin down the person she was speaking to. Her voice, too, was harsh, but curiously not unpleasant. She meant, he thought, to be affable, even very affable. The effect was of a condescension so unconscious that she might have been patting an animal. He did not like her, but she intimidated him. He did what he could, by meeting her glance sharply, to hide it.

  ‘Gregory was so well worth helping,’ he said. ‘You can believe that, can’t you?’

  ‘I believe anything.’ She turned her head suddenly and stiffly, like a parrot in a temper, and spoke to her husband. ‘Except that there was ever a time when you thought of yourself as a nobody.’

  She was smiling, but Gate felt that she had meant to prick. Gregory’s attentive air did not change. When she moved, one of her cushions had slipped. He put it carefully back, behind her head. ‘Is that comfortable?’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  He turned to Gate, at the same time pulling towards them a man as tall or taller than himself, who had been standing, lounging, against one of the sofas. ‘My brother-in-law. Arthur Blount.’

  Gate had spent some time in the public library in Danesacre, tracing what he could about Gregory’s family-in-law. He knew that the Hon. Arthur Blount was two or three years older than his sister; was an amateur musician, and a philosopher who had written a book on Categories of Deism of which (he was not surprised) the library did not possess a copy. There was something of the elder statesman, something of the don, and rather more of the lily of the field about him. He held out a noticeably beautiful hand, long, narrow, delicate. ‘I’m delighted to find you here, Mr. Gate. My sister and I have wanted to meet you.’ His handshake was brief and very languid.

  ‘You’re very kind,’ Gate said.

  ‘Gregory tells me that you trained his ear so strictly that he feels guilty if he writes a clumsy sentence. I can well believe it.’

  ‘He had naturally a good ear.’

  ‘Ah. But it needed training — surely?’

  He means, thought Gate, to be kind. His affability had a certain likeness to his sister’s, but there was a difference; he had more sweetness, more charm. Though careless, his friendliness seemed genuine. Gate thought wryly: It’s one of my worst faults that I can’t talk in any easy way to a man who is more intelligent, better-educated, better-bred, than myself…. This might be vanity. It was not only vanity. What, he thought, have I to give such a man?

  The only other person in the room had been standing with his back to it, stooping to look closely at the china in a recess in the farthest wall. He turned and came forward, with the long graceless slouching step Gate remembered, an arm stuck out t
o its full length in front of him, shoulders so pulled together and arched that they were almost deformed. Lambert Corry.

  His smile exaggerated the cracks scored in his lean face and the brightness of his little eyes. ‘Well, my dear Gate? It’s good to see you.’

  For a man I saw last when he was a pustular youth, he is too familiar, Gate thought.

  Like Gregory’s wife, he seemed very much older than Gregory. Yet I doubt if there are more than a few days between them, thought Gate. And he is as ugly as ever…. His long nose appeared longer; it had acquired a twist to the left as though to watch what was going on at that side; the thin fold of his mouth was prolonged by deep lines starting from this grotesque nose; the teeth he showed when he smiled were ridiculously too large and even; he was lean and slack-bodied, his bones and such flesh as hung on them making an odd impression of complete incoherence. Not, Gate reflected, that he ever had any charm, not even the brief grace of any young animal. Never, even in childhood, was he capable of giving himself suddenly, as the least friendly child will sometimes. It may not have been his fault. His parents were strict even for Danesacre, and savagely pious and ignorant…. Ashamed, he reminded himself that Gregory liked and had chosen the graceless fellow.