The Good Apprentice Page 3

  ‘I couldn’t. It’s not — an experience — ’

  ‘Write a diary about it, about how you feel, you could use it for material later on.’

  Edward shook his head. His whole face was insipid, entirely changed, ugly with weakness. Looking at that change Harry thought, he’s very ill.

  ‘You’re making too much of it, see it in proportion, see it in perspective, you’re sick with self-pity, you want to wallow in guilt, in a way you’re enjoying it. It doesn’t matter so much. It doesn’t matter all that much what you do, personal responsibility is a sort of pretentious notion anyway, it’s a fiction, who do you think you are? There isn’t anything deep here, God isn’t watching you, your job is to make yourself function again, just get going, get back to college, get back to work anyway, and for Christ’s sake don’t let Thomas talk you into some sort of interesting psychological condition, that could go on forever. Edward, are you listening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘This is a small incident in your life, it’s almost nothing to do with you at all, you’ll see that later, all life is accidental, of course we blunder against each other, and there are wicked men, but you’re not one. Buck up, stop thinking about yourself, that’s what’s wrong, don’t let this business lodge in your soul, it isn’t anything, it isn’t deep, it isn’t a great spiritual drama, just shrug it off, toss it away, as if it were a bit of mud or a bit of ash or — ’ Harry, made increasingly irritable and upset by Edward’s silence, leaned forward and picked up a cinder from the grate. He dropped it hastily. It was extremely hot and had burnt his fingers. ‘Damn!’ He flapped his hand and blew upon it.

  Edward watched him with a faint gleam of interest.

  ‘Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased, pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow?’

  ‘No.’

  The first speaker was Harry Cuno, the second Thomas McCaskerville.

  The scene was the McCaskervilles’ dinner party at their house in Fulham, the little gathering which was ‘for’ the unfortunate Edward. Midge McCaskerville was in the kitchen, Thomas, Harry and Edward in the drawing room. Edward, glanced at occasionally by the other two, had taken a book from a shelf and was sitting in a corner pretending to read it. He had refused a drink. The room, Midge’s taste, for Thomas was unconscious of his surroundings, was brilliant with flowers, upon the curtains, upon the wallpaper, upon the oriental carpet, even in plaster wreaths upon the ceiling, as well as serenely and more ephemerally present in jugs and vases. Yet each flower knew its place, and the tall stiff brigades of yellow-eyed narcissi, whose perfume filled the room, did not put the discreet little wallpaper roses in any way out of countenance. Upon the walls here and there, stemming the floral tide, were airy views of Berkshire by Midge’s (and Chloe’s) deceased father, Cleve Warriston, a minor painter and follower of Paul Nash. Many lamps lit the still expectant scene. Willy Brightwalton, who loved Midge, was helping her in the kitchen. Ursula and Stuart, the remaining guests, had not yet arrived.

  Harry and Thomas stood by the fireplace upon an art deco rug embroidered with tulips. Primroses from Midge and Thomas’s country cottage crowded upon the mantelpiece. Outside, the east wind prowled, rattling the windows. The curtains were securely drawn. Harry and Thomas, standing close to each other, were conscious of a familiar beam of ambiguous emotion occasioned by proximity. They had known each other for a long time. Harry took a step back. He was dandyish in his bow tie, his broad calm fine-complexioned face (‘milk and roses’ as Chloe used to say), newly shaved, glowing with health. Thomas, whose ancestors were Jacobites and Rabbis, was thin, with a narrow dog-like jaw and cool blue eyes and a square-cut fringe of wiry light grey hair, and thick robust rectangular glasses which he was rarely seen without.

  ‘Why not?’ said Harry.

  ‘The patient must minister to himself.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course, call yourself a mediator, an enabler of the gods, what you like, but can’t you do something?’ Harry was by now so used to feeling that Edward did not hear what he said that he spoke as if the boy were absent.

  The door bell rang.

  ‘Midge will go,’ said Thomas in his high fastidious Edinburgh voice. A woman’s tones were heard. ‘That’s Ursula. Stuart will come?’

  ‘He said he would, so he will.’

  ‘What’s the latest?’

  ‘He wants to be a probation officer!’

  Stuart Cuno, four years older than Edward, had lately startled his family and friends by refusing to continue his education. Established as a graduate student with distinguished honours in mathematics, offered a coveted teaching post at a London college, he had announced that he was leaving the academic world in order to do ‘social work’.

  ‘Well, why not?’ said Thomas. ‘But what is it?’

  ‘Well, you should know, no mother, a neurotic stepmother, a father who preferred his brother — ’

  ‘I don’t mean that — ’

  ‘However well Stuart did, Edward was always the star, he was the charmer, he was the one they noticed — ’

  ‘I mean, what’s his idea?’

  ‘Some religious sect must have brainwashed him or something -’

  ‘Why shouldn’t he break out and help his fellow-men?’

  ‘It’s not just that, it’s his attitude, he’ll be barefoot in a brown robe next. If it were political I wouldn’t mind so much — ’

  ‘It’s not political?’

  ‘Only vaguely, like helping the under-privileged.’

  ‘Some mathematicians just lose their drive at that age.’

  ‘He was clearing out of maths anyway. He was doing some logic and philosophy stuff for his doctorate, something on Boole and Frege. I thought he was loving it.’

  Harry felt something cold touching his hand. He looked down and saw that it was a bowl of olives held by Meredith McCaskerville. Meredith was Thomas and Midge’s son aged thirteen. Meredith had straight fairish brownish hair like his mother, which he wore combed down in neat lines to his collar, and with a fringe like his‘father. Tonight he was jacketed and wearing a tie. He was a straightbacked dignified laconic boy. He did not look up at Harry but simply thrust the edge of the bowl against his hand. Harry was used to Meredith and fond of him, he appreciated his reticent style, he even imagined they had something of a secret understanding. ’No thanks, Meredith. Is it fun being a teenager?‘

  ‘Not much. There are salted almonds if you’d rather.’

  ‘No thanks. Are you looking forward to boarding school?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have some more of the mixture,’ said Thomas. They were drinking a blend of white port with Carpano and Noilly Prat with liberally added apple juice. Such gluey aperitifs, concocted by himself, were drunk, sometimes under protest, by Thomas’s guests.

  Meredith, who was never called ‘Merry’, was distinguished by a red wine-coloured birthmark upon his cheek, referred to by his father as ‘the sign of Dionysus’. Everyone continually told him how attractive it was. What Meredith thought was not known.

  Ursula Brightwalton came in. She was wearing a long stiff black satin evening skirt which made a noise like a small saw, and an old and visibly shabby Chinese jacket embroidered with dragons. As she often announced, she always dressed hastily in something easy. Her dark greying hair was cut in a sensible bob, and her clever thoughtful eyes peered merrily at the world. Her smirking facetious garrulous manner deceived only some. She was a handsome woman who usually looked like what she was, an able and popular general practitioner. Thomas had known her for a considerable time in a medical context (where they did not always agree) and more recently Willy had attracted Edward into his college. Ursula and Willy had a brilliant son Giles, a little older than Stuart, who was away winning extra laurels at an American university, where Willy was about to visit him.

  ‘Hello, Thomas, hello, Harry. What a frightful smell of flowers in here. Shouldn’t you open a window? People think flowers are good for them like they think sunlight is, a
great mistake. Good evening, Meredith, you’ve grown. Hasn’t he got a grown-up look? What a fine suit you’re wearing, all you need is a waistcoat and a watch chain. With a strawberry birthmark and a name like Meredith McCaskerville you can conquer the world. You’ll be Prime Minister. Don’t you think?’

  Meredith ignored this sally.

  ‘Such a soldierly child,’ said Ursula to Thomas, ‘so upright and self-contained. What does he want to do now when he grows up?’

  ‘He thinks now,’ said Thomas, ‘that he’d like to be an aeronautical engineer. He wants to reintroduce airships.’

  ‘He’ll make a fortune. And how are you, Harry dear?’

  ‘How do you think, with all this. In general I’m resting, like an actor.’

  ‘You are an actor, you always were. What a pity you didn’t get into politics, you could have used up all that restless ambition. Midge and Willy are in control in the kitchen, they don’t need me, can’t I have a drink, I’ve had a terrible day, whisky please, Thomas, not your sugary mixture. Isn’t Midge looking lovely in that new dress? No wonder she was voted London’s best-dressed woman.’

  Going to the drinks Thomas said, ‘She never made it to best-dressed woman, she was only a runner-up.’

  ‘He always puts her down,’ Ursula murmured to Harry.

  Meanwhile Meredith, picking up the salted almonds, was offering both bowls with outstretched hands to Edward. Edward, still in his corner, had shrunk as if in the process of some biological change, into a small animal. His lean head had become narrower and descended into a hole between his skinny shoulders, and he had drawn his long legs in against the chair. He clasped the book hard against his chest. His grieving mouth enacted a jerky smile like a little paroxysm and he shook his head. Meredith put the bowls down on the carpet and lightly caressed the sleeve of Edward’s jacket; then he picked them up again and placed them on the table and left the room.

  Ursula now noticed Edward. She flushed and put her hand up to the neck of her jacket. As shewent over to him he shrank into an even smaller compass. ‘Edward, how are you? Are you taking those pills I gave you? Are you eating? Harry, is he eating?’

  ‘Sort of,’ said Harry.

  ‘Edward, you must eat. I’ll come over and talk to you tomorrow. May I?’

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Edward in a dead voice.

  ‘Is he still staying in bed all day?’

  ‘Not so much.’

  ‘He must eat, he must. We must surround him with — we must surround him — oh dear — ’

  Midge McCaskerville came in followed by Willy Brightwalton. Midge was wearing a long straight blue and pink and white striped silk dress, with a poised undulating collar with smaller closer stripes of the same colours, and a suggestion of a train which slid sibillantly upon the formal tapestry of the carpet. With a flourish she whirled up the train revealing her fine legs in pink stockings, and laughed. Thomas stared at her as if he had never seen her before. Her copious fairish brownish hair, which contained many tinges, including red here and there, disposed itself in a decorous graceful mop about her head, tossed mane-like from time to time. She wore little but very careful make-up, whose boldest feature was the deep glossy red of the little fingernails upon her small hands. She rarely wore jewellery. Her eyes, a cordial gentle brown, seemed always to petition and persuade: like me, like me! Her face expressed an almost insistent sympathy. She was friends with everyone, and her little air of self-satisfied animation made people, even as they admired her beauty, smile a little. She had a perfect nose and was often photographed in profile in the ‘smartest woman’ days. Since then she had admittedly put on weight.

  Her self-appointed chevalier Willy was comfortably stout and bald. He continually, even in the middle of dinner, combed a long lock of his gingery hair over his bald patch, but as often the lock fell away, depending awkwardly over his ear, giving him a slightly mad look. Willy was famous for having, as a child, witnessed his father’s death, killed by a camel on a long-planned long-looked-forward-to visit to Egypt. The camel, perhaps mistaking Brightwalton senior for a driver who had ill-treated him, knocked him down and knelt on him. Willy also witnessed the shooting of the camel which happened soon after. When Ursula said ‘he thinks about it all the time’ she scarcely exaggerated. ‘He feels that camel kneeling on his heart.’ This tragic business had, in the callous hurly-burly of social life, become a joke, and people warned each other how important it was never to mention camels in Willy’s presence, and how mysteriously difficult it was to keep off the subject. Willy, clever, lazy, always anxious, always guilty before his pupils, was a Proust expert, but never managed to finish his great book. He disliked intellectual conversations which he would dreamily break off by murmuring his favourite saying, ‘Ah well — tout passe, toute casse, tout lasse.’ He had lately developed the notion, entertained in fact by no one else, that he was expected to take Edward with him to America so as to ‘distract him from his troubles’. Willy especially regarded Harry as having framed such a plan. With a glance now at Edward, whom he had greeted earlier and did not have to attend to now, Willy at once began explaining, ‘Pardon, gentles all, I’m afraid, I’ve told Midge, I can’t stay to dinner. I’ve got to go home and pack, I’m leaving for California tomorrow morning.’

  ‘So soon?’ said Thomas.

  ‘I have to go earlier, it’s because of Giles, he quite insists, it’s my first sabbatical for I don’t know how long, I’ve been looking forward to it so much — ’

  ‘It’s true,’ said Ursula, ‘he’s like a child waiting for his hols, Willy loves America, he feels liberated there like so many Englishmen, he’s longing to see Giles, how I wish I could go! And he must go and pack, he’s done nothing!’ Ursula looked indulgently upon Willy’s chaste passion for Midge, it seemed even to cause hersome satisfaction.

  ‘You’re lucky,’ said Harry, ‘no problems with Giles, he just goes on from one triumph to another. I wonder if you could ask him to write to Stuart and tell him not to be such a fool?’

  ‘Don’t go yet, have another drink,’ said Thomas.

  ‘I’m afraid Willy got onto the whisky in the kitchen,’ said Midge.

  Willy cast a glance of dread towards the terrible figure of suffering Edward. He hated it when his pupils had troubles. He always drank the detestable ‘mixture’ out of politeness. Thomas, perhaps out of some rabbinical ancestral puritanism, had made a positive rite of it. Midge caught Harry’s eye and smiled, then turned away to look at Edward. She went to him and with a flurry and a soft hiss of the striped dress knelt on one knee, and, with a gesture which resembled her son’s, touched his jacket and then laid her red-tipped fingers lightly upon the back of his hand. Edward shuddered and withdrew his hand, then forced a smile. Midge sighed and rose. ‘Edward, dear, do come and join us, have a drink.’ But the words were uttered tonelessly, without hope of effect, as she turned away.

  ‘Stuart is late,’ said Thomas.

  ‘He’s probably at a prayer meeting,’ said Harry.

  ‘But Stuart doesn’t believe in God,’ said Midge.

  ‘That doesn’t stop him. And to do him justice, I don’t really think it’s a sect, he’s doing it all on his own, he thinks he’s got a mission to mankind, he’s waiting for it all to start, he’s expecting the first miracle.’

  ‘I’ll have some jugs of water ready for him in the kitchen.’

  ‘I suppose he reads lots of oriental books like they all do,’ said Willy.

  ‘No, he doesn’t, he reads nothing, he doesn’t like any form of art, he hasn’t any friends, he just sits wrestling with himself, wondering what the purehearted young idealist does now!’

  ‘It’s an out-of-date question,’ said Midge.

  ‘He’s an out-of-date boy.’

  ‘You said once he wanted to be a soldier.’

  ‘That was ages ago, just symbolic, the idea of duty and obedience, and a life of monkish deprivation. He wants to be like Job, always in the wrong before God, only he’s got to
do it without God.’

  ‘Does he want martyrdom then?’ said Ursula.

  ‘I expect so. He’ll probably die young, in the sea or underneath a train or — ’

  ‘Not suicide?’

  ‘No, no, stupidly trying to save somebody’s life. He’s a retarded schoolboy.’

  ‘Stuart thinks before he laughs at a joke,’ said Midge, ‘and then if he does laugh, he laughs loudly like a child.’

  ‘No risqué jokes when he’s around!’

  ‘Is it true he’s taken an oath of celibacy?’ said Willy. ‘How’s it done?’

  ‘At his age it’s impossible,’ said Midge, ‘he just lacks confidence. I’ll find him a girl. He wants to draw attention to himself. It’s a cry for help.’

  ‘No, he takes it all seriously,’ said Harry.

  ‘All what?’ said Thomas.

  ‘About being good, being perfect!’

  ‘Well, I suppose it was meant to be — ’

  ‘Can he do anything for Edward?’ said Willy.

  ‘No, he’s too self-obsessed, he scarcely knows that Edward exists, and they never really got on — ’

  ‘I think Stuart was wrongly advised at the start,’ said Ursula, ‘don’t you agree, Willy? He ought to have done biological sciences. But really he’s all right, he’s just having a schoolboy religious crisis a bit late in the day, he always was a slow sort of chap.’

  ‘I suppose it’s nuclear war,’ said Midge, ‘the young say it hangs over us all.’

  ‘I confess I don’t notice it all that much,’ said Ursula, ‘but then I’m so busy.’

  ‘Stuart is more worried about computers,’ said Harry.

  ‘Computers?’ said Ursula. ‘But they’re man’s best friends. They’re invaluable in medicine.’

  ‘Harry, you’ve hurt your hand,’ said Midge. ‘It looks like a burn.’

  ‘It is a burn. What do you prescribe, Ursula?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Trying to bring home a point to Edward, I picked up a red hot coal.’

  ‘Was he impressed?’ said Midge.

  ‘Stuart has moved in on me, he arrived yesterday with all his stuff. He’s terminated his grant, and his digs, he didn’t have to, typical youthful selfishness at someone else’s expense. And of course Edward’s been at home since that business. I’m cooking for those two loutish boys now, and one’s a vegetarian!’