– if we had any reasonable pretext, as on that night, we went and looked at them with our present eyes.
Margaret had asked for bitter, which she rarely drank nowadays. The pub was humming with background music, in the corner lights on a pin-table flashed in and out, all new since our time. But then we had not noticed much, except ourselves.
She gazed round, and smiled again. She said: ‘Well, what’s it going to be like tonight?’
We hadn’t the vestige of an idea. The week before I had received a letter in a beautiful italic hand that once had been so familiar, when I used to read those minutes of Rose’s, lucid as the holograph itself. The letter read:
My dear Lewis, It is a long time since I said goodbye to you as a colleague, but I have kept in touch with your activities from a distance. When I read your work, I feel that I know you better than during our period together in the service: that gives me much regret. It is unlikely that you could have heard, but I have recently remarried. It would give us both much pleasure if you and your wife could spare us an evening to come to dinner. [There followed some dates to choose from.] I have retired from all public activities, and so you will be doing a kindness if you can manage to come.
Yours very sincerely,
Hector Rose
In the years when I had worked under Rose in Whitehall, and they were getting on for twenty, I had never met his wife. It was known that he lived right at the fringe of Highgate: when he entertained, which wasn’t often, he did so at the Athenaeum: there was no mention of children: he kept his private life locked up, as though it were a state secret. Underneath his polite, his blindingly polite manners, he was a forbidding man, in the sense that no one could come close. He was as tough-minded as any of the civil-service bosses, and I came to admire his sheer ability more, the longer I knew him. But that facade, those elaborate manners – they were so untiring, so self-invented, often so ridiculous, that one felt as though one were stripping off each onion-skin and being confronted by a precisely similar onion-skin underneath. There were those who thought he must be homosexual. I couldn’t have guessed. By this time he was sixty-six, and reading his letter Margaret and I decided that he must have married a second time for company (I remembered reading a bare notice of the death of the first wife, with the single piece of information that she, like Rose himself, had been the child of a clergyman). Otherwise, the only inference we could draw came from his last sentence. Rose used words carefully, as a master of impersonal draftsmanship, and that sounded remarkably like a plea. If so, it was the only plea I had ever known him make. He was the least comfortable of companions, but no one was freer from self-pity.
So, as Margaret and I walked, with our own perverse nostalgia, across the end of the square, past the church and the white scarred planes, along the street for a few hundred yards, we couldn’t imagine what we were going to. When we came outside the house itself, it was like the one that I had lived in towards the end of the war, under the eye and landladyship of the ineffable Mrs Beauchamp: a narrow four-storey building, period latish nineteenth century, ramshackle, five bells flanking the door with five name-cards beside them. Rose’s was the ground-floor flat: it couldn’t be more than three or four rooms, I was reckoning as I rang the bell. It was another oddity that Rose should live in this fashion. He had no private means, he might not have earned much since he retired from the Department, but his pension would be over £3000 a year. That didn’t spread far by this date, but it spread farther than this.
But, when he opened the door, all was momentarily unchanged. Strong, thick through the shoulders, upright: his preternatural youthfulness had vanished in his fifties, but he looked no older than when I saw him
Margaret had asked for bitter, which she rarely drank nowadays. The pub was humming with background music, in the corner lights on a pin-table flashed in and out, all new since our time. But then we had not noticed much, except ourselves.
She gazed round, and smiled again. She said: ‘Well, what’s it going to be like tonight?’
We hadn’t the vestige of an idea. The week before I had received a letter in a beautiful italic hand that once had been so familiar, when I used to read those minutes of Rose’s, lucid as the holograph itself. The letter read:
My dear Lewis, It is a long time since I said goodbye to you as a colleague, but I have kept in touch with your activities from a distance. When I read your work, I feel that I know you better than during our period together in the service: that gives me much regret. It is unlikely that you could have heard, but I have recently remarried. It would give us both much pleasure if you and your wife could spare us an evening to come to dinner. [There followed some dates to choose from.] I have retired from all public activities, and so you will be doing a kindness if you can manage to come.
Yours very sincerely,
Hector Rose
In the years when I had worked under Rose in Whitehall, and they were getting on for twenty, I had never met his wife. It was known that he lived right at the fringe of Highgate: when he entertained, which wasn’t often, he did so at the Athenaeum: there was no mention of children: he kept his private life locked up, as though it were a state secret. Underneath his polite, his blindingly polite manners, he was a forbidding man, in the sense that no one could come close. He was as tough-minded as any of the civil-service bosses, and I came to admire his sheer ability more, the longer I knew him. But that facade, those elaborate manners – they were so untiring, so self-invented, often so ridiculous, that one felt as though one were stripping off each onion-skin and being confronted by a precisely similar onion-skin underneath. There were those who thought he must be homosexual. I couldn’t have guessed. By this time he was sixty-six, and reading his letter Margaret and I decided that he must have married a second time for company (I remembered reading a bare notice of the death of the first wife, with the single piece of information that she, like Rose himself, had been the child of a clergyman). Otherwise, the only inference we could draw came from his last sentence. Rose used words carefully, as a master of impersonal draftsmanship, and that sounded remarkably like a plea. If so, it was the only plea I had ever known him make. He was the least comfortable of companions, but no one was freer from self-pity.
So, as Margaret and I walked, with our own perverse nostalgia, across the end of the square, past the church and the white scarred planes, along the street for a few hundred yards, we couldn’t imagine what we were going to. When we came outside the house itself, it was like the one that I had lived in towards the end of the war, under the eye and landladyship of the ineffable Mrs Beauchamp: a narrow four-storey building, period latish nineteenth century, ramshackle, five bells flanking the door with five name-cards beside them. Rose’s was the ground-floor flat: it couldn’t be more than three or four rooms, I was reckoning as I rang the bell. It was another oddity that Rose should live in this fashion. He had no private means, he might not have earned much since he retired from the Department, but his pension would be over £3000 a year. That didn’t spread far by this date, but it spread farther than this.
But, when he opened the door, all was momentarily unchanged. Strong, thick through the shoulders, upright: his preternatural youthfulness had vanished in his fifties, but he looked no older than when I saw him
Similar Books
