The Book And The Brotherhood

They had been arguing now for nearly an hour. Everything about the argument upset Gerard. Rose and Gulliver were both surprisingly venomous, they seemed to be consumed by personal hatred for Crimond. Gulliver detested Crimond because (and Gull had told Gerard this) Crimond had once snubbed him savagely at a public meeting. But he also hated what he took to be Crimond's theories, and was speaking from he heart in defence of ardently held political convictions. Gulliver, riffling his dark oily hair back with his hand and opening his golden brown eyes defiantly wide and expanding the nostrils of his aquiline nose, looked spirited, distinctly younger and more interesting. At one point Gerard smiled at him and received a signal of gratitude from the brown eyes. Gerard then felt guilty and thought, I must help that boy, does he blame me, I hope not. Rose's emotion (she was quite flushed with indignation) Gerard attributed not only to strong political principles, especially concerning secret societies and terrorism, but also to herbelief, of which he had often been made aware but on which he had never commented, that Crimond was Gerard's enemy and might some day do him harm. Also involved were Rose's deep feelings about Jean, Rose felt anger with, and fear for, her life-long friend and blamed Crimond for both of these distressing sensations. Gerard had not discussed this matter with her either. Is Crimond my enemy? Gerard wondered. It was an unpleasant idea. Gerard had also been upset, during the argument, by Jenkin's quiet determination to excuse Crimond. It was some time since Gerard had had a really detailed discussion of' politics with Jenkin. He had always assumed that their views on this matter more or less coincided. Supposing he were now to discover, and feel obliged to pursue, some really serious and disturbing difference of opinion? This possibility of a damaging breach was instantly transformed in his mind into the image of Jenkin somehow defecting to Crimond. But this was, must be, unthinkable. Gerard was more immediately annoyed by the aggressive atmosphere in which he was being driven to go and 'have it out' with the rascal.

They were sitting at the round rosewood table in Rose's flat which overlooked a little square garden enclosed by railings. Between bare branches of trees, before Rose had pulled the curtains, the lighted windows of houses opposite made a pattern of golden rectangles. Snow was still slowly falling. It was now after five o'clock and the lamps were on in Rose's sitting room. It was warm in the flat and their overcoats and umbrellas, now dry and unfrozen, were piled upon the Jacobean chest in the hall. Rose's flat was comfortable, a bit shabby, full of a miscellany of things which had come from her maternal grandfather's house in Ireland. The 'fine' stuff, the Waterford glass, the Georgian silver, the pictures by Lavery and Orpen, Rose had given to her cousins in Yorkshire after Sinclair's death, at a time when she felt dead herself and wanted to throw away all the things that might have lived in her brother's house and belonged to his children, to strip herself of all those insidious small reminders, the terrible details, leaving but one great comprehensive pain. That had been before she had found herself, so miraculously, in bed with Gerard. We were suffering from shock, she thought, we were broken and not put together, we were half made of wood like puppets not quite changed into real people. It was something not quite real and for him, she felt, forgettable like a dream. Did he remember, she even wondered? If only it, that, could have happened earlier – but it couldn't – or later – but it didn't. It was several years before Rose really wanted to acquire anything, even clothes, for herself. Her remaining pieces of furniture, mainly from Ireland where she now had no close relations, were handsome enough but un-looked-after, imperfect, damaged, scuffed, stained, even broken. The mahogany sideboard was scratched, the Davenport lacked a foot, the rosewood table had wine-glass rings, the Jacobean chest in the hall upon which the thawing coats were enjoying the warmth of the central heating had lost a side panel which had been replaced by plywood. Rose had once meant to have the bathroom carpeted and the curtains cleaned. She had meant to have the furniture 'seen to', but she kept putting it off because her life always seemed so provisional, a waiting life, not settled like other people's. Now it was probably too late to bother. Neville and Gillian, the children of her cousins, the heirs, sometimes chided her for not having the table properly French polished and the chest restored. The young people cared about these things. They would be theirs one day.

`I wonder if he's actually mad,' said Rose.

`Of course not,' said Jenkin, 'if we get obsessed with his Shcrecklichkeit and simply call him crazy we won't think about what he says -'

`He's on the side of the evil in the world,' said Rose. 'He's a bully, and I ^hate bullies. He's dangerous, he'll kill someone.'

`Rose, calm down. We were all Marxists once -'

`So what, Gerard – and I wasn't! He's a conspirator. I don't believe he's a solitary thinker, or that he belongs to sonic dotty little group – I think he's a dedicated underground communist.'

`I'm not just blindly defending him,' said Jenkin, 'I don't know exactly what he thinks, if I did I'd probably hate it, but we must find out. He's gone on thinking about it all and we haven't, we must give him that -'

`That's a damn silly argument -!'

`Shut up, Gull, let me talk. Crimond has worked, he's tried to put something together. He believes, or he believed, that he could make some sort of synthesis -'

`The book that the age requires!'

`And we didn't just laugh at him in those days.'

`There can be no such book,' said Gulliver.

`All right, if we think that now, we should ask ourselves why! We’ve lost a lot of confidence since then. Our heroes, dissidents who fight tyrannies and die in prisons, are enabled by history to be soldiers for truth. We are not – I mean quite apart from not being brave enough, we aren't martyred for our opinions in ^this country. The least we can do is try to think about our ^society and what's going to happen to it.'

Gerard murmured, 'Yes, but -'

`Crimond says it's the end of our society,' said Rose. 'He said he wanted to destroy 'that world', meaning our world.'

`I don't see what stops us from being heroes too,' said Gull, except bloody ^cowardice of course.'

`I think <sup>Cri</sup>mond is a lone wolf,' Jenkin went on, `I think he's really a romantic, an idealist.'

`Utopian ^Marxism leads straight to the most revolting kinds of ^repression!' said Gull. 'The most important fact of our age is the ^wickedness of Hitler and Stalin. We mustn't tolerate any stuff which suggests that communism is really fine if only it can be done properly!'

`Don't be cross with me,' said Jenkin. 'I was going on to say that at least Crimond's sort of Marxism is utilitarian, he cares about suffering and poverty and injustice. It's like the Catholic church in South America. Suddenly people begin to feel that nothing matters except human misery.'

‘He wants to destroy our democrac^y and have one-party government,' said Rose, 'that's scarcely the way to fight injustice!'

`Rose is right,' said Gulliver. 'Democracy means you accept disagreement and imperfection and bloody-minded individualism. Crimond hates the idea of the individual, he hates the idea of being incarnate, he's a puritan, he's not a bit romantic, he's something new and awful. He praises horror films because they show that behind cosy bourgeois society there's something violent and disgusting and terrible which is more real!'

‘I think it's time to adjourn this meeting,' said Gerard. ‘We've talked enough, everyone's said what he thinks several times over -' Jenkin was looking upset, Rose as if she might burst into tears.

`We ought to have it out with him,' said Gulliver, 'at least someone should. Bags I not.'

`And not me,' said Jenkin.

`Gerard must go, of course,' said Rose.

`All right, I'll see him,' said Gerard, 'at least we've decided something.'

`Who'll have a glass of sherry?' said Rose.

The^y all got up. Jenkin said he must go at once. He looked at Gerard and a telepathic message passed between them to the effect that neither was cross with the other. Gulliver, who was less telepathic and was