The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(259)

Michael caught her at it

‘That’s jolly good,’ he said. ‘You ought to keep up your water-colours, old thing.’

Rigid, as if listening for something behind the words, Fleur answered: ‘Sheer idleness!’

‘What’s the fruit?’

Fleur laughed.

‘Exactly! But this is the soul of a fruit-tree, Michael – not its body!’

‘I might have known,’ said Michael ruefully. ‘Anyway, may I have it for my study when it’s done? It’s got real feeling.’

Fleur felt a queer gratitude. ‘Shall I label it “The Uneatable Fruit”?’

‘Certainly not – it looks highly luscious; you’d have to eat it over a basin, though, like a mango.’

Fleur laughed again.

‘Steward!’ she said. And, to Michael bending down to kiss her, she inclined her cheek. At least he should guess nothing of her feelings. And indeed, the French blood in her never ran cold at one of whom she was fond but did not love; the bitter spice which tinctured the blood of most of the Forsytes preserved the jest of her position. She was still the not unhappy wife of a good comrade and best of fellows, who, whatever she did herself, would never do anything ungenerous or mean. Fastidious recoilings from unloved husbands of which she read in old-fashioned novels, and of which she knew her father’s first wife had been so guilty, seemed to her rather ludicrous. Promiscuity was in the air; a fidelity of the spirit so logical that it extended to the motions of the body, was paleolithic, or at least Victorian and ‘middle class’. Fullness of life could never be reached on those lines. And yet the frank paganism, advocated by certain masters of French and English literature, was also debarred from Fleur, by its austerely logical habit of going the whole hog. There wasn’t enough necessary virus in her blood, no sex mania about Fleur; indeed, hereunto, that obsession had hardly come her way at all. But now – new was the feeling, as well as old, that she had for Jon; and the days went by in scheming how, when she was free again, she could see him and hear his voice and touch him as she had touched him by the enclosure rails while the horses went flashing by.





Chapter Six



FORMING A COMMITTEE



IN the meantime Michael was not so unconscious as she thought, for when two people live together, and one of them is still in love, he senses change as a springbok will scent thought. Memories of that lunch, and of his visit to June, were still unpleasantly green. In his public life – that excellent anodyne for its private counterpart – he sought distraction, and made up his mind to go ‘all out’ for his Uncle Hilary’s slum-conversion scheme. Having amassed the needed literature, he began considering to whom he should go first, well aware that public bodies are centrifugal. Round what fine figure of a public man should he form his committee? Sir Timothy Fanfield and the Marquess of Shropshire would come in usefully enough later, but, though well known for their hobbies, they ‘cut no ice’ with the general public. A certain magnetism was needed. There was none in any banker he could think of, less in any lawyer or cleric, and no reforming soldier could be otherwise than discredited, until he had carried his reforms, by which time he would be dead. He would have liked an admiral, but they were all out of reach. Retired Prime Ministers were in too lively request, besides being tarred with the brush of Party; and literary idols would be too old, too busy with themselves, too lazy, or too erratic. There remained doctors, business men, governor-generals, dukes, and newspaper proprietors. It was at this point that he consulted his father.

Sir Lawrence, who had also been coming to South Square almost daily during Kit’s illness, focused the problem with his eye-glass, and said nothing for quite two minutes.

‘What do you mean by magnetism, Michael? The rays of a setting or of a rising sun?’

‘Both, if possible, Dad.’

‘Difficult,’ said his progenitor, ‘difficult. One thing’s certain – you can’t afford cleverness.’

‘How?’

‘The public have suffered from it too much. Besides, we don’t really like it in this country, Michael. Character, my dear, character!’

Michael groaned.

‘Yes, I know,’ said Sir Lawrence, ‘awfully out of date with you young folk.’ Then raising his loose eyebrow abruptly so that his eye-glass fell on to the problem, he added: ‘Eureka! Wilfred Bentworth! The very man – last of the squires – reforming the slums. It’s what you’d call a stunt.’

‘Old Bentworth?’ repeated Michael dubiously.

‘He’s only my age – sixty-eight, and got nothing to do with politics.’