The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(264)

‘Then,’ said Michael, with a sigh, ‘there’s nothing in this scheme that appeals to you, sir?’

‘I will ask my wife,’ answered Mr Montross, also with a sigh. ‘Good-night, gentlemen. Let me write to you.’

The two Monts moved slowly towards Mount Street in the last of the twilight.

‘Well?’ said Michael.

Sir Lawrence cocked his eyebrow.

‘An honest man,’ he said: ‘it’s fortunate for us he has a wife.’

‘You mean –?’

‘The potential Lady Montross will bring him in. There was no other reason why he should ask her. That makes four, and Sir Timodiys a “sitter”; slum landlords are his bêtes noires. We only want three more. A bishop one can always get, but I’ve forgotten which it is for the moment; we must have a big doctor, and we ought to have a banker, but perhaps your uncle, Lionel Charwell, will do; he knows all about the shady side of finance in the courts, and we could make Alison work for us. And now, my dear, good-night! I don’t know when I’ve felt more tired.’

They parted at the corner, and Michael walked towards Westminster. He passed under the spikes of Buckingham Palace Gardens, and along the stables leading to Victoria Street. All this part had some very nice slums, though of late he knew the authorities had been ‘going for them’. He passed an area where they had ‘gone’ for them to the extent of pulling down a congery of old houses. Michael stared up at the remnants of walls mosaicked by the unstripped wallpapers. What had happened to the tribe out-driven from these ruins; whereto had they taken the tragic lives of which they made such cheerful comedy? He came to the broad river of Victoria Street and crossed it, and, taking a route that he knew was to be avoided, he was soon where women encrusted with age sat on doorsteps for a breath of air, and little alleys led off to unplumbed depths. Michael plumbed them in fancy, not in fact. He stood quite a while at the end of one, trying to imagine what it must be like to live there. Not succeeding, he walked briskly on, and turned into his own Square, and to his own habitat with its bay-treed tubs, its Danish roof, and almost hopeless cleanliness. And he suffered from the feeling which besets those who are sensitive about their luck.

‘Fleur would say,’ he thought, perching on the coat-sarcophagus, for he, too, was tired, ‘that those people having no aesthetic sense and no tradition to wash up to, are at least as happy as we are. She’d say that they get as much pleasure out of living from hand to mouth (and not too much mouth), as we do from baths, jazz, poetry and cocktails; and she’s generally right.’ Only, what a confession of defeat! If that were really so, to what end were they all dancing? If life with bugs and flies were as good as life without bugs and flies, why Keating’s powder and all the other aspirations of the poets? Blake’s New Jerusalem was, surely, based on Keating, and Keating was based on a sensitive skin. To say, then, that civilization was skin-deep, wasn’t cynical at all. People possibly had souls, but they certainly had skins, and progress was real only if thought of in terms of skin!

So ran the thoughts of Michael, perched on the coat-sarcophagus; and meditating on Fleur’s skin, so clear and smooth, he went upstairs.

She had just had her final bath, and was standing at her bedroom window. Thinking of – what? The moon over the Square?

‘Poor prisoner!’ he said, and put his arm round her.

‘What a queer sound the town makes at night, Michael. And, if you think, it’s made up of the seven million separate sounds of people going their own ways.’

‘And yet – the whole lot are going one way.’

‘We’re not going any way,’ said Fleur, ‘there’s only pace.’

‘There must be direction, my child, underneath.’

‘Oh! of course, change.’

‘For better or worse; but that’s direction in itself.’

‘Perhaps only to the edge, and over we go.’

‘Gadarene swine!’

‘Well, why not?’

‘I admit,’ said Michael unhappily, ‘it’s all hair-triggerish; but there’s always common sense.’

‘Common sense – in face of passions!’

Michael slackened his embrace. ‘I thought you were always on the side of common sense. Passion? The passion to have? Or the passion to know?’

‘Both,’ said Fleur. ‘That’s the present age, and I’m a child of it. You’re not, you know, Michael.’

‘Query!’ said Michael, letting go her waist. ‘But if you want to have or know anything particular, Fleur, I’d like to be told.’