Last Things Read Free

pushing the decanter runners round, after the women had left us. Well, one had to admit, there were considerable bonuses. The food in Diana’s time had always been skimpy, and usually dim. Not now. There used not to be enough to drink. Lester Ince, who remained a hearty and a kindly man, had taken care of that.
    Still, it seemed a slight difference of emphasis away from the Lester Ince who was a junior fellow of my old college only ten years before. He had written a highly regarded work on the moral complexities in Joseph Conrad: but his utterances, almost as soon as he was elected, had been somewhat unexpected. He had surveyed his colleagues, and decided that he didn’t think much of them. Francis Getliffe was a stuffed shirt. So was my brother Martin. The best college hock Lester firmly described as cat’s pee. The comfortable worldliness of Arthur Brown was even less to his taste. ‘I should like to spill the crap about this joint,’ someone reported him saying in the combination room: at that stage, he had a knack of speaking what he thought of as American demotic.
    As a result of this kind of trenchancy, he became identified as one of the academic spokesmen of a new wave. This was protest. This was one of the voices of progressive opinion. Well, there seemed a slight difference of emphasis now.
    To a good many, particularly to those who couldn’t help finding leaders and then promptly losing them, the conversation at Basset that weekend might have been disconcerting. This used to be one of the major political houses. A number of ministerial careers had been helped, or alternatively hindered, in Diana Skidmore’s drawing-room. It was possible that policies – though did any of us know how policies were really made, in particular the persons who believed they made them? – had at least been deviated. Basset was not a political house any longer. But, in spite or because of that, it had become far more ideological than it had ever been. Diana’s Tory ministers hadn’t indulged much in ideology: the Inces and their friends were devoted to it. The old incumbents didn’t talk about the Cold War: now, there were meals when the Basset parties talked of nothing else.
    That was election autumn, both in America and England. Ince’s wife thought that we were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the merits of Senator Goldwater. He mightn’t have everything, but at least he wasn’t soft on Communism. As for our general election, if the Conservatives didn’t come back, there was a prospect of ‘confiscatory taxation’, a subject on which Lester Ince spoke with poignant feeling.
    Once or twice we had a serious argument. Then I grew bored and said that we had better regard some topics as forbidden. Lester Ince was sad; he believed what he said, he believed that, if they listened, people of goodwill would have to agree with him. However, he was not only strong on hostly etiquette, he was good-natured; if the results of his political thinking put us out, then we ought to be excused from hearing them. ‘In that case, Lew,’ he said, with a cheerful full-eyed glint from his older incarnation, ‘you come to my study before you change, and we’ll have a couple of snifters and you can talk about the dear old place.’
    He meant the college, for which, though it had treated him well, he still felt a singular dislike. In actual truth, he had altered much less than others thought, less even than he thought himself. Protest? Others had been sitting in the places he wanted. Now he had settled his ample backside in just those places, and it was for others to protest. When young men seemed to be rebelling against social manners, I used to think, it meant that they would, in the end, not rebel against anything else.
    In the train, Margaret and I agreed that we each had a soft spot for him. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that one saw an old acquaintance living like a millionaire. As the taxi took us home from Waterloo, we were