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.Only half an hour ago, driving through the free night streets.He had remembered Mark acting at random, walking out of an examination because it was all too stupid: acting as though he didn’t care about past or future, just moved by pure free will.He had often shown a strength of resolve, and no one could tell where it came from.For the first time in his life, Stephen had been plunged into one of those paranoias, paranoias of secrecy, which come to some, perhaps to most, in crises, especially in claustrophobic crises: when one can read anything into anyone around one, including those one has loved for a lifetime: when one has no faith in one’s instinct or one’s mind, or when they seem not to exist.With an effort he had controlled himself.How much an effort he had made, Mark, trying to reach him across the smeared and shiny table, did not realize.As it was, he felt compassion for what the other man was going through: and also, but that he was used to, respect for the nature underneath.‘No,’ said Stephen roughly, as though cutting off someone else’s useless thoughts.‘We must find out who it is.’For Mark, it would have seemed silly, and also unfeeling, to mention Tess’ name.Or to make more jokes about themselves.The sooner they had some ground solid beneath them, the less helpless they would be.‘So there are four possibilities,’ said Mark, with flat common sense.‘Just four.’Stephen gave a nod of recognition.After a moment, he said: ‘That includes Neil.Is he a possibility?’‘What do you think?’‘Could anyone act as well as that?’‘Whoever it is,’ said Mark, ‘someone is acting pretty well.’Yet each of them found it difficult, or perverse, to concentrate a suspicion upon Neil.They didn’t so much like him: he was a colleague and ally, not a friend: but in two years they had never seen – not even Mark, so observant of people round him – the slightest sign of deviating from his commitment.In fact, that was for some the forbidding thing about him.And also both Stephen and Mark were with Neil at a moral disadvantage.It was an old story, which other middle-class young men, taking part in a rebel movement, had known long before they did.In a sense, they were lucky: but they were also on their own: they had only their own will or conscience to impel them: while Neil – so they felt and so did he – had the force of his own people behind him.When he talked about the poor there was nothing artificial about it.He could harangue them about class hatred, and it wasn’t pretended: it was the hatred that he felt for their own class.In theory they had learned, long before they met him, that you could change nothing without the Neils and the masses for whom the Neils were speaking.Were the Neils really speaking for the masses? In detachment that might appear romantic.When they met Neil in the flesh, it seemed true.Stephen, much less than Mark, wasn’t at all humble: but there was no doubt that, working in their cause alongside Neil, he had sometimes felt more humble – or more awkward, with an outsider’s inferiority – than he had ever done.It was the same with ‘little Bernie’.Bernard, much colder and more intellectual than Neil: he didn’t talk about any personal suffering, yet he must have had it.In this home town of Stephen’s and Mark’s, there had never been many Jews, nor, so far as the two of them knew, much anti-semitism.They could only guess what it was like to be a poor Jew in the local back streets.Had he had his share among ‘the insulted and injured’? He gave no sign of it.Except by being so impregnably on the side of those who were.Stephen and Mark were thinking at the table (at the next one, drivers had been cursing, not at them, not at anything in particular, but so that they heard ‘fucking’ as often as at a smart artistic party) – he was acting from an experience different in kind from theirs, perhaps richer, more firmly based.Stephen could not allow a realistic suspicion about him, any more than about Neil.Occasionally Mark, less consistent than his friend, found a thought drifting back (could one rule out anyone?), but both of them found their attention narrowing, to the two whose origins were like their own.Emma? Lance? Emma – they couldnt believe it, except, as happened at moments, when universal suspiciousness flashed bright again.Not Emma.They had known her since she was a little girl.She could do almost anything, said Stephen, but not this.She could go to bed with anyone, and had with a good many.But not this.Mark, arguing against his intuition, said she might be getting tired of not conforming, she might be trying to find her way back.‘I don’t believe that,’ said Stephen.‘Do you?’ Mark shook his head.No, she might hanker after the past, in the long run, but it wouldn’t stop her.She’d be prostrating herself in front of progressive heroes, until her life’s end.To Stephen that sounded over-fanciful, but he said something simpler.She was an honest girl.Whatever she did, she didn’t lie.She had her own code.It might be a curious one, but she abided by it.She was a hundred per cent honest.‘Yes,’ said Mark in complete acquiescence.‘Which seems to leave Lance.’ In fact, except in fugues, it had been Lance of whom Stephen had been thinking all that night.He was no good, he said with savageness.It had been folly, blinding folly, ever to let him in.Stephen blamed himself.Lance was a layabout.All he wanted was sensation.They ought to have known that from the start.It rang strange to hear themselves speak bitterly of a companion: not only of one of the core, but even of an acquaintance of their own age, they hadn’t spoken like this.They could plan violent things, they could take risks: but among themselves they were curiously gentle in passing opinions, loth to criticize.But now that pattern, that protective and tender prudishness, had broken.‘Why would he do it?’ asked Mark.‘Does that matter?’‘He could be looking for another sensation, that might be enough.’Stephen was not ready to discuss his motives.He had to be seen tomorrow – no, today, for it was already two o’clock in the morning.Other people had to be talked to: some of these arrangements had been settled with Tess, and now Mark would take on others: they must have the whole operation clear by the afternoon: Stephen himself – as he had all along intended – would, in the morning, interrogate Lance.Yet even the clarity of decision, the prospect of action – Mark, himself borne up, was observing with concern – hadn’t settled his friend.Stephen’s voice had been firm, but the resonance had gone.Once more he was staring down at the formica, and the skim of milk on the cold coffee.Even Mark, who was no sort of coward, had to screw himself up to intrude.‘It needn’t be so bad,’ he said, half as though it were a question.Under the bleak light, the two heads, fair and dark, the two faces, one unlined and one indrawn, faced each other across the table.‘If you mean what we’re in for ourselves,’ said Stephen, ‘that’s the least of it.’He said it as if brooding to himself, with something like tired contempt.He might have been deceiving himself, or softening the truth.It was often the simplest and most selfish thoughts which weighed the most.Professionally, Stephen could have thought, he would live this one down.A decent scientist wasn’t going to be put out of action for ever.But he had never lived with a scandal.He didn’t know what it would be like.Perhaps he was more frightened than he recognized
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