A Fairly Honourable Defeat Read Online Free PDF Page A

my darling wife. Don’t you?’
    ‘Yes, I do, Rupert. Angel! But we’re a special case, as we’ve already agreed, and we’re so unlike in some ways. Axel and Simon are so different. Axel must be a very difficult man to live with. He’s so gloomy and morose. And Simon is so sensitive and childlike and sort of pleasure-loving. I don’t mean this in a bad sense. And really, all queers do like trouble. I’ve never met one who didn’t.’
    ‘Any sentence beginning “All queers …” is pretty sure to be false! It’s like “All married men …” “All married men over forty deceive their wives”.’
    ‘Well, we know that’s false! But I’m sure Axel bullies him.’
    ‘Some people like to be bullied.’
    ‘I suppose they do. And of course he is so much younger than Axel. Thank heavens our relationship is democratic. I suspect they quarrel bitterly every night.’
    ‘You’ve no reason to think so, Hilda. And they might quarrel bitterly every night and still love each other.’
    ‘ We don’t quarrel every night, thank God. And if we did I would take it as evidence against the view that we loved each other.’
    ‘There are all kinds of marriages.’
    ‘You are incurably compassionate, Rupert.’
    ‘I should have said the trouble with those two was almost the opposite. They’re so wrapped up in each other they can hardly see the outside world at all.’
    ‘Talking about the institution of marriage and the procreation of children, I don’t suppose our son will honour us with his presence tonight?’
    ‘Naturally I asked him. Naturally he has not replied.’
    ‘He won’t come.’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Oh dear, Rupert—Are you going to write to Cambridge again?’
    ‘There’s nothing new to tell them. I must say, they’ve been very patient so far about Peter’s tantrums.’
    ‘How much does it matter, his not having done that first year exam?’
    ‘Not much—so long as he can be persuaded to go back in October. ’
    ‘He knows he doesn’t have to read classics. He could change to something else.’
    ‘It isn’t the subject he objects to, it’s the university!’
    ‘You’d think at his age Cambridge would be heaven. Nineteen, first year at the university, lots of friends—’
    ‘But there weren’t lots of friends, Hilda. I think young people don’t make friends nowadays the way we used to. Friendship’s out of fashion. When I was his age at Oxford I had hundreds of friends.’
    ‘And you’ve still got most of them. I know. If only at least he’d shown signs of having a girl friend. I hope he isn’t going to take after his uncle! Whatever made Cambridge go wrong for Peter? Well, we’ve asked ourselves that question often enough.’
    ‘I don’t think it was anything specific. Just a quite different view of the world which you and I can scarcely begin to imagine.’
    ‘I just don’t understand the modern young. I can’t see any conceivable merit in this dropping out, can you?’
    ‘They’ve got a sharper eye than we have for what’s rotten in this society.’
    ‘Young people have always had that. But it usen’t to affect their joie de vivre. We rejected society at his age, but it didn’t stop us from going to commem balls!’
    ‘We didn’t really reject it, Hilda. And sometimes joie de vivre can amount to irresponsibility and compromise. These kids want to register some total protest against a set-up where they see so much that’s bad. You must remember, Hilda, that Peter belongs to the first generation that can really envisage the end of the human race. And he belongs to the first generation that’s grown up entirely without God.’
    ‘We disbelieved in God. It didn’t turn us against the whole of creation.’
    ‘God was still around when we were young. It’s different now.’
    ‘Then let him join the Communist Party. I think dropping out is cynicism.’
    ‘No, no. Cynicism is real vice. It’s the vice of the age and it could be the end of us all. These young creatures