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known him longer than you have, haven’t I?’ said Margaret.
    ‘That’s why you don’t see everything about him now,’ Pat replied, with his mixture of tenderness and cheek. No, he insisted, you have to notice that Davidson was eager for his little pleasures: he was allowed five cigarettes a day, and each one was an occasion; so were his cups of tea. He had made his own timetable to live by. He would go on living for a long time yet.
    He had put that ‘other business’ behind him, Pat was persuading her. It had been an incident, that was all. Margaret did not believe him, and yet wanted to. In spite of herself she was feeling grateful. Pat had heard all about Davidson’s plan to kill himself. And yet he could forget it, from one minute to the next: it wasn’t that he was too young to understand, for often the young understood suicide better than the rest of us. Perhaps he was just too surgent. Anyway, his optimism came from every cell of his body. He was positive that Austin Davidson would survive and that his life was worth living.
    Azik, left out of this conversation, was giving his wife uncomfortable glances. Not that he hadn’t listened to it all before; not that he was embarrassed for Margaret, or found his son-in-law unduly brash; more, I thought, because Azik had the delicacy of the very healthy, who did not much relish the echoes of mortality. Finally he said to Margaret that he would send her father more flowers, and addressed me down the table on the subject of next week’s general election. Yes, it would be a near thing. The American election wouldn’t be. Things looked a bit more promising all round, said Azik: for about that time, a year or two before and after, he, like other detached and unillusioned men, was letting himself indulge in a patch of hope. That was the case with Francis Getliffe and with me: with Eastern European and American friends, including even David Rubin, the least optimistic of men. In world-outlook, there was more hope about than at any time since the twenties. We did not enjoy being reminded of that afterwards, but it was so.
    About our local affairs, Azik was repeating what he often told us: it didn’t much matter who got in. He proceeded to lecture us, with the relish of a born pedagogue, on the limits of political freewill. Margaret was grinning surreptitiously in my direction: she enjoyed hearing me being treated as an innocent. Like me, she was fond of Azik, and his ingrained conviction that we were ignorant, though not entirely unteachable, was one of the endearing things about him. But she couldn’t resist asking him if he wasn’t being disingenuous. After all, it was common knowledge that he had made lavish contributions to Labour Party funds.
    Azik was imperturbable. ‘That doesn’t affect the issue, my friends,’ he said. ‘That is a little piece of insurance, you understand?’
    Did we? Azik liked playing the game all ways. He was a shrewd operator. If a Labour government came to power, there were advantages in having friends at court. Yet that, I thought, was altogether too simple. Azik wished to pretend to us, and to himself, that he calculated all the time: but he didn’t, any more than less ingenious men. He was an outsider, and he was, in some residual fashion, of which he was half-ashamed, on the side of other outsiders. For all his expansiveness, the luxury in which he revelled, he was never ultimately at ease with his fellow tycoons. He had once told me that, coming to England as an exile, he had felt one irremovable strain: you had to think consciously about actions which, in your own country, you performed as instinctively as breathing. He was also another kind of exile: rich as he had become, he had to think consciously about his actions when he was in the company of other rich men.
    It sometimes occurred to me – not specially at that dinner table – how differently he behaved from the Marches, who had been the first rich family to befriend me