Going Home - Doris May Lessing [96]
And besides, whereas it might be said that Mr McCarran-Longman was obviously a spiv, that is not altogether true.
Each country has its own type of rogue. Britain, for instance, has the spiv, and one has only to write the word to see him standing there. It was about this time that I got a letter from a friend in Britain saying: ‘We have a new word. Spiv. I bet you don’t guess what it is.’
I guessed it must be either a sort of meat-mixture, like Spam, or a detergent, but as soon as I heard about spivs, I asked my husband if he thought Mr McCarran-Longman was a spiv.
He said: ‘No. Because a spiv is someone who consciously deludes his victims. But this man believes in every word he says.’
‘Conscious or unconscious,’ I said, ‘I think a great many people are going to be very unhappy because of this man.’
‘But,’ said he, ‘you will not be unhappier, because by now you have learned to take my advice. And you are being very bad for him, because you listen when he talks. You must not. And I shall tell Bob he must not. Yes.’
With this, he went across the iron bridge and knocked on Bob’s door, and seeing that the living-room was so full of people, children and illness and the noise from the radio that one could not think in it, he invited Bob over for a drink.
For several hours he explained to Bob why he should not put any trust in Mr McCarran-Longman.
Bob listened, rather suspicious, as if he thought that he was being done out of something. It was this that made us worried for the first time about Bob, because he was not a suspicious person.
Then he said: ‘Why shouldn’t a man make bricks this way? Look what scientists do. They can do anything. So why shouldn’t McCarran-Longman have invented something important?’
Then, his ears closed against everything that we said, he remarked finally that in any case nothing could be done until the ground was bought. After that evening he did not come near us for some days; he only nodded, rather stiff, from over the bridge.
We heard that he and another family and Mr McCarran-Longman had raised between them £500, borrowing it between them here and there. They were going to the big firms, who lend big sums of money, asking for £10,000 on the £500. All these firms wanted was some security. And there was not the vestige of security in the lives of the Whartons, the Strickmans, or, for that matter, Mr McCarran-Longman.
Weeks went by, and we hardly saw the Whartons. The elder daughter came back from her holiday, 14 years old now, and her horizons widened by the sea, and badly wanting some space to spread her soul in; and as a relief she took to dropping over to see me of an evening, and she talked steadily about her father, who was crackers, she said, and her mother, who couldn’t manage her servant, and the baby—she couldn’t do her homework because the baby’s things were everywhere. Not once did she mention that sick boy who sat in the middle of the family draining the life out of them. Her mother, she said, was learning shorthand in the evenings at the Polytechnic, between eight and ten, so she must stay in with the children. When we asked about Mr McCarran-Longman, she said: ‘He’s gone to see some friends in Portuguese East who will lend him the money for the project.’ When she called it a project we could see that she believed in it, even though she had called her father crazy. She brought out the word delicately, with a respect for it.
And then nothing happened. Nothing. Mr McCarran-Longman did not come. But it was nothing sudden. It was not a question of saying: ‘If Mr McCarran-Longman does not come back by the end of the month it means we have been made fools of.’ For he had gone off, telling them reasonably that since none of them could raise enough money for the project, he would have to tap resources elsewhere, and that would naturally take some time. He even wrote a letter from Beira, saying he had great hopes of a certain man he had met.
And then the silence set in, and Bob