The Malcontents

by C. P. Snow

  ‘Christ, you might have done it yourself.’

  ‘Yes, I might. For all that anyone knows.’ Stephen’s mouth twitched in a hard, Nordic, fighting smile.

  ‘How do we know,’ Neil shouted on, ‘that you haven’t invented all this bullshit about your father–?’

  ‘You don’t know. You’ll have to trust me, that’s all.’

  ‘My God,’ said Emma, without her man’s ferocity, ‘but we don’t know who to trust.’

  ‘You’ll have to decide for yourselves.’ Stephen added: ‘We shall all have to decide for ourselves.’

  There was another patch of silence. Then Lance, who, without effort, sounded both airy and cool: ‘Yes, that man’s (he nodded at Neil) talking bilge. Where do we go from here?’

  ‘The best that can happen,’ Tess broke in, ‘is that – whoever did it – just clears out of our way.’

  ‘That’s too easy,’ said Bernard.

  Stephen: ‘I agree with Tess.’

  Bernard: ‘No, we can’t forget as easily as all that.’

  ‘No, we can’t forget,’ said Stephen, ‘but we can’t start reprisals. There’s no end to that.’

  ‘I should like to know,’ said Lance, voice lively after Stephen’s, ‘just how this friend of ours is going to clear out.’

  Miasma thickening, the argument went on. Distrust flickered from one to another, like static electricity leaping, pairing couples as it had paired Neil and Stephen. With all present in the room, no one could speak to one he trusted: though most trust had gone. They would have to meet tomorrow. No reprisals. The hope, the intimation, was that someone would be absent. Loaded words, intended for someone who should be absent. No reprisals. Then the rest of them could prepare themselves.

  As it grew later, the exchanges became curiously formal. The bouts of rage had quite vanished. Innuendoes died down, and no one could ask who would be present next day. Remarks were made as at an official meeting, attended by members who did not, outside the office, know each other well. The only breeziness came from Lance, after another long visit to the lavatory (no one was free enough to ask, had he gone for a fix?). He said: ‘If it’s all the same to everyone, that is everyone who feels like coming–’ he grinned – ‘I suggest we make it my pad tomorrow afternoon.’

  He grinned again, towards Neil: ‘No hard feelings. We might have better luck.’

  It sounded, and could have been, the remark of a gambler changing his luck, or a piece of sheer superstition. As they all – after what had happened, they still found it difficult to part – got up to go, Lance gazed round the room, and said, with the satisfaction of one dismissing a place where he has heard bad news: ‘Well, we shan’t come here again.’

  8

  As Mark drove his car towards the Bishop’s house, on the back seat Tess was holding Stephen’s hand. None of them spoke until, suddenly, Mark drew up by the side of the road, the house a hundred yards away, gate not yet in sight.

  He said: ‘I’m going to have a breath of air. Back in ten minutes.’

  He walked away from them, beside the neat hedges. It was late, the road was silent, beyond one garden he could see a single light in a bedroom window. For an instant he wondered, with an indulgence that might have belonged to someone much older, what the two of them were saying to each other. He felt an elation so natural to him that he didn’t examine it, though to others it would have seemed alien or disassociated. Yet to him life was going faster, and immersed as he was in the spectacle and thoughts of the evening his step was light.

  When he returned to the car, he knew at a glance that Stephen hadn’t a glimmer of his own mood. He had left Stephen to comfort Tess: but it was Stephen who needed comfort now. Of what he and Tess had said in privacy there was no sign: all that was left was prosaic, the timetable for tomorrow, who should see whom. The meeting had been arranged for five o’clock, to give ‘someone’ (who is it, Stephen said again, as he must have said obsessively to Tess) a chance to make a decision. For the rest of them, there were confrontations ahead of them, as well as other decisions to be made. It sounded matter-of-fact, like the routine of any crisis.

  As soon as Tess had left them, Mark said: ‘You’re not tired, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right.’

  In fact, they each had the complete absence of fatigue that comes with any violent feeling: just as in an unhappy love affair one can go without sleep and walk for miles, or in waiting for news of a mother’s illness.

  Mark knew the town well, better than any of them, ever since, while he was still at school, he had gone on solitary, wilful explorations. Without asking, he began to drive fast down the London Road, away from the suburbs, into the city centre. Apart from a series of trucks clanking past, there was little traffic: the tarmac gleamed under the headlights: in the darker streets, buildings closed down on them.

  ‘Who is it?’ said Stephen once.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Mark.

  A little later, Mark remarked: ‘It’s turning out a long weekend.’

  He had said it lightly, throwing back an irony of Stephen’s in the cathedral precinct on Saturday night but Stephen wasn’t fit for irony just then. Any more than he was fit for, or even noticed, another irony when they came to their destination. It was a lorry drivers’ caff, open all night, which Mark had visited before in the small hours. They, and their friends, not only the core, entertained fellow feeling for the lorry drivers: but, as they made their way in, the lorry drivers did not entertain fellow feeling for them. It wasn’t so much their dress: they were wearing sweaters and jeans. It wasn’t their hair: some of the younger drivers grew hair at their necks and down their cheeks, much longer than theirs. It was something in their manner, though Mark’s was gentle and Stephen’s quiet. The lorry drivers recognized them at sight, and didn’t like them. There was a barrier neither of them could have climbed. There were one or two curses, meant to be heard: more discontent, paradoxically enough, than if a pair of well-to-do young men had entered that same caff a generation before.

  Stephen noticed none of that. He didn’t lift his eyes from the formica-covered table, carrying rings of liquid still not dry, shining like snail-tracks under the naked bulb. He didn’t lift his eyes until Mark brought mugs of coffee and sandwiches, thick bread, thin ham, edges of fat protruding. Neither of them had eaten, apart from Stephen’s slice of cake at the Kelshalls’, since midday, and they found themselves – appetite having its own tactless way – shamingly hungry. Then Stephen said: ‘Who is it?’

  ‘It might be me.’ Mark looked at him with bold, affectionate eyes, catching precisely the tone in which Stephen had replied to Neil St John.

  Stephen said: ‘It might be. But I tell myself it isn’t.’

  Mark was left with a smile, but the discomforting smile that isn’t shared. To him, that answer had been totally unexpected: he had perceived much about his friend, but not that he had been going through one of those states, almost emotionless, in which everything seemed as likely, or unlikely, as anything else. In Neil’s room Emma had not been the only person who was staring open-eyed with the brilliance of suspicion. Even with Tess: there had been an instant, repudiated now, not to be remembered, when Stephen – it flashed on him like an illumination, not different in kind from an illumination of sense – wondered. Meeting her gaze, candid and devoted. Could she have had a motive – perhaps a loving one?

  That dismissed, he had had, among other thoughts (though they were not so much thoughts as coronas of suspicion), one of Mark. 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 c
laustrophobic 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.

  Still, there was something else. Mark was searching for it.

  ‘You’re not worrying about Lance, are you? Or whoever else it is. He doesn’t matter. He’s not worth worrying about. One person’s not worth worrying about.’

  It was not what Mark expected, but all of a sudden, as though a key had been turned, Stephen began fervently to talk.

  ‘Are any of us worth worrying about? Is he any different from the rest of us? I mean, from the rest of blasted human beings. You know, there are times when it looks as though everything is a nonsense. Quite likely, humanity is a nonsense. Do you see any answer to that? Men are just clever animals. Not all that clever, but the cleverest that have appeared so far. Just clever animals, with no good in them.’

  Stephen was speaking to someone whom – though he had never said so – he thought good.

  ‘Is this man any worse than the rest of us?’ Stephen’s eyes, dark and penetrating, didn’t leave the other’s. ‘We’re cruel like animals. We’re worse than they are, because we get enjoyment out of it.’

  For an instant, Mark’s expression lost its innocence, and he interrupted: ‘I think there’s something worse than that, those who are cruel without feeling anything at all.’

  Stephen rushed o
n: ‘My father talked to me this evening. As you know. I tell you, I was cruel to him. Quite needlessly. There was no good in either of us. He was as bad as I was. That doesn’t make it better, don’t you see?’

  Stephen added more slowly: ‘He doesn’t believe in anything. He goes to his cathedral, and he doesn’t believe a word of it. Or perhaps he cheats himself with words. If they didn’t cheat themselves, could anyone believe? Any faith you like. Most of the questions men have asked since they learned to talk haven’t any meaning. If we haven’t learned anything else this century, we’ve learned that. What does man live by? We’d all like the answer to that. But I ask you, does it mean anything at all?’

  Mark’s face, which during some of Stephen’s outburst had been shadowed with pain, regained its radiance. He said: ‘When you talk of your father not believing, aren’t you talking of yourself?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Stephen replied with indifference, as though he were for the moment spent.

  ‘But you do believe in something, you know. I can tell you what you live by, if you want.’

  Stephen did not utter.

  ‘Why have you been doing what you have?’ Mark said. ‘You needn’t have. You could just have sat pretty and let everything go by. Very few people have had all the luck you’ve had. But that wasn’t enough for you, was it? You weren’t ready just to enjoy your luck. So you’ve got into danger and you’ll pay the price.’

  Mark gave a fresh smile: ‘Well, would one of your clever animals have done that? I don’t care what you’ve done it for. Or where the motive comes from. “Killing your father”, as they say, or from anywhere else. It’s the same with the rest of us. We haven’t been content with what we’ve got. And that’s something to build on. Have you ever asked yourself, why you got mixed up in this at all?’

  Stephen hesitated, and then answered awkwardly: ‘I suppose I should say I don’t like seeing intolerable things. If there’s a chance of shifting them. Perhaps it’s a distaste for injustice, if you like.’