The Malcontents

by C. P. Snow

  Stephen said – his father’s advice sifting unwillingly back – that Neil must have a lawyer. Neil, capable of sustaining his emotion and being simultaneously practical, agreed. Who should he go to? Stephen replied that they might as well all use Hotchkinson: he was said to be competent. Neil nodded: he knew when to take advantage of middle-class know-how.

  Then Stephen said: ‘About Bernard.’

  ‘What about him?’ Neil’s voice was level.

  ‘We’ve been thinking.’ Once again, Stephen brought out their explanation. Neil sat without moving a feature, and remarked: ‘You’ve got it.’

  He was quicker to accept than any of them had been, and more positive. He was more positive also that someone, not Bernard himself, must have done the drugging.

  ‘Yes, it was that shit Lance. His idea of a nice party.’

  ‘That’s what we think,’ said Tess.

  Stephen added: ‘I don’t see who else it was likely to be.’

  ‘We may as well find out.’ Neil broke out. ‘Christ Jesus! If it hadn’t been for that bastard, we should have got away with it all.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ said Mark. ‘I really doubt it.’

  ‘You’ve doubted everything, haven’t you?’ Neil turned on him. There was hostility in the room: Neil had no affection for Stephen, but he was less hostile to him than to Mark. Businesslike again, Neil said that they needed to cut out the talk and ask Lance the straight question, yes or no.

  ‘I did that yesterday. About the other thing,’ said Stephen.

  ‘You didn’t get anywhere.’ It wasn’t a question, though Neil hadn’t heard in precise terms that the others had information – over and above Stephen’s impression – that Lance was not the betrayer.

  Neil went on: ‘Trying again this time?’

  ‘If necessary.’

  All of a sudden Neil stirred.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’d better do it myself. It’s a chance to have it out with the bleeder.’

  He stood up, exuding purpose, glad to be moving, light on the balls of his feet. He would ring them up if he had news, he said: he would find his way out, he said. He left without any kind of goodbye.

  It was still early in the afternoon. The others returned to the condition they had known before, but instead of wearing it more lightly, they felt it worse: it was that special blend of boredom and dread which, they were later to realize, took up in terms of time so much of any crisis or any period of action: it was the anxious ennui which was an occupational affliction of a soldier before battle, or a politician when his future was being decided by others, himself as powerless – and preferably as silent – as a giraffe in the zoo.

  The longer it lasted, the less they got used to it. That afternoon there was even more waiting to do. They were waiting – for what? Well, for Neil’s telephone call. That wasn’t decisive, it couldn’t matter much: and yet it was something to wait for. Once Stephen rang up his house, to ask if there were any messages: none at all. The three of them, so used to talking to each other, could find nothing to talk about. There were extensions of silence. Mark began playing records, and that came as some kind of relief.

  At last the telephone. That must be Neil, some news. Mark went quickly to answer: the others saw a frown cover his face.

  ‘Oh,’ he said. And, a shade less easily than usual, ‘Oh yes. That’ll be all right. Yes, I’ll expect you.’

  He came back to his chair saying: ‘That was Sylvia. She’s coming out here. After the office.’

  Neither Stephen nor Tess commented. More records. The maid brought in tea. It was half past four before the telephone rang again. Again Mark answered: ‘Hallo, it is you, is it?’

  He nodded to the others: this was Neil. He didn’t summon Stephen to conduct the talking. It had been part of their discipline that personal relations were submerged, that each of them was interchangeable with any other.

  ‘I’ve had a session with him,’ Neil was saying.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘He didn’t admit a thing. He says, of course he gave her (Emma) a dose, she asked for it. He says, he nearly tried the effect on Stephen, it might have been interesting, he says. But he wouldn’t have done it to Bernie, it wouldn’t have crossed his mind, Bernie wasn’t anyone you wanted to try it on.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t know why, but I feel inclined to believe him.’

  Objectively, said Neil, it might be true. Oh, and Lance hadn’t denied the possibility of Bernie acting under the influence of LSD. It happened often enough. He had actually known someone who, during a trip, had been certain that he could levitate.

  To the others, Mark reported Neil’s end of the conversation something like word-for-word. They were disappointed, disproportionately so; they had expected, they had been curiously certain, that one anxiety would have been clinched. Once more restless, Stephen telephoned his home: once more no message whatever.

  ‘Do you want us to go?’ he said to Mark, not referring directly to Sylvia’s visit.

  ‘No, don’t go.’

  Both Stephen and Tess assumed that Sylvia was making an excuse, this was another of her pretexts (she was so importunate, at the same time so haughty and so meek) to be with him. They also assumed, knowing that Mark was for once embarrassed, that he would be glad of their company when she came. They had nothing else to do, there was nothing to do but wait, and so they stayed.

  20

  The last of the light faded over the fields, Mark drew the curtains. With a grin towards the other two (quieter than usual, he was still livelier than they were) he put on a record from Fidelio. The cries of liberty swelled and mounted, waves of hope fulfilled surged through the room. Stephen, more depressed as he listened, was blaming Mark, it was one of his lapses of feeling – his abandon, as though he didn’t expect anyone to care – to make them hear the sound of such a joy.

  ‘She’ll be free soon,’ said Mark, letting them see that Sylvia was on his mind. ‘She’s very dutiful about not leaving the office early.’

  Music and time lingered on, they weren’t sedated, they had the night to get through. Six o’clock struck from the clock over the fireplace. Minutes passed, and then Sylvia made an entrance. Yes, she made an entrance, for in her extreme self-consciousness (perhaps sharpened the instant she saw Mark was not alone), recalling to Stephen the time when she was much younger, she couldn’t walk in naturally, she flounced from the door, head bent forward and then thrown back, like an old-fashioned music hall comedian projecting himself on to the stage. It wasn’t comic, it would have been jarring on the most peaceful of afternoons, to see the absurd and put-on smile on the severely beautiful face. ‘Here I am,’ she cried.

  She expected to be kissed, and yet wasn’t certain how to make him. Though he had his own unease, Mark couldn’t let her remain in hers. He put an arm round her, brushed her cheek (awkwardly for him, his physical grace failing him as though copying hers), and said ‘Come and settle down.’

  He led her to the sofa, asked her to have a drink. ‘Good idea,’ she said over-brightly, and then, as he brought a tray, poured herself a large-sized gin. The others took more modest ones, their first that night. It wasn’t simply however that she was accepting comfort which they wouldn’t: despite her nerves, she was a strong girl with hearty hunting tastes, and was used to drinking more than any of them.

  ‘Hallo, Stephen,’ she said, greeting him for the first time. ‘Hallo, Tess.’

  Tess, who had met her only occasionally, watched her as she became relaxed, though still she had one leg entwined in the other. She was wearing a plain black-and-white office dress, and looking singularly beautiful, with the kind of beauty which is much rarer than very high intelligence or Olympic-class ability at the 400 metres. Tess felt a pang of jealousy. She needn’t have. Stephen had noticed her looks since the two of them were grown up, and like everyone else admired them: he liked her much more than most people did: he thought she was clever and fundamentally kind. But,
almost without consideration, he – like other young men with their share of sexual confidence or intuition – knew that she was not for him.

  ‘Well!’ she said, gulping at her glass. ‘I have some news for you.’

  ‘What?’ asked Stephen, but she was talking, eyes staring, straight at Mark.

  ‘On the whole, it’s good news. Yes, I think it is. I hope you think so too.’ Her tone was clear and competent, and also submissive: she was issuing bulletins, and also so anxious to please him.

  ‘Whatever do you mean?’ Mark broke out. He was astonished, so were the others. It was absolute astonishment, so complete, so instantaneous, cutting across the grain of their mood, that, though they felt surprise like a physical shock, their original dread – the apprehension, the fear of that afternoon, even the ennui – continued to weigh upon them, even to go on developing new disquiet.

  ‘It is more or less all right. For you anyway.’ She had a thought for Stephen and Tess. ‘And you two as well. It’s more or less all right.’

  ‘That can’t be.’ A mechanical response from Stephen.

  ‘Listen. It’s turned out better than anyone imagined. It may have turned out better for the wrong reasons, but you’ll have to put up with that.’

  In fact, though her belief hadn’t sunk deep, nevertheless Stephen and Mark had believed her straight away. She was happy to bring Mark good news, radiantly happy: but they trusted her sense, she was as competent – and more legally minded – than they were. While to Stephen there was a half-conscious thought: investing so many hopes in her love for Mark, so brilliant, so fragile, she would never have dared raise false hopes in him, or even any hopes that stood a chance of proving false. More than that, underneath the shrinking nerve-ends, underneath the classical façade, Stephen accepted her as someone solid, and trusted her as he might have done the lawyer Hotchkinson. The day before, he had concealed nothing from her, accepting that she was discreet. Although he did not know it, she had been discreet that afternoon. Mark’s explanation for her late arrival was ingenious, true to her character, but wrong: she wasn’t so punctilious that she wouldn’t have slipped out of the office to transmit news like this. The reason was much more businesslike: until all was over, she didn’t want to draw attention to herself.

  ‘They’re letting you off the hook. You three and Emma,’ she said, voice high and crisp. ‘It makes sense, so far as they’re concerned,’ she went on. ‘They’ve got you exactly where they want you. After what happened last night, they can kill your plans stone-dead. They never did want to come out in the open, if they could avoid it. The less fuss the better, so long as they could shut you up so that no one would listen to you. Well. They’ll take Forrester and St John for drugs, that’s all they needed. If there’s any evidence that Kelshall took drugs too, that’s a bonus. What with an inquest and a couple of drug charges, they’re untouchable. So they’re playing it cool. They can’t see any reason for bothering about you.’

  Most of this explanation she delivered, not to Mark, but to Stephen, and her tone became changed into one friendly and astringent. She was being quite lucid: so much so that on the plane of intellect Stephen could already predict – and accurately – a good deal of the practical future. As he was listening, Tess was in his field of vision: she had blushed dark: was she, like him, suffused with cowardly relief? Relief which swept through him, taking control like an anaesthetic. Shame that it could be so cowardly: there were liabilities in parallel, that he couldn’t miss. Yet the relief was overmastering. Cowardly relief and shame.

  ‘Plan B2 can’t work now,’ said Sylvia. She wasn’t asking them, she was informing them. Stephen acquiesced. If anyone tried it, their allies, such as they were, in politics and the press would be frightened off. Maybe their enemies had already done the frightening. Their intelligence (Sylvia had just used one of the secret operational terms) was exact. Whoever had been a traitor had been an efficient one. ‘It’s all right, I tell you.’ Sylvia gazed round with great eyes, happy to be looking after them, happy to be in command. ‘It’s cut-and-dried. They won’t worry you any more.’ She fixed her gaze, suddenly diffident, on Mark and said, tentative and like an adolescent girl offering a gift: ‘Is that something nice for you? I hope it is.’

  Mark said gently: ‘You’ve been very good.’

  At another time Stephen would have wished her luck, troubled that she was so defenceless. But that night in the drawing-room it was too incongruous to be borne, splintering the respite and the shadows beyond it, utterly incongruous with the authority she had brought them. She sat there, the bones of her face sculptured, body composed by now, the fine skin blooming. In a brusque impatient manner, Stephen told her: ‘You said that they were going to take Neil St John for drugs.’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘That’s nonsense.’

  ‘Is it? You’ll see.’

  ‘He’s as innocent as we are.’

  ‘They don’t agree. Of course I don’t know him.’

  ‘That doesn’t completely eliminate him from the human race, you know.’

  It wasn’t an unfriendly gibe: it took her back to dances two or three years before, when she was too shy to meet young men outside her own acquaintances. She gave an indrawn, apologetic laugh.

  ‘I’ve only met him once. With you,’ she said to Mark. ‘I must say, I thought he was pretty awful.’

  ‘He’s not.’ Tess was angry, ready to dislike her, ready to believe her snobbish. But she was sisterly to Tess, at ease with her as she wasn’t with men.

  ‘Well, you know him and I don’t. I take your word for it. That doesn’t affect the issue, though. They’ve got him.’

  ‘This can’t be right,’ said Stephen.

  ‘You’ll see,’ she repeated.

  ‘Sylvia dear, you’ll have to spell it out,’ said Mark.

  ‘It’s very simple.’ As before, she was incisive about facts. ‘They collected enough stuff from Forrester’s place last night to fix him. That’s laid on. They’re hoping that the post-mortem will show some signs in Kelshall, but they’re not putting too much faith in that. As for St John, they made a search there today–’

  ‘We’ve heard that.’

  ‘I couldn’t find out whether they’d picked up anything. But they have another string. That Jamaican of yours, what’s his name, Finlayson is prepared to swear–’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Tess cried.

  ‘Just that the pair of them, Forrester and St John, were flogging marijuana in that precious street.’

  ‘Would anyone in his senses believe a word,’ said Stephen, ‘that that crook said?’

  ‘I thought you were all willing to. Not so long ago.’ She spoke without malice, but firmly, giving her first hint of scruple and distaste.

  ‘I think that’s fair comment,’ said Mark very lightly.

  ‘This is a filthy business,’ said Tess.

  ‘Yes. You walked into it pretty deep, though, didn’t you?’

  Stephen interrupted (echoing an old-fashioned term of his father’s): ‘You’re telling us that Neil St John is going to be framed, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

  She had by this time more control and poise than any of them.

  ‘I’m not in a position to be certain of that. I can tell you, they have some security information about him. They can’t use that–’

  ‘That’s his politics.’

  ‘Maybe. It doesn’t make them less anxious to get him. And they will.’

  ‘He’s absolutely innocent in this drug business. You must believe us.’

  Stephen’s voice was strained and harsh, hers cool in reply.

  ‘If you say so, then I think I do.’

  ‘We can’t let him go into this alone. We shall have to say so.’ In the middle of the first blaze of relief, this had been a shadow, sharp-edged now.

  ‘That’s your responsibility.’ Then she said, with a curious awkward softness: ‘But please, please, don’t stretch it any further than you must. Plea
se don’t stretch yourself too far.’ With the same awkwardness, injected now with humility, she spoke to Tess, as though the other two were not present: ‘You can say things to him I can’t, perhaps you can influence him. Please don’t let him stretch himself too far. He can’t be responsible for everything.’

  Just for the moment, Sylvia seemed more concerned for Stephen than for Mark: perhaps understanding him better, because loving him less. In the medley of the wealthy, untasteful, indifferent room, in the confusion of moral impressions, Tess was half-recollecting that she had listened to two people that day begging Stephen to define the limits of responsibility – both of them speaking with the same insight, the same kindness, her own father, whom she loved, and this cold superior young woman, whom she envied and didn’t wish to like.

  ‘That sounds too easy,’ said Stephen.

  ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  ‘If you’d like us to let everything happen–’

  ‘Yes. If you can’t do any good.’ She went on: ‘I’m trying to think how you feel. I’m not much of a one for having comrades, you know. I couldn’t have got into your kind of game. But still – if you can’t do any good? That doesn’t seem serious. It doesn’t even seem high-minded. Not really.’

  She gave a slight inward smile, not mocking. ‘After all,’ she said, ‘you haven’t done much good up to now.’

  Stephen answered: ‘Someone died last night.’

  ‘I know.’ It wasn’t the fact she was acknowledging, but the expression on the faces round her: faces dark and closed. Then she said: ‘Well. It was a quick death.’

  It might have sounded affectless: but in her aseptic fashion she was trying to console them (the most habitual consolation, the nature of death, the only one which Stephen could offer Bernard’s parents). She was exactly Stephen’s age, but as they had talked she began to appear older – not maternal, for that wasn’t in her nature, but more like a sharp-witted spinster, or even a male whose own life was behind him but who wished them well. Certainly, Tess was thinking, half-passionately resentful, half-longing that he was being moved, Stephen was taking more from the girl than he had ever done from her. He began to speak to her with an off-hand intimacy: ‘You may as well know. We’re not sure that it was altogether an accident.’