The Malcontents

by C. P. Snow

  At last Stephen said: ‘I shall give evidence for you. It won’t be much help.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘You’ve never had anything to do with drugs in your life. I can say that. It happens to be true.’

  ‘Not a scrap of use.’

  ‘Very little use. More or less negligible.’

  ‘Nice plushy young bourgeois giving me a certificate of character, that’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Neil said: ‘It won’t do you any good.’

  ‘Perhaps not.’

  ‘Getting into the scene by the back door, aren’t you?’

  Stephen did not reply.

  ‘I don’t see why you should,’ Neil said.

  ‘The reasons don’t concern you.’

  ‘Bloody Quixotism. Is that it? I’ve got no use for that.’

  Neil was jeering again, unmoved, though there might have been a shade less contempt. ‘You’re going in for the luxury of honourable behaviour. So that you can feel good. Individual salvation, that’s what you’re after. There’s no doctrine of individual salvation that doesn’t get in the way in the long run. We have to eliminate all that stuff. Just fancy our positions were reversed. Which, by the nature of the system, is impossible. But do you imagine that I’d do as much for you? Not on your sweet fanny. Unless I thought two things. First, that I could have some effect. On the blasted trial. Second, that I was certain you were objectively useful. To the movement. If I wasn’t certain of that, you’d have to take your chance.’

  He went on: ‘Of course I shouldn’t be certain of it, either. I don’t believe you’ll ever be objectively useful to the movement. If you live a hundred years.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s as well for you,’ said Stephen, ‘that I don’t make the same conditions.’

  ‘It doesn’t signify one way or the other,’ said Neil. ‘Whatever you do.’

  He showed no more interest in Stephen’s evidence, or even whether he had aborted it. It was possible that he knew Stephen well enough, and assumed – not with gratitude, but with indifferent respect – that that wouldn’t happen. Instead, he began to talk about his future, or rather to revert to earlier talk about it, which had left Emma mutinously silent ever since Stephen entered the room. For herself, she would have behaved as Stephen was behaving: she had no feeling for Stephen, except maybe envy that he could make a gesture denied to her. While Neil was making the opposite of a gesture, something her imagination revolted at, and saw as too dingy to be borne.

  Neil had been talking prosaically about his future – and, with Stephen now present, he did again. The trial; suspended sentence. He couldn’t take risks while that lasted. Or for long after. They would have tabs on him. Anyway, student politics were no good. Foreign politics were no good. Instant revolution was a blink in a middle-class eye. Fatuous talk about alternative societies. All middle-class nonsense. He wasn’t going to waste his time.

  Defeatist, said Emma.

  The only real politics left in a country like this was on the shop floor. That was where he was going. Marxist politics on the shop floor. He would go back to Liverpool. He could pick up with people he knew. Not in the docks, more straightforward in a big firm. They would have it against him that he’d been to college, but he’d get round that in time. The union would look after him. It didn’t matter that there were tabs on him there. Marxist shop stewards had tabs on them too. He would be one himself some day. Then he could do some real work. ‘How long?’ Emma had said it before, in rage, in anticlimax.

  ‘A few years,’ said Neil. He would have to win their confidence, he said. If he knew the people he had come from, it wouldn’t be all that easy.

  ‘Then little strikes in the shop!’ cried Emma.

  ‘Of course. That’s what it’s all about. To begin with.’

  ‘It’s running away,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t be childish. It’s the opposite.’

  ‘It’s letting everyone down.’

  She meant, letting her down, or her dreams about him. She wasn’t heartbroken, her kind of passion was too wilful for that. But she was deserted. Not many people had seen Neil as romantic, but she had. He had been her new-style hero. She had imagined conspiring for him when he went to prison, keeping him when he came out. She had pictures of standing beside him in the streets, when the rising broke through. She wasn’t overrating herself. She had as much physical courage as anyone not insane. She would have been splendid among the Paris students a couple of years before. Yet she wouldn’t have been so splendid after the revolution had succeeded, or any revolution that had happened or could ever happen. It was like dreaming of a lover, and then settling down in marriage to find out what he was like in the boredom of ordinary days. It was like that with Neil now. The flat routine he was setting himself, the boredom of slow talk on the factory floor, the keeping sight of ten years ahead, the calculations, the analysis, the union climb – that took away the aura he had once had. That wasn’t the hero she wanted. That wasn’t for her.

  She had all the unsentimentality of the romantic, perhaps unsentimentality doubled because it was mixed with sex. She could snatch at men to replace him. It wouldn’t take her long. There were activists less rational than these had been, projects and visions more inflamed, danger, a new existence, round the corner. That was where the excitement lay.

  During the morning, Stephen had foreseen most of the external consequences for them all. But those which were already in train within them – they were still hidden. This was the first to break surface. Stephen had nothing to say to her. He had no claim, and not much influence, upon her. Although, at least in terms of intellect, he understood Neil’s choice in a way to which she was blind. For, although he and Neil had little in common – they had been allies without a personal relation between them, except perhaps subliminal resentment or dislike, sharpened that afternoon – they were searching for a purpose, and by this time (as another consequence) it had to be a disciplined purpose. That was what Neil was looking for in shop floor politics: possibly, more likely than not, he was already home. Which Stephen wasn’t. He was going on the same search, but the answer might take him a long time to find.

  Soon afterwards Lance, with an air of casualness, asked: ‘What about me?’

  Since he first saw Lance in that room, Stephen had been preparing himself for this. Now, uncomfortable, suddenly ashamed, he pretended not to understand.

  ‘I mean, do you feel inclined to give a bit of evidence for me?’

  Lance had put on a brash, impudent smile.

  ‘I’ve thought about that.’ Stephen’s reply was slow in coming.

  ‘I wonder, do you feel inclined to say you’ve never seen me smoke anything but a nice Virginia cigarette?’

  ‘No. I can’t do that.’

  ‘I suppose you can’t. Perhaps that wouldn’t be too convincing.’ Lance’s expression was changing. ‘But you could tell them, couldn’t you, that I’ve never gone in for pushing. It doesn’t make sense. I’ve looked after myself, that’s all. I’ve never sold anything in my life. You could tell them that.’

  An empty pause.

  ‘It wouldn’t do any good,’ said Stephen.

  ‘You said you can’t do Neil any good. But you’re appearing for him all the same.’

  ‘No,’ said Stephen. ‘I didn’t say quite that. I can give concrete evidence about him. I can say, I shall say, that I’ve been here with him often enough and I’ve never seen him touch a spot of grass. Either here or anywhere. That might make five per cent difference for him.’

  ‘You could say you’ve never seen me sell a spot of grass.’

  ‘That wouldn’t make the slightest difference at all.’

  ‘So you don’t feel like playing?’

  When he had been brazen, overdoing it, it had been easier for Stephen. Not instantaneously, he said: ‘No. It would be useless.’

  ‘Oh, come on. In for a penny, in for a pound. It won’t get you in
much deeper.’

  ‘There’s no point in it.’

  ‘I’ve been one of you, haven’t I?’ The front had dropped right away, Lance was pleading. ‘I’ve done my whack.’

  Stephen didn’t answer.

  ‘You’re not still thinking I’m responsible for poor old Bernie, are you? I swear that I had nothing to do with it.’

  ‘I haven’t a view on that. It doesn’t enter.’

  ‘Well then. You might as well say a word for me.’

  ‘It would be valueless.’

  ‘I dare say it would. Just for the look of it, though.’

  Stephen’s voice sounded harder than he intended.

  ‘No. Not for the look of it, I can’t.’

  ‘Of course you can. Why not?’

  ‘Have I got to tell you?’

  ‘You’d better.’

  ‘It’s your fault that we’re in this situation. With hindsight I think they’d probably have stopped us anyway, but they wouldn’t have made us look ridiculous into the bargain. You’ve done that. With your drugs. No one minds what you do – providing it’s no danger to the job or anyone else. This has been. I’d come to the rescue if I could really help you. But as for tokens, I don’t think they’re called for. I’ve tried to think it out. It seems to me the obligation is cancelled.’

  Lance had listened without a twitch. He said: ‘You knew all about me before you took me in.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I didn’t.’

  ‘You should have done.’

  ‘That’s fair.’

  ‘Anyway, you soon did know. You should have told me to stop.’

  ‘That’s fair too.’

  ‘We were too democratic, we never interfered with anyone. Someone ought to have been in charge,’ Neil broke in. Lance said to Stephen: ‘I’d either have played or got out. I wouldn’t have blown any secrets. You could have trusted me.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Stephen.

  ‘Well then. Won’t you think again?’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t make any difference. I’ve thought enough. I’m sorry.’

  Lance gave an imitation of his impertinent smile. He gazed steadily at Stephen, and said: ‘Right ho. There’s never any harm in trying, is there, though?’

  It was that flick of jautiness which, as Stephen left them, on his way to meet Tess, recurred to him, made him unreconciled to the decisions he had made, and once, like a shame jabbing back into memory, forced him to shut his eyes and stand stock-still.

  25

  Over the telephone to Tess, in a hurry, possible meeting places for tea leaving him blank as though he were a stranger in the town, Stephen had finally come out with the name, Simpkin and James. It was an unlikely rendezvous for them. This was the local Fortnum and Mason’s, a grocery for the genteel, not long after this to be, like other small genteel emporia, closed down. Stephen had sometimes been taken there for tea when he was a child, but had not been inside since. There, in the café upstairs, overheated, overscented, full of provincial ladies, at a side table Tess was waiting for him. As he went towards her, he seemed to be the only man in the room.

  ‘How’s it gone?’ she said.

  She already knew something about the interview with Hotchkinson, and that Stephen was seeing Neil that afternoon. During that lunchtime telephone conversation, Stephen hadn’t told her what he had decided, or if he had decided anything: but that she had guessed, or more than guessed. So, when he repeated what he had said to Neil, she nodded.

  ‘It’s no use trying to get you to change your mind, is it?’

  He shook his head, thinking that, if there had been such a hope, he would have gone to her before this.

  ‘I don’t think I want to,’ she said. ‘It’s difficult. But I don’t think I want to. Most people wouldn’t have done what you’re doing, though.’

  ‘Lance was there. That was a nuisance.’ Stephen was pressing on a sore. ‘He wanted me to do the same for him.’

  He went over the scene for her, as he had done within himself – not getting free since he left Neil’s room.

  ‘He accepted that it would be absolutely useless. He knows that as well as I do,’ said Stephen, as though she were arguing with him.

  ‘I think he just wanted not to be left out,’ she said. She hesitated, and then went on: ‘Perhaps we got him wrong. We thought he was only after sensation. And adventure. And didn’t care a rap for anyone else. Perhaps that’s wrong. Or perhaps people like that want a bit of affection, like everyone else.’

  ‘That’s the blackmail of pity,’ said Stephen.

  ‘You wouldn’t say that,’ she replied, ‘unless you thought so too.’

  They were picking at the neat little sandwich triangles.

  She understood that he was distracted and guilty. In their own shorthand, fragmentary, sentences not finished, he was saying that they had tolerated everything, they hadn’t interfered with, or criticized, anyone’s ‘private life’ (that was the phrase they used, prim when it was referring to activities anything but prim). It was part of their creed. Still, no one should let his private life mess up others or the job in hand. They had excluded people from the core, close friends, whose private lives might have been a danger: such as a clever man, a very good man, whose homosexual pickups went too wide. It was easy to see that they ought to have excluded Lance. That was their mistake. Had they the right to blame him for it now?

  ‘I think so,’ said Tess.

  ‘Have we?’

  ‘He’s never thought about anyone but himself.’ She added: ‘Is he worthwhile?’

  ‘Who is? I mean, can we say that against anyone?’

  Suddenly Tess was finding herself more positive than he was. This was a kind of discrimination which they didn’t like making, which didn’t fit the climate they had been brought up in, or their hopes. But to Tess, left to herself, it came naturally enough, gave a sign of how her character would later show itself, like bone so far almost hidden under the flesh.

  She didn’t choose to argue with him that afternoon. She wanted to ease him, she tried another way.

  ‘Darling. Would you feel better if you spoke up for him, after all?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘I’m sure you would.’

  He held out his cup for her to fill again, but didn’t answer.

  ‘It wouldn’t make much more unpleasantness for you, would it?’

  ‘A certain amount.’

  ‘Never mind. You could take it. We could take it, couldn’t we?’

  ‘That goes without saying. It wouldn’t really count, one way or the other.’

  ‘Well then. Do it.’

  He was sitting back, she watched the clear profile. Then he turned to her with an affectionate, intimate smile, and she was sure that she had resolved him. He said: ‘No. That’s not for me.’

  He went on, still intimately, almost lightly: ‘I’d better get it cut-and-dried. I’ll ring up the man Hotchkinson before we go. I’ll tell him that I shall give evidence for Neil, and then I shall call it a day. That’s as much as I shall do.’

  It came to Tess as an unmitigated, unprepared surprise. She was certain that he meant it, and that this was how he would act. She was as certain that he had spoken honestly a moment before, and wasn’t being moved by a last residue of prudence, or loss of nerve. It was a mystery, perhaps as much to him as to her. It seemed to cut clean across his nature. He spoke and behaved as though doubts, or even scruples, had at last been wiped away. She wondered if he were feeling the release of exerting his will. Exerting his will in a vacuum or without cause, after being at others’ mercy all those days. She wondered how often he could be so hard.

  In a matter of minutes, she was due for another surprise. He had said he was thirsty, and ordered another pot of tea.

  Teacups clinked on the next table, there was the sound of womens voices, the smell of scent.

  ‘There’s another thing,’ said Stephen.

  He was looking down at the table. What hadn’t he covered, wh
at was coming, one more threat to take care of, she thought.

  ‘I think we ought to get married pretty soon. If you agree. Will you?’

  She had imagined so often hearing him ask her. She had doubted whether it would ever happen. Her hopes had been strong, but she had tried to sink them down. Often her imagination had been too much for her. But it hadn’t produced a scene like this, not the two of them in the midst of a crisis, sitting in the feminine well-to-do café, crowded, public, so that he hadn’t even taken her hand. Astonished, taken aback, the shock wave not yet followed by delight, she found herself, in reply, asking the singular question: ‘Why?’

  ‘I need you.’

  ‘Is that enough?’

  ‘It is for me.’

  The shock wave was receding now. Tess said: ‘Darling. Of course I want to marry you. More than anything on earth. I’m not coy. But for you – Is this the right time for you to know what you want?’

  ‘What is the right time?’

  ‘No. I’m serious. I’ve got to tell you the truth. God knows, I wish I hadn’t to. But you’ve been under great strain. You still are. So have we all, but you’ve felt it worst. I don’t think you’re in a state to make up your mind – about anything like this.’

  She went on, determined, almost fierce, cheeks flushed dusky.

  ‘I’ve got to tell you something else. You won’t like it. You’re strong, but you’re vulnerable too. A lot of supports have let you down. Your parents have let you down. You were prepared for it, in one way, and in another way you weren’t. You want to get rid of everything that’s let you down. I believe that’s right for you. But I don’t believe it’s a good reason for marrying me.’

  Stephen didn’t respond at once. Then he said, as though thinking to himself: ‘All that is absolutely true.’

  Tess felt a seep of desolation, empty inside. She had been honest with him, she had thought of him. She had harmed herself, he wouldn’t make the same choice again.

  ‘All that is absolutely true. Most of it had occurred to me, you know.’