Homecomings

by C. P. Snow

  ‘I think most people would agree that his firm hasn’t got the technical resources of the other two–’ I named them.

  ‘What has Lufkin got?’

  ‘I’m afraid the answer to that is, Lufkin himself: He’s much the strongest figure in the whole game.’

  ‘He’s a good chap,’ said Hector Rose incongruously. He was not speaking of Lufkin’s moral nature, nor his merits as a companion: Rose meant that Lufkin was a pantocrator not dissimilar from himself.

  He stared at me.

  ‘My dear Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’m sure it’s unnecessary for me to advise you, but if you do decide that he is the right man for us, then of course you’re not to feel the least embarrassment or be too nice about it. The coincidence that you know something about him – the only significance of that is, that it makes your judgement more valuable to us. It’s very important for us not to fall over backwards and, for quite inadequate reasons, shirk giving the job to the right man, that is, if we finally decide that he does turn out to be the right man.’

  I was a little surprised. No one could have doubted that Hector Rose’s integrity was absolute. It would have been high farce to try to bribe him; he assumed the same of me. Nevertheless, I expected him to be more finicky about the procedure, to talk about the necessity of justice not only being done, but being seen to be done. In fact, as the war went on and the state became more interleaved with business, Civil Servants like Rose had made themselves tougher-minded; nothing would get done if they thought first how to look immaculate.

  In the same manner, when I asked whether I might as well let Lufkin entertain me, Rose replied: ‘The rule is very simple, my dear Eliot, and it remains for each of us to apply it to himself. That is, when some interested party suddenly becomes passionately desirous of one’s company. The rule is, do exactly as you would if the possibility of interest did not exist. If you wouldn’t normally accept an invitation from our excellent friend, don’t go. If you would normally accept, then do go, if you can bear it. I can’t say that I envy you the temptation,’ said Rose, whose concept of an evening out was a table for two and a bottle of claret at the Athenaeum.

  When I came to spend the evening at Lufkin’s, I would have compounded for a table for two myself. As in the past when I was one of his entourage, I found his disregard of time, which in anyone else he would have bleakly dismissed as ‘Oriental’, fretting me. In his flat at St James’s Court, his guests were collected at eight o’clock, which was the time of the invitation, standing about in the sitting-room drinking, nine of us, all men. Lufkin himself was there, standing up, not saying much, not drinking much, standing up as though prepared to do so for hours, glad to be surrounded by men catching his eye. Then one of his staff entered with a piece of business to discuss: and Lufkin discussed it there on the spot, in front of his guests. That finished, he asked the man to stay, and beckoned the butler, standing by the dinner-table in the inner room, to lay another place. Next, with the absence of fuss and hurry of one in the middle of a marathon, which he showed in all his dealings, he decided to telephone: still standing up, he talked for fifteen minutes to one of his plants.

  Meanwhile the guests, most of whom were colleagues and subordinates, stood up, went on drinking and exchanged greetings to each others’ wives. ‘Give my regards to Lucille.’ ‘How is Brenda?’ ‘Don’t forget to give my love to Jacqueline.’ It went on, just as it used when I attended those dinners, and men heartily inquired after Sheila and sent messages to her: not that they knew her, for, since she never went to a party, they could only have met her for a few minutes, and by accident. But, according to their etiquette, they docketed her name away and afterwards punctiliously inquired about her, as regularly as they said good evening. No doubt most of those husband-to-husband questions that night, so hearty, so insistent, were being asked about women the speakers scarcely knew.

  It was nearly half past nine when Lufkin said: ‘Does anyone feel like eating? I think we might as well go in.’

  At the crowded table Lufkin sat, not at the head, but in the middle of one side, not troubling to talk, apparently scornful of the noise, and yet feeling that, as was only right, the party was a success. There was more food and drink than at most wartime dinners: I thought among the noise, the hard male laughter, how little any of these men were giving themselves away. Orthodox opinions, collective gibes, a bit of ribbing – that was enough to keep them zestful, and I had hardly heard a personal remark all night. It made me restless, it made me anxious to slither away, not only to avoid conversation with Lufkin, but also just to be free.

  The walls pressed in, the chorus roared round me: and, in that claustrophobia, I thought longingly of being alone with Margaret in her room. In a kind of rapturous day-dream, I was looking forward to marrying her. In the midst of this male hullabaloo my confidence came back. I was telling myself, almost as one confides, brazenly, confidently, and untruthfully to an acquaintance on board ship, that it was natural I should trust myself so little about another marriage after the horror of the first.

  Listening to someone else’s history, I should not have been so trustful about the chances of life. Thinking of my own, I was as credulous as any man. Sitting at that table, responding mechanically and politely to a stranger’s monologue, I felt that my diffidence about Margaret was gone.

  When one of Lufkin’s guests said the first good night, I tried to go out with him. But Lufkin said: ‘I’ve hardly had a minute with you, Eliot. You needn’t go just yet.’

  That company was good at recognizing the royal command. Within a quarter of an hour, among thanks and more salutations to wives, the flat was empty, and we were left alone. Lufkin, who had not stirred from his chair as he received the goodbyes, said: ‘Help yourself to another drink and come and sit by me.’

  I had drunk enough, I said. As for him, he always drank carefully, though his head was hard for so spare and unpadded a man. I sat in the chair on his right, and he turned towards me with a creaking smile. We had never been intimate, but there was a sort of liking between us. As usual, he had no small talk whatsoever; I made one or two remarks, about the war, about the firm, to which he said yes and no. He started off: ‘Quite frankly, I still don’t like the way Barford is being handled.’

  He said it quietly and dryly, with a note of moral blame that was second nature to him.

  ‘I’m sorry about that,’ I said.

  ‘It’s no use being sorry,’ he replied. ‘The thing is, we’ve got to get it right.’

  ‘I’m at a bit of a disadvantage,’ I said, ‘not being able to say much about it.’

  ‘You can say quite enough for the purpose.’

  I asked straight out: ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘I hear,’ Lufkin replied, in his bluntest and most off-hand tone, ‘that you people are wasting your own time and everyone else’s debating whether to shut the place up or not.’

  ‘I hope they’ll come down in favour,’ I said, feeling my way. ‘But I’m by no means sure.’

  ‘In that case you’re losing your grip,’ Lufkin gave a cold, jeering smile. ‘Of course they’ll keep it going.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  For a second I did not put it past him to have inside knowledge, but he answered: ‘No one ever closes a place down. Governments can’t do it; that’s one of the things that’s wrong with them.’ He went on: ‘No, you’d better assume that they’ll keep it ticking over. But not putting enough behind it, blowing hot and cold the whole wretched time. That’s what I call making the worst of both worlds.’

  ‘You may be right,’ I said.

  ‘I’ve been right before now,’ he said. ‘So it won’t be much satisfaction.’

  In his negotiations Lufkin made much use of the charged silence, and we fell into one now. But it was not my tactic that night to break it; I was ready to sit mute as long as he cared. In time he said: ‘We can assume they’re going to hopelessly underestimate their commitment, and unless someone steps in they
’ll make a mess of it. The thing is, we’ve got to save them from themselves.’

  Suddenly his eyes, so sad and remote in his hard, neat, skull-like head, were staring into mine, and I felt his will, intense because it was canalized into this one object, because his nature was undivided, all of a piece.

  ‘I want you to help,’ he said.

  Again I did not reply.

  He went on: ‘I take it the decisions about how this job is done, and who makes the hardware, are going to be bandied about at several levels.’

  Lufkin, with his usual precision and realism, had made it his business to understand how government worked; it was no use, he had learned years before, to have the entrée to cabinet ministers unless you were also trusted by the Hector Roses and their juniors.

  ‘I’m not prepared to let it go by default. It’s not my own interests I’m thinking of. It’s a fourth-class risk anyway, and, so far as the firm goes, there’s always money for a good business. As far as I go myself no one’s ever going to make a fortune again, so it’s pointless one way or the other. But I’ve got to be in on it, because this is the place where I can make a contribution. That’s why I want your help.’

  It sounded hypocritical: but Lufkin behaved just as he had to Bevill the previous New Year’s Day, not altering by an inch as he talked to a different man, just as stable and certain of his own motives. It sounded hypocritical, but Lufkin believed each word of it, and that was one of his strengths.

  For myself, I could feel a part of me, a spontaneous part left over from youth, which sympathized with him and wanted to say yes: Even now the temptation was there – one that Lufkin had never felt. But, since I was a young man, I had had to learn how, in situations such as this, to harden myself. Just because I had to watch my response, which was actually too anxious to please, which wanted to say yes instead of no, I had become practised at not giving a point away: in a fashion different from Lufkin’s, and for the opposite reasons, I was nearly as effective at it as he was himself.

  That night, I still had not decided whether I ought to throw in my influence, such as it was, for him or against him.

  ‘I can’t do much just yet,’ I said. ‘And if I tried it would certainly not be wise.’

  ‘I’m not sure I understand you.’

  ‘I’ve been associated with you,’ I told him, ‘and some people will remember that at the most inconvenient time. You can guess the repercussions if I overplayed my hand–’

  ‘What would you say, if I told you that was cowardly?’

  ‘I don’t think it is,’ I said.

  For his own purposes, he was a good judge of men, and a better one of situations. He accepted that he would not get further just then and, with no more ill grace than usual, began to talk at large.

  ‘What shall I do when I retire?’ he said. He was not inviting my opinion; his plans were as precise as those he sent to his sales managers, although he was only forty-eight; they were the plans such as active men make, when occasionally they feel that all their activity has done for them is carve out a prison, In reality Lufkin was happy in his activity, he never really expected that those plans would come about – and yet, through making them, he felt that the door was open.

  As I heard what they were, I thought again that he was odder than men imagined; he did not once refer to his family or wife; although I had never heard scandal, although he went down to his country house each weekend, his plans had been drawn up as though she were dead.

  ‘I shall take a flat in Monaco,’ he announced briskly. ‘I don’t mean just anywhere in the principality, I mean the old town. It isn’t easy to get a place there for a foreigner, but I’ve put out some feelers.’

  It was curious to hear, in the middle of the war.

  ‘Whatever shall you do?’ I said, falling into the spirit of it.

  ‘I shall walk down to the sea and up to the Casino each day, there and back,’ he said. ‘That will give me three miles’ walking every day, which will do for my exercise. No man of fifty or over needs more.’

  ‘That won’t occupy you.’

  ‘I shall play for five hours a day, or until I’ve won my daily stipple, whichever time is the shorter.’

  ‘Shan’t you get tired of that?’

  ‘Never,’ said Lufkin.

  He went on, bleak and inarticulate: ‘It’s a nice place. I shan’t want to move, I might as well die there. Then they can put me in the Protestant cemetery. It would be a nice place to have a grave.’ Suddenly he gave a smile that was sheepish and romantic. In a curt tone, as though angry with me, he returned to business.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he put in as though it were an aside, ‘that you’re getting too cautious about the Barford project. Cold feet. I didn’t expect yours to be so cold.’

  I had set myself neither to be drawn nor provoked. Instead I told him what he knew already, that at most points of decision Hector Rose was likely to be the most influential man – and after him some of the Barford technicians. If any firm, if Lufkin’s firm, were brought in, its technicians would have to be approved by the Barford ones. Lufkin nodded: the point was obvious but worth attending to. Then he said, in a cold but thoughtful tone: ‘What about your own future?’

  I replied that I simply did not know.

  ‘I hear that you’ve been a success at this job – but you’re not thinking of staying in it, there’d be no sense in that.’

  I repeated that it was too early to make up my mind.

  ‘Of course,’ said Lufkin, ‘I’ve got some right to expect you to come back to me.’

  ‘I haven’t forgotten that,’ I said.

  ‘I don’t understand all you want for yourself,’ said Lufkin. ‘But I can give you some of it.’

  Looking at him, I did not know whether it was his harsh kindness, or a piece of miscalculation.

  22: Mention of a Man’s Name

  WAKING, I blinked my eyes against the light, although it was the dun light of a winter afternoon. By the bedside Margaret, smiling, looked down on me like a mother.

  ‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

  It was Saturday afternoon, the end of a busy week; the day before, Barford’s future had been settled, and, as Lufkin had forecast, we had got our way. Soon, I was thinking, lying there half-asleep in Margaret’s bed, we should have to meet Lufkin officially –

  ‘Go to sleep again,’ she said.

  I said that I ought to get up.

  ‘No need.’ She had drawn an armchair up to the bed, and was sitting there in her dressing-gown. She stroked my forehead, as she said: ‘It’s not a sensible way to live, is it?’

  She was not reproaching me, although I was worn out that afternoon, after the week’s meetings and late nights, dinner with Lufkin, dinner with the Minister. She pretended to scold me, but her smile was self-indulgent, maternal. It was pleasure to her to look after anyone; she was almost ashamed, so strong was that pleasure, she tried to disparage it and called it a lust. So, when I was tired and down-and-out, any struggle of wills was put aside, she cherished me; often to me, who had evaded my own mother’s protective love, who had never been cared for in that sense in my life, it was startling to find her doing so.

  Yet that afternoon, watching her with eyes whose lids still wanted to close, letting her pull the quilt round my shoulders, I was happy, so happy that I thought of her as I had at Lufkin’s, in her absence. For an interval, rare in me, the imagination and the present flesh were one. It must go on always, I thought, perhaps this was the time to persuade her to marry me.

  She was gazing down at me, and she looked loving, sarcastic, in charge.

  No, I thought, I would not break this paradisal state; let us have it for a little longer; it did not matter if I procrastinated until later that night, or next week, so long as I was certain we should he happy.

  Thus I did not ask her. Instead, in the thickness of near-sleep, in the luxury of fatigue, I began gossiping about people we knew. Her fingers touching my cheeks, she joined in on
e of those conspiracies of kindness that we entered into when we were at peace, as though out of gratitude for our own condition we had to scheme to bring the same to others. Was there anything we could do for Helen? And couldn’t we find someone for Gilbert Cooke? We were retracing old arguments, about what kind of woman could cope with him, when, suddenly recalling another aspect of my last talk with Lufkin, I broke out that Gilbert might soon have a different kind of problem on his hands.

  I explained that, like me, he would be engaged in the negotiations over which firm to give the contract to – which, now that the decision had gone in favour of the project, was not just a remote debating point but something we should have to deal with inside a month. Just as Lufkin was too competent not to know my part in the negotiations, so he would know Gilbert’s; it might be small, but it would not be negligible. And Gilbert, after the war, would certainly wish to return to Lufkin’s firm: would he be welcome, if he acted against Lufkin now?

  I told Margaret of how, right at the end of our tête-à-tête, when we were both tired and half-drunk, Lufkin had let fly his question about my future, and I still could not be sure whether it was a threat. Gilbert might easily feel inclined to be cautious.

  Margaret smiled, but a little absently, a little uncomfortably, and for once brushed the subject aside, beginning to talk of a man she had just met, whose name I had not heard. He was a children’s doctor, she said, and I did not need telling how much she would have preferred me to live such a life. The official world the corridors of power, the dilemmas of conscience and egotism – she disliked them all. Quite indifferent to whether I thought her priggish, she was convinced that I should be a better and happier man without them. So, with a touch of insistence, she mentioned this new acquaintance’s work in his hospital. His name was Geoffrey Hollis; perhaps it was odd, she admitted, that so young a man should devote himself to children. He was as much unlike Gilbert as a man could be, except that he was also a bachelor and shy.

  ‘He’s another candidate for a good woman,’ she said.