Homecomings

by C. P. Snow

  ‘Would you mind running over the back history, just to get your part and the Department’s part in something like perspective?’ Rose inquired with unblinking politeness. ‘Perhaps you’d better assume that our colleague here’ – he looked at Osbaldiston – ‘is pretty uninformed about the early stages, as he wasn’t in at the beginning.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d better,’ said Osbaldiston offhandedly. ‘Though as a matter of fact I’ve done some of my homework since.’

  Starting to enjoy himself, George gave the history of the atomic energy project from the time he entered the office. Even to me, his feat of memory was fantastic; my own memory was better than most, I had been as close to this stuff as he had, but I could not have touched that display of recapitulation. I could feel that, round the table, they were each impressed, and all took for granted that it was unthinkable for him to give a date or a paper fact wrong. But he was a shade too buoyant, and I was not quite easy. It was partly that, unlike Osbaldiston, he had not taken on a scrap of protective coloration; given the knowledge, he would have made his exposition in the identical manner, in the same hearty voice, when I first met him in a provincial street twenty-five years before. And also – this made me more uneasy – he had not put our part in the project in exact proportion: we had been modestly important, but not quite so important as he thought.

  George was beaming and at ease. Jones, who I knew liked him, put in some questions about method which might have been designed to show George at his most competent. George’s answer was lucidly sober. Just then it seemed to me unthinkable that any body of men, so fair-minded as these, could reject him.

  Jones had lit a pipe, so that the chrysanthemum smell no longer prevailed over the table; outside the windows at our back, the sun must have been brilliant to make the room so light. Rose continued with the interview: present work? how much could be dispensed with? One answer business-like, another again too buoyant and claiming too much, the third fair and good. At all interviews Rose was more than ever impassive, but he gave a slight acquiescent nod: so at once did Jones.

  Then, as though lackadaisically, Osbaldiston spoke.

  ‘Look here,’ he said to George, ‘there’s something we are bound to have at the back of our minds, and it’s far better to have it in the open, I should have thought. You’re obviously an intelligent chap, if I may say so. But with due respect you don’t seem to have done much with your life until you got dragged here by the war, and then you were forty-three already. It’s bound to strike all of us as curious. Why was it? Can you give us some sort of lead?’

  George stared at him.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ George said, with diffidence, ‘that I didn’t get much of a start.’

  ‘Nor did a lot of us, you know.’

  ‘I’ve got to make it clear that my family was very poor.’

  ‘I bet it wasn’t as poor as mine.’ Osbaldiston made a point of not being snobbish about his origin. It was for that reason that he was more pressing about George’s lack of ambition than Rose had been in the first interview three years ago.

  ‘And of course,’ said George, ‘everyone at school thought that becoming a solicitor’s clerk was a step up in the world for me, a bit above my station, as a matter of fact. No one ever pointed out, even if they knew, which I’m inclined to doubt, that there was anything else open to me.’

  ‘I suppose schools were worse in your time,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘And afterwards you were with your firm, Eden and Martineau, for over twenty years and I take it the job is still open for you – I confess I’m still puzzled that you didn’t see your way out.’

  ‘Perhaps I didn’t give it as much attention as others might have done, but at first there were things which interested me more. Somehow the right chance never seemed to present itself–’

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Osbaldiston casually, but they were looking at each other with incomprehension, the young man who, wherever you put him, knew how the successful world ticked, George who was always a stranger there.

  Osbaldiston told Rose that he had no more questions: punctiliously Rose asked George if he had anything more he wished to tell us. No, said George, he thought he had been given a very full hearing. With a curious unobsequious and awkward grace, George added: ‘I should like to say that I am grateful for your consideration.’

  We listened to George’s footsteps down the corridor. When they had died away, Rose, again without expression and in a tone utterly neutral, said: ‘Well, what do you think of him?’

  Quick off the mark and light-toned, Osbaldiston said: ‘At any rate, he’s not a nobody.’

  ‘I thought he interviewed rather well,’ said Jones.

  ‘Yes. He had his ups and downs,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘On the whole he interviewed much as you’d expect. He showed what we knew already, that there’s something in him.’

  Rose said nothing, while Osbaldiston and Jones agreed that George’s mind was powerful, that he would have done well in any academic course. If he had sat for the competitive examination as a young man at the regulation age, he would have got in comfortably, Osbaldiston reflected, and had an adequate career.

  ‘What do you think, Hector?’ Jones inquired.

  Rose was still sitting silent, with his arms folded on his chest. ‘Perhaps he would,’ he said after a pause. ‘But of course that isn’t the point. He’s not a young man now, he’s a middle-aged one of forty-seven, and I think it’s fair to say a distinctly unusual one.

  ‘I’m inclined to think,’ Rose added, his face blank, ‘that the answer this time isn’t immediately obvious.’

  At once, I knew what I was in for. Indeed, I had known it while Rose sat, politely listening to the other’s views, non-committal in his quietness. For, in the long run, the decision was his: the rest of us could advise, argue, persuade: he would listen to the sense of opinion, but his was the clinching voice. Though it did not sound like it, though the manners were egalitarian and not court manners, this was as much a hierarchy as Lufkin’s firm, and Rose’s power that morning, concealed as it was, was as free as Lufkin’s.

  The only chance was for me to match will against will. He had opposed George’s entry right at the beginning; Rose was not the man to forget his own judgements. In that one impartial comment of his, I could hear him believing inflexibly that he had been right.

  Yet within the human limits he was a just man: and, screwing myself up for the argument, there were some fears which I could wipe away. I could rely on it that he would not mention George’s prosecution fourteen years before: he had been acquitted, that was good enough. I could also rely on it that neither he nor the others would be much put off by rumours of George’s womanizing. Compared with those three round the table that morning, not many men, it struck me afterwards, would have been so correct, uninquisitive, unbiased.

  ‘It might help us,’ said Rose, ‘if Lewis, who has seen more of Passant’s work than any of us, would give us his views. I’m very anxious,’ he said to me, ‘that you should feel we’ve been seized of all the information we ought to have.’

  Addressing myself to Rose, I made my case. Probably I should have made it more fluently for anyone but George. I was not relaxed, I had to force myself into the professional idiom.

  I described his work, trying to apportion his responsibility, remembering that to Rose it would not seem right if I did not also demarcate my own. I said that he was a man of immense capacity. It was true – I was straining not to overstate my case – that his immediate judgement was not always first-class, he hadn’t the intuitive feel for what could or could not be done. But he had two qualities not often combined – zest for detail and executive precision, together with a kind of long-term imagination, a forecaster’s insight into policy. In the area between detail and the long term, he was not so good as our run-of-the-mill administrators: but nevertheless his two qualities were so rare that he was more valuable than any of them.

  I had been talking on the plane of reason, but I heard my own v
oice harsh, emphatic without helping the sense.

  ‘We’re most grateful to you for that piece of exposition, my dear Lewis. We really are very, very much obliged to you.’

  Jones sucked at his pipe: one could feel him sniffing dissension in the air. He said: ‘I imagine that, if old Passant didn’t get established, he’d just go straight back to those solicitors and it wouldn’t be any terrific hardship for him.’

  ‘He’d be about £200 a year better off with us,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘but you can knock some of that off for living in London.’

  ‘I wonder whether it would be really a kindness to establish him?’ Jones was meditating. ‘Because he’s obviously an unusual man, as Hector says, but with the best will in the world we can’t do much for him. He’d have to begin as a principal and he’s nearly fifty now, and at his age he couldn’t possibly go more than one step up. That’s not much for someone who really is a bit of a fellow in his own way.’

  ‘It may not be much, but he wants it,’ I burst out.

  ‘All that is off the point,’ said Rose, with untypical irritation. ‘We’re not required to say what is good for him or what isn’t, and we’re not concerned with his motives. He’s applied to be established, and he’s got a right to apply, and our business starts there and ends there. The only conceivable point we have got to decide is whether on his merits we ought to recommend him. I suggest,’ he said, recapturing his politeness but with a flick in his tone, ‘that we shall find the problem quite sufficiently intricate without introducing any psychological complications.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ said Osbaldiston, ‘that I can see a strong enough reason for not having him.’

  ‘Do you see one, Hector?’ asked Jones.

  ‘Aren’t you making very heavy weather of it?’ I said, thinking the time for caution had gone. ‘Here’s a man everyone agrees to have some gifts. We’re thinking of him for a not desperately exalted job. As a rule we can pass people, like Cooke for example, without half this trouble. Does anyone really consider that Cooke is a quarter as competent as Passant?’

  ‘I didn’t want to give my opinion,’ said Rose smoothly and slowly to Jones, ‘before I had some indication of what you others thought. I still don’t want to rush things, but perhaps this is a reasonable time to sketch out the way my mind’s been tending. As for your question, Lewis, I don’t consider that we’ve been making unduly heavy weather of this business. We want to see that this man gets fair treatment: and we also don’t want to take an unjustified risk for the Department. It isn’t entirely easy to reconcile those two objectives. I’m inclined to think that you slightly, not very greatly, but perceptibly, exaggerate Passant’s mental qualities, but I won’t quarrel with the view that he is a distinctly better mind than Cooke, for example, or, as far as that goes, than most of the ordinary principals in the Department. I think I remember saying much the same thing when I first saw him. On the other hand, that doesn’t entirely persuade me that keeping him wouldn’t be a mildly regrettable risk where the Department stands to lose slightly more than it stands to gain. After all, if we keep Passant, we gain a principal in some ways rather better than the average, in some ways, as you very properly pointed out, Lewis, rather worse. And at the same time we take on a definite hazard, not of course a serious one or one likely to materialize in fact, but the kind of hazard that you can’t escape if you commit yourself to a man of, I don’t want to do him an injustice but perhaps I can reasonably say, powerful, peculiar, and perhaps faintly unstable personality. There’s bound to be a finite chance that such a man wouldn’t fit in for his remaining thirteen years or whatever it is. There’s a finite chance that we should be making trouble for ourselves. There might just possibly be some row or commotion that wouldn’t do us any good. I don’t think that it is responsible to take those risks for the sake of an appointment at this level. I think I should conceivably have come down in Passant’s favour if we were able to consider him for something more senior. He’s the sort of man, in fact, who might have been far less trouble as a cabinet minister than he’d be in the slightly more pedestrian ranks of the administrative service.’

  ‘Well,’ said Jones, ‘I don’t think anyone could add much to a summing up like that.’

  While there had seemed a doubt, Osbaldiston had been as painstaking as Rose himself. Now he tilted back his chair, and sounded more than ever offhand.

  ‘Agreed,’ he said, as if anxious not to waste any more time. ‘Though perhaps it’s a pity that we didn’t catch the chap young.’

  ‘In that case, with your approval,’ Rose remarked, ‘I propose to report on him to the Commission in terms something like this. I’ll send you a draft. But I propose to say that he has filled a principal’s place here quite up to standard form, and in one or two respects better than standard form. That we consider him intellectually well up to the level of the administrative class. But that at his age, bearing in mind certain features of his personality, we shouldn’t feel entirely easy about fitting him into the Department as an established man.’

  ‘It might be a friendly thought,’ said Jones, and he was speaking with good nature, ‘to tell him to withdraw and not fag to go up to the Commission. Because there will be nothing they can do but say no.’

  ‘I agree,’ said Rose.

  I began, keeping my voice down, still seeming reasonable, to open the argument again, but in a moment Osbaldiston broke in: ‘It’s no use going over old ground.’

  ‘I really don’t think it’s very profitable,’ said Rose.

  Then I lost my temper. I said they were too fond of the second-rate. I said that any society which deliberately made safe appointments was on the way out.

  ‘I’m sorry that we can’t carry you with us, Lewis.’ Rose’s eyes were cold, but he was keeping his own temper.

  ‘You do not realize your own prejudices,’ I cried.

  ‘No, this isn’t at all profitable and we must agree to differ.’ Rose spoke with exaggerated calm. ‘You’ve had more experience in selecting men than any of your colleagues. As you know, I for one have often been guided by you. But you’d be the first to admit that no man can be infallible. And even very wise people sometimes seem no more infallible than the rest of us, the nearer they get towards home.’

  He had permitted himself that last arctic flick. Then, leaning back in his chair, his face smooth, he said: ‘Well, I think that is all for this morning. Thank you all very, very much for sparing your valuable time. Thank you, John. Thank you, Douglas. Thank you very much, Lewis.’

  Back in my room, I stared out into the sun-bright Whitehall with the gauze of anger, of something like anxiety, of despondent restless bitterness in front of my eyes. It was the state that I used to know more often, that I had lived in during my worst times. It was a long while since I had been so wretched.

  It had come pretty easy, it had not given me much regret, to slip out of the struggles of power – as a rule I did not mind seeing the places of power filled by the Osbaldistons, those who wanted them more. But that morning, gazing blankly down at the sunny street, I was wretched because I was not occupying them myself. Then and only then could I have done something for George and those like him.

  The men I sat with in their offices, with their moral certainties, their comfortable, conforming indignation which never made them put a foot out of step – they were the men who managed the world, they were the people who in any society came out on top. They had virtues denied the rest of us: I had to give them my respect. But that morning I was on the other side.

  45: Frigid Drawing-room

  IN Whitehall the fog was dense: it was a little whiter, I could make out the lights in the shop-fronts, as the taxi nosed up Baker Street. By the time we reached Regent’s Park, the pavements were clear to the view as far as the glowing ground-floor windows. Trying to damp down expectation, I was soothed by the fog shutting me in: instead of the joggle of the taxi, the reminder of adult expectations to which one did not know the end, I felt the sh
eer cosiness of a childhood’s winter afternoon.

  Whatever my expectations had been, I was surprised when I entered Davidson’s study. For Margaret smiled at me, without much trace of trouble: Davidson did not look up: they were playing a game. In the fireplace stood a teapot, cups, a plate of crumpets, but on Davidson’s side the tea had a skin on it. The crumpet’s butter was solid. He was leaning, his face still distinguished even though his mouth was open with concentration, over the board. So far as I could pick up at a glance, the board was home made, something like a chess board but not symmetrical and with at least three times the number of squares on the base line: at some points there appeared to be blanks and hazards. They were using ordinary chessmen, but each had some extra pieces, together with small boxes whose function I did not begin to understand.

  As I looked at Margaret’s face, it seemed to me that I remembered returning to the house in Chelsea, finding Sheila staring with psychotic raptness at her chessmen: it was not a jab of pain, it was more like the pleasure (the exact converse of the Dantesque misery) with which, in the company of someone whom one safely loves, one looks in at a place where one has been miserable.

  ‘She said that you might be coming,’ said Davidson without preamble, gazing up under his eyebrows and then back at the board.

  I said, ‘Just for a few minutes’, but Davidson ignored me.

  ‘You’ll have to play, of course,’ he said sternly. ‘It’s a much better game with three.’

  It was, in fact, a war game which Davidson had perversely invented while he and his friends were pacifists in 1914–18. So far as I could judge, who envisaged the game stretching on, the three of us kept speechless there, it was elaborate but neat, crisp because he had a gift for concepts: Davidson wanted to explain it to me in all its beauties, irritated because I did not seem to be attending. I did not even pay enough attention, Davidson indicated, to the names of the two sides. They were Has-beens and Humbugs. The Has-beens were the side Davidson was commanding: their officers were chosen from his allies, associates and teachers, for Davidson, with his usual bleak honesty, knew critical fashion when he saw it. The other side was picked from Davidson’s irremovable aversions, among them D H Lawrence, Jung, Kierkegaard; various Catholic intellectuals and Communist art critics had places as brigadiers.