by C. P. Snow
I did not know enough about the game to lose on purpose. All I knew was that Davidson would never get bored with it.
I could not even guess whether Margaret was willing to break the peace-of-the-moment.
Just then she was threatening one of her father’s rooks, who stood for an academic philosopher known to all three of us.
‘He oughtn’t to be on your side anyway,’ said Margaret.
Davidson studied the battle-plan.
‘Why shouldn’t he?’ he said without attention.
‘He’s going to be the next convert, or so the Warden says.’
‘The Warden,’ Davidson remarked, still preoccupied with his move, ‘is a good second-class liar.’
At last he guarded the rook, and was able to gather together the conversation – ‘he [the philosopher] is about as likely to be converted as I am. He’s a perfectly sensible man.’
‘And you couldn’t say fairer than that, could you?’ Davidson smiled: he liked being teased by his daughter: it was easy to feel how he had liked being teased, perhaps still did, by other women.
‘He was always perfectly sensible,’ he said.
‘However did you know?’
‘I don’t remember him ever saying anything really crass,’ said Davidson.
‘But you all said the same things,’ said Margaret. ‘I always wondered how you could tell each other apart.’
It was the first time I had seen her alone with her father. I had heard her talk of him very often, but never to him: and now I listened to her sounding gay and very much his daughter. Although I should have known better, I was surprised.
It was true that she felt something stronger than dislike for the beliefs of her father and his friends, and still more for their unbeliefs. She had been passionately convinced ever since she was a child that their view of life left out all that made men either horrible or splendid.
And yet, seeing her with her father, upset because I wanted nothing but to speak to her alone, I had to notice one thing – that she was proud of him. Her language was more like his than mine; in some ways her nerves were too.
I noticed something else, as I tried to calculate when the game might end – that she was disappointed for him. By the standards of his friends, he, who in his youth had been one of the most glittering of them, had not quite come off. He was no sort of creative person, he was not the critic that some of them had been. He had no illusion about it: at times, so Margaret divined, he had suffered because of it, and so did she. She could not help feeling that, if she had been a man, she would have been stronger than he. That protest, born of their relation or edged by it, had been too deep for me to see, in our first time together. I imagined her as other people did: all they imagined was true, she was loving, she was happy to look after those she loved – it was all true: but it was also true (and the origin of much that she struggled with) that her spirit was as strong as her father’s or mine, and in the last resort did not give an inch to either of us.
The game continued. Repeatedly Margaret was glancing at me, until suddenly, as though screwing herself to the threshold edge, she said: ‘I want to talk to Lewis for a minute.’
It was Davidson’s move, and with a faint irritation he nodded. In an instant I followed Margaret into the hall; she led me into the drawing-room, which was dark except for a dim luminescence from the street lamp outside, bleared by the fog: the room struck chilly, but her cheek, as my fingers touched it, was hot, and I could feel my own skin flushed. She switched on a light: she looked up at me, and, although we were alone in the long room, although there was no one else in the house except Davidson, her voice was faint.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said.
‘That’s easy to say.’
‘No, it’s not easy to say.’ She had roused herself. Her face was wide open: it might have been smiling or in pain.
‘I tell you,’ she cried, ‘there’s no need to worry!’
I exclaimed.
‘Do you believe me?’ she cried.
‘I want to believe you.’
‘You can.’ Then she added, in a matter-of-fact but exhausted tone: ‘I’ll do it.’
She went on:‘Yes, I’ll tell him.’
We were standing in the corner of the frigid room. I felt for an instant the rip of triumph, then I shared her tiredness. It was the tiredness which comes after suspense, when the news may be good or bad: suddenly the good news comes, and in the midst of exaltation one is so light-headed with fatigue that one cannot read the letter through. I felt that happiness had sponged my face, taking away care like the smell of soap in the morning: I saw her face, also washed with happiness.
We stood quiet, our arms round each other: then I saw there was another purpose, a trouble, forming underneath the look of peace.
She said: ‘I’ll tell him. But you must wait a little.’
‘I can’t wait any longer.’
‘You must be patient, just this once.’
‘No, you must do it straightaway.’
‘It’s not possible,’ she cried.
‘It’s got to be.’
I was gripping her shoulders.
‘No,’ she said, looking at me with knowledge of us both, ‘I don’t want you to, it would be bad. I promise you, it won’t be long.’
‘What are you waiting for?’ To my bewilderment, she replied in a tone sounding like one of her aunts, astringent, cynical: ‘How often have I told you,’ she said, ‘that if you’re going to hurt anyone, it’s no use being timidly considerate over the time you choose to do it?
‘I always told you,’ she could not leave it alone, ‘that you did more harm by trying to be kind. Well, there’s nothing like practising what one preaches.’
She was trapped, so that she could not bring herself to tell the truth to Geoffrey, or even mildly upset him. By a minor irony, the reason was as prosaic as some which had from time to time determined my own behaviour. It happened that Geoffrey was within a fortnight of sitting his examination for Membership, that is, his qualification as a specialist. It happened also that Geoffrey, so confident in general, was a bad and nervous examinee. She had at least to coax him through, take care of him for this last time: it meant dissimilating, which to her was an outrage, it meant not acting, which was like an illness – and yet not to look after him, just then, when he was vulnerable, would mean a strain she could not take.
‘If you must,’ I agreed at last.
She was relieved, she was abandoned to relief. Soon this would be behind us, she said. Then, as though at random, she cried: ‘Now I want to do something.’
‘What?’
‘I want us to go and tell my father.’
Her cheeks and temples had coloured, her eyes were bright with energy, her shoulders were thrown back. She led me back through the house, her steps echoing excitedly in the empty hall, until we threw open the door of the study where her father, his beautiful head sunk on his chest, was staring with a mathematician’s intensity at the board.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.
He made a cordial but uninterested noise.
‘You’ll have to listen. Or have I got to write you a letter about it?’
Reluctantly he looked up, with intelligent, brilliant, opaque eyes. He said: ‘If you’re going to disturb the game, I hope it isn’t something trivial.’
‘Well. Lewis and I want to get married.’
Davidson looked blank-faced. He seemed to have had no intimation whatsoever of the news: she might have been telling him that she had just seen a brontosaurus.
‘Do you, by God?’ he said.
Then he became convulsed with laughter.
‘Perhaps you were within your rights to disturb the game. No, I can’t say that the news is entirely trivial.’
‘I haven’t told Geoffrey yet,’ she said. ‘I can’t for a little while. I don’t know whether he’ll let me go.’
‘He’ll have to,’ said Davidson.
‘It may
be difficult.’
‘I should have thought he was a moderately civilized man,’ he replied. ‘In the long run, one’s got no choice in these things, don’t you know?’
She would have preferred her father not to be quite so casual: but telling him had given her the pleasure of action. It was a joy to let us be seen in another’s eyes.
For once her father’s glance had not dropped; he looked at her with a sharp, critical, appreciative smile, and then at me.
‘I’m quite glad,’ he said.
I said: ‘You ought to be prepared for some unpleasantness. We shall be giving anyone who wants plenty to get hold of.’
‘Anyone who wants,’ he replied indifferently, ‘is welcome to it, I should have thought.’
I supposed he did not know our story, but went on: ‘Even well-wishers are going to find it slightly bizarre.’
‘All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part,’ said Davidson. ‘I don’t see why yours is any more so than anyone else’s.’
He went on: ‘I’ve never known a situation where it was worth listening to outsiders.’
He was the last man to talk for effect: he meant it. It was a kind of contempt which was much more truly aristocratic than that of Betty Vane’s relatives: it was the contempt of an intellectual aristocracy, who never doubted their values, least of all in sexual matters: who listened to each other, but not at all to anyone outside. Sometimes – it had often alienated his daughter – his lack of regard for opinion implied that those outside the magic ring might as well belong to another species. But, in times of trouble, it made him inflexible, one to whom the temptations of disloyalty did not exist.
‘As a general rule and nonsense apart,’ he said, ‘when people are in your position the only help of any conceivable good is practical.’
With a surprisingly brisk and executive air, he asked: ‘Are you all right for money?’
It sounded more surprising, for Davidson, who had never got acclimatized to fountain-pens or telegrams, seemed the most un-practical of men. In fact, the concentration he applied to art-history or to home-made games went also into his investments and he had been consistently and abnormally successful with them.
I told him that money was not a problem. Still executive, he said: ‘I’ve known it to be useful to have somewhere to live where people don’t expect to find you. I could arrange to let you have this house for six months.’
Margaret said she might take him at his word. She would want somewhere to live with the child until we could be married.
Davidson was satisfied. He had no more to contribute. Once more he studied his daughter’s face with pleasure, then his eyes dropped to their habitual level. Although he did not openly suggest that we should finish the game, his glance began to stray towards the board.
46: Last Train to a Provincial Town
EACH morning, as I telephoned Margaret, the winter sky heavy over the trees outside, I heard her forcing her voice to hearten me. At last, so near the time when I trusted her to come to me, I was jealous. I could not stand the thought of her life from day to day, I had to switch my imagination off. I could not stand the thought of her keeping his spirits up; I went through those prosaic miseries of the imagination in which one is tormented by the hearth-glow of another’s home, even if it is an unhappy home.
I told myself her part was the harder, but I began to be frightened of the telephone, as though it did nothing but force me to think of her home, of the two of them together.
As we talked, I never inquired about the exact date of his Membership. It was partly that I was trying to keep my side of the bargain, she was to choose her time: but it was also that I did not want to know, either that or anything else about him.
Christmas passed. On a morning just as I was getting ready to ring her up, the telephone bell rang. I heard her voice, though it was distorted and forced.
‘It will be all right.’
‘You’ve told him?’ I cried.
‘Yes, I’ve told him.’
‘Is all well?’
‘All will be well.’ She was crying.
‘When?’
‘Soon.’
‘Very soon?’ I burst out. She said: ‘For a long time he wouldn’t believe it.’
‘When shall I fetch you?’
‘I had to make him believe me.’
‘The sooner I’m with you–’
‘He can’t understand why this has happened to him.’
‘Has he accepted it?’
‘Yes, but he’s bitter.’
She had deceived herself when we talked of him, she was saying. I replied, if that was true, I had deceived myself as much. Then crying, sometimes dragged back to the night just past (for they had talked right through it) she was asking, as she had not done before, for me to reassure her, to tell her what we should give each other.
When would she come to me? Not that day, she said, in a tone that made me feel there was one last way in which she was trying to look after him. Not that day, but the next.
‘At last,’ she said, in a tone neither sad nor young.
That same evening, I was having a drink with George Passant, who had served his final day at the office and was returning to the provincial town by the last train. We met in a public house, for George had not adapted himself to clubs: there he sat by the fire, enjoying himself as comfortably as in our youth. I told him again, as I had done many times, how angry I was with the Department, and how I still uselessly thought of methods by which I might have presented the case better.
‘It was a nuisance,’ said George. ‘But anyway I had three interesting years, I wouldn’t have been without them for the world.’
Somehow he could still draw a line across the past, regard it with an invulnerable optimism as though it had happened to someone else.
‘The more I think of it,’ said George, with a complacent smile, ‘the better it seems. I’ve had three remarkably interesting years and done some work which I know the value of better than anyone else. The value in question is incidentally considerable. In the process I’ve been able to estimate the ability of our hierarchical superiors and there’s no danger that I shall be tempted to get them out of proportion. And also I’ve managed to seize the opportunity for a certain amount of private life. Which all constitutes a pretty fair return for a very minor bit of humiliation.’
When he first heard that he had been rejected, he had broken into a comminatory rage, cursing all who had ever been in authority over him, all officials, all members of the new orthodoxy, all who conspired to keep him in the cold. But very soon he had been exaggeratedly reasonable, pointing out ‘Of course, I couldn’t expect anything different…’ and he would produce some ingenious, highly articulated and quite unrealistic interpretation of why Rose, Jones, and Osbaldiston found it necessary to keep him out.
So now he sat comfortably by the fire, drinking his beer, proving to me that he was not damaged.
‘All I hope is that you invite me up here pretty regularly,’ said George. ‘In future, an occasional visit to London will be essential to my well-being.’
It might have been some new night-spot he had discovered: it might have been the balm, mysterious to all but himself, of meeting successful acquaintances: probably it was both, but I did not attend, for I had meant to tell him my news and this was the opening.
‘Of course,’ I said.
I had listened while Margaret, rejoicing in candour, had broken our secret to her father, Myself, I had not said anything, open or implicit, even to my brother or to a friend as old as George – except when, to my own astonishment, I came out with it to Getliffe. Even with George that night I did not wish to talk: I still wanted to be timid with fate: I found myself speaking with an obliqueness I could not quite control.
‘Next time you come,’ I said, ‘there’s just a faint possibility that I may not be alone.’
‘I’ll give you plenty of notice,’ said George obtusely.
&
nbsp; ‘I mean, I may have someone in my flat.’
George chuckled.
‘Oh well, she won’t be there forever.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ I said, ‘it’s not quite inconceivable, of course, it’s too early to say–’
George was puzzled. He had not often heard me so incoherent; he had not heard me anything like so incoherent twenty years before, when my friends and I told glorious stories of fornications we had not yet in fact committed. At last I made it clear enough, and he was on his feet towards the bar, saying in a great voice: ‘Well, this is a new start, and I’m damned if we don’t have a celebration!’
Superstitiously I tried to stop him, but he turned on me: ‘Is this a new start or isn’t it?’
‘I hope it is.’
‘Don’t sit on the blasted fence. Of course it is, and I’m not going to be done out of celebrating it.’
George continued in that state of noisy argumentative well-being until, when he had drunk more, he said: ‘There’s a certain beautiful symmetry in the way we stand tonight. You’re just coming out of your old phase of existence – just at the precise moment that I am neatly returning to mine.’
He laughed out loud, not rancorously, not enviously, but with a curious pleasure, pleasure it seemed in the sheer pattern of events. He was a happy man: he always had been, but was growing even happier in middle age, when it seemed to all external eyes that he had totally failed. As he said, he was returning to his old existence, to the provincial town, to the firm of solicitors, where he would continue not as partner but as managing clerk: and there, one would have bet that night, George first to do so, he would stay for the rest of his life. But he breathed in a happiness that begins to visit some in middle age: it was the happiness which comes to those who believe they have lived according to their nature. In George’s own view he had been himself, he had lived as himself, more than anyone round him. He blamed his external calamities to that cause and still thought – partly as a consolation, partly because in the happiness of his senses it seemed true – that he had had the best of the bargain.
