by C. P. Snow
50: Comparison of Marriages
WHEN I was alone, I thought sometimes of the warning Margaret had not spoken. But neither of us so much as hinted at it, until a night over a year later, a night still unshadowed, when we had Gilbert and Betty Cooke to dinner.
To my surprise – I had expected the worst, and got it wrong – that marriage was lasting. They often came to see us since – also to my surprise – Betty and Margaret had become reconciled. Thus, by the most unexpected of back doors, Gilbert’s inquisitiveness at last found our house wide open. That inquisitiveness, however, had lost its edge. We had looked for every reason for his wanting to marry Betty except the simple one; but he was devoted to his wife, and humbly, energetically, gratefully, he was engrossed in making the marriage comfortable for her.
On the surface, it was a curious relation. They quarrelled and snacked. They had decided not to have children and spent much thought, disagreeing with each other, on food and drink and how to decorate their flat. With an income much less than ours, they had achieved twice the standard of luxury, and they went on adding to it, simultaneously attending to and criticizing each other. It was easy to imagine them at sixty, when Gilbert retired, knowing just the hotels to squeeze the last pound’s worth out of his pension, badgering restaurant proprietors all over Europe, like the Knights without the hypochondria, a little cantankerous, a little scatty except about their comforts, carping at each other but, to any remark by any intruder, presenting a united front. It might have seemed a comedown, compared with Betty in her twenties, so kind and slap-dash, so malleable, anxious for a husband to give purpose to her existence: or compared with Gilbert at the same age who, enormities and all, was also a gallant and generous young man.
But they had done better than anyone saw. They were each of them unvain, almost morbidly so: the prickles and self-assertiveness which made them snack did not stop them depending on each other and coming close. They were already showing that special kind of mutual dependence occasionally seen in childless marriages, where neither the partners nor relations ever seem to quite grow up, but where, in compensation, they preserve for each other the interest, the absorption, the self-centredness, the cantankerous sweetness of young love.
Looking at them at our dinner table I saw Gilbert, in his middle forties, getting fatter and redder in the face; Betty, well over forty, her eyes still fine, but her nose dominating, more veins breaking through the skin, the flesh thickening on her shoulders. And yet Margaret, in years and looks so much the younger, was older in all else – so that, watching them, one had to keep two time-scales in one’s head, one non-physiological: and on the latter, Betty, with her gestures as unsubdued as when she was young, allied with Gilbert in a conspiracy to secure life’s minor treats, was standing delectably still.
That night they had come a little late, so as to avoid seeing the children; increasingly, like two self-indulgent bachelors, they were cutting out exercises which they found boring. But for politeness’ sake Betty asked questions about the boys, in particular about mine: and Gilbert did his bit by examining and hectoring us about our plans for their education.
‘There’s nothing to hesitate about,’ he said, bullying and good-natured. ‘There’s only one school you need think about,’ he went on, referring to his own. ‘You can afford it, I can’t conceive what you’re hesitating for.
‘That is,’ he said, his detective passion suddenly spurting out, gazing at Margaret with hot eyes, ‘if you’re not going to have a big family–’
‘No, I can’t have any more,’ Margaret told him directly.
‘Well, that’s all right then,’ cried Gilbert.
‘No, it hangs over us a bit,’ she said.
‘Come on, two’s enough for you,’ he jollied her along.
‘Only one is Lewis’,’ she replied, far less tight-lipped, though still far shyer, than I was. ‘It would be safer if he had more than one.’
‘Anyway, what about this school?’ said Betty briskly, a little uneasily, as though shearing away from trouble she did not wish to understand.
‘It’s perfectly obvious they can well afford it, there’s only one school for them.’ Gilbert was talking across the table to her, and across the table she replied.
‘You’re overdoing it,’ she said.
‘What am I overdoing?’
‘You think it’s all too wonderful. That’s the whole trouble, none of you ever recover from the place.’
‘I still insist,’ Gilbert was drawing a curious triumph out of challenging her, he looked plethoric and defiant, ‘that it’s the best education in the country.’
‘Who’s to say so?’ she said.
‘Everyone says so,’ he replied. ‘The world says so. And over these things the world is usually right,’ added Gilbert, that former rebel.
They went on arguing. Betty had reserved her scepticism more than he had; she recalled days when, among aristocrats of her own kind, intellectuals like the Davidsons, it was common form to dislike the class subtleties of English education; she had known friends of ours who had assumed that, when they had families, they would break away from it. She said to Gilbert: ‘You’re just telling them to play the same game with their children as everyone round them.’
‘Why shouldn’t they?’
Betty said: ‘If anyone can afford not to play the same game, Lewis and Margaret can.’
Duty done, with relief they grumbled about their last weekend. But I was absent-minded, as I had been since Margaret spoke about the child. The talk went on, a dinner-party amiable, friendly, without strain, except that which gripped me.
‘It would be safer–’ She had meant something more difficult, I knew clearly, than that it would be a life-long risk, having an only son. That was obvious and harsh enough.
But it was not that alone of which Margaret was afraid. No, she was afraid of something which was not really a secret between us but which, for a curious reason, she would not tell me.
The reason was that she distrusted her motive. She knew that she expected perfection more than I did. She had sacrificed more than I had; it was she who had, in breaking her marriage, taken more responsibility and guilt; she watched herself lest in return she expected too much.
But in fact, though she distrusted herself, her fear was not that I should be compelled to lose myself in my son, but that, in a final sense, I should desire to. She knew me very well. She had recognized, before I did, how much suffering a nature can bring upon itself just to keep in the last resort untouched. She had seen that the deepest experiences of my early life, unrequited love, the care I spent on an afflicted friend, my satisfaction in being a spectator, had this much in common, that whatever pain I went through I need answer to myself alone.
If it had not been for Margaret, I might not have understood. It had taken a disproportionate effort – because under the furrows of such a nature as mine there is hidden an inadmissible self-love – to think that it was not good enough. Without her I should not have managed it. But the grooves were cut deep: how easy it would be, how it would fit part of my nature like a skin, to find my own level again in the final one-sided devotion, the devotion to my son.
When Betty and Gilbert, each half-drunk and voluble, had at last left us, at the moment when, after drawing back the curtains, I should have started gossiping about them, the habit of marriage as soothing as the breath of the night air, I said instead: ‘Yes, it is a pity that we’ve only the one.’
‘You ought to have been a bit of a patriarch, oughtn’t you?’ she said. She was giving me the chance to pass it off, but I said: ‘It needn’t matter to him, though, need it?’
‘He’ll be all right.’
‘I think I’ve learned enough not to get in his way.’
I added: ‘And if I haven’t learned by now, I never shall.’
She smiled, as though we were exchanging ironies: but she understood, the mistakes of the past were before us, she wished she could relieve me of them. And then I seemed t
o change the subject, for I said: ‘Those two’ – I waved the way Betty and Gilbert had gone ‘– they’ll make a go of it now, of course.’
On the instant, she knew what I was doing, getting ready to talk, through the code of a discussion of another marriage, about our own.
It was stuffy in the room, and we went down into the street, our arms round each other, refreshed: the night was close, cars were probing along the pavement, we struck in towards one of the Bayswater squares and then walked round, near to each other as we spoke of Betty and Gilbert.
Yes, she repeated, it was a triumph in its way. She thought that what had drawn them together was not desire, though they had enough to get some fun, was nothing more exalted than their dread of being lonely. Betty was far too honourable to like Gilbert’s manoeuvres, but they were lonely and humble spirited, they would fly at each other, but in the long run they would confide and she would want him there. If they had had children, or Betty had had a child by her first marriage, they might not have been so glued together, I said: I was trying to tell the truth, not to make things either too easy for myself or too hard: they were going to need each other more, at the price of being more selfish towards everyone else.
In the square, which had once been grand and had now become tenement flats, the last lights were going out. There was no breeze at all: we were holding hands, and talking of those two, we met each other, and spoke of our self-distrust.
51: Listening to the Next Room
AS we walked round the square that night, both children were well. A fortnight later we took them to visit their grandfather, and the only illness on our minds was his. In the past winter Davidson had had a coronary thrombosis: and, although he survived, it was saddening to be with him now. Not that he was not stoical: he was clear-sighted about what he could expect for the rest of his life: the trouble was, he did not like what his clear sight told him, his spirits had gone dark and he would have thought it unreasonable if they had not.
Up to the sixties he had lived the life of a young man. His pleasures had been a young man’s, even his minor ones, his games and his marathon walks. He looked more delicate than most men, but there was a pagan innocence about him, he had not been compelled to adjust himself to getting old. Then it had happened at a blow.
He was out of comparison more stoical than Mr Knight. Though Davidson believed that when he died he was going into oblivion, he feared death less than the old clergyman. He had found life physically delightful until he was sixty-five, while Mr Knight had immobilized himself in hypochondria more than twenty years before. But of the two it was Davidson who had no consolation in the face of a sick old age.
What he did was concentrate fanatically on any of his pastimes still within his power. No one could strike another spark of interest out of him; that Saturday afternoon Margaret was screwing herself up to try.
As we entered his study with the children, he was playing the war game against Helen, the board spread out on a table so that he could be comfortable in an armchair. In the quiet both boys backed shyly to Margaret, and momentarily the only noise we heard was Davidson’s breathing, a little shorter, a little more strenuous than a healthy man’s, just audible on the close air.
The silence cracked as Maurice went straight to Helen, to whom he talked more fluently than any other adult, while the little boy advanced and stared from the board to Davidson. While Helen took Maurice away into the corner, Charles asked: ‘What is Grandpa doing?’
‘Nothing very dazzling, Carlo.’
Although Davidson’s voice had none of the spring and tone it used to have, although the words were mysterious to him, the child burbled with laughter: being called ‘Carlo’ made him laugh as though he were being tickled. He cried out that his grandfather called him Carlo, he wanted the joke repeated. Then Davidson coughed and the child looked at him, transparent indigo irises turned upon opaque sepia ones, the old man’s face sculptured, the child’s immediate and aware, so unlike that they seemed not to have a gene in common.
‘Are you better?’ the child asked.
‘Not really. Thank you,’ Davidson replied.
‘Not quite better?’
‘No, not quite better.’
‘A little better?’
For once not replying with the exact truth, Davidson said: ‘Perhaps a little better.’
‘Better soon,’ said the child, and added, irrelevantly and cheerfully: ‘Nanny is a little better.’ It was true that the nurse who came in half the week had been ill with influenza.
‘I’m very glad to hear that, Carlo.’
I wanted to distract the child from his grandfather. I could hear – beneath Davidson’s tone, off-hand rather than polite, which he used to the infant not yet three as to a Nobel Prize winner – I could hear a discomfort which by definition, as Davidson himself might say, was beyond help. So I asked the little boy to come and talk to me instead.
He replied that he would like to talk to his grandfather. I said that I would show him pictures. He smiled but said: ‘Grandpa called me Carlo.’
He went round the board, nearer to Davidson, staring applaudingly into his face. Then Margaret spoke to Charles, explaining that he could come back later and that I had splendid new pictures for him.
‘Go with daddy,’ she told him.
The child gazed at me, his eyes darkened almost to black.
As a rule he was amenable, but he was enjoying the clash of wills. He was searching for words, there was a glint in his eye which in an adult one would have suspected as merry, obstinate, perceptibly sadic.
‘Go with daddy,’ Margaret said.
Clearly and thoughtfully he replied: ‘I don’t know who daddy is.’
Everyone laughed, me included: for the instant I was as hurt as I had been at eighteen, asking a girl to dance and being turned down. Then I was thinking how implacable one’s egotism is, thinking from mine just wounded to this child’s.
Gazing at him beside his grandfather’s chessboard, I felt unusual confidence, without any premonition, that, as he grew up, he would be good-natured: within the human limits, he would be amiable and think of others. But one had to learn one’s affections: the amiability and gentleness one dressed up in, but the rapacious egotism had been there all the time beneath. It protruded again, naked as in infancy, as one got into old age. Looking from the smiling little boy to his grandfather, dispirited and indrawn, I thought that by a wretched irony we were seeing its re-emergence in that man, so stoical and high-principled, who only a year before had been scarcely middle-aged.
As we tried to persuade the child away from his grandfather’s side, he was bad-tempered in a manner uncommon with him. He cried, he was fractious, he said he had a cough like grandpa, he practised it, while Margaret listened, not knowing how much was genuine, except that he had woken up with the faint signs of a cold that morning.
She put her hand to his forehead, and so did I. He seemed just warm with passion. Through anger, he kept telling us he would like to stay with grandpa: he repeated, as though it were a reason for staying, that he had a cough like grandpa, and produced it again.
‘I think he’s over-excited, I don’t think it can be more than that,’ said Margaret to me in an undertone, hesitating whether to look after him or her father, her forehead lined. Then she made up her mind; she had come to speak to her father, she could not shirk it and leave him with his spirits dead. She called to Helen, telling her that Charles was upset, would she take care of him for half an hour? Helen nodded, and got up. It was curious to see her, trim yet maternally accomplished as Margaret would never be, since Helen’s instinct was so sure that it left her no room for wondering whether she might not be taking the wrong course, saying the wrong thing. As effortlessly as a hypnotist, she led him and Maurice out of the room, other attractions wiped out of Charles’ mind as though his memory were cut off.
Left with her father, Margaret’s first act was to take Helen’s side of the war game, at which she was the only perso
n who could give Davidson a run. In silence, they finished the game. Davidson’s expression had lightened a little: partly it was that Margaret was his favourite daughter, partly the anodyne of the game – but also, where many men would have drawn comfort from their grandchildren, to him the sight of them seemed a reminder of mortality.
He and Margaret were staring down at the board: his profile confronted hers, each of them firm and beautiful in their ectomorphic lines, their diagonals the mirror-image of each other. He had a winning position, but she contrived to make the end respectable.
‘For neatness,’ said Davidson, his tone lively again, ‘I give that finish 65 out of a 100.’
‘Nothing like enough,’ said Margaret. ‘I want 75 at least.’
‘I’m prepared to compromise on 69.’
He sounded revivified. He looked at the clock and said eagerly: ‘If we’re quick, there’s time for another one.’
Reluctantly Margaret said no, they’d better leave it till next week, and his face went heavy, as though the skin were at last bagging out over the architecture of the bones. Afterwards, she had to ask him questions to keep him from sinking numb into his thoughts. His replies were uninterested and dull. Were there any pictures we ought to see? One exhibition, he said flatly, was possibly worth our time. When would he be able to go himself? Not yet. When? Margaret asked. They said – his reply was indifferent – that in a month or two he might be able to take a taxi and then walk through a couple of rooms. You must do that as soon as you can, she said. He hadn’t the slightest inclination to, he said.
She understood that she was on the wrong tack. He had said all he had to say about pictures when he was well; he had written about them at the height of his powers; he could do so no more, and it was better to cut it out absolutely, not to taunt himself by seeing a picture again.
Casting about, she mentioned the general election of the past winter, and then the one she thought must soon follow.
‘I should have thought,’ said Davidson, ‘that one had to be a morbidly good citizen to find the prospect beguiling.’
