by C. P. Snow
She wanted to look after me but I could not let her. In this care and grief I had recessed, back to the time when I wanted to keep my inner self inviolate.
As a child I had not taken a sorrow to my mother, I had kept my sorrows from her, I had protected her from them. When I first loved I found, and it was not an accident, someone so self-bound that another’s sorrows did not exist.
But with Margaret they existed, they were at the core of our marriage: if I kept them from her, if I did not need her, then we had failed.
In the darkness I could think of nothing but the child. The anxiety possessed me flesh and bone: I had no room for another feeling: it drove me from any other person, it drove me from her.
I thought of his death. In the claustrophobia of dread, it seemed that it would be an annihilation for me too. I should want to lose myself in sadness, have no one near me, I should not have the health to admit the claim of the living again. In sadness I should be alone: I should be finally and at last alone.
I thought of his death, as the light whitened round the curtains. The room pressed me in; I had a picture, sudden and sharp as an hallucination, it might have been a memory or a trick with time, of myself walking along a strip, not of sand but of pavement, by the sea. I did not know whether I was young or an old man: I was walking by myself on the road, with the sea, leaden but calm, on my right hand.
I slept a little, woke with an instant’s light-heartedness, and then remembered. Margaret was already dressing. As she looked at me, and saw the realization come into my face, hers went more grey. But she still had her courage: without asking me this time she said that she would ring the ward. Remaining in the bedroom I heard her voice speaking, the words indistinguishable, the cling of the bell as she rang off, the sound of her feet returning: they were not light, I dreaded to see her eyes. She told me: ‘She said there’s no change to speak of.’
All I could make myself reply was a question about our visiting Geoffrey at the hospital: when would she be ready to leave? I heard my voice deaden, I could see her regarding me with pity, with injury and rejection, with her own pain.
Whilst she gave Maurice breakfast and got him off to school, I did not move from the bedroom. At last she returned to me there: I said that it was time we were setting out.
She looked at me with an expression I could not read. She said: ‘I think perhaps it would be better if you went alone.’
All of a sudden I knew that she understood. The night’s dreads – she had divined them. She had endured her own suffering about the child, and mine also. What could she do now either for the child or me? She could not bear, any more than I could, not to be with him; yet she was trying to tend me. Her tone was tight, she was admitting as much as she could bear.
It was a moment in which I could not pretend. To refuse her offer just because she craved I should – that was not in me. To refuse out of duty, or the ordinary kind surface of love – that was not in me either. There was only one force out of which I could refuse, and that was not love, but need.
All of a sudden, I knew that the fugue of the night was over. That part of me, which she understood even if it cost her her last hope, was not overmastering now.
Somehow the moment held not only the strains of our past, but something like a prophecy. I thought of the child’s death, as I had in the night. If I lost him, I knew – it was the certainty of the fibres, not of thought – I should not be much good to her, but I should need her.
‘No,’ I said, ‘come with me.’
55: Effects of an Obligation
THROUGH the underground corridor of the hospital, which smelt of brick dust and disinfectant, Margaret and I were finding our way to Geoffrey’s office. Along the passage, whose walls, as bare as those of a tube railway, carried uncovered water-pipes, went mothers with children. At a kind of junction or open space sat a group of women, their children in pushchairs, as though expecting nothing, waiting endlessly, just left there, children not specially ill, their fate not specially tragic, waiting with the resignation that made hospitals seem like forgotten railway stations littered with the poor and unlucky camping out for the weekly train. Nurses, their faces high-coloured and opaque, moved past them with strong, heavy-thighed steps as though they did not exist.
When at last we saw a notice, turned down a subsidiary passage and reached the office, which was still underground, Geoffrey’s secretary told us that he was with the child, that he had been giving him his sixth injection. That if we liked, we could wait in the doctor’s room until he returned. Like the nurses in the corridor, she was a strong young woman, her face comely and composed with minor power. When she spoke to us it was in a tone which was brisk and well ordered, but which held an undertone of blame, as though we were obscurely responsible for our ill fortune. It was the tone which is not far distant from most of us, when we have to witness suffering and address it, as though when the veils of good nature were off we believed that the suffering were merely culpable, and suffering a sin.
In the office so small that the walls pressed round us, the light was switched on although through a window one could look up to the sky. The room glistened under the light, both naked and untidy – a glass-fronted bookcase full of text-books and sets of journals, a couple of tubular chairs, a medical couch. We sat down, she put her hand on mine: there we stayed like those others in the corridor, waiting as they were, not expecting to be picked up, too abject to draw attention to ourselves.
I was aware of her palm touching the back of my hand: of my own breathing: of the sheets of typescript on the desk, which looked like a draft of a scientific paper, and the photograph of a woman, handsome, dashing, luxurious.
The telephone rang, the secretary swept in and answered it. It was the mother of a patient: there was a misunderstanding about an address and the secretary was confused. As it happened, I knew the answer: I could not get the words out. It was not malice, I wanted to help, I even wanted to propitiate her, but I was dumb.
When she went out, having at length solved the problem, I muttered to Margaret that I had known all along, but she did not understand. At last she had become no braver than I was, all she could do was press my hand. We had each got to the point of apprehensiveness which was as though we were not thinking any more, as though we were no longer waiting for release. This was all we knew, sitting there together; we were incapable of looking for an end to it.
There was a noise outside, and Geoffrey banged the door open. As soon as I saw his face, I realized. He was shining with a smile of triumph and elation, with a kind of repleteness such as one might see in a man who has just won a tennis match.
Margaret’s fingers touched me. Suddenly our hands were slippery with sweat. Without a word said, we were certain.
In the same instant, Geoffrey cried: ‘He’ll be all right. He’ll do.’
Margaret exclaimed, the tears spilled down her cheeks, but Geoffrey was oblivious of them.
‘It’s interesting,’ he said, ‘I’ve noticed it before, how the very instant the objective signs are beginning to go right, then the child seems to know it himself, one’s only got to look at his face. It’s interesting, one might have thought there’d be a time lag. But the minute that the count in the lumbar fluid showed we had really got this one under control, then the boy was able to hear again and his mind began to clear.’
Suddenly he said, still wrapped up in his triumph: ‘By the way, you needn’t worry, there oughtn’t to be any after-effects. He’s a fine boy.’
It was not a compliment, it was just his statement of biological fact. He was brimming with his own triumph at seeing the child recover: but also, uninterested in so many things which preoccupied the rest of us, not reading the news, contemptuous of politics, laughing off art as a plaything, he nevertheless was on the side of the species. He drew his most unselfcentred happiness, with a kind of biological team spirit, from the prospect of a strong and clever child.
I was giddy with Margaret’s joy, which re
sonated with mine, so that I could not have distinguished which was which. I wanted to abandon myself to praise of Geoffrey: I was in the sublime state in which all my extravagance, so long pent in, was pelting against the wall of tact, or even of ordinary human consideration. I wanted to patronize him and be humble; I wanted to ask him outright whether he intended to marry the woman in the photograph. I should have liked to ask him if I could be of any use to him.
But I was moved by a compulsion which came from something deeper among the three of us.
‘He’s a fine boy,’ Geoffrey repeated. I was compelled to say: ‘So is yours.’
For an instant he was surprised.
‘Yes, I suppose he is.’
He added, with his head tossed back, with his student vanity: ‘But then, I should have expected him to be.’
He was staring at Margaret. Her tears were not dry, her expression was brilliant with rapture and pain. She said: ‘I’m watching for the first sign of anything wrong with him.’
‘Yes,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If nothing happens within a fortnight from now, then he’s clear.’
‘I shall do anything you tell me,’ she said.
He nodded.
‘I’d better see him two or three times a week until the period of incubation is over.’
She cried: ‘We must save him from anything we can!’
She had known, when she came to me, the loads that she was taking; some could shrug them off, not she: even now, in the midst of rapture, they lay on her, lay on her more heavily, perhaps, because she was uplifted. Somehow the boy’s chance of infection stood before her like an emblem. When she spoke of it, when she said we must save him from anything in our power, she was speaking, not only of the disease, but of the future.
I said: ‘Yes, we must save him from everything we can.’
It was a signal of understanding between us. But Geoffrey, who had also heard her affirmation, appeared to have missed it. He replied, as though illness was the only point: ‘Well, even if he does show any signs, which incidentally is much less likely than not, you needn’t take it too tragically. We should be pretty incompetent if we didn’t get it in time. And children are very tough animals, you ought to remember that.’
He said it with detached satisfaction. Then, in a totally different tone, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for your child.’
In the constricted office, he was sitting on the desk, above us, and, as he spoke he looked down first at her, then at me. In the same tone which was sharp, insistent, not so much benevolent as condescending, he said: ‘I’m glad I was able to do something for you.’
He was free with us now. Before, he had been constrained, because he was a man, light-natured but upright, who did not find forgiveness easy, who indeed felt not revengeful but inferior and ineffective in the presence of those whom he could not forgive. Now he had us under an obligation. His was the moral initiative. He was ready to be fond of her again: he was even ready to like me. He felt happy, released, and good.
So, it might have seemed incongruous, did we. She, and I also, had previously felt for him that resentment which one bears towards someone to whom one has done wrong and harm – a resentment in which there lurks a kind of despising mockery, a dislike in which one makes him smaller than he is. Now he had been powerful when we were abject. We had been in his hands; and, for both of us, for her more violently, but for me also, the feeling swept hidden shame away.
He sat there, above us, his head near the light bulb. Margaret and I looked up at him; her face was blanched with sleeplessness and anxiety, her irises were blood-streaked; so must mine have been. He showed no sign of a broken night: as usual, vain about his appearance, he had his hair elegantly brushed and parted, he smelt of shaving powder.
He was happy: we were sleepy with joy.
56: The Short Walk Home
JUST over a fortnight later, on a humid July afternoon, the clouds so dense that some windows were already lit at six o’clock, Margaret called at my office to take me home. She was wearing a summer frock, and in the heat she was relaxed with pleasure, with delectable fatigue, coming from the hospital, where she had been arranging for the child to return to us next day.
He was well and cheerful, she said. So was Maurice, who had escaped the infection altogether: there was no one in her charge to worry her now, she was lazy with pleasure, just as she had been when Gilbert first brought her into my sick-room.
Just then there sounded Rose’s punctilious tap at the door. As soon as he saw Margaret, whom as it happened he had not met, he broke into apologies so complex and profuse that even I began to feel embarrassed. He was so extremely sorry: he had looked forward all these years to the pleasure of meeting Mrs Eliot: and now he had just butted in, he was making a nuisance of himself, he only wanted to distract her husband for a moment, but even that was an infliction. They had neither of them got better at casual introductions: Rose, inflexibly, wearing his black coat and striped trousers in the steaming heat, went on talking according to his idea of gallantry, his eyes strained; Margaret faced him as she might as a girl at one of her father’s exhibitions, hating the social forms, doing her best to be easy with an awkward and aspiring clerk.
I saw that they mildly liked each other, but only as partners in distress. When Rose had finished his piece of business with me, which with his usual economy took five minutes, he made his protracted and obsequious goodbyes. After he had at last departed, I told her that he was one of the most formidable men I had known, in some ways the most formidable: she had heard it before, but now in the flesh she could not credit it. But she was too tired, too happy to argue; she did not want to disagree, even on the surface: she said, let us go home.
As soon as we had left the well-like corridors of the old building and went into the street, we pushed against the greenhouse air: sweat pricked at the temples: it was in such weather, I remembered, holding Margaret’s arm, that I first walked from Lufkin’s office to the Chelsea house, getting on for twenty years before.
Now, in the same weather, we turned the other way, sauntered up Whitehall towards Trafalgar Square, and there got a bus. I told her how I had once sat on a bus close by with old Bevill, and he had mentioned her father’s name, which gave me a card of re-entry into her life. As the bus spurted and braked up Regent Street, we talked about the child as we might have done in bed between waking and sleeping, the diary of his days, the conspiracy of hope which, during his illness, we had put away as though we had never played with it.
We talked of the children and then put them aside: along Oxford Street we were talking of ourselves. We talked at random, of the first nights we spent together, of what we had feared for each other in the last month, of thoughts of each other during the years we were separated.
As we got off at Marble Arch and walked along the pavement rustling with litter, under the trees, Margaret gave a smile of pretended sarcasm, and said: ‘Yes, I suppose there are some who’d say we had come through.’
I put my arm round her and held her to me as we walked slowly, as slowly as though we planned to spin the evening’s happiness out. The vestigial headache, seeping in with the saturated air, seemed like a sensual ache. There was a smell of hot grass and fumes, and, although the lime was almost over, just once I fancied that I caught the last of it.
Her smile sharp, she said: ‘I suppose some would really say that we’d come through.’
She had more courage than I had. She was not anything like so given to insuring herself: her spirit was so strong that when she rejoiced, she rejoiced without qualification. To her, victories were absolute; at that moment, as we walked together, she had all of them she wanted: she wanted no more than this. And yet, by a perversity which she would not lose, she, whose fibres spoke of complete happiness, could not use the words.
That evening she had to dissimulate her faith, put on a smile that tried to be ironic, and deny the moment in which we stood. Just as I had done so often: but now it was I, out of
comparison more suspicious of fate than she was, who spoke without troubling to placate it.
We were in sight of home. A light was shining in one room: the others stood black, eyeless, in the leaden light. It was a homecoming such as, for years, I thought I was not to know. Often in my childhood, I had felt dread as I came near home. It had been worse when I went, as a young man, towards the Chelsea house. Now, walking with Margaret, that dread had gone. In sight of home my steps began to quicken, I should soon be there with her.
It was a homecoming such as I had imagined when I was lonely, but as one happening to others, not to me.
Strangers & Brothers Series
Series in broad chronological ‘story’ order (see Synopses below for ‘Series order’)
Dates given refer to first publication dates
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as stand-alone novels
1. Time of Hope 1949
2. George Passant (Originally entitled ‘Strangers & Brothers’) 1940
3. The Conscience of the Rich 1958
4. The Light and the Dark 1947
5. The Masters 1951
6. The New Men 1954
7. Homecomings 1956
8. The Affair 1960
9. Corridors of Power 1964
10. The Sleep of Reason 1968
11. Last Things 1970
Synopses (Both Series & ‘Stand-alone’ Titles)
Published by House of Stratus
A. Strangers and Brothers Series (series order)
These titles can be read as a series, or randomly as stand-alone novels
George Passant
In the first of the Strangers and Brothers series Lewis Eliot tells the story of George Passant, a Midland solicitor’s managing clerk and idealist who tries to bring freedom to a group of people in the years 1925 to 1933.
