A Coat of Varnish

by C. P. Snow

  ‘If you get soused, Logo, you won’t be able to get it up.’

  ‘No,’ another intervened, ‘you’ll get it up. But you won’t be able to finish it.’

  ‘Unfinished business,’ came from someone else, approaching incoherence. ‘Inconclusive.’

  ‘What a pity that would be.’ Loseby gave his sweetest, most innocent smile.

  ‘What a pity for Susan.’

  ‘Poor girl.’

  ‘Still,’ one of the youngest said, ‘she knows what to expect, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Just possibly.’ Loseby was bland. Humphrey caught a glance between him and Paul Mason.

  ‘Perhaps she knows what a man looks like.’ The boy was overcome by his own brilliance.

  So it went on. To the company sex jeers became more extraordinarily funny the more often they were repeated, as in Shakespearian backchat. Humphrey was getting bored. Among his neighbours, there was a little sensible conversation. A couple of young men, either soberer or harder headed, were talking about their future. Did one stay in the Army? Would there be an army in ten years’ time? They asked Loseby what he intended.

  Loseby hadn’t been drinking heavily. That wasn’t because of the advice he had been receiving. Humphrey had never seen him do so. He enjoyed a drink, but he enjoyed sex much more. Paul Mason had been drinking considerably more steadily, but according to his habit without any discernible effect, totally against all the physical laws, as Humphrey had often thought. A scholarly, fine-drawn man shouldn’t be so immune: it must be a metabolic freak.

  Loseby didn’t answer direct questions about his future, but he was practised in evading them. He began to talk coolly, plans well calculated, about the family estate. No, he wasn’t even going to try to maintain it.

  ‘It’s a nonsense,’ Loseby said amiably. ‘My father won’t come back. Anyway, he’s incapable. I’m not going to scrape money together for the rest of my life, just to pretend to be a feudal magnate. It may have been nice while it lasted. The Richesons have had a fairly long run. They did better than they deserved. I’m not going to be a kind of custodian, just to have busloads of people walking through the house. It’s not even a specially pretty house. That’s all gone. Gone for ever.’

  ‘I dare say you’re right,’ said one of the others.

  ‘I just saw the end of it.’ Loseby spoke like a man enjoying himself. ‘It had its points. Serfs touching their caps to the future seigneur. I expect they hated me. Never mind, when I was about twelve I basked in it. What you’ve never had you don’t miss, I’ve heard people say. What you have had, you don’t miss, either. It was rather fun to have had it. It still is. If I finish up as a taxi driver in New York, I’m sure it still will be.’

  It wasn’t what was being said that surprised Humphrey – he had heard the same from others born to riches or privilege, not repining when they were torn away – but who was saying it. He hadn’t heard Loseby in a speculative mood before, nor imagined that he had any.

  One man’s head had gradually sunk down to the table, and was now resting peacefully in a plate which contained a half-eaten savoury. Two others had gone out, presumably to be sick. Someone said it was time to break up. A loud cry: ‘Let’s go and have a spot of chemmy.’

  That seemed a spectacularly good idea to some who had drunk enough to want to drink more. That they could do at a gambling club.

  ‘Come on, Yoyo, finish off the night. Never mind about tomorrow. This doesn’t happen every day.’

  ‘Lucky for men that it doesn’t,’ a voice said darkly.

  ‘No,’ said Loseby, sweet but firm, ‘I don’t care for gambling, you know.’

  So far as Loseby had a prudish spot, they had touched it. It was pleasant to find something he was inhibited about, Humphrey thought.

  Long drunken logistic arguments about transport. Who was sober enough to drive. Many claimed, few were chosen. Paul, to all appearances cold sober, said that he couldn’t risk a police test. Further, he wouldn’t risk Humphrey driving him back to Aylestone Square, either. Douglas Gimson, who had drunk almost nothing, offered to drive anyone. Loseby, who was spending the night in his best man’s apartment, not in Douglas’, accepted for the two of them.

  That might have been callous, or the reverse, Humphrey couldn’t guess. He had an inkling that Douglas loved Loseby, loved him in earnest. Perhaps Douglas was a real homosexual, who loved men who were not, and so suffered like Vautrin from the tristesse de l’Olimpio. That was only another guess, as likely to be right.

  They went outside the club. Some of the young officers were weaving up St James’s Street towards Piccadilly as their predecessors had done before them, making that gentle incline look like the north face of the Eiger. Paul Mason insisted once more to Humphrey that they were going home in a taxi, and, in a more decorous fashion, the two of them followed the young men up the street.

  24

  At two-fifteen next day, people were coming into St Margaret’s, Westminster, kneeling dutifully on their hassocks, sitting up, looking round to see someone they recognised or to spot a well-known face. It was something like an occasion in the theatre. In fact, someone in front of Humphrey, who was sitting in the inconspicuous dark of the back row, said in a firm knowledgeable voice, ‘I must say, I don’t think this is much of a house.’

  The church was about half-full, nothing like so well attended, Humphrey thought, as it would once have been for a fashionable wedding. It was Saturday, and maybe Tom Thirkill’s tactics had been successful; it was also, after a lull the day before, raining steadily again outside. Not many men that Humphrey could see had put on morning dress, though there were a number of women in smart frocks. Celia Hawthorne, whom Humphrey hadn’t cast eyes on since the Thirkill dinner, was there, alone, clothes a model of how to achieve simplicity.

  Nearly all of those who visited Lady Ashbrook had come, and Frank Briers, at Humphrey’s side, was noticing them. It was because Briers and Humphrey had met outside the church that they were sitting in obscurity. Briers had said that he didn’t want to be too obviously in attendance. He didn’t resist adding: ‘After all, I’m not one of the family, am I?’

  The bridegroom and best man, in dress uniform, walked up the aisle. Loseby’s hair shone, fair, what was called golden, though not accurately, burnished, under the central chandeliers. Male beauty usually passed Humphrey by, but this man seemed to have it. He looked rather like a saccharine nineteenth-century picture of Sir Galahad, or of one of the Frankish knights who fought at Roncesvalles.

  As Susan and her party arrived a punctilious ten minutes late, the organ was playing the chorale, ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’. That sounded like a nice piece of irony, Humphrey thought, but it couldn’t have been. Tom Thirkill, stately, too much of an actor not to be dressed for the part, walking with an actor’s command of his body, watched his daughter as a public figure should watch his daughter at her wedding. She was veiled, face so far as it could be observed solemn, demure and pretty, dress all in immaculate white, virginal white.

  Briers muttered something out of the side of his mouth, Humphrey didn’t catch it; it might have been ‘What a nerve’ or ‘What a girl’. Four tiny children were carrying her train. Either her will had turned out stronger than her father’s, or else he had accepted that there was nothing for it, to hell with the enemy, they might as well do it in style.

  Humphrey settled down to enjoy the service. Like other unbelievers of his period, he had a fondness for the liturgy in which he had been brought up.

  However, the marriage service was not one of his favourites. Cranmer was a great master of sixteenth-century English. On the other hand, he was not a great master of suspense. In Briers’ company, or in Humphrey’s own mind, there was enough suspense around; but still, as the reverberating words rolled on, in this marriage service the deed was done much too soon. Within ten minutes, Loseby, in a tone emollient, subdued but audible, was saying his I Will, and Susan, in a tone meek and almost inaudible, hers. Then the vicar pronou
nced them man and wife. That was it. The rest was anticlimax. Not too long, for fashionable weddings were not drawn out. Nevertheless, another half-hour, spirited short address, English not so lingering as Cranmer’s, hymns, prayers, Vidor’s Toccata: all over, all out.

  Outside the church, the rain descended, not stormily, not in torrents, but with persistence. The ushers, who all seemed to be officers from Loseby’s regiment, some present at White’s the night before, rushed about with enormous part-coloured umbrellas, getting guests into a fleet of cars, ready to take them to Thirkill’s reception in Eaton Square.

  Humphrey and Briers retreated into the porch out of the way.

  ‘They didn’t ask me to the reception,’ said Briers, with his policeman’s grin. ‘I’ve got a girl keeping her eyes open there. If there’s anything to pick up.’

  Briers was being confidential. He said: ‘Look here, I don’t think you and I ought to be seen too much together. One or two may clam up when they talk to you, and we don’t want that. So I shan’t come to your house so much. Are you free tomorrow night?’

  Humphrey said yes.

  ‘Come and have supper at home. Out in the sticks. My car and driver will pick you up.’

  With staccato abruptness, Briers walked off through the rain up Victoria Street in the direction of New Scotland Yard.

  In the drawing-room at Eaton Square, guests jostling around when Humphrey arrived, waiters carrying trays with glasses of champagne, he had an impression which excluded all the rest. This was the sight of Susan. She had changed from her wedding dress, but Humphrey couldn’t see anything but her face. It was transformed. It had become more than pretty, as though lit up from inside, seraphic. At first sight he responded to sheer joy. Then he was wondering. He had seen girls after their wedding night – innocent girls maybe, and certainly lucky ones, who had been transformed something like this. But Susan hadn’t had her wedding night, and it wouldn’t have come as a revelation if she had. How long was it since she had first been taken by the Adamic surprise? Why did one say Adamic, as though only men were totally astonished by their first knowledge of sex? Was it assumed that Adam was more innocent than Eve, before either knew anything?

  Here Susan was, joyous and triumphant. It was startling. Humphrey didn’t understand and soon knew that he didn’t like it. Perhaps this was what Kate’s ear had detected over the telephone. This wasn’t the girl he had once thought easy to understand. He would have been more at ease if he hadn’t come to the reception, seeing people whom he had heard talked about with suspicion and of whom he would hear again next day. Less easy-mannered than usual, he said no to champagne. He didn’t like it, but at any other time he would have drunk out of politeness. He felt, as he had scarcely felt since he was a boy, like an intruder, an outsider, or even more like someone with agoraphobia.

  Humphrey moved among the crowd. There was no chance of talking to Kate, who was with a group of young officers, such as she might have met in her girlhood. He did encounter Loseby in the throng, who said, open-faced, as though appealing for reassurance which he didn’t need: ‘All going according to protocol, isn’t it, Humphrey?’

  Just afterwards, Celia touched Humphrey’s sleeve. No trouble showed in her expression; she looked beautiful and tranquil. She asked: ‘Have you heard anything of Alec Luria recently?’

  Humphrey said no, he assumed Luria was back at New Haven. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. He called me a week or two ago. I was just curious.’

  Humphrey allowed himself a surreptitious twitch of the mouth. Alec was prospecting for another wife. Celia was responding to his flicker of amusement.

  ‘Paul used to say that with Alec one had to forget the verbiage. Underneath he was one of the wiser men.’

  ‘Paul is a good judge,’ Humphrey said. On his own, he imagined what Celia and Alec Luria would be like together.

  It was Tom Thirkill who dominated the reception. He was preyed on by many kinds of anxiety: not only Humphrey but others there must have known. His political future was on the quiver. Police enquiries, even tentative ones, were not calculated to help. Prime ministers had their own channels of information, with which Humphrey was much more familiar than anyone in that drawing-room. Nevertheless, Thirkill, driven in private by worries, private phantoms, hopes, dreads less articulated than those, in public could behave like a film star coming down the aircraft steps, greeted by admiring faces, radiating his own energy and goodwill. Some temperaments one could enter into just a little, one had an element of them oneself, Humphrey thought again, but he couldn’t enter into this.

  The best man proposed the health of bride and husband, making a limp little speech. Loseby made another little speech, not so limp but for once self-conscious, not fluent on his feet. Thirkill made a speaker’s speech, easy, sometimes funny, not afraid to be sentimental.

  ‘I’m losing a daughter, of course. If Lancelot Loseby is what I believe him to be, of course I am. And I wouldn’t have it otherwise. But it is a loss to lose an only daughter. Any marriage is a loss to someone. Never mind. It is a marvellous loss. And they will make up for it for the rest of my life by their own happiness.’

  Kate was touched. Humphrey, who didn’t like wedding cake any more than champagne, patiently ate a scrap of almond paste. Then he could, unnoticed, get out of the crowd, down on to the pavement, on his way home. The rain didn’t clear his head. He was nothing but confused.

  25

  After their first aquaintance, when Frank Briers had returned to duty at the Yard, Humphrey had once or twice enjoyed an evening at his house – professional talks with him might be acerbic, but they were usually refreshing. And, much more, it was good to see a couple as happy as Briers and his wife. On the way in the police car out to Sheen, Humphrey was now getting ready for a sight which wouldn’t be so happy.

  True, he had been told that Betty was going through a remission, and a long one. It might go on for months, or even years. But those two, happy, zestful, guiltless, had been hit by a fatality. Humphrey had something like total recall of the night when Briers had told him. Briers had had to find someone to confide in. He was deadened, he didn’t sound angry or raging with protest, he couldn’t get his energies free. All he could say, in a tired tone, was ‘I never thought this could happen to us.’

  That had been two years before, when Betty was thirty. They had been married six years. They were satisfied with each other, beyond the normal run, except that she hadn’t yet had a child. Humphrey remembered her as quick-witted, fine-featured, looking much younger than her age, anxious to make others round her as happy as she was. He had sometimes thought that she was unusually given to tears, rather like a sensitive Victorian girl. He had seen her cry at a sad story in one of Frank’s enquiries, and, distinctly out of her century, at a magnificent cloud-strewn sunset. She was active, and in those years she and Frank went off mountain-climbing. She believed she was utterly healthy, and so did he. She was the opposite of hypochondriac. Maybe there might have been vestigial warnings, but not to her.

  Suddenly, she noticed that she was seeing double. She looked across the room, and Frank was smoking two cigarettes, not one. Soon she was walking like a spastic. The diagnosis didn’t take long. Frank was told that she had multiple sclerosis. It was then that he had needed to tell someone, and went to Humphrey. It had been left to his own judgment to break the news to her.

  There was no known cure. She might have long remissions, or she might become paralysed quite soon. Frank was cowardly enough, he confessed, to think that it might be better not to tell her himself, but leave it to the doctor.

  At last Frank did tell her, and found that she had known for weeks. He also found, what Humphrey found on one visit after he heard the news, the most unnerving aspect of all, that she was existing in an extravagant degree of euphoria. Frank was a man of stoical and vigorous spirit, but hers had always been higher. Now they mounted to something near to joy. When a friend such as Humphrey arrived, trying lamely to
cheer her up, that was the last thing she needed. Unaffectedly, with love, it was she who did the cheering up.

  As the car drew up outside the Briers’ house, semi-detached in a neat chestnut-lined avenue, Humphrey was prepared for something similar that night.

  He didn’t get it. So far as Betty’s condition went, the evening was soothing, like a remembrance of the past, but not a perfect remembrance, since the future was never quite asleep. It was Betty herself who opened the door, kissed him, and, in the light of the hall, said it was a long time since she had seen him. Her cheekbones looked a little higher. When he had last visited her, her legs had been thinning. Now she was wearing a long dress, maybe as a cover. Otherwise, apart from a just perceptible limp as she led him into the sitting-room, there was little change from what Humphrey first remembered; but great change from what he had witnessed when she was in one of the worst, and also most euphoric, phases.

  ‘She’s looking after you, is she?’ Frank greeted him, already pouring a whisky. Was Frank a shade over-hearty, as though all was smooth and wouldn’t alter? Yet it was peaceful to be with them, in that sitting-room. The Briers were living on an official salary, about £8,000 a year, much less than the income of most of the inhabitants of Aylestone Square; but they managed to live at least as comfortably. The pictures were timid watercolours: Betty was educated, she had taught in a grammar school before her marriage, but she hadn’t much visual taste. But, then, most of Humphrey’s acquaintances in Aylestone Square hadn’t much visual taste, either. A foreigner wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between the decoration of this house and of those of Humphrey’s neighbours. Unless he understood the delicate difference in the postal address.