by C. P. Snow
‘Have a gasper?’ said Smith.
‘I still don’t smoke,’ Sawbridge replied, with his curious rude substitute for humour.
Smith began inquiring into his welfare. Was he getting enough reading material? Would he like Smith to inquire if he could be allowed more?
‘I don’t mind if you do,’ said Sawbridge.
Was he getting any scientific books?
‘I could do with more. Thanks,’ said Sawbridge.
Smith made a note; for once, Sawbridge was allowing himself to let slip a request.
Then Smith remarked that we had come down for a ‘spot of talk’.
‘What are you after?’
‘We should like to have a spot of talk about Puchwein,’ said Smith, surprisingly direct.
‘I’ve not got anything to say about him.’
‘You knew him and his wife, didn’t you?’
‘I knew them at Barford, like everybody else. I’ve not got anything to say.’
‘Never mind about that, old man,’ said Smith. ‘Let’s just talk round things a bit.’
As Smith foretold, Sawbridge was willing, and even mildly pleased, to chat. He had no objection to going over his story for yet another time. It occurred to me that he was simply lonely. He missed the company of his intellectual equals, and even talking to us was better than nothing. Methodically he went over the dates of his spying. As in each statement he had made, he would mention no name but his own: he had inculpated no one, and maintained all along that he was alone.
‘People remember seeing you at Mrs Puchwein’s,’ said Smith.
‘I shouldn’t be surprised,’ said Sawbridge.
‘Don’t you think you ought to be surprised?’
‘I don’t see why.’
‘I can’t think of anything obvious you’ve got in common.’
‘Why should we have anything obvious in common?’
‘Why were you there?’
‘Social reasons.’
‘Did you ever pay any other social calls of any kind?’ Smith asked.
‘Not that you’d know of.’
‘Why were you there?’
‘As far as that goes,’ said Sawbridge, turning on me with his kind of stolid insolence,’ why were you?’
Smith gave a hearty, creaking laugh. He went on questioning Sawbridge about Puchwein – where had he met him first?
‘You soon found out that he was left wing?’ said Smith.
‘I tell you, I haven’t anything to say about him.’
Smith persisted.
‘When did you first hear that he was left wing?’
All of a sudden, Sawbridge broke into sullen anger.
‘I shouldn’t call him left wing?
‘What would you call him?’ I said.
‘He’s no better,’ said Sawbridge, ‘than you are.’
His voice was louder, at the same time impersonal and rancorous, as he let fly at Francis Getliffe, Luke, me, all liberal–minded men. People who had sold out to the enemy: people who would topple over at the first whistle of danger, that was what he thought of liberal men.
‘That chap Puchwein isn’t any better than your brother,’ said Sawbridge. Impersonally, he lumped Martin in with the rest of us, only different in that he was more effective, ‘I’m not sure he isn’t worse. All Puchwein knows is when it’s time to sit on the fence.’
‘I thought you’d nothing to tell us about him,’ said Smith.
‘Well, I’ve told you something, haven’t I?’ said Sawbridge. ‘We’ve got no use for chaps like that.’
Back in a café in Westminster, Smith, sipping China tea with his masquerade of preciousness, went over Sawbridge’s replies.
‘We didn’t get over much change out of our young friend,’ he said.
‘Very little,’ I replied.
‘No, I wouldn’t say that, old son,’ said Smith. But, as he argued. I was thinking of Sawbridge – and it was a proof of his spirit that, neither in his presence nor out of it, did I think of him with pity. Faith, hope, and hate: that was the troika which rushed him on: it was uncomfortable to remember that, for the point of action, hate was a virtue – but so also, which many of us were forgetting in those years, was hope.
Could one confront the Sawbridges without the same three forces? He was a man of almost flawless courage, moral and physical. Not many men would have bent as little. Then, against my will, for I was suppressing any comparison with Martin, I was teased by a thought in my brother’s favour, the first for long enough. It was difficult to imagine him taking Sawbridge’s risk; but, if he had had to pay Sawbridge’s penalty, his courage would have been as stoical and his will as hard to crack.
41: Lights Twinkling in the Cold
Two nights later (it was Sunday) I was walking up Wigmore Street towards Portman Square, hurrying because of the extreme cold. The weather had hardened, the lights twinkled frigidly across the square. I was paying attention to nothing except the minutes before I could get back to a warm room. There were few people in the square, and I did not notice the faces as I hurried past.
I did not notice the couple standing near the corner, in the half-shadow. Without knowing why, I looked over my shoulder. They were standing oblivious of the cold, the man’s overcoat drooping open, flapping round his knees. They were Irene and Hankins.
At once I turned my head and started down the side street, out of sight. A voice followed me, Irene’s – ‘What are you running away for?’
I had to go back. As they came towards me under the lamp, they both looked pinched, tired, smiling.
‘Why haven’t I seen you all these months?’ said Hankins. We went into a hotel close by and sat drinking in the lounge, among the palms and the sucking noise from the revolving door.
Hankins was quieter than usual, and when he spoke the words seemed dredged up through other thoughts. We asked about each other’s careers. He had just got a good job; he had made a reputation before, but now, for the first time in his life, he was free from worry about his next year’s rent, I congratulated him, but his thoughts absented themselves again.
Soon he looked at Irene with an odd expression. His face, like that of many with a quickly changing inner life, was emotional but hard to read, ‘I think I must be going now,’ he said. Her eyes sharpened.
‘Goodbye,’ said Hankins, and the revolving door sucked round behind him, sucking empty air.
He had gone so quickly that they might have arranged to meet again, when I was disposed of.
Irene stared at me with full eyes.
‘I had to see him,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t sit down under things any longer.’
‘What are you going to do?’
She did not reply, but continued to stare at me as though I knew. Just for a second, on her mouth there appeared a tart smile. She settled herself against the arm of her chair, and I noticed that her shoulders were getting rounder. In the last year she had thickened both in the throat and the upper arm. It was easy to imagine her in middle age, lolling in her dressing-gown.
‘Fancy the old thing pulling in a regular salary at last,’ she said.
‘Both of them have done pretty well for themselves,’ I replied.
She looked puzzled. I had to explain that ‘both of them’ meant Hankins and Martin, the two men who had meant most to her. They were coming to the top of their professions at the same time.
‘The top?’ she said.
‘The head of Barford,’ I replied.
‘Oh.’ She fixed me with a glance which seemed malicious, regretful, sympathetic.
‘And as for Hankins,’ I said, ‘so far as there is anything left of literary London, this job will put him in the middle of it.’
‘He’ll dote on that!’ she cried. Quietly she added: ‘And so should I.’
She spoke straight out: ‘It would suit me better than anything I have ever had with Martin, or anything that I could ever have.’
Once more she gave me a glance edged with fellow-feeli
ng. Without explanation, with her expression malicious and ominous, she went on: ‘I’m not cut out for it. I can see Martin going on patiently and getting a bit drier every year. What sort of life do you think that means for me?’
We looked at each other, without speaking for some moments. I said: ‘But you’re going to live it, aren’t you?’
‘You don’t think I’m going off with E H?’
‘No,’ I said.
‘I could stop his marriage. I could have everything I wanted ten years ago. Why shouldn’t I now?’
‘You won’t,’ I said.
‘You’re positive?’ Suddenly she slumped down, her hand fell on her breast, her tone no longer brittle, but flat, lazily flat, as she said: ‘You’re right.’
She went on: ‘I never knew where I was with E H. I never even knew if he needed me. While Martin doesn’t need me – he could get on without me or anyone else, but he wants me! He always has! I never had much faith that anyone would, until he came along.’
So at last, under the palm trees of that aseptic lounge, preoccupied by the suspicion, which she had provoked, of a crucial turn in Martin’s life, I was given a glimpse of what bound Irene to him. In the past I had speculated often. Why should she, in the ultimate run, be anchored to Martin instead of Hankins? I had looked for qualities in Martin which could make some women love him, rather than another man. They were present, but they did not count.
It was true that Martin was the stronger: it was true also that Martin was, if these cant terms mean anything, the more masculine. Hankins was one of those men, and they are not uncommon, who invest much emotion in the pursuit of women without having the nature for it; he thought he was searching for the body’s rapture, but his profoundest need was something less direct, the ambience of love, its meshes of unhappiness, its unfulfilled dreams, its tears for the past and its images of desire. Many women found it too delicate, but not Irene.
With her, there was a hypnotic charm about his capacity for feeling; he could feel as she did, he had the power to enter into, as all important, each emotion of love. It was that which she first loved in him, and which held her fascinated for years, her whom other women obtusely thought was searching only for a partner in bed. Against that emotional versatility Martin could not compete. Yet never once, if she had been faced with the choice, would she have left Martin.
The real reason which delivered her to Martin lay not in him, but in herself.
She had just told it to me, so simply that it was difficult to believe. In fact, Irene had suffered all her life from a diffidence which seemed at a first glance, the last one would expect in her. In her childhood, even more totally than with other girls, love and marriage filled her daydreams: those daydreams had not left her alone all her life; yet they had never been accompanied by the certainty of the fibres, that she had it in her to draw the love she coveted. More than most she studied herself in the looking-glass, but not with narcissistic pleasure; only with a mixture of contemptuous liking and nervousness that such a face, such a body, might never bring what she craved.
In the hotel lounge, hearing the revolving doors swing round, I thought of another woman so different from Irene that any resemblance seemed like a joke. Nora Luke, dowdy, professionally striving, in the home a scolding faithful housewife – Irene, once notorious for her love affairs, the most reckless of women – yet in secret they had found life difficult in the same manner. At the root of their nature they were sisters.
Irene had spoken simply, and maybe it was as simple as she said. Hankins, so tentative and undecided himself, she had never had the confidence to reach for; while Martin, all else forgotten, was the one man who wanted enough to stay with her at any cost, to give the assurance, so far as she was capable of accepting it, that he would stay steady, that he would be there to make her feel that she was as lovable as, her nerves twitching under the adventuress’ skin, she had never since she was a child been able to believe,
That night, she had sent Hankins away. It was only after he had gone that I realized this was the end between them, that under the lamps of Portman Square they had spoken the last words. Hankins pushing round the door might have been leaving her for half an hour; in fact, they would not meet again: it was curious that he, at any other time so eloquent, had gone in silence.
Irene smiled at me, as though, sitting before her looking-glass, she was putting on her dashing face.
‘He will have me on his hands,’ she said. She was speaking of Martin.
She added: ‘I shall be a drag on him in this new game.’
She was keeping me in the dark, she was obscurely triumphant.
‘What are you telling me?’ I asked.
‘You knew, of course you knew, about this offer that Martin had last week?’
I said yes.
‘You knew he expected it before it came?’
‘He must have expected it for weeks.’
‘I guessed as much.’
She went on, not knowing the break between Martin and me, but knowing something I did not. For days (it must have been during the first sittings of the Committee, and he might have had inside information, probably from Mounteney) he was excited that the job was coming his way. She said that he was lively, active, restless with high spirits; she remembered how he had talked to his son one evening, talked to the three-year-old-boy as though they were both adults and he was letting himself boast.
‘Well, Lewis,’ Martin had said to the child, ‘now I’m going further than anyone in the family’s ever gone. It will give you a good start. You’ll be able to build on it, won’t you?’
In the next few days Irene felt a change. She could not ask him; with her, in his own home, he let his moods run more than I had seen him, but she dared not to try to penetrate them. It was still several days before the offer was made. For the only time she could remember, Martin stayed away from the laboratory without a reason. The weather had turned foggy; he sat silent by the fire. He did not ask her advice, but occasionally spoke of the advantages of being the Barford superintendent, of the entertaining she could do there. Occasionally also he spoke of some disadvantages, as though laughing them off.
‘He wouldn’t talk about them,’ Irene flared out. ‘But I didn’t need him to. I hadn’t forgotten the letter he didn’t send.’
One foggy afternoon, he suddenly said: ‘The head of Barford is just as much part of the machine as any of the others.’
He went on: ‘If I take the job, I shan’t have the trouble of thinking for myself again.’
Irene said to me, simply and quietly: ‘Then I knew that he would never take it.’
That had happened the previous Saturday, three days before the offer came. I asked how he had behaved when he actually had the offer in his hand.
‘He was shaken,’ said Irene. ‘He was terribly shaken.’
With the fog outside the windows, he had sat by the fire so absent that he let it go out. Then she made it up, and I imagined the firelight reflected into the room from the fog-backed window. Martin only roused himself from that paralysis of the nerves to play again with the little boy – the two of them under the window, young Lewis shouting, Martin patiently rolling a ball, and still silent.
Both Irene and I, through our different kinds of knowledge of him, took it for granted that he would not alter his resolve.
‘I don’t pretend to understand it,’ she said to me. ‘Do you?’
I shook my head, and, as lost and open as she was, I asked: ‘What do you think he intends to do?’
‘I don’t think, I know,’ she replied.
During the past weeks, so as to be ready, he had been making inquiries, unknown to me, of our college. If he decided to give up his work at Barford and return to pure science, could they find a niche for him?
‘It’ll be funny for him, not having any power,’ she said.
She added: ‘He’s going into dimness, isn’t he? He won’t make much of a go of it?’
She went on asking,
what were his chances in pure science? Would he do enough to console himself?
‘They all say he hasn’t got quite the talent,’ I replied. He would publish a few respectable papers, he would not get into the Royal Society. For a man as realistic as Martin, it would be failure.
‘He’s got a real talent for his present job,’ I said.
‘It’ll be difficult for him to lead a dim life,’ she said, ‘having had a taste of something different.’
She said it in a matter-of–fact tone, without any sign of tenderness.
I broke out: ‘And I suppose you’re glad about it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You wanted him to make his protest. I suppose this is the next best thing?’
Irene was flushing down the neckline of her dress. With difficult honesty she turned her eyes away, and said: ‘No. I’m not cut out for this.’
‘Why aren’t you?’
‘I’m a sprinter. I could have stood a major row, it would have been something to live through. I should have been more use to him than any of you.’
I said: ‘I believe you would.’
She flashed out: ‘It isn’t often you pay me a compliment.’
‘It was meant,’ I said.
‘But you mustn’t give me too much credit. I’m not high-minded. I shouldn’t have worried if Martin had become the boss at Barford. I should have enjoyed the flah-flah.’
Then she asked: ‘Why ever is he doing it? I wish you’d tell me that.’
I was confused.
‘Do you think,’ she said, ‘he’s just trying to be a good man?’
‘I should like to believe it,’ I said.
‘You think he’s got another motive, do you?’
‘We usually have.’
To my astonishment, she burst out laughing, with her high-pitched yelps of glee.
‘I believe you think,’ she cried, ‘that he’s doing it to take it out of me. Just to show me that things have changed since he married me, and that he holds the whip hand now.’
It had not even crossed my mind.
‘You’re wrong!’ she shouted. ‘If he’s reacting against anyone, it isn’t me!’