by C. P. Snow
Tired, too tired to talk much more, he asked out of politeness how her affairs were going.
‘You mean Julian?’ she said.
He nodded.
‘No change,’ she said.
‘I was afraid of that.’
‘There can’t be any. Yet,’ she said, as tartly as when she first confronted him. Then she told him that they were going ahead with the appeal. Through his tiredness he brightened.
‘Is that wise?’ he asked. ‘Is that really wise?’
‘He thinks so.’
‘Ah yes.’
Liz explained that they could have compounded for a tolerable settlement, but he wouldn’t have it.
‘Ah yes,’ said Hillmorton again, as indicating both negative surprise and his opinion of Julian. He asked when the appeal would be decided.
No one was certain, she said. Towards the end of the year, she expected.
‘Oh, I should like to hear the result of that. I hope I manage to. I do hope so.’
He said that with a curious simplicity, not at all sarcastic, not pathetic, just telling her his wish. She thought she had stayed too long and that it was time to say goodbye.
Part Three
27
More than once that summer James Ryle recalled asking Hillmorton in Brooks’ whether anything was wrong, and being told that it was only a slight malaise. Ryle recalled it, because that seemed some sort of description of his own state. Not physically: he felt as well as he had for years past. But he was disturbed, nerves too near the surface, in a way he had not learned to cope with, as though he were living his life backwards.
The charm, and it had been a charm, of feeling the spring of love again had now quite left him. It was humiliating. It was ludicrous, to be hankering after a woman who scarcely noticed him. She never would. He hadn’t seen anyone more totally surrendered to immolating love. He was enough in control of himself to accept that.
The more he saw of her, the more unarguable it was. He saw a good deal of her, unable to put her off when she called for his company, that early summer. Once she had managed to quarrel with Julian, and left him for a couple of weeks. Several nights running, she sat with Ryle in the Lords’ guest room and went out with him to dinner in the town. Ryle had moments of ridiculous pride, when he noticed eyes following her. Then she went back to Julian. The telephone didn’t ring any more. Again she had to be put out of mind.
Submerge one worry and another flooded in. Censor thoughts of Liz, and others, just as sombre, took their place. They might have seemed impersonal. Perhaps they were less humiliating than an old man’s youthful reveries. In fact, Ryle took to worrying about the fate of the country, more than he had since the beginning of the war, and he was as morbid as when he thought of Liz.
There were plenty of objective reasons for worry, he told himself. How were they all going to come out of this mess? He was still, in his fashion, tough-minded. He didn’t anticipate anything dramatic. The nation-states wouldn’t suddenly collapse. The capitalist world wouldn’t collapse, certainly not in the United States; it had proved remarkably resilient, and would stay so for foreseeable time. So incidentally would the collectivist world.
Ryle didn’t envisage any cataclysmic change in his sons’ time. His own country? Was it going to become a poor relation on the western side? Quite likely. It might turn into a bigger, more ramshackle, more internally fissured Sweden, social democratic, trade union controlled, nothing like so efficient. That might be the best prospect. Others were darker.
Ryle was finding an excuse for his discontents. If he had been happy, he would have searched for a different future. It was anyone’s guess, whether he would have found it.
London, the summer of 1972. It remained, Ryle admitted to himself, the most comfortable capital in the world to live in. Unexacting. Presumably, when the English were more strenuous, it hadn’t been so unexacting. Ryle, whom foreigners sometimes considered very English, liked it as it was. Manners, in shops, in the streets, were less gentle than they used to be: among his own acquaintances, rather more so.
He went out to dinner, not so often in private houses these days, the food much better than in his youth, more wine drunk, far more spirits (and far more than in the nineteenth century, his historian’s mind observed). He still had occasional business in the morning: he sat on the board of a merchant bank, and on a couple of others. Those would go on until he was seventy. In the afternoons and evenings, the House of Lords. For some men, getting near retirement, it would have been a tolerable way to pass their time, as until recently it had for him.
Were any of the people he met as worried as he was? He didn’t mean about a woman, though some must have been. One or two, he knew, were in various kinds of sexual trouble. As for himself, he believed that he had kept an imperturbable front and that no one, except perhaps Hillmorton, now beyond interest, had seen his secret. But was anyone worried about the future, short term or long?
Again some must have been, Ryle couldn’t doubt it. Yet, if they were, they concealed it irritatingly well. Even in the luncheon room at the bank, secluded, leisurely, well fed, the faces weren’t strained, they might have been conducting financial affairs in the City of London in the reign of Edward VII. Money was frightened, of course; but money had been frightened before, and would be again. They discussed it with interest, as doctors might have discussed a tiresome endemic disease. As for what they were doing with their own money, that was not discussed. Nothing was more unmentionable. Ryle had attended many board meetings, but he had never heard a hint which would have earned him a legitimate penny, except what he could have interpreted himself through reading the papers.
Meinertzhagen, who had once paid that friendly visit to Swaffield, was one of his colleagues on the bank’s board. Meinertzhagen exuded absolute faith in the Government, like a bishop who was a shade more Catholic than the Pope.
‘All they have to do is to stick on course,’ he assured the luncheon table, not that they appeared to need assurance. ‘They’ll keep their nerve.’ Meinertzhagen also exuded confidence that before long they would have ‘the country’ behind them.
It all reminded Ryle of similar people when he was a young man, both before and during the war. It didn’t add to his own confidence, that before the war they had been dead wrong. Yet, during the war, exactly the same phlegm and lack of foresight had turned out useful. It was only intellectuals who had confessed to one that we were going to lose. Phlegm was valuable when there was no point in foreseeing. There were plenty of occasions when, with enough foresight, one wouldn’t act at all.
Nevertheless, there were times when Ryle, in his present mood, wondered how many men had ever been as complacent as these. He had lived among acquaintances like Hillmorton for a long time now. But he felt, as though reverting to his youth, that he didn’t belong there. Hillmorton used to have his flashes of detachment. As for the rest of them? Had any governing class, or one-time governing class, been as thoughtless as these? Was this how a governing class slid out? Thoughtless might not be fair – Ryle was trying to handle his own gloom. Maybe short-sighted was nearer: and, even with men as shrewd as Meinertzhagen, preposterously uninformed.
Ryle needed some intelligent conversation. He wanted to know what the Treasury boys were thinking. It was for that reason, and not because there was the chance of filial intimacy, that he telephoned his son Francis and asked him to drop in one evening after the office.
Actually, since Whitehall was so near James Ryle’s apartment, Francis not infrequently ‘dropped in’. These two were on affable terms, but were getting no closer. As Francis appeared, according to this unnecessary invitation, not wearing the old official uniform, black coat, pin-striped trousers, but the modern equivalent, a neat dark suit, his father viewed him with his usual approach to irritation. Francis was smiling and polite, his hair was short. James Ryle had not become acclimatised to long hair, and his younger son would have had his down to his shoulders. Nevertheless, that young man would somehow have e
ased the frets. He wasn’t as competent or successful as this one. He was a schoolmaster, returning to family origins, not overcapable at that. He was no more like his father than Francis was. He had a streak of deep, inborn, causeless depression, whereas James Ryle hadn’t habitually been depressed, anyway not without cause. Yet that streak gave his second son the sympathy which depressives sometimes had. He was kind, and just now his father could do with a bit of kindness.
Why, Ryle was moved by an entirely unreasonable fit of exasperation, was that son, whom he loved, unhappy, and this older one looked as though he hadn’t had a day’s unhappiness in his life? That was a fatuous thought. Ryle would in his normal equilibrium have jeered at it. For a balanced man to be crying out because there wasn’t justice on this earth – injustice was prescribed from the moment one was conceived, it lasted all of a lifetime. Into one’s old age. Into the way one died. Here was he, getting towards seventy, still vigorous. Better men than he, such as Adam Sedgwick, had received injustice the other way round. So had Hillmorton, more savagely.
As for happiness, that was a grace. No justice there. It descended at random. Sometimes it skipped those who should have had it, such as his younger son. Sometimes it elected for the silly or the wicked. It wasn’t a prize for good conduct. Ryle had had as much of it as most people, possibly more. Liz had so far had less.
Ryle asked his son Francis to help himself to any drink he cared for, and enquired with routine duty about wife and children. Then, as Francis was sitting down, chair drawn up close to the sofa, just as when Liz had once solicited advice in this room, James Ryle said, with the overhearty brusqueness that infected him in his son’s company: ‘What are you chaps playing at?’
‘Do you mean–?’
‘I mean, what are you really doing about the economy? I suppose you must be doing something.’
Francis said: ‘Oh, we’re plugging away.’
‘I’ve heard that before. It always means that things are going to turn out even worse than one expects.’
Francis remained relaxed. He said: ‘Well, you’ve seen a fair amount in your time, haven’t you?’
Once more his father had a surge of unreasonable exasperation. ‘I might feel a bit more confident – if your department occasionally showed rudimentary signs of being shaken.’
‘Would that do any good?’
‘I suppose some of you get a shade uneasy, now and then. At least I hope you do.’
Francis gave a wide smile, indicating cat-humour.
‘Some people do. There was a case a couple of days ago. Someone had made an appointment to see my chief. About a private matter. He was a fairly prominent member of your House, as a matter of fact. I was called in to take a few notes.’
James Ryle was able to interpret this in terms of official protocol. Francis couldn’t, and wouldn’t, produce the name of the visitor or give away anything about the private business. That was correct. It was stuffy, but it had its value. Francis’ chief was one of the permanent secretaries, and the man concerned was probably well known. Well known enough for someone as senior as Francis to be invoked as a silent listener to the interview. That was the polite and open Whitehall equivalent of bugging, and it too was correct.
‘Well,’ said Francis, ‘the piece of business seemed to pass off all right. Then this man – it had nothing to do with what he had come for – happened to mention that he didn’t like the look of things. In your sense, that is. He had wondered whether it wouldn’t be sensible to go somewhere where the future was more promising. Such as Canada. But after all this was his country. So far as he could see, it was a sinking ship. Still, only rats left sinking ships.’
Ryle was thinking, who could this man be, he probably knew him. He seemed to have a sharp taste in rhetoric. Ryle asked: ‘What did your chief say to that?’
Francis’ smile appeared immovable.
‘Just – Well, you can’t expect me to agree with that, can you? Referring to the first part of the statement.’
Francis, even when amused, didn’t lose his precision. Then he did say, reporting his chief again:
‘But I do know what you mean.’
Ryle, feeling for an instant warmer to his son, said: ‘Spoken like a good civil servant.’ He added: ‘What do you really think? Yourself?’
Francis replied: ‘Officials have to be moderately optimistic, you know. Otherwise we couldn’t do the job.’
‘I’ve seen more mistakes caused by overoptimism than by any other single cause.’
Francis persisted, without expression: ‘If we hadn’t a touch of optimism, we shouldn’t do anything at all.’
For a short time he did some technical analysis. His father thought it was competent and conventional. Expansion was theoretically right. The Treasury wouldn’t have done it so fast. This was a gamble. If it failed there would be a considerable shambles. Of course, there had been some contingency planning already. Francis was too discreet to say so, but officials like himself had some practice in making contingency plans, unknown to incumbent governments, methodically filed away.
In precisely the same equable tone, Francis said: ‘As a matter of fact, I was just going to write you a letter.’
It was so unemphatic, temperate, businesslike, that Ryle was totally deceived.
‘Were you, by God? Anyway, you’ve said it now, I suppose.’
‘No, I haven’t, you know.’
Francis gave a smile, but it was neither amused nor polite.
‘I wasn’t going to write to you about the state of the nation.’
‘What was it, then?’
‘Someone’s got to tell you. I thought it had better be me.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘You’re making a fool of yourself about that girl of yours. You ought to take hold of yourself.’ His voice was still unexcited and disciplined: yet lurking underneath was a vestige of the brusqueness with which his father often spoke to him. ‘People are beginning to talk.’
Ryle had listened with astonishment and chagrin mixed. Suddenly he had an excuse for anger.
‘What the hell do I care about that?’
‘Why should you?’ Francis was embarrassed: that had been a tactical mistake. ‘That isn’t what we’re concerned about–’
‘Who is “we”? Who are these people you are talking about?’
‘You do have a family, you know. As for the people who’ve noticed something, you’re not entirely insignificant. You’ve been seen about with her.’
Ryle had, not for the first time, been falling into a trap, specially designed for acute and inquisitive men. They couldn’t avoid the delusion that they were able to go about observing without being observed themselves, as though by a curious kind of uncertainty principle. At that moment, in his own sitting-room, he was thinking, wildly, of modern surveillance. Would this son of his have access to intelligence departments?
He was blustering it out.
‘Of course I’ve been out with her. If I had had the chance I should have been out with her a great deal more.’
‘She’s no good to you,’ said Francis. ‘We don’t want to see you waste your time.’
‘I take it you are speaking for my devoted family,’ said Ryle.
‘That’s fair enough.’
‘I’m very touched by this overwhelming interest. You might care to hear that if this woman would have me I should marry her tomorrow. She wouldn’t have me. That’s the only thing I think twice about. I take it that my devoted family wouldn’t be overpleased if I got married again. You wouldn’t come into the money you’re expecting.’
It was Francis’ turn to look at the other with astonishment. He had not once in his life heard his father speak like this. Few people had. Most would have said that this lurch of vulgar sarcasm wasn’t in Ryle’s character. Yet it had grimaced its way out.
Francis had reverted to his mechanical Japanese smile, but his colour had yellowed. He was one of those who blanch with anger. It was some moment
s before he controlled himself.
‘That’s quite unfair. I regard it as inadmissible.’
He spoke, quietly, formally, as he might have done across the table in committee.
Ryle, equally angry, was also controlling himself. He had to call, not on affection, but on his pride. He had always prided himself on his balance and his sense of fact – and those indicators said that he had been wrong.
‘I accept that. It was unfair. I’m sorry. I withdraw.’
It was said harshly, not with any grace: but it was said.
‘Look here,’ said Francis, ‘there’s nothing we should all like better than to see you married again. I’d approve of it myself, more than anything that could happen to you. That’s not to be doubted. You have to believe it.’
There was a pause.
‘Yes, I believe it.’
Again, that was said without grace, but it was said.
‘We should be glad to throw some nice unattached women in your way, if that’s any use.’
‘It might be a good idea,’ said Ryle, tone still uninflected.
‘There’s no reason on earth why you shouldn’t find a wife and enjoy yourself. We’d all like to see it.’ Francis was breaking into a real smile that wasn’t in itself expressive but was actually lubricious. ‘I expect you can still make it all right.’
If that remark had been produced by one of his friends, Ryle wouldn’t have been displeased. He had the least complicated of recent proofs that it was true. He had attempted some of the recipes for escaping from a hopeless passion. They didn’t work, as anyone who had lived his life ought to have known, but nevertheless, since a good many emotions were neither dignified nor grand, he had found himself walking away from a woman friend’s house, breathing the night air, confronting faces in the street as boldly, as impudently set up, as he had after not dissimilar occasions as a young man.
Yet, hearing that remark from his son, the son whom he regarded as tight-laced and priggish, he was outraged. Whatever those two said to each other that evening, as on other evenings, was wrong. Both were even-tempered men: and still they couldn’t help stirring each other’s temper below the surface. Ryle had long ago decided not to make sexual references, certainly not confidences, to his sons. Only the innocent did that, those who thought that life was hygienic and who knew nothing about fathers and sons. Now to hear one in reverse. It was meant kindly, maybe, but that made it crasser.