by C. P. Snow
He felt lonely. No one was visiting him that night. He went in for homely self-pity. Reg Swaffield rattling about like a pea in a pod. He would whistle up Jenny – she was a sensible woman, he hadn’t regretted taking her up, that affair was done with now, but she wasn’t. He had better ask that dumb husband of hers as well. They could come in and sit with him after dinner, and after a few drinks maybe he would be able to sleep.
38
1973.
Ryle took to spending more time in the House. He was still a sociable man, and was not often alone. Once or twice, though, he reflected that, three years before, he, Sedgwick, and Hillmorton used to sit together in the Bishops’ Bar. It would have taken supernormal foresight to predict what was going to happen to them. Hillmorton had looked in vigorous health, and now was dead. Sedgwick, whose state had distressed them, was walking about like a fit man. While to Ryle himself, nothing had happened – except that three years had passed, and nothing was likely to happen now. Ryle was too stoical to protest, like old Skelding, about the justice of this world. Still no one would have foreseen these three personal stories.
There were some who did feel like protesting against the justice of this world, especially when they witnessed Julian flourishing in excelsis. Mrs Underwood’s triumph continued but often seemed to her precarious. Julian had become worried about how to safeguard his money. None of the western stock markets were any good, investments were no good: should one buy jewels, pictures, silver? This needed as much cautious thought as his health. He bought a small house in Campden Hill (that might be a safer investment than most), and there allowed Liz to live with him. They entertained very little, since he decided it was a waste of money. Ryle was invited there once, and then not again. He thought that Liz had become thinner, and much more silent. Others, more disinterested, said that at least she had got some of what she wanted.
To Liz, with irrefragable reasonableness, Julian pointed out that one argument for marriage no longer existed. The great financial inducement had been taken away, since Liz’s youngest sister (the one who had looked after Hillmorton at the end) had recently produced a boy. So, if money continued to mean anything, which Julian took leave to doubt, this child would ultimately inherit the Hillmorton fortune. Even if he and Liz married and had a son, they had lost that chance. To his mother on the other hand he sometimes ruminated that it was time he settled down for good.
Jenny hadn’t got all she wanted either, but she was enjoying what she had. Thanks to Swaffield (though Lorimer grimly suspected that some of the payments on the mortgage filtered back to him) they acquired a house off the end of the Fulham Road, by coincidence not far from Dr Pemberton’s. After her days in the office, Jenny had enough energy, gusto, and long-frustrated homemaking skill to make her house elegant, and to all appearances – despite the gross difference in wealth – they lived more comfortably than Julian and Liz. They entertained much more, and Lorimer’s acquaintances in the Lords, including new ones made for him by Jenny, enjoyed going there. There was some talk of sliding him in as a junior whip, but by the end of the year he still had not managed his maiden speech. Jenny’s conspiracy with the smooth young whip was still continuing.
In May Swaffield received a letter from Downing Street saying that the Prime Minister ‘had it in mind’ to recommend Swaffield for a knighthood in the Birthday Honours, if this was acceptable. Swaffield, despite disappointment and fury, was capable both of calculation and taking advice. At his age, they wouldn’t offer him anything more. Paying him off at the lowest possible rate. He did accept. On the day after the list appeared, there were envelopes coming through the letter box at Hill Street addressed to Sir Reginald Swaffield. Effusive congratulations from Meinertzhagen, Haydon-Smith, the rest. In his study, Swaffield uttered a number of words to the empty room. However, he wrote seemly letters of thanks: hope never completely died. He allowed himself one luxury or self-indulgence. That same week, he sent a message for Lord Clare to come to his office, sat at his desk reading papers when Clare came in, and kept him standing up. Then: ‘Edward, I’m taking you off the Board.’
‘May I be told why?’
‘You’re not doing anything useful. All right? Bless you.’
Also in June, David March was appointed a judge of the High Court. This wasn’t a surprise, but had come early enough to mean other steps in prospect. Lander was bouncing with delight, and stood the drinks all evening, which cost him something, the recipient being David March. Under monumental phlegm, March had the fighting satisfaction of an ambitious man: but in secret, there was a vestige of worry about his friend, Lander’s tongue had recently been disrespectful, even by its own high standard. March was beginning to doubt whether he would ever have the chance to return the celebration.
In the Lords, Ryle was finding that his black thoughts of the year before were being shared by others. In private (not in debate or in print) some were saying them. Ryle found this a kind of left-handed consolation. One bright-faced handsome man passed him going out through the swing doors.
‘Did you ever know a time when no one anywhere had the slightest constructive idea? Or a grain of hope?’ Most of his friends were more sedate than that. But men older than himself, on both sides, were being sad. He heard more insights and self-recriminations than he had heard in that place before.
Azik Schiff, so long above the battle, disposed to think that politicians were unteachable, was as sad as any. The new Arab war made him shrink as with an illness or as very old men do. He had, years before, lost his only son. He had done his duty by his adopted country, but Israel was his only emotional commitment and all he had left. With an unfamiliar burst of candour, one night he told Ryle, whom he didn’t know well, that after the Poland of his childhood he recognised anti-semitism when he smelt it, and he smelt anti-semitism stirring again all over the western world.
Those were impersonal anxieties or calamities. Most of these people were as contented as they had been before, a good many of them happy, like Jenny and Lorimer or above all (to some outsiders regrettably) Julian Underwood. Some were having what their world regarded as success, such as David March. Bishop Boltwood, one of the cleverest and toughest men among them, was being tipped as a possible odds-against bet for Canterbury. Still, in a number of people selected at random, the statisticians would have said that there was likely to be, whether there were impersonal calamities about or not, a personal one. That was the reverse of sheltering under the arch of probability. It had duly happened. To someone who those connected with the Massie case would have considered one of the more indestructible. That summer Symington, at the age of forty, was struck down by an arachnoid haemorrhage. He could easily have died, the doctors said, but his strong nature carried him through – and his wife’s will for him to live was as strong as his. By the end of the year, it seemed that he might get back to work again. Hubris, he said without a blench. I thought I could do anything. It was unlikely that he would ever be able to work as he once did. He had been rapacious under the lustrous surface. He would have to renounce that now. He had aimed to be one of the first solicitors to sit on the same Bench as David March. If any solicitor did, it wouldn’t be Symington: and he accepted it.
Towards the end of the year, Ryle was waiting for Sedgwick in the Bishops’ Bar. He had appreciably less of Sedgwick’s company than he used to: for, on a sitting day in the Lords, between teatime and a quarter to six, Sedgwick was constantly escorted by Dr Pemberton. To Sedgwick’s friends, this was difficult to understand. To think that Pemberton – who had become known there as Archie Hillmorton – was popular in the Lords would be a misjudgement. Lorimer, since he lived near, had made an effort to talk to him, but said to Jenny that he was a bounder. Others were more tolerant, but the unspoken consensus was that he took some tolerating. It didn’t help that he neither accepted drinks nor stood them. A few, on hearing his views of national politics, his countrymen, and his fellow men in general, found them satisfying: but for those he had even less res
pect than for other members. His capacity for respect seemed to diminish as he grew older. He also had no capacity for pretending any. He had no more use for the place than when he entered, and no more for the people in it. He had delivered a couple of speeches during the year. One, his maiden, on funds for the Medical Research Council, was greeted with the normal congratulations for any maiden speech. The second, on student grants (in his view, at least one half of the students in the country should have no grants at all), was not received with enthusiasm. He didn’t like the place, and didn’t disguise that he never would. He came in at teatime, and left in time for his surgery at six o’clock. Yet Sedgwick, the fastidious and cultivated, put up with him. Ryle, who thought himself more suitable for coping with roughnecks, once asked him why. Sedgwick replied, urchin-grin taking over from austerity, that as one grew older unqualified admiration was good for any man. He added that the man was a hopeless philistine, uneducated, coarse-fibred, but had what ought to have been a good mind, It was refreshing to meet a good mind, which had never been domesticated or tamed at all.
That December night, waiting for Sedgwick in the bar, Ryle wasn’t thinking of Pemberton, in whom his interest was not excessive. He had just heard that his son Francis was being seconded to the European Commission in Brussels. His interest in his son Francis was not excessive either, but he couldn’t help reflecting on his grandchildren. What sort of life would they have? From professional England, from anywhere in the professional West? Those children had some of his genes. If they had a specific gift, they would be fortunate. If not, if they were anything like himself, reasonably competent, reasonably forceful, he couldn’t see them having so free or interesting a time. True, they had been born more privileged than he had. But the real privilege was to be born in the right country at the right period. That they hadn’t been.
It occurred to him to wonder, how would a historian of the future, a historian of his own type, judge the society he had lived in and the people in it. It was possible, it was more than possible, that historians of the future wouldn’t be much fascinated. It might seem a period of confusion between great epochs, and those didn’t shine very bright in history. But if they did give us any attention, it was certain that they would analyse our discontents, anxieties, the forces moving us, even our attempts at foresight and our hopes, quite differently from the way we had tried ourselves. And they would be right, or more right than we had been. If there was a lesson a historian learns, that was it.
But there was another lesson a historian learned. He would also read our feelings and our experiences quite differently from the way we lived them. The present couldn’t imagine the ideas of the future, that is one of the certainties. It seemed equally certain, from what Ryle knew of history, that the future couldn’t live again the existence of any present. For what it was worth, that was our own. We didn’t know much, but that was something only we could know.
A consolation? No, it just put us into perspective in the whole chain of lives, and that was humbling. Not that anyone should require humbling, Ryle thought, if he had lived in our time.
Endnote
[1] Interpolations in square brackets are not part of the record.
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.
The Light & The Dark
The Light and the Dark is the second in the Strangers and Brothers series. The story is set in Cambridge, but the plot also moves to Monte Carlo, Berlin and Switzerland. Lewis Eliot narrates the career of a childhood friend. Roy Calvert is a brilliant but controversial linguist who is about to be elected to a fellowship.
Time of Hope
The third in the Strangers and Brothers series (although the first in chronological order) and tells the story of Lewis Eliot’s early life. As a child he is faced with his father’s bankruptcy. As a young man, he finds his career at the Bar hindered by a neurotic wife. Separation from her is impossible however.
The Masters
The fourth in the Strangers and Brothers series begins with the dying Master of a Cambridge college. His imminent demise causes intense rivalry and jealousy amongst the other fellows. Former friends become enemies as the election looms.
The New Men
It is the onset of World War II in the fifth in the Strangers and Brothers series. A group of Cambridge scientists are working on atomic fission. But there are consequences for the men who are affected by it. Hiroshima also causes mixed personal reactions.
Homecomings
Homecomings is the sixth in the Strangers and Brothers series and sequel to Time of Hope. This complete story in its own right follows Lewis Eliot’s life through World War II. After his first wife’s death his work at the Ministry assumes a larger role. It is not until his second marriage that Eliot is able to commit himself emotionally.
The Conscience of the Rich
Seventh in the Strangers and Brothers series, this is a novel of conflict exploring the world of the great Anglo-Jewish banking families between the two World Wars. Charles March is heir to one of these families and is beginning to make a name for himself at the Bar. When he wishes to change his way of life and do something useful he is forced into a quarrel with his father, his family and his religion.
The Affair
In the eighth in the Strangers and Brothers series Donald Howard, a young science Fellow is charged with scientific fraud and dismissed from his college. This novel, which became a successful West End play, describes a miscarriage of justice in the same Cambridge college which served as a setting for ‘The Masters’
The Corridors of Power
The corridors and committee rooms of Whitehall are the setting for the ninth in the Strangers and Brothers series. They are also home to the manipulation of political power. Roger Quaife wages his ban-the-bomb campaign from his seat in the Cabinet and his office at the Ministry. The stakes are high as he employs his persuasiveness.
The Sleep Of Reason
The penultimate novel in the Strangers and Brothers series takes Goya‘s theme of monsters that appear in our sleep. The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and sadism.
Last Things
The last in the Strangers and Brothers series has Sir Lewis Eliot’s heart stop briefly during an operation. During recovery he passes judgement on his achievements and dreams. Concerns fall from him leaving only ironic tolerance. His son Charles takes up his father’s burdens and like his father, he is involved in the struggles of class and wealth, but he challenges the Establishment, risking his future in political activities.
B. Other Novels
A Coat of Varnish
Humphrey Leigh, retired resident of Belgravia, pays a social visit to an old friend, Lady Ashbrook. She is waiting for her test results, fearing cancer. When Lady Ashbrook gets the all clear
she has ten days to enjoy her new lease of life. And then she is found murdered.
Death Under Sail
Roger Mills, a Harley Street specialist, is taking a sailing holiday on the Norfolk Broads. When his six guests find him at the tiller of his yacht with a smile on his face and a gunshot through his heart, all six fall under suspicion in this, C P Snow’s first novel.
In Their Wisdom
Economic storm clouds gather as bad political weather is forecast for the nation. Three elderly peers look on from the sidelines of the House of Lords andwonder if it will mean the end of a certain way of life. Against this background is set a court struggle over a disputed will that escalates into an almighty battle.
The Malcontents
Thomas Freer is a prosperous solicitor who is also the Registrar, responsible for his cathedral’s legal business. His son Stephen is one of a secret group of young men and women known as the core. When Stephen’s group ctivities land them in terrible trouble, no one guesses that the consequences will lead to a death and more.
The Search
This story told in the first person starts with a child’s interest in the night sky. A telescope starts a lifetime’s interest in science. The narrator goes up to King’s College, London to study. As a fellow at Cambridge he embarks on love affairs and searches for love at the same time as career success. Finally, contentment in love exhausts his passion for research.