by C. P. Snow
‘Can you imagine it? Aren’t people extraordinary?’
It was not until Mark had mopped up his steak-and-kidney pie that she said, in a voice that sounded constrained and hard: ‘I’ve been talking to Stephen.’
‘Oh, have you?’
‘I’ve told him that Lance Forrester isn’t the one you’re looking for.’
‘No?’ To her bewilderment, Mark, expression radiant, broke into a happy mocking laugh.
‘You knew?’
‘I obviously don’t know as much as you.’
His expression was radiant: but as so often, except when he was being kind and perceptive about others, she found it difficult to read. Sometimes it didn’t matter, it only made her think of him, wonder about him, more. But now it did matter: had he made some resolve, hidden from her? Why was he so – excited, no, more than excited, lit up from inside?
In the same hard voice, which she couldn’t control, she said: ‘Please, be careful.’ And then, almost in a whisper, she shyly added: ‘Darling.’
‘I don’t see what use carefulness is going to be now. Do you?’
He made it sound matter-of-fact, like one sensible and prosaic person talking to another. She said: ‘Anything you do, will only make it worse. The same with the others. All you can do is sit it out. You must be patient. Please.’
‘Don’t worry.’
‘There’s nothing you can do.’
‘I expect that’s right.’
‘What are you thinking about?’ she cried.
‘Oh, there might be one or two little things to put straight, that’s all.’
She was being fended off, that was the one thing she was certain of. She set herself (self-consciousness and pride didn’t matter, she scarcely realized how, alone with him, she threw them away, nor what a release that was) to be sober and accurate.
‘You can’t get anything straight with these people. They hold all the cards. They have it neatly stacked up. I can give you the details if you like.’
‘I’ll take your word,’ said Mark lightly.
‘You’ve offered them the opportunity of a lifetime. They’re not philanthropists, they’re pretty hard in their own fashion. They’re going to take you on. Believe me, there’s not a chance of putting things straight with them.’
‘Not a chance in the world.’
She was more disconcerted by that reply than by anything he had said so far. She had reshaped her own words, but she didn’t expect and understand this agreement, casual, easy, unperturbed. She had to hack on.
‘Well then. At the best they’re going to make an example of you. That means they’ll expose you. At the worst they’ll prosecute, and that’s more likely than not. Very much more likely,’ she said, speaking straight to him and slowly. ‘It’s going to be very dirty. And all you can do is take it.’
‘Oh, I’ll take it.’
‘Can we ride it out?’ Suddenly, the emphasis, the realistic assessment went out of her voice, and she sounded youthful and pleading again.
‘There’s not much else to do, is there?’
A pang of disappointment for her: she had hoped for more than that.
She went on: ‘Darling. Do take it quietly. Resign yourself as much as you can. That’s the best way out,’ And then–’
He looked at her with a brilliant smile. When she saw that, there were times, as now, when she didn’t know whether he cared about himself at all: and she, self-bound, felt melted and lost.
‘Don’t do anything now,’ she said. ‘Get away from them, and let it wash over you. It’ll pass, you know.’
She said: ‘Please don’t do anything now. Come and see me tonight. We’ll have a quiet time.’
‘I’m not sure that’s possible.’ He was making a gentle apology. ‘There’s a meeting of the others this evening.’
‘Must you go?’
‘If I didn’t, they might think I’d done the damage.’
To her astonishment – used as she was to his spirits, so high and (as she thought to herself) so lonely – he began to hum. She recognized the Jemmy Twitcher song. She couldn’t resist a smile herself: ‘You are absurd.’
Then, pressing him again, she said: ‘Then come and see me afterwards. It doesn’t matter how late it is. It’ll be restful. I’ll play you some music.’
Mark said, as though to soothe her, that he had no idea how long the meeting would go on or what would happen there. In any event, when it was over he would ring her up.
13
That afternoon, while Stephen and the others were waiting for the crisis, only a handful of people in the town knew anything of their affairs, or gave them a thought. There were a quarter of a million people living round about; no one has ever done a survey of what is happening, on such an afternoon, to so many human lives. For many of course, it wouldn’t be much different from the day before or the day after. For a few, the anxieties of any of Stephen’s companions would have seemed trivial beside their own. If statistics are any guide, there must have been, in the homes and hospitals of the town, something like six or eight men and women who were nearing their deaths that day, as on any other day throughout the year. That was in the nature of things, just mortality: but to some close to them those words would have been no comfort.
Nearer home, that is nearer Stephen’s home, the fates were less evident and the goings-on more domestic. The Bishop had come away from a Rotary luncheon, and was for once slightly depressed about his fellow men. It wasn’t his daughter who was on his mind, or at least not heavily. He had noticed that she was preoccupied, but assumed that that was on account of a young man: since his wife was not a silent partner, he hadn’t been left in doubt who the young man was. Well, that would be more than satisfactory: anyway, for the Bishop was a hearty man, he hoped and expected that his daughter would marry someone soon enough, enjoy herself, have children and be happy. He was very fond of her, and he thought of her marriage as being as happy as his own.
So it wasn’t she who, that afternoon, had lowered his spirits a few points. It had been some of his hosts at the luncheon. The Bishop could get on with anyone, and in his ascent through the Church he had got on with many businessmen. Yet in some deep, private, inadmissible recess he didn’t really like them. That was un-Christian, and the Bishop didn’t approve of forming an attitude to groups of people, instead of to separate human beings. Nevertheless, when he did meet businessmen as a group, and listened to their backchat and exchanged his own, he found them discomfiting. If this was how men thought about the poor, or those who worked for them – he was used to it, and yet, each time it happened, he was never used to it. The Bishop was a Christian socialist, in what was by then an old-fashioned but also a rooted sense. He was not deluded, he didn’t expect businessmen or anyone else to talk or behave like St Francis or Beatrice Webb. But that they could talk as they did: that they could blissfully believe that these opinions were still permissible: it made the Bishop absentminded, inattentive to his timetable, which usually he adhered to with the dutifulness of a Cabinet Minister, distracted him for a quarter of an hour, a long time for him, from the sermon he ought to have been preparing for a parish church next Sunday, the second after Epiphany.
In his office, Thomas Freer, more apprehensive by nature than the Bishop and informed of matters of which the Bishop was still totally ignorant, had phases of worry about his son. He had not spoken to him since the evening before. Some of those words were still wounding. Thomas Freer took more blame, and felt more sadness than others, including maybe his wife, would have imagined. Despite his self-indulgence and self-protectiveness, he could be candid with himself. He knew that he was very selfish, but he also knew, and couldn’t help knowing, that he wasn’t sufficient to himself. It wasn’t entirely for his own esteem that he worried about his son.
He had received no more news. He couldn’t decide, he had no means of knowing, when either side would take action: or even, for he was still capable of a surreptitious hope, if they would. That day
did not seem specially significant, or at least no more than any day that week.
As the afternoon went by, Thomas Freer spent the time drafting a letter to the Chancellor of the cathedral. It was a standard business letter, such as he wrote several times a month: however, as he became engrossed in the draft, his thoughts – for minutes together, and then for longer than that – left him alone. He enjoyed writing in his stylish italic hand. He enjoyed the process of composition. It was more of a nepenthe than one might have thought.
There were other activities that afternoon. The Bishop’s wife, who still behaved as she had in their first living, was visiting sick West Indians in a street not far from Neil St Johns’ room. Mrs Kelshall was preparing the pastry for chicken liver patties, a luxury for her husband which they couldn’t often afford. Sylvia Ellis sat staring at her typewriter, wondering whether Mark would keep his promise to ring her up that night. Could she find an excuse to get access to more papers? Even that would be a relief.
Some of them were thinking, couldn’t keep the thoughts away, of what was going to happen: but none of them that afternoon was thinking what had happened. Just as Sylvia, who had as much conscience as most girls, could push out of mind the fact that she had been disloyal to her employers, so could Stephen, Tess and Mark push out of mind some of their own behaviour: and they had done worse than that. They hadn’t been continuously complacent, or merciful to themselves, about it. When Stephen had said to his father that the side one was on counted more than the steps one takes, that would have been self-evident to Neil: but to Stephen it was a rationalisation which (if he hadn’t been swamped by the revelation of betrayal) wouldn’t have been free from guilt. But he had found – it wasn’t a new discovery – that moral affronts against oneself drive out the moral affronts one has oneself committed: and so, more overpoweringly, do hopes and dangers.
As a matter of record, they had moved from step to step with something like the logic or escalation of action. Neil’s initial find about the rack-renting was both innocent and genuine: so was their indignation: so was their realization that they could use it in their cause. The chain of tenants, culminating in the ground landlord, the Shadow Minister, was quite authentic.
What was not so innocent was the connection they had made between these finds. Simply – and for different reasons with no qualms – Neil and Lance Forrester had persuaded, using a straightforward bribe in the process, the man Finlayson to implicate both agents and the landlord. Stephen and Mark had known of this soon afterwards. They didn’t like it, but Stephen hadn’t stopped it, or tried to. It stiffened the case, it enriched the cause. There was a price to pay in scruple: which had allowed Lance to make his jeers about prime specimens of honesty, that last Sunday night in Neil’s room.
But it had escalated further. Through their contacts, similar groups in other universities, they knew they were on to a big thing and, in a phrase they kept hearing, ‘something real’. Journalists, press and TV were drawn in: ‘we’ll blow this up,’ they said. So were one or two politicians. This was a chance to bring down the Shadow Minister for good. With a bit more trimming, his character could be killed off. This was not directly political, in the English party sense. Most of those involved would have been just as happy, or more so, if they could have done the same character-killing of a Labour front bencher. The most ardent adviser was, in fact, a journalist of the irregular right. To him, it would be a stroke against what he called ‘the system’.
To Stephen, that kind of thinking was crassly simple. But the machinations weren’t. They led into what became a conspiracy of defamation. It was that which Thomas Freer had heard of, as a ground for legal action, though his informants couldn’t at that time have learned the full story.
One interesting thing was, none of them knew, or gave a thought to, the man whom they were aiming at. To themselves, among themselves, they could be sensitive: but they didn’t, not even the most imaginative of them, even when they were coming frank about the ethics of situations (or what the Bishop would have recognized as the theology of cases), speak of him as though he were a man.
In that, they made a practical mistake. For the Shadow Minister was an unusual man for a politician: not because of his dangerous or attacking qualities, but the reverse. He was a gentle soul, with a touch of defenceless paranoia. Like others with that kind of temperament – so rare in politics that people in Whitehall couldn’t understand how he had got so far – he inspired protectiveness in others. That was why, so inexplicably to outsiders, security officers had been devoting what seemed a disproportionate amount of attention to the activities of the core. Neil’s picture of security resources was exaggerated, a conspirator’s image in reverse. Stephen had been correct in observing, at the Monday meeting, that they would be flattering themselves to think that they were worth much in the way of professional security surveillance. The security service wasn’t without its intelligence in universities. There was a shortish file on Neil in a London office, since he had for a time carried a party card. Lance’s drug purchases hadn’t passed unsuspected by the police. Normally, that would have been all.
But, owing to the Shadow Minister’s personality, things hadn’t proceeded normally. In his previous term of office, he had been on close terms with a couple of security chiefs. They liked him: they saw he was in trouble: they discovered why: they set their apparatus going. As a matter of duty, they would have done something for other politicians in trouble. But here they went rather beyond the line of duty. As it happened, they had some help from inside.
14
Nearly twenty minutes early, it was not yet a quarter to five, Stephen and Tess stood outside the New Walk apartment block. After Stephen rang the bell, they heard the buzz and Lance’s jaunty voice down the intercom.
In his sitting-room he looked to Stephen as though he hadn’t stirred out since the morning. He had, it was true, taken off his dressing-gown and changed from pyjama trousers into jeans: otherwise he might just have got up, not precisely sleepy but not ready to recognize that the day had begun.
‘Hi,’ he said. ‘I thought you two would come.’
Just as in the morning, Stephen couldn’t match that tone, and Tess set herself not to be provoked.
‘Plenty of time to wait,’ Lance went on. ‘It will be interesting to see who comes, won’t it?’
Neither of them replied. Stephen, who didn’t often smoke, lit a cigarette.
‘Oh, hell,’ said Lance, ‘you can’t say it won’t be interesting, can you?’
‘I want to get this over.’ Stephen spoke impatiently and sternly, and for a moment Lance stopped gibing. Then he began again: ‘Did you ever play last across?’
‘No.’
‘Nor did I. Too carefully brought up, that was the trouble. Very precious we were, weren’t we?’ He looked at Tess. ‘Were you precious too, duckie?’
She couldn’t tell whether he was lit up. He sounded quite coherent, maddeningly and indifferently so. Suddenly her unassertive manner fell away, and she said, with firm flat authority: ‘Drop it. We’re not playing.’
Lance gazed, eyes hooded, at the two taut faces. He wasn’t put down. He said: ‘It isn’t going to be a bit like last across, you know it isn’t.’ He drew no response at all, and the room fell quiet. Then the bell rang, and even Lance, quick on his feet, appeared glad to hear it.
It was Neil.
‘Welcome,’ said Lance. ‘I’d have liked a bet on the next arrival.’
Neil nodded to the others. He didn’t pay special attention to Lance, as though unsurprised that he was present and the meeting going according to plan. Dislike, even suspicion, much nearer the nerve of living than dislike and so much more ineradicable, seemed to have become neutralized by now: or at least there were neutral intervals, curiously lacking in personal exchanges, as they sat there while their watches ticked on towards five o’clock.
Another ring of the bell. It took between twenty and thirty seconds for someone to push on the outside door
and climb upstairs. Twenty seconds is a long time. When Emma entered, all their eyes were already watching: and immediately she looked round, counting who was there.
‘Well,’ she said trailingly.
The next to come was Bernard. Some of the greetings were louder by now, and it would have been difficult to tell whether they were heartier or more strained. He said good afternoon and went over to a chair. Everyone else was sitting unoccupied, but he took out a small writing pad and began to make some notes.
Five o’clock had just passed. No one said it, but Mark had not come. Several of them, Emma first, without a word spoken, had begun to walk about the room. Although it was a January evening, there was light enough to see from the windows people in the road below.
All of a sudden, Emma, standing by the side window close to which Lance had drunk his coffee that morning, cried out: ‘There he is!’
It was a strong cry, but the excitement had died out of it. Stephen gazed down to the pavement, five storeys beneath, and saw, in the last of the sunset, Mark’s hair shining like an oriflamme.
As soon as he entered the room, he said: ‘I’m so sorry I’m late. I had a bit of trouble with the car.’ He apologized with an embracing smile, with the manners that were both first and second nature.
Neil said: ‘We’re all here, then.’
There was a pause, until Lance gave a creaking yell of a laugh.
‘What else in Christs’ name did anyone expect?’