by C. P. Snow
I did not agree, but Charles did. He might be perceptive beyond his years, but he had a healthy fifteen-year-old appetite: and so, while I drank a cup of tea and smoked a cigarette, the grandfather and grandson, with over seventy years between them, sat on opposite sides of the fireplace – in silence, except for appreciative lip noises under the moustache – eating cakes. Not just one cake each, but two, three, four, half-a-dozen.
When they had finished the plateful, my father sighed with content and turned mild eyes on me.
“You made a mistake there, Lewis. They went down all right, confound me if they didn’t.”
Then he seemed to feel that some concession was called for.
“Still,” he said, “you’ve got on well, I must say that.”
He had, I was sure, only the haziest notion of my life. He may have realised that I had played some part in affairs: he ought to have known that I was no longer poor, for I had told him so. Certainly he had never read a word I had written. Charles, still vigilant, was wearing a surreptitious smile. Unlike my father, Charles knew a good deal about what had happened to me, the rough as well as the smooth. He knew that, since I left the official life, some attacks had followed me, one or two predictable, and one based upon a queer invention. Charles did not, as some sons would, imagine that I was invulnerable: on the contrary, he believed that this last situation he would have handled better himself.
“I often wish,” my father continued, “that your mother had lived to see how you’ve got on.”
Yes, I did too. Yes, I thought, she would have revelled in a lot of it – the title, the money, the well-known name. Yet, like Charles – though without the sophistication – she would have known it all; once again, the rough as well as the smooth. Anyone who raised a voice against me, she, that fierce and passionate woman, would have wanted to claw, not as a figure of speech but in stark flesh, with her own nails.
“That’s how I like to think of her, you know,” my father said, pointing to the mantelpiece. “Not as she was at the end.”
I got up, took the photograph down, and showed it to Charles. It was a hand-tinted photograph, taken somewhere round 1912, when they were a little better off than ever after, and when I was seven years old. She was wearing a dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves: her black hair and high colouring stood out, so did her aquiline beak of a nose. She looked both handsome, which she could be, and proud, which she always was, sometimes satanically so. As I remarked to Charles, it wasn’t a bad picture.
What my father had said might have sounded sentimental, like a gentle old man lamenting the past and the only woman, the only happiness, he had ever known. On the contrary. My father was as little sentimental as a man could reasonably be. The truth was different. What he had said, was a plain statement. That was how, when he thought of her at all – he lived in the present and their marriage was a long time ago – he preferred to think of her. But it had been an ill-tuned marriage: for her, much worse than that. He had been the “wrong man”, she used to confide in me, and in my childhood I took this to mean that he was ineffectual, too amiable for the world’s struggle, unable to give her the grandeur that somehow she thought should be hers by right. Later I thought, remembering what I had submerged, that there was more to it. I could recall bitter words over a maid (yes, on something like £250 a year, before the First World War, she kept a maid): I guessed, though I should never know for certain, that under his mild and beaming aspect there was a disconcerting ardour, which came as a surprise, though a pleasant one, to himself. As their marriage got worse, he had, when I was quite young, found his own consolations. Since she died, it had puzzled me that he had not married again. Yet again I guessed that in a cheerful covert fashion he had found what he wanted: and that, on a good many nights, he had returned to this little room raising his robust baritone with a satisfaction, as though singing meaninglessly to himself, which as a child I did not begin to understand.
Charles was still looking at the photograph. My father made an attempt to address him by name, gave it up, but nevertheless spoke to him:
“She always used to tell me ‘Bertie, don’t be such a donkey! Don’t be such a donkey!’ Milly used to do the same. They always used to say I was a donkey!”
The reminiscence seemed to fill him with extreme pleasure. Charles looked up, and felt called upon to smile. But he gave me a side glance, as though for once he was somewhat at a loss.
The clock on the mantelpiece, in measured strokes, struck five.
“Solemn-toned clock,” said my father with approval. “Solemn-toned clock.” That was a ritual phrase which I must have heard hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times. When she was hopeful, and her hopes though precarious were inextinguishable, it used to make my mother smile: but in a crisis it made her break out in jangled nerves, in disappointment at all the hopes frustrated. That evening, however, the sound of the clock set my father going: now he was really on his own; so far as he had any self-esteem, here it was. For the clock had been presented to him after a period of service as secretary to a male voice choir: and he had been secretary to similar choirs ever since, for nearly sixty years in all. This had been the theme of his existence, outside himself, and he proposed to talk about it. Which, with amiable, pattering persistence, he duly did. It was all still going on. Not so flourishing as in the past. What with television – he had refused to let us buy him a set, though there was a sound radio in a corner of the room – people weren’t so willing to give up the time as in the old days. Still, some were keen. There had been changes. Male voice choirs weren’t so popular, so he had brought in women. (That I had known; it had been the one political exertion of my father’s life; it took me back for an instant to my speculations of a few moments before.) He had managed to keep a group of twenty or so together. Nowadays they met for rehearsal each Sunday after service at St Mary’s, one of the churches in the town.
It was a quiet little obsession, but it gave him all the enjoyment of an obsession. I didn’t want to cut him short, but at last he flagged slightly. I could ask a question. Wasn’t St Mary’s a longish journey for him? It must be all of three miles.
“Oh,” he said, “I get a bus that takes me near enough.”
“But coming back late at night?”
“Well, one of our members, Mr Rattenbury” – (I wondered if Charles noticed that ‘Mr’ which my father had applied to each of his male acquaintances all his life) – “he usually gives me a lift.”
“But if you don’t get a lift?”
“Then I just have to toddle home on my own two pins.”
He rose from his chair, and exemplified – without complaint, in fact with hilarity – very short steps on very short legs.
“Isn’t that a bit much?” At his age, that was an understatement, but I couldn’t say any more. Even at this, his face was clouded, and I wasn’t going to spoil his pleasure.
“It’s a bit slippy in winter, you know. But I get here. I shouldn’t be here now if I didn’t, should I?”
That struck him as the most clinching of retorts. He was delighted with it. It set him off chanting loudly: Anyway – the summer – is – coming – anyway – the – spring – is – here.
Then he seemed to feel that he had certain responsibilities for Charles which he had not discharged. He had given him cakes. Was that enough? My father looked puzzled: then suddenly his face shone with preternatural worldliness.
“Young man,” he said, “I want to give you a piece of advice.”
Charles leaned gravely towards him.
“I expect,” the old man said, “your father gives you some money now and then, doesn’t he?”
Charles misunderstood, and was a shade embarrassed. “I’m quite all right for money, thank you very much, sir.”
“Of course you are! Of course you are! I’m going to give you a piece of advice that I gave your father a long time ago.” Now I myself remembered: he had the memory for detail long past that I had seen before in the very old. “I
always tell people,” he said, as though he were daydreaming again, this time of himself as the successful financier, deferred to by less experienced men, “I always tell people that you never ought to go about without a few pound notes sewn in a place where you’re never going to lose it. I told your father a long time ago, and I hope he listened to me, that he ought to have five of his pound notes sewn into the seat of his trousers. Mind you, five pounds doesn’t go as far now as it did then. If I were you, I should get someone to sew fifteen or twenty pounds into the seat of your trousers. I expect you can lay your hands on twenty pound notes, can’t you? Well, you do what I tell you. You never know when they’ll come in useful. You just think of me when you find they’ve got you out of a tight corner.”
Charles, his face controlled, promised that he would.
My father exuded content. Charles and I stretched our legs, getting ready to go. When we were putting on our coats, opening the French window so that the evening air struck cold into the stuffy, odorous little room, I told my father that I would drop in during my next visit to the town.
“Oh, don’t put yourself out for me, Lewis,” he said, as though he quite liked my company but even more preferred not to be disturbed. With his beaming innocent smile he waved us out.
Charles and I didn’t speak until we had emerged from the entry back into the road. There was a light, I noticed, two houses along, in what had been our old “front room”.
It had been raining, the sky was bright again. Charles gave me a curious smile.
“Life goes on,” he said.
I took him the longer way round to the bus stop, past the branch library, past the red-brick church (1900-ish, pitchpine and stained-glass windows, scene both of splendours and miseries for my mother), down the hill to the main road. From the grass in the garden patches there came a fresh, anxiety-lifting, rainwashed smell. We were each of us silent, not uncomfortably so, but still, touched by the afternoon.
After a time Charles said: “It wasn’t exactly what I expected.”
“You mean, he wasn’t?”
“No, I didn’t mean that, quite.”
I asked him another question, but he shook his head. He was preoccupied, just as I had been in the middle of the town, and this time it was he who did not want to be pressed.
On the top of the bus, on the way to the railway station, he made one reference to my father’s practical advice, smiled, and that was all. We chatted on the station, waiting for his train: he was going home alone, since I had an appointment in the town next day. As we were chatting, quite casually, the station’s red brick glaring at us, the sulphurous smoke swirling past, just for once that day, memory, direct memory, gave me its jab. I was standing in that station, years before, going to London, nerves tingling, full of hope.
The train was coming in. Charles’ education had been different from mine, but he was no more inhibited than I was, and we hugged each other in the Russian fashion as we said goodbye.
2: A Young Woman in Love
AFTER leaving my son, I took a taxi to the Vice-Chancellor’s Residence. In my youth, there wouldn’t have been such a place or such a person: but in the ’fifties the old College of Art and Technology, where I had once attended George Passant’s lectures, had been transmogrified into one of the newest crop of universities. In fact, it was for that reason that I made my periodical visits to the town. The new university had adopted – out of an obstinacy that derived entirely from its Head – something like a Scottish constitution, with a small executive Court, consisting of academics, local dignitaries, and a representative elected by the students: since I could, by a certain amount of stately chicanery, be regarded as an old member, they had elected me. I was happy to go there. For years I had been free of official business: this was no tax at all, it did not distract me from my work: occasionally, as in those for the next day, the termly agenda contained a point of interest. But I was happy really because I had reached a stage when the springs of my life were making their own resonances clear, which I could hear, sometimes insistently, not only with my family but with people I had known.
In the April evening, the taxi chugged along in the stream of outbound traffic, past the hedges and gardens of the prosperous suburb, the gravel drives, the comfortable bourgeois houses, the lighted windows. These were houses I had walked by as a boy: but to this day I had not often been inside. I knew much poorer houses, like my father’s, where I had been an hour before: and, because of the way things had gone, I had spent some time in recent years in grander ones. But somehow that specific sector had eluded me, and with it a slice of this comfortable, affluent town.
Was that why, as I stood outside the Residence and saw the bright drawing-room, blinds not drawn, standard light by the window, I felt a pang, as though I were an outsider? It seemed so for an instant: and yet, in cold blood, I should have known it was not true. I was still capable of walking down any street, seeing a lighted window, and feeling that same pang, which was made up of curiosity, envy and desire: in that sense, one doesn’t age: one can still envy a hearth glow, even if one is returning to a happy home: it isn’t a social chance, but something a good deal deeper, that can at untameable moments, make one feel for ever youthful, and, as far as that goes, for ever in the street outside.
I went in, and became, as though a switch had been turned, at home. Vicky Shaw greeted me. Yes, my bag had been taken upstairs. Her father was, as usual, working late. I was to come and have a drink.
Sitting in an armchair in the drawing-room (which was not at all magical, soft-cushioned but with tepid pictures on the walls), I looked at her. Since her mother died, Vicky had been acting as hostess for her father, although she had just qualified as a doctor and had a job at the infirmary. She was just twenty-four, not handsome, her face a shade too equine to be pretty, and yet comely: long, slight: fair hair swept back and knotted. I was very fond of her. She did not make me feel – as on those visits, despite the time-switch on the drive outside, I sometimes did – that I was an ageing man with a public face. And also she had the special radiance, and the special vulnerability, of a young woman for the first time openly in love.
I expected to hear something of that. But she was direct and often astringent; there was business to get through first. She was a devoted daughter, but she thought that her father, as a Vice-Chancellor, was a bit of an ass. His enemies were trying to ease him out – that she knew as well as I did. He was giving them opportunities. Tomorrow’s case would be used against him, unless I could work on him. She didn’t have to tell me about it: I had heard from the appellants themselves. A couple of young men had been found bedding a girl each in a room in one of the hostels. The disciplinary committee, which meant in effect Arnold Shaw himself, had next day sent all four down for good. They had appealed to the Court.
“He may get away with it there,” Vicky said, “but that won’t be the end of it.”
Once again, both of us knew. He put people off. They said that he was a shellback, with no sympathy for the young.
“Of course,” she said, “he was wrong anyway. He ought to have told them to go and do it somewhere else. But he couldn’t say that, you know.”
I found it impossible to keep back a vestigial grin. Arnold Shaw could bring himself to say that about as easily as John Calvin in one of his less libertarian moods.
“Why in God’s name, though,” she said, “didn’t he play it cool?”
Did she have to ask me? I replied.
Reluctantly she smiled. She knew, better than anyone, that he was incorruptible: rigid: what he believed, he believed. If everyone else in the country were converted to sexual freedom, he would stay outside the swim: and be certain that he was right.
She put more whisky into my tumbler. She said: “And yet, you know, he was a very good father to me. Even when I was little. He was always very kind.”
“I shouldn’t have thought you were difficult to bring up,” I told her.
She shook her head. “No. I
wasn’t all that disciplined.” She broke off: “Anyway, do your best with him tonight.”
I said she mustn’t bank on anything I could do. With a frown, she replied: “He’s as obstinate as a pig.”
There was nothing else useful to say. So, businesslike, she cut off short, and told me who was coming to dinner. It was a small party. The Hargraves, the Gearys – yes, I had met Hargrave on the Court, I knew the Gearys well – and Leonard Getliffe. As she mentioned the last name, I glanced at her. She had the delicate skin common among her own kind of blonde, and she had flushed down to the neckline.
Leonard Getliffe was the eldest son of my friend Francis, whom I had met almost as soon as I first went to London from this town: ever since, our lives had interweaved. But their connection with the university was no credit to me, only to Arnold Shaw. Since Francis gave up being an influence in Whitehall, at the time of Quaife’s failure and mine, his scientific work had gone better than in his youth, his reputation had grown. And, though probably not as a consequence, he had recently been made a life peer. So Arnold Shaw, whose academic standards were as rigorous as his moral ones (and who, incidentally, was by no means averse to titles), had schemed for him to be the second Chancellor of the University: and for once Arnold had brought something off. He had brought something else off too, more valuable to the place: for he had persuaded Leonard, before he was thirty, to take a professorship. Leonard was, in the jargon of the day, a real flier. He was more gifted than his father: he was, so David Rubin and the others said, one of the best theoretical physicists going. All he needed was a bit of luck, they said, talking of luck exactly as people did in more precarious fields: then they would be tipping him for a Nobel prize. He might be more gifted than his father, but he was just as high-principled. He could do his theoretical work anywhere; why not try to help a new university? So, when Arnold Shaw invited him, he had without fuss left Trinity and come.