by C. P. Snow
“I’m getting just a little tired,” said Francis, “of people telling me that as a scientist he is an order of magnitude better than I am.” But he said it with the special pride of a father who enjoys his son being praised at his own expense. To give an appearance of stern impartiality, as of one who isn’t going to see his family receive more than their due, he said that their second son, Lionel, wasn’t in the same class. “I don’t think he’s any better than I am,” said Francis judiciously. “He ought to get into the Royal before he’s finished, though.”
I said that they were abnormally lucky: but still, the genes on both sides were pretty good. Francis said, not all that good. His father had been a moderately competent barrister at the Parliamentary Bar. Katherine said: “There’s not been a single March who’s ever produced an original idea in his life. Except, perhaps, my great-uncle Benjamin, who tried to persuade the Rothschilds not to put down the money for the Suez canal.”
Anyway, said Francis, who wanted to talk more of Leonard, a talent like his must be a pure sport. High level of ability, yes, lots of families had that – but the real stars, they might come from anywhere, they were just a gift of fate. “It must be wonderful,” he said, half-wistfully, “to have his sort of power.”
They were so proud of him, as I should have been, or any sentient parent. They were pleased that he was as high-principled as they were: he had recently defied criticism and appointed Donald Howard, who had once been a fellow of the college, to his staff, just because he had been badly treated – although Leonard didn’t even like the man. But, despite their close family life, they seemed to know little or nothing of his unhappiness over Vicky. “It’s high time he got married,” said Katherine, as though that were his only blemish, an inexplicable piece of wilfulness. They wondered what sort of children he would have.
After Francis had driven me to the college gate, I walked through the courts to the Senior Tutor’s house. I had walked that same way often enough when Jago was Senior Tutor. Now I was accustomed to it again, since my brother, after Arthur Brown’s term, got the succession. Lights were shining, young men’s voices resounded: the smell of wistaria was faint on the cool air: it brought back, not a sharp memory, but a sense that there was something I knew but had (like a name on the tip of the tongue) temporarily forgotten.
My brother’s study was lit up, curtains undrawn, and there he and Irene were waiting for me. She fussed round, yelping cheerfully: Martin sat by the fireside in his slippers, sharp-eyed, fraternal, suspecting that there was some meaning in this visit.
Another home, another marriage. A settled marriage, but one which had arrived there by a different route from the Getliffes’. She had been a reckless, amorous young woman: in their first years she had had lovers, had cost him humiliation and, because he had married for love, much misery. But he was the stronger of the two. It was his will which had worn her down. It was possible – I was not certain – that as she grew to depend upon him utterly, she in her turn had been through some misery. I was not certain, because, though he trusted me more than anyone else and occasionally asked me to store away some documents, he preserved a kind of whiggish decorum. If there had been love affairs, they had been kept hidden. Anyway, their marriage had been settled for a long time past, and Martin’s anxiety had its roots in another place.
On my way down to Cambridge, I hadn’t been confident that I should get him to talk. As soon as I entered his study we were easy together, with the ease of habit, and something stronger too. But he had been controlled and secretive all his life, and in middle age he was letting secretiveness possess him. I still didn’t know whether I should get an answer, or even be able to talk at all.
By accident, or perhaps not entirely by accident, for she understood him well, it was Irene who gave me the chance.
We had begun by gossiping. Nowadays the college changed more rapidly than it used to in my time. There were twice as many fellows, they came and went. Many of my old acquaintances were dead. Of those who had voted in the 1937 election, only Arthur Brown, Francis and Nightingale were still fellows. Some I had known since hadn’t stayed for long. One who hadn’t stayed – it was he that Irene was gossiping about – was a man called Lester Ince. He had recently run off with an American woman: an American woman, so it turned out, of enormous wealth. They had each got divorces and then married. The present rumour was that they were looking round for a historic country house.
“A very suitable end for an angry young man,” said Martin, with a tart smile. I was amused. I had a soft spot for Lester Ince. It was true that, since he had started his academic career by being remarkably rude, he had gained a reputation for holding advanced opinions. This had infuriated both Francis and Martin, who believed in codes of manners, and who had also remained seriously radical and had each paid a certain price.
“He’s quite a good chap,” I said.
“He hasn’t got the political intelligence of a newt,” said Martin.
“He’s really very amiable,” I said.
“If it hadn’t been for that damned fool,” Martin was not placated, “we shouldn’t have been in this intolerable mess.”
That also was true. Before Crawford, the last Master, retired, it had been assumed that Francis Getliffe would stand and get the job. That would presumably have happened – but Francis had suddenly said no. The college had dissolved into a collective hubbub. Lester Ince had trumpeted that what they needed was an independent man. The independent man was G S Clark. Half the college saw the beauty of the idea: G S Clark was an obsessed reactionary in all senses, but that didn’t matter. Martin, who was an accomplished college politician, did his best for Arthur Brown, but the Clark faction won by a couple of votes. It had been one of the bitter elections.
“It’s got to the point,” Martin was saying, “that when the Master puts his name down to dine, half-a-dozen people take theirs off.”
“What about you?”
“As a rule,” said Martin, without expression, “I dine at home.”
That had its own eloquence. He was both patient and polite: and once he had been on neighbourly terms with Clark. Yes, he replied to my question, they were saddled with him for another seven years.
Irene was more interested in Lester Ince’s future.
“Think of all that lovely money,” she said.
She told me about the heiress. It appeared that Lester Ince had at his disposal more money than any fellow (or ex-fellow, for he had just resigned) of the college in five hundred years.
“Money. We could do with a bit of that,” she said.
She said it brightly, but suddenly I felt there was strain, or meaning, underneath. To test her, I replied: “Couldn’t we all?”
“You can’t say that to us, you really can’t.” Her eyes were darting, but not just with fun.
“Is anything the matter?” I wasn’t looking at Martin, but speaking straight to her.
“Oh, no. Well, the children cost a lot, of course they do.”
Their daughter Nina, who was seventeen that year, went to a local school: she was a gentle girl, with a musical flair which her brother might have envied, and had cost them nothing. It was Pat on whom they had spent the money – and, I guessed, more than they could spare, although Martin was financially a prudent man. It was Pat about whom she was showing the strain. She had to risk offending Martin, who sat there in hard silence.
I risked it too.
“I suppose it’ll be some time before he’s self-supporting, won’t it?” I asked.
“Good God,” she cried. “We shouldn’t mind so much if we were sure that he would ever be.”
She went on talking to me, Martin still silent. I must have known young men like this, mustn’t I? What could one do? She wasn’t asking much: all she asked was that he should come to terms, and begin to behave like everyone else.
This was the strangest game that time had played with my sister-in-law. It had played a game with her physically, but that I was used t
o: she had been a thin, active young woman, and then in her thirties became the victim of a pyknic practical joke: so that, although her face kept an avid girlish prettiness, she had, as it were, blown up like a Michelin tyre man. But that was a joke of the flesh, and this was odder. For only a few years before, as she contemplated her son, she was delighted that he seemed “as wild as a hawk”. She had enjoyed the prospect of a son as “dashing” as the young men with whom she had herself racketed round. Now she had it. And she was less comfortable with it than respectable parents like the Getliffes might have been.
She seemed specially horrified about his debts, though, again oddly, she had no idea how big they were.
“Don’t worry too much about that,” I said. “Perhaps I can help.”
“That isn’t necessary.” For the first time since his son was hinted at, Martin spoke.
Irene looked at him: either she did not choose, or did not dare, to talk any further. In a moment, with a bright yelping cry, she announced that she was tired. “You boys can sit up if you want, don’t mind me,” she said, on her way to the door.
Martin was sitting with his shoulders hunched, his fingers laced together on one knee. His scalp showed where the hair was thinning: between us, in the old grate, gleamed one bar of the electric fire. Behind Martin was a bookcase full of bound scientific journals, photographs of teams he had played for in his athletic days: as I glanced round, in the constrained and creaking quiet, on his desk I noticed the big leather-covered tutors’ register which Arthur Brown used to keep.
Then he began to talk, in the tone of a realistic and experienced man, as though we were talking, not having to explain ourselves, about an acquaintance. He interrupted himself, seeming more deliberate, to light a pipe. It was easy to exaggerate these things, wasn’t it? (He might have been echoing my talk with Vicky.) People grew up at different rates, didn’t they? Young men who were sexually mature often weren’t mature in other ways. And young men who were sexually mature found plenty of opportunities to spend their time. “Most of us,” said Martin, in a matter-of-fact, ironic fashion, “would have welcomed a few more such opportunities, wouldn’t we?”
In an aside, he mentioned my first marriage. When I met Sheila, I was nineteen: if I had known more about women – Martin said, with dry intimacy – I should have been spared a lot.
“In his case” (he did not call his son by name), “it’s the other way round.”
He was looking away from me, with his forehead furrowed.
“I don’t know where I made the mistake. I wish I knew where to blame myself.” Quite suddenly his realism had deserted him. His tone had changed. His voice, as a rule easy and deep, had sharpened. If he had sent his son to a different school – they hadn’t been clever at handling him, they had certainly misunderstood him. If he had never started at the university – that was Martin’s fault. It was just the kind of harking back that Martin must have listened to many times in that room: from parents certain that their young man was fine, that circumstances had done all the havoc, or his teachers, or a particular teacher, or their own blindness, lack of sympathy, or bad choice.
“There’s only one rule,” I said, trying to console him. “Whatever you do is wrong.”
“That’s no use. I’ve got to make sure where I’ve made the mistakes – so that I can get him started now.”
Not only his realism had deserted him, so had his irony. That last remark of mine, which he might have thought to himself, listening to parental sorrows, was just a noise in his ears. For neither I nor anyone else could be any good to him. Irene, who was an affectionate mother, worried about her son, but practically, not obsessively; Martin’s love was different in kind. People sometimes thought him a self-contained and self-centred man: but now, more than in sexual love, he was totally committed. This had been so all through his son’s life. It was a devotion at the same time absolutely possessive and absolutely self-abnegating.
It was possible that Martin might not have been so vulnerable if his own life had gone better. He had started with ambitions, and he had got less than he or the rest of us expected. Here he was, as Senior Tutor, dim by his own standards, and that was, in careeristic terms, the end. Martin was a worldly man, and knew that he was grossly undercast. He had seen many men far less able go much further. To an extent, that had made him wish to compensate in the successes of his son. And yet, I thought it might have happened anyway: it was men like himself, stoical and secretive, who were most often swept by this kind of possessive passion.
It was a kind of passion that wasn’t dramatic; to anyone outside the two concerned, it was often invisible, or did not appear like a passion to all: and yet it could be weighted with danger, both for the one who gave the love and for its object. I had seen it in the relation of Katherine Getliffe’s father with his son. It had brought them both suffering, and to the old man worse than that. It was then that I picked up the antique Japanese phrase for obsessive parental love – darkness of the heart. Nowadays the phrase had become too florid for my taste; nevertheless, that night, as I listened to Martin, it might still have had meaning for someone who had known what he now felt.
I had seen this passion in old Mr March. But I had felt it in myself. I had felt it for one person, and – in his detached moments the reflection might strike him as not without its oddity – that was Martin. Sitting there in his study, we were middle-aged men. Although I was nine years the older, in many ways he was the more set. But when we were young, that wasn’t so; I was deprived of the children whom I wanted, and, less free than I had later become, I transferred that parental longing on to him. Once again, it had brought us suffering. It had separated us for a time. It had helped bring about crises and decisions in his career, in which he had made a sacrifice. As he spoke of his son, I didn’t bring back to mind that time long past: yet, for me at least, it hung in the air: I did not need telling, I did not need even to observe, that this parental love can be, at the same moment, both the most selfless and the most selfish of any love one will ever know.
I couldn’t give him any help. In fact, he didn’t want any. This was integrally his own. When he had brushed off my offer of money, he had done it in a way quite unlike him. Usually he was polite and not over-proud. But this was his own, and I didn’t offer money again that night. The only acceptable help was that I might arrange some more introductions for his son.
At last I was able, however, to talk about Vicky: and he replied simply and directly, more so than he had done that night, as though this were a relief or a relaxation. Did he know her?
“Oh yes, she’s been here.”
“What do you think of her?”
“She’s in love with him, of course.”
“What about him?” I asked.
“He’s fond of her. He’s been fond of a good many women. But still – he’s certainly fond of her.”
He was speaking quietly, but with great accuracy. It struck me that he knew his son abnormally well, not only in his nature but in his actions day-to-day. Whatever their struggles or his disappointments, they were closer, much closer, in some disentangleable sense, than most fathers and sons. It struck me – not for the first time – that it took two to make a possessive love.
“She’s expecting him to marry her, you know,” I said.
“I think I realised that.”
“She’s a very good young woman.”
“I agree,” said Martin.
“I’ve got a feeling that, if this goes wrong, it may be serious for her. I’d guess that she’s one of those who doesn’t love easily.”
“I think I’d guess the same.” Martin added, quite gently: “And that’s not a lucky temperament to have, is it?”
“God knows,” I said, “I don’t blame the boy if he doesn’t love her as she loves him.”
“He’s a different character. If he does love her – I can’t say for sure – it’s bound to be in a different way, isn’t it?”
“Of course,” I said, �
�I don’t blame him if he doesn’t want to be tied.”
“It might be what he needs,” said Martin. “Or it might be a disaster.”
“I tell you, I don’t blame him. But if she goes on expecting him to marry her – and then at the end he disappears – well, it will damage her. And that may be putting it mildly.”
“Yes.”
“She is a good young woman, and she doesn’t deserve that.”
“I hope it doesn’t happen.”
“And yet,” I said, “you don’t care, do you? You don’t really care? So long as he isn’t hurt–”
Martin replied: “I suppose that’s true.” Since we were speaking naturally, face-to-face, a flicker of his sarcasm had revived. “But it isn’t quite fair, is it? One can’t care in that way for everyone, now can one? I’m sure you can’t. You wait till your son has a girl who is besotted on him.”
He gave me a friendly, fraternal smile.
“In any case,” he went on, “whatever do you want me to do?”
“No. I don’t think there is anything you could do.”
“I’m certain there isn’t.”
“But if he’s going to drop her in the long run, it would probably be better for her if he did so now.”
“I couldn’t influence him like that,” said Martin. “No one could.” Again he smiled. “Coming from you, it doesn’t make much sense, anyway. I don’t pretend to know what’s going to happen to them. You seem to have made up your own mind. But you may be wrong, you know. Haven’t you thought of that?”