by C. P. Snow
7: A Question of Luck
THE afternoon was so dark that we had switched on the drawing-room lights. The windows were rattling, the clouds loomed past. It was the middle of June, and Charles was at home for a mid-term holiday. He lay on the sofa, without a coat or tie, long legs at full stretch. Margaret was out having her hair done: I had finished work, and Charles had just mentioned some observation, he told me it was Conrad’s, about luck.
Of course, I was saying. Anyone who had lived at all believed in luck. Anyone who had avoided total failure had to believe in luck: if you didn’t, you were callous or self-satisfied or both. Why, it was luck merely to survive. I didn’t tell him, but if he had been born twenty years earlier, before the antibiotics were discovered, he himself would probably be dead. Dead at the age of three, from the one illness of his childhood, the one recognition symbol which his name evoked in George Passant’s mind.
Charles had set me daydreaming. When I thought of the luck in my own life, it made me giddy. Without great good luck, I might shortly be coming up for retirement in a local government office. No, that wasn’t mock-modest. I had started tough and determined: but I had seen other tough, determined men unable to break loose. Books? I should have tried. Unpublished books? Maybe. By and large, the practical luck had been with me. On the other hand, I might have been unlucky in meeting Sheila. And yet, I should have been certain to waste years of my young manhood in some such passion as that.
Something, perhaps a turn of phrase of Charles’ or a look in his eye, flicked my thoughts on to my brother Martin. He had been perceptibly unlucky: not grotesquely so, but enough to fret him. If I had had ten per cent above the odds in my favour, he had had ten per cent below. Somehow the cards hadn’t fallen right. He had never had the specific gift to be sure of success at physics: unlike Leonard Getliffe, whose teachers were predicting his future when he was fifteen. Martin ought to have made his career in some sort of politics. True, he had renounced his major chance; it seemed then, it still seemed, out of character for him to make that sacrifice, but he had done it. I believed that it was a consolation to him, when he faced ten more dim years in college: he had a feeling of free will.
But still, he had all the gifts for modern politics. You needed more luck in that career, of course, than in science, more even than in the literary life. Nevertheless, if Martin had been a professional politician, I should have backed him to “get office” as the politicians themselves called it. He would have enjoyed it. He would have liked the taste of power. He would have liked, much more than I should, being a dignitary. And yet, I supposed, though I wasn’t sure, that he didn’t repine much: most men who had received less than their due didn’t think about it often, certainly not continuously: life was a bit more merciful than that. There were about ten thousand jobs which really counted in the England of that time. The more I saw, the more I was convinced that you could get rid of the present incumbents, find ten thousand more, and the society would go ticking on with no one (except perhaps the displaced) noting the difference. Martin knew that unheroic truth as well as I knew it. So did Denis Geary and other half-wasted men. It made it easier for them to laugh it off and go on working, run-of-the-mill or not, it didn’t matter.
Charles said: “You remember at Easter, when we came away from your father’s, what I said? I told you, it wasn’t quite what I expected.”
He had a memory like a computer, such as I had had when I was his age. But his conversational openings were not random, he hadn’t introduced the concept of luck for nothing.
“Well?” I said, certain that there was a connection, baffled as to what it was.
“I expected to think that you’d had a bad time–”
“I told you, I had a very happy childhood.”
“I know that. I didn’t mean that. I expected to think that you’d had a bad start.”
“Well, it might have been better, don’t you think?”
“I’m not sure.” He was smiling, half-taunting, half-probing.
“That’s what I was thinking when I came away. I was thinking you might have had better luck than I’ve had.”
I was taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, you were a hungry boxer. And hungry boxers fight better than well-fed boxers, don’t they?”
However he had picked up that idiom, I didn’t know. In fact, I was put out. I was perfectly prepared to indulge in that kind of reflection on my own account: but it seemed unfair, coming from him.
“I should have thought,” I said, “that you fight hard enough.”
“Perhaps. But I’ve got to do it on my own, haven’t I?”
He spoke evenly, good-temperedly, not affected – though he had noticed it – by my own flash of temper. He had been working it out. I had had social forces behind me, pressing me on. All the people in the backstreets who had never had a chance. Whereas the people he had met in my house and grown up among – they had been born with a chance, or had made one. Achievement didn’t seem so alluring, when you met it every day. He was as ambitious as I had been: but, despite appearances, he was more on his own.
I was talking to him very much as nowadays I talked to Martin. Sometimes I thought he bore a family resemblance to Martin, though Charles’ mind was more acute. Yes, there was something in what he said. I had made the same sort of observation when I met my first rich friends. Katherine Getliffe’s brother Charles – after whom my son was named – had felt much as he did. The comfortable jobs were there for the taking: but were they worth it? Books were being written all round one: could one write any good enough? I was twenty-three or more before I met anyone who had written any kind of book. “And that,” I observed, “was a remarkably bad one.”
Charles gave a friendly grin.
When I first went into those circles, yes, I had comforted myself that it was I who had the advantage. For reasons such as he had given. And yet – I had had to make compromises and concessions. Too many. Some of them I was ashamed of. I had sometimes been devious. I had had to stay – or at any rate I had stayed – too flexible. It was only quite late in life that I had been able to harden my nature. It was only quite late that I had spoken with my own voice.
“But all that,” said Charles, “kept you down to earth, didn’t it?”
“Sometimes,” I said, “too far down.”
“Still, it has come out all right.” He insisted: “It’s all come out more than all right, you can’t say it hasn’t?”
“I suppose I’m still more or less intact,” I said.
He knew a good deal about what had happened to me, both the praise and blame. He was a cool customer, but he was my son, and he probably thought that I was a shade more monolithic than I was.
“Don’t overdo it,” he said.
“I thought I should have a placid old age. And I shan’t.”
“Of course you will in time. Anyway, do you mind?”
I answered: “Not all that much.”
“The important thing is, you must live a very long time.”
That was said quite straight, and with concern. His smile was affectionate, not taunting. The exchange was over. I said: “Of course, if it will make things easier for you, I can disown you tomorrow. I’m sure you’d get a nice job in the sort of office I started in.”
We were back to the tone of every day. The clouds outside the window were denser, Margaret had not yet come in. Charles fetched out a chess set, and we settled down to play.
Not that afternoon, perhaps at no moment I could isolate, I realised that there was another aspect in which I was luckier than Martin. Anyone who knew us in the past, in the not-so-remote past, would have predicted that, if either of us were going to be obsessively attached to his son, it would be me. I should have predicted it myself. I was made for it. All my life history pointed that way. I had deliberately forewarned myself and spoken of it to Margaret. But, though I was used to surprises in others’ lives, I was mystified by them in my own. It hadn’t happened
.
When first, a few hours after he was born, I held him in my arms, I had felt a surge of animal insistence. His eyes were unfocused and rolling; his hands aimlessly waving as though they were sea plants in a pool: I hadn’t felt tender, but something like savage, angrily determined that he should live and that nothing bad should happen to him. That wasn’t a memory, but like a stamp on the senses. It had lasted. In the illness of his infancy, I had gone through a similar animal desolation. Soon, when he learned to drive a car, I should be anxious until I heard his key in the lock and saw him safely home.
But otherwise – I didn’t have to control myself, it came by a grace that baffled me – I didn’t want to possess him, I didn’t want to live his life for him or live my own again in him. I was glad, with the specific kind of vanity that Francis Getliffe showed, that he was clever. I got pleasure out of his triumphs, and, when he let me see them, I was irritated by his setbacks. Since there was so little strain between us, he often asked my advice, judging me to be a good professional. He had his share of melancholy, rather more than an adolescent’s melancholy. As a rule, he was more than usually high-spirited. The tone of our temperaments was not all that different. I found his company consoling, and often a support.
I could scarcely believe that I had been so lucky. It seemed inexplicable and, sometimes, in my superstitious nerves, too good to be true. Call no man happy until he is dead. Occasionally I speculated about an event which I should never see: whether my son, far on in his life, would also have something happen to him which was utterly out of character and which made him wonder whether he knew himself at all.
8: Red Capsules
TWO evenings later – Charles was still at home, but returning to school next day – a telegram was brought into the drawing-room, as we were having our first drinks. Margaret opened it, and brought it over to me. It read: Should be grateful if you and Lewis would visit me tonight Austin Davidson.
Austin Davidson was her father. It was like him, even in illness, to sign a telegram in that fashion. It was like him to send her a telegram at all: for he, so long the champion of the twenties’ artistic avant garde, had never overcome his distrust of mechanical appliances, and in the sixteen years Margaret and I had been married, he had spoken to me on the telephone precisely once.
“We’d better all go,” said Margaret, responsibility tightening her face. She didn’t return to her chair, and within minutes we were in a taxi, on our way to the house in Regents Park.
Charles knew that house well. As we went through the drawing-room where Margaret had once told me I could be sure of her, I glanced at him – did he look at it with fresh eyes, now he had seen how his other grandfather lived? In the light of the June evening, the Vlaminck, the Boudin, the two Sickerts, gleamed from the walls. Charles passed them by. Maybe he knew them off by heart. The Davidsons were not rich, but there had been, in Austin’s own phrase, “a little money about”. He had bought and sold pictures in his youth: when he became an art critic, he decided that no financial interest was tolerable (Berenson was one of his lifelong hates), and turned his attention to the stock market. People had thought him absent-minded, but since he was forty he hadn’t needed to think about money.
In his study, though it was a warm night, he was sitting by a lighted fire. Margaret knelt by him, and kissed him. “How are you?” she said in a strong maternal voice.
“As you see,” said her father.
What we saw was not old age, although he was in his seventies. It was much more like a youngish man, ravaged and breathless with cardiac illness. Over ten years before he had had a coronary thrombosis: until then he had lived and appeared like a really young man. That had drawn a line across his life. He had ceased even to be interested in pictures. Partly, the enlightenment that he spoke for had been swept aside by fashion: he had been a young friend of the Bloomsbury circle, and their day had gone. But more, for all his stoicism, he couldn’t come to terms with age. He had gradually, for a period of years, got better. He had written a book about his own period, which had made some stir. “It’s not much consolation,” said Austin Davidson, “being applauded just for saying that everything that was intellectually respectable has been swept under the carpet.” Then he had weakened again. He played games invented by himself, whenever Margaret or his other daughter could visit him. Often he played alone. He read a little. “But what do you read in my condition?” he once asked me. “When you’re young, you read to prepare yourself for life. What do you suggest that I prepare myself for?”
There he sat, his mouth half-open. He was, as he had always been, an unusually good-looking man. His face had the beautiful bone structure which had come down to Margaret, the high cheekbones which Charles also inherited. Since he still stumbled out to the garden to catch any ray of sun, his skin remained a Red Indian bronze, which masked some of the signs of illness. But when he looked at us, his eyes, which were opaque chocolate brown, quite different from Margaret’s, had no light in them.
“Are you feeling any worse?” she said, taking his hand.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Well then. You would tell us?”
“I don’t see much point in it. But I probably should.”
There was the faintest echo of his old stark humour: nothing wrapped up, nothing hypocritical. He wouldn’t soften the facts of life, even for his favourite daughter, least of all for her.
“What can we do for you?”
“Nothing, just now.”
“Would you like a game?” she said. No one would have known, even I had to recall, that she was in distress.
“For once, no.”
Charles, who had been standing in the shadows, went close to the fire.
“Anything I can do, Grandpa?” he said, in a casual, easy fashion. He had got used to the sight of mortal sickness.
“No, thank you, Carlo.”
Austin Davidson seemed pleased to bring out the nickname, which had been a private joke between them since Charles was a baby, and which had become his pet name at home. For the first time since we arrived, a conversation started.
“What have you been doing, Carlo?”
“Struggling on,” said Charles with a grin.
There was some talk about the school they had in common. But Austin Davidson, though he had been successful there, professed to hate it. How soon would Charles be going to Cambridge? In two or three years, three years at most, Charles supposed. Ah, now that was different, said Austin Davidson.
He could talk to the boy as he couldn’t to his daughter. He wasn’t talking with paternal feeling: he had little of that. All of a sudden, the cage of illness and mortality had let him out for a few moments. He spoke like one bright young man to another. He had been happier in Cambridge, just before the first war, than ever in his life. That had been the douceur de la vie. He had been one of the most brilliant of young men. He had been an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual society (Margaret and I had learned this only from the biographies of others, for he had kept the secret until that day, and had not given either of us a hint).
“You won’t want to leave it, Carlo.” Davidson might have been saying that time didn’t exist, that he himself was a young man who didn’t want to leave it.
“I’ll be able to tell you when I get there, shan’t I?” said Charles. Again, all of a sudden, timelessness broke. Davidson’s head slumped on to his chest. None of us could escape the silence. At last Davidson raised his head almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate that he was addressing me.
“I want a word with you alone,” he said.
“Do you want us to come back when you’ve finished?” asked Margaret.
“Not unless you’re enjoying my company.” Once again the vestigial echo. “Which I should consider not very likely.”
On their way out Margaret glanced at me and touched my hand. This was something he would not mention in front of Charles. She and I had the same suspicion. I said, as though a matter-of-fa
ct statement were some sort of help, that I would be back at home in time for dinner.
The door closed behind them. I pulled up a chair close to Davidson’s. At once he said: “I’ve had enough.”
Yes, that was it.
“What do you mean?” I said automatically.
“You know what I mean.”
He looked straight at me, opaque eyes unblinking.
“One can always not stand it,” he said. “I’m not going to stand it any longer.”
“You might strike a better patch–”
“Nonsense. Life isn’t bearable on these terms. I can tell you that. After all, I’m the one who’s bearing it.”
“Can’t you bear it a bit longer? You don’t quite know how you’ll feel next month–”
“Nonsense,” he said again. “I ought to have finished it three or four years ago.” He went on: he didn’t have one moment’s pleasure in the day. Not much pain, but discomfort, the drag of the body. Day after day with nothing in them. Boredom (he didn’t say it, but he meant the boredom which is indistinguishable from despair). Boredom without end.
“Well,” he said, “it’s time there was an end.”
He was speaking with more spirit than for months past. He seemed to have the exhilaration of feeling that at last his will was free. He wasn’t any more at the mercy of fate. There was an exhilaration, almost an intoxication, of free will that comes to anyone when the suffering has become too great and one is ready to dispose of oneself: it had suffused me once, when I was a young man and believed that I might be incurably ill. At the very last one was buoyed up by the assertion of the “I”, the unique “I”. It was that precious illusion, which, on a lesser scale, was a consolation, no, more than a consolation, a kind of salvation, to men like my brother Martin when they make a choice injurious (as the world saw it) to themselves.
“You can’t give me one good reason,” he said, “why I shouldn’t do it.”
“You matter to some of us,” I began, but he interrupted me: “This isn’t a suitable occasion to be polite. You know as well as I do that you have to visit a miserable old man. You feel better when you get outside. If I know my daughter, she’ll have put down a couple of stiff whiskies before you get back, just because it’s a relief not to be looking at me.”