The Sleep of Reason

by C. P. Snow

  “Thank you, Vice-Chancellor,” said Francis, who might have been thinking as I did. “Anyway,” he addressed the room, “I must say, I think there is some merit in Professor Getliffe’s suggestion, if it appeals to the Court. I know this seems an important piece of business to some of us, and it would be a mistake to rush it. I’m anxious that everyone should have the opportunity to give us his views. I believe Sir Lewis is interested, isn’t that so?”

  “Yes, I am rather interested.”

  “Well then. We hope you’ll be able to attend the Court next term. Completely recovered. Then I shall propose we might set aside the first part of the meeting for this business. We shall very much want to hear your opinion.”

  I said, yes, I should try to attend the Court. In temper, in ultimate let-down, I could keep to the official language. Would anyone to whom the official language might as well have been Avar or Estonian, realise that they were considering me, that this was a put-up job between father and son?

  Leaving the meeting in time to escape conversation, I got a university car to myself to take me to the Residence. There, among the smell of leather (to me an anxious smell), I sat in a state both harsh-tempered and depressed. The let-down, yes. The wasted effort, yes. The physical discomfort, yes. But this was a state, concealed from others, that I used to know, and didn’t often now. The bizarre thing was, I had got my way. Through the Getliffes’ indulgence I had won Shaw four months’ grace. If I had been at my most competent, I shouldn’t have done better than that. I might easily have done much worse (there would be time, there was still the residue of a planner working within me, to lobby Denis Geary and some of the others). I should never know whether – if the Getliffes hadn’t treated me with pity – I could have made my effort that afternoon at all.

  When Margaret saw me enter our bedroom at the Residence, she said, “You’ve been doing too much.” I said, “I’ve been doing nothing at all.” Before I told her the story, she made me lie on the bed: then, reassured, she let me talk. This time I wasn’t using the official language: Margaret was used to me when I wasn’t giving events the benefit of the doubt. She sat beside me, looking down with a curious expression, clear-eyed.

  She told me it was six o’clock, nearly time to dress for the dinner that night. Was I going to be able to manage it? I nodded. She didn’t protest: she just remarked that a drink would help, and she would find one. Soon she returned, with Arnold Shaw following her, in his shirt sleeves and carrying a tray, eupeptic, enjoying himself as butler. He poured a large whisky for her, and an even larger one for me. He splashed in soda, spooned the ice. Then, as he picked up the tray, ready to depart, he said to me, with a wise reproving frown: “It was irresponsible of you. To come here today. It was irresponsible, you know.”

  The door shut behind him, brisk executive feet pattered down the passage. I took a gulp at my glass, and then I laughed. It was a sour laugh, but it was at least a laugh.

  Margaret joined in. “I’ve been wanting to do that for quite some time,” she said. “I’ve been wondering just when you wouldn’t mind.”

  Since I couldn’t knot a tie easily one-eyed, she did it for me, and I went down before her into the drawing-room. David Rubin and Francis Getliffe had already arrived, and as I joined them Rubin was saying that sometimes, this autumn, he had felt his intellectual analysis might be wrong. He meant, his analysis of the chances of peace. It had always been blacker than either of ours, more pessimistic than that of anyone we met. Yet he knew as much as we did, and more. He said he was inclined to trust his analysis, not his feelings: said it with a shrug and began to cachinnate. He was not the lightest of company when the cachinnation broke out and he was predicting the worst. Still, he said, sometimes he felt he might be wrong. If so, he went on sarcastically, it wouldn’t be any thanks to people like us. We had, all three of us, done our best, we had spent months and years of our lives, we had tried to find ways of action. It hadn’t affected the situation, said Rubin, by .001 of 1%. If things did go right, it would be no thanks to us: it would be due to something as random and as incalculable as a change in the weather.

  Others came up to us. Francis was being less fatalistic, when David Rubin took me aside. In a corner of the room he indicated my patched eye and said: “This is a nuisance, Lewis.”

  It sounded brusque. But it wasn’t so. He looked at me with monkey-sad eyes, incongruous above his immaculate dinner jacket (his colleagues gossiped, why should a man of his morbid pessimism appear to be competing as the Best Dressed Man of the Year?). His eyes were sad, his nerve ends were as fine as Margaret’s. He wasn’t going to harass me with sympathy, or with alternative plans for surgical treatment.

  “Yes,” I said, without any bluff.

  “These retinas are getting rather common.”

  I asked him why.

  “Quite simple. We’re all living longer, that’s all. You’ve got to expect bits of the machine to break down.”

  He had judged it right, he was being a support.

  “You’ve played your luck, you know,” he said.

  He went on: he had a check-up every six months. When did I last have a check-up?

  I said something about American hypochondria.

  “Maybe,” said Rubin, with astringent comradeship. “They’ll find something sooner or later. Let’s see, you’re ten years older than I am. But remember, I did my best work before I was thirty. I bet you, I’ve felt older than you have – I bet you I have done for years.”

  But, when we had gone into dinner, the courses clattering in the most lucullan of all Arnold Shaw’s feasts, I sat with Rubin’s brand of consolation wearing off. The amnesia of the first drinks wore off too: going into hospital next day, I had to stop drinking early in the meal, though I didn’t want to. The mechanics of politeness jangled on: I turned from the honorary graduate’s wife on my right to the one on my left and back again: they found me dull: I just wanted the day to end.

  There was one diversion, though. Vicky had led the women out, and the rest of us had reseated ourselves at Shaw’s end of the table. Shaw was in excelsis. He had made four distinguished scholars honorary graduates. There was also Lufkin, who had been forced upon him by the engineers, but still he was good enough. Shaw saw them all round him. He was a man of uncomplicated pleasures, and he was content. He was also content because he had given them splendid wine, and drunk a good deal of it himself. Again, Lufkin was an exception. True to his bleak rule, he had drunk one whisky before dinner, another with the meal, and now, while the others were enjoying Shaw’s port, he allowed himself a third. But it was he who dominated the table. He was explaining certain circumstances, to him still astonishing though they had happened a couple of years before, surrounding his retirement.

  “I decided it was right to go. Before there was any risk of being a liability to my people. Not that I wasn’t still at my best, or I should have got out long before.” He sat there skull-faced, still youthful-looking for a man in his late seventies. He delivered himself as though indifferent to his audience, completely absorbed in his own drama, projecting it like something of transcendental importance and objective truth.

  “What do you imagine happened?” It was the kind of rhetorical question no one could answer, yet by which men as experienced as Rubin and Francis Getliffe were hypnotised.

  “Nothing happened.” Lufkin answered himself with stony satisfaction.

  He went on: “I made that industry.” It sounded gigantesque: it was quite true. He had possessed supreme technological insight and abnormal will. He had made an industry, not a fortune. He had more than enough money for his needs, but he had nothing to spend it on. By the standards of his industrial colleagues, he was not a rich man. “I made that industry, and everything inside it. I used to tell my people, I am your best friend. And they knew, I was their best friend.”

  Heads, hypnotised, were nodding.

  “What did they do?” Silence again. Again Lufkin answered himself. “Nothing.” He spoke with
greater confidence than ever. “When any of my managers retired, the whole works turned out. When my deputy retired, the whole organisation sent a testimonial. What did they do for me?”

  This time he didn’t give an answer. He said: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

  He repeated: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

  When we joined the women, it was only minutes before Margaret spoke to Vicky and Arnold Shaw and took me off to bed. Alone in our room, I said to her: “Paul Lufkin is lonely.” I was wondering, how used were the others to this singular display of emotion? Horizontal fission, we used to call it. Lufkin sincerely believed that he wasn’t hurt. And yet, even he must realise at least that he felt lost. After great power for forty years, power all gone. After a lifetime of action, nothing to do. Once he had talked of retiring to Monaco. Now, so far as I knew, he lived in Surrey and came to London once a week for the committee of a charity. “Paul Lufkin is lonely,” I said.

  “He’s not the only one,” said Margaret.

  I asked what she meant.

  “Didn’t you realise that Vicky was waiting for a telephone call all night, poor girl?”

  In the solipsist bubble in which I had gone through that day, I had scarcely noticed her.

  “Did she hear?”

  Margaret shook her head.

  “That nephew of yours. I’m afraid he’s throwing her over, don’t you think so?”

  “It doesn’t look good.” I was sitting on the bed, just having taken off the eyepatch. I was trying to speak about Vicky, but the black edge cut out the light, the orange fringe was giddily swimming, and I let out that complaint only for myself.

  13: Homage to Superstition

  THE next morning, tea trays on our bed, Margaret sketched out the day’s timetable. There was a train just after one, we could be in London in a couple of hours: that would bring us to the hospital before tea. The less time I had in the dark, the better, I said. I knew that I should have to lie on my back, both eyes blindfolded, to give the retina hours to settle down.

  When I had agreed to Margaret’s programme, I said: “In that case, I think I’d like to see my old father this morning.”

  For an instant, she was caught open-mouthed, her looks dissolved in blank astonishment. Her own relation with her father had been so responsible. She had sometimes been shocked by mine. She had never seen me in search of a father, either a real one or a surrogate, in all our time together. She gazed at me. She gave a sharp-eyed, intimate smile and said: “You know, it isn’t much more than having a few teeth out, you do know that?”

  It sounded like free association gone mad, but her eyes were lit up. To others I seemed more rational than most men; not to her. She had lived with a streak of superstitiousness in me as deep as my mother’s, though more suppressed. She had watched me book in, year after year, at the same New York hotel, because there I had heard of a major piece of luck. She had learned how I dreaded any kind of pleasure on a Tuesday night because one such evening I had enjoyed myself and faced stark horror on the Wednesday morning. Sometimes, in fact, I infected her. She wasn’t sorry, she was relieved, to hear this atavistic desire of mine. It might be a longish operation, Margaret had said: there was a shrinking from unconsciousness which was atavistic too. She, as well as I, wasn’t disinclined to make an act of piety, to make this sort of insurance for which one prays as a child. The fact that it was an incongruous act of piety might have deterred her, she had more sense of the fitness of things, but she took me in my freedom, and didn’t wish it to deter me.

  So, by the middle of the morning, she had said our goodbyes, and we were driving out through the backstreets along which, the preceding spring, I had walked with Charles. The cluster of shops, the chapel, the gentle rise. When I was a boy, cars didn’t pass those terraced windows once a day; and even that morning, when the university Daimler stopped outside Aunt Milly’s old house, there were curious eyes from the “entry” opposite.

  I led Margaret in by the back way. Passing the window of my father’s room, I stood on tiptoe but could see only darkness. When I went up the steps to the French window, I found the room was empty. We returned along the passage. I rang at the familiar front door (pulling the hand bell, perhaps it was still the same bell, as when I came back one night, late from a school debate, found our own house empty and rang Aunt Milly’s bell: there was my mother pretending to laugh off a setback, lofty in her disappointed pride). The bell jangled. After a time footsteps sounded, and a middle-aged man in his shirt-sleeves opened the door. I had seen him before, but not spoken to him: he was always referred to by my father as Mr Sperry. He was called my father’s “lodger”, though he occupied the entire house except for the single room.

  I told him my name and said that I was looking for my father. Mr Sperry chuckled. He was long and thin, with a knobbly Adam’s apple and a bush of hair. He had a kind, perplexed and slightly eccentric face. I thought I remembered hearing that he was a jobbing plumber.

  “I expect the old gentleman’s doing his bit of shopping,” he said.

  “When do you think he’ll be back?”

  Mr Sperry shook his head. “It’s wonderful how he does for himself,” he said. He had the most gentle manners: but it was clear that, though he had occupied the house for ten years, he didn’t know much about my father, and was puzzled by what little he did know. “I can’t tell you when he’ll be home, I’m sure. Would you care to come in?”

  I exchanged a glance with Margaret. I said we hadn’t many minutes, there was a train to catch, we’d just hang about outside for a little while. That was true: and yet, kind as Mr Sperry was, he was a stranger, and I didn’t want to sit in childhood’s rooms with him.

  Standing outside the car, Margaret and I smoked cigarettes. It would be bad to miss my father now. I kept looking along the road to the library, down the rise to the chapel. Then Margaret said: “I think that’s him, isn’t it?”

  I was watching the other direction. She was pointing to a tiny figure who had just turned into sight, by the chapel railings.

  She wasn’t certain. Her eyes were perfect: she could make out that small figure as I could not: but she couldn’t be certain because, owing to my father’s singularity, she had met him only twice.

  Slowly, with small steps, the figure toddled on. Yes, it was my father. At last I saw him clearly. He was wearing a bowler hat, beneath which silky white hair flowed over his ears: his overcoat was much too long for him, and his trousers, as wide as an old-fashioned Russian’s, billowed over his boots. At each short step, a foot turned outwards at forty-five degrees. He was singing, quite loudly, to himself. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. He was only four or five houses away when he noticed us.

  “Well, I declare,” he said.

  Away from him, how long was it since I had heard that phrase? It was like listening at a college meeting when I was a young man: one heard usages, long since dead, such as this one of my father’s, stretching back three generations. “I declare,” he repeated, gazing not at me but at Margaret, for he kept his appreciative eye for a good-looking woman.

  I explained that we had had to attend a university function the day before, and thought we would look him up. It would be easier if he had a telephone, I grumbled.

  “Confound it,” said my father, speaking like a national figure who would not dare to have an entry in the directory, “I should never have a minute’s peace. Anyway–” he fumbled over Margaret’s name, which he had forgotten, but went on in triumph – “You tracked me down, didn’t you? Here you are as large as life and twice as natural.”

  We followed him in, down the passage again, up the steps to the French window, saying that we would stay just a quarter-of-an-hour. In the dark odorous little room, my father switched on a light. To my mother, who had never seen it in that house or her own, electric light had been one of the symbols of a higher existence: and anyone who thought that proved her unspiritual didn’t know what the spirit was.
r />   He offered to put the kettle on, and make us some tea. No, we didn’t want to drink tea at twelve o’clock in the morning. But he had to give us something. At last, with enormous gratification, he produced from a cupboard a bottle about one-third full of tawny port. “I’ve always liked a drop of port,” he told Margaret, and proceeded to tell her a story about going out with the waits at Christmas “when Lena was alive”, being invited into drawing-rooms and figuring as the hardened drinker of the party. That was one of the daydreams in which I didn’t believe. I looked out into the stone-flagged yard. There was a stump of a plum tree still surviving near his window. As far back as I could remember, that tree had never borne any fruit.

  My father was talking with animation to Margaret. So far he hadn’t commented on the patch over my eye. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he thought that it was the kind of idiosyncrasy in which I was likely to indulge. I interrupted him: “As a matter of fact, I’ve got to have a minor operation tomorrow.”

  “You’ve ruptured yourself have you?” he said brightly, as though that was the only physical mishap he could imagine happening to anyone. It had happened, apparently, to Mr Sperry.

  “No,” I said with a faint irritation, tapping my patch. “I’ve got a detached retina.”

  My father had never heard of the condition. In fact, he had only the haziest notion of where the retina was. Margaret, very patient with him, drew a diagram, which he studied with an innocent expression.

  “I expect he’ll be all right, won’t he?” he asked simply, as though I wasn’t there.

  “Of course he will. You’re not to worry.”

  Not, I couldn’t help thinking, that he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety.

  “I’ve never had any trouble with my eyes, you know,” he was ruminating. “I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, by gosh I have.” In fact he had kept all his senses into his late eighties. He surveyed me with an air of preternatural wisdom or perhaps of cunning.