by C. P. Snow
There was something I wanted to find out. As if casually, I said: “How well do you know her?”
George’s voice was more animated than it had been that afternoon. “Oh, about as well as some of the others on the fringe of our crowd. She was rather interesting at one time, but then she began to slip out of things. And of course there were always a lot of lively people coming on–”
“What is she like?”
George responded with an air of distraction, even irritation, speaking of someone far away: “She didn’t join in much. I suppose she used to listen. I thought she took things in.”
“Is that all?”
“I didn’t notice anything special, if that’s what you mean. Of course, some time or other she took up with the Pateman girl. Some of the young men seemed to like the Pateman girl, I never could see why.”
“George,” I was speaking with full urgency by now, “you must have talked to your niece, you must know more about them than this?”
He said, suddenly violent: “I refuse to take any responsibility for either of them. You know what I’ve told them. I told them what I’ve told everyone else, that they ought to make the best of their lives and not worry about all the neutered rubbish round them who’ve denied whatever feeble bit of instinct they might conceivably have been endowed with. Do you think I cared if they lived together? Not that I knew for certain, but if they did they were just acting according to their nature. And that’s more than you can say for the people you’ve chosen to spend your time among. I suppose you’re trying to put the responsibility on to me. If they’d never been told to make the best of their lives, they’d have been just as safe as everyone else, would they? None of this would ever have happened to them? I won’t accept it for a single instant. It’s sheer brutal hypocritical nonsense. If that’s all you’ve got to say, I’m not prepared to be attacked any more.”
As his voice died down, I replied: “I didn’t say it.”
After his outburst, he sank back, exhausted, drained.
I went on: “But there is something I ought to say. It’s quite practical.”
“What’s that?” he said without interest.
“The police know a good deal about your group. For God’s sake be careful.”
“How have you heard this?” His attention had leapt up: his eyes were cautious and veiled.
“Maxwell told me.”
“What did he say?”
“He only talked vaguely about corrupting the young. But they’ve been watching you.”
“What do they call corrupting the young?”
I said: “Never mind that. For God’s sake don’t give them the slightest chance–”
When I was a young man, I had failed him by not being harsh enough. Now, too late, I meant to be explicit. After this case, the police would have no pity. They were well-informed. Either he ought to break up the group once and for all: or else it had to be kept legally safe. No drugs (not that I had heard any rumour of that). No young girls. No homosexuality.
George gave a dismissive nod. “I’ll see about it.”
“Do you mean that?”
Once more he nodded.
“You’ve got to mean it,” I said.
“I’m sorry if I’ve got people into a mess,” he replied.
It was a response that seemed extraordinary: inadequate, detached, as though he were not at all involved or had no need to look into himself. All along, perhaps, even when I first knew him, he had been alienated (though at that time we didn’t use the word) from the mainstream of living: now he had become totally so. I had to believe, against my will, that nothing could have changed him. It wasn’t just chance, or the accidents of class and time. There were plenty who had lived alongside him, who thought they shared his hopes – like my brother Martin or me, when we were in our teens – who, whatever had happened to us, were not alienated at all. But George had gone straight on, driven by passions that he didn’t understand or alternatively were so pre-eminent that he shrugged off any necessity to understand them. I was not sure, though I guessed, how he had been spending his later years. He was a man of sensual passion. Of that there was no doubt, he was more at its mercy than most men. But equally it was sensual passion more locked within himself, or his imagination, than most men’s. He was in search, not really of partners, but of objects which would set his imagination alight. But that solipsistic imagination (as self-bound as mine when I was lying in the hospital dark) was linked – and that may have been the most singular thing about him – to a peculiarly ardent sexual nature. And so he had finally come to desire young girls, one after another, each of them lasting just as long as they didn’t get in his imagination’s way. It had meant risks. Yet he seemed to be stimulated by the risks themselves. There had been his disaster, where I had been a spectator, of years before. That hadn’t stopped him. There had been, though I didn’t learn the details until after his death, warnings and near-catastrophes since. In secret, after each one, he seemed driven, compelled, or delighted to double his bets.
It was a sexual temperament which only a man in other respects abnormally controlled could have coped with. That he wasn’t, and – so it seemed – in his later life didn’t want to be. In the past I had thought that, despite his gusto and capacity for joy, he too had known remorse and hadn’t cared to look back at the sight of what he had once been. I had thought so during the time, long before (it was strange to recall, after my last meeting with her), when Olive and I were friendly, and she, who gave none of us the benefit of the doubt, jeered at me for giving it to George. I had believed that she didn’t understand faith or aspiration, that she looked at men as strange as George through the wrong end of the telescope. That was true: and yet her view of George wasn’t all that wrong, and mine had turned out a sentimentality. Curiously enough, it would have seemed a sentimentality to George himself. To borrow the phrase he had just employed, he had lived “according to his nature”. For him, that was justification enough. He wasn’t one who felt the obligation to reshape his life. Of course he could look back at the sight of what he had once been. If I – because of comradeship or my own moral needs – wished to invest him with the signs of remorse, then that was my misfortune: even if, as I sat with him that afternoon, it meant the ripping away of – what? part of my youth, or experience, or hope?
I still had an answer to get out of him, though part of it had come through what he hadn’t said.
“The legal line, I take it, will be pretty obvious,” I said. “The defence for those two, I mean.”
“I thought you were suggesting that there wasn’t any,” said George, withdrawn again.
“Oh, it’ll all depend on their state of mind, won’t it?”
Intentionally, I said it in a matter-of-fact tone, like one lawyer to another. But George ceased to be lacklustre, he straightened himself, his voice was brisk with action.
“Of course it does!” he cried. “I suppose everyone realises that, you’d better make sure they do.”
I said, it looked as though counsel would have no other choice.
“Of course, they must be mad,” said George.
“You didn’t say so, when I asked you about them, did you?”
I had said that as an aside, and George took no notice. “Of course, they must be mad,” he repeated, with an increase of vigour.
“What makes you think so?”
“That’s the answer,” George shouted.
“Did you ever see any signs in either of them, which make you think so?”
“Damn it, man,” he said, “I’m not a bloody mental doctor.”
“What sort of signs did you see?”
“I tell you, I’m not a mental doctor.”
I asked: “Why do you think they are mad?”
George stared at me, as he used to when he was young, face protesting, defiant, full of hope.
“I’m assuming they’ve done what you say,” he said. “No sane person could have done it. That’s all.”
&n
bsp; “Is it as easy as that?”
“Yes,” he cried. “It’s as easy as that. They’re criminal lunatics, that’s what they are. Only lunatics could behave as they did. They’re nothing to do with the rest of us–”
I had to tell him: “The police don’t think so. They think they’re as sane as any of us.”
George cursed the police, and said: “They’re not bloody mental doctors either, are they?”
“I expect,” I said, “that those two are being watched by doctors all the time.”
“Well,” he said, fierce and buoyant, “we’ve got to bring in our own. I can rely on you, can I, that the lawyers get hold of the right people–”
He went on, as though he had realised the truth from the moment I broke the news; the comforting and liberating truth. He was active as I had not seen him for a long time. Happy again, he went on examining me about the defence.
“It stands to reason,” he cried, “they must be as mad as anyone can possibly be.”
Soberly, firmly, he began to talk about the trial. The committal proceedings wouldn’t take long. He wasn’t going to ask me to come. But when it came to the Assizes, George said, he would have to attend himself.
“It won’t be very pleasant, I accept that,” he said.
He asked, with a half-smile: “Can you be there?”
I said, “What use would that be?”
“I should feel better if you were somewhere round, you know,” he said.
22: Out of Prison
IT occurred to me that Maxwell, for reasons of his own, would be in favour of my paying a visit to the jail. So, back at the Residence, I rang him up. Passant wanted me to talk to his niece, I said: he wasn’t in a fit state to do it himself: it wasn’t a job I welcomed, but what was the drill? Maxwell said that he would speak to the governor. If she wouldn’t see me, they couldn’t force her, that was the end of it.
Later in the evening, the telephone rang, and Vicky, who was sitting with me, went into the hall to answer it. In a moment she returned and told me: “It’s for you. Police headquarters.”
I heard Maxwell’s voice, brisk, sounding higher-pitched than when one met him in the flesh. All fixed. I could go to the jail at four o’clock the following afternoon. She hadn’t shown any interest. They had asked if she objected, and she said she didn’t mind whether I went or not.
When I got back to the drawing-room, Vicky enquired: “All right?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
She knew why I was staying in the town, but she hadn’t asked about any of the details. She assumed that I was trying to help old friends. She might have noticed that I was unusually silent. Perhaps not: she had her own concerns, she didn’t think there could be anything wrong with me. In any case, she was not inquisitive.
Instead she was talking in high spirits about her father’s dinner party next day. Her spirits were high because she had heard from Pat (who, I thought, either got fond of her in absence or was keeping her in reserve) that week. She was also pleased because her father, instead of resisting the advice which I relayed from Francis Getliffe, had, contrary to all expectation, taken it. He had actually invited Leonard and his other young academic critics to dinner. It was to be an intimate dinner so that he could put his “cards on the table”, as he had told both of us euphorically, implying that we should have to keep out of the house. Vicky was herself euphoric. She couldn’t help but think of Leonard and her father as clever, silly, squabbling men, and now perhaps they would take the opportunity to stop making idiots of themselves.
Next afternoon, just before four, I was outside the main gate of the jail. Above me the walls stretched up, red brick, castellated, a monument of early nineteenth-century prison architecture – and a familiar landmark to me all through my childhood, for I passed it on the route between home and school. Passed it without emotion, of course: it just stood there, the gates were never open. And yet, even before the inset door did open that afternoon, let me in, closed behind me, I felt the nerves at my elbows tight with angst – the sort of tightness one felt visiting a hospital, perhaps, as though one were never going to escape? No, more shameful than that.
A policeman met me, gave me the governor’s compliments, told me the governor was called away to a meeting but hoped that next time I would have a glass of sherry with him. The policeman led me up flights of stone stairs, right up to the top of the building, along a corridor, white-painted, to a door marked CONFERENCE ROOM.
“Will you wait here, sir?” said the policeman. “We’ll get her along.”
The room was spacious, with a long table: it was dark here, but through the window I could see the russet wall of the prison, and over the wall the bright evening sky.
After a time there were footsteps outside, and two women entered. One was in police uniform: in the twilight she seemed buxom and prettyish. Should she switch on the light? she asked. Yes, it might be better, I replied. Her voice sounded as uneasy as mine.
The exchange of domesticities went on. Should she send for a cup of tea? I hesitated. I heard her ask her companion – though with the room now lit up, I had glanced away – whether she would like a cup of tea. Some sort of affirmation. You can sit down, said the policewoman to her companion. I took the chair on the other side of the table: and then, for the first time, I had to look at her.
“May I give her a cigarette?” I called to the policewoman, who had gone right to the end of the room.
“Yes, sir, that’s allowed.”
I leant over the table, as wide as in a boardroom, and offered a packet. The fingers which took the cigarette were square-tipped, nails short, not painted but neatly varnished. I had not really looked at her before, not in the few minutes in the Patemans’ living-room; her eyes met mine just before I held out a match, and then were half-averted.
Her face was good-looking, in a strong-boned, slightly acromegalic fashion, more like her uncle’s than I had thought, though unlike him she did not have a weight of flesh to hide her jaw. Her hair, side-parted, cut in a thick short bob, was the same full blond. But it was her eyes, quite different from his, from which I could not keep my own away. George’s were a light, almost unpigmented blue, the kind of colour one sees only in Nordic countries: hers were a deep umber brown, so heavily charged that, though they stayed steady while averted from me, they seemed to be swimming in oil.
“What have you come here for?” she asked.
“George asked me to.”
“What for?”
I didn’t answer until two cups of tea had been placed on the table. I sipped mine, weak, metallic-tasting, like Whitehall tea.
I had to submerge or discipline what I felt. Going into the jail, preparing for this visit, I had been nervous. In her presence, I still was. It might have been anxiety. It might have been distaste, or hatred. But it was none of those things. It was something more like fear.
“He wanted me to see if there was anything I could do for you.”
“I shouldn’t think so.”
She had been wearing a half-smile ever since I looked at her. It bore a family resemblance to the expression with which George, at our last meeting and often before that, asked me for a favour, but on her the half-smile gave an air, not of diffidence, but of condescension.
“He asked me to come,” I repeated.
“Did he?”
“He wanted me to see if you needed anything.”
My remarks sounded, in my own ears, as flat as though I were utterly uninterested: and yet I was longing to break out and make her respond. (What have you done? What did you say to each other? When did that child know?)
“I like George,” she said.
“Did you see much of him?”
“I used to. How is he?”
“He’s not too well.”
“He doesn’t look after himself.”
The flat words faded away. Silence. The other questions were making my pulses throb (Who suggested it? Didn’t you ever want to stop? Are you thinkin
g of it now?) as, after a time, I asked, in the stiff mechanical tone I couldn’t alter: “How are they treating you?”
“All right, I suppose.”
“Have you any complaints?”
A pause. Her glance moved, not towards me, but down to her lap.
“This dress they’ve given me is filthy.”
It was a neat blue cotton dress, with a pattern of white flowers and a pocket. I could see nothing wrong with it.
“I’ll mention that,” I said.
Another pause. “Anything else?” I asked.
“I shouldn’t mind seeing a doctor.”
“What’s the matter?”
She wouldn’t reply. Was she being modest? I looked at her body, which, contradicting her face, was heavy, deep-breasted, feminine. (Did you ever feel any pity? Will you admit anything you felt?)
“I’ll tell them.”
Flat silence. Forcing myself, I said: “I used to be a lawyer. I’m not sure if you know that.”
She gave the slightest shake of her head.
“If I can be any help–” (Did you do everything they say? What have you done?)
“We’ve got our lawyers,” she answered, with what sounded like contempt.
“Have you talked to them?”
“They’ve asked me a lot of questions.”
“Are you satisfied?”
“It didn’t get them very far,” she said.
Silence again. I was trying to make another effort, when she said: “Why have we got different lawyers?”
For an instant I thought she was confused between solicitors and barristers, and started to explain; but she shrugged me aside and went on: “Why have Kitty and me got different lawyers?”
“Well, the defence for one of you mightn’t be the same as for the other.”
“They’re trying to split us up, are they?”
“It’s common practice–”
“I thought they were. You can tell them they’re wasting their time.”
She went on, bitter and scornful: “You can go and tell the Patemans so.”