by C. P. Snow
The conversation was not conclusive. Three or four times a week the call came through: reverse the charges? The same voice, the same statements, often identically the same words. Rats in mazes. Authorities high up. His point of view. He wasn’t rude, he wasn’t even angry, he just went grinding on. Once he had found words which contented him, he felt no need to change them.
It was no use Margaret answering the telephone, and saying that I was out. He was ready to ring up again at midnight, 1 a.m., or very early the following morning. We thought of refusing to accept the calls: but that we couldn’t bring ourselves to do. Whatever his wife had feared, whether it was that he might become clinically deranged, seemed not to be happening to him now. In hectoring me, in grating on with this ritual, he had found an activity which obsessed and satisfied him. He might even have lost contact with what the object of it was. Over the telephone I couldn’t see – and didn’t want to see – his face. I suspected that he was beginning to look as when I had first seen him, the dislocation going, the confidence of folie de grandeur flooding back.
Yet each night we became fretted as we waited for the telephone to ring. And, there was no denying it, we found ourselves showing a streak of miserliness, as though we were being infected from the other end of the line. It was ridiculous. Margaret had never counted shillings in her life. We spent more on cigarettes in a week than those reverse charges could possibly amount to. Nevertheless, with the experience of the trial only a few weeks behind us, we scrutinised our telephone bill with indignation, calculating what was the cost of Mr Pateman.
39: A Young Man on His Own
A few days after my visit to the prison, Charles and I were sitting under a weeping willow on the riverbank. It was a fine afternoon, and I had gone down to his school to settle what he should do during the next academic year. Not that there was much to settle, for he had made up his mind months before. He had cleared off all the examinations, and it was time to go. The only issue remaining was not when, but where. He wouldn’t be seventeen for a good many months, and he had to fill in three terms before he went to the university. He was taking the chance to start off on his travels, and it was some of those plans that we had been discussing.
“You might even write a letter occasionally,” I said.
He grinned.
It would have seemed strange in my time, I said, to be going off on one’s own at his age. In fact, among my friends, it would have been not only strange, but unimaginable. Of course, we didn’t have the money–
“Do we really grow up faster, do you think?”
“In some ways, yes, you do.”
I added: “But, for what it’s worth, I wanted to get married before I was twenty.”
“Who to?”
“My first wife.”
“You didn’t marry her for six – or was it seven – years afterwards, did you?”
“No.”
“If it had happened when you were twenty – what would it have been like?”
“It couldn’t have been worse than it turned out.”
Charles gave a grim, saga-like smile, similar to his uncle’s. But I was thinking that, though he knew the facts of my life with extreme accuracy, he didn’t know how torn about I’d been. He wouldn’t have believed that I had gone through that long drawn out and crippling love. He saw me as balanced and calm, a comparatively sensible ageing man. Sometimes I was amused. I permitted myself to say: “You haven’t got the monopoly of temperament in this family, you know.”
It was easy to talk to him, as to Martin, on the plane of sarcasm. As we sat there, I mentioned the telephonic activities of Mr Pateman. “You’ve brought it on yourself,” said Charles, operating on the same plane. An acquaintance of his sculled by, and Charles gave an amiable wave – rather like, since he was leaving so soon, Robin Hood gazing on the exploits of the budding archers. When the swell had passed, the river was mirror-calm, the willow leaves meeting their reflections in the water. It was something like an afternoon with C L Dodgson, I said to Charles, and went on to tell him that I had talked to Cora Ross in Holloway.
“Haven’t you packed all that up by now?”
“Not quite.” I added, sometimes it seemed that I never should.
He leaned forward, confronting me.
“I think you’re wrong.”
“What do you mean, I’m wrong?”
“This is an incident. If it hadn’t been for sheer blind chance, it wouldn’t have been an incident that mattered to you. All along, you’ve given it a significance that it doesn’t possess.” He was speaking lucidly, articulately, but with force and something like antagonism.
“I could have found other incidents, you know. Which would have affected me in the same fashion.”
“That’s because you are looking for them,” said Charles. “Do you remember, that weekend I was at home, you were breathing hellfire and damnation about Auschwitz? I disagreed with you then. You noticed that, did you? And I still disagree with you.”
“Auschwitz happened.”
“Many other things have happened. Remember, Auschwitz happened years before I was born. I’m bound to be interested in what’s happening now–”
“That’s fair enough.”
“Of course there are awful things. Here and now. But I want to find them out for myself.”
“Retracing all our mistakes in the process.”
“That’s not fair enough.” He said it politely, but as though he had been thinking it out alone and his mind had hardened. “I don’t think I’m easily taken in. My generation isn’t, you know. We’ve had to learn a fair amount.”
“It’s curious how you talk about ‘your generation’,” I said. “We never did.”
He wasn’t distracted. “Perhaps that’s because we know that we have a difficult job to do. You don’t deny that, do you?”
I said, that would be the last thing I intended.
He was referring to his friends by name. As a group, they were abler, very much abler, than those I had known as a boy. Some of them would take the world as they found it: become academics, conventional politicians, civil servants: that was easy enough, they had no problem there. But one or two, like himself, were not so content. Then what do you do? “We should like to find something useful. Perhaps I ought to lower my sights, but I don’t feel inclined to, until I’ve had a shot. And I don’t think it would be very different, even if I hadn’t got you on my back–”
He threw in that remark quite gently. I said that he could forget me.
He said, still gently but with a flick of sarcasm, that he would do his best to. That was the object of the exercise.
No, not really the object, just the first condition, he corrected himself. He wanted to throw in his weight where it would be useful: and he wanted to be sure it was his weight and no one else’s.
It had the ring of a youth’s ambition, at the same time arrogant and idealistic, mixed up with dreams of happiness. Some of it sounded as though it had been talked out with friends. Most of it, I thought, was solitary. He seemed spontaneous and easy-natured, but he kept his secrets.
He said that he had no more use for “doctrines of individual salvation” than I had. (I wondered where they had picked up that expression?) Any of those doctrines was dangerous, he said: they nearly always meant that, either actively or passively, one wished harm on to the world. Of course, he wanted for himself anything that came. What did he want? He was imagining something, but kept it to himself. He returned to saying that, whatever he found to do, it was going to be hard enough: so he couldn’t afford to carry any excess luggage with him.
“I want everything as open-ended as it can be, isn’t that right?” he said. “I don’t want to set limits yet awhile. Limits about people, I mean. So that’s why I can’t take this trouble of yours as tragically as you do. Do you mind that?”
All I could answer was to shake my head. I was sure by now that he had come to this meeting resolved to make his declaration: once he had got it
over, he was in high spirits. Cheerfully he stretched himself, sucking a stem of grass. It was almost time, he said, for us to move off into the town for tea. “Tea’s not much good to you, is it?” he said. “Well, afterwards we’ll go to a hotel and I’ll stand you a Scotch. Just to celebrate the fact that this is the last time you’ll have to come down to this establishment–” he spread out a hand towards the river, the fields, the distant towers across the meadows.
I asked whether he would miss it at all: but I guessed the answer, for here we were very much alike.
“Who knows?” he said.
Yes, I knew, the places, the times, one was nostalgic for were not the obvious ones, not even the happy ones.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I can always send them home thoughts from abroad.”
A moment later he said: “It will be good to be on the move.”
Then, before we stirred ourselves, he enquired about how we should be getting on at home. Maurice would presumably still be round: he was close to his mother, and that was fine. “He’s very sweet,” said Charles, who, like others of what he called his generation, wasn’t ashamed of what mine would have considered saccharine expressions. He was fond of his half-brother, and sometimes, I thought, envied him, just because he seemed so untainted by the world. What would happen to him? “I wish,” said Charles, “that he could get through his damned examinations.” Was there nothing we could do?
Charles was busy about others’ concerns, joyful, vigorous, since in independence he was setting off on his own. It would be good to be on the move, he had said. I wasn’t resenting the rapacity and self-absorption of his youth, perhaps one couldn’t in a son when the organic links were strong, when one had known in every cell of one’s body what that state was like. I should worry about his remaining alive, until I myself was dead. It was strange, though – not unpleasant, a kind of affirmation, but still strange – to see him sitting there, as much on his own as I was now or had ever been.
40: Death of an Old Man
AS Margaret and I sat over our breakfast, the telephone rang. Good God, I said, was it Mr Pateman again? – not so amused as Charles had been, hearing of this new addition to our timetable. Margaret answered, and as she stood there nodded ill-temperedly to me: it was a trunk call, from the usual place. Then her expression altered, and she replied in a grave and gentle tone. Yes, she would fetch me. For an instant she put a hand on mine, saying that it was about my father.
“This is Mr Sperry here.”
“Yes?”
“I’m afraid I’ve got bad news for you, I’m very sorry, I’m sure. Old Mr Eliot–”
“Yes?”
“Early this morning. He passed away.”
Again I said yes.
“I was with him when he went.”
Mr Sperry was asking me about the funeral. “I’m doing what I can,” he said. I replied that I would arrive at the house by lunchtime. Mr Sperry, sounding more than ever apologetic, said that he had a piece of business then. Could I wait till half past three or four? “It doesn’t matter to him now, does it? He was a fine old gentleman. I’m doing what I can.”
Returning to the breakfast table, I repeated all this to Margaret. She knew that she would be desolated by her own father’s death: she was tentative about commiserating with me about the death of mine. Somehow, even to her, it seemed like an act of nature. He was very old, she said: it sounded like a good way to die. It was a pity, though, that instead of having only his lodger with him, there was none of us. “I’m not sure that he even wanted that,” I said.
We found ourselves discussing what he would have wanted in the way of funerals. It was so long since I had talked to him seriously – I had talked to him seriously so seldom, even when I was a child – that I had no idea. I suspected that he wouldn’t have cared a damn. I forgot then, though later I remembered, that once he had expressed a surprisingly positive distaste for funerals in general, and his own in particular. He was rueful that if he died before his wife (he had outlived her by over forty years) she would insist on ‘making a fuss’. But I forgot that.
Neither Margaret nor I felt any of that singular necrophilic confidence with which one heard persons express certainty about what a dead relative would have ‘liked’. I had once stood with a party at Diana Skidmore’s having drinks round her husband’s grave, carefully placed near a summer house on his own estate. Diana had been positive that there was nothing he would have liked more than to have his friends enjoy themselves close by: she was equally positive that he would, curiously enough, have strongly disliked golf balls infringing the airspace over the grave.
Margaret and I had no such clear idea. My father must have a funeral. In church? Again we didn’t know. As one of his few gestures of marital independence, he had always refused to attend church with my mother, who was devout. I was pretty sure that he believed in nothing at all. Yet, for the sake of his choir practices, he had frequented church halls, church rooms, all his life. When I rang up Martin to tell him the news, I asked his opinion. Rather to my surprise, for Martin was a doctrinaire unbeliever, he thought that maybe we ought to have a service in the parish church. Quite why, he didn’t or couldn’t explain. Perhaps some strain of family piety, perhaps a memory of our mother, perhaps something more atavistic than that. Anyway, wherever his impulse came from, I was relieved, because I had it too.
This was a Wednesday, still mid-June. Martin’s family would all travel the next day, and so would Margaret and Charles. The funeral had better be on Friday, if I could arrange it. That was what I had to tell Mr Sperry, as we sat in Aunt Milly’s old ‘front room’ that afternoon – the room where, with indignant competence, she laid down the battle plans for the teetotal campaigns. But I couldn’t tell Mr Sperry about the funeral at once, for he had a good deal to tell me.
It was a dank close day, and when he opened the door he was in his shirt sleeves. As though he wouldn’t have considered it proper to speak of ‘the old gentleman’ dressed like that, he immediately put his jacket on. The Venetian blinds in the front room were lowered, a crepuscular light filtered through. Mr Sperry gazed at me with an expression that was sad and at the same time excited by the occasion.
“I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” he said, repeating his greeting at the door. I thanked him.
“Of course, it has to come to us all in the end, doesn’t it? He had a long innings, you’ve got to remember that.”
Yes, I said.
“Mind you, he’s been a bit poorly since the winter. But I didn’t expect him to go like this, and I wonder if the doctor really did, though he says it might have happened any time.”
From his first words, he had been speaking in a hushed whisper, the tone in which my mother always spoke of death. In the same whisper, he went on: “There was someone, though, who knew his time had come.”
He said: “The old gentleman did. Himself.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
He paused. Then, more hushed: “I was just getting in from a job, I had been looking after Mrs Buckley’s drainpipe, it must have been getting on for half past six, and I heard him call out, Mr Sperry, Mr Sperry. He had a good strong voice right up to the end. Of course I went in, he was lying on his sofa, it was made up to sleep in, you know, he said, Mr Sperry, I wonder if you’d mind staying with me tonight. I said, yes, Mr Eliot, of course I will if you want me to. I said, is there anything the matter? He said, yes, stay with me please, I think I’m going to die tonight. That’s what he said. So I said, do you mind if I go and get a bit to eat. He said, yes, you have your supper, and I went and had a bit of salmon, and came back as soon as I could. He said, I wonder if you’d mind holding my hand. So I stayed there all night. I kept asking him, do you want anything else, but he wouldn’t say.”
I asked, was he in pain.
“He didn’t say much after I got back, he didn’t seem to want to. Sometimes he gave a kind of shout. I didn’t think he was going, but he did. I wish I’d sent f
or the doctor sooner, Mrs Sperry and me, we blame ourselves for that. His breathing began to make a noise, then the sun came up. I’m sorry to say–”
I said, “You did all that anyone could do.”
“It was full light before he went. The doctor got here a few minutes after.”
He added: “I got her (Mr Sperry didn’t explain who that was) to lay him out this morning. He didn’t look very nice before, and I didn’t think you’d want to see him like that.”
He said: “I never heard anyone say a bad word about him.”
That was a formal epitaph, such as I used to hear in my childhood in that road. But Mr Sperry, as well as keeping his sense of propriety about a death, had also been totally efficient. The death certificate had been signed: the undertaker would be calling to see me later that evening. At last I had the opportunity to tell Mr Sperry that we wanted a church service. Mr Sperry was ready to cope with that. It meant that I ought to go round to the vicar’s and fix a time, before the undertaker came. All the old gentleman’s “bits of things” had been sifted through and collected in his room. So far as Mr Sperry knew or could discover, he had not left a will.
“Why should he?” I asked. Yet, in fact, he owned the house: it was dilapidated now, not worth much, a thousand at most. Anyway, whatever arrangement Mr Sperry had with him (I later found that Mr Sperry was paying £2.2.6 a week), that must go on. Mr Sperry would not have brought up the subject – certainly not until after the funeral – but he was relieved.
He said: “Now you’d like to see him, I’m sure.”
He took me into the hall, opened the door of my father’s room, touched my sleeve, and left me alone. As I crossed the threshold into the half-dark, I had a sense, sudden, dominating, of déjà vu. I could just make out the short body lying on the sofa, then, though all the superstitious nerves held my fingers back, I switched on the light, and looked at him. Strangely, he appeared much more formidable than in life. His head had always been disproportionately larger than the rest of him: as it lay there above the sheets, it loomed strong and heavy, the clowning all gone now that the spectacles were off and the mild eyes closed. His moustache had been brushed and didn’t droop any more. It might have been the face of a stranger – no, of someone bearing a family resemblance, a distant relative whom I hadn’t often seen.