by C. P. Snow
Mrs Knight cried: ‘No, we can’t think of leaving you.’
Mr Knight muttered: ‘I wouldn’t willingly think of leaving you, it would throw all of it on to your shoulders–’
Mrs Knight broke in: ‘We can’t do it.’
Mr Knight went on: ‘One doesn’t like to think of it, but Lewis, in case, in the remote case, that my wretched heart was getting beyond its degree of tolerance tomorrow afternoon, are you sure that you could if need be manage by yourself?’
So Mr Knight, whose empathy was such that he knew more than most men both what my life with Sheila had been and what my condition was that night, was only anxious to escape and leave me to it: while Mrs Knight, who blamed me for her daughter’s unhappiness and death, felt in her fibres that they ought to stand by me in the end, give their physical presence if they could give nothing else. She felt it so primally that for once she gave up thinking of her husband’s health.
There were those, among whom I had sometimes been one, who believed that, if she had not pampered his hypochondria, he would have forgotten his ailments half the time and lived something near a normal life. We were wrong. She had a rough, simple nature, full of animal force: but, despite her aggressiveness, she had always been, and was now as much as ever, under his domination. It was he who felt his own pulse, who gave the cry of alarm, and she who in duty and reverence echoed it. Even that night he could not subdue it, and for a few moments she was impatient with him.
In the end, of course, he got his way. She soon realized that the inquest would tax his heart more than she could allow; she became convinced that it was he who out of duty insisted on attending, and she who was obliged to stop him; she would have to forbid his doing anything so quixotic, even if I was prostrate without them.
As it was, I said that I would settle it alone, and they arranged to return home next morning. I did not mention Charles March’s offer to give a false certificate, so that we could have avoided the inquest. I wondered how Mr Knight would have reconciled his conscience, in order to be able to accept that offer.
In his labyrinthine fashion, Mr Knight asked how much publicity we had to be prepared for. I shrugged it off.
‘No,’ said Mr Knight, ‘it will hurt you as much and more than us, isn’t that true?’
It was, but I did not wish to admit it, I did not like the times that day when the thought of it drove out others.
Perhaps the war-news would be a blessing to us, Mr Knight was considering. I said I would do my best with my Press acquaintances. The Knights could go home next morning: I would do what could be done.
Relieved, half-resentful, half-protective, Mr Knight began inquiring where I would sleep tomorrow night, whether I could take a holiday and get some rest. I did not want, I could not bear, to talk of myself, so I made an excuse and left them alone.
At dinner none of us spoke much, and soon afterwards, it must have been as early as nine o’clock, Mrs Knight announced that she was tired and would go straight to bed. Of all women, she was the least well designed for subterfuges: she proclaimed her piece of acting like a blunt, embarrassed, unhappy schoolgirl. But I had no attention to spare for her; Mr Knight was determined to speak to me in intimacy, and I was on guard.
We sat in the drawing-room, one each side of the fireplace, Mr Knight smoking a pipe of the herb-tobacco which out of valetudinarian caution he had taken to years before. The smell invaded me and I felt a tension nearly intolerable, as though this moment of sense, the smell of herb tobacco, was not to be endured, as though I could not wait to hear a word. But when he did speak, beginning with one of his circuitous wind-ups, he astonished me: the subject he wanted to get clear before they left next day was no more intimate than the lease of the house.
When I married Sheila, I had had no capital, and Mr Knight had lent us the money to buy a fourteen years’ lease, which had been in Sheila’s name. This lease still had six years to run, and Mr Knight was concerned about the most business-like course of action. Presumably, after all that had happened, and regardless of the fact that the house was too large for a man alone, I should not wish to go on living there? If it were his place to advise me, he would advise against. In that case, we ought to take steps about disposing of the lease. Since the loan had been for Sheila’s sake as well as mine, he would consider it wiped off, but perhaps I would think it not unreasonable, as he did himself, particularly as Sheila’s own money would come to me under her will, that any proceeds we now derived from the lease should go to him?
Above all, said Mr Knight, there was a need for speed. It might be possible to sell a house before the war developed: looking a few months ahead, none of us could guess the future, and any property in London might be a drug on the market. I had always found him one of the most puzzling and ungraspable of men, but never more so than now, when he took that opportunity to show his practical acumen. I promised to put the house in the agents’ hands within a few days.
‘I’m sorry to lay this on your shoulders too,’ he said, ‘but your shoulders are broad – in some ways–’
His voice trailed away, as though in the qualification he might be either envying me or pitying me. I was staring into the fire, not looking at him, but I felt his glance upon me. In a quiet tone he said: ‘She always took her own way.’
I did not speak.
‘She suffered too much.’
I cried out: ‘Could any man have made her happy?’
‘Who can say?’ replied Mr Knight.
He was trying to comfort me, but I was bitter because that one cry had escaped against my will.
‘May she find peace,’ he said. For once his heavy lids were raised, he was looking directly at me with sad and acute eyes.
‘Let me say something to you,’ he remarked, his words coming out more quickly than usual, ‘because I suspect you are one of those who take it on themselves to carry burdens. Perhaps one is oneself, perhaps one realizes the danger of those who won’t let themselves forget.’
For an instance his tone was soft, indulgent with self-regard. Then he spoke sharply: ‘I beg you, don’t let this burden cripple you.’
I neither would nor could confide. I met his glance as though I did not understand.
‘I mean the burden of my daughter’s death. Don’t let it lie upon you always.’
I muttered. He made another effort: ‘If I may speak as a man thirty years older, there is this to remember – time heals most wounds, except the passing of time. But only if you can drop the burdens of the past, only if you make yourself believe that you have a life to live.’
I was gazing, without recognition, into the fire; the smell of herb tobacco wafted across. Mr Knight had fallen silent. I reckoned that he would leave me alone now.
I said something about letting the house. Mr Knight’s interest in money did not revive; he had tried for once to be direct, an ordeal for so oblique a man, and had got nowhere.
For minutes, ticked off by the clock, again the only sound in the room, we stayed there; when I looked at him his face was sagging with misery. At last he said, after neither of us had spoken for a long while, that we might as well go to bed. As we went out to the foot of the stairs, he whispered: ‘If one doesn’t take them slowly, they are a strain on one’s heart.’
I made him rest his hand on my shoulder, and cautiously, with trepidation, he got himself from tread to tread. On the landing he averted his eyes from the door of the room in which her body lay.
Again he whispered: ‘Good night. Let us try to sleep.’
13: A Smooth Bedcover
IT was three nights later when, blank to all feeling, I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. Blankly, I pulled off the cover from my own bed; then I glanced across at hers, smooth, apple-green under the light, undisturbed since it was made four days before. All of a sudden, sorrow, loss, tore at me like a spasm of the body. I went to the bed and drew my hands along the cover, tears that I could not shed pressing behind my eyes, convulsed in the ravening of
grief. At last it had seized me. The bed was smooth under the light. I knelt beside it, and wave after wave of a passion of the senses possessed me, made me grip the stuff and twist it, scratch it, anything to break the surface, shining quietly under the light.
Once, in an exhausted respite, I had a curious relief. The week to come, some friends had invited us to dinner. If she had been alive, she would have been anxious about going, she would have wanted me to make excuses and lie her out of the evening, as I had done so many times.
Then the grief flooded through me again. In the derangement of my senses, there was no time to come: all time was here, in this moment, now, beside this bed.
I learned then, in that devastation, that one could not know such loss without craving for an after-life. My reason would not give me the illusion, not the fractional hope of it – and yet I longed to pray to her.
Part Two
The Self-defeated
14: Loan of a Book
OUTSIDE the window, in the September sunshine, a couple of elderly men were sitting in deckchairs drinking tea. From my bed, which was on the ground floor of a London clinic, I could just see past them to a bed of chrysanthemums smouldering in the shadow. The afternoon was placid, the two old men drank with the peace of cared-for invalids; for me it was peaceful to lie there watching them, free from pain. True, Gilbert Cooke would be bringing me work, I should have to be on my feet by Thursday; but there was nothing the matter with me, I could lie idle for another twenty-four hours.
That day was Tuesday, and I had only entered the clinic on the previous Saturday afternoon. Since Sheila’s death nearly two years before (this was the September of 1941) I had been more on the move than ever in my life, and the pain in my back had not been giving me much rest. It was faintly ludicrous: but, in the months ahead, I was going to be still more occupied, and it was not such a joke to think of dragging myself through meetings as I had been doing, or, on the bad days, holding them round my office sofa. It was not such a joke, and also it watered one’s influence down: in any kind of politics, men listened to you less if you were ill. So I had set aside three days, and a surgeon had tried manipulating me under an anaesthetic. Although I was incredulous, it seemed to have worked. Waiting for Cooke that afternoon, I was touching wood in case the pain returned.
When Gilbert Cooke came in, he had a young woman with him whose name, when he made an imperious gobbled introduction, I did not catch. In fact, taking from him at once some papers marked urgent, I only realized some moments afterwards, absent in my reading, that I had not heard her name. Then I only asked for it with routine politeness. Margaret Davidson. He had mentioned her occasionally, I recalled; she was the daughter of the Davidson whom he had talked of at the Barbican dinner and whom I had been surprised to hear that Gilbert knew.
I glanced up at her, but she had withdrawn to near the window, getting out of our way.
Meanwhile Gilbert stood by my bed, a batch of papers in his hand haranguing me with questions.
‘What have they been doing to you?’
‘Are you fit for decent company at last?’
‘You realize you must stay here until you’re well enough not to embarrass everyone?’
I said I would take the committee on Thursday. He replied that it was out of the question. When I told him how I should handle that day’s business he said that, even if I were fool enough to attend, I could not use those methods.
‘You can’t get away with it every time,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me in warning. He stood there, his massive shoulders humped, his plethoric face frowning at me. After the fussy, almost maternal concern with which he looked after my health, as he had done since he came into my office, he turned brusquer still. He was talking to me like a professional no-man, just as he used to talk to Paul Lufkin. He did so for the same reason – because he regarded me as a success.
Working under me for nearly two years of war, Gilbert had seen me promoted; he had his ear close to the official gossip. He magnified both what I had done and what was thought of it, but it was true enough that I had made, in those powerful anonymous couloirs, some sort of reputation. Partly I had been lucky, for anyone as close to the Minister as I was could not help but attract attention: partly, I had immersed myself in the job, my life simplified for the first time since I was a boy, with no one to watch over, no secret home to distract me.
To Gilbert, who had joined my branch soon after Sheila died, I now seemed an important man. As a consequence, he was loyal and predatory about my interests when I was not present, but face to face insisted on back-chat.
On the coming Thursday we should have to struggle with a problem of security. Some people in one of the ‘private armies’ of the time were busy with a project that none of us believed in; but they had contrived so to enmesh themselves in security that we could not control them. I knew about their project: they knew that I knew: but they would not talk to me about it. I told Gilbert that their amour propre might be satisfied if we went through a solemn minuet: they must be asked to explain themselves to the Minister, which they could not refuse to do: he would then repeat the explanation to me: then on Thursday both they and I could hint obliquely at the mystery.
It was the kind of silly tactic that any official was used to. I made some remark that it was dangerous to give secrets to anyone with exaggerated self-esteem: it was bad for business, and worse for his character.
I heard a stirring by the window. I looked at the young woman, who had been sitting quietly there without a word, and to my astonishment saw her face transfigured by such a smile that I felt an instant of ease, almost of expectancy and happiness. Never mind that my piece of sarcasm had been mechanical: her smile lit up her eyes, flushed her skin, was kind, astringent, lively, content.
Until that moment I had scarcely seen her, or seen her through gauze as one sees a stranger one does not expect to meet again. Perhaps I should have noticed that her features were fine-cut. Now I looked at her. When she was not smiling her face might have been austere, except for the accident that her upper lip was short, so that I could not help watching the delicate lines of her nostril and the peak of her lip. As she smiled her mouth seemed large, her face lost its fine moulding: it became relaxed with good nature and also with an appetite for happiness.
Looking at her, I saw how fine her skin was. She had used very little make-up, even on the lips. She was wearing a cheap plain frock – so cheap and plain that it seemed she had not just picked up the first in sight, but deliberately chosen this one.
As she sat by the window, her amusement drying up, she had a curious gaucheness, like an actor who does not know what to do with his hands. This posture, at the same time careless and shy, made her look both younger and frailer than she was in fact. The little I knew of her was collecting in my mind. She must be about twenty-four, I thought, twelve years younger than Gilbert or me. When she laughed again, and her head was thrown back, she did not look frail at all.
I smiled at her. I began to talk to her and for her. I was beating round for something to link us. She was working in the Treasury – no, she was not easy about the people or her job.
Acquaintances in Cambridge – we exchanged names, but no more.
How should I occupy myself tomorrow, I asked, staying here in this room?
‘You oughtn’t to do anything,’ she said.
‘I’m not good at that,’ I replied.
‘You ought to do as Gilbert tells you.’ She had taken care to bring him in, she broke the duologue, she smiled at him. But she spoke to me again: she was positive.
‘You ought to rest all the week.’
I shook my head; yet a spark had flashed between us.
No, I said, I should just have tomorrow to bask in and read – I was short of books, what would be best for the day in bed? She was quick off the mark.
‘You want something peaceful,’ she said.
Not a serious novel, we agreed – not fiction at all, maybe – journals that one co
uld dip into, something with facts in them. Which were the most suitable journals, Bennett’s, Gide’s, Amiel’s?
‘What about the Goncourts?’ she asked.
‘Just what I feel like,’ I said.
I asked, how could I possibly lay my hand on the books by tomorrow?
‘I’ve got them at home,’ she said.
Suddenly the air held promise, danger, strain. I had not enough confidence to go ahead; I needed her to make the running, to give me the sign I longed for; I was waiting for her to say that she would bring a book, or send it to me. Yet I could feel, as she folded her fingers in her lap, that she was diffident too.
If it had been Sheila when I first knew her – some half memory made me more constrained – she would not have given a thought that Gilbert had brought her into the room: she would have announced, in ruthlessness and innocence, that she would deliver the book next morning. But Margaret would not treat Gilbert so, even though their relation appeared to be quite slight. She was too good-mannered to give me the lead I sought. But, even if Gilbert had not been present, could she have done so? She was not only too gentle, but perhaps also she was too proud.
Looking at her, her head no longer thrown back, her eyes studying me, I felt that she had a strong will, but no more confidence that moment than I had myself.
It was Gilbert who snapped the tension off. He would arrange, he said, brusque and cheerful, to get the books round to the clinic first thing next morning. Soon afterwards they left, Margaret saying goodbye from the door: as soon as I heard their steps in the corridor, I was suffused with happiness.
In a beam of evening sun which just missed my bed, the motes were spinning. Outside it, in the twilight, I cherished my happiness, as though by doing so I could stretch it out, as though, by letting myself live in the moment of recognition between this young woman and me half an hour before, I could stay happy.