Homecomings

by C. P. Snow

  ‘Never mind,’ I replied, but I was taken off guard.

  ‘Have you seen Margaret since she got married?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose you wouldn’t!’ He laughed, satisfied, on top. ‘Well, you needn’t get too bothered about her. I think she’ll be all right.’

  I wanted to cry out, ‘I don’t intend to listen’, just as I had avoided going near anyone who knew her or even hearing the date of her wedding. The only news I had not been able to escape was that she was married. I wanted to shout in front of Gilbert’s inflamed eyes – ‘I can stand it, if I don’t hear.’ But he went on: Geoffrey Hollis had taken a job at a children’s hospital, they were living at Aylesbury.

  ‘I think she’ll be all right,’ said Gilbert.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘He’s head over heels in love with her, of course.’

  ‘Good,’ I said again.

  ‘There is one other thing.’

  ‘Is there?’ I heard my own voice dull, mechanical, protecting me by thrusting news away.

  ‘She’s going to have a child.’

  As I did not reply, he continued: ‘That will mean a lot to her, won’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Gilbert, ‘she can’t have started it more than a month or two–’

  While he was talking on, I got up and said that I must have an early night. There were no taxis outside, and together we walked up Oxford Street: I was replying to his chat affably if absently: I did not feel inimical; I already knew what I was going to do.

  The next morning I sat in my office thinking of how I was going to say it, before I asked Vera Allen to fetch Gilbert in. He slumped down in the easy chair beside my desk, relaxed and companionable.

  ‘Look,’ I said, ‘I want you to transfer to another branch.’

  On the instant he was braced, his feet springing on the floor, like a man ready to fight.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Will it do any good to either of us to answer that?’

  ‘You just mean, that you want to get rid of me, after four years, without any reason, and without any fuss?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean that.’

  ‘I won’t accept it.’

  ‘You must.’

  ‘You can’t force me.’

  ‘I can,’ I replied. I added: ‘If necessary, I shall.’ I was speaking so that he would believe me. Then I added in a different tone: ‘But I shan’t have to.’

  ‘Why do you think you can get away with it?’

  ‘Because I need you to go to make things easier for me.’

  ‘Good God,’ cried Gilbert, his eyes angry and puzzled, ‘I don’t think I deserve that.’

  ‘I’ve got great affection for you, you know that,’ I said. ‘You’ve been very good to me in all kinds of ways, and I shan’t forget it. But just now there are parts of my life I don’t want to be reminded of–’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘While you’re about, you can’t help reminding me of them.’

  ‘How do you mean, I can’t help it?’

  ‘You can see.’

  Hotly, angrily, without self-pity or excuse, Gilbert said: ‘It’s my nature. You know how it is.’

  I knew better than he thought; for in my youth I had been as tempted as most men by the petty treachery, the piece of malice warm on the tongue at a friend’s expense, the kind of personal imperialism, such as he had shown the night before, in which one imposes oneself upon another. Even more I had been fascinated by the same quicksands in other men. As to many of us when young, the labile, the shifting, the ambivalent, the Lebedevs and the Fyodor Karamazovs, had given me an intimation of the depth and wonder of life. But as I grew up I began to find it not only unmagical, but also something like boring, both in others and myself. At the age when I got rid of Gilbert Cooke I found it hard to imagine the excitement and attention with which, in my young manhood, I had explored the transformation-scene temperament of an early friend. As I got near forty, my tastes in character had changed, I could not give that attention again. If I had still been able to, I could have taken Gilbert as an intimate friend.

  29: First Interview of George Passant

  WHEN I told Rose that I wished to transfer Gilbert Cooke, I had an awkward time.

  ‘Of course, I have only a nodding acquaintance with your dashing activities, my dear Lewis,’ said Rose, meaning that he read each paper word by word, ‘but I should have thought the present arrangement was working reasonably well.’

  I said that I could see certain advantages in a change.

  ‘I must say,’ replied Rose, ‘that I should like to be assured of that.’

  ‘It would do Cooke good to get a wider experience–’

  ‘We can’t afford to regard ourselves as a training establishment just at present. My humble interest is to see that your singular and admirable activities don’t suffer.’ He gave his polite, confident smile. ‘And forgive me if I’m wrong, but I have a feeling that they will suffer if you let Master Cooke go.’

  ‘In many ways that’s true,’ I had to say in fairness.

  ‘I shouldn’t like us to forget that he showed a certain amount of moral courage, possibly a slightly embarrassing moral courage, over that Lufkin complication last year. I scored a point to his credit over that. And I have an impression that he’s been improving. He’s certainly been improving appreciably on paper, and I’ve come to respect his minutes.’

  As usual, Hector Rose was just. He was also irritated that I would not let him persuade me. He was even more irritated when he learned how I proposed to fill Gilbert’s place. For, finding me obstinate, and cutting the argument short, he admitted that they could probably give me an ‘adequate replacement’; it was the end of 1943, there were plenty of youngish officers invalided out, or a few capable young women ‘coming loose’.

  No, I said, I would not take a chance with anyone I did not know through and through; the job was going to get more tangled, and parts of it were secret; I wanted someone near me whom I could trust as I did myself.

  ‘I take it that this specification is not completely in the air, and you have some valuable suggestion up your sleeve?’

  I gave the name: George Passant. The man who had most befriended me in my youth, although I did not tell Rose that. He had been working as a solicitor’s managing clerk in a provincial town for twenty years. The only point in his favour in Rose’s eyes was that his examination record was of the highest class.

  Further, I had to tell Rose that George had once got into legal trouble, but had been found innocent.

  ‘In that case we can’t count it against him.’ Rose was showing his most frigid fairness, as well as irritation. He dismissed that subject, it was not to be raised again. But sharply he asked what proofs ‘this man’ had given of high ability. His lids heavy, his face expressionless, Rose listened.

  ‘It isn’t an entirely convincing case, my dear Lewis, don’t you feel that? It would be much easier for me if you would reconsider the whole idea. Will you think it over and give me the benefit of another word tomorrow?’

  ‘I have thought it over for a long time,’ I replied. ‘If this job’ – I meant, as Rose understood, the projects such as the headquarters administration of Barford which came in my domain – ‘is done as it needs to be done, I can’t think of anyone else who’d bring as much to it.’

  ‘Very well, let me see this man as soon as you can.’

  Just for that instant, Hector Rose was as near being rude as I had heard him, but when, three days later, we were waiting to interview George Passant, he had recovered himself and, the moment George was brought in, Rose reached heights of politeness exalted even for him.

  ‘My dear Mr Passant, it is really extremely good of you, putting yourself to this inconvenience just to give us the pleasure of a talk. I have heard a little about you from my colleague Eliot, whom I’m sure you remember, but it is a real privilege to have the opportunity of meeting you in person.�
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  To my surprise George, who had entered sheepishly, his head thrust forward, concealing the power of his chest and shoulders, gave a smile of delight at Rose’s welcome, immediately reassured by a display of warmth about as heartfelt as a bus conductor’s thanks.

  ‘I don’t get to London very often,’ said George, ‘but it’s always a treat.’

  It was a curious start. His voice, which still retained the Suffolk undertone, rolled out, and, as he sat down, he smiled shyly at Rose but also man-to-man. They were both fair, they were both of middle height, strongly built, with massive heads; yet, inside that kind of structural resemblance, it would have been hard to find two men more different.

  Even spruced up for the interview, George looked not so much untidy as dowdy, in a blue suit with the trouser legs too tight. His shoes, his tie, separated him from Rose as much as his accent did, and there was not only class, there was success dividing them. George, never at his ease except with protégés or women, was more than ever fiddling for the right etiquette in front of this smooth youngish man, more successful than anyone he had met.

  Sitting down, he smiled shyly at Rose, and of all the contrasts between them that in their faces was the sharpest. At forty-six Rose’s was blankly youthful, the untouched front of a single-minded man, with eyes heavy and hard. George, three years younger, looked no more than his age; he was going neither grey nor bald; but there were written on him the signs of one who has found his temperament often too much to manage; his forehead was bland and noble, his nose and mouth and whole expression had a cheerful sensual liveliness – except for his eyes, which, light blue in their deep orbits, were abstracted, often lost and occasionally sad.

  With the practised and temperate flow of a Civil Service interview, Rose questioned him.

  ‘I wonder if you would mind, Mr Passant, just helping us by taking us through your career?’

  George did so. He might be shy, but he was lucid as always. His school career: his articles with a Woodbridge solicitor –

  ‘Forgive me interrupting, Mr Passant, but with a school record like yours I’m puzzled why you didn’t try for a university scholarship?’

  ‘If I’d known what they were like I might have got one,’ said George robustly.

  ‘Leaving most of us at the post,’ said Rose with a polite bow.

  ‘I think I should have got one,’ said George, and then suddenly one of his fits of abject diffidence took him over, the diffidence of class. ‘But of course I had no one to advise me, starting where I did.’

  ‘I should hope that we’re not wasting material like you nowadays, if you will let me say so.’

  ‘More than you think.’ George was comfortable again. He went on about his articles: the Law Society examinations; the prizes; the job at Eden and Martineau’s, a firm of solicitors in a midland town, as a qualified clerk.

  ‘Where you’ve been ever since. That is, since October 1924,’ put in Rose smoothly.

  ‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

  ‘Why haven’t you moved?’

  ‘You ought to be told,’ said George, without any embarrassment, ‘that I had an unpleasant piece of difficulty ten years ago.’

  ‘I have been told,’ said Rose, also without fuss. ‘I can perfectly well understand that trouble getting in your way since – but what about the years before?’

  George answered: ‘I’ve often asked myself. Of course I didn’t have any influence behind me.’

  Rose regarded him as though he wanted to examine his lack of initiative. But he thought better of it, and dexterously switched him on to legal points. Like many high-class Civil Servants, Rose had a competent amateur knowledge of law; I sat by, without any need to intervene, while George replied with his old confidence.

  Then Rose said: most countries recruit their bureaucracy almost exclusively from lawyers: our bureaucracy is not fond of them: who is right? It was a topic which Rose knew backwards, but George, quite undeterred, argued as though he had been in Permanent Secretaries’ offices for years: I found myself listening, not to the interview, but to the argument for its own sake: I found also that Rose, who usually timed interviews to the nearest two minutes, was letting this over-run by nearly ten. At last he said, bowing from the waist, as ceremonious as though he were saying goodbye to Lufkin or an even greater boss: ‘I think perhaps we might leave it for the moment, don’t you agree, Mr Passant? It has been a most delightful occasion and I shall see that we let you know whether we can possibly justify ourselves in temporarily uprooting you–’

  With a smile George backed out, the door closed, Rose looked not at me but out of the window. His arms were folded on his chest, and it was some moments before he spoke.

  ‘Well,’ he said.

  I waited.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s obviously a man of very high intelligence.’

  In that respect, Rose in half an hour could appreciate George’s quality more than his employer in the solicitors’ firm, who had known him half a lifetime. He went on: ‘He’s got a very strong and precise mind, and it’s distinctly impressive. If we took him as a replacement for Cooke, on the intellectual side we should gain by the transaction.’

  Rose paused. His summing-up was not coming as fluently as usual.

  He added: ‘But I must say, there seems to be altogether too much on the negative side.’

  I stiffened, ready to sit it out.

  ‘What exactly?’

  ‘Not to put too fine a point on it, a man of his ability who just rests content in a fourth-rate job must have something wrong with him.’

  A stranger, listening to the altercation which went on for many minutes, would have thought it business-like, rational, articulate. He might not have noticed, so cool was Rose’s temper, so long had I had to learn to subdue mine, that we were each of us very angry. I knew that I had only to be obstinate to get my way. I could rely on Rose’s fairness. If George had been an impossible candidate, he would have vetoed him. But, although Rose felt him unsuitable and even more alien, he was too fair to rule him out at sight.

  That being so, I should get George if I stuck to it; for this was the middle of the war, and I was doing a difficult job. In peace-time, I should have had to take anyone I was given. Rose had been trained not to expect to make a personal choice of a subordinate, any more than of an office chair: it offended him more, because mine was nothing but a personal choice. It was wartime, however; my job was regarded as exacting and in part it was abnormally secret. In the long run I had to be given my head. But I knew that I should have to pay a price.

  ‘Well, my dear Lewis, I am still distinctly uneasy about this suggestion. If I may say so, I am slightly surprised that you should press it, in view of what I have tried, no doubt inadequately, to explain.’

  ‘I wouldn’t do so for a minute,’ I replied, ‘if I weren’t unusually certain.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the impression you have managed to give.’ For once Rose was letting his bitter temper show. ‘I repeat, I am surprised that you should press the suggestion.’

  ‘I am sure of the result.’

  ‘Right.’ Rose snapped off the argument, like a man turning a switch. ‘I’ll put the nomination through the proper channels. You’ll be able to get this man started within a fortnight.’

  He glanced at me, his face smoothed over.

  ‘Well, I’m most grateful to you for spending so much time this afternoon. But I should be less than honest with you, my dear Lewis, if I didn’t say that I still have a fear this may prove one of your few errors of judgement.’

  That was the price I paid. For Rose, who in disapproval invariably said less than he meant, was telling me, not that I might turn out to have made an error of judgement, but that I had already done so. That is, I had set my opinion against official opinion beyond the point where I should have backed down. If I had been a real professional, with a professional’s ambitions, I could not have afforded to. For it did not take many ‘errors of judgement’ – t
he most minatory phrase Rose could use to a colleague – docketed in that judicious mind, to keep one from the top jobs. If I became a professional, I should have the future, common enough if one looked round the Pall Mall clubs, of men of parts, often brighter than their bosses, who had inexplicably missed the top two rungs.

  I did not mind. When I was a young man, too poor to give much thought to anything but getting out of poverty, I had dreamed of great success at the Bar; since then I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense. And, of course, they were not wrong: if a man spends half of his time discussing basketball, thinking of basketball, examining with passionate curiosity the intricacies of basketball, it is not unreasonable to suspect him of a somewhat excessive interest in the subject.

  Yet, over the last years, almost without my noticing it, for such a change does not happen in a morning, I was growing tired of it: or perhaps not so much tired, as finding myself slide from a participant into a spectator. It was partly that now I knew I could earn a living in two or three different ways. It was partly that, of the two I had loved most, Sheila had ignored my liking for power, while Margaret actively detested it. But, although I believed that Margaret’s influence might have quickened the change within me, I also believed it would have happened anyway.

  Now that I felt a theme in my life closing, I thought it likely that I had started off with an interest in power greater than that of most reflective men, but not a tenth of Lufkin’s or Rose’s, nothing like enough to last me for a lifetime. I expect that I should keep an eye open for the manoeuvres of others: who will get the job? and why? and how? I expected also that sometimes, as I watched others installed in jobs I might once have liked, I should feel regret. That did not matter much. Beneath it all, a preoccupation was over.

  As it vanished step-by-step, so another had filled its place. But this other was genuine; I had been clear about it, although I had had to push it out of sight, even when I was a child. I had known that sooner or later I should have some books to write; I did not worry about it; I was learning what I had to say. In trouble, that knowledge had often steadied me, and had given me a comfort greater than any other. Even after Margaret left me, in the middle of the war, when I was too busy to write anything sustained, nevertheless I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It gave me a kind of serenity; it was like going into a safe and quiet room.