by C. P. Snow
‘Do you really say that I patronize anyone?’ she cried.
‘With individuals, no, I shouldn’t say so. But when you think about social things, of course you do.’
Her eyes were dark and snapping; her cheeks were flushed; it was as I remembered her when angry, the adrenalin was pumping through her, all pallor had left her and she looked spectacularly well.
‘I must say,’ Geoffrey remarked pacifically, ‘I’m inclined to think he’s right.’
‘I suppose you’ll say I’m a snob next?’ Her eyes, still snapping, were fixed on me.
‘In a rarefied sense, yes.’
Geoffrey reminded her that it was half past one, time to give Maurice his meal. Without speaking, her shoulders set with energy, with anger against me, she took the tray and led us to the nursery.
‘There he is,’ said Geoffrey, as I got my first glance at the child.
His pen was just outside a strong diagonal of sunlight; sitting with his back to the bars, like an animal retreating at the zoo, he was slowly tearing a magazine to pieces. I had only my brother’s boy to compare him with, and despite what I had heard of his manual precocity, I could not see it. I just saw him tearing up the paper with that solemn, concentrated inefficiency characteristic of infants, which made his hand and elbow movements look like those of a drunken man photographed in slow motion.
I did not go up to him, but went on watching as, after Margaret spoke to him, he continued obsessively with his task. He was, and the sight wounded me though I had prepared for it, a most beautiful child. The genes had played one of their tricks, and had collected together in him the best looks of parents and grandparents, so that already, under the india-rubber fat, one could pick out the fine cheekbones of his mother and the poise of his father’s neck. It was easy to imagine him as a young man, dark, indrawn, hard to approach and gaining admirers just because of that.
Margaret was telling him that his meal was ready, but he replied that he did not want it.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, with that matter-of-fact gentleness she showed to a lover.
The little boy was gripping a ping-pong ball, and, as soon as she lifted him from his pen, he began to lam it at a looking-glass over the mantelpiece, and then at a picture near the cot.
Geoffrey left, to fetch something missing from the tray, but the boy paid no notice, and went on throwing the ball. As he let fly, I was scrutinizing the boneless movement of his shoulder, as fluid as though he were double-jointed. Margaret said to me: ‘It’s a nice way for him to be.’
‘Isn’t he rather strong?’ I asked.
She was smiling at me, the quarrel smoothed away by the animal presence of her son. As she stood with him thigh-high beside her, she could not conceal – what at her father’s party she remained silent about, when Geoffrey was so voluble – her passion for the child. It softened and filled out her face, and made her body lax. Pained again, as by the boy’s good looks, I knew that I had not seen her look more tender.
‘It’s nice for him just to chuck himself about,’ she said.
I caught her meaning. Like many of the sensitive, she had wished often, especially before she gained the confidence that she could make a man happy, that her own childhood had been less refined, had been coarser and nearer the earth.
I put in a remark, to let her know I understood, She smiled again: but Maurice began shouting, violent because she was talking away from him.
While he had his meal I remained outside the circle of attention, which was lit by the beam of sun gilding the legs of the high chair. Geoffrey sat on one side, Margaret in front, the child facing her with unflickering eyes. After two or three spoonfuls he would not eat until she sang; as I listened, it occurred to me that, when I had known her, I had not once heard her singing voice. She sang, her voice unexpectedly loud and deep; the child did not take his eyes off her.
The robust sound filled the room: Geoffrey, smiling, was watching the boy: the beam of sunlight fell on their feet, as though they were at the centre of a stage, and the spotlight had gone slightly off the mark.
The meal was over, Geoffrey gave the child a sweet, for an instant the room went dead quiet. They were still sitting with the sunlight round their feet, as Margaret gazed at her son, either unselfconscious or thinking she was not observed. Then after a moment she raised her head, and I felt rather than saw, for I had looked away, that her glance had moved from the child to me. I turned towards her: her eyes did not fall, but her face went suddenly sad. It was only for a second. She gazed again at the little boy, and took his hand.
It had only been for a second, but I knew. I should have known before, when we parted after her father’s party, certainly when she quarrelled with me in defence of Geoffrey at the dining-table, if I had not desired it too much: I knew now that she was not free of me, any more than I of her.
In the hot room, noisy now with the boy’s demands, I felt, not premonition, not responsibility, not the guilt that would have seemed ineluctable if I had seen another in my place, but an absolute exaltation, as though, all in one move, I had joy in my hands and my life miraculously simple. I did not recognize any fear mixed with the joy, I just felt happy and at one.
39: Illusion of Invisibility
IT was a September afternoon when I was waiting, for the first time since her marriage, to meet Margaret alone. It was the day on which I had been helping to interview Gilbert Cooke. Half an hour before I was due at our rendezvous he entered, having already heard from Hector Rose that he was safe.
‘So I diddled them, did I?’ he said, not so much with pleasure as a kind of gloating triumph: which was the way in which he, who did not expect much success, greeted any that came to him. Actually, this was more than a success, for in fact, though not in form, it settled his career for life. Hector Rose was deciding his final judgement on each of the men in the Department who wished to be established in the service; once a week, a committee of four of us sat and interviewed; George Passant’s turn would arrive soon.
‘It can’t come unstuck now, can it?’ Gilbert said, flushed, his eyes bloodshot. I told him that Rose’s nomination would have to be accepted.
‘Damn it,’ cried Gilbert, ‘I never reckoned on finishing up as a Civil Servant.’
‘What did you reckon on?’ I knew he would scarcely be able to answer: for in his career he had always been a curiously vague and unselfseeking man.
‘Oh,’ he said, looking badgered, ‘there was a time when I thought I might make something of it as a soldier. That was before the doctors did me in the eye. And then I thought I might collect some cash with that old shark Lufkin. I don’t know. But the last thing I should ever have dreamt of was finding myself here for good. To tell you the honest truth,’ he burst out, ‘I should never have credited that I was clever enough!’
Oddly, in a certain restricted sense, he was not: he had nothing of the legalistic accuracy and lucidity of the high-class Civil Servant: the deficiency would stop him going very far, as Rose and the others had agreed that day: he would most likely get one rung higher and stop there.
Nevertheless, he had put up a good performance before those men so different from himself. He was so little stiff that Rose felt his own stiffness soften, and enjoyed the sensation: sometimes his refusal to stay at a distance, his zest for breathing down one’s neck, made him paradoxically welcome to correct and buttoned natures. Hector Rose and his colleagues did not over-value him much; they were too experienced, and their judgement too cool for that; they were probably right to keep him; but still, there was no doubt that, if the decision had been a closer thing, he had the advantage that respectable men liked him.
I wondered what they would have thought, if they had guessed at his wilder activities. For instance, it would have startled them to know that, sitting in my office that afternoon, I – after being a friend for a dozen years and his boss for several – was frightened of him. Frightened, that is, of his detective work. I did not dare let out a hint that I
was slipping away for tea. Even then I was still nervous of his antennae, as though they might pick up the secret in the air.
Thus, sweating and fretted, I was late when at last I reached the café opposite St James’s Park tube station. Margaret was sitting there, stubs of cigarettes in the ashtray. She looked anxious, but unreproachful and glad.
‘I’ll tell you why I was late,’ I said.
‘It doesn’t matter, you’re here now.’
‘No, I’d better tell you.’ I could not have got away from Gilbert, I explained, without the danger of his finding out that I was meeting her.
‘Oh well,’ she said. She spoke as though she had not admitted to herself the thought of concealment. At the same moment, her face was flushed with happiness and a kind of defiant shame. Firmly, she began to ask me what I had been doing.
‘I told you, nothing that matters.’
‘No,’ she said, still with energy and animation, ‘I don’t even know where you’re living. You know much more about me than I do about you.’
I told her what I was busy with. I said that I was not held any longer by the chessboard of power: I had gone as far as I intended in the official life.
‘I thought so,’ she said with pleasure, understanding my present better than my past.
‘I am not sure that it would have happened but for you.’
‘It would,’ she said. The cups of tea steamed, a cigarette end smouldered against the metal ashtray, the smell was acrid: I saw her as though the smoked glass of care had been snatched from in front of my eyes. Twenty minutes before I had been on edge lest anyone, as it might be Gilbert, should pass the window and see us sitting there. Now, although we were smiling at each other and our faces would have given us away to an acquaintance, I felt that secrets did not matter, or more exactly that no one could notice us; I had been taken by one of those states, born of understanding, desire, and joy, in which we seem to ourselves anonymous and safe. It was a state which I had seen dangerous to discreet men going through an illicit love-affair, when suddenly, in a fugue of astonished bliss, such a man can behave as if he believed himself invisible.
Her hand was on the table, and I touched her fingers. We had made love together many times, we had none of that surprise to come: but, at the touch, I shivered as though it were a complete embrace.
‘Let me talk to you,’ I said.
‘Can’t we leave it?’ she cried.
‘Can we?’
‘It’d be better to leave it, just for a while.’ She spoke in a tone I had not heard – it held both joy and fear, or something sharper than fear.
‘I used to be pretty expert at leaving things just for a while,’ I said, ‘and it wasn’t an unqualified success.’
‘We’re peaceful now,’ she broke out.
She added: ‘When a thing is said, we can’t come back where we were.’
‘I know it.’ There was a hush. I found myself trying to frame the words, just as when she first forced me on that evening years before – with an inarticulateness more tormenting to one used to being articulate, with the dumbness I only knew when I was compelled to dredge my feelings. ‘It is the same with me,’ I said at length, ‘as when I first met you.’
She did not move or utter.
‘I hope,’ I said, the words dragging out, ‘it is the same with you.’
She said: ‘You don’t hope: you know.’
The room was dark; in the street the sun had gone out. She cried – her voice was transformed, it was light with trust, sharp with the curiosity of present joy: ‘When were you certain it was the same with you?’
‘Some time ago.’
‘Was it that night at my father’s?’
‘If not before,’ I answered. ‘I’ve thought of you very much. But I was afraid my imagination might be cheating me.’
‘What time that night?’
‘I think when you were standing there, before we spoke.’
I asked: ‘When were you certain?’
‘Later.’
She added: ‘But I wanted you to come that night.’
‘If we hadn’t met again there, we should have soon,’ I said.
‘I talked about you to my father. I lied to myself, but I was trying to improve the chances of meeting you–’
‘You needn’t worry, I should have seen to it that we did.’
‘I’m not worrying,’ she said. ‘But I wanted to tell you that we’re both to blame.’
To both of us, blame seemed remote or rather inconceivable; the state of happiness suffused us with its own virtue.
We said no more except chit-chat. Yes, when she could get Helen to look after the child again, she would let me know. It was time for her to go. We went out into the street, where the light had that particular density which gives both gentleness and clarity to the faces of passers-by. The faces moved past us, softly so it seemed, as I watched Margaret put her foot on the taxi-step and she pressed my hand.
40: Happiness and Make-believe
IN the same café a week later Margaret sat opposite me, her face open and softened, as though breathing in the present moment. When I first met her I had been enraptured by her capacity for immediate joy, and so I was now. There had been none of the dead blanks of love between us, such as a man like me might have run into. Once there had been struggle, resentment, and dislike, but not the dead blank.
In the aura from the table-lamp, she was smiling. Outside the window the afternoon light was muted, so that on the pavement faces stood out with a special delicacy. She took the sight in, content and rapacious, determined to possess the moment.
‘It’s like last week,’ she cried. ‘But last week it was a few shades darker, wasn’t it?’
We had not much time. She would have to be home by six, to let her sister go. With a mixture of triumph, humility, and confusion she had told Helen that it was I she was meeting.
She was not used to lying, I thought. She had not before done anything unstraightforward or that caused her shame.
She was happy sitting there opposite me. But I knew that she was, to an extent and for the first time, making believe. What she had replied, when I had declared myself the week before, was true. As we talked, she felt a joy she could not restrain: together, we were having an intimation of a life more desirable than we had known. But I knew that for her, though not for me, it was not quite real. It was a wonderful illusion; but the reality was when she got back to her husband and the child.
In a marriage unhappier than hers, I could not forget how, returning to Sheila in the evening, I gained just one recompense, a feeling of moral calm: and I was sure that in Margaret’s own home, in a marriage which was arid but for the child, it was just that moral calm which she knew. It came upon her when she went home after our meeting, at the first sight of the child. It did not so much wipe away the thought of our meeting as make it seem still delectable but unreal.
It was that which I had to break. I did not want to: we were in a harmony that seemed outside of time: we could go on talking as though it were a conversation more serene than any the most perfect marriage could give, with no telephone bell, no child’s voice, to interrupt. But my need was too great, I could not leave it there.
Once more I was dredging for what I had to say.
‘When I told you,’ I began, ‘that it was the same with me, there is one difference.’
‘Is there?’ She said it with doubt and reluctance.
I went on: ‘In our time together you were right and I was wrong.’
‘That doesn’t matter.’
‘Yes, it does, because there is a difference now. I hope I’ve changed a little in myself, I know I’ve changed in what I want.’
Her eyes were as brilliant as when she was angry: she did not speak.
I said: ‘I want for us exactly what you always did.’
‘I never thought I should hear you say that!’
She had cried out with joy: then, in an instant, her tone was transformed.
/> ‘Other things have changed too,’ she said.
She looked straight at me, and asked: ‘Are you sure?’
In a time so short that I could not measure it, her mood had flickered as I had never seen in her, from triumphant joy to bitterness and shame, and then to concern for me.
‘No,’ she broke out, ‘I take that back, I shouldn’t have said it. Because you couldn’t have done this unless you were sure.’
‘I’m sure of what I want,’ I repeated. ‘As I say, I hope I have changed in myself, but of that I can’t be sure, it’s very hard to know what’s happening in one’s own life.’
‘That’s rather funny, from you.’ Again her mood had switched, she was smiling with affectionate sarcasm. She meant that, herself used to being in touch with her own experience, she had discovered the same in me. On the surface so unlike, at that level we were identical. Perhaps it was there, and only there, that each of us met the other half of self.
‘Once or twice,’ I said, ‘I’ve woken up and found my life taking a course I’d never bargained on. Once upon a time I thought I knew the forces behind me pretty well – but now it seems more mysterious than it used to, not less. Isn’t that so with you?’
‘It may be.’ She added: ‘If it is, it’s frightening.’
‘For me, it’s made me less willing to sit down to–’
I stumbled for a moment.
‘Sit down to what?’
‘To my own nature: or anyway the side of it which did us both such harm.’
‘It wasn’t all your doing,’ she said.
I answered: ‘No, not all. I agree, I won’t take all the responsibility, not more than I have to.’
We fell into a silence, one of those doldrums that sometimes take over in a mutual revelation, just as in a scene of violence.
She began, in a manner gentle and apparently realistic: ‘If it were possible for us to start again, you’d look very foolish, wouldn’t you? Especially to those who know our story.’
I nodded.