by C. P. Snow
‘It would seem inconceivably foolish at the best,’ she said.
‘They’d have a certain justice,’ I replied.
‘You haven’t had much practice at looking foolish, have you? Have you begun to imagine how humiliating it would be? Particularly when people think you’re so wise and stable?’
‘I can ride that,’ I said.
‘It might not be so nice.’
She went on: ‘Those who love you would blame poor Sheila – and those who don’t would say there’d always been something wrong with you and now you’ve come out into the open and shown it.’
‘One’s enemies are often righter than one’s friends.’
‘They’re not. That’s the sort of remark that sounds deep and is really very shoddy.’ She said it with love.
The café was emptying, our time was running out. She said, in a sharp, grave tone: ‘But what they would think of you, perhaps you’re right, that’s not the real point. The real point is, you’ve not had much practice at behaving badly, have you?’
I said: ‘I’ve done bad things.’
‘Not like what this would be.’
‘The way I behaved to you before,’ I said, ‘was worse than anything I have to do now.’
‘This way,’ she said, ‘you know what you would be asking me to do.’ She meant – do harm to others, act against her nature and beliefs.
‘Do you think I haven’t faced that?’
She said: ‘I was not absolutely sure.’
Yet, though she seemed to be speaking realistically, there was a haze of happiness round her, and me also. Incongruously I recalled the night when Lufkin, at the height of his power, indulged a romantic dream of retiring to Monaco. She too was speaking of a future that in her heart she did not expect to see. Usually her spirit was nakeder than mine: for once it was the other way about. Her face, her skin, her eyes were happy: yet she was levitated with something like the happiness of a dream.
I did not doubt that, in my absence, she would have to listen again to what I had said.
Once more she spoke gently, reasonably, intimately.
‘If we could make a new start, I should be afraid for you.’
‘I need it–’
‘You’d know,’ she said, ‘you’ve just said you know, what it would mean for me to come to you. You’d be committed more than anyone ought to be. If things ever went wrong, and it might be harder for you day by day than you could possibly foresee, then I’m afraid you’d feel obliged to endure forever.’
‘You can’t be much afraid,’ I said.
‘I should be, a little.’
She could keep her words honest, so could I – while, with the lamp on the table between us, our hopes were expanding, sweeping us with them into a gigantic space of well-being. Our hopes no longer had any connexion with the honest, doubting words we said.
41: End of an Epoch
AFTER that second meeting, and before we could contrive another, a chance to be unclandestine came along, for we were invited to the same wedding-party. In itself, the occasion would have been startling enough: when I saw the invitation I felt fooled. The party was to announce the marriage that had taken place, weeks before, in secret – the marriage of Gilbert Cooke and Betty Vane.
As I walked along the river to the house they had borrowed for the night, a house near Whistler’s, which in those years had become just a place to be hired, I was both elated, because of Margaret, and faintly sad, self-indulgently in tune with the autumn night. It was drizzling and warm, the leaves slippery on the pavement, the smell of must all round; it was an autumn night which held more sensual promise than the spring.
I was not thinking much about Betty and Gilbert. When I first heard the news I had been piqued because she had not confided in me. Maybe she had, it occurred to me, a year or more ago: more likely than not, this was what she meant by her chance to settle down. Should I have told her that I did not believe the marriage could work? She was so shrewd, she would know what I felt without my saying it. I knew too well, however, that the shrewd and clear-sighted, if they are unhappy and unsettled and lonely enough, as she was, can delude themselves at least as much as, perhaps more than, less worldly people.
Yet, as I went towards the party, the lights from the windows shimmering out into the drizzle, I was aware of other thoughts drifting through my mind, as though this marriage were an oddly final thing. For me it seemed to call out time, it was the end of an epoch. I had known them each so long, Betty for nearly twenty years. We had seen in each other youth passing, causes dribbling out, hopes cutting themselves down to fit our fates: our lives had interleaved, we had seen each other in the resilience of youth’s flesh, on and off for years we had, in the other’s trouble, helped pick up the pieces. Now we saw each other when the covers and disguises were melting away, when the bones of our nature were at last showing through.
Our life of the thirties, our wartime life, was over now. Somehow the gong sounded, the door clanged to, more decisively through her marriage than through any fatality to those who touched me to the roots – through her, who was just a comrade, someone I had been fond of without fuss.
In the house, the first person I recognized was old Bevill, drinking a glass of champagne at the bottom of the stairs and talking to a pretty girl. The downstairs rooms were already full of people, and I had to push my way upstairs to reach the main origin of noise. As I passed him, Bevill told me that Gilbert and his wife were ‘up above’. He said: ‘I always wondered when our friend would succumb. Do you know, Lewis, I’ve been married forty-eight years. It makes you think.’
The old man was radiant with champagne and the company of the young. He began to tell us the story about Betty Vane’s father – ‘We were at school together, of course. We never thought he’d come into the title, because there was that cousin of his who went off his head and stayed off his head for thirty years. So it didn’t look much of a cop for Percy Vane. We didn’t call him Percy, though, we called him Chinaman Vane – though I haven’t the faintest idea why, he didn’t look like a Chinaman, whatever else they could say about him.’
This incongruity struck Bevill as remarkably funny, and his bald head flushed with his chortles: he was content to stand in the hall without inserting himself into the grander circles of the party. But there were others who were not: the main room upstairs was packed with immiscible groups, for Gilbert and Betty had invited guests from all the strata they had lived among. There was Lord Lufkin and some of his court, from Gilbert’s business past: acquaintances from Chelsea before the war, the radicals, the ill-fitting, the lumpen-bourgeoisie.
There were a good many Civil Servants, among them Hector Rose, for once at a disadvantage, abnormally uncomfortable and effusively polite, detesting the sight of any society except in the office and the club. There was George Passant, moving about alone, with that expression unfocused, reverie-laden, absently smiling, which at this time more and more came over him in the proximity of women. There were Gilbert’s relatives, many of them soldiers, small-headed, thin, gravel-voiced. There were Betty’s, the younger women talking in the curious distorted Cockney of their generation of the upper-class, huddled together like a knot of scientists at the British Association anxious not to be interrupted by camp-followers.
In all those faces there was only one I looked for. Soon I discovered her, listening but not participating at the edge of a large circle, her eyes restlessly looking out for me. As at her father’s, we met alone in the crowd.
‘That’s better,’ she said.
‘I wish I could have brought you,’ I said.
‘I was touching wood, I didn’t like to ask for you.’
She was excited; as she lit a cigarette, there was a tremor in her fingers.
‘Who have you been talking to?’
‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that.’ She was laughing, not only with excitement, but at herself. Even now that she was grown-up, she was still shy. If this had been an ordinary party, no
t a cover for the two of us to meet, she would still have had to brace herself to cope: though, when once she had started, she revelled in it.
‘We’re here, anyway, and that’s lucky,’ I said.
‘It is lucky,’ she replied with an active restless smile.
I was just telling her that soon we could slip away downstairs and talk, when Betty herself joined us.
‘Lewis, my dear. Won’t you wish me luck?’
She held out her arms, and I kissed her cheek. Then, bright-eyed, she glanced at Margaret.
‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ said Betty.
‘You have,’ I was putting in, when Betty went on: ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but will you tell me who you are?’
It sounded at best forgetful, it sounded also rude, for Betty’s manner to a stranger was staccato and brusque. Yet she was the least arrogant of women, and I was at the same time astonished by her and upset to see Margaret wilt.
‘My name,’ she said, with her chin sunk down, ‘is Margaret Hollis.’
‘Oh, now I know,’ cried Betty. ‘You used to be Margaret Davidson, didn’t you?’
Margaret nodded.
‘I’ve heard my husband talk about you.’
With the same heartiness, the same apparent lack of perception, Betty went on with meaningless gossip, not caring that Margaret and I were looking strained. Yes, her husband Gilbert was a friend of Margaret’s sister Helen, wasn’t he? Yes, Gilbert had spoken about Helen’s husband. At last Betty broke off, saying to Margaret: ‘Look, there are some people here who I want you to meet. I’ll take you along straightaway.’
Margaret was led off. I had to let her go, without protecting her. It was a bitterness, known only to those in illicit love, not to be able to be spontaneous. I was reckoning how much time I had to allow before I could take her away.
Meanwhile, myself at a loss, I looked round. Gilbert, high-coloured, was surveying his guests with bold, inquisitive eyes. They were the collection of acquaintances of half-a-lifetime; I expected his detective work was still churning on; but I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.
So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered, and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of scepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except for catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by Civil Service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were now as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese Court. And I did not believe that I was seduced by literary resonances when I imagined that Betty Vane’s and Thomas Bevill’s relatives were behaving like Guermantes.
Just as the men of affairs had fractionated themselves into a group with its own rules and its own New Year’s Day rewards, just as the arts were, without knowing it, drifting into invisible academies, so the aristocrats, as they lost their power and turned into ornaments, shut themselves up and exaggerated their distinguishing marks in a way that to old Bevill, who was grander than any of them, seemed rank bad manners, and what was worse, impolitic. But old Bevill belonged to a generation where the aristocracy still kept some function and so was unselfconscious: in his time it was far more casual, for example, where you went to school; when he told his anecdote about Percy Vane, the school they were both attending was not Eton; yet it was to Eton, without one single exception in the families I knew, that they sent their sons, with the disciplined conformity of a defiant class. With the same conformity, those families were no longer throwing up the rebels that I had been friendly with as a young man; Betty Vane and Gilbert Cooke had no successors.
Looking round their wedding party, I could not shake off a cliché of those years, this was the end of an epoch; I should have liked the company of those who could see one beginning.
A twitch at my arm, and Betty was glancing up at me.
‘All right?’ she said.
‘Are you?’ Angrily, I wanted to ask why she had been rude to Margaret: but once more I had to calculate.
‘Yes, my dear.’
‘I never thought of this happening to you.’
‘I can manage it,’ she said. It was not just her courage and high spirits: she meant it.
She broke off sharp: ‘I’m sorry I had to cart her off. But people were watching you.’
‘Does that matter?’ I replied blank-faced.
‘You ought to know.’
‘What do you expect me to know?’
‘So long as you realize that people were watching you.’
‘I see.’
‘That’s all I can do for you now,’ said Betty.
She was, of course, warning me about her husband. It removed my last doubt that she might not know him right through, and on her account I was relieved. She was too loyal to say more, perhaps this was the one crack in her loyalty I should ever see, and she only revealed it because she thought I was running into danger. She had done me so many good turns; I was touched by this last one.
And yet, I could not be sure why she had been so uncivil to Margaret. It had not been necessary, not even as a ruse. At their only other encounter, she had thought Margaret rude: was she getting her own back? Or had she genuinely forgotten Margaret’s face? No one had indulged less in petty spite – just for a second, had she been doing so?
Just as I had got out of the room, on the balcony on my way downstairs to Margaret, someone intercepted me. For minutes I was pegged there, the glasses tinkling on the trays as they were carried past, the noise climbing in amplitude and pitch, Gilbert leaning from the door and taking note.
Over the banisters, when I broke away, I saw Margaret standing about down below.
‘I feel a bit badgered,’ I said as soon as I reached her, all tension leaving me.
‘So do I.’
‘Still, we’re here, and it’s worth it.’
She called out my name, quietly but with all her force, more of an endearment than any could be. Her expression was brilliant, and until she spoke again I totally misread it.
‘Isn’t it?’ I cried.
In the same quiet and passionate tone, she said: ‘We’re deceiving ourselves, aren’t we?’
‘About what?’
‘About us.’
‘I’ve never been so sure,’ I said.
‘It’s too late. Haven’t we known all along it’s too late?’
‘I haven’t.’
‘I’m just not strong enough,’ she said. I had never known her ask for pity before.
‘You will be,’ I said, but I had lost my nerve.
‘No. It’s too late. I knew it, tonight. I knew it,’ she said.
‘We can’t decide anything now.’ I wanted to soothe her.
‘There’s nothing to decide.’ She used my name again, as though that was all she could tell me.
‘There will be.’
‘No, it’s too hard for me.’
‘Come out with me–’
‘No. Please get me a taxi and let me go home.’
‘We shall have to forget all this.’
For an instant I hear
d my voice hard.
‘There’s no future in it,’ she cried, using the slang flatly instead of her own words. ‘Let me go home.’
‘I shall speak to you tomorrow.’
‘It will be cruel if you do.’
Guests were passing us on their way out, and looking at her, knowing that she was near breaking-point, I could do nothing. I called out to the porter and asked him to find a cab. She thanked me, almost effusively, but I shook my head, my eyes still on her, trying to make my own choice, trying not to be crippled by the habits of defeat, the recurrent situations, the deepest traps within me.
42: Apparent Choice
LISTENING the next afternoon to George Passant talking of his future, I said nothing of mine. For months, almost for years, since my resolve about Margaret began to form, I had not hinted even at a hope, except to her; but it was not only secretiveness that kept me reticent with George, it was something like superstition. For I had telephoned Margaret that morning, insisting that we should meet and talk it out, and she had given way.
‘Assuming that I’m kept in this department, which I take it is reasonable, then I may as well plan on living in London for the rest of my life,’ said George.
His interview was arranged for a fortnight hence; and George, with the optimism which he had preserved undented from his youth, through ill-luck and worse than ill-luck, took the result for granted.
‘I haven’t any idea,’ I said – it was true, but I could not help being alarmed by George’s hubris – ‘what Rose intends to do about you.’
‘Whatever we think of Rose,’ George replied comfortably, ‘we have to admit that he’s a highly competent man.’
‘His personal choices are sometimes odd.’
‘I should have said,’ George was unaffected, ‘that he paid some attention to justice.’
‘I don’t deny that,’ I said. ‘But–’
‘In that case we’re reasonably entitled to consider that he’s pretty well informed of what I’ve done here.’
‘Within limits that’s probably so.’