by C. P. Snow
As the nurse gave him to Margaret his head inclined to her, and I saw his side-face, suddenly transfigured into a cartoon of an adult’s, determined, apprehensive. Grasping him, Margaret looked at him with an expression that was no longer youthful, that held responsibility and care, as though the spontaneous joy with which she had spoken about him had been swallowed up in pity.
I stood and watched her holding the child. Partly I felt I could not get used to it, it was too much for me, it had been too quick, this was only a scene of which I was a spectator. Partly I felt a tug at the fibres, as though I were being called on in a way I did not understand; as though what had entered into me could not yet translate itself into an emotion, into terms of anything I could recognize and feel.
49: A Child Looking at the Moon
WHEN, fifteen months after the child’s birth, I received a letter from Mrs Knight saying that her husband had been very ill and wished to see me, I did not think twice before going. They were staying, so she told me in the letter, at Brown’s Hotel – ‘so as to get him to the seaside by easy stages. Of course, he has such a sense of duty, he says he must get back to his parish work. But I trust you not to encourage him in this. He is not to think of returning to the Vicarage until the summer.’
Apparently he was not to think of retiring either, it occurred to me, though by this time he was nearly seventy: they had never needed the stipend, it was negligible beside her income: but that did not prevent Mr Knight from clinging on to it. As for his cure of souls, for years he had found that his ill-health got worse when confronted with most of his daily tasks, except those, such as preaching and giving advice, which he happened to enjoy.
When I first caught sight of him in the hotel that afternoon he looked neither specially old nor ill, although he was lying stretched out on his bed and only whispered a greeting. Mrs Knight plunged straight into the drama of his illness. They were doing themselves well, I noticed: they had taken a suite, and I walked through a sitting-room lavish with flowers on the way to their bedroom. By Mr Knight’s bed stood grapes, books, medicine bottles, and tubes of drugs: by Mrs Knight’s stood magazines, a box of chocolates, a bottle of whisky and a syphon of soda. It had an air of subfusc comfort, of indulgences no longer denied, that I had seen before in elderly couples travelling.
Mrs Knight sat on her bed, describing her husband’s symptoms: in a dressing-gown, his coat and collar off, Mr Knight lay on his, his eyes closed, his clever petulant mouth pulled down; he lay on his back, his legs relaxed, like a figure on a tomb or one in a not disagreeable state of hebephrenia.
According to Mrs Knight’s account, he had for a long time past been starting up in the middle of the night with his heart racing.
‘I take his pulse, of course,’ she said energetically to me. ‘Ninety! A hundred! Sometimes more!
‘I decided,’ she looked at me with her active innocent eyes, ‘that I ought to keep a diary of his health. I thought it would help the doctors.’ She showed me a quarto day-book, two days to the page, and in it some of the entries in her large hand…
‘L woke up as usual: pulse 104. Quietened down to 85 in twenty minutes…’ ‘Better day. I got his heart steady for twenty-four hours…’
It sounded to me like the physical condition of a highly strung and hyperaesthetic man, but it would not have been profitable to tell Mrs Knight so. Apart from ‘good afternoon’, she had said nothing to me since I arrived that did not concern her husband’s health.
‘It was always the same, though,’ she cried. ‘We couldn’t stop it! Him waking up in the middle of the night with his heart pounding away like this–’
Sitting on the bed she moved both her thick, muscular arms up and down, the palms of her hands facing the floor, at the rate of hundreds a minute. For the first time, the silent figure on the other bed joined in: Mr Knight used one arm, not two, and without opening his eyes flapped a hand to indicate the rapid heart-beats, but not so quickly as his wife, not in time.
‘And I couldn’t get him to be examined properly,’ she said. ‘He’s always been frightened of his blood pressure, of course. He wouldn’t let the doctors take it. Once I thought I had persuaded him to, but just as the doctor was putting the bandage round his arm he shouted “Take it away! Take it away!”’
Mr Knight lay absolutely still.
‘Then one night three months ago, it was in September because he was just thinking about his harvest thanksgiving sermon, it was a nice warm night and he’d had a couple of glasses of wine with his dinner, I woke up and I didn’t hear him at all, but I knew he was awake. As a rule, of course, he calls out to me, and I knew – it was just like second sight – I knew there was something wrong because he didn’t call out. Then I heard him say, quite quietly, just as though he were asking me for a glass of water: “Darling, I think I’m going.”’
A sigh came from the other bed.
‘I didn’t say “I think I’m going”,’ came a whisper from Mr Knight. ‘I said “Darling, I think I’m dying”.’
Still good-tempered, still urgent, Mrs Knight accepted the correction: she told me of the visit of the doctor, of his opinions, encouragements, and warnings, her own activity, Mr Knight’s behaviour. Oddly enough, despite her hero-worship of her husband, her narrative was strictly factual, and pictured him as comporting himself with stoicism perceptably less than average. After his one protest he did not object or open his eyes again, until at last he said, faintly but firmly: ‘Darling, I should like to talk to Lewis just for a little while.’
‘As long as it doesn’t tire you.’
‘I don’t think it need tire me, if we’re careful,’ said Mr Knight – with a concern that equalled hers.
‘Perhaps it won’t be too much for you,’ she said. ‘Anyway I shan’t be far away.’
With injunctions to me, she removed herself to the sitting-room: but she did not go out of sight, she left the door open and watched as though she were a policeman invigilating an interview in gaol. Very painstakingly Mr Knight hitched his head higher upon the pillow; his eyes were no longer shut, he appeared to be staring out of the window, but he gave me an oblique glance that was, just as I remembered it, shrewd, malicious, and sharp with concealed purpose.
‘I don’t receive much news nowadays, naturally, Lewis, but all I hear of you suggests that you’re prospering.’
He began again, just as I remembered, some distance from the point; I was ready for him to weave deviously until his opening came. ‘Should you say that, allowing for the uncertainties of life and not claiming too much, that that was true?’
‘In many ways it is.’
‘I am glad for you, I am glad.’
In part, I thought, he meant it; he had always had an affection for me. Then, probing again, he said: ‘In many ways?’
‘In more than I reckoned on.’
‘There is bound to be much that you and I find difficulty in asking each other, for reasons that would distress us both to think of, and yet I should like to think that you perhaps have known what it is to have the gift of a happy marriage?’
I was sure that this was not the point he was winding towards. He asked it quite gently, and in the same tone I said yes, I was coming to know it.
‘It is the only good fortune I’ve been given, but I’ve been given it more completely than most men,’ said Mr Knight. ‘And if you will let me tell you, Lewis, there is nothing to compare with it.’
He was whispering, his wife could not hear: but again, singular as it might have seemed to a spectator, he meant it. He went on: ‘I seem to remember, forgive my meanderings if I am wrong, that I caught sight of the announcement of a birth in The Times – or the Telegraph, was it? Or perhaps both? – that somehow I connected with your name. Could that possibly be so?’
I said yes.
‘I seem to remember, though again you must forgive any mistakes I make, it was of the male sex?’
I said yes.
‘It seems to come back to me that you ann
ounced his names as Charles George Austin. Somehow, not knowing anything of your recent adventures, of course, I connected the name George with that eccentric figure Passant, whom I recalled as being an associate of yours in the days that I first heard about you.’
Yes, I said, we had called him after George Passant.
‘Not bad,’ Mr Knight gave a satisfied smile, ‘for an old man in a country vicarage, long out of touch with all of you and the world.’
But he was still skirmishing, right away from his point of attack. He went on: ‘I hope your boy gives you cause to be proud of him. You may be one of those parents whose children bring them happiness.’
Then he changed direction again. He said, in a light, reflective tone: ‘Sometimes, when I’ve heard mention of an achievement of yours, I go back to those days when you first came into my house, should you say that’s because I’ve had nothing to occupy me? Does it occur to you that it was a quarter of a century ago? And sometimes, with all respect to your achievements and acknowledgement of the position you’ve secured for yourself, I find myself wondering, Lewis, whether all that time ago you did not contemplate even more of the world’s baubles than – well, than have actually accrued to you. Because at that age there was a formidable power within you. Of course I know we all have to compound with our destinies. But still, I sometimes felt there might have been hours when you have looked at yourself and thought, well, it could have gone worse, but nevertheless it hasn’t gone perfectly, there have been some disappointments one didn’t expect.’
I was wondering: was this it? I replied: ‘Yes. At that age I should have expected to cut more of a figure by now.’
‘Of course,’ Mr Knight was reflecting, ‘you’ve carried a heavy private load so much of your life. And I suppose, if you’d been going to take a second wind and really go to the top, you wouldn’t at your present age have readjusted yourself to a wife and child.’
Was this it? Had he got me there simply to remind me that my public career had not been wonderful?
If so, I could bear it, more easily than he imagined. But somehow I thought he was still fencing. It was just that at seventy, believing himself ill, taking such care of his life that he had no pleasure left, he nevertheless could not resist, any more than in the past, tapping the barometer of an acquaintance’s worldly situation. And he was, also as in the past, just as good at it as Rose or Lufkin. He had never been outside his parish, he had been too proud and vain to compete, but at predicting careers he was as accurate as those two masters of the power-ladder.
Curiously, when any of the three of them made mistakes, it was the same type of mistake. They all tended to write men off too quickly: they said, with a knell not disagreeable to themselves, he’s finished, and so far as his climbing the ladder in front of him went, they were nearly always right. But they forgot, or undervalued, how resilient human beings were. Herbert Getliffe would never be a judge: Gilbert Cooke would never be more than an assistant secretary: George Passant would stay as a managing clerk at eight or nine hundred a year until he retired: but each of them had reserves of libido left. They were capable of breaking out in a new place: it was not so certain as the prognosticians thought that we had heard the last of them.
‘Should you say,’ Mr Knight continued to delve, ‘we are likely to hear more of you in high affairs?’
‘Less rather than more,’ I said.
His lids drooped down, his expression had saddened.
‘Perhaps,’ he said, ‘if it hadn’t been for my daughter, you would have got a better start.’
‘It would have made no difference in the end,’ I replied.
‘I can’t help thinking how you must have been held back.’
‘In the long run, I should have done much the same,’ I said.
Just for an instant he turned his head and looked at me with eyes wide open.
‘I think of her and ask myself about her,’ he said. ‘And I’ve wondered if you do also.’
At last. This was the point. Now he had led up to it, it turned out not to be a dig at me.
‘I have done often,’ I said.
‘I know you ask yourself what you did wrong, and how you ought to have helped her.’
I nodded.
‘But you’re not to blame, I can’t put the blame on you. Time after time I’ve gone over things she said to me, and how she looked when she was a girl. She had become strange before ever you met her or she brought you to my house.’
He was speaking more directly than I had heard him speak.
‘I keep asking myself, what I should have done for her. I suppose I pretended to myself that she was not so very strange. But I don’t know to this day what I should have done. As a very little girl she was remote from either of us. When I told her she was pretty, she shrank away from me. I remember her doing that when she was six or seven. I was very proud of her, and I used to enjoy saying she was beautiful. I can see her eyes on me now, praying that I should stop. I don’t know what I should have done. I ought to have found some way to reach her, but I never could.’
He added: ‘I ought to have helped her, but I never could. I believe now I did her more harm than good.’
He asked: ‘What could I have done?’
Just then Mrs Knight came bustling out of the sitting-room, scolding him because he was tiring himself, indicating to me that it was time I left him to rest.
In an instant the veil of self-concern came over Mr Knight.
‘Perhaps I have talked too much,’ he said. ‘Perhaps I have.’
On my way home across the edge of the park I was moved because I had seen Mr Knight, the most hypochondriacal and selfish of men, bare a sorrow. How genuine was it? In the past his behaviour had baffled me often, and it had that afternoon. Yet I thought his sorrow lived with him enough so that he had to summon me to listen to it. I found myself sorry for him. It was the heaviest feeling I took away with me, although, when his invitation came and I knew that I should be reminded of Sheila, I had not been certain how much it would disturb me.
It seemed that I might feel the same pain as that which seized me the night I caught sight of R S Robinson at the party. But in fact I had felt it not at all, or very little.
Talking to her father, I had thought of Sheila with pity and love: but the aura which had surrounded her in my imagination, which had survived her death and lasted into the first years with Margaret, had gone altogether now. Once her flesh had seemed unlike any other’s, as though it had the magic of someone different in kind. Now I thought of her physically with pity and love, as though her body was alive but had aged as ours had aged, as though I wished she were comfortable but found that even my curiosity about her had quite gone.
When I arrived, Margaret was in the nursery playing with the children. I did not talk to her about the Knights at once, although she detected at a glance that I was content. We did not speak intimately in front of Maurice because anxiously, almost obsessively, she planned to keep him from jealousy. Her nerves were often on the stretch for him; she not only loved him, but could not shut out warning thoughts about him.
That afternoon, we both paid him attention before I spoke to Charles. Maurice was sitting at a little table with a set of bricks and steel rods. He was now five and had lost none of the beauty he showed when I first saw him. By what seemed an irony, he had shown no perceptible jealousy of his half-brother. His temper, which had been violent in infancy, had grown neither better nor worse. Whenever he was placid a load lifted from Margaret’s brow; that afternoon, he was building with a mechanic’s interest, and in peace. We turned to Charles, lifted him from his pen, and let him run between us.
Looking at him, I was suffused with pleasure, pleasure unqualified. In the days when Margaret and I first lay together watching the firelight on the ceiling, I thought that I had not known before the sweetness of life, and that here it was. Here it was also, as I looked at the little boy. He had learned to walk, but although he was laughing, he would not move until we
were both in place; he beamed, he was jolly, but he was also sharp-eyed and cautious. Rotating an arm, head back, he ran, trusting us at last.
He had none of Maurice’s beauty. His face was shield-shaped, plain and bright: he had eyes of the hard strong blue common in my family. A few minutes later, when Maurice had gone into another room, Margaret touched my arm and pointed – the child’s eyes were concentrated and had gone darker, he was staring out of the window where the moon had come up among a lattice of winter trees. He kept reiterating a sound which meant ‘light’, he was concentrated to the depth of his fibres.
It was then, in happiness, that I reported to Margaret how Mr Knight had pointed out the extent to which I had failed to live up to my promise, and the number of disappointments I had known.
‘He doesn’t know much about you now,’ she cried.
‘He knows something,’ I said.
‘What did you say?’
‘I said there was a good deal in it.’
She read my expression and smiled, happy herself.
I added: ‘I didn’t tell him what I might have done – that I think I could accept most miseries now, except–’ I was watching the child – ‘except anything going wrong with him.’
She began to speak and stopped. Her face was swept clean of happiness: she was regarding me protectively, but also with something that looked like fright.