Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“I think she is,” she said, with what seemed a meaningless edge of doubt.

Could I have a word with her? George was a lifelong friend; by a coincidence, I should be meeting him in half-an-hour. It was not such a coincidence, though I didn’t tell her so.

Kitty did some more shuffling, then said: “I’ll see if she can come.”

In the time Kitty was out of the room, Mr Pateman had returned to the “diabolical” results of administrative decisions. Then the two young women returned, Cora first. She was tallish, with blunt heavy features, short straight hair; under a plain straight-hanging dress, she was strong-shouldered and stoutly built. I couldn’t see much look of the Passant family, except perhaps a general thick-boned Nordic air. I said that I knew her uncle. She gave an abrupt yes. I said I owed him a lot. She said: “I like George.”

There were a few more words spoken, not many. She volunteered that she didn’t see George much, nowadays. She said to Kitty: “We ought to go and clear things up. The room’s in a mess.”

As they went out, I did not anticipate seeing them again. More people evanescing: it had been the condition of that day. By the side of the two Pateman males, those self-bound men, the girls didn’t make demands on one, not even on one’s attention. True, I felt cold and shut in: but then, the little room was cold and shut in. It was a relief that it was not now so full of people. This “simple home”, as Mr Pateman called it, in one of his protests about Dick’s contribution, pressed upon me. I was growing to dislike the sharp and inescapable smell, strong in the little room, strongest near to Mr Pateman himself. I had now isolated it in my nostrils, though I did not know the explanation, as a brand of disinfectant.

Mrs Pateman was clearing away the tea, Dick — whose manners could not have been regarded as over-elaborate — had gone out, shortly after the girls, and without a word. It was still early, but I could decently leave; I was anticipating the free air outside, when Mr Pateman confronted me with a satisfied smile and said: “Now, we can talk a little business, can’t we?”

Immediately I took it for granted that he was, at last, going to speak seriously about his son. That made me more friendly: I settled in my chair, ready to respond.

“I’m not very happy about things,” he said.

I began to reply, the best practical step was to find Dick a place elsewhere–

He stopped me. “Oh no. I wasn’t thinking about him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He’ll be all right,” said Mr Pateman. “I’ve done my best for my family and I don’t mind saying, no one could have done more.”

He looked at me, as usual so straight in the eye that I wanted to duck. He wasn’t challenging me, he was too confident for that.

“No,” he went on, “I’m not very happy about my position.”

So that was it. That was why I had been invited, or enticed, to the house that evening.

“Do you realise,” he asked, “that those two young people in the next room are both bringing in more than I am?”

I asked what he was doing. Cashier, he said, in one of the hosiery firms, a small one. Curiously enough, that was a similar job to my father’s, years before. The young women? Secretaries. Fifteen or sixteen pounds a week each, I guessed?

“You’re not far off. It’s a lot of money at twenty-two or three.”

Mr Pateman did not appear to have the same appreciation of the falling value of money as my father, that unexpected financial adviser. But I happened to know the economics of this kind of household, through a wartime personal assistant of mine and her young man. Though Mr Pateman could not realise it, that acquaintanceship, in which I hadn’t behaved with much loyalty, made me more long-suffering towards him and his family now.

“How much are they paying you for their room?” I said.

“If you don’t mind,” Mr Pateman answered, throwing his head back, “we’ll keep our purses to ourselves.”

Anyway, I was thinking, he couldn’t extract a big amount from them — even though, as I now suspected, he was something of a miser, a miser in the old-fashioned technical sense. I had been watching his negotiations with the tea table food. Between them, the two young women must have money to spend: they could run a car: it was strangely different from my own youth in this town, or the youth of my friends.

“My position isn’t right,” said Mr Pateman. “I tell you, it isn’t right.” It was true to this extent, that a middle-aged man in a clerical job might be earning less than a trained girl.

“All I need,” he went on, “is an opportunity.”

I had to hear him out.

“What have you got to offer?”

“If I get an opportunity,” he said, with supreme satisfaction, “I’ll show them what I’ve got to offer.”

I said, he had better tell me about his career. How old was he? Fifty last birthday.

“I must say,” I told him, “I should have thought you were younger.”

“Some people,” said Mr Pateman, “know how to look after themselves.”

Born in Walsall. His parents hadn’t been “too well endowed with this world’s goods” (they had kept a small shop). They had managed to send him to a grammar school. He had stayed on after sixteen: the intention was that he should one day go to a teachers’ training college.

“But you didn’t?”

“Why not?”

A very slight pause. Then Mr Pateman said defiantly: “Ah, thereby hangs a tale.”

For the first time that evening, he was dissatisfied with his account of himself. I wondered how often I had heard a voice change in the middle of a life story. A platitude or a piece of jargon suddenly rang out. It meant that something had gone wrong. His “tale” seemed to be that he wanted to make money quick. He had had what he called a “brainwave”. At twenty he had become attached to a second-hand-car firm, which promptly failed.

“Why did it fail?”

“It isn’t everyone who is fortunate enough to have capital, you know.”

Then he had become a clerk in an insurance office in Preston.

“You may be thinking I’ve had too many posts. I was always looking for the right one.”

He had got married (“I’m a great believer in taking on one’s responsibilities early”). Unfit for military service. Both children born during the war.

Another brainwave, making radio sets.

“My ship didn’t come home that time either,” said Mr Pateman.

“What happened?”

“Differences of opinion.” He swept his arm. “You know what it is, when the people in command don’t give a man his head.”

“What would you have done if they had given you your head?”

“They never intended to. They asked me there on false pretences. My schemes never got beyond the blueprint stage.”

A new venture — this time in patent medicines. It looked as though all was well.

“Then we met a very cold wind. And I don’t want to accuse anyone, but my partner came better than I did out of the financial settlement.”

By that time, in his early forties, he had lived in a dozen towns and never made more, I guessed, than a few hundred a year. He descended further, and for eighteen months was trying to sell vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He brought it out quite honestly, but as though with stupefaction that this should have happened to him. Then — what he admitted, with a superior smile, had seemed like a piece of luck. An acquaintance from his radio days had introduced him to his present firm. He had moved to the town, and this house, five years before. It was his longest continuous job since his young manhood.

“And I’m still getting less than my own daughter. It isn’t right. It can’t be right.”