Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

I should have liked to avoid what was coming. Playing out time, I asked if his firm knew that he was considering another move. He gave a lofty nod.

“Are they prepared to recommend you?”

“They certainly are. I have a letter over there. Would you like to read it?”

It did not matter, I said. Mr Pateman gave me a knowing smile.

“Yes, I should expect you to read between the lines.”

I was saying something distracting, meaningless, but he was fixing me with his stare: “I want an opportunity. That’s all I’m asking for.”

I said, slowly: “I don’t know what advice I can possibly give you—”

“I wasn’t asking for advice, sir. I was asking for an opportunity.”

Even after that higgledy-piggledy life, he was undefeated. It was easy to imagine him at the doors of big houses, talking of his vacuum cleaners, impassively, imperviously, not down and out because he was certain the future must come right.

Nevertheless, I was thinking of old colleagues of mine considering him for jobs. Considering people for jobs had to be a heartless business. No man in his senses could think Mr Pateman a good risk. They mightn’t mind, or even be interested in, his odder aspects. But he carried so many signs that the least suspicious would notice — he had been restless, he had quarrelled with every boss, he had been unrealistically on the make.

Still, nowadays there was a job for anyone who could read and write. Mr Pateman was, in the mechanical sense, far from stupid. He had a good deal of energy. At his age, he would not get a better job, certainly not one much better. He might get a different one.

He was sitting with his hands on his knees, his head back, a smile as it were of approbation on his lips. He did not appear in the least uneasy that I should not find an answer. The slack fire smoked: the draught blew across the room: among the fumes I picked out the antiseptic smell which hung about him as though he had just come from hospital.

“Well, Mr Pateman,” I said. “I mustn’t raise false hopes.” I went on to say that I was out of the official life for good and all. He gazed at me with confident disbelief: to him, that was simply part of my make-believe. There were two places he might try. He could possibly get fitted up in another radio firm: I could give him the name of a personnel officer.

“Once bitten, twice shy, thank you, sir,” said Mr Pateman.

Alternatively, he might contemplate working in a government office as a temporary clerk. The pay would be a little better: the work, I warned him, would be extremely monotonous: I could tell him how to apply at the local employment exchange.

“I don’t believe in employment exchanges. I believe in going somewhere where one has contacts at the top.”

He seemed — had it been true before he met me? — to have dreamed up his own fantasy. He seemed to think that I should say one simple word to my old colleagues. I tried to explain to him that the machine did not work that way. If the Ministry of Labour took him on, they would send him wherever clerks were needed. He could tell them that he had a preference, but there was no guarantee that he would get what he wanted.

Anyone who had been asked for such a favour had to get used to the sight of disappointment — and to the different ways men took it. There were a few who, like Mr Pateman now, began to threaten.

“I must say, I was hoping for something more constructive from you,” he said.

“I am sorry.”

“I don’t like being led up the garden path.” His eyes were fixed on mine. “I was given to understand that you weren’t as hidebound as some of them.”

I said nothing.

“I shall have to consider my course of action.” He was speaking with dignity. Then he said: “I expect that you’re doing your best. You must be a busy man.”

I got up, went into the back kitchen, and shook hands with his wife. She could have overheard us throughout: she looked up at me with something like understanding.

Mr Pateman took me down to the passage (the record player was still sounding from the front room), and, at the door, threw out his hand in a stately goodbye.

OWING to the single-mindedness of Mr Pateman, I was a few minutes late for my appointment with George Passant. I arrived in the lounge of the public house where we had first drunk together when I was eighteen, nearly forty years before: the room was almost empty, for the pub was no longer fashionable at night and George himself no longer used it, except for these ritual meetings with me.

There, by the side of what used to be a coal fire and was now blocked up, he sat. He gave me a burst of greeting, a monosyllabic shout.

As I grew older, and met friends whom I had known for most of my lifetime, I often thought that I didn’t see them clearly — or rather, that I saw them with a kind of double vision, as though there were two photographs not accurately superposed. Underneath, there was not only a memory of themselves when young, but the physical presence: that lingered in one’s sight, it was never quite ripped away, one still saw them — through the intermittence of time passing — with one’s own youthful eyes. And also one saw them as they were now, in the present moment, as one was oneself.

Nowadays I met George three or four times a year, and this double vision was still working. I could still — not often, but in sharp moments — see the young man who had befriended me, set me going: whose face had been full of anger and hope, and who had walked with me through the streets outside on nights of triumph, his voice rebounding from the darkened houses.

But, more than in any other friend, the present was here too. There he sat in the pub. His face was in front of me, greeting me with formal welcome. It was the face of an old, sick man.

Not that he was unhappy. On the contrary, he had been happier than most men all his life, and had stayed so. Not that he behaved as though he were ill. On the contrary, he behaved as though he were immortal. If I had been studying him for the first time, I should have been doubtful about guessing his age. His fair hair was still thick, and had whitened only over his ears, though it was wild and disarranged, for his whole appearance was dilapidated. His face was lined, but almost at random, so that he had no look of mature age. His mouth often fell open, and his eyes became unfocused.

He was actually sixty-three. I had tried to get him to discuss his health, but he turned vague, sometimes, it seemed to me, with a deliberate cunning. He spoke casually about his blood pressure and some pills he had to take. He admitted that his doctor, whose name he wouldn’t tell me, had put him on a diet. From what I noticed, he didn’t even pretend to keep to it. He still ate gargantuan meals, somehow proud of his self-indulgence, topping off — in a fashion which once had been comic but was now frightening — a meal larger than most of us ate in two days with four or five cream cakes. He drank as much, or more, than ever. He had always been heavy, but now was fat from his upper chest down to his groin. He must have weighed fifteen stone.

None of that had interfered with his desire for women. I had an uncomfortable suspicion that, as he grew old, he wanted younger girls: but, with the same elderly cunning with which he dissimulated his health, he had long ago concealed those details from me. I knew that his firm of solicitors had pensioned him off a couple of years before. Once again, he was vague in telling me the reasons. It might have been that his concentration had gone, as his body deteriorated. It might have been that what he called his “private life”, that underground group activity by which he had once started out to emancipate us all, had become notorious. And yet, in this middle-sized town, none of the members of the Court that morning would have been likely even to have heard his name.