Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

He kept his strange diffident sweetness. When he forced himself, his mind became precise. He liked seeing me. Yet, I had to admit it (it was an admission that for years I had shut out), he had become quite remote. Whenever we met, he asked the same set of hearty mechanical questions, as he did that night. How was Margaret? Well, I said. Splendid, said George. Was I writing? Yes, I said. Splendid, said George. How was Charles? Getting on fine, I said. Here the formula took a different course. “I’m not concerned about his academic prospects. I take those for granted,” said George. “I’m asking you about his health.”

“He’s very tough,” I said.

“I hope you’re certain about that,” said George, as though he were a family doctor or the best-qualified censor of physical self-discipline.

“He’s fine.”

“Well, that’s slightly reassuring,” said George. “It’s his health that I want to be convinced about, that’s the important thing.”

That conversation, in very much the same words, took place each time we met. It expressed a kind of formalised affection. But it had set in a groove something like ten years before. So far as there was meaning in the questions about Charles, they referred to the fact that he had been seriously ill in infancy. Since then he had been as healthy as a boy could be: but George, who wanted to show his interest, couldn’t find an interest in anything that had happened to him since.

“Drink up!” cried George. I had another pint of beer, which, except with him, I never drank.

I should have liked (I had enough nostalgia for that) to settle down to talk. I mentioned my singular experience with Mr Pateman. George, happy with some internal reverie, gave a loud but inattentive laugh. I said that I had, for a moment or two, come across his niece. At that he showed some response, as though breaking through the daydream which submerged him.

“I’m afraid I haven’t been able to see much of my family,” he said.

I understood his language too well to ask why not. There were esoteric reasons manifest to him, though to no one else. In fact, he had had three sisters: all had married, and one, Cora’s mother, was now dead. Another one was living in London, and the third stayed in the town. All three of them had borne nothing but daughters; I had met none of George’s nieces until that afternoon, and he himself seldom referred to them.

“This one (Cora) seems to be pretty bright,” he said. “She even tagged along with some of my people not so long ago—”

“My people” were the successors to the group of which, in my time, he had been the leader and inspirer. All the years since he had been surrounded by young men and women, his own self-perpetuating underground.

“What happened?”

“Oh, somehow she seemed to lose touch.” He went on: “I’ve never enquired into the lives of any of my family. And I’ve never told them anything about my own.”

He said that with the simplicity of Einstein stating that “puritanical reticence” was necessary for a searcher after truth.

I started to speak about a concern of mine. After all, he was my oldest friend, and it had been a jagged year for me, as my father didn’t know but my young son did — and as George had barely noticed. When I got out of public life, soon after Roger Quaife’s defeat, I had expected to get out of controversy also. But it hadn’t happened like that. Some of the enmity had followed me, and had got tangled up with my literary affairs. A few months before, I had been accused, in somewhat lurid circumstances, of plagiarism. This had made the news, and kept recurring. As I told George, understating the whole business, if you live in public at all, you have to take what’s coming: but, though I could imagine almost any other kind of accusation against me having some sort of basis, this one hadn’t. That, however, didn’t make it any more pleasant.

My brand of sarcasm washed over him.

“I remember seeing something or other in the papers,” he said. “Of course, I couldn’t take part. Who’s going to listen to a retired solicitor’s clerk? Anyway, as you say, you’ve nothing to complain about.”

That was not what I had really said: he had forgotten my tone of voice. “If anyone’s got anything to complain about,” said George, warming up, “I have. Do you realise that I’ve spent forty-two years in this wretched town, and they’ve kept me out of everything? They’ve seen to it that I’ve never had a responsible position in my whole life. They’ve put a foot across my path ever since I was a boy. And at the end, if you please, they don’t say as much as thank you and they give me a bit more than they need just to stop feeling ashamed of themselves.”

In the first place “they” meant his old firm of solicitors. But “they” also meant all the kinds of authority he had struggled against, detected conspiracies among, found incomprehensible and yet omnipotent, since he was a boy. All the authority in the country. Or in life, as far as that went. It sounded like persecution mania, and he had always had a share of it. Yet, like many people with persecution mania, he had something to feel persecuted about. Perhaps the one allured the other? Which came first? He was the cleverest man whom I had seen, in functional terms, so completely wasted. But now I had seen more, I speculated on the kind of skill, or whether there was any, which would have been needed not to waste him — or not to let him waste himself.

“I never got anything, did I?” he said, with a gentle puzzled smile.

“No, you didn’t.”

“I suppose I didn’t want it very much.” Just for an instant, all the paraphernalia of his temperament was thrown aside, and that dart of candour shot out.

“Anyway,” he shouted, in a great voice, not the voice of a sick man, “they won. They won . Let’s have another drink on it.”

He was happy and resigned. Did he realise — probably not, he was too happy to go in for irony — that, in a different sense, it was he who had won? All those passionate arguments for freedom — which meant sexual freedom. The young George in this town, poor, unknown, feeling himself outside society, raising the great voice I had just heard. “Freedom from their damned homes, and their damned parents, and their damned lives.” Well, he had won: or rather, all those like him, all the forces they spoke for (since he was, as someone had said during one of his ordeals, a “child of his time”) had won. How completely, one could not escape at the Court that morning. The freedom which George had once dreamed about had duly happened: and, now it had happened, he took it for granted. He didn’t cherish it as a victory. He just assumed that the world was better than it used to be.

I had expected that we should have a meal together — but George was looking at his watch.

“I’m afraid,” he said, “that I’m rather pressed tonight.”

He had the air, which one sometimes saw in businessmen or politicians, of faint estrangement from those not regulated by a timetable.

I did not ask where he was going. I said I should attend the Court in June, and that we could meet as usual. Splendid, said George. Splendid, he repeated, with immense heartiness. He got up to leave me. As he went to the door, I noticed that he was making one, though only one, concession to his physical state: he was walking with abnormal slowness. It was deliberate, but from the back he looked like an old man.

When I myself left the pub, I didn’t stroll through the streets, as I often liked doing. That meeting with George had had an effect on me which I didn’t understand, or perhaps didn’t want to: it hadn’t precisely saddened me, but I didn’t want my memory to be played on. It was better to be with people whom I hadn’t known for long, to be back in the here-and-now. So I returned to the Residence: this time the drawing-room lights, seen from the drive, were welcoming. The sight of Vicky was welcoming too. They had had an early dinner, she said, and her father had gone off to his manuscripts. She said: “When did you eat last?”