Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Not since breakfast, I replied. She clucked, and said that I was impossible. Soon I was sitting in front of the fire with a plate of sandwiches. Vicky curled up on the rug. I was tired, but not unpleasantly so, just enough to realise that I had had a long day. It was all familiar and comfortable, the past pushed away, no menace left.

Vicky wouldn’t talk, or let me, until I had eaten. Then she said that her father had told her about the Court proceedings. She knew the result, and she was relieved: anyway, we had time to work in: perversely, she was enough relieved to be irritated with me.

“You two (she meant her father and me) had an up-and-a-downer, didn’t you?”

“Not exactly.”

“That’s his account, anyway.”

I told her that I thought I deserved a bit of praise. She said: “I must say, I should like to knock your heads together.”

It appeared that Arnold Shaw had told her of a violent argument, in which he had prevailed. Actually, she was pleased. Pleased because she was protective about her father and trusted me. She was hopeful about the next moves. I said that the academics were being sensible, and I myself would try to involve Francis Getliffe.

She was sitting on her heels, her hair shining and her face tinted in the firelight.

“Bless you,” she said.

I had not mentioned Leonard Getliffe’s name, but only his father’s. That was enough, though, to set her thoughts going, as if I had touched a trigger and released uncontrollable forces. Her expression was softened; when she spoke her voice was strong, but had lost the touch of bossiness, the doctor’s edge.

Could she make a nuisance of herself again? she said. She knew that I understood: questions about Pat had formed themselves. My first impulse, before she had said a word, was of pity for Leonard Getliffe.

Though I knew, and she knew that I knew, she started off by seeming unusually theoretical. Was a marriage, all other things being good, likely to be affected if the wife was earning the livelihood? Even for her, the most direct of young women, it was a pleasure to go through a minuet, to produce a problem in the abstract, or as though she were seeking advice on behalf of a remote acquaintance. I gave a banal answer, that sometimes I had known it work, sometimes not. In my own first marriage, I added, my wife had contributed half the money: and, though it had been unhappy, it had not been any more unhappy, perhaps less, because of that. She hadn’t heard of my first marriage: and after what I had just said, she still really hadn’t heard. She said: “So you’re not against it?”

I said, once more banal, that any general answer had no meaning. Then I asked: “Are you going to get married then?”

“I hope so.”

I had another impulse, this time of concern for her. She was speaking with certainty. I wished that she was more superstitious, or that she had some insurance against the future.

“You see,” said Vicky, “I can earn a living, though it won’t be a very grand living, while we see if he can make a go of it. Is that a good idea?”

“Isn’t he very young—” I began carefully, but she interrupted me.

“There is a snag, of course. You can’t do a medical job with young children around. I’m too wrapped up in him to think about children now. You know how it is, I can’t believe that I shall ever want anything but him. I have to tell myself of course I shall.” She gave a self-deprecating smile. “I’m just the same as everybody else, aren’t I? I expect I shall turn into a pretty doting mother.”

“I expect you will,” I said. I was easier when she got down from the heights.

“If we wanted to start a family in three or four years’ time, and we oughtn’t to leave it much later, because I shall be getting on for thirty, then he might not be able to keep us, might he?”

Practical plans. Delectable practical plans. As delectable as being on the heights, sometimes more so.

“However good he is,” I said, “it’s hard to break through at his game—”

“I know,” she said. “Well, what else can he do on the side?” I said it would be difficult for his father to allow him anything. Martin had a daughter still at school, and, apart from his Cambridge salary, not a penny. As for myself–

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly let you give us money.”

Her young man quite possibly could, I thought. I nearly said it: but she, like George in the pub an hour or two before, would not have recognised my tone of voice.

In any case, there was something that I ought to say.

“Look, Vicky,” I began, as casually as I could, hesitating between leaving her quite unwarned and throwing even the faintest shade upon her joy, “I told you a minute ago, he is a very young man, isn’t he?”

“Do you know, I don’t feel that.”

“ Your character’s formed,” I went on. “You’re as grown-up as you’ll ever be.” (I wasn’t convinced of that, but it was a way to talk of Pat.) “I’m not so sure that’s true of him, you know.”

She was looking at me without apprehension, without a blink.

“I mean,” I said, “parts of people’s character grow up at different rates. Perhaps that’s specially so for men. In some ways Pat’s mature. But I’m not certain that he is in all. I’m not certain that he’s capable of knowing exactly what he wants for his whole life. He may be too young for that.”

She smiled.

“You’re wrong,” she said.

She smiled at me affectionately, but like someone in the know, with a piece of information the source of which cannot be revealed.

“He’s a very strong character,” she said.

All my hesitation had been unnecessary. I hadn’t hurt her. She was no less fond of me, and also no less joyous. She was totally unaffected. She was confident — but that was too weak a word, for this was the confidence of every cell in her body — that she knew him as I could never do, and that she was right.

We did not say much more about Pat that night. Some time afterwards, while we were still sitting by the fire, Arnold Shaw came in, rubbing his hands.

“Couple of hours’ good work,” he announced. “Which is more than most of my colleagues will do this term.”

With the utmost friendliness and good nature, he asked me if I had spent a tolerable afternoon, and invited me to have a nightcap. Vicky was watching us both with a blank expression. She had heard him talk of a bitter quarrel: if I knew Arnold Shaw’s temper, he had denounced me as every kind of a bad man: here he was, convivial, and treating me as an old friend. She admired him for being a museum specimen of a sea green incorruptible (in that she was her father’s daughter): here he was, looking not incorruptible but matey and malicious, and certainly not sea green. Here we both were, drinking our nightcaps, as though we wanted no one else’s company. Yet she didn’t for an instant doubt that he would never budge an inch, and that I too would stick it out. Here we were, exchanging sharp-tongued gossip. It struck her as part of a masculine conspiracy which she could not completely comprehend.

When Arnold Shaw was disposed to think of a second nightcap, she roused herself and, daughter-like, doctor-like, said that it was time for bed.

BACK in our flat, the sunlight slanting down over the Hyde Park trees, my wife was listening to me. I had been telling her about the past two days: we had our own shorthand, she knew where I had been amused and where I was pretending to be amused.

“It’s a good job you’ve got some stamina, isn’t it?” she said.

It sounded detached; it couldn’t have been less so. She was happy because I was well and not resigned, any more than she was herself. She had always looked younger than her age, and did so still. Her skin remained as fine as Vicky Shaw’s. The only open signs of middle age were the streaks of grey above her temples. I had suggested that, since she looked in all other respects so young, she might as well have them tinted. She had been taken aback, for that was the kind of intervention which she didn’t expect from me. But she said no: it was the one trivial thing she had refused me. She wore those streaks like insignia.