Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“He’s quite a good chap,” I said.

“He hasn’t got the political intelligence of a newt,” said Martin.

“He’s really very amiable,” I said.

“If it hadn’t been for that damned fool,” Martin was not placated, “we shouldn’t have been in this intolerable mess.”

That also was true. Before Crawford, the last Master, retired, it had been assumed that Francis Getliffe would stand and get the job. That would presumably have happened — but Francis had suddenly said no. The college had dissolved into a collective hubbub. Lester Ince had trumpeted that what they needed was an independent man . The independent man was G S Clark. Half the college saw the beauty of the idea: G S Clark was an obsessed reactionary in all senses, but that didn’t matter. Martin, who was an accomplished college politician, did his best for Arthur Brown, but the Clark faction won by a couple of votes. It had been one of the bitter elections.

“It’s got to the point,” Martin was saying, “that when the Master puts his name down to dine, half-a-dozen people take theirs off.”

“What about you?”

“As a rule,” said Martin, without expression, “I dine at home.”

That had its own eloquence. He was both patient and polite: and once he had been on neighbourly terms with Clark. Yes, he replied to my question, they were saddled with him for another seven years.

Irene was more interested in Lester Ince’s future.

“Think of all that lovely money,” she said.

She told me about the heiress. It appeared that Lester Ince had at his disposal more money than any fellow (or ex-fellow, for he had just resigned) of the college in five hundred years.

“Money. We could do with a bit of that,” she said.

She said it brightly, but suddenly I felt there was strain, or meaning, underneath. To test her, I replied: “Couldn’t we all?”

“ You can’t say that to us, you really can’t.” Her eyes were darting, but not just with fun.

“Is anything the matter?” I wasn’t looking at Martin, but speaking straight to her.

“Oh, no. Well, the children cost a lot, of course they do.”

Their daughter Nina, who was seventeen that year, went to a local school: she was a gentle girl, with a musical flair which her brother might have envied, and had cost them nothing. It was Pat on whom they had spent the money — and, I guessed, more than they could spare, although Martin was financially a prudent man. It was Pat about whom she was showing the strain. She had to risk offending Martin, who sat there in hard silence.

I risked it too.

“I suppose it’ll be some time before he’s self-supporting, won’t it?” I asked.

“Good God,” she cried. “We shouldn’t mind so much if we were sure that he would ever be.”

She went on talking to me, Martin still silent. I must have known young men like this, mustn’t I? What could one do? She wasn’t asking much: all she asked was that he should come to terms, and begin to behave like everyone else.

This was the strangest game that time had played with my sister-in-law. It had played a game with her physically, but that I was used to: she had been a thin, active young woman, and then in her thirties became the victim of a pyknic practical joke: so that, although her face kept an avid girlish prettiness, she had, as it were, blown up like a Michelin tyre man. But that was a joke of the flesh, and this was odder. For only a few years before, as she contemplated her son, she was delighted that he seemed “as wild as a hawk”. She had enjoyed the prospect of a son as “dashing” as the young men with whom she had herself racketed round. Now she had it. And she was less comfortable with it than respectable parents like the Getliffes might have been.

She seemed specially horrified about his debts, though, again oddly, she had no idea how big they were.

“Don’t worry too much about that,” I said. “Perhaps I can help.”

“That isn’t necessary.” For the first time since his son was hinted at, Martin spoke.

Irene looked at him: either she did not choose, or did not dare, to talk any further. In a moment, with a bright yelping cry, she announced that she was tired. “You boys can sit up if you want, don’t mind me,” she said, on her way to the door.

Martin was sitting with his shoulders hunched, his fingers laced together on one knee. His scalp showed where the hair was thinning: between us, in the old grate, gleamed one bar of the electric fire. Behind Martin was a bookcase full of bound scientific journals, photographs of teams he had played for in his athletic days: as I glanced round, in the constrained and creaking quiet, on his desk I noticed the big leather-covered tutors’ register which Arthur Brown used to keep.

Then he began to talk, in the tone of a realistic and experienced man, as though we were talking, not having to explain ourselves, about an acquaintance. He interrupted himself, seeming more deliberate, to light a pipe. It was easy to exaggerate these things, wasn’t it? (He might have been echoing my talk with Vicky.) People grew up at different rates, didn’t they? Young men who were sexually mature often weren’t mature in other ways. And young men who were sexually mature found plenty of opportunities to spend their time. “Most of us,” said Martin, in a matter-of-fact, ironic fashion, “would have welcomed a few more such opportunities, wouldn’t we?”

In an aside, he mentioned my first marriage. When I met Sheila, I was nineteen: if I had known more about women — Martin said, with dry intimacy — I should have been spared a lot.

“In his case” (he did not call his son by name), “it’s the other way round.”

He was looking away from me, with his forehead furrowed.

“I don’t know where I made the mistake. I wish I knew where to blame myself.” Quite suddenly his realism had deserted him. His tone had changed. His voice, as a rule easy and deep, had sharpened. If he had sent his son to a different school — they hadn’t been clever at handling him, they had certainly misunderstood him. If he had never started at the university — that was Martin’s fault. It was just the kind of harking back that Martin must have listened to many times in that room: from parents certain that their young man was fine, that circumstances had done all the havoc, or his teachers, or a particular teacher, or their own blindness, lack of sympathy, or bad choice.

“There’s only one rule,” I said, trying to console him. “Whatever you do is wrong.”

“That’s no use. I’ve got to make sure where I’ve made the mistakes — so that I can get him started now.”

Not only his realism had deserted him, so had his irony. That last remark of mine, which he might have thought to himself, listening to parental sorrows, was just a noise in his ears. For neither I nor anyone else could be any good to him. Irene, who was an affectionate mother, worried about her son, but practically, not obsessively; Martin’s love was different in kind. People sometimes thought him a self-contained and self-centred man: but now, more than in sexual love, he was totally committed. This had been so all through his son’s life. It was a devotion at the same time absolutely possessive and absolutely self-abnegating.

It was possible that Martin might not have been so vulnerable if his own life had gone better. He had started with ambitions, and he had got less than he or the rest of us expected. Here he was, as Senior Tutor, dim by his own standards, and that was, in careeristic terms, the end. Martin was a worldly man, and knew that he was grossly undercast. He had seen many men far less able go much further. To an extent, that had made him wish to compensate in the successes of his son. And yet, I thought it might have happened anyway: it was men like himself, stoical and secretive, who were most often swept by this kind of possessive passion.