Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Charles said: “You remember at Easter, when we came away from your father’s, what I said? I told you, it wasn’t quite what I expected.”

He had a memory like a computer, such as I had had when I was his age. But his conversational openings were not random, he hadn’t introduced the concept of luck for nothing.

“Well?” I said, certain that there was a connection, baffled as to what it was.

“I expected to think that you’d had a bad time—”

“I told you, I had a very happy childhood.”

“I know that. I didn’t mean that. I expected to think that you’d had a bad start.”

“Well, it might have been better, don’t you think?”

“I’m not sure.” He was smiling, half-taunting, half-probing.

“That’s what I was thinking when I came away. I was thinking you might have had better luck than I’ve had.”

I was taken by surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, you were a hungry boxer. And hungry boxers fight better than well-fed boxers, don’t they?”

However he had picked up that idiom, I didn’t know. In fact, I was put out. I was perfectly prepared to indulge in that kind of reflection on my own account: but it seemed unfair, coming from him.

“I should have thought,” I said, “that you fight hard enough.”

“Perhaps. But I’ve got to do it on my own, haven’t I?”

He spoke evenly, good-temperedly, not affected — though he had noticed it — by my own flash of temper. He had been working it out. I had had social forces behind me, pressing me on. All the people in the backstreets who had never had a chance. Whereas the people he had met in my house and grown up among — they had been born with a chance, or had made one. Achievement didn’t seem so alluring, when you met it every day. He was as ambitious as I had been: but, despite appearances, he was more on his own.

I was talking to him very much as nowadays I talked to Martin. Sometimes I thought he bore a family resemblance to Martin, though Charles’ mind was more acute. Yes, there was something in what he said. I had made the same sort of observation when I met my first rich friends. Katherine Getliffe’s brother Charles — after whom my son was named — had felt much as he did. The comfortable jobs were there for the taking: but were they worth it? Books were being written all round one: could one write any good enough? I was twenty-three or more before I met anyone who had written any kind of book. “And that,” I observed, “was a remarkably bad one.”

Charles gave a friendly grin.

When I first went into those circles, yes, I had comforted myself that it was I who had the advantage. For reasons such as he had given. And yet — I had had to make compromises and concessions. Too many. Some of them I was ashamed of. I had sometimes been devious. I had had to stay — or at any rate I had stayed — too flexible. It was only quite late in life that I had been able to harden my nature. It was only quite late that I had spoken with my own voice.

“But all that,” said Charles, “kept you down to earth, didn’t it?”

“Sometimes,” I said, “too far down.”

“Still, it has come out all right.” He insisted: “It’s all come out more than all right, you can’t say it hasn’t?”

“I suppose I’m still more or less intact,” I said.

He knew a good deal about what had happened to me, both the praise and blame. He was a cool customer, but he was my son, and he probably thought that I was a shade more monolithic than I was.

“Don’t overdo it,” he said.

“I thought I should have a placid old age. And I shan’t.”

“Of course you will in time. Anyway, do you mind?”

I answered: “Not all that much.”

“The important thing is, you must live a very long time.”

That was said quite straight, and with concern. His smile was affectionate, not taunting. The exchange was over. I said: “Of course, if it will make things easier for you, I can disown you tomorrow. I’m sure you’d get a nice job in the sort of office I started in.”

We were back to the tone of every day. The clouds outside the window were denser, Margaret had not yet come in. Charles fetched out a chess set, and we settled down to play.

Not that afternoon, perhaps at no moment I could isolate, I realised that there was another aspect in which I was luckier than Martin. Anyone who knew us in the past, in the not-so-remote past, would have predicted that, if either of us were going to be obsessively attached to his son, it would be me. I should have predicted it myself. I was made for it. All my life history pointed that way. I had deliberately forewarned myself and spoken of it to Margaret. But, though I was used to surprises in others’ lives, I was mystified by them in my own. It hadn’t happened.

When first, a few hours after he was born, I held him in my arms, I had felt a surge of animal insistence. His eyes were unfocused and rolling; his hands aimlessly waving as though they were sea plants in a pool: I hadn’t felt tender, but something like savage, angrily determined that he should live and that nothing bad should happen to him. That wasn’t a memory, but like a stamp on the senses. It had lasted. In the illness of his infancy, I had gone through a similar animal desolation. Soon, when he learned to drive a car, I should be anxious until I heard his key in the lock and saw him safely home.

But otherwise — I didn’t have to control myself, it came by a grace that baffled me — I didn’t want to possess him, I didn’t want to live his life for him or live my own again in him. I was glad, with the specific kind of vanity that Francis Getliffe showed, that he was clever. I got pleasure out of his triumphs, and, when he let me see them, I was irritated by his setbacks. Since there was so little strain between us, he often asked my advice, judging me to be a good professional. He had his share of melancholy, rather more than an adolescent’s melancholy. As a rule, he was more than usually high-spirited. The tone of our temperaments was not all that different. I found his company consoling, and often a support.

I could scarcely believe that I had been so lucky. It seemed inexplicable and, sometimes, in my superstitious nerves, too good to be true. Call no man happy until he is dead. Occasionally I speculated about an event which I should never see: whether my son, far on in his life, would also have something happen to him which was utterly out of character and which made him wonder whether he knew himself at all.

TWO evenings later — Charles was still at home, but returning to school next day — a telegram was brought into the drawing-room, as we were having our first drinks. Margaret opened it, and brought it over to me. It read: Should be grateful if you and Lewis would visit me tonight Austin Davidson.

Austin Davidson was her father. It was like him, even in illness, to sign a telegram in that fashion. It was like him to send her a telegram at all: for he, so long the champion of the twenties’ artistic avant garde , had never overcome his distrust of mechanical appliances, and in the sixteen years Margaret and I had been married, he had spoken to me on the telephone precisely once.

“We’d better all go,” said Margaret, responsibility tightening her face. She didn’t return to her chair, and within minutes we were in a taxi, on our way to the house in Regents Park.

Charles knew that house well. As we went through the drawing-room where Margaret had once told me I could be sure of her, I glanced at him — did he look at it with fresh eyes, now he had seen how his other grandfather lived? In the light of the June evening, the Vlaminck, the Boudin, the two Sickerts, gleamed from the walls. Charles passed them by. Maybe he knew them off by heart. The Davidsons were not rich, but there had been, in Austin’s own phrase, “a little money about”. He had bought and sold pictures in his youth: when he became an art critic, he decided that no financial interest was tolerable (Berenson was one of his lifelong hates), and turned his attention to the stock market. People had thought him absent-minded, but since he was forty he hadn’t needed to think about money.