Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“I just don’t know.” Usually so active in a crisis, she stayed close to me, benumbed.

“I will tell you this,” I said. “If it’s going to hurt you too much to give him the stuff, that is, if it’s something you think you won’t forget, then I’m not going to do it either. Because you’d find that would hurt you more.”

“I don’t know whether I ought to think about getting hurt at all. I suppose it’s him I ought to be thinking about, regardless—”

“That’s not so easy.”

“He wants to kill himself.” Now she was speaking with her father’s clarity. “According to his lights, he’s got a perfect right to. I haven’t got any respectable right to stop him. I wish I had. But it’s no use pretending. I haven’t. All I can do is make it a bit more inconvenient for him. It would be easy for us to slip him the stuff. It would take him some trouble to find another source of supply. So there’s no option, is there? I’ve got to do what he wants.”

The blood rushed to her face again. Her whole body stiffened. Her eyes were brilliant. “I can’t,” she said, in a voice low but so strong that it sounded hard. “And I won’t.”

I didn’t know what was right: but I did know that it was wrong to press her.

Soon she was speaking again with her father’s clarity. The proper person for him to apply to for this particular service would be one of his friends. After all — almost as though she were imitating his irony — there was nothing they would think more natural.

Obviously he had to be told without delay that we were failing him. “He’ll be disappointed,” I said. “He’s looking forward to it like a treat.”

“He’ll be worse than disappointed,” said Margaret.

“I’d better tell him,” I said, trying to take at least that load from her.

“That’s rough on you.” She glanced at me with gratitude.

“I don’t like it,” I said. “But I can talk to him, there’s no emotion between us.”

“There’s no emotion between him and anyone else now, though, is there?” she said.

Once more she stiffened herself.

“No, I must do it,” she said.

She looked more spirited, brighter, than she had done that night. Hers was the courage of action. She could not stand the slow drip of waiting or irresolution, which I was better at enduring: but when the crisis broke and the time for action had arrived, when she could do something, even if it were distasteful, searing, then she was set free.

So, with the economy of those who know each other to the bone, we left it there. We returned to the drawing-room, where Charles, who was reading, looked at us, curiosity fighting against tact. “You’re worried about him, I suppose,” he allowed himself to say.

ALL through those weeks, I was being badgered by messages from the Pateman family. One had arrived during Charles’ break; another the evening after Austin Davidson made his request, the same day that Margaret went to him with our answer. Dick Pateman’s messages came by telephone, in the form of protracted trunk calls (who paid the bills? I wondered): he had been found a place at a Scottish university, but that made him more dissatisfied. But his dissatisfaction was not so grinding as that of his father, who wrote letters of complaint about his son’s treatment and his own. There was, I knew it well, a kind of blackmail of responsibility: once you did the mildest of good turns, natures such as these — and there were more than you imagined — took it for granted that you were at their mercy. Well, after the June Court, I had decided to pay them a last visit and say that that was the end.

Meanwhile, Margaret had faced her father: and the result was not what we expected. True, he had been bitter, he had been intellectually scornful. He regarded what he called her “mental processes” as beneath contempt. And yet, she could not be sure, was he also feeling relieved, or perhaps reprieved? At any rate, he seemed both more active and less despairing: and physically, after his announcement to us and his quarrel with her, he had, for days which lengthened into weeks, something like a remission. If that had happened to anyone else, he would have thought it one of fate’s jokes, though in slightly bad taste. During Margaret’s visits, daily though uninvited, he produced ironies of his own, but didn’t speculate on that one. As for her, she dared not say a word, in case this state were a fluke, something the mind-body could hold stable for a little while, before the collapse.

On the day of the Court meeting, which was the twenty-second of June, I arrived at the station early in the afternoon and went straight out to the university. The Court was to meet at 3.0: the proceedings would be formal: but (so I had heard from Vicky) Leonard Getliffe and two of the younger professors had decided that, since it wasn’t necessary for them to attend, they wouldn’t do so. Arnold Shaw had expressed indifference: he was going to get his vote of support, there would be no dissension. Had the man no sense of danger? I thought. The answer was, he hadn’t. Among his negative talents as a politician, and he had many, that was the most striking. If one had watched any kind of politics, big or little, one came to know that a nose for danger was something all the real performers had. They might lack almost every other gift, but not that. Trotsky, like Arnold Shaw, whom he didn’t much resemble in other respects, had singularly little nose for danger. He got on without it for a few years. If he had had it, he might have held on to the power for longer.

Thus I was sitting in Leonard Getliffe’s office (they used the American term by now) in the physics department. Outside, it was a bright midsummer afternoon, just like the weather twenty-two years before, when Leonard was nine years old, the day we heard that Hitler’s armies had gone into Russia. A motor mower was zooming over the lawn, and through the open window came the smell of new-cut grass. In the room was a blackboard covered with symbols; there were three or four photographs, among whom I recognised Einstein and Bohr: on the desk, notebooks, trays, another photograph, this time of Vicky Shaw. Not a flattering one. She wasn’t photogenic. In the flesh she had both bloom and vital force, but in two dimensions she looked puddingy.

There the picture stood, in front of him. I said, wouldn’t he reconsider and come along to the Court? After all, we had done what we could for the students. Yes, said Leonard, even Pateman had got fitted up. “The Scots can cope with him now,” I said.

“No, not the Scots.” Leonard gave the name of a university close by, only twelve miles away. “They’ve accepted him,” said Leonard.

“Are you sure?”

“I don’t see why he should invent the story, do you?” Leonard’s grey eyes were regarding me cat-humorously through his glasses. “Especially as it stops us exerting ourselves.”

No doubt that was why I hadn’t been badgered on the telephone for several days. It hadn’t been thought necessary to tell me that I wasn’t to trouble myself further.

“Well then,” I said. “It’s only a formality today. Why not come along?”

“It’s only a formality,” said Leonard. “Why come along?”

“You know as well as I do. Just to patch things up.”

“In that case, it’s not precisely a formality, is it?”

It resembled an argument with his father — over tactics, or principles, or choices — such as we had had since we were young men. But it wasn’t quite like that. Leonard was just as immovable, but gentler and at the same time more certain. The matter had been mishandled. He and his colleagues (but I now felt sure that his was the authority behind them) weren’t willing to appear placated, until they had made their own terms. They weren’t being noisy. They were merely abstaining. It was the quietest form of protest. Maybe others would understand.