Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Still, it was pleasant to walk by myself round the campus (that word also had swept eastward) in the still sunshine. The students were dressed differently from those I used to know: young men and girls in jeans, long hair, the girls’ faces unpainted and pale. Transistor radios hung from a good many wrists. Pairs were lolling along, arms round each others’ waists: that too wouldn’t have happened in my college before the war. I stretched myself on the grass, not far from such a group. The conversation, however, as much as I could catch, was not amorous but anxious. They nearly all carried examination papers with them. This was the time of their finals: they had just been let out of a three-hour session: they were holding inquests. Dress changed: social manners changed: sexual manners changed: but examinations did not change. These boys and girls — they must have been round twenty-one, but they were so hirsute that they looked younger — were at least as obsessed as any of us used to be. They had another paper next morning. One girl was saying that she must shut herself up that night, she needed to put in hours and hours of work. Wrong, I wanted to say: real examinees didn’t behave like that: don’t look at a book, don’t even talk about it. But I kept quiet. Whoever listened to that kind of advice? Or to any other kind of advice, except that which they were already determined to take?

It was pleasant in the sun. I was timing myself to arrive at the Patemans’ house at six. Now that I knew the way, I managed it to the minute. But Mr Pateman was not there. His wife let me in, the passage dark and odorous as I entered from the bright afternoon. From the front room the record player was, just as last time, at work. In the parlour high tea was laid. The room was empty except for Kitty, who, cutting a slice of bread, gave a little beck of recognition.

“He’s not in yet, I’m afraid,” said Mrs Pateman again.

“I told him the time I should be coming.” She was the only woman of the household whom I liked: I couldn’t let myself be rough with her.

“The doctor doesn’t have his surgery till six, you see,” Mrs Pateman began a flustered explanation.

“I’m sorry,” I had to say. “I hope there’s nothing much the matter?”

“Of course there isn’t.” Kitty gave a fleering smile. “There’s never anything the matter with him—”

“You didn’t ought to say that about your father.” Mrs Pateman seemed overwhelmed in this house, this “simple home” which even to me was uncomfortably full of egos. Kitty shrugged, looked at me under her eyebrows, and informed me that Dick was camping, and wouldn’t be back for a week. She said it in a manner which was little-me-ish and at the same time hostile, no, not so much hostile as remote from all of them. She might be resenting his having a higher education, while she, appreciably cleverer, had been kept out of one. I found her expression, partly because of its mobility, abnormally difficult to read. I guessed that she might, despite the fluttering, be as hard as the others. That was as far — and perhaps even this I imagined or exaggerated — as I could see that night.

Taking her slice of bread, she went back with light scampering steps to the front room, where I assumed that Cora Ross was waiting. Mrs Pateman, naturally polite, embarrassed, continued to explain about her husband. He was always one for going to the doctor in good time. He had a stiffness in his throat which he thought might be associated with a backache (a combination, I couldn’t help thinking to myself unknown to medical science). He was always careful about what she, echoing him, called “germs”. That accounted, I realised, for the disinfectant smell which hung about this room, even in his absence. He must add, to his other unwelcoming characteristics, a chronic hypochondria.

At last he came in, head thrown back, hand outstretched. He gave me a stately good evening, and sat down to his corned beef and tomato ketchup. Meanwhile his wife was saying: “He didn’t find anything, did he, Percy?”

“Nothing serious,” he said with a condescending smile. “I’m a great believer,” he turned to me, “in taking precautions. I don’t mind telling you, I should recommend anyone of your age to be run over by his doctor once a month.”

I said that I couldn’t stay long. I wanted only to finish up this business of his son. I hadn’t heard until that day that he had been accepted by — (the neighbouring university). That completed the story, and they ought to consider themselves fortunate.

“No,” said Mr Pateman, not angrily but in a level, reasonable fashion. “I can’t be expected to agree with that.”

“I do expect you to agree with that.” I had come to break this tie. To be honest, I didn’t mind a quarrel: but I wasn’t getting it.

“Well then, we shall have to agree to differ, shan’t we?”

“Your son,” I said, “is a remarkably lucky young man. If he were here — by the by I have not had a word from him about his news — if he were here I should tell him so. He might have been thrown out for good. As it is, this is exactly like going on at the university here as though nothing had happened.”

“Ah,” Mr Pateman smiled, an all-knowing patronising smile. “There I have to take issue with you. Do you realise that this place is twelve miles away?”

“Of course I do.”

“How is he going to get there?”

I muttered, but Mr Pateman continued in triumph: “Someone is going to have to pay his fare.”

I stared at him blank-faced. With a gesture, he said: “But I’ll grant you this. It’s not so bad as Scotland. No, it’s not so bad as Scotland. So we’d better let bygones be bygones, hadn’t we?”

He was victorious. For the moment, he was sated. I thought — not then but later, for on the spot I was outfaced, deflated, like one working himself up to a row and finding himself greeted with applause — how people say comfortably that persecution never works. Read a little history, and you find that persecution, more often than not, is singularly effective. The same with paranoia. You might think it was a crippling affliction: live some of your life, and you find that paranoia too, more often than not, is singularly effective. Certainly the streak possessed by the Patemans, father and son, had won them, in this business, what they wanted. It also made Mr Pateman that evening feel powerful as most of us never do. Paranoia of that kind is only placated for an interval, and then, like sexual jealousy, starts up again. But while it is placated, it — again like sexual jealousy — gives a reassurance which is utterly possessing, as though all enemies were conquered or annihilated, a reassurance of non-enmity that those of us who are not paranoid will never know.

Before I left, Mr Pateman favoured me with his views on civil servants. It was no thanks to me, but he was enjoying some new “brainwave” about a move for himself. He reiterated, he couldn’t remain a cashier much longer. “I’m like a bank clerk shovelling money over the counter and not having any for himself.” But he had listened to me enough to visit the Employment Exchange. As he had foreseen, he said with satisfaction, they had been useless, totally useless.

“You know what civil servants are like, do you?”

I told him I had been one, during the war and for years later.

“Present company excepted.” He gave a forgiving smile. “But you’ve had some experience outside, you ought to know what civil servants are like. Rats in mazes . You switch on a light and they scramble for the right door.”

I said goodbye. Mr Pateman, standing up and squaring his shoulders, said that he was glad to have had these talks. I asked if the new job he was thinking of was an interesting one.