Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“For some people,” he said, “every job is an interesting one.”

He volunteered no more. His lips were complacently tight, as though he were a cabinet minister being questioned by a backbencher of dubious discretion.

Sitting in the Residence drawing-room, a few minutes to go before dinner, I told Vicky that I had had a mildly punishing day. “Poor old thing,” she said. I didn’t say anything about Leonard Getliffe or the Pateman parlour, but I remarked that it was bleak to miss my customary drink with George. She shook her head: she didn’t know him, he was just a name from the town’s shadows.

“Anyway,” she said, “you might meet another old friend tonight.” She asked — would I let her drive me out into the country, for a party after dinner? Would that be too much for me? What was this party, I wanted to know. Parents of friends of hers, prosperous business people, not even acquaintances of mine. “But they want to collect you, you know. And it’d be a bit of a scoop for me to produce you.” Vicky gave a cheerful grimace. She had a tendency, characteristic of realistic young women, to find any symptom of the public life extremely funny. I found that tendency soothing.

Before she had time to tell me who the “old friend” was, Arnold Shaw joined us, beaming with eupeptic good humour. “Excellent meeting today, Lewis,” he said. He was feeling celebratory, and had opened one of his better bottles of claret for dinner. At the table, the three of us alone, he did not once refer to the controversy. It was over, in his mind a neat, black, final line had been drawn. He talked, euphorically and non-stop, about the October congregation. Arnold loved ceremony, protocol, anything which distinguished one man from another. If the President of the Royal Society came to receive an honorary degree, should he, or should he not, on an academic occasion, take precedence over a viscount who was not receiving a degree?

As he propounded this intricate problem, Vicky was smiling. She was still amused when he went on to what for him was the fascinating topic of honorary degrees. Here he took great trouble, and, as so often, received no credit from anyone, not even her. If a university was going to give honorary degrees at all, he had harangued me before now, it ought to be done with total purity. He would make no concessions. As so often, no one believed that he was a pure soul. Yet he had done precisely what he said. No local worthies. No putative benefactors. No politicians. Men of international distinction. No one else.

“I’m glad you mentioned the man Rubin,” he said to me. David Rubin was an American friend of mine, and one of the most eminent of theoretical physicists. “I’ve made enquiries. They say he’s good. No, they say he’s more than good.”

“Well, Arnold, the fact that he got a Nobel prize when he was about forty,” I said, “does argue a certain degree of competence.”

Arnold let out his malicious chuckle.

“Leonard Getliffe thinks a lot of him. And that young man isn’t very easily pleased.” He was glancing meaningfully at his daughter. “I always know I shall get an honest opinion from Leonard on this sort of business. Yes, he’s absolutely honest, he really is a friend of mine.”

His glance was meaningful. So, in a different sense, was mine. I hadn’t told Vicky about my conversation with Leonard: now I was glad that I hadn’t; it would have done no good and turned her evening sour. I sipped at the admirable wine. Why was Arnold so innocent? Hadn’t he noticed the abstentions from the Court? Why were he and Leonard so pure? Under the taste of the wine, a vestigial taste of blackcurrants — a vestigial reminder of a worldly man, unlike those two, a man nothing like so pure, Arthur Brown, looking after his friends in college, giving us wine as good as this, years ago.

As soon as we had settled in her car and Vicky was driving up the London Road, out of the town, I asked who was the old friend? The old friend I was to meet?

“They didn’t want to tell either of you, so that it would be a surprise.”

“Come on, who is it?”

“I think her name is Juckson-Smith.”

“I’ve never heard of her,” I said.

“They said you used to know her.”

“I’ve never heard the name.”

“Have I got you on false pretences?” Vicky glanced sideways from the wheel, to see if I was disappointed. “Juckson-Smith — I think they call her Olive.”

Then I understood. I had not seen her for thirty years. Once there had been a sort of indeterminate affection, certainly not more, between us. She had been a member of George Passant’s group, the only one of us from a well-to-do family. Those had been idealistic days, when George ranged about the town, haranguing us with absolute hope about our “freedom”. But after I left the town, some of them worked out their freedom: Olive took a lover, and under his influence got mixed up in the scandal which — to me at least, who had to watch it — had been a signpost along our way.

She had, so far as I had heard, cut off all connections with the town. Her family was respectable, and it was not a pretty story. She had married her lover, and, some time during the war, I had been told that they had parted. Presumably she had married again. All this had happened many years before, and except to a few of us, might be submerged or forgotten.

Myself I wasn’t remembering much of it, memory didn’t work like that, as Vicky drove past the outer suburbs, into the country, past the Midland fields, every square foot manmade and yet pastoral in the level light. It was past nine, but the sun was still over the horizon. Swathes of warm air kept surging through the open window, as we passed, slowing down, tree after tree.

“You do know her then?”

“I knew her first husband better. He was rather an engaging man.”

“Why was he engaging?”

“You might have liked him.” No, I shouldn’t have said that. Jack Cotery was just the kind of seducer whom this young woman had no guard against. I hurried on: “He had a knack of reducing everything to its lowest common denominator. He often turned out to be right, though I didn’t enjoy it.”

I began to tell her an anecdote. But this was one that I didn’t mind recalling. My spirits had become higher. When I was in high spirits, and letting myself go, Vicky found it hard to decide whether I was serious or not. She drove on, her expression puzzled and even slightly mulish, as I indulged myself talking about Martineau. Martineau, when I was in my teens, had been a partner in one of the town’s solidest firms of solicitors — the same firm of which George Passant was managing clerk. He was a widower, and he kept something like a salon for us all. Then, over a period of two or three years, round the age of fifty, he became invaded by religion, or by a religious search: he started wayside preaching, and before long gave up all he had, except for what he could carry, and went off as a tramp. At my college I used to receive postcards from various workhouses.

“Did you?” said Vicky, as though it were an invention.

He joined a religious community, and soon left that to become a pavement artist on the streets of Leeds. The pictures he drew were intended to convey a spiritual message. After a while, he moved to London and operated in the King’s Road. The average daily take in Chelsea was three times the take in Leeds: I picked up some information about the economics of pavement artistry in the late thirties.

“Did you?” said Vicky once more.

The point was, I said, Jack Cotery had insisted from the start that all Martineau wanted was a woman. Jack had discovered that his wife had been an invalid, he had had no sexual life right through his forties. Jack said that if he and my Sheila went off together, that would cure them, if anything could. I thought that was too reductive, too brash by half. The trouble was, about Martineau it turned out to be right.