Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“What happened?” Suddenly Vicky was interested.

Very simple. At the age of sixty Martineau met, Heaven knows how, a very nice and mildly eccentric woman. They got married within three weeks and had two children in the shortest conceivable time. Martineau gave up pavement artistry (though not religion) and returned to ordinary life. Very ordinary: because he became a clerk in exactly the type of solicitors’ firm in which he had been a partner and given his share away. My last glimpse of him: he had been living in a semi-detached house in Reading, running round the garden bouncing his daughter on his back. He had exuded happiness, and had survived in robust health until nearly eighty.

“I can understand that,” said Vicky, driving past the golden fields.

“Can you?”

“I shouldn’t be so edgy if I weren’t so chaste.”

“You’re not very edgy.”

“I’m getting a bit old to sleep alone.”

“You know,” I said, “it isn’t the answer to everything.”

“It’s the answer to a good many things,” she said.

From the road, a mile or two further on, one could see a house standing a long way back upon a knoll, as sharp and isolated as in a nineteenth-century print. Yes, that was where we were going, said Vicky. It was a comely Georgian façade: once, I supposed, this had been a squire’s manor house. Not now. Not now, as we drove up the tree-verged drive, car after car parked right to the door: no poor old Leicestershire squire had ever lived like this. In fact, we didn’t enter the house at all, but went round, past the rose gardens, to the swimming pool. There, standing on the lawn close by, or sitting in deckchairs, must have been sixty or seventy people. Some were in the water: waiters were going about with trays of drinks. I met my hostess, middle-aged, well dressed. I met some of the guests, middle-aged, well dressed. I found myself trying to remember names, just as if I were in America. For an instant, looking down from the pool over the rolling countryside, I wondered how I could tell that I wasn’t in America. This might have been Pennsylvania. This was a style of life that was running round the fortunate of the world. One difference, perhaps, but that was only a matter of latitude: in Pennsylvania it wouldn’t have been bright daylight at half past nine.

I had a drink, answered amiable questions, received an invitation or two: one man claimed to have played cricket with my brother Martin. My hostess rejoined me and said: “You know Olive Juckson-Smith, don’t you?”

I said, yes, I used to. She said, do come and meet her, it’ll be a surprise.

We made our way, through the jostling party, the decibels rising, the alcohol sinking, to a knot of people at the other side of the pool. My hostess called: “Olive! I’ve got an old friend for you.”

The first thing I noticed was that Olive’s hair had gone quite white. She was my own age, so that oughtn’t to have disturbed me, though for a moment, after all those years, it did. She had been, in her youth, a handsome Nordic girl, bold-eyed and strong. Her eyes still shone light-blue, but her face was drawn: she had lost a lot of weight: though her arms were muscular, her body had become gaunt. The first moment was over, the shock had gone. But I was left with the expression that greeted me. It was one of hostility — no, more than that, something nearer detestation.

“How are you?” I asked, still expecting (it was the mild pleasure I had been imagining on the way out) to meet an old friend.

“I’m well enough.” Her answer was curt, as though she didn’t want to speak at all.

“Where are you living now?”

She brought out the name of a Northern town. She was fashionably turned out. I guessed that she and her husband were as well-off as my hosts. I didn’t know whether she had had children, and I couldn’t begin to ask. I said, trying to remain warm: “It’s a long time since we met, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is.” Her voice was frigid, and she hadn’t given even a simulacrum of a smile.

My hostess, who was both kindly and no fool, was becoming embarrassed. To ease things over, she said to Olive that I had done a good many things in the time between. “I’ve heard of some of the things you’ve done,” Olive said to me, her face implacable.

To start with, I had thought that she was hating me because I reminded her of a past she wanted to obliterate, in which I had, quite innocently, been involved. But that seemed to be the least of it. For suddenly she began to attack me, and soon to denounce me, for parts of my public life. I had been a man of the left. My “gang”, people like Francis Getliffe and the others (she knew a number of them by name, as though she had been monitoring all we said and wrote) had done their best to bring the country to ruin. We were all guilty, and I was as guilty as any man.

If she had merely become conservative, there would have been nothing astonishing in that. It had happened to half the friends, perhaps more than half, with whom I had knocked about in my youth. But she had become fanatically so. And, for the paradoxical reason that I had lived a good deal among politicians, I was all the worse prepared to cope. In Westminster and Whitehall, in political houses such as Diana Skidmore’s Basset, your opponents didn’t curse you in private. Sometimes, at the time of Munich or Suez, one thought twice about accepting a dinner invitation — but I had never, not once, been blackguarded like this. Except, now I came to think of it, by one of my cousins, who, discovering that I had made a radical statement, told my brother Martin that he had crossed my name out of his family Bible.

There was nothing to do. I caught the eye of Vicky, who was standing not far off, made an excuse and joined her group. Then I moved round the pool, from one cordial person to another, cordial myself. They were drinking, so was I, it was like any party anywhere. Except that, when I next encountered Vicky, I said that I didn’t want to stay too long: as soon as we decently could, I should like to slip away. She was enjoying herself, but she nodded. Before half-past eleven, she was driving back into the town. Over the dark fields, the sky was dark at last.

“That wasn’t a success, was it?” she said.

“Not by the highest standards,” I answered.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry to have dragged you away.” She didn’t get enough treats, I was thinking: but she made the most of any that happened to her. She had been happy by the poolside, as though she were a child, fascinated by her first party. Nevertheless, she had witnessed some of the scene with Olive, and she had come away without a question. As I had told Martin, she was a good girl.

Never mind, she was saying, she would be taking her holiday in September, she would be in London with Pat, there would be plenty of parties. She broke off: “Was she always like that?”

“When she was your age, people might have thought she was a lot like you.”

“Oh, that’s not fair!”

“I was going on to say that they would have been dead wrong. Sometimes she seemed to think about others, but I fancy she was always self-absorbed.”

“Of course,” said Vicky in her level tone, “I suppose I am rather conservative. Most doctors are, you know.”

“But you won’t get conservative like that. If you meet Maurice” — I was choosing someone with whom she was friendly — “in thirty years’ time, you won’t tell him he’s the worst man in the world.”

She chuckled, then said: “Was it nasty?”

“No one likes being hated. I’ve known people who pretended not to care—”

“You do have to put up with some curious things, don’t you?”

She said it in her kind, aseptic fashion, and for the rest of the drive we talked about her father. When we came to the suburbs, she had to stop at a traffic light, behind another car. There was a lamp standard on the pavement, brightening the leaves of the lime tree close beside. Quite suddenly, without warning or cause, I had something like an hallucination. The number plate of the car in front, either to my eyes or in my mind, I could not distinguish whether the transformation was visual or not, was carrying different, fewer figures. NR 8150. Those were the figures in my mind. That was the number of Sheila’s father’s car, when we were twenty. She disliked driving and seldom used it. She had driven me in it only once or twice, and nowhere near this road. The car meant nothing to either of us, and I had not thought of its number in all those years. There it was. Vicky was asking me something, but all I could attend to was that number.