Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

It was a trick of memory that seemed utterly unprovoked. At dinner the taste of claret had brought back an instant’s thought of Cambridge, but that was the kind of sensuous trigger-pressing all of us often know. It was possible that I was hyper-aesthetised to some different form of memory after the confrontation with Olive: but it didn’t strike home like that, the scene with Olive had been in the here-and-now, this was as though time itself had played a trick.

Vicky had put a hand on my arm.

“Are you all right?” she was saying.

“Perfectly.”

I was speaking the truth. I had remembered a number, that was all.

SUMMER, autumn, 1963. It was a placid time for us, more so than for a long time past. My name had gone out of the news: Margaret’s father stayed, by what seemed like one of fate’s perversities, in better health and spirits. The world outside was more placid too. Sometimes we talked of South-East Asia, but without the smell of danger. Even suspicious and experienced men, like Francis Getliffe, were allowing themselves a ration of hope.

We turned inwards to the family — and there Margaret had a little to worry about, nothing dramatic, just a routine worry, as she watched her children’s lives. Maurice had failed in his first year examination: by a concession which in abstract justice should not have been granted, he was being allowed back for his second year. He took it with as little pique as ever. When Charles cursed a piece of work he had brought back for the holidays, Maurice said: “Now you realise that you ought to be stupid, like me.”

Then he had gone off for the whole summer to work as an attendant in a mental hospital. It was not a job many young men would have taken, but he was happy. He had the singular composure which one sometimes meets in the self-abnegating. At night, when we were alone, Margaret often talked about him. Ought he to care so little for himself? Wouldn’t it be better if he had more drive, and yes, a dash of envy? She was worrying, but she felt a twisted joke at her own expense. She had come to admire the selfless virtues: and now with her first-born — whom she loved differently from Charles — she was wishing that, instead of trying to be of some good to the helpless, he would think about his future and buckle down to his books.

Yet, when they were together, he was protective towards her. Just as he was protective towards Vicky, the evening that she and Pat spent with us in the flat. It was late in September, Charles had gone back to school, the two of them came for an early drink and stayed to dinner, Maurice had not yet returned from his hospital.

Pat, who knew well enough that Margaret disapproved of him, began making up to her the moment he came in. I found the spectacle entertaining, partly because I had a soft spot for my nephew, partly because Margaret was not entirely unsusceptible. He entered, put Vicky down in one chair, made Margaret keep her place in another while he took charge of the drinks. It was all brisk, easy and practised: and yet, in the serene evening, the mellow light, there was at once a stir and crackle in the room.

He was a shortish young man, shorter than his father, who was himself inches less tall than Charles or me. He had strong shoulders like his father’s, and similar heavy wrists. His hair curled close to his forehead, he had sharp eyes, a wide melon mouth. No one could have called him handsome, or even impressive. When he made a sidelong remark to Vicky, who didn’t show amusement easily, she was laughing with sheer delight.

I observed them as he bustled round with the whisky and the ice jug. She was elated. As for him, his spirits were usually so high that it would be hard to detect a change. Frequently he called her darling, he said that “we” had been to the theatre last night, that “we” were going to a friend’s studio tomorrow. He was using all the emollients of a love affair. She was looking at no one else in the room: while he was sparking with energy to make Margaret like him.

He was sitting between her and Vicky, and I opposite to them, with my back to the light. Eyes acute, he was searching Margaret’s face to see when he drew a response. Her father? Yes, he seemed a little better, said Margaret. “That’s all you can hope for, isn’t it?” said Pat, quick and surgent. Once, when he was brasher, he would have been asking her to let him call on Austin Davidson: but now Pat not only knew her father’s condition, he knew also that she had been exposed all her life to young painters on the climb. With the same caution, he didn’t refer, or pay attention, to the great Rothko, borrowed from her father, on the wall at their back, which from where I sat beamed swathes of colour into the sunset. Pictures, painting, Pat was shutting away: as he leaned towards her, he was leaving himself out of it. He tried another lead. Maurice? Yes, he knew about the hospital. “I’m sorry he missed the Mays” (he was speaking of the examination). “But still, it doesn’t matter all that much, now does it?”

“It’s a nuisance,” said Margaret.

“Aren’t you being old-fashioned, Aunt Meg?” When I heard him call her that, which no one else ever did, I felt he was getting surer. “You all believe in examinations, like my father, don’t you now?”

“Well, he’s got to get through them — if he’s going to do what he wants.”

“But does he want to? Are you sure he does?”

“Don’t you think he wants to be a doctor?” Margaret was asking a question, a genuine question.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that he does. But I’ll bet you this, he’ll find something, either that or something else, that he really wants to do.”

He looked eagerly at Margaret, and spoke with authority. “I suppose you realise that all the people my age think he’s rather wonderful? I mean, he’s influenced a lot of us. Not only me. You know what I’m like. But if I’d stayed at Cambridge, and it wasn’t a tragedy for anyone that I didn’t, you know, he would have been one of the better things—”

“I know he’s kind—”

“I mean more than that.”

For the moment at least he had melted her. Next day she would have her doubts: she was too self-critical not to: and yet perhaps the effect wouldn’t wear off. I was thinking, you can’t set out to please unless you want to please. He had his skill in finding the vulnerable place, and yet this wasn’t really skill. He couldn’t help finding the way to give her pleasure. Men like Arnold Shaw would view this activity, and the young man himself, with contempt. In most of the moral senses, men like Arnold were beyond comparison more worthy. Nevertheless, they would be despising something they could never do.

I was thinking also, how old should I guess Pat to be, if I didn’t know? Certainly older than he was, older than Vicky: but he had, apart from his mouth, the kind of lined, small-featured face which stays for years in the indeterminate mid-twenties. He was taking two drinks to our one, but there again his physical temperament was odd. He showed the effect of alcohol when he had finished his first glass — and then drank hard, and didn’t show much more effect, for hours to come. He seemed to live, when quite sober, two drinks over par: with alcohol, he climbed rapidly to four over par, and stayed there.

They were talking about doctoring.

“I’ve always thought I should have enjoyed it,” Margaret was saying to Vicky. “I often envy you.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Vicky.

“Oh, you must.”

“No,” Vicky persisted with her stubborn honesty. “I don’t think I had a vocation. It’s a job—”