Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Others came up to us. Francis was being less fatalistic, when David Rubin took me aside. In a corner of the room he indicated my patched eye and said: “This is a nuisance, Lewis.”

It sounded brusque. But it wasn’t so. He looked at me with monkey-sad eyes, incongruous above his immaculate dinner jacket (his colleagues gossiped, why should a man of his morbid pessimism appear to be competing as the Best Dressed Man of the Year?). His eyes were sad, his nerve ends were as fine as Margaret’s. He wasn’t going to harass me with sympathy, or with alternative plans for surgical treatment.

“Yes,” I said, without any bluff.

“These retinas are getting rather common.”

I asked him why.

“Quite simple. We’re all living longer, that’s all. You’ve got to expect bits of the machine to break down.”

He had judged it right, he was being a support.

“You’ve played your luck, you know,” he said.

He went on: he had a check-up every six months. When did I last have a check-up?

I said something about American hypochondria.

“Maybe,” said Rubin, with astringent comradeship. “They’ll find something sooner or later. Let’s see, you’re ten years older than I am. But remember, I did my best work before I was thirty. I bet you, I’ve felt older than you have — I bet you I have done for years.”

But, when we had gone into dinner, the courses clattering in the most lucullan of all Arnold Shaw’s feasts, I sat with Rubin’s brand of consolation wearing off. The amnesia of the first drinks wore off too: going into hospital next day, I had to stop drinking early in the meal, though I didn’t want to. The mechanics of politeness jangled on: I turned from the honorary graduate’s wife on my right to the one on my left and back again: they found me dull: I just wanted the day to end.

There was one diversion, though. Vicky had led the women out, and the rest of us had reseated ourselves at Shaw’s end of the table. Shaw was in excelsis. He had made four distinguished scholars honorary graduates. There was also Lufkin, who had been forced upon him by the engineers, but still he was good enough. Shaw saw them all round him. He was a man of uncomplicated pleasures, and he was content. He was also content because he had given them splendid wine, and drunk a good deal of it himself. Again, Lufkin was an exception. True to his bleak rule, he had drunk one whisky before dinner, another with the meal, and now, while the others were enjoying Shaw’s port, he allowed himself a third. But it was he who dominated the table. He was explaining certain circumstances, to him still astonishing though they had happened a couple of years before, surrounding his retirement.

“I decided it was right to go. Before there was any risk of being a liability to my people. Not that I wasn’t still at my best, or I should have got out long before.” He sat there skull-faced, still youthful-looking for a man in his late seventies. He delivered himself as though indifferent to his audience, completely absorbed in his own drama, projecting it like something of transcendental importance and objective truth.

“What do you imagine happened?” It was the kind of rhetorical question no one could answer, yet by which men as experienced as Rubin and Francis Getliffe were hypnotised.

“Nothing happened.” Lufkin answered himself with stony satisfaction.

He went on: “I made that industry.” It sounded gigantesque: it was quite true. He had possessed supreme technological insight and abnormal will. He had made an industry, not a fortune. He had more than enough money for his needs, but he had nothing to spend it on. By the standards of his industrial colleagues, he was not a rich man. “I made that industry, and everything inside it. I used to tell my people, I am your best friend . And they knew, I was their best friend .”

Heads, hypnotised, were nodding.

“What did they do?” Silence again. Again Lufkin answered himself. “Nothing.” He spoke with greater confidence than ever. “When any of my managers retired, the whole works turned out. When my deputy retired, the whole organisation sent a testimonial. What did they do for me?”

This time he didn’t give an answer. He said: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

He repeated: “I wasn’t hurt . I was surprised .”

When we joined the women, it was only minutes before Margaret spoke to Vicky and Arnold Shaw and took me off to bed. Alone in our room, I said to her: “Paul Lufkin is lonely.” I was wondering, how used were the others to this singular display of emotion? Horizontal fission, we used to call it. Lufkin sincerely believed that he wasn’t hurt. And yet, even he must realise at least that he felt lost. After great power for forty years, power all gone. After a lifetime of action, nothing to do. Once he had talked of retiring to Monaco. Now, so far as I knew, he lived in Surrey and came to London once a week for the committee of a charity. “Paul Lufkin is lonely,” I said.

“He’s not the only one,” said Margaret.

I asked what she meant.

“Didn’t you realise that Vicky was waiting for a telephone call all night, poor girl?”

In the solipsist bubble in which I had gone through that day, I had scarcely noticed her.

“Did she hear?”

Margaret shook her head.

“That nephew of yours. I’m afraid he’s throwing her over, don’t you think so?”

“It doesn’t look good.” I was sitting on the bed, just having taken off the eyepatch. I was trying to speak about Vicky, but the black edge cut out the light, the orange fringe was giddily swimming, and I let out that complaint only for myself.

THE next morning, tea trays on our bed, Margaret sketched out the day’s timetable. There was a train just after one, we could be in London in a couple of hours: that would bring us to the hospital before tea. The less time I had in the dark, the better, I said. I knew that I should have to lie on my back, both eyes blindfolded, to give the retina hours to settle down.

When I had agreed to Margaret’s programme, I said: “In that case, I think I’d like to see my old father this morning.”

For an instant, she was caught open-mouthed, her looks dissolved in blank astonishment. Her own relation with her father had been so responsible. She had sometimes been shocked by mine. She had never seen me in search of a father, either a real one or a surrogate, in all our time together. She gazed at me. She gave a sharp-eyed, intimate smile and said: “You know, it isn’t much more than having a few teeth out, you do know that?”

It sounded like free association gone mad, but her eyes were lit up. To others I seemed more rational than most men; not to her. She had lived with a streak of superstitiousness in me as deep as my mother’s, though more suppressed. She had watched me book in, year after year, at the same New York hotel, because there I had heard of a major piece of luck. She had learned how I dreaded any kind of pleasure on a Tuesday night because one such evening I had enjoyed myself and faced stark horror on the Wednesday morning. Sometimes, in fact, I infected her. She wasn’t sorry, she was relieved, to hear this atavistic desire of mine. It might be a longish operation, Margaret had said: there was a shrinking from unconsciousness which was atavistic too. She, as well as I, wasn’t disinclined to make an act of piety, to make this sort of insurance for which one prays as a child. The fact that it was an incongruous act of piety might have deterred her, she had more sense of the fitness of things, but she took me in my freedom, and didn’t wish it to deter me.

So, by the middle of the morning, she had said our goodbyes, and we were driving out through the backstreets along which, the preceding spring, I had walked with Charles. The cluster of shops, the chapel, the gentle rise. When I was a boy, cars didn’t pass those terraced windows once a day; and even that morning, when the university Daimler stopped outside Aunt Milly’s old house, there were curious eyes from the “entry” opposite.