Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

I led Margaret in by the back way. Passing the window of my father’s room, I stood on tiptoe but could see only darkness. When I went up the steps to the French window, I found the room was empty. We returned along the passage. I rang at the familiar front door (pulling the hand bell, perhaps it was still the same bell, as when I came back one night, late from a school debate, found our own house empty and rang Aunt Milly’s bell: there was my mother pretending to laugh off a setback, lofty in her disappointed pride). The bell jangled. After a time footsteps sounded, and a middle-aged man in his shirt-sleeves opened the door. I had seen him before, but not spoken to him: he was always referred to by my father as Mr Sperry. He was called my father’s “lodger”, though he occupied the entire house except for the single room.

I told him my name and said that I was looking for my father. Mr Sperry chuckled. He was long and thin, with a knobbly Adam’s apple and a bush of hair. He had a kind, perplexed and slightly eccentric face. I thought I remembered hearing that he was a jobbing plumber.

“I expect the old gentleman’s doing his bit of shopping,” he said.

“When do you think he’ll be back?”

Mr Sperry shook his head. “It’s wonderful how he does for himself,” he said. He had the most gentle manners: but it was clear that, though he had occupied the house for ten years, he didn’t know much about my father, and was puzzled by what little he did know. “I can’t tell you when he’ll be home, I’m sure. Would you care to come in?”

I exchanged a glance with Margaret. I said we hadn’t many minutes, there was a train to catch, we’d just hang about outside for a little while. That was true: and yet, kind as Mr Sperry was, he was a stranger, and I didn’t want to sit in childhood’s rooms with him.

Standing outside the car, Margaret and I smoked cigarettes. It would be bad to miss my father now. I kept looking along the road to the library, down the rise to the chapel. Then Margaret said: “I think that’s him, isn’t it?”

I was watching the other direction. She was pointing to a tiny figure who had just turned into sight, by the chapel railings.

She wasn’t certain. Her eyes were perfect: she could make out that small figure as I could not: but she couldn’t be certain because, owing to my father’s singularity, she had met him only twice.

Slowly, with small steps, the figure toddled on. Yes, it was my father. At last I saw him clearly. He was wearing a bowler hat, beneath which silky white hair flowed over his ears: his overcoat was much too long for him, and his trousers, as wide as an old-fashioned Russian’s, billowed over his boots. At each short step, a foot turned outwards at forty-five degrees. He was singing, quite loudly, to himself. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. He was only four or five houses away when he noticed us.

“Well, I declare,” he said.

Away from him, how long was it since I had heard that phrase? It was like listening at a college meeting when I was a young man: one heard usages, long since dead, such as this one of my father’s, stretching back three generations. “I declare,” he repeated, gazing not at me but at Margaret, for he kept his appreciative eye for a good-looking woman.

I explained that we had had to attend a university function the day before, and thought we would look him up. It would be easier if he had a telephone, I grumbled.

“Confound it,” said my father, speaking like a national figure who would not dare to have an entry in the directory, “I should never have a minute’s peace. Anyway—” he fumbled over Margaret’s name, which he had forgotten, but went on in triumph — “You tracked me down, didn’t you? Here you are as large as life and twice as natural.”

We followed him in, down the passage again, up the steps to the French window, saying that we would stay just a quarter-of-an-hour. In the dark odorous little room, my father switched on a light. To my mother, who had never seen it in that house or her own, electric light had been one of the symbols of a higher existence: and anyone who thought that proved her unspiritual didn’t know what the spirit was.

He offered to put the kettle on, and make us some tea. No, we didn’t want to drink tea at twelve o’clock in the morning. But he had to give us something. At last, with enormous gratification, he produced from a cupboard a bottle about one-third full of tawny port. “I’ve always liked a drop of port,” he told Margaret, and proceeded to tell her a story about going out with the waits at Christmas “when Lena was alive”, being invited into drawing-rooms and figuring as the hardened drinker of the party. That was one of the daydreams in which I didn’t believe. I looked out into the stone-flagged yard. There was a stump of a plum tree still surviving near his window. As far back as I could remember, that tree had never borne any fruit.

My father was talking with animation to Margaret. So far he hadn’t commented on the patch over my eye. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he thought that it was the kind of idiosyncrasy in which I was likely to indulge. I interrupted him: “As a matter of fact, I’ve got to have a minor operation tomorrow.”

“You’ve ruptured yourself have you?” he said brightly, as though that was the only physical mishap he could imagine happening to anyone. It had happened, apparently, to Mr Sperry.

“No,” I said with a faint irritation, tapping my patch. “I’ve got a detached retina.”

My father had never heard of the condition. In fact, he had only the haziest notion of where the retina was. Margaret, very patient with him, drew a diagram, which he studied with an innocent expression.

“I expect he’ll be all right, won’t he?” he asked simply, as though I wasn’t there.

“Of course he will. You’re not to worry.”

Not, I couldn’t help thinking, that he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety.

“I’ve never had any trouble with my eyes, you know,” he was ruminating. “I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, by gosh I have.” In fact he had kept all his senses into his late eighties. He surveyed me with an air of preternatural wisdom or perhaps of cunning.

“You ought to take care of your eyes, that you ought. I tell people, I must have told you once upon a time, be careful, you’ve only got one pair of eyes. That’s it. You’ve only got one pair of eyes.”

“At this moment,” I said, “I’ve got exactly half of that.”

This was a kind of grim comment in which Martin and I, and young Charles after us, occasionally indulged ourselves. My father was much too amiable a man to make such comments: but whenever he heard them — it had been true in my boyhood, it was just as true now — he appeared to regard them as the height of humour. So he gave out great peals of his surprisingly loud, harmonious laughter.

“Would you believe it?” he asked Margaret. “Would you believe it?” He kept making remarks about me, directed entirely at her, as though I were a vacuum inhabited only by myself. “He’s a big strong fellow, isn’t he? He’ll be all right, won’t he? He’s a young man, isn’t he?” (I was within a week of my fifty-eighth birthday). “I wish I were as young as he is.”

At that reflection, his face, usually so cheerful, became clouded. “I’m not so young as I used to be,” he turned his attention from Margaret to me. “I don’t mind for myself, I poddle along just as well as ever. But people are beginning to say things, you know.”

“What people?”

“I’m afraid they’re beginning to say things at the choir.”

I felt a stab of something like animal concern, much more as though he were my son than the other way about.