Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

After the rest had gone, Francis and Martin, not so frugal as their colleagues, stayed with me for a final drink. But Martin, when I mentioned Arnold Shaw, did not take any part in the conversation. He and Francis, though they were sometimes allies, were not friends. There had always been a constraint between them, and now, for a simple reason, it was added to. Francis had come to know of the misery that Vicky was causing his son. Francis also knew that she was infatuated with Pat, whom he thought a layabout. In all that imbroglio, Francis could not help remembering that Pat was Martin’s son: and — with total unfairness from a fair-minded man — he had come to put the blame on Martin and regard him with an extra degree of chill.

As I tentatively brought in the name of Arnold Shaw, I got a response from Francis which surprised me. In his own house in the spring, he had had no patience with me. This night, sitting by the littered table in Brown’s, he answered with care and sympathy. “Of course,” he said, “I still think you overrate the old buffer. You’re putting yourself out too much, I’m certain you are. But that’s your lookout—”

I said that I hadn’t any special illusions about Arnold: but I didn’t want him to be pushed out in a hurry, hustled out by miscellaneous dislike.

“Leonard doesn’t dislike him,” Francis was saying. “He thinks he’s a damned bad Vice-Chancellor, but otherwise he’s rather fond of him.”

He looked at me with a considerate smile, and went on: “I don’t believe you’re going to alter the situation there. It’s gone too deep. But what do you really want?”

I replied, I too accepted that there wouldn’t be peace until Arnold left. The decent course was to make it tolerable for him, to ease him out, with a touch of gratitude, over the next three years.

Francis shrugged. “Nice picture,” he said. But, in a friendly fashion, he continued: “Look, I think the only hope is for him to come to terms with the young Turks. I don’t imagine it will work, mind you, but I’m sure it’s the only hope.” That is, according to Francis, Shaw would have to take the initiative (as anyone fit to be in charge of an institution, he added tartly, would have done long ago). He would have to face Leonard and his colleagues, no holds barred. They were used to harsh argument, they would respect him for it. Couldn’t I pass on the word, that this was worth trying? “You know, if he doesn’t try it,” said Francis, “there’ll be the most God-almighty row.”

Francis was speaking as though he were on my side: yet in principle he wasn’t. And when he disagreed in principle, he wasn’t often as sympathetic as this. It occurred to me that he might be affected by my physical misadventure. Most people when you were incapacitated or ill tended insensibly to write you off. They took care of you in illness, but did less for you in action. Your mana had got less. With a few men, particularly with strong characters like Francis — perhaps by a deliberate effort — the reverse was true. They seemed to behave, or tried to behave, as though your mana had increased.

After we had said good night to Francis, who was staying at the Athenaeum, Martin and I sat in the dark taxi, swerving in the windy dark through empty Mayfair streets. Nothing eventful had happened to him, but we went on talking in my drawing-room, talking the small change of brothers, anxiety-free, while the windows rattled. He had nothing to report about Pat, but for once he spoke of his daughter Nina. Yes, she seemed to have a real talent for music, she might be able to make a living at it. She was a great favourite of mine, pretty, diffident, self-effacing. If the luck had fallen the other way, and Pat had had that gift, Martin would have been triumphant. But he was composed and happy that night, and, though he was an expert in sarcasm, that specific sarcasm didn’t get exchanged.

NOW I had started moving about again in London, I had to pay a duty visit to Austin Davidson. It was not such an ordeal as it had been, Margaret told me, She, except when I was in hospital, went to him each day. In fact, when we called at tea-time, passing by the picture-hung walls, he was able to meet us at his study door and return to his armchair without help or distress, though he waited to get his breath before he spoke.

In the study, strangely dark, as it always seemed, for a connoisseur of visual art, the only picture I could make out hung above his chair. I thought I had not seen it before: a Moore drawing? The December night was already setting in, the reading lamp beside Davidson lit up nothing but our faces.

He looked at me from under his eyebrows: from the cheekbones, the flesh fell translucently away. His eyes, opaque, sepia, bird-bright, had, however, a glint in them.

“I’m sorry about your catastrophe,” he said.

“It’s all over,” I replied.

“You notice that I used the word catastrophe?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old men get a remarkable amount of satisfaction out of the physical afflictions of their juniors.” He gave his old caustic grin. “There’s nothing to make an old man feel half his age — as much as hearing that someone twenty years younger has just died.”

It might have been an effort. If so, it was a good one. It had the note of the unsubdued, unregenerate Davidson. Margaret and I were laughing. If most men had said that — certainly if I had — it would have sounded guilty. Not so with him. It sounded (just as his talk about his own suicide had sounded) innocent and pure.

He leant back, brown eyes sparkling. He was delighted that he could entertain us. For the next couple of hours, except when he heard himself gasping, he forgot to be morose. Another friend of his came in, whom Margaret and I had often met, a man about my age called Hardisty. He had been a disciple of the set to which Davidson belonged: he was clever, miscellaneously cultivated, good-looking apart from being as nearly bald as a man can be: he believed that Davidson and his friends had been the new Enlightenment, and that it would be a long time before there was another. He did most of the talking, while Davidson nodded, for they formed a united front. Neither Margaret nor I wanted to be abrasive, so we left them to it, Davidson occasionally making some reflection which gave Hardisty a chance to eat a tea young Charles wouldn’t have thought contemptible. Savoury toast: Chelsea buns: éclairs. Davidson’s housekeeper had provided tea for us all. The rest of us ate nothing, but the tea disappeared, and Hardisty chatted away between mouthfuls, the sort of man who did not put on weight.

Davidson recalled when, just before the 1914 war, he had seen his first Kandinsky. It had been uncivilised of the Russians not to understand that that was a step forward. Yes, said Hardisty, perfectly in tune, art, any art, had its own dynamic, nothing could stop it. You mightn’t like it, you mightn’t understand it, but since the first abstracts were painted nothing could have stopped the art of our time. A little later, he said, just as easily, morals had their own dynamic too. In a few years, for example, we should all regard drugs, or at least most drugs, as we now regarded alcohol. It was much too late for any of us to start on them, he said, brimful of health, but still — Again Davidson nodded. Yes, he said, it was interesting how the taboos had been vanishing in his own lifetime.

“In my young days at Cambridge, don’t you know,” he went on, “homosexuality was a very tender plant.”

Hardisty gave an acquiescent smile. For as long as Margaret and I could remember, he had been living with another man. This partner I had seen only once: I had an idea that he didn’t fit into our sort of company: but the arrangement had been as stable as most marriages. Certainly Hardisty was a happy man.