Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

It was a great gift of hers, I thought, to fall in love so totally just where it was convenient to fall in love. Though she wasn’t an adventuress, she had done better for herself than any adventuress I had met. Roy had been well-off, at least by our modest academic standards of the time (I had seen his father’s name over a hosiery factory when I walked to school as a boy): Azik was perhaps ten times richer. She had loved each of them in turn. She herself said that night, in the sublime flat phrase of our native town: “No, I can’t say that I’ve got much to complain about.”

In the throng of the party Muriel joined us, Roy Calvert’s daughter, born a few months before he was killed, so that she was over twenty now. I had seen her, intermittently, in the last few years. As a child she promised to get the best out of both her parents’ looks, but by now, though she had a kind of demure attractiveness, that hadn’t happened. Her nose was too long, her eyes too heavy-lidded. Usually those eyes were averted, her whole manner was demure: but when she asked a question, one received a green-eyed sharp stare, perhaps the single physical trait that came from her father. No, there was another: her face one wouldn’t notice much, now she was grown up, but when she walked she had his light-footed upright grace.

Rosalind chatted on about Azik’s exploits. Muriel, eyes sidelong, put in a gentle comment. On the face of it, she thought Rosalind was underrating him. Whether this was Muriel’s way of amusing herself, I didn’t know.

The bells were ringing, we went into our box. Azik’s passion for the theatre was an eclectic one, and we were seeing a play of the Absurd. Within a few minutes I tried, in the darkness of the box, to make out the hands of my wristwatch: how long before the first interval? In time it came. Back into the private room. Back to more champagne, the table restocked, dishes of caviare brought in. But back also to a sight I had had no warning of. One of the diplomats had taken charge of Margaret, I was in another group with Azik — when I saw, in the corner of the room, dinner-jacketed like the rest of us, my nephew Pat. He was talking, head close to head, with Muriel. I put my hand on Azik’s massive arm, and drew him aside. I indicated the couple in the corner, and in an undertone said: “How do you know that young man?”

“It was impossible to fit him into the boxes,” said Azik, misunderstanding me, as though apologising for not doing his best for Pat. “So I asked if he would not mind to join us for our little drink—”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how did you come to know him?”

“I must say,” replied Azik, “I think he presented himself to my wife. Because his father was such a great friend of Calvert.”

He moved his great moon face nearer to mine, with a glance of friendly cunning. Did he have any suspicions about that story? In fact, it was quite untrue. Martin had known Roy Calvert only slightly: they might have walked through the college together, that was about all. Of course, it was conceivable that Pat had picked up a different impression. Family legends grow, he must have heard a good deal about Roy both from me and his father. As for Rosalind, I doubted whether she had known, let alone remembered, many of Roy’s Cambridge friends.

“I did not raise objection,” Azik said. He added, putting a finger to the side of his squashed and spreading nose: “Remember, I am a Jewish papa.”

I told him, I sometimes felt I should have made a pretty good Jewish papa myself. But some of our thoughts were in parallel, and one at right angles.

“Your brother’s is a good family, I should say,” said Azik.

I would have disillusioned him, if it had been necessary. But it wasn’t. He knew as well as I did that the Eliots were not a “good family” in the old continental sense. He knew precisely where we came from. But he meant something different. Azik saw, much more clearly than most Englishmen, what the English society had become. It was tangled, it was shifting its articulations, but in it men like Martin had their place.

I asked Azik whether he had seen much of Pat.

“Ach, he is very young,” said Azik, with monumental good nature and a singular lack of interest. Our thoughts still did not meet. Azik began to speak, quietly but without reticence, about money, Muriel’s money. “I have to be careful, my friend. Mu will have something of her own when she is twenty-one.” Calvert (as Azik always called Roy) had not had much except a big allowance: but what he left had been “tied up” for Mu. “He was a very careful man,” said Azik with a kind of respect. “However, that is chicken feed.” Azik, totally unprudish about money, unlike most of my rich English acquaintances, told me the exact sums. “But Calvert’s father, no, that isn’t such chicken feed.” Rosalind had been bequeathed a life interest in half of it; the rest was in trust for Muriel, and would come to her next year. “Fortunately, she has her head screwed on.”

Before we parted, Azik could not resist explaining to me how different his own dispositions were. “I have made over a capital sum to Rosalind with no strings attached. So she can walk out on me tomorrow if she can’t stand me any longer.” He gave an uxorious chuckle. As for David, well, need anyone ask? Though I did not need to ask, Azik insisted on telling me of a magniloquent settlement.

After another instalment of the Absurd, we returned for the second interval in the private room. This time, seeing that Pat had reappeared and was once more close to Muriel, I went straight to them.

“Hello, Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, treacle-brown eyes wide open and cheeky. “Who’d ever have thought of seeing you here?”

“Daddy would have hated it if you weren’t here, you know that, Sir Lewis,” said Muriel, precisely. She was utterly composed.

I asked them how they liked the play. Muriel smiled, lashes falling close to her cheeks. Pat began: “I suppose we can’t communicate, at least that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

Yes, that was the idea.

He looked at Muriel. “But I can communicate with you sometimes, can’t I?”

“I think,” she said, “I can communicate with Daddy.”

For a moment, I had cursed myself for mentioning the play. It was true that for two acts it had been expressing non-communication: but at the end of the second, as though for once human beings could make themselves clear to one another, there had been a lucid, and in fact a lyrically eloquent description of fellatio. I had been with Pat in company where he would have found this an occasion too hilarious to resist. But no, now he was holding his tongue: was he being protective towards her, or was it too early to frighten her?

I watched her, her eyes meekly cast down. She did not appear to be in need of protection. She was so composed, more than he was. I knew that Rosalind, like other mothers whose own early lives had not been unduly pure, had taken extreme care of her. She hadn’t gone unsupervised, she had had to account for any date with a young man. And yet I should have guessed — though I wouldn’t have trusted any of my guesses about her very far — that she was one of those girls who somehow understand all about the sexual life before they have a chance to live it.

“Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, “are you open on New Year’s Eve this year?”

This time he was really being brash. I had to answer that I had been pretty much occupied that autumn, we hadn’t made up our minds. That was, in literal terms, true. But Margaret and I had got into the habit of asking our families and close friends for New Year’s Eve: neither of us had suggested breaking it. The point was, he was begging for the two of them — as though Vicky, who had been invited the year before, could be dropped, or as though they might all have an amicable time together.