Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

There were swirls through the rooms as a few people left or others came in late. Caro, who used to be Roger Quaife’s wife, made an entrance with her new husband. It was surprising that she came, for normally she moved entirely in a smart circle with which Margaret and I had only a flickering acquaintance. Her second husband, unlike Roger, came from an ambience as rich and rarefied as her own — though to some that was concealed under the name of Smith. He was cultivated, much more so than Caro, and, of all those I had talked to that night, he was the only one who could identify our paintings.

We were standing in the dining-room, which had at that stage of the party become the central lobby, so congested that I found it hard to direct Smith’s Hanoverian head to a newly-acquired Chinnery, when I heard scraps of a conversation, loud and alcoholic, nearer the middle of the room.

“That’s all we need to say,” Edgar Hankins was declaiming, in the elegiac tone he used for his literary radio talks. His rubbery, blunt-featured face was running with sweat. “That’s all we need to say. Birth, copulation, and death. That’s all there is.”

He was declaiming to, or at least in the company of, Irene. Once, and it had overlapped the first years of her marriage to Martin, she had been in love with him. All that was long since over. She gave a cheerful malicious yelp (was there, out of past history, just the extra edge?), and replied: “‘He talks to me that never had a son’.”

It was true (aside, someone was complaining about quotations from the best authors) that Hankins, who had married after their love affair, had no children. Hankins, with elevated reiteration, answered: “Birth, copulation and death.”

“If you must have it,” cried Irene triumphantly, “birth, copulation, children and death! That’s a bit nearer.”

Hankins went on with his slogan — as though he had reached one of the drinking stages where the truth is ultimately clear and only needs to be pronounced. As I pushed away, seeing someone alone, I heard Irene’s antiphon.

“Birth, copulation, children and death! If anyone leaves out the children, he doesn’t begin to know what it’s all about.”

Quite late, about a quarter to twelve, when the rooms were beginning to thin, Sammikins, in a dinner jacket with a carnation in his buttonhole, walked in. He asked loudly after his sister Caro, who had already left. Their father had died a couple of years before, and Sammikins had come into the title. So he had had to give up his seat in the Commons, which to him, though to no one else, appeared his proper occupation. He told me — or rather he told the room — that he had lost “a packet” at poker an hour or two before. I hadn’t seen him for months: I thought he looked drawn and that the flesh had fallen in below his cheekbones. When I got him to myself, I asked how he was.

“Just a touch of alcoholic fatigue, dear boy,” he said in his brazen voice. But he was quite sober. Apart from me and some of the very young, he seemed the only person present who had not had a drink that night.

Many people in the swirl were well and happy. Some, I knew, were heartsick. With Douglas, from a cause that couldn’t be cured. Others, like Vicky, who couldn’t restrain herself from begging ten minutes alone with Pat, might some day look on at this kind of party, just as the content now looked at her. Leonard Getliffe had been and gone. There must have been others there, not only among the young, who — without the rest of us knowing — were putting a face on things. It was part of the flux. Just as it was part of the flux that, in the public eye, some were having the luck and some the opposite. Douglas, in spite of his organic grief, had reached the peak in his job. The master politician was confident that, before this time next year, he would have reached the peak in his. An American playwright, who had been modestly drinking in a corner, had just had a spectacular success. And there was another success, the most bizarre of all. Gilbert Cooke, who had been fortunate to be kept in the civil service after the war, had managed to become deputy head of one of the security branches. It couldn’t have been a more esoteric triumph: except to Douglas, one dared not mention the name of the post, much less of its occupant. I had not the slightest conception of how Gilbert had made it. For him, who was not able even to suggest that he had been promoted, it was his crowning glory.

Whereas Herbert Getliffe was not the only one for whom the snakes had been stronger than the ladders. Edgar Hankins’ brand of literary criticism, which had been rooted in the twenties, had gone out of fashion. He could still earn a living, one saw his name each week, he still wrote with elegiac eloquence: but the younger academics sneered at him, and in the weeklies he was being referred to as though he were a dead Georgian poet. There was another turn-up for the book (Sammikins, in another context, had just been blaring out those words), the most unjust of all — as though anything could happen either way. Walter Luke had stepped in for half-an-hour, grizzled, crisp. Yes, he had got honours, but what did they mean? Apart from Leonard Getliffe, he had a greater talent than anyone there. But for years past he had thrown up everything to lead the project on plasma physics. Now, so all the scientists said, it was certain that the problem would not be solved for a generation. Walter Luke knew it, and knew — making jaunty cracks at his own expense — that he had wasted his creative life.

At midnight, as I was saying some goodbyes at the hall door, another guest, the last of all, emerged from the lift. It was Ronald Porson. He hadn’t been invited by me — but he was one of those, living alone in bedsitters in the neighbourhood, whom Maurice and the local parson went to visit. The parson had been at the party, but had left some time before to celebrate Christmas mass. I guessed, from the first sight, that I should need some help with Porson, but Maurice was nowhere near.

He came lurching up. In the passage light there was the gleam of an MCC tie.

“Good evening, Lewis,” he said in a domineering tone. I asked him to come in. As we walked into the dining-room, he said: “I was told you had a champagne party on.”

Not quite, I said. But there was the bar over there –

“I insist,” said Porson, “I was told it was a champagne party.”

As a matter of fact, I said, there were lots of other liquids, but not champagne.

“I insist,” began Porson, and I told him that, if he wanted champagne, I would find a bottle. He had come to pick a quarrel: I didn’t mind his doing so with me, but there were others he might upset. Immediately he refused champagne, and demanded gin.

“I don’t like large parties,” said Porson, looking round the room.

“Can’t be helped,” I replied.

He took a gulp. “You’ve got too many Jews here,” he announced.

“Be careful.”

“Why should I be?”

Martin, who had been watching, whispered, “You may need a strong man or two.” He beckoned Sammikins, and they both stood near. Porson was in his seventies, but he could be violent. None of us, not even the clergyman, knew how he survived. He came from a professional family; he had eked out his bit of capital, but it had gone long since. He had once been convicted of importuning. But all that happened to him made him fight off pity and become either aggressive or patronising or both.

“Who is he?” He pointed to Sammikins.

I said, Mr Porson, Lord Edgeworth.

“Why don’t you do something about it?” Porson asked him.

“What are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you do something about this country? That’s what you’re supposed to sit there for, isn’t it?” Porson put out his underlip. “I’ve got no use for the lot of you.”