Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“I did tell them,” said my father, sniffling, defensive, as though I were angry with him for incompetence, as his wife and sister used to be. “I did tell them, Lewis.”

“Well then?”

“It was no good.”

“They had me on a piece of string,” he added, lachrymose but acceptant.

It turned out, he went on to explain, that they persuaded him not to find his own car. They drove him forth and back every Sunday night until Christmas. Then they told him — one of the older men had to break the news — that it was “getting too much” for him.

“It wouldn’t have done any good, Lewis. Even if you’d driven me yourself. They thought it was time to get rid of me. They thought it was time I went.”

I couldn’t comfort him. Wouldn’t they let him go on somehow, wouldn’t it be something if he just attended the choir, when he felt like it?

“It’s no use. There’s nothing I can do any more.”

He went on: “I told you what they were up to. You can’t say I didn’t tell you, can you?”

For an instant, that pleased him. He said: “I suppose you can’t blame them. They’ve got to think about the future, haven’t they?”

“You’ve got to think about yourself.”

He answered: “I haven’t got anything to think about.”

As I heard that, I was left silent.

“Mind you,” he said, “they made a bit of a fuss of me. They had a party, and they drank my health. Sherry I think it was. You’d have enjoyed that, Lewis, that you would. And what do you think they gave me?”

I shook my head.

“Over there,” he pointed.

The little room had struck strange: but in the dim light, taken up by my father’s wretchedness, I hadn’t noticed the clock in the corner, although it had been ticking, I now realised, heavily away, racket-and-whirr. It was a large old-fashioned grandfather clock, glass-fronted, works open to sight. When I drew my chair nearer, I could see that it was a good specimen of its kind, with gold work on the face and gilt inlays in the woodwork. They had made a handsome, perhaps a lavish, present to the old man.

“Two clocks,” said my father, indicating the familiar one, on the mantelpiece. “That’s what I got.”

“They can’t have known you’d had another one—”

“I’ve only had two presentations in my livelong days,” he said. “Both clocks.”

I couldn’t be sure whether he was ready to clown, or making an effort to. I said, anyway, they had spent a lot of money this time, the gift was well-meant.

“They don’t even tell the same time,” said my father. “You ought to hear them strike, they go off one after the other. When they wake me up in the morning, I think, confound the clocks.”

Not for the first time, I was beating round for something to interest him. Wouldn’t he at least let me send him a television set? No, he said with meek obstinacy, he would never look at it. How did he know till he tried? He did know. Everything else I could think of, record player, books, he met with the same gentle no. Wasn’t there anything at all I could get for him?

“Nothing I can think of, thank you, Lewis,” he said.

Absently, quite remote from me, he seemed to be thinking again about his clocks.

“I don’t know why people should fancy that I always want to know the time. Time doesn’t matter all that much now, does it?”

He went on: “After all, I shouldn’t be surprised, I might go this year.”

He was speaking without inflection, and in fact as though I were not present. He didn’t say much more, apart from offering to put the kettle on again and make some more cocoa, or tea if I preferred it. Whether he was glad to have told me of his demission, I couldn’t guess, but he was calm and affable as we said goodbye.

Outside the house, I remembered the visit with my son Charles the previous spring. When I thought of the old man, I should have been grateful for my son’s company, all of us part of the flow. But then Maxwell’s question drilled back into my mind: that was what I was here for: no, it was better to be alone.

THE following afternoon, there was a light in George Passant’s sitting-room at three o’clock. When I lived in the town, that light had often welcomed me late at night: he had taken lodgings in this dark street of terraced houses — similar to the Patemans’ and less than half-a-mile away — as soon as he got his job in the firm of solicitors, and had kept them ever since. Though I had not visited him there for a good many years, it was my own choice, and a deliberate one, to go that afternoon. I did not want to meet in a pub, and give him an excuse to have a drink and break — restlessly? secretively? — away. At least that would have been my rationalisation. Perhaps I did not want to be reminded of hearty evenings and the grooves of time.

At the front door he greeted me with his robust, cordial, impersonal shout. Although he had kept the same lodgings for so long, I couldn’t help but notice that those lodgings had changed for the worse. There was a violent, attacking smell of curry percolating the whole house, reaching inside his own sitting-room. Once he had been looked after by a landlady. When she died, her heirs had split up the house into tiny apartments: George had no one to cook a meal for him, and in his sixties was more uncomfortable than as a young man. I glanced round his sitting-room, littered with papers, pipes, ashtrays, undusted, newsprint on the floor. Like my father, he was having to “make do” for himself. Unlike my father, he didn’t produce a vestige of order, but seemed to imbue the derelict room with an air of abandon or even of intent.

Over the mantelpiece stood a steel engraving of the Relief of Ladysmith, which had been there getting on for forty years before. Since his parents died, a few of his personal documents had accrued to him and been hung round the walls: his Senior Oxford certificate, the records of his solicitor’s examinations (showing him always in the highest class), a photograph of himself when he first qualified, and a diploma stating that he had been incorporated as a member of the Independent Order of Rechabites. I knew the Rechabites from my own childhood; they were one of the teetotal movements that sprang up in the nineteenth century, just as the upper fringe of the working class tried to become respectable; my own Aunt Milly had held high office in the organisation, just as she had in any teetotal organisation within her reach. Once, long ago, after a night when George and I had been racketing round the town, we had discovered that each of us had “signed the pledge” before the age of ten. I was as hilarious as he was, and as determined to celebrate with another drink. But, in cold history, the pubs were already shut.

As I sat down, on the other side of the fireplace in which glowed one bar of an electric fire, I looked into his face. The skin under his eyes was dark and corrugated: that had been so for long enough. I couldn’t be sure that there was any change in him at all, any visible change, that is, from the night before Christmas Eve. He said, in a loud but formal tone: “Well, how do you think things are going?”

I answered: “Worse than anyone could have imagined.”

His reply was automatic: “Oh, I’m not entirely prepared to accept that.”

“You must.”

“You can’t expect me to assume that whatever your set of informants have been telling you—”

“George,” I said, “there have been times when I’ve let you comfort yourself. I may have been wrong, I don’t know. Anyway, this time I can’t.”

I told him that I had had an interview with the superintendent. George interrupted, protesting about “these policemen”. But as so often his optimism, and the lack of it, seemed to coexist in the same instant. When I said “You must listen to me”, he fell silent, his eyes blank.