Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

I told him, just as clinically as I had remembered killings in Maxwell’s office, what the police believed the two young women had done. His face was frowning and deliquescent with pain. Physically, he had always been easily moved: he could be upset by the thought of suffering trivial by the side of this.

When I finished (I was as curt as I could be) he said: “Do you believe this too?”

“Yes. “

George gazed at me with a helpless expression, the sound of his breathing heavy, and said, as though it was all he could find to say: “It’s very bad.”

There were no words for me either. But I could not let him slip, as I had once seen him in a disaster of his own in that same room, into the extreme lethargy which was more like a catatonic state.

After a time, I said: “There’s almost nothing that anyone can do.”

“I’m leaving it to you,” he said.

“I can’t do anything.”

“You’re not backing out, are you?”

I did not reply at once. I said: “No. For what it’s worth, I’m not.”

For an instant his face shone with one of his old, expansive smiles. Then he asked: “Will you go and see her? My niece, I mean?”

I said, as gently as I could manage: “I think that’s your job, you know.”

He replied: “I’m afraid I’m not up to it any more.”

Looking at him, I knew that I had no option. This might be a surrender of his, he might, if forced, still be capable of an effort. But I was obliged to do what I had come for. She must be in the local jail, I assumed. George nodded. I wasn’t certain whether any but relatives would be allowed to visit her. If it could be arranged, I would go.

George thanked me, but as though he took it for granted. Ever since he collected his first group of young people round him, ever since he was to them — which included me — the son of the morning in this town, he had been used to a kind of leadership. Even now he felt it natural that anyone who had been close to him should do as he asked.

There was something I wanted to find out. As if casually, I said: “How well do you know her?”

George’s voice was more animated than it had been that afternoon. “Oh, about as well as some of the others on the fringe of our crowd. She was rather interesting at one time, but then she began to slip out of things. And of course there were always a lot of lively people coming on—”

“What is she like?”

George responded with an air of distraction, even irritation, speaking of someone far away: “She didn’t join in much. I suppose she used to listen. I thought she took things in.”

“Is that all?”

“I didn’t notice anything special, if that’s what you mean. Of course, some time or other she took up with the Pateman girl. Some of the young men seemed to like the Pateman girl, I never could see why.”

“George,” I was speaking with full urgency by now, “you must have talked to your niece, you must know more about them than this?”

He said, suddenly violent: “I refuse to take any responsibility for either of them. You know what I’ve told them. I told them what I’ve told everyone else, that they ought to make the best of their lives and not worry about all the neutered rubbish round them who’ve denied whatever feeble bit of instinct they might conceivably have been endowed with. Do you think I cared if they lived together? Not that I knew for certain, but if they did they were just acting according to their nature. And that’s more than you can say for the people you’ve chosen to spend your time among. I suppose you’re trying to put the responsibility on to me. If they’d never been told to make the best of their lives, they’d have been just as safe as everyone else, would they? None of this would ever have happened to them? I won’t accept it for a single instant. It’s sheer brutal hypocritical nonsense. If that’s all you’ve got to say, I’m not prepared to be attacked any more.”

As his voice died down, I replied: “I didn’t say it.”

After his outburst, he sank back, exhausted, drained.

I went on: “But there is something I ought to say. It’s quite practical.”

“What’s that?” he said without interest.

“The police know a good deal about your group. For God’s sake be careful.”

“How have you heard this?” His attention had leapt up: his eyes were cautious and veiled.

“Maxwell told me.”

“What did he say?”

“He only talked vaguely about corrupting the young. But they’ve been watching you.”

“What do they call corrupting the young?”

I said: “Never mind that. For God’s sake don’t give them the slightest chance—”

When I was a young man, I had failed him by not being harsh enough. Now, too late, I meant to be explicit. After this case, the police would have no pity. They were well-informed. Either he ought to break up the group once and for all: or else it had to be kept legally safe. No drugs (not that I had heard any rumour of that). No young girls. No homosexuality.

George gave a dismissive nod. “I’ll see about it.”

“Do you mean that?”

Once more he nodded.

“You’ve got to mean it,” I said.

“I’m sorry if I’ve got people into a mess,” he replied.

It was a response that seemed extraordinary: inadequate, detached, as though he were not at all involved or had no need to look into himself. All along, perhaps, even when I first knew him, he had been alienated (though at that time we didn’t use the word) from the mainstream of living: now he had become totally so. I had to believe, against my will, that nothing could have changed him. It wasn’t just chance, or the accidents of class and time. There were plenty who had lived alongside him, who thought they shared his hopes — like my brother Martin or me, when we were in our teens — who, whatever had happened to us, were not alienated at all. But George had gone straight on, driven by passions that he didn’t understand or alternatively were so pre-eminent that he shrugged off any necessity to understand them. I was not sure, though I guessed, how he had been spending his later years. He was a man of sensual passion. Of that there was no doubt, he was more at its mercy than most men. But equally it was sensual passion more locked within himself, or his imagination, than most men’s. He was in search, not really of partners, but of objects which would set his imagination alight. But that solipsistic imagination (as self-bound as mine when I was lying in the hospital dark) was linked — and that may have been the most singular thing about him — to a peculiarly ardent sexual nature. And so he had finally come to desire young girls, one after another, each of them lasting just as long as they didn’t get in his imagination’s way. It had meant risks. Yet he seemed to be stimulated by the risks themselves. There had been his disaster, where I had been a spectator, of years before. That hadn’t stopped him. There had been, though I didn’t learn the details until after his death, warnings and near-catastrophes since. In secret, after each one, he seemed driven, compelled, or delighted to double his bets.

It was a sexual temperament which only a man in other respects abnormally controlled could have coped with. That he wasn’t, and — so it seemed — in his later life didn’t want to be. In the past I had thought that, despite his gusto and capacity for joy, he too had known remorse and hadn’t cared to look back at the sight of what he had once been. I had thought so during the time, long before (it was strange to recall, after my last meeting with her), when Olive and I were friendly, and she, who gave none of us the benefit of the doubt, jeered at me for giving it to George. I had believed that she didn’t understand faith or aspiration, that she looked at men as strange as George through the wrong end of the telescope. That was true: and yet her view of George wasn’t all that wrong, and mine had turned out a sentimentality. Curiously enough, it would have seemed a sentimentality to George himself. To borrow the phrase he had just employed, he had lived “according to his nature”. For him, that was justification enough. He wasn’t one who felt the obligation to reshape his life. Of course he could look back at the sight of what he had once been. If I — because of comradeship or my own moral needs — wished to invest him with the signs of remorse, then that was my misfortune: even if, as I sat with him that afternoon, it meant the ripping away of — what? part of my youth, or experience, or hope?