Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“Please,” she whispered. “Come in here a minute.”

With quick scurrying steps (such as I had noticed in my glimpses of her daughter) she opened the door of the front room. It looked, as soon as the standard lamp was switched on, bright, frilly, feminine: the lamps gleamed behind painted Italian shades: from the passage one could see straight across the room to a long, low dressing-table, looking-glass shining under the lights. The floor was swept and polished, just as on an afternoon when the young women were returning from their work. And yet I had an instant of holding back before I could cross the threshold, an instant which was nothing but superstitious, as though I were entering a lair.

Furtively she closed the door behind us. I sat on one divan, Mrs Pateman on the other, which lay underneath the window: in the black uncovered glass one of the lamps was reflected full and clear. Close to me stood the latest model of a record player. There were other gadgets, well cared-for, stacked neatly on the shelves, a tape recorder, a couple of transistor radios.

Mrs Pateman gave me a wistful, ingratiating smile.

“Are you sure?” she said.

Taken aback, I stammered a reply: “Am I sure of what?”

“Are you sure what’s happened?”

The eyes in the small, wrinkled face were fixed on mine.

I said “No”. She was still gazing at me.

“It’s a good job he doesn’t believe she’s done anything, isn’t it?”

“Perhaps it is,” I answered.

“He won’t believe it whatever happens. It’s just as well. He couldn’t face it if he did.”

She said it simply. She was speaking of the husband who dominated her as though he were sensitive, easily broken, the soul whom she had to protect.

“Are you sure yourself?” she asked again, just as simply.

I hesitated.

“I should have to be absolutely sure to tell you that.” It was as near a straight answer as I could give. It seemed to satisfy her. She said: “I can’t bear to think of her in there.”

The words sounded unhysterical, unemotional, almost as though she were referring to a physical distress.

“I can understand that.”

“She’s got such nice ways with her when she tries, Kitty has.”

I mentioned — we were both being matter-of-fact — that I had met her once or twice.

“And she often did good things for people, you know. She was always free with her money, Kitty was.”

She added: “Her father used to tell her off about that. But it went in one ear and out of the other.”

Her face was so mobile, for an instant there was the recollection of a smile.

“I’ve been worrying about her a long time, as far as that goes.”

“Have you?”

“I thought there was something going wrong with her. But I couldn’t find out what it was. It wasn’t just having a good time—”

“Did she talk to you?” I put in.

She shook her head.

“That’s the trouble with children. They’re your own and you want to help them and they won’t let you.”

She went on, without any façade at all: “I don’t know where I went wrong with her. She always kept herself to herself, even when she was a little girl. She had her secrets and she never let on what they were. I didn’t handle her right, of course I didn’t. She was the clever one, you know. She’s got more in her head than the rest of us put together.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself too much,” I said.

“Wouldn’t you?”

I replied in the same tone in which she asked: “Yes, if anything bad happened to my son, I know I should.”

“I can’t bear to think of her in there,” she repeated.

“I’m afraid you’ve got to live with it.”

“How long for?”

“You don’t need me to tell you, do you?”

Her face was twisted, but no tears came. All she asked me was that, if I saw her during the trial, I should tell her any news without her husband knowing. She wouldn’t understand the lawyers, she said, it would be over her head. That was all. Very quietly she opened the door of the room, and then the front door. She whispered a thank you, and then saw me into the street without another word.

THE sky over Hyde Park, as Margaret and I sat together in the afternoons, was free and open, after the Patemans’ parlour. The lights of the London streets were comfortable as we drove out at night. It might have been the only existence that either of us knew. But Margaret was watching me with concern. She saw me go into the study to work each morning: she didn’t need telling that I had never found it harder. She didn’t need telling either that I was making excuses not to dine out or go into company.

One night, she had persuaded me to accept an invitation. At the dinner party, her glance came across to me more than once, seeing me behave in the way she used to envy when she herself was shy. Back in our own flat, she said: “You seemed to enjoy that.”

I said that for a time I did.

“You’ve still got more than your share of high spirits, haven’t you?”

“Other people might think so,” I said. “But they don’t know me as well as you do.”

“I think so too,” she replied. “It’s been lucky for both of us. But—”

She meant, she knew other things. A little later, after we had fallen silent, she said, without any warning: “What’s the worst part for you?”

“The worst part of what?”

“You know all right. The worst part of all this horror.” I met her eyes, brilliant and unevadable. Then I looked away. It was a long time before I could find any words. It was as hard to talk as in the dark period before we married, when we each bore a weight of uncertainty and guilt.

“I think,” I said haltingly at last, “that I’m outraged because I am so close to it. I feel it’s intolerable that this should have happened to me. I believe it’s as selfish as that.”

“That’s natural—”

“I believe it’s as petty as that.” Yet to me that outrage was as sharp as a moral feeling.

“But you’re not being quite honest. And you’re not being quite honest at your own expense.”

“It’s surprising how selfish one is.”

“Particularly,” she said, “when it’s not even true. I don’t believe for a moment that that is the worst of it for you.”

She added: “Is it?”

I was mute, not able to answer her, not able to trust either her insight or my own.

On another topic, however, which came up more than once, it was not that I wasn’t able to answer her, but that I wouldn’t. Just as, during my conversation with Cora Ross, so flat and banal, there had been questions pounding behind my tongue, so there were with Margaret. What did she do? What did they say to each other? What was it like to do it? For me in the jail, for Margaret in our drawing-room, those questions boiled up: out of a curiosity which was passionate, insistent, human, and at the same time corrupt. She was no purer than I was, and more ready to ask. I felt — with what seemed like a bizarre but unshakable hypocrisy — that she oughtn’t even to want to know. I didn’t give her, or alternatively muffled, some of the information that I actually possessed. I showed her the reports of the committal proceedings which, although they made a stir in the press, were tame and inexplicit.

Throughout those weeks I took no action which had any bearing on the case. It would have been easy to talk to counsel, but I didn’t choose. I had one of George’s neat impersonal notes, telling me the name of a psychiatrist who was to be called in his niece’s defence. It would have been easier still to talk to this man. He was a distant connection of Margaret’s, her mother having been a cousin of his. They both came from the same set of interbred academic families, and I had met him quite often. He was called Adam Cornford, and he was clever, tolerant, easy-natured, someone we looked forward to seeing. He was also, I told myself, a man of rigid integrity: nothing that I or anyone else said to him would alter his evidence by a word. That was true: but it wasn’t the reason why I shied away from speaking to him and even — as though he were an enemy whose presence I couldn’t bear — avoided going to a wedding at which he might be present.