Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Not waiting for Charles to be tactful, I asked if he had noticed that.

He nodded.

“Well?” he said.

“One gets a bit tired of it. But still—”

Margaret gave a curse. I didn’t tell him, but he certainly knew that it was true for me, that no one I had known, including the hardest political operators, ever quite got used to it. Instead I said (using reflectiveness to deny the here-and-now, the little sting), that this kind of comment, the mass media’s treatment of private lives, had become far more reckless in my own lifetime.

Charles was not much impressed. This was the climate which he had grown up in and took for granted.

“Have you done any good?” he asked.

I thought of George at tea the day before.

“Very little,” I said. “Probably none at all.”

Charles broke into a broad smile. “Anyway, we’ve got to give you credit for honesty, haven’t we?” He teased me, with the repetitive family gibes. Margaret was laughing, relieved that we hadn’t reverted to our quarrel. Why did I insist on getting into trouble? Even when I wasn’t needed? Fair comment, I said, thinking of George again.

I hadn’t seen Charles at all the night before, and he hadn’t had a chance to enquire about the trial itself. At last he did so. What was it really like?

I looked at them both. I repeated what I had said to Margaret, just before going to sleep.

“It’s unspeakable.” Then I added: “No, that’s foolish, we’ve been speaking about it all the week. But not been able to imagine it.”

I didn’t want to talk to him as I had done to Martin: perhaps I should have been freer, if it hadn’t been for the sexual heaviness that hung over it all. True, there wasn’t much, in verbal terms, that I could tell Charles: he had listened for years to people whose language wasn’t restrained, and I was sure the same was true with him and his friends. But together we didn’t talk like that. There was a reticence, a father-and-son reticence, on his side as well as mine, when it came to the brute facts, above all the brute facts of this case.

So I said, it had been appalling to listen to. Like an aeroplane journey that was going wrong: stretches of tedium, then the moments when one didn’t want to believe one’s ears. I couldn’t get it out of my experience, I told him.

“I haven’t had as much of it as you have,” said Margaret. “But that’s true—” she turned to Charles.

Once more, as with Martin, I was remembering Auschwitz. To these two, I did not need to say much more than the name.

A couple of summers before, when the three of us had been travelling in Eastern Europe, I had left Margaret and Charles in Krakow, and had driven off to the camp with an Australian acquaintance. We had walked through the museum, the neat streets, the cells, in silence. It was a scorching August day, under the wide cloudless Central European sky. At last we came to the end, and were walking back to the car. My acquaintance, who hadn’t spoken for long enough, said: “It’s a bastard, being a human being.”

Often this last week, I’d felt like that, I said to Charles. I was certain that his Uncle Martin had as well.

Charles was silent, regarding me with an expression that was grave, detached and unfamiliar.

After a few moments, I went on: “Did you know,” I said, “that there was a medieval heresy which believed that this is hell? That is, what we’re living in, here and now. Well, they may have had a point.”

Charles gazed at me with the same expression. Almost imperceptibly, he shook his head. Then in a hurry, as though anxious not to argue, trying to climb back upon the plane of banter, he asked me, why was it that unbelievers always knew more about theological doctrine than anyone else? However had I acquired that singular fact? He was being articulate, sharp-witted, smiling, determined not to become serious himself again, nor to let me be so.

After tea the following afternoon, when I was in one of the back rooms, Charles called out that there was someone for me on the telephone.

Who was it? He wouldn’t say. Soft voice, Charles added — slight accent, North Country perhaps.

I went into the hall, picked up the receiver, asked who was there, and heard: “This is Jack.”

“Jack who?”

“The one you’ve known longest.”

“Sorry,” I said, unwilling to play guessing games.

“It’s Jack Cotery,” came the voice, soft, reproachful. “Are you free, Lewis? I do want to see you.”

I was extremely busy, I said. All that night. I shouldn’t be at home the following day.

“It is important, it really is. I shan’t take half-an-hour.” Jack’s tone was unputoffable, wheedling, unashamed, just as it used to be.

“I don’t know when.”

“Only half-an-hour. I promise.”

I repeated, I was busy all that night.

“You’re alone now, aren’t you? I’ll just come and go.”

He had hung up before I could reply. When I rejoined Charles, he asked who had been speaking. A figure from the past, I said. A fairly disreputable figure. What did he want? “I assume,” I said, “that he’s trying to borrow money.” Why hadn’t I stopped him? Charles enquired, when he discovered that Jack Cotery was coming round. Irritably I shook my head, and went off to assemble a tray of drinks, reminded of how — with pleasure — I had done the same for George, that evening the previous December.

As soon as I heard the doorbell ring, I went and opened the door myself.

“Hello, Lewis,” breathed Jack Cotery confidentially.

I had seen him last about ten years before. He was my own age to the month: we had been in the same form at school. But he was more time-ravaged than anyone I knew. As a young man his black hair was glossy, his eyes were lustrous, he had a strong pillar of a neck: he had only to walk along the street to get appraising glances from women, to the envy of the rest of us. Now the hair was gone, the face not so much old as unrecognisably lined, still a clown’s face but as though the clown hadn’t put his make-up on. Even his carriage, which used to have the ease of someone who lived on good terms with his muscles, had lost its spring. But his glance was still humorous, giving the impression that he was making fun of me — and of himself.

I led the way into the study, put him in the chair where George had sat when he first broke the news.

“Will you have a drink?” I said.

“Now, Lewis.” He spoke with reproach. “You ought to know that I never was a drinking man.”

In fact, that had been true. “I’m a teetotaller nowadays, actually,” said Jack, as though it were a private joke. “Also a vegetarian. It’s rather interesting.”

“Is it?” I said. I turned to the whisky bottle. “Well, do you mind if I do?”

“So long as you take care of yourself.”

Sitting at the desk, glass in front of me, I looked across at his big wide-open eyes.

“Shall we get down to business?” I said. “There isn’t much time, I’m afraid—”

“Why are you so anxious to get rid of me, Lewis?”

“I am pretty tied up—”

“No, but you are anxious to get rid of me, aren’t you?”

He was laughing, without either rancour or shame. I couldn’t keep back some sort of a smile.

“Anyway,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you?”

“That isn’t the right question, Lewis.” Once more, he seemed both earnest and secretly amused.

“What do you mean?”

“The right question is this: Is there anything I can do for you?”

Once I had had some practice in learning when he was being sincere or putting on an act: although, often, he could be doing both at once, taking in himself as well as me. It was a long while since I had met anyone so labile, and I was at a loss.