Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“I can’t have this,” he said.

I said that I was sorry for them.

“I can’t let it go at this,” he said.

I attempted to soothe him. Couldn’t they all go and try to sleep, and then talk to the solicitors tomorrow?

That made him more angry. His eyes stood out, his fists clenched as though he were going to hit me.

“They’re no good to us.”

“Well then—”

“I want someone who’ll take care of people who are ill. My daughter’s ill, and I insist on having something done about it.”

“That’s what we want,” said Dick Pateman.

I said, she would certainly be under medical supervision–

“I’m not going to be put off by that. I want the best people to take care of her and make her better.”

Again I tried to soothe him.

“No,” he shouted into my face. “I can’t leave it like this. I shall have to talk to you about how I can get things done—”

He was threatening me, he was threatening everyone. And yet he was crying out for help. The curious thing was, I was more affected by his appeal than by his wife’s. She had known a good many sorrows: this was another, but she could bear it. Whatever else came to her, she would go on enduring, and nothing would break her. But she didn’t believe that was true of her husband and her son. Standing with him, listening to their threats (for Dick joined in), I thought she could be right. To be in their company was intolerable: in many ways they were hateful: and yet they were helpless when there was nothing they could do. Their only response to sorrow, the chill of sorrow, was to fly out into violence. Violence without aim. Shouts, scowls, threats. What could they do? They were impotent. When they were impotent, they were nothing at all.

I told Mr Pateman that I had no knowledge of the prison service or of prison doctors but that, if he ever wanted to talk to me, he was welcome to. He didn’t thank me, but became quieter. Any bit of action was better than none. Getting a promise out of me, however pointless, showed that he was still effective, and was a comfort to him.

“I should like you to come round to my place for half-an-hour,” George had said, before Mrs Pateman took me away. When I rejoined the three of them, they were waiting to walk out to Martin’s car. As we drove across the town, up past the station, all of us in silence, I was thinking again, yes, that was how George used to invite us — when he was asking us, not to a pub, but to his “place”, as though it were a baronial hall. Actually, it consisted of the sitting-room and bedroom in which he had lived for nearly forty years. How he managed it, I had never known. George had clung on, with no one to look after him. Not that he needed much.

In the sharp spring night, transistor radios were blaring and people lolled about the pavement, when we drew up outside the door. Inside his sitting-room, as he switched on the light, the newspapers and huddle sprang to the eye, and one’s nostrils tingled with the dust.

“Now,” he said, as, panting, he cleared litter from the old sofa to make a place for Margaret. There were only two chairs. Martin put me in one of them, and himself sat on the sofa end. “Now,” said George. “Is there anything I can get you?”

Margaret glanced at me, looking for a signal. She was tired, after the long, nerve-ridden day. She would have liked a drink. But, though she knew George well, she had really no idea about his style of life. Even in her student days, she hadn’t seen a room like this. No, she said, he wasn’t to bother. If she had asked for a drink, I thought, she would probably have been unlucky. For George, who drank more than anyone round him, had — at least in my experience, in the time I knew him best — scarcely ever drunk at home.

“I can easily make some tea,” said George.

“Never mind,” said Martin. “We’ve drunk enough tea for one day.”

George looked at the three of us, as if to make sure that the formalities had been properly observed. That gave him pleasure, even now, as it had always done. Then he took the vacant chair at the side of the fireplace, pulled down his waistcoat, and said: “Well. I thought you ought to be the first to hear.”

He was addressing me more than the others, but not personally, rather as a matter of etiquette, because he had known me longest.

He said: “I’m going away.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that I shan’t put a foot inside this damned town again.” He stared past me. “It’s quite useless to argue,” he went on, though in fact none of us was arguing. “I made my plans as soon as I saw that business of hers” (he meant Cora, but couldn’t, or didn’t, refer to her by name) “could only come to one end. Incidentally, I thought that you were all deceiving yourselves about that. I never believed that any jury in the country would do anything different.”

He said: “It’s horrible, I don’t require anyone to tell me it’s horrible, but there’s no use wasting time over that. I’ve had to think about my own position. I’ve got plenty of enemies in this wretched town. I’m perfectly prepared to admit that, according to ordinary standards, I deserve some of the things they want to bring up against me. But I’ve got enemies because I wouldn’t accept their frightful mingy existence and wouldn’t let other people accept it either. And all these sunkets want is to make the place too hot to hold me.” This didn’t have the machine-like clank of paranoia, which one often heard in him. “Well, now the sunkets have something to use against me. They can breathe down my neck until I die. It doesn’t matter to them that she hasn’t spoken to me for a couple of years. They can smear everything I do. They can control every step I take. By God, it would be like having me in a cage for crowds to stare at.”

Martin caught my eye. Neither of us could deny it.

George said: “That’s not the worst of it. If it were just myself, I think I might conceivably stay here and take my medicine. But there is the whole crowd. Everyone who has ever come near to me. You heard what they did to young — in the witness box. They’ll all be under inspection as long as I am here. Their lives won’t be worth living. When I go away, it won’t be long before it all calms down again. They’ll be all right, as soon as people have forgotten about me.”

Again, neither Martin nor I could say that he was wrong. It was Margaret who said: “That’s very generous, George. But are you sure you’re really well enough?”

“Well enough for what?”

“Well enough to uproot yourself like that.”

George gave her a shifty, defiant smile, and said: “Oh, if I’m not up to the mark, I shall get in touch with some of you.”

Had he thought of where he might be going? Of course , what did she take him for? For the first time that night, George broke into laughter, loud laughter. For days past — perhaps when he had been absent from the court, and perhaps, I now suspected, for a longer period than that — he had been making logistic plans, like the administrator he might have been. It would take him no time at all to “clear up his effects”. He didn’t propose to stay in England. He had never travelled much: as a matter of fact, apart from a weekend in Paris and a few days in Ostend, he had not, in sixty-four years, travelled at all. Yet, it was one of his schematic hobbies, he knew the geography, railways, timetables of Europe far better than the rest of us.

“Well, now I’ve got a bloody good chance to look round,” he cried.

He intended to start in Scandinavia, for which he had a hankering, because he had once met a Swede who looked remarkably like himself.