Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Margaret said, she had been brought up among people who believed it was easy to be civilised and rational. She had hated it. It made life too hygienic and too thin. But still, she had come to think even that was better than glorifying unreason.

Put reason to sleep, and all the stronger forces were let loose. We had seen that happen in our own lifetimes. In the world: and close to us. We knew, we couldn’t get out of knowing, that it meant a chance of hell.

Glorifying unreason. Wanting to let the instinctual forces loose. Martin said — anyone who did that, either hadn’t much of those forces within himself, or else wanted to use others’ for his own purpose. And that was true of private leaders like George as much as public ones.

(Were others thinking, as I did, of those two women? Was it true of one of them?)

Midnight had passed. Margaret and Alison were trying to look after each other. Margaret knew that the Gearys were not, like the rest of us, buoyed up by the energy of strain. We were feeling tireless, as one does in the crisis of a love affair, ready to walk all night. The Gearys had had nothing to make them tireless: Margaret said it was time to go to bed. But Alison had a sense that we were getting a curious kind of nepenthe, even when we were speaking as harshly as we could. We weren’t being considerate: at times we should have said that we didn’t mind reawakening our own distress or anyone else’s: and yet, it seemed that we were producing the opposite effect. It was like being made hypocrites by accident. Whatever we said, however hard our voices sounded, just by being together we were creating an island of peace.

No, said Alison, he (Denis) didn’t have to go to school tomorrow. She would make us a pot of tea. To herself, she thought it was good for us to go on sitting there.

We shied off tea, which had been offered to us enough that day. Then Denis ordered us to have another drink. Martin refused, saying he had to drive his car back to Cambridge before the morning. Margaret settled down in her chair, wakeful, but all of us quiet by now.

Denis said: “We can only do little things, can’t we? But we must go on doing them. At any rate, I must. There’s no option. I shall have to go on doing the things that come to hand.”

Martin nodded. They spoke about old acquaintances, whom they had known when they were in the same form together. Denis broke off: “Look here, I’m the Martha of this party. Much more than she is.” He put his hand over his wife’s. “There’s a certain amount of debris to be cleared up. You’d better remind me what I ought to do.” A call on George before he left — he was ticking off: “those Patemans”: inquiries about the prisons. That all?

Then, leaning forward, he surprised us — it came out without any lead at all — by asking what was the name of that old man, who, living in riches, said he felt like a beggar holding out his hand for another day of life. Was that going to happen to us all? When did it begin to happen? He was in his early fifties, but, half-smiling, he wanted an answer. I was the oldest there, but I shook my head.

“I’ve got an uncomfortable idea,” said Denis, “that some day it is going to happen to me.”

YOU’VE got to forget it, Denis Geary had said, that night in his house after the trial. But, for at least a couple of prosaic reasons, it wouldn’t have been easy, even if we had been different people: one of those reasons was the result of some activities of Denis himself. He had duly paid his call on George Passant, who had mentioned that, once he left the country — which he did within a week — there was no one to visit Cora. Perhaps it might be arranged for me to do so? It was the most off-hand of legacies. I did not hear a word from George direct, although he had passed on a poste restante address.

I got in touch with Holloway prison, and was told that Cora was totally uninterested: she was, by her own choice, living in solitary confinement, and would scarcely speak to the doctors or prison officers. A few weeks later, I had a telephone call from the governor. “Now she says that she wouldn’t mind seeing you some day. It won’t be pleasant for you, but I expect you must be prepared for that.”

It was a bright afternoon late in May as I drove through the low indistinguishable North London streets, which after living in the town so long I had never seen: betting shops, little shabby cafés with chalk scrawls on blackboards outside, two-storey terrace after two-storey terrace, then porticoed houses, oddly prosperous, in sight of the pastiche castle itself. In a public garden the candles stood bright on the flowering chestnuts, but when I got out of the car in front of the jail the air blew bitterly cold from the Arctic, the late spring cold that we were getting used to.

As I was signing my name in the visitors’ book, I should have been glad to get as used to prisons, hospitals, any institutions where the claustral dread seized hold of me: even now, I couldn’t get rid of that meaningless anxiety. The corridors, the stone, the smells: the sight of other visitors taken passively off. By a mistake of my own, I was led to the wrong reception room, something like a café, plastic-topped tables with trolleys pushing between them. It was a general visiting day, the tables were already full, I was wondering if I could have picked out prisoners from the relations who came to see them. Some wearing their remand dresses, blue and pink, as Cora had done in the local jail. As I waited, standing in the corner, I noticed one woman chain-smoking, with a packet of cigarettes in front of her. It looked as though she was determined to get through it before the hour was up.

In a few minutes one of the staff had found me.

“Oh no,” she said, with a commanding smile, like a hospital nurse’s, “we couldn’t let her in here. It wouldn’t be safe.”

With anyone inside for her kind of crime, she was explaining, the other prisoners would try to ‘do’ her. It was as Maxwell had said. Cora was making a rational choice in opting for solitary. It showed that she had thought out how to preserve her own life.

“It’s a headache for us,” said the deputy. “And it’s going to be a headache as long as she’s here.”

Each time they took her out for exercise, it meant a security operation; to the same extent, but in exact reverse, as if she were a prisoner about whom plans were being made for an escape. As for herself, she gave no trouble. She didn’t grumble, her cell was immaculate. Apart from what they had on paper, the prison staff knew nothing more about her.

The deputy, whose name was Mrs Bryden, took me to another block and opened the door of a very small room, perhaps ten feet by six: inside were a table and two chairs, the backs of both chairs almost touching the walls, which were papered but had no decorations of any kind. On the table, curiously dominant, the only other object in the room, stood a single ashtray. “You’ve an hour to yourself,” said Mrs Bryden. “Two officers will be waiting in the corridor outside to take her back.”

The door opened again, and, one of those officers on either side of her, Cora stood in the doorway. She was wearing one of her own dresses, one which she had worn on the first day of the trial. She nodded as Mrs Bryden greeted her and said goodbye to me.

As the two of us sat there alone, I offered her a cigarette, grateful right at the beginning — as in a hospital visit — for anything which got some seconds ticked away.

I had to break the silence.

“You know George has gone away?” My voice sounded loud and brusque.

Again she nodded.