Charles Snow - The New Men

After the Minister’s night of victory, there was for months nothing I could do for Luke and Martin. I had to set myself to wait, picking up any rumour from Barford, any straw in the wind. Because I could do nothing, the suspense nagged at me more.

That was the reason I started into anxiety, the instant Hanna Puchwein inquired about Martin’s fate.

I was having dinner with the Puchweins at the Connaught, at the farewell party they gave me before Kurt Puchwein left for Chicago. They were standing me a lavish treat; as I sat by Hanna’s side, with her husband opposite, in the corner near the door, lights flashed on glass and sank cosily into the rosewood, and I was reflecting, if you were used to English fellow travellers, how incongruous Hanna Puchwein seemed. There was nothing of the self-abnegation of the English radical about her, none of the attempts, common among other acquaintances of mine, to imitate the manners of the working class. Hanna’s glossy head gleamed trimly in our corner, and she was the best-groomed woman in the room. She was in her early thirties. She had a small head, narrowing catlike to a pointed chin. Her forehead was white, bland, unlined; but her eyes flashed as she talked, and she had an air that was, I thought, at the same time cultivated and farouche.

Meanwhile Kurt was presenting me with gifts: he was a man who found it delectable to give, though not to receive. He liked doing good turns and letting one know it; but that had always seemed to me more amiable than not liking to do good turns at all. He gave me wine. He gave me his opinion that, out of Luke’s project, he and Martin would ‘do themselves good in the long run’.

Yet, although he was expending himself to make me cheerful, his own mood was overcast. He and Hanna spoke little to each other; and it occurred to me that probably in an unexacting friendship, such as he felt for me, one saw the best of him. In a closer relation, he could be violent, spoiled, bad tempered.

That night he went to bed early, leaving me and Hanna together, on the excuse that he had some last letters to write. He spun out his goodbye to me, pressing my hand.

‘It may be a long time before we meet again, my friend,’ he said. He was flying the Atlantic within forty-eight hours. I looked at him — his great prow of a nose, his mouth pinched in, as though with press-studs, that night.

‘Ah, well,’ he said. ‘We shall meet once again in the world.’

As soon as he had gone, I spoke to Hanna. Once or twice before I had talked to her intimately, as I had never done with Kurt. I asked, outright: ‘Why is Kurt so anxious to go to America?’

He could have stayed at Barford. Apart from Luke’s project, some others, including Rudd’s, had been left in being. Nothing official ever got closed down flat, old Bevill used to say.

Hanna stared at me, first with a blank, washed, open look (her temper was as formidable as his), then with an expression I could not read.

‘Why ask me?’ she said. Then quickly: ‘Why didn’t you persuade your brother to go also?’

It was then I started. She went on: ‘Wouldn’t it have been better for him?’

I said, at once hypersensitive, on the defensive: ‘It depends whether Luke’s scheme comes off — but a good many of them believe in it. You heard what Kurt said.’

Hanna said: ‘Oh that! You’re a most singleminded man.’

Her smile had an edge.

‘I didn’t mean that at all,’ she said.

‘What did you mean?’

‘If he went to America,’ she said, ‘he might be able to escape from that woman.’

‘I don’t know whether he wants to escape,’ I said.

‘I know that he ought to,’ said Hanna.

She reminded me that geographical distance, like time, helped one to recover from unhappy love. Three thousand miles could be as good as the passage of six months. Hanna’s eyes were flashing with impatience, in which there was, however, a trace of the pleasure with which a man and a woman, not attached but not totally unaware of each other, spread out before them the platitudes and generalizations of love.

I said that I hoped the child might heal their marriage.

‘Have you never known women have a child and leave their husbands flat?’

She went on: ‘With women like her, children break marriages more often than they save them.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘if she did leave him, you wouldn’t break your heart.’

‘Unless he’s got free of her first,’ she said, ‘he might break his.’

I was frowning, and she said: ‘I suppose you know that he’s been passionately in love with her? And may be still?’

‘I think I did know that,’ I said.

‘She is quite useless to him,’ she said. ‘If he isn’t lucky and doesn’t get away, she will destroy a great part of his life.’

I was thinking: when I worried about the danger of Martin’s marriage, it had been for cruder reasons than these, it had been because Irene might do him ‘practical’ harm in terms of money and worldly standing and jobs. I had almost deliberately shut my eyes to what he felt for her: and it was left for Hanna, herself someone whom I had always thought a selfish woman, to show the consideration, the imaginative sympathy, in which I had failed.

It was partly that our loves are entirely serious only to ourselves; years of my own life had been corroded by a passion more wretched than Martin’s, and yet, as a spectator of his, I felt as my friends used to feel about mine. We would ‘get over it’, it was irritating to watch a man dulled by his own infatuation, it seemed, certainly not tragic, scarcely even pathetic, almost his own fault. In fact, all loves but one’s own have an element of the tiresome: and from the way I behaved about Martin’s until that evening when Hanna forced me to face it, I came to think that was even more true of a brother’s unhappy love than of a friend’s.

‘She gives him nothing he couldn’t get from any woman he picked up,’ she said. ‘And in self-defence he has learned to give nothing back.’

‘I think he can bear it,’ I said.

‘Of course he can bear it. But sometimes it is a greater danger to bear it than not to bear it.’

She went on: ‘One can stand so much that one gets frightened of anything better. Isn’t that true of you?’

‘There’s something in that,’ I said.

‘It isn’t noble,’ Hanna said, ‘It is just that one has become too frightened to choose, and then one goes on standing it. Well, I want to see Martin stop suffering patiently. I want to see him take himself in hand and make his choice.’

As I listened to her, speaking with the bite that sounded at the same time intimate and cross, I felt a touch of concern — for her. It was disturbing to hear her talk so intently of another — not through tenderness for Martin, though she had a little, not even because she was putting me off from talking of her husband, though that was also true. It was disturbing because she was really talking of herself. She was behaving like Martin that night when he and I walked towards his empty house; she was unable to say outright that she too was coming near a choice. About her there clung the desperation, the fragility, of a woman who still looks young but no longer feels it to herself — or rather who, still feeling young, becomes self-conscious that others are marking off the years — and who has become obsessed that she has only one choice to make, one, no more, before she is old.

Those in the secret did not talk easily with each other, and as the months passed and Luke’s ‘pile’ went up, it was hard to judge how many believed in him. In committee heads were shaken, not much was said, yet feelings ran high. Luke was one of those figures who have the knack, often surprising to themselves, of stirring up controversy; people who did not know him, who had no conception of his surgent, exuberant, often simple-hearted character, grew excited about him, as someone who would benefit the country or as a scandalous trifler with public money, almost as a crook.