Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

“You’ll sleep now, if you go to bed,” I said.

“You don’t know,” said Roy. “I shan’t sleep tonight. I’ll do anything you like. Let’s do anything. Let’s play cards. Three-handed bezique. Please stay and play bezique with me. Good game, three-handed bezique. It’s a wonderful game. Please stay and play. Please stay with me.”

Day after day, Roy was left with the darkness on his mind. He read his manuscripts until he was faint, but no relief came to him. He had never been through melancholy that was as dark, that lasted so long. He could not sleep, and his nights were worse than his days.

It was heart-rending to watch, now I saw his affliction clear for the first time. At least once I was cowardly enough to make an excuse not to see him at night. It was agony, not to be able to lift his despair, not even for an hour. It was agony to know his loneliness — and so to know my own.

And I was frightened. I was lost. I had never before felt my way among this kind of darkness. I could read of experiences which here and there resembled it, but books are empty when one is helpless beside such suffering. Nothing I found to read, nothing I had learned myself, could tell me what was likely to come next. Often I was frightened over quite practical things: would he collapse? would he break out in some single irreparable act? I was never afraid that he might kill himself: from a distance, it might have seemed a danger, but in his presence I did not give it a thought. But I imagined most other kinds of disaster.

The melancholy, which fell on him the weekend that Lyall and Foulkes arrived, did not stay uniform like one pitch-black and unchanging night. Occasionally, it was broken by a wild, lurid elation that seemed like a fantastic caricature of his natural gaiety. The mischievous high spirits with which he took me round the bookshops or baited the surgeon at the feast — those spirits seemed suddenly distorted into a frenzy. I feared such moments most: they happened very seldom. I was waiting for them, but I did not know whether sympathy or love could help him then. Sometimes the melancholy lifted for a time much more gradually, for a day or a night, and he became himself at once, though sadder, more tired and more gentle. “I must be an awful bore, old boy,” he said. “You’d better spend your time with Arthur Brown. You’ll find it less exhausting.”

All through, in melancholy or false elation, his intelligence was as lucid as ever: in fact, I sometimes thought that he was more lucid and penetrating than I had ever known him. He was given none of the comfort of illusion. He worked with the same precision and resource; some of his best emendations came during a phase of melancholy. And once or twice, struggling away from his own thoughts, he talked to me about myself as no one else could have done.

Whenever he could lose himself in another, I thought one night, he gained a little ease. It was a night not long after Lyall’s visit, and Roy and I were dining in the Lodge. The Master was in Oxford, and Lady Muriel had asked us to dine en famille with herself and Joan. After I had dressed, I went up to Roy’s room, and found him in shirtsleeves and black waistcoat studying his image in the mirror.

“If I keep out of the light, I may just pass.” He smiled at me ruefully. “I don’t look very bright for Lady Mu.”

Nights of insomnia had left stains under his eyes and taken the colour from his cheeks. There were shadows under his cheekbones, and his face, except when he smiled, was tired and drawn.

“I’ll have to do my best for her,” he said. He gazed again at his reflection. “It’s bad to look like death. It makes them worry, doesn’t it?” He turned away. “I’m also going bald, but that’s quite another thing.”

For once, Lady Muriel had not asked Mrs Seymour as the inevitable partner for me. There were only the four of us, and I was invited just as an excuse for having Roy: for Lady Muriel intended to enjoy his presence without being distracted at all.

She sat straightbacked at the end of the table, but if one had only heard her voice one would have known that Roy was there.

“Why have I been neglected, Roy?” she said.

“That is extremely simple,” said Roy.

“What do you mean, you impertinent young man?” she cried in delight.

“I’ve not been asked, Lady Mu,” he said, using her nickname to her face, which no one else would have dared.

He was using the tone, feline, affectionate, gently rough, which pleased her most. He was trying to hide his wretchedness, he acted a light-hearted mood in order to draw out her crowing laugh.

He smiled as he watched her face, suddenly undignified and unformidable, wrinkled, hearty, joyous as she laughed.

She recovered herself for a moment, however, when she talked of the Christmas vacation. Lord Boscastle had taken a villa outside Monte Carlo, and the Royces were going down “as soon as the Master (as Lady Muriel always called him) has finished the scholarship examination”.

I mentioned that I was arranging to spend a fortnight in Monte Carlo myself.

“How very strange, Mr Eliot,” said Lady Muriel, with recognition rather than enthusiasm. “How very strange indeed.”

I said that I often went to the Mediterranean.

“Indeed,” said Lady Muriel firmly. “I hope we may see something of you there.”

“I hope so, Lady Muriel.”

“And I hope,” she looked at me fixedly, “we may have the pleasure of seeing your wife.”

“I want to take her,” I said. “She may not be well enough to travel, though.”

It was nearly true, but Lady Muriel gave an ominous: “I see, Mr Eliot.”

Lady Muriel still expressed surprise that I should be going to Monte Carlo. She had all the incredulity of the rich that anyone should share their pleasures. Rather as though she expected me to answer with the name of an obscure pension, she asked: “May I ask where you are staying?”

“The Hermitage,” I said.

“Really, Mr Eliot,” she said. “Don’t you think that you will find it very expensive?”

During this conversation, I had noticed that Joan’s glance had remained on Roy. Her own face was intent. It was still too young to show the line of her cheekbones. Her eyes were bright blue, and her hair brown and straight. It struck me that she had small, beautiful ears. But her face was open and harassed; I could guess too easily what had fascinated her: I looked across for a second, away from Lady Muriel, and saw Roy, stricken and remote. Usually he would have hung on to each word of the exchange, and parodied it later at my expense: now he was not listening. It seemed by an unnatural effort that he spoke again. Lady Muriel was remarking, in order to reprove my extravagance: “My brother considers it quite impossibly expensive to live in Monte itself. We find it much more practical to take this place outside.”

“How terrible it must be to be poor, Lady Mu,” broke in Roy’s voice. Joan started as he spoke: it made what she had seen appear ghostly. He was smiling now, he teased Lady Muriel, just as she wanted. She had noticed nothing, and was very happy. She crowed as he made fun of the Boscastle finances — which amused him, for he was enough his father’s son to have a lively interest in money. And she was delighted when he threatened not to be left out of the party at Christmas, but to join me at the hotel. She even regarded me with a kind of second-hand favour.

Her response to Roy was very simple, I thought. Life had never set her free, but underneath the armour she was healthy, vital and coarse-fibred. She had borne three daughters, but no sons. Roy was the son she had never had. And he was an attractive young man, utterly unimpressed by her magnificence, who saw through her, laughed, and shook her now and then. She could never find a way to tell people she liked them, but that did not matter with this young man, who could hear what she was really saying behind the gruff clumsy words.