Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

The previous house, the Tudor Boscastle, had lurked in the valley. The domestic engineers could now supply them with water if they built on the hill. With a firm eighteenth-century confidence that what was modern was best, they tore the Tudor house down to its foundations. They had not the slightest feeling for the past — like most people in a vigorous, expanding age. They were determined to have the latest thing. And they did it in the most extravagant manner, like a good many other Georgian grandees. They built a palace, big enough for the head of one of the small European states. They furnished it in the high eighteenth-century manner. They had ceilings painted by Kent. They had the whole scheme, inside and out, vetted by Lord Burlington, the arbiter of architectural taste.

They impoverished the family for generations: but they had a certain reward. It was a grand and handsome house, far finer than the Tudor one they had destroyed. It impressed one still as being on the loftiest scale. It also impressed one, I thought as I went from my bedroom to a bathroom after tea, as being grandiosely uncomfortable. There were thirty yards of corridors before I got to my bathroom: and the bathroom itself, which had been installed in the nineteenth century, was of preposterous size and struck cold as a vault. There were also great stretches of corridor between the kitchens and the dining-rooms, and no dish ever arrived quite warm.

I discovered one piece of news before I had been in the house an hour. Lord Boscastle had in his gift several of the livings round the countryside; one of these had recently fallen vacant, and Roy had persuaded him to give it to Ralph Udal. So far as I could gather, Roy had sent letter after letter to Lord Boscastle, offered to return from Berlin to describe Udal, invoked both Joan and her mother to speak for him. He was always importunate when begging a favour for someone else. Lord Boscastle had given way, saying that these fellows were much of a muchness, and Udal was now vicar of a small parish, which included the house of Boscastle itself. His church and vicarage were a mile or two along the coast.

I walked there before dinner, thinking that I might find Roy; but Udal was alone in the vicarage, although Roy had called that morning. Udal brought me a glass of sherry on to the lawn. It was a long time since we had last met, but he greeted me with cordiality and with his easy, unprickly, almost impersonal good nature. He had altered very little in appearance; the hair was turning grey over his ears, but since he was twenty-five he had looked a man in a tranquil and indefinite middle age. He was in shirtsleeves, and looked powerful, sunburnt and healthy. He drank his sherry, and smiled at me, with his eyes narrowed by interest and content.

“How do you think Roy is?” he said easily, going back to my question about Roy’s visit.

“How do you?”

“You see much more of him than I do,” said Udal, also stonewalling.

“Not since he’s been abroad,” I said.

“Well,” said Udal, after a pause, “I don’t think he is to be envied.”

He looked at me with his lazy kindness. “To tell you the truth, Eliot, I didn’t think he was to be envied the first time I set eyes on him. It was the scholarship examination. I saw him outside the hall. I said to myself ‘that lad will be too good for you. But he’s going to have a rough time.’”

He smiled, and added: “It seems to me that I wasn’t far wrong.”

He asked me about Roy’s professional future. I said that everything must come to him; the university could not help creating a special readership or chair for him within three or four years.

Udal nodded his head.

“He’s very talented,” he said. “Yet you know, Eliot, sometimes I think it would have been better — if he had chosen a different life.”

“Such as?”

“He might have done better to join my trade. He might have found things easier if he’d become a priest.” Suddenly Udal smiled at me. “You’ve always disliked my hanging round, in case he was going to surrender, haven’t you? I thought it was the least I could do for him, just to wait in the slips, so to speak.”

I asked him how much Roy had talked to him about faith. He said, with calm honesty, very little: was there really much to say? Roy had not been looking for an argument. Whichever side he emerged, he had to live his way towards it.

Udal went on: “Sometimes I wonder whether he would have found it easier — if he’d actually lived a different life. I mean with women.”

“It would have been harder without them,” I said.

“I wonder,” said Udal. “There’s much nonsense talked on these matters, you know. I’m trying to be guided by what I’ve seen. And some of the calmest and happiest people I’ve seen, Eliot, have led completely ‘frustrated’ lives. And some of the people I’ve seen who always seem sexually starved — they’re people who spend their whole time hopping in and out of bed. Life is very odd.”

We talked about some acquaintances, then about Roy again.

Udal said: “Well, we shall never know.” Then he smiled. “But I can give him one bit of relief, anyhow. Now I’ve got this job, I don’t see any particular reason why I should have to borrow any more money from him. It will save him quite a bit.”

I laughed, but I was put off. I tried to examine why. From anyone else, I should have found that shameless candour endearing. Like Roy, I did not mind his sliding out of duties he did not like. I did not mind, in fact I admired, his confidence in his own first-hand experience. I did not mind his pleasure, quite obvious although he was so settled, in an hour of scabrous gossip. They were all parts of an unusual man, who had gone a different way from most of our acquaintances.

Yet I was on edge in his company. Roy had once accused me of disliking him. As we talked that afternoon, I felt that was not precisely true. I did not dislike him, I found him interesting and warm — but I should be glad to leave him, I found his presence a strain. I could not define it further. Was it that he took everything that happened to him too much as his by right? He had slid through life comfortably, without pain, without much self-questioning: did I feel he ought to be more thankful for his luck? Did he accept his own nature too acquiescently? His idleness, his lack of conscience, his amiable borrowing — he took them realistically, without protest, with what seemed to me an over-indulgent pleasure. He looked at himself, was not dissatisfied, and never kicked against the pricks.

It was strange. Though I was not comfortable with him, he seemed perfectly so with me. He told me of how he proposed to adjust his life, now that at last he had arrived at a decent stopping place.

He intended to devote Sunday and one other day a week to his parish: three days a week to his own brand of biographical scholarship: one day to sheer physical relaxation, mowing his lawn, ambling round the hills, sitting by the sea: which would leave one day “for serious purposes”. I was curious about the “serious purposes”, and Udal smiled. But he was neither diffident nor coy. He meant to spend this one day a week in preparing himself for the mystical contemplation. One day a week for spiritual knowledge: it sounded fantastically businesslike. I said as much, and Udal smiled indifferently.

“I told Roy about it,” he said. “It’s the only time I’ve ever shocked him.”

It struck me as so odd that I spoke to Roy when we met in the inner drawing-room before dinner. I said that I had heard Udal’s time-table.

“It’s dreadful,” said Roy. “It makes everything nice and hygienic, doesn’t it?” He was speaking with a dash of mockery, with hurt and bitter feeling. He shrugged his shoulders, and said: “Oh, he may as well be left to it.”