Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

I helped Lady Boscastle into an armchair beside my fireplace.

“I haven’t had the chance to tell you before, my dear boy,” she said, “but you look almost respectable tonight.”

But she had not settled down into sarcastic badinage before Bidwell, who was on duty at the ball, tapped softly at the door and entered. “Lord Bevill is asking whether he can see Lady Boscastle, sir.” I nodded, and Bidwell showed Humphrey Bevill into the room.

Humphrey had been acting in an undergraduate performance, and there were still traces of paint on his face. He was exhilarated and a little drunk. “I didn’t really want to see you, Lewis,” he said.

“I’ve been trying to discover where my mother is hiding.” He went across to Lady Boscastle. “They’ve kept you from me ever since you arrived, mummy. I won’t let you disappear without saying goodnight.”

He adored her; he would have liked to stay, to have thrown a cushion on the floor and sat at her feet.

“This is very charming of you, Humphrey.” She smiled at him with her usual cool, amused indulgence. “I thought I had invited myself to tea in your rooms tomorrow — tête-à-tête?”

“You’ll come, won’t you, mummy?”

“How could I miss it?” Then she asked: “By the way, have you seen your father tonight?”

“No.”

“He’d like to see you, you know. He has probably got back to the hotel by now.”

“Must I?”

“I really think you should. He will like it so much.” Humphrey went obediently away. Lady Boscastle sighed. “The young are exceptionally tedious, Lewis, my dear. They are so preposterously uninformed. They never realise it, of course. They are very shocked if one tells them that they seem rather — unrewarding.”

She smiled.

“Poor Humphrey,” she said.

“He’s very young,” I said.

“Some men,” said Lady Boscastle, “stay innocent whatever happens to them. I have known some quite well-accredited rakes who were innocent all through their lives. They never knew what this world is like.”

“That can be true of women too,” I said.

“Most women are too stupid to count,” said Lady Boscastle indifferently. “No, Lewis, I’m afraid that Humphrey will always be innocent. He’s like his father. They’re quite unfit to cope with what will happen to them.”

“What will happen to them?”

“You know as well as I do. Their day is done. It will finish this time — if it didn’t in 1914, which I’m sometimes inclined to think. It will take someone much stronger than they are to live as they’ve been bred to live. It takes a very strong man nowadays to live according to his own pleasure. Hugh tried, but he hadn’t really the temperament, you see. I doubt whether he’s known much happiness.”

“And you?”

“Oh, I could always manage, my dear. Didn’t you once tell me that I was like a cat?”

She was scrutinising her husband and her son with an anthropologist’s detachment. And she was far more detached than the rest of them about the fate of their world. She liked it; it suited her; it had given her luxury, distinction and renown; now it was passing forever, and she took it without a moan. “I thought,” she said, “that your friend Roy was rather égaré tonight.”

“Yes.”

“What is the matter? Is my niece still refusing to let him go? Or am I out of date?”

She said it airily. She was not much worried or interested. If Roy had been exhibiting some new phase of a love affair, she would have been the first to observe, identify and dissect. As it was, her perception stopped short, and she was ready to ignore it.

She leaned back against the head-rest of the chair. Under the reading-lamp, her face was monkey-like and yet oddly beautiful. The flesh was wizened, but the architecture of the bones could never be anything but exquisite. She looked tired, reflective and amused.

“Lewis!” she asked. “Do you feel that you are doing things for the last time?”

I was too much engrossed in trouble to have speculated much.

“I do,” said Lady Boscastle. “Quite strongly. I suppose the chances are that we shall not dine here again. It tends to give such occasions a certain poignancy.”

She smiled.

“It didn’t happen so last time, you know. It all came from a clear sky. A very clear sky, my dear boy. Have I ever told you? I think I was happier in 1914 than I ever was before or since. I had always thought people were being absurdly extravagant when they talked of being happy. Yet I had to admit it. I was ecstatically happy myself. It was almost humiliating, my dear Lewis. And distinctly unforeseen.”

I had heard something of it before. Of all her conquests, this was the one to which she returned with a hoarding, secretive, astonished pleasure. She would not tell me who he was. “He has made his own little reputation since. I am not quite ungallant enough to boast.” I believed that it was someone I knew, either in person or by name.

The whirr and clang and chimes of midnight broke into a pause. Reluctantly Lady Boscastle felt that she must go. I was just ringing for a taxi, when she stopped me.

“No, my dear,” she said. “I have an envie for you to take me back tonight.”

Very slowly, for she had become more frail since I first met her, she walked on my arm down St Andrew’s Street. The sky had clouded, there was no moon or stars, but the touch of the night air was warm and solacing. Her stick stayed for an interval on the pavement at each step; I had to support her; she smiled and went on talking, as we passed Emmanuel, decked out for a ball. Fairy lights glimmered through the gate, and a tune found its way out. A party of young men and women, in tails and evening frocks and cloaks, made room for us on the pavement and went in to dance. They did not imagine, I thought, that they had just met a great beauty recalling her most cherished lover.

Lord Boscastle was waiting up for her in their sitting-room at the hotel.

“How very nice of you, Hugh,” she said lightly, much as she spoke to her son. “I have been keeping Lewis up. Do you mind if I leave you both now? I think I will go straight to my room. Good night, Hugh, my dear. Good night, Lewis, my dear boy.”

Lord Boscastle did not seem inclined to let me go. He poured out a whisky for me and for himself, and, when I had drunk mine, filled the tumbler again. He was impelled to find out what his wife and I had been saying to each other; he could not ask directly, he shied away from any blunt question, and yet he went too far for either of us to be easy. There was a curious tone about those enquiries, so specific that I was certain I ought to recognise it — but for a time I could not. Then, vividly, it struck me. To think that he was jealous of his wife’s affection for me was, of course, ridiculous. To think he was still consumed by the passionate and possessive love for her which had (as I now knew) darkened much of his manhood — that was ridiculous too. But he was behaving as though the habit of that consuming passion survived, when everything else had died. In his youth he had waited up for her; it was easy to imagine him striding up and down the opulent rooms of Edwardian hotels. In his youth he had been forced to question other men as he had just questioned me; he was forced under the compulsion of rivalry, he was driven to those intimate duels. At long last the hot and turbulent passion had died, as all passions must; but it had trained his heart to habits he could not break.

His was a nature too ardent to have come through lightly; I thought it again when he confronted me with Roy’s demeanour that night.

“I was afraid the man was going to make an exhibition of himself,” he said.

I had no excuse to make.

“He’ll have to learn that he mustn’t embarrass his guests. We’ve all sat through dinners wanting to throw every scrap of crockery on to the floor. But we’ve had to hide it. Damn it, I shall wake up in the night wondering what’s wrong with the young man.”