Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

Accordingly he secured a little more than the Foreign Office could reasonably expect. It was a hot afternoon, and he leaned back in his chair, mopping his forehead. He always got hot in the ardour of putting his case. He beamed. He was happy to have won a concession.

I was due to speak on the next business, but the chairman was looking through his papers. I was sitting next to Eggar; he pushed an elbow along the table, and leant towards me. He said in a low voice, casual and confidential: “So Calvert is getting his release.”

“What?”

“He has got his own way. Good luck to him. I told his chief there’s no use trying to keep a man who is determined to go.”

“Where is he going?”

Eggar looked incredulous, as though I must know.

“Where is he going?” I said.

“Oh, he wants to fly, of course. It’s quite natural.”

I had known nothing of it, not a word, not a hint. For a second, I felt physically giddy. A blur of faces went round me. Then it steadied. I heard the chairman’s voice, a little impatient: “Isn’t this a matter for you, Eliot?”

“I’m sorry, Mr Chairman,” I said, and mechanically began to explain a new piece of government machinery. I could hear my own words, faint and toneless like words in a dream — yet they came out in a shape fluent, practised, articulate. It was too hard to break the official habit. One was clamped inside one’s visor.

Eggar left before the end of the meeting, and so I could not get another word with him. I put through a call to Roy’s office, but he was out. I gave a message for him: would he telephone me at my flat, without fail, after eleven that night?

I went straight from my office to have dinner with Lady Muriel and Joan. They had come to London in the first week of the war, and were living in the Boscastles’ town house in Curzon Street. They were extravagantly uncomfortable. The house was not large, judged by the magnificent criterion of Boscastle (Lord Boscastle’s grandfather had sold the original town mansion); but it was a good deal too large for two women, both working at full-time jobs. It was also ramshackle and perilously unsafe. Nothing would persuade Lady Muriel to forsake it. A service flat seemed in her eyes common beyond expression — as for danger, she dismissed us all as a crowd of “jitterbugs” getting the idiom wrong. “This disturbance is much exaggerated,” she said, and slept with a soundness that infuriated many of us and put us to shame.

Her sense of duty would not permit her to employ any servants who could possibly do other work. In fact, they had two women who had been with the family all their lives, both well over seventy and infirm. Lady Muriel did all the cooking herself when she gave a dinner party, but made them both wait at table. It was a quixotic parody of nights in the Lodge and Boscastle.

She and Joan were sitting together in the drawing-room. The pictures had been taken away for safety, and the walls were bare.

“Good evening, Mr — Lewis,” said Lady Muriel. “It is good of you to come and see us.”

Nowadays, she used my Christian name when she remembered. The explanation was a little complicated. It did not mean for a minute that she thought the time had come to relax her social standards. As a matter of fact, the exact opposite was the case. She might officiate at a refugee centre each day and every day — which she did inexorably. She submitted to being slapped on the back by cheery women helpers: it was part of her job. But at night, in the privacy of Curzon Street, where she had lived as a girl, she became so magniloquently snobbish that her days in the Lodge came to seem like slumming. It was her defence, her retort, to those who kept saying that the day of her kind was gone forever. Lord Boscastle responded in just the same fashion — not with accommodation, not trying to fit in, but with an exaggerated, a considered, a monumental arrogance. They were both dropping most of their old acquaintances.

No, when Lady Muriel called me by my Christian name it certainly did not imply that she accepted me in any social sense. Perhaps she liked me a little more; with her, getting used to people and liking them tended to run together. But really her softening came from quite a different cause: it was a gesture of respect towards the government and those who organised the war. She was passionately determined that her country should win; and it made her curiously respectful to anyone who seemed to be in control. She had decided that I was far more important than in fact I was; she had also decided that I knew every conceivable military secret. Nothing would remove these misconceptions; a flat denial merely strengthened her faith in my astuteness and responsibility. Then someone told her that I was doing well, and that finished it. She listened open-mouthed to every word I said about the war, like a girl student with a venerated teacher; she drew inferences when I was silent; and, with a certain effort, she brought herself after all those years to use my Christian name.

I smiled at Joan. Despite her exertions, thick and heavy as she was, Lady Muriel was well preserved at fifty-five. But Joan no longer looked a girl. She had worked in the Treasury from the first winter, and her face had changed through success as well as unhappiness. She had shown how able she was; it was just the outlet for her tough, strong nature; and it had stamped its mark on her, for on the surface she was a little more formidable, a little more decisive, ruthless and blunt.

Though everyone praised her, though she knew that she could go high if she wanted, she recoiled. She liked it and hated it. In protest, she lived at night the gayest life she could snatch. She went out with every man who asked her. I saw her often in public-houses and smart bars and restaurants. She was searching for a substitute for Roy, I knew — and yet also she longed for the glitter and the lights more than many giggling thoughtless women.

I did not want to tear open her wound, but I was driven to ask at once about Roy. I could not begin to make conversation. I had to ask: did they know anything of him?

To my consternation, Joan smiled.

“You must have heard.” She told me the same news as Eggar.

“I’ve heard nothing.”

“I should have thought he would have told you,” said Joan. “He let me know.”

“It was only to be expected,” said Lady Muriel, “that he should let us know.”

I gathered that he had written to Lady Muriel. Joan was glad that she had heard the secret, and I had not; even now her love would not let her go, searched for the slightest sign, found an instant of dazzling hope in a letter to her mother. His friend had not been told; was this letter a signal to her?

“He seems content,” said Joan. “I hope it’s right for him. I think perhaps it is.”

“It is certainly right for him,” said Lady Muriel.

“He’s such a strange man,” said Joan. “I hope it is.”

“I’ve always known that he’s been uncomfortable since the war began. A woman feels these things,” said Lady Muriel superbly. “I can rely on my intuition.”

“What has it told you, Mother?” said Joan, as though she had picked up a spark of mischief from Roy.

“He could not bear being kept back while others fought. I consider that he would never have been happy until he fought.”

Joan smiled at her. Now that Joan had been battered by her own experience, she was much fonder of her mother, much kinder to her, more able to see the rich nature behind the absurd, forbidding armour. She was more ready to put up with her mother’s lack of perception — when Joan was a girl, before she had loved, it had merely made her aggressive and fierce. As the years passed, they were growing together.

They took the news of Roy quite differently, and yet with one point in common. For Lady Muriel, all was now clear and well. When she gave her trust, she gave it naïvely and absolutely, like a little girl; white was white, and she admired with her whole heart; and there was no one whom she admired more than Roy. She tried to get used to a war in which young men had safe jobs, did not want to leave them; but she could not manage it. She could not reconcile herself to Roy inert and indecisive. Now her trust was justified. She could worship again, in her simple, loyal, unqualified fashion. “I always knew it would happen,” said Lady Muriel, forgetting that she had ever been troubled, forgetting it just as completely as she forgot she had once herself opposed the war.