Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

I nodded.

“They’ll want me to bomb Berlin soon. Think of that.” Then he said: “But you don’t believe in bombing anyway, do you?”

“No,” I said.

“You don’t think it’s any use? It won’t win the war?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“You’re pretty sure?”

“Reasonably.”

“What does he think?” Roy pointed to the door which led through to the Minister’s room.

“The same.”

“Just so,” said Roy. “He’s a wise old bird. So are you, aren’t you?”

He smiled brilliantly, innocently, laughing at himself and me. He said: “There’s never been a place for me, has there?”

On those afternoons I heard something about his crew. He had become interested in them, realistically, affectionately, with amusement, just as with everyone he met, just as with the inmates of No. 32, Knesebeckstrasse. They were nearly all boys, and the oldest was twenty-six, seven years younger than himself. “I’m getting too old for this game,” said Roy. There was a Canadian among them. Most of them were abnormally inarticulate, and Roy mimicked them to me. Some were extremely brave. “Too brave for me,” he said.

I often speculated about what they thought of him. So far as I could gather, they did not consider him academic, donnish, or learned; it had always surprised people to discover his occupation. But they also did not think him intelligent or amusing. They liked him, they respected him as a pilot, and thought he was a kind, slightly eccentric old thing. I suspected he had gone in for some deliberate dissimulation — partly to stay anonymous, partly to shield them from what he was really like. For instance, they certainly did not know that he was a notorious lover of women. They just placed him as an uxorious married man, devoted to his daughter and inclined to show them photographs of his wife and baby.

He told me that with a smile. It was often, I reflected, odd enough to send a shiver down the spine, when one heard a friend described by other people.

It was as though each of us went about speaking a private language which no one else could understand; yet everyone caught a few words, uttered a cheerful, confident, dismissive judgment, and passed on. It reminded me of the fellows discussing Roy before he was elected. If one heard people talking confidently of another’s character, one realised once for all that human beings were inescapably alone.

Actually, the opinions formed by Roy’s crew were quite explicable. He was devoted to the child, with a strength of feeling that at times astonished me. And he was content and comfortable with Rosalind.

During one of his visits to my office, both he and I were set to write letters that were difficult to put together. For I had heard from Joan the day before that Humphrey Bevill had just died in hospital. He had been decorated again for one of the small boat actions; then, a week or so past, his boat had been sunk and he had spent some hours in the water. His fantastic courage was a courage of the nerves, and he was as frail as he looked. He had died from exposure and loss of blood, when a normally tough young man would have recovered.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “It must have been dreadful to go out and fight — and then come back in an hour or two. Everything clean and normal. It makes it much harder.”

He said that he felt it acutely himself. In the daytime he would be at home in peace, all tranquil. At night they would be flying out in fear. Next morning he came back home again. It would have been easier if all his life were abnormal, disturbed, spent nearer the dark and cold. It would have been easier in trenches in a foreign country. Here the hours of danger were placed violently side by side with days of clean sheets, in familiar rooms with one’s child, one’s wife and friends.

“Poor boy,” said Roy. “He couldn’t have had a happy life, could he?”

We each wrote separate letters to Lord and Lady Boscastle.

“It’s hard to write,” said Roy. “It will break up Lord B. It’s a mistake to be fond of people. One suffers too much.”

We had no doubt that Lord Boscastle would be terribly afflicted, but even so we were amazed by the manner of his grief. I heard of it from Lady Boscastle, who wrote in reply to my letter of condolence. Herself, she was taking bereavement with her immaculate stoicism — but she seemed overborne, almost stunned, by her husband’s passion of inconsolable misery. He shut himself up in Boscastle, would acknowledge no letters, not even from his family, would see no one except his servant. He had only spoken once to his wife since he heard of Humphrey’s death. It was a rage of misery, misery that was like madness, that made him in sheer ferocity of pain shut himself away from every human touch.

Lady Boscastle was out of her depth. She would have liked to help him; yet, for once in her life, she felt ignorant and inept. She had never been possessed as he was now; for all her adventures, she had never been overmastered by an emotion; she had never abandoned herself to love, as her husband did, with all the wildness of his nature, first in love for her and then for his son. She could not meet such a passion on equal terms. For the first time in their marriage, she was not mistress of the situation.

When Roy next came to see me, it was a warm, sunny day at the end of February; the other side of Whitehall was gilded by the soft, misty, golden light.

I told Roy about Lady Boscastle’s letter.

“She’s too cold,” he said. He had never liked her as I did, though he felt a kind of reluctant, sparring admiration. “She’ll survive. But he’ll live with the dead.”

Roy looked at me, and spoke with extreme gentleness and authority: “You mustn’t live with the dead too much. You could.”

He had seen me live on after my wife’s death; he was the only person who had seen me close to.

“If you lose me as well,” said Roy, “you mustn’t mourn too long. You mustn’t let it haunt you. You must go on.”

He was pale, quiet, burdened that afternoon. He and his crew had moved a few days before to another aerodrome. “They don’t want us to see our losses. They need to keep us cheerful,” he said.

He went on: “If we started with thirty aeroplanes” (he never used the current terms, but always with great precision brought out the outmoded ones, such as “aeroplanes”) “and we notice that two don’t come back each night, they think we mightn’t like it much. Because we’ve got to make thirty trips before they give us a rest. Even if the losses are only five per cent — we might start working out our chances. They’re not good, are they?”

It was such a beautiful afternoon that we went for a walk in St James’s Park. The sky was a light, radiant blue; but, although it was only early afternoon, a mist was creeping on to the brilliant grass.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “I like to see that.”

I misunderstood him.

“It is a lovely day,” I said.

“Not so aesthetic,” said Roy. “I meant — as long as this weather lasts, we shan’t have to fly.”

He walked by my side, over the soft winter turf.

“Some nights,” he said in a moment, “I’m pretty certain that I’m not coming back. I want to ask them to let me stay at home. I need to be safe. I feel like saying that I can’t go through it once again. Those nights, I feel certain that I’m going to die.”

He added: “Somehow I’ve come back, though.”

We walked along through the calm, warm, fragrant air. Roy turned to me, his face quite open.

“Dear old boy, I am afraid, you know,” he said. “I am afraid of my death.”

On Roy’s next visit, nothing of importance happened; he said nothing which struck me at the time; it was a placid evening, but I came to remember it in detail.