Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

He was shown into my office about half-past two on a Saturday afternoon. I should not have been there, but I was preparing a draft for the Minister. Roy saw that I was writing, cocked an eyebrow, and with exaggerated punctiliousness would not come round my side of the desk.

“Too secret,” he said.

“No. Just a speech.”

Roy was light-hearted, and his mood infected me. He had the next four days free, and when he left me that evening was going on to Cambridge. He was so calm and light that I could not stay in a grey, ordinary, workaday mood. I had nearly finished the speech, but I recalled that the Minister had one or two idioms which he always got wrong: “they can’t pull the wool over my ears,” he used to say with great shrewdness. I was fond of him: it occurred to me that those idioms should be inserted in the speech. I told Roy what I was doing.

“I thought you’d become much too responsible.” He smiled with cheerful malice. “Remarkable occupation for a high civil servant. You should model yourself on Houston Eggar. I’m afraid you’ll never catch him up.”

When we went down into the street, Roy said that he needed some books for the next four days. So we took a bus, cut down Charles II Street, and reached the London Library before it closed. Roy bent over a rack of recent books; his nose looked inquisitively long, since the peak of his cap cut off his forehead. He talked about one or two of the books. “Very old-brandy,” he murmured. Then suddenly, with an expression serious and concerned, he pointed to a title. He was pointing to a single word — FISH. “Lewis,” he said, in a clear, audible tone, “I’m losing my grip. I’ve forgotten the Soghdian for fish.” He looked up, and saw a member, fat, stately, in black hat and fur-lined overcoat, walking out with books under his arm. “I wonder if he knows,” said Roy. “I need to ask him.”

Roy stepped lightly in front of the fat man, and gave him a smart salute.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but I have forgotten the Soghdian for fish. Can you help me?”

“The what?”

“Soghdian.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“One ought to keep one’s languages up,” said Roy: his gaze was solemn, reproving, understanding. “It’s terrible how one forgets them. Isn’t it?”

Hypnotised, the member agreed that it was. Roy let him go. On the bus to Dolphin Square, the word returned to Roy. He professed extreme relief. The bus racketed and swayed round the corner by Victoria. Roy said, calm and matter-of-fact: “If I live, I shall go back to the Soghdian, you know. I may as well.”

“I think you should,” I said.

“I shall become extremely eminent. And remarkably rude.”

“I wish you’d study that whole Central Asian civilisation. It must be very interesting — how did it keep alive? and why did it die?”

“You always wanted me to turn into a journalist,” said Roy. “I’m too old to change now. I shall stick to something nice and sharp.”

In my flat, we made a kind of high tea, since Roy was catching a train just after seven. But it was a high tea composed of things we had not eaten for a long time. I had a small hoard of foods that once we ate and did not know how good they were — butter, strawberry jam, a few eggs. We had bought a loaf of bread on our way; we boiled a couple of eggs each, and finished with several rounds of bread and butter and jam.

“Excellent,” said Roy. “This is good stuff.”

We had eaten well together in many places, but it was a delectable meal. Afterwards, we made another pot of tea; Roy lay on the sofa, smoked a cigarette, asked me about my love affair.

For I had fallen in love in the middle of the war. It had given me days of supernatural brilliance among the pain, anxiety and darkness. For hours together, I had been ecstatically happy and blind to everything else.

“You should let me vet them,” said Roy. “I still don’t like the sound of her.”

“She wouldn’t do for you,” I said.

“You like women who wouldn’t do for anyone, old boy. Such as Lady B.”

“Life wouldn’t have been dull,” I said, “with Lady B.”

Roy smiled mockingly, protectively.

“You’ve not tired yourself out, have you?” he said. “So much has happened to you — and yet you still don’t need life to be dull.”

He teased me, gave me advice, made me promise to arrange a dinner with both him and the young woman. Once I turned and caught him watching me, a half-smile on his lips, his eyes intent.

Then he said: “We haven’t had a walk for a long time, have we? Walk with me to the station.”

It was several miles, but I was glad to. We were both active that day. As soon as we got into the open air, we felt the prick of a Scotch mist, almost a drizzle. I asked if he minded about his buttons.

“Never mind them,” he said. “Rosalind will clean them tomorrow. She likes to.”

The drizzle persisted, but the moon was getting up behind the clouds, and the last of the daylight had not quite faded. Along the embankment to Westminster it was not oppressively dark; the derelict houses of Millbank stood blacker than the sky, and on our right there was a sheen upon the water. The tide was running full, and brought a smell from the sea.

“It’s a good night,” said Roy.

We left the river at Westminster, strolled down Whitehall, and then went back to the Embankment as far as Blackfriars Bridge. Trams clanked past us, sparks flashing in the dusk. Now and then a torch shone a beam on the wet road. Roy recalled jokes against us both, predicaments we had run into when we were younger, the various attempts to domesticate us.

“They got me at last,” he said. “They got me at last.”

He talked fondly of his daughter.

“I wonder what she’ll be like,” he said. “She won’t be stupid, will she?”

I smiled.

“I hope not,” said Roy. “I’ve got a feeling she’ll be anxious to please. If so, there’ll be trouble for someone.”

He took my arm, and went on in a light, clear, definite tone: “They mustn’t teach her too much. They mustn’t teach her to hold herself in. I’d like her to be easy. She’s my daughter. She’ll find the dark things for herself.”

Arm-in-arm, we went up Ludgate Hill towards St Paul’s. Roy was talking with affection tender and disrespectful, about one who “held herself in” — Lady Muriel. She must not be let loose on her godchild; he teased me about all her efforts to make me respectable in a way fitting to my station.

“Yet you dote on her,” I said.

“Ah, she needs so much love.”

“And Joan?”

He never laughed much about Joan. Of all the people we knew intimately, she was the only one he never mimicked. Even that evening, when he was so free, when his feelings flowed like quicksilver, he paused.

“And Joan?” I repeated.

“She needs more still,” said Roy.

We passed the cathedral; the rain was pattering down, but by now the invisible moon was high enough to lighten the sky, so that we could see the waste land close by; we stopped on the city side, near what used to be Bread Street, and gazed at the empty expanse under the gentle rain.

“Not pretty,” said Roy.

“No,” I said.

Then we discovered that we had cut it fine, if he were to catch his train. We walked fast the rest of the way to Liverpool Street. “Good for you,” said Roy, as he made the pace with a light step.

He was smiling as we entered the station. “I’ll send you a book,” he said, with a flick in his voice, as though he were playing an obscure joke.

He had only two minutes to spare. The train was at the platform, the carriage-doors were being shut, men were standing in the corridors. Roy ran towards it, waving back at me. He was the most graceful of men — but I thought then, as I used when he ran up to bowl, how he suddenly ceased to be so as he ran. His running stride was springy and loose but had a curious, comic, rabbit-like lollop. He got a place in the corridor and waved again: I was smiling at the picture of him on the run.