Charles Snow - The Light and the Dark

The following Friday afternoon, I was in my office reading through a file. The telephone bell rang: it was a trunk call. There were mutters, faint sounds at the other end — then Arthur Brown’s rich, steady, measured voice.

“Is that you, Eliot?”

“Yes.”

“I have bad news for you, old chap.”

“Yes.”

It did not need saying, but the kind, steady, deliberate voice went on: “Roy Calvert is missing from last night. His wife has just been in. I’ll see that she is properly looked after. She’s taking it very sturdily.”

“Thank you, Arthur.”

“I’m more sorry than I can say. I suppose there is a little hope, but I cannot hold it out to you.”

I did not reply. I could not reply. I had been swept by the first paralysing shock of death.

“If he is dead,” Arthur Brown’s voice came firmly, “we have lost someone who will never be replaced.”

For nights I could not sleep — or when I did, awoke from nightmares that tormented me as Roy’s had once tormented him. I thought of his nightmares, to get away for a second from my own. For mine, in those first nights, were intolerable with the physical imagination of his death. Sleeping or waking, I was lapped by waves of horror. A word would bring him back — “stuffed” or “Welsh” or often one that was not his special use — and I could not shut out the terrifying pictures of the imagination: the darkness, the face in the fire, the moments of unendurable anguish and fear, the face in the fire, the intolerable agony of such a death.

Nothing could guard me from that horror. It was impossible to harden oneself to such a death.

While that physical dread swept over me night and day (sometimes another pain attacked me: the night he died, I was dining happily with friends at Claridges), I could not bear to see anyone who wanted to give me hope. I could not bear to see anyone who knew him. I got through my committees somehow. I did my work. For the rest, I went about alone, or searched for company. Any company that would not bring him back.

This was the second time I had known intense grief through death. I could understand well enough the mad, frantic, obsessed concentration on his grief into which Lord Boscastle threw himself after the death of his son. I could understand well enough how some in grief squandered themselves in orgies.

After a fortnight of those days and nights, the first shock lessened. I had still spoken to no one about him, though I had managed to write a note to Rosalind. I was not ready for it yet. But I found myself searching for recollections of him. Time after time, I went over each detail of that last evening: it had seemed so light and casual when it happened, far less significant than a hundred other times we had talked together. Now I knew it off by heart. I kept asking myself questions to which there could never be an answer: just because of that they were sharp as a wound. What was the book that I should never receive? When he talked of his daughter, was he giving me instructions? Did he fear that this was his last chance to do so? Had he been fey that evening? Was he acting so lightly, to give me peace?

Then came the final news that he was dead. It was not an added shock. It meant only that I could indulge myself no longer. It was time to see others who were stricken. I would have avoided it if there had been a way: there was nothing for it but to go among them, and listen.

I sat through a night in Curzon Street with Lady Muriel and Joan. Joan was prostrate and speechless, her face brooding, white, so still that it seemed the muscles were frozen. Of those who loved him, perhaps she suffered most. Lady Muriel was like a rock. In the first shriek of pain, her daughter had told her everything about her love for Roy. Lady Muriel had forgotten propriety, had forgotten control, and had tried to comfort her. Lady Muriel had never been able to speak from her own heart; she had never seen into another’s; but when one of her children came to her in manifest agony, she lavished on them all her dumb, clumsy, overpowering affection. It was better for Joan than any subtler sympathy. For the first time since her childhood, she depended on her mother. She gained a deep, primitive consolation. Like all of us, she had laughed at Lady Muriel; she had produced for Roy’s benefit some of the absurdities, the grotesque snobberies, the feats of misunderstanding, which Lady Muriel incorrigibly perpetrated; but after she was driven to tell her mother how she suffered, Joan felt again that Lady Muriel was larger than life and that her heart was warm.

I thought that, of the two, Lady Muriel would be more crippled. For Joan was very strong; she had not a happy nature, but underneath there was a fierce, tough vitality as unquenchable as her mother’s; and she was still young. She would never be quite the same through knowing Roy — but I believed she was resilient enough to love again with all her heart.

It would not be so for Lady Muriel. It had taken an unusual man to tease her, to see that she was not formidable, to make her crow with delight. To find a friend like Roy — so clear-sighted, so utterly undeceived by exterior harshness — was a chance which would not come again. With age, disaster and loss, she was becoming on the outside more gruff and unbending. She would put everyone off, more completely than in the past. It would only be Joan who came close to her. Yet that night, her neck was stiff, her head upright, as she said goodbye in the old formula.

“Good evening, Mr — Lewis. It was good of you to come and see us.”

I went to see Rosalind in Cambridge. She had hoped right up to the end. She had seemed callous and thoughtless to many people; but I noticed that, in a few weeks, the hair on her temples had gone grey. I mentioned it.

“It doesn’t matter,” she cried. “He won’t see it, will he?”

She sobbed most of the time I was with her. She was trying to recapture every physical memory of him. She wanted to think of him, feature, skin and muscle, until she could recreate him in the flesh.

It was pagan. It was what all human beings felt, I thought, when someone dies whom they have loved in the body. Above all with sexual love — but also with the love one bears a son or anyone who is physically dear. If one has been truly bereaved, all resignation is driven away. Whatever one’s mind says, one craves that they may live again. One cannot help but crave for resurrection and a life to come. But it would all be meaningless, a ghastly joke, without the resurrection of the body. One craves for that above all. Anything else would be a parody of the life we cry out to have restored. Rosalind did not believe in an afterlife, did not believe in resurrection, either of the body or anything else; she believed that Roy had gone into annihilation. Yet with every atom of her whole existence, she begged that he might come to her again in the flesh.

We all found a kind of comfort in anything to do with his memory: as though by putting ourselves out, by being busy, by talking of him and making arrangements, we were prolonging his life. So Arthur Brown spent days organising the memorial service; and I occupied myself with the obituaries. It seemed to push back the emptiness — and I became obsessed, beyond any realism, beyond any importance that they could possibly carry, that the notices should praise his work and should not lie. I wanted them to say that he was a great scholar, and try to explain his achievement. For the rest, let them say as little as could be. It was hard to tell the truth about any man; the conventional phrases, the habits of thought which came so glibly, masked all that men were like. For Roy to be written about in the “stuffed” terms which he had spent so much of his life mocking — that I found painful out of proportion. He had spoken of himself with nothing but candour: with none of the alleviating lies which helped the rest of us to fancy ourselves at times: with a candour that was clear, light, naked and terrible. It would be a bitter irony to have that tone silenced, and hear the public voices boom out about his virtues and his sacrifice.