Charles Snow - Last Things

She gazed round, and smiled again. She said: ‘Well, what’s it going to be like tonight?’

We hadn’t the vestige of an idea. The week before I had received a letter in a beautiful italic hand that once had been so familiar, when I used to read those minutes of Rose’s, lucid as the holograph itself. The letter read:

My dear Lewis, It is a long time since I said goodbye to you as a colleague, but I have kept in touch with your activities from a distance. When I read your work, I feel that I know you better than during our period together in the service: that gives me much regret. It is unlikely that you could have heard, but I have recently remarried. It would give us both much pleasure if you and your wife could spare us an evening to come to dinner. [There followed some dates to choose from.] I have retired from all public activities, and so you will be doing a kindness if you can manage to come.

Yours very sincerely,

Hector Rose

In the years when I had worked under Rose in Whitehall, and they were getting on for twenty, I had never met his wife. It was known that he lived right at the fringe of Highgate: when he entertained, which wasn’t often, he did so at the Athenaeum: there was no mention of children: he kept his private life locked up, as though it were a state secret. Underneath his polite, his blindingly polite manners, he was a forbidding man, in the sense that no one could come close. He was as tough-minded as any of the civil-service bosses, and I came to admire his sheer ability more, the longer I knew him. But that facade, those elaborate manners – they were so untiring, so self-invented, often so ridiculous, that one felt as though one were stripping off each onion-skin and being confronted by a precisely similar onion-skin underneath. There were those who thought he must be homosexual. I couldn’t have guessed. By this time he was sixty-six, and reading his letter Margaret and I decided that he must have married a second time for company (I remembered reading a bare notice of the death of the first wife, with the single piece of information that she, like Rose himself, had been the child of a clergyman). Otherwise, the only inference we could draw came from his last sentence. Rose used words carefully, as a master of impersonal draftsmanship, and that sounded remarkably like a plea. If so, it was the only plea I had ever known him make. He was the least comfortable of companions, but no one was freer from self-pity.

So, as Margaret and I walked, with our own perverse nostalgia, across the end of the square, past the church and the white scarred planes, along the street for a few hundred yards, we couldn’t imagine what we were going to. When we came outside the house itself, it was like the one that I had lived in towards the end of the war, under the eye and landladyship of the ineffable Mrs Beauchamp: a narrow four-storey building, period latish nineteenth century, ramshackle, five bells flanking the door with five name-cards beside them. Rose’s was the ground-floor flat: it couldn’t be more than three or four rooms, I was reckoning as I rang the bell. It was another oddity that Rose should live in this fashion. He had no private means, he might not have earned much since he retired from the Department, but his pension would be over £3000 a year. That didn’t spread far by this date, but it spread farther than this.

But, when he opened the door, all was momentarily unchanged. Strong, thick through the shoulders, upright: his preternatural youthfulness had vanished in his fifties, but he looked no older than when I saw him last.

‘My dear Lewis, this is extraordinarily good of you! How very kind of you to come! How very, very kind!’

He used to greet me like that when, as his second in command, I had been summoned to his office and had performed the remarkable athletic feat of walking the ten yards down the corridor.

He was bowing to Margaret, who had met him only two or three times before.

‘Lady Eliot! It’s far far too long since I had the pleasure of seeing you–’

His salutations, which now seemed likely to describe arabesques hitherto unheard of, had the knack of putting their recipient at a disadvantage, and Margaret was almost stuttering as she tried to reply.

Bowing, arms spread out, he showed us – the old word ushered would have suited the performance better – into the sitting-room, which led straight out of the communal hall. As I had calculated when we stood outside, they had only one main room, and the sitting-room was set for dinner, napery and glass upon the table, what looked like Waterford glass out of place in the dingy house. Round the walls were glass-fronted bookshelves, stacked with volumes a good many of which, I discovered later, were prizes from Marlborough and Oxford. A young lecturer or research student at one of the London colleges, just married, might have been living there. However, neither Margaret nor I could attend to the interior decoration, when we had the prospect of Rose’s wife herself.

‘Lady Eliot,’ said Rose, like a master of ceremonies, ‘may I present– Darling, may I introduce Sir Lewis Eliot, my former colleague, my distinguished colleague.’

As I muttered ‘Lady Rose’ and took her hand, I was ready for a lot of titular incantations, wishing that we had Russian patronymics or alternatively that Rose had taken to American manners, which seemed unlikely. It was going to be tiresome to call this woman Lady Rose all night. She was alluring. No, that wasn’t right, there was nothing contrived about her, she was simply, at first sight, attractive. Not beautiful: she had a wide mouth, full brown eyes, a cheerful uptilted nose. Her cheeks seemed to wear a faint but permanent flush. She must have been about forty, but she wouldn’t change much; at twenty she wouldn’t have looked very different, a big and sensuous girl. She was as tall as Rose, only two or three inches shorter than I was, not specially ethereal, no more so than a Renoir model.

Margaret gave me the slightest of marital grins, jeering at both of us. Our reconstructions of the situation…elderly people ‘joining forces’, marriage for company. If that was marrying for company, then most young people needed more of it. As for Rose’s putative plea, the only reason for reviving our acquaintance seemed to be that he wanted to show her off, which was simple and convincing enough.

In actual fact, as company in the conversational sense, she wasn’t a striking performer, as I discovered when we set out to talk. She was superficially shy, not at all shy deeper down. She was quite content to leave the talk to us, beaming placidly at Rose, as though signalling that she was pleased with him. I picked up one or two facts, such as that there had been another husband, though what had happened to him was not revealed. If there had been a divorce, it had been kept quiet. I couldn’t gather how she and Rose had ever met: she didn’t belong to any sort of professional world, she came perhaps – there was a residual accent – from origins like mine. I knew that when Rose left the service he had taken a couple of directorships: my guess was that he had come across her in one of those offices; she might have been his secretary.

Well, there they were, eyes meeting down the table. ‘Jane darling, would it be troubling you if you reached behind you–’ The one aspect which baffled me completely was why they should be living like students. It might have been one of the games of marriage, in which they were pretending to be young people starting out. If so, that must have been his game, for she would have been satisfied wherever they had lived.

She was an excellent cook. On nights when we had worked late together, Rose and I used to split a bottle of wine, and he had recollected that.

He was talking with elaborate animation to Margaret about the differences between Greats in his time at Oxford, and the philosophy in hers at Cambridge. Jane listened and basked. As for me, I was engaged in a simple reflection. A woman had once told me that she didn’t know, no one could possibly know, what a man was like until she had gone to bed with him. It was the kind of comment that sounded wise when one was young, and probably wasn’t. And yet, looking at that pair, remembering how so many people had pigeon-holed Rose, myself among them, I felt that this once there might be something in it.