Charles Snow - Last Things

Table pushed back after the meal, for the room was small though high-ceilinged, we sat round the grate, in front of an electric fire. Rose and his wife had finished drinking for the evening, but hospitably he had put a decanter of port on the floor. Some more fine glass, from the archidiaconal or even the Highgate home. I mentioned former colleagues. I tried to get him to say something about his career.

‘Oh, my dear Lewis, that’s really water under the bridge, water distinctly under the bridge, shouldn’t you agree? I don’t know whether Lady Eliot has ever had the misfortune to be exposed to the reminiscences of retired athletes,’ he was gazing, bleached-eyed, at Margaret, ‘but I assure you that mine would be, if anything, slightly duller.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ said Margaret, who still found him disconcerting.

‘But then, my dear Lady Eliot, if you’ll permit me, you haven’t spent getting on for forty years in government departments.’

‘Do you regret it?’ I said. I had learned long since that one had to tackle him head on.

‘Regret in what particular manner? I’m afraid I’m being obtuse, of course.’

‘Spending your life that way.’

Rose gave his practised, edged, committee smile. ‘I follow. I should be inclined to think that, with my attainments such as they are, I shouldn’t have been markedly more useful anywhere else. Or perhaps markedly less.’

‘That’s a bit much, Hector,’ I broke out. I said that, when I first reported to him and for years afterwards, he had been tipped to become head of the Civil Service. That hadn’t happened. He had finished as a senior permanent secretary, one of the half-dozen most powerful men in Whitehall, but not at the absolute top. Most of us thought he had been unlucky, and in fact badly dealt with. (I noticed that this seemed to be news to his wife, who had blushed with something like gratification.) Did he mind?

‘I doubt if it would have affected the fate of the nation, my dear Lewis. I think you will agree that the general level of our former colleagues was, judged by the low standard of the human race, distinctly high. That is, granted their terms of reference, which may, I need hardly say, be completely wrong, a good many of them were singularly competent. Far more competent than our political masters. I learned that when I was a very lowly assistant principal, just down from Oxford. And I’m afraid I never unlearned it. Incidentally, out of proportion more competent than the businessmen that it was my misfortune to have to do official business with. Of course my experience has been narrow, I haven’t had Lewis’ advantages, and my opinion is parti pris .’ He was speaking to Margaret. ‘So you must forgive me if I sound parochial. But, for what it is worth, that is my opinion. That is, the competition among my colleagues was relatively severe. So a man who by hook or by crook became a permanent secretary ought to feel that he hadn’t any right to grumble. He’s probably been more fortunate than he deserved. There was an old Treasury saying, Lewis will remember, that in the midst of a crowd of decent clever men anyone who became a permanent secretary had of necessity to be something of a shit.’

Rose delivered that apophthegm as blandly as his normal courtesies. His wife chortled, and Margaret grinned.

‘Well,’ said Rose, ‘I qualified to that extent.’

‘Hector,’ I said, ‘you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Haven’t I, my dear Lewis? I really do apologise. I am so very, very sorry.’

We gazed at each other. We were less constrained that night than we had been during the years in the office. And yet he was just as immovable, it was like arguing with him over a point on which I was, after all the paraphernalia, going inevitably to be overruled.

Rose was continuing, in his most unargumentative tone.

‘Recently I had the pleasure of introducing my wife to the Italian lakes. Actually we chose that for our honeymoon–’

‘Lovely,’ said Jane.

‘Yes, we thought it was a good choice. And, as a very minor bonus, I happened to come across an inscription which might interest you, Lewis. Perhaps, for those whose Latin has become rusty, I may take the liberty of translating. It is pleasantly simple. GAIUS AUFIDIUS RUFUS. HE WAS A GOOD CIVIL SERVANT.

‘Don’t you think that is remarkably adequate? Who could possibly want a more perfect epitaph than that?’

I knew, and he knew that I knew, that he was parodying himself. I nodded my head, in acquiescent defeat. Impassively he let show a smile, but, unlike his committee smile, it contained a degree of both malice and warmth. Then he gave us, his wife for the first time assisting in the conversation, a travelogue about Como and Garda, the hotels they had stayed in, the restaurants they would revisit when, the following spring, they proposed to make the same trip again. This honeymoon travelogue went on for some time.

Then, when we got up and began our goodbyes, Rose encircled us with thanks for coming. At last we got out into the road, waiting for a taxi: the two of them, while they waved to us, stood on the doorstep close together, as though they were ready to be photographed.

As we drove past Victoria through the Belgravia streets, Margaret, in the dark and sheltering cab, was saying: ‘How old is she?’

‘Late thirties?’

‘Older. Perhaps she’s too old.’

‘Too old for what?’

‘A child, you goat.’ Her voice was full of cheerful sensual nature. ‘Anyway, we’d better watch the births column next year–’

She went on: ‘Good luck to them!’

I said yes.

She said: ‘I hope it goes on like that.’ She added: ‘And I hope something else doesn’t.’

We had both enjoyed the bizarre but comforting evening, and I had remembered only intermittently (and that perhaps had been true for her) that she had news to break. Now she was angry again – at me, at herself, at the original cause – for having to fracture the peace of the moment.

‘What is the matter?’

‘Your nephew.’

Muriel had told her the story that afternoon. Pat was having other women, certainly a couple since the marriage, with the baby due in the New Year. It was as matter-of-fact as that.

‘He’s a little rat,’ said Margaret.

With the lights of Park Lane sweeping across us, I remarked: ‘You can’t do anything.’

‘You mustn’t defend him.’

‘I wasn’t–’

‘You want to, don’t you?’

I had never been illusioned about Pat. And yet Margaret was reading something, as though through the feel of my arm: an obscure male freemasonry, or perhaps another kind of resistance she expected, whenever her judgments were more immediate and positive than mine.

We didn’t say much until we were inside our bedroom.

‘It’s squalid,’ said Margaret. ‘But that makes it worse for her.’

‘I’m sorry for her.’

‘I’m desperately sorry for her.’

Her indignation had gone by now, but her empathy was left.

‘I know,’ I said. I asked how Muriel was taking it.

‘That’s a curious thing,’ Margaret gave a sharp-eyed, puzzled smile. ‘She seems pretty cool about it. Cooler than I should have been, I tell you, if you’d left me having Charles and done the same.’

A good many women would have been cooler than that, I told her.

She burst out laughing. But when I repeated, how had Muriel reacted, her face became thoughtful, not only protective but mystified and sad. In her composed, demure fashion, Muriel had been evasive about her husband during previous visits; this time she had come out with it, still composed but clinical. Not a tear. Not even a show of temper.

‘What do they think they’re playing at?’ said Margaret. ‘He wasn’t in love with her, we never believed he was. He was after the main chance, blast him. But what about her? It doesn’t make sense. She must love him, mustn’t she?