Charles Snow - Last Things

‘After all,’ she went on, ‘she’s only twenty-two.’

A silence.

Margaret said: ‘I don’t understand them, do you?’

She was upset, and I tried to comfort her: and yet for her it was no use being reflective or resigned. For, though this mess was quite far away from her – it wasn’t all that dramatic or novel, and Muriel was no more than a young woman she knew by chance – it had touched, or become tangled with, some of her own expectations. None of us had expected more from all the kinds of love than Margaret. With her father, those afternoons as she sat by him in his loneliness, she had felt one of them finally denied: and with her sons also, as she grew older, there was another kind of isolation. Maurice passive, gentle, but with no flash of her own spirit coming back: Charles, who had spirit which matched hers, but who responded on his own terms. She had invested so much hope in what they would give her: and now, despite her sense, her irony, she sometimes felt cut off from the young. That was why Pat and his deserted wife became tokens for her: they made romantic love appear meaningless: all her expectations were dismissed, as though she belonged to another species. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell her, but I did no good. Unlike herself, so strong in trouble close to hand, that night – on the pretext or trigger of an acquaintance’s ill-treatment – she felt lonely and unavailing.

‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you’ll feel different when Carlo (our name for Charles) is back.’

‘What will he be like then?’ she said.

She asked, would he understand the situation of Pat and Muriel better than we did. Neither of us could guess. It was hard to believe that he had much in common with either.

ON the afternoon of Christmas Day, Margaret and I were sitting in our drawing-room, along with Maurice, who had the day off from his hospital. Over the Park outside, the sky was low, unbroken: no rain, not cold, a kind of limbo of a December day. We had put off the Christmas meal until the evening, since my brother Martin and his wife and daughter were driving down from Cambridge. No newspapers, no letters, a timeless day. I suggested that we should go for a walk: Margaret looked at the cloud cover, and decided that it wasn’t inviting. Maurice, as usual glad to oblige, said that he would come with me.

We didn’t go into Hyde Park, but instead turned into the maze of streets between our flat and Paddington. Or rather I turned that way, for Maurice didn’t assert himself, and happily took what came. It wasn’t that he was a weak character: in his own fashion, he was a strong one; but it was a fashion so different from mine, or my own son’s, that I was no nearer knowing what he wanted, or where his life would go. Since he came to me, at the age of three, when I married Margaret, he and I had always got on well: there hadn’t been the subliminal conflict of egos that had occasionally broken out in my relation, on the surface ironic and amiable, with young Charles. Sometimes it seemed that Maurice didn’t have an ego. I had been concerned, because it made Margaret anxious, about his examination failures. I had also been concerned, because I was enough of a bourgeois born, about whether he would ever earn a living. Which had a certain practical interest, since otherwise I should have to go on supporting him.

He walked at my side, face innocent, good-looking, not feminine but unhardened for twenty-one. As usual, he was unprickly free from self: yet, I had often wondered, was that really true? It was the puzzle that one sometimes met in people who asked very little for themselves. They cared for others: they did good works and got nothing and claimed nothing: they had no rapacity or cruelty: so far as human beings could be, they were kind. Nevertheless, occasionally one felt – at least I did – that underneath they had a core more impregnable than most of ours. Somehow they were protected. Protected as some men are by shields of vanity or self-regard. Certainly Maurice made one feel that he was in less danger than any of us. Maybe it was that, more than his kindness, which made him so comfortable to be with.

Under the monotone sky, the high houses, also monotone, similar in period to the one where the Roses were living, more run-down. In the square, neon signs of lodging houses. Church built when the square was opulent (a million domestic servants in London then, and the slum-poor nowhere near these parts), Christmas trees lit up outside. Sleazy cafés on the road to Paddington station. A few people walking about, slowly, in the mild gloom. A scrum of West Indians arguing on the pavement. Christmas decorations in closed shops. Here and there on the high house-fronts lighted windows.

Once or twice Maurice reminded me of stories which he had told about those streets, for he knew them well. In his holidays he used to join a friend of his, the vicar of a local parish, on pastoral visits, making a curious, unsolemn and faintly comic pair, the vicar stout, be-cassocked and birettaed, Maurice as thin as a combination of the idiot prince and a first-class high-jumper. It was their way of enjoying themselves, and they had been inside many more rooms in the Paddington hinterland than the vicar’s duty called for. Yes, some of the sights weren’t pretty, Maurice had reported, unshockable: you could find most kinds of vice without going far. Also most kinds of suffering. Not the mass poverty of the thirties, that had been wiped out. But alcoholic’s poverty, drug addict’s poverty, pensioner’s poverty. Being poor when you’re old, though, that’s not the worst of it, Maurice had said. It’s being alone, day after day, with nothing to look forward to until you die. For once (it had happened one night when he returned home, a couple of years before), Maurice had spoken with something like violence. Genteel poverty behind lace curtains. A lucky person had a television set. If anyone feels like being superior about television, when they’re old they ought to live alone without one. You know, Maurice had gone on, they look forward to seeing Godfrey (the vicar) and me. I suppose one would if one were alone. Of course we can’t do much. We can just stay talking for half an hour. Anyway, Godfrey isn’t much good at conversation. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

As we walked along, solitary figures passing us in the empty streets, lighted windows in the houses, I was thinking, he had been behind some of those windows. They weren’t as taunting when one got inside as when one gazed at them from the street as a young man. For an instant, I was, not precisely remembering, but touched by a residual longing from, other Christmas days long past, when I had also gone out for walks on deserted pavements, just to kill time, just to get through the day. That had been so in the provincial town, after my mother died: slipping out after Christmas dinner, necessarily teetotal, at Aunt Milly’s, I used to tramp the streets as the afternoon darkened, gazing up garden paths at bright and curtained sitting-rooms, feeling a kind of arrogant envy. That had been so again, my first year in London: my friends all at home, no George Passant to pass the evening with, and I with nothing to do. The streets must have looked much as they did that day with Maurice, but that I had forgotten or repressed, and where I finished up the night.

‘Not exactly cheerful,’ I said, as though commenting on the present situation, indicating a young man who was dawdling past us.

‘Poor old thing,’ said Maurice, who really was commenting on the present situation. ‘He doesn’t look as if he’s got anywhere to go–’

For any connoisseur of townscapes, that afternoon’s had its own merit. The unvaried sky lay a thousand feet above the houses: the great city stretched all round one, but there was no sense of space: sky, houses, fairy lights on Christmas trees all pressed upon the lost pedestrians in the streets. Yes, the townscape had its own singular merit, but it was good to be back (did Maurice feel this too?) among the lights of our own drawing-room, able to find our own enclave.