Charles Snow - Last Things

To be realistic, it was not quite such a well-constructed enclave as it might have been. At least, not when we sat down to dinner. Physically all was well. The food was good, there was plenty to drink. But in Margaret, and in me watching her, the nerves were pricking beneath the skin. One reason everyone round the table knew. That was the first Christina. Charles had not been at home. Shortly he would be celebrating his seventeenth birthday in Karachi; for the time being he was static and safe. Then he would start his journey home, all over-land, travelling alone, picking up rides. The whole Eliot family was there, eating the Christmas dinner, except the youngest.

The whole Eliot family, though, that was a second reason for constraint, which perhaps, I couldn’t be certain, Martin and his wife didn’t realise. They had duly arrived, with their daughter Nina, while Maurice and I were out on our afternoon walk. We hadn’t seen any of them since the summer, at Pat’s wedding, but this family party had been planned long since. So, as a matter of course, Pat and Muriel had been invited. After Muriel’s disclosures, Margaret had asked her if she still wanted the pair of them to come. Yes, Muriel replied, without expression. There they were at dinner, Muriel on my left, by this time heavily pregnant, hazel eyes sharp, face tranquil, Pat on Margaret’s left, working hard to be a social stimulant.

It was difficult to know whether anything was being given away. Once Pat tried his brand of deferential cheek on Margaret: she was polite, but didn’t play. Pat, whose antennae, always active, were specially so that night, must have known what that meant. But his father and mother did not seem to notice. Maurice tried, like a quiet impresario, to make the best of Pat’s gambits. Margaret didn’t like dissimulating, but when she was keeping a secret she was as disciplined as I was. From the other end of the table, all I could have told – if she hadn’t warned me – was that she laughed very little, and that her laughter didn’t sound free. While Pat, whose brashness was subdued, kept exerting himself to make the party bubble, Martin was attending to him, with a faint amused incredulous smile which I had seen creep on him before in his son’s company – as though astonished that anyone so unguarded could be a son of his.

By my side, Irene didn’t often meet Pat’s quick frenetic brown-eyed glance, so like her own, but instead kept me engaged with Cambridge gossip. As she did so, I heard Muriel, voice clear and precise, taking part in repartee with Pat: no sign of strain, no disquiet that I could pick up. Later, I observed her talking to Nina, her sister-in-law, inconspicuous in her parents’ presence, more so in Pat’s. She might be inconspicuous, but she was a very pretty girl, so far as one could see her face, for she had hair, in the fashion of her contemporaries, which trailed over one eye. Also in the fashion, her voice was something like a whisper, and I couldn’t hear any of her replies to Muriel. Of the two, I was judging, most men would think her the prettier: but perhaps most men would think that Muriel provoked them more.

In the drawing-room after dinner, Muriel announced that, as this was a family Christmas party, she proposed to put off her bedtime. Very dutifully, Pat argued with her – ‘Darling, you know what — (her doctor) said?’

‘He’s not here, is he?’ said Muriel, and got her way. They didn’t leave until half past eleven: it was midnight before Martin and I sat by ourselves in my study, having a final drink.

Now at last it seemed to me like an ordinary family evening, peace descending upon the room. We hadn’t talked, except with others present, all that night: nor in fact since the summer, the day of our father’s funeral. Martin proceeded to interrogate me, in the way that had become common form since we grew older. Nowadays his workaday existence didn’t change from one term to another, while mine was still open to luck, either good or bad. So that our roles had switched, and he talked to me like a concerned older brother. How was the new book going? I was well into it, I said, but it would take another year. Was there anything in this rumour about my being called into the Government? He was referring to a piece of kite-flying by one of the parliamentary correspondents – New Recruits?

I knew no more about it than he did, I told him, and mentioned the conversation with Francis Getliffe in the Lords’ bar. This correspondent wrote as though he had been listening, or alternatively as though the House of Lords was bugged. As had happened often during my time in Whitehall, I had the paranoid feeling that about half the population of Parliament were in newspaper pay.

I had heard nothing more, I repeated to Martin. I supposed it was possible. They knew me pretty well. But it would be a damned silly thing for me to do. ‘Oh, if they do ask you, don’t turn it down out of hand,’ said Martin, watchful, tutorial, as cautious as old Arthur Brown. He went on, he could see certain advantages, and I said with fraternal sarcasm, that it was a pity he ever withdrew from the great world. Great World, I rubbed it in. We both know enough about it, partly by experience, partly by nature. Martin gave his pulled-down grin.

He would like just one more drink, he said, and went over to the sideboard. Then, as he settled back in his chair, glance turned towards his glass, he said, in a casual tone: ‘I don’t think Irene knows anything about these goings-on.’

‘What do you mean?’ It was a mechanical question. I had understood.

‘That young man of ours playing round.’ Pat’s Christian name was actually Lewis, after me, and Martin seldom referred to him by his self-given name. Suddenly Martin looked full at me with hard blue eyes.

‘I gathered you had heard,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘I’m sure she doesn’t know.’

That seemed to give him an obscure satisfaction. Irene had never liked the marriage, although it had taken Pat off their hands, providing him with the money he had never earned.

‘Did you realise’, I asked, ‘that we knew – before tonight?’

‘Never mind that.’ He wouldn’t answer, and left me curious. He might have picked it up in the air, for he was a perceptive man. But I thought it sounded as though he had been told. By whom? He was not intimate with his daughter-in-law. Bizarre as it seemed, it was more likely to be his son. Martin felt for his son the most tenacious kind of parental love. It was, Martin knew it all by heart, so did Margaret, so did Azik Schiff, so did Mr Marsh and old Winslow long before we did, the most one-sided of human affections, the one which lasts longest and for long periods gives more pain than joy. And yet, one-sided though such a relation as Martin’s and his son’s had to be, it took two to make a possessive love. With some sons it couldn’t endure; if it did endure, there had to be a signal – sometimes the call for help – the other way. Pat had cost his father disappointment and suffering: there had been quarrels, lies, deceits: but in the midst of it all there was, and still remained, a kind of communication, so that in trouble he went back, shameless and confiding, and gave Martin a new lease of hope.

The result was that Martin, who was usually as quick as any man to see the lie in life, who had an acute nose for danger, was talking that night as though I were the one to be reassured. He did it – I had heard him speak of his son in this tone before – with an air of apparent realism. Yes, there must be plenty of young men, mustn’t there, who think of amusing themselves elsewhere in the first year of marriage. No one was ever really honest about the sexual life. How many of us made fantasies year after year? There weren’t many who would confess their fantasies, or admit or face what their sexual life had been.