Charles Snow - Last Things

I didn’t interrupt him, but he could have guessed what I was thinking. Did he remember, earlier that year in our native town, how we had talked during the murder trial? Talked without cover or excuses, unlike tonight. There was a gap between fantasy and action, the psychiatric witnesses had been comfortably saying. It was a gap that only the psychopaths or those in clinical terms not responsible managed to cross. That made life more acceptable, pushed away the horrors into a corner of their own. Martin wouldn’t accept the consolation. It was too complacent for him, he had said, as we sat in the hotel bar, talking more intimately than we had ever done.

Now, Martin, swirling the whisky in his glass, looked across the study from his armchair to mine.

‘I agree,’ he said, as though with fair-mindedness, ‘not so many people act out their fantasies. But still, this business of his must be fairly common, mustn’t it? You know, I’m pretty sure that I could have done the same.’

Shortly afterwards, he made an effort to sound more fair-minded still.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to face the fact that he might turn into a layabout.’

He used the objective word, his voice was sternly objective. Yet he was about as much so as Francis Getliffe complaining (with a glow of happiness concealed) that people said his son Leonard was a class better as a scientist than himself. Both of them liked to appear detached. It made Martin feel clear-minded, once he had suggested that the future might be bad. But he didn’t believe it. He was still thinking of his son as the child who had been winning, popular, anxious to make people happy – and capable of all brilliant things.

‘I thought they were getting on all right tonight, didn’t you?’ said Martin. ‘He’ll shake down when the baby is born, you know. It will make all the difference, you’ll see.’

He gave a smile which was open and quite unironic. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t have believed that he was a pessimistic man.

THE New Year opened more serenely for Margaret and me than many in the past. True, each morning as the breakfast tray came in, she looked for letters from Maurice or Charles, just as one used to in a love affair, when letters counted more. And, as in a love affair, the fact that Charles was thousands of miles away sometimes seemed to slacken his hold on her. Distance, as much as time, did its own work. Reading one of Charles’ despatches, she was relieved that he was well: but she was joyful when she heard from Maurice. Sometimes I wondered, if she and I could have had other children, whom she would have loved the most.

The flat was quiet, so many rooms empty, with us and the housekeeper living there alone. Mornings working in the study, afternoons in the drawing-room, the winter trees in the park below. Visits to Margaret’s father, back to the evening drink. Once out of the hospital, it was all serene, and there was nothing to disturb us. As for our acquaintances, we heard that Muriel was moving into Azik Schiff’s house to have her baby – Eaton Square, Azik laying on doctors and nurses, that suited him appropriately enough. Margaret kept up her visits to her, as soon as she was installed, which was towards the end of January, with the baby due in a couple of weeks.

About six o’clock one evening, the birth expected any day now, there was a ring at our hall door. As I opened it, Pat was standing on the threshold. There wasn’t likely to be a more uninvited guest. I knew there couldn’t be any news, for Margaret had not long returned from Eaton Square. He entered with his shameless smile, ingratiating and also defiant.

‘As a matter of fact, Uncle Lewis,’ he said, explaining himself, ‘I would rather like a word with Aunt Meg.’

He followed me into the drawing-room, where Margaret was sitting. She said good evening in a tone that he couldn’t have thought indulgent (it was the first time she had seen him since the Christmas dinner), but he went and kissed her cheek.

‘Do you mind’, he said, bright-faced, ‘if I help myself to a drink?’

He poured himself a whisky and soda, and then sat on a chair near to her.

‘Aunt Meg,’ he said, ‘I’ve come to ask you a favour.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I want you to let us call this child after you.’

For once Margaret was utterly astonished, her face wide open with surprise, and yes, for an instant, with pleasure.

Her first response was uncollected. ‘Why, you don’t know whether it’s going to be a girl.’

‘I’m sure it will be.’

‘You can’t be sure–’

‘I want a girl. I want to call it after you.’

His tone was masterful and wooing. Watching with a certain amusement from the other side of the room (I had not often seen anyone try this kind of blandishment on her), I saw her eyes sharpen.

‘Whose idea was this?’

‘Mine, of course, what do you think?’

Margaret’s voice was firm.

‘What does Muriel say?’

‘Oh, she’s in favour. You’d expect her to be in favour, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t know, she might be.’ Margaret hadn’t altered her expression. ‘But she hasn’t quite your reasons, after all.’

‘Oh come, Aunt Meg, I just want to show how much I feel for you–’ For the first time he was protesting – as though he had just recognised that he was no longer in control.

‘When did you think this up?’

‘A long time ago, months ago, you know how you think about names.’

‘How long ago did you hear that Muriel had told me?’

‘Oh that–’

‘You don’t like being unpopular, do you?’

‘Come on, Aunt Meg, you’re making too much of it.’

‘Am I?’

He threw his head back, spread his arms, gave a wide penitential grimace, and said: ‘You know what I’m like!’

She looked at him with a frown, some sort of affection there: ‘Is that genuine?’

‘You know what I’m like, I’ve never pretended much.’

‘But, when you say that, it means you’re really satisfied with yourself, don’t you see? Of course, you want to make promises, you want us all to be fond of you again, that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? But really you don’t feel there’s anything gone wrong–’

‘Now you’re being unfair.’

Even then, he wasn’t ready to be totally put down. Apologetic, yes – but, still, people did things, didn’t they? People did things that hurt her and perhaps they couldn’t help themselves. Like her father. There were others who didn’t feel as she did. Somehow Pat had discovered, it must have been from Davidson himself, that once he had applied to us for drugs. Still, he found someone else, didn’t he, said Pat, not brashly but with meaning. ‘It’s no use expecting us to be all the same.’

Margaret told him that he was making things too comfortable for himself. For a time they were talking with a curious intimacy, the intimacy of a quarrel, more than that, something like understanding. It was easy to imagine him, I thought, behaving like this to his wife when she had found him out, penitent, flattering, inventive, tender and in the end unmoved.

But Margaret didn’t give him much. Soon, she cut off the argument, She wasn’t responsible for his soul or his actions, she said: but she was responsible for any words of hers that got through to Muriel. It sounded as though she wanted to issue a communiqué after a bout of diplomatic negotiations, but Margaret knew very well what she was doing. Pat, as a source of information, particularly as a source of information about his own interests, was not, in the good old Dostoevskian phrase, a specially reliable authority. He was not, Margaret repeated, to give any version of this conversation. He was not to report that Margaret would like a girl to be called after her. Margaret herself would mention the proposal to Muriel the next time she saw her.