Charles Snow - Last Things

Pat knew the last word when he heard it. With a good grace, with a beaming doggy smile, he said, Taken as read, and helped himself to another drink. Soon afterwards, he knew also that it was time for him to go.

Did he expect to get away with it, I was speculating, not intervening, although Pat had tried to involve me once or twice. Like most bamboozlers or conmen, he assumed that no one could see through him. More often than not, bamboozlers took in no one but themselves. In fact, Margaret had seen through him from the start. Of course, the manoeuvre was a transparent one, even by his standards. He had studied how to slide back into favour; he may have thought of other peace offerings, before he decided what would please her most. Incidentally, he had chosen right. But a woman didn’t need to be as clear-sighted as Margaret to see him coming, gift in hand.

So he had, with his usual cheek, put his money down and lost it. Lost most of it, but perhaps not all. Margaret thought him as worthless as before, perhaps more so: she knew more of his tricks; he had even ceased to be interesting; and yet, despite herself, sarcastic at her own expense, she was, after that failure of his, left feeling a shade more kindly towards him.

Muriel, as usual polite and friendly, did not give away her thoughts about the baby’s name, so Margaret told me. ‘I’ve got an idea she’s made her own decision,’ said Margaret. If that were so, we never knew what it was. For the child, born a few days later, turned out to be a boy. He was to be called, Margaret heard the first time she saw him, Roy Joseph. And those names were certainly Muriel’s own decision, Margaret was sure of that. In fact, Muriel had said that she would have liked to call the boy after her stepfather, but you couldn’t use Azik if you weren’t a Jew. So she fell back on Roy, after her own father, and threw in Joseph, which was one of Azik’s other names.

Anyway, whatever the marriage was like, this was a fine little boy, said Margaret, and took me to see him on her next visit, when he was not yet a week old.

The first time I went inside a prosperous house in London nearly forty years earlier, I had been greeted by a butler. In Azik Schiff’s house in Eaton Square, one was also greeted by a butler. That didn’t often happen, in the London of the sixties. But even Azik, many times richer than old Mr March, couldn’t recruit the footmen and the army of maids I used to meet in the March household. Still, the Eaton Square house was grander, different in kind from those most of our friends lived in – the comfortable flats, the Kensington, Chelsea, Hampstead houses of professional London. So far as that went, Azik wouldn’t have considered adequate for his purposes the politicians’ houses in Westminster, a good deal richer, that I used to know.

Azik, as he liked to announce, was fond of spending money. In the hall at Eaton Square, the carpets were deep: round the walls there were pictures which might have belonged to the antechamber of a good, though somewhat conventional, municipal gallery. That was true of Azik’s pictures throughout the house. His taste wasn’t adventurous, as Austin Davidson’s had been. Azik had bought nothing later than the Impressionists, except for one Cézanne. He had been cautious, out of character for him, perhaps not trusting either his judgment or his eye. But he had a couple of Sisleys, a Boudin, a Renoir, a Ruysdael – he might have been cautious, but we coveted them each time we went inside his house.

Getting out of the lift, which was one of Azik’s innovations, Margaret led me to the master bedroom on the third floor, the whole of which Azik had made over to his stepdaughter. Inside the high light bedroom (through the window one could see the tops of trees in the private garden), Muriel was sitting up in bed, a great four-poster bed, a wrap round her shoulders, looking childish, prim, undecorated. She said, Good afternoon, Uncle Lewis, with that old-fashioned correctness of hers, which often seemed as though she were smiling to herself or pretending to drop a curtsey.

‘It’s very good of you to come,’ she said.

I said no.

‘Aunt Margaret likes babies. It can’t be much fun for you.’

Margaret put in that I had been good, when Charles was a baby.

‘That was duty, though,’ said Muriel, looking straight at me. I was, as often, disconcerted by her, not sure whether she had a double meaning, or whether she meant anything at all.

She made some conversation about Charles, the first time I had heard her mention him. Then there was a hard raucous cry from a room close by, from what must have been the dressing-room.

‘Yes, that’s him,’ she said, with composure.

‘Oh, come on, let’s have him in,’ said Margaret.

‘That will be boring for Uncle Lewis, though.’

With other young women, that might have seemed coy. Not so with her. I told her that I hadn’t expected to wait so long. She gave a grin which made her look less decorous, and pressed the bell by her bedside.

As a nurse carried in the baby, Margaret said: ‘Let me have him, just for a minute.’

She pressed the bundle, arms slowly waving, to her, and looked down at him, with her expression softened by delight.

‘I do envy you,’ she said to Muriel, and from the tone I was sure that remark had been made before. Yet Margaret’s pleasure was as simple as it could be, all the life in her just joyful at the feel of life.

She passed the child to his mother, who settled him against her and said, in a clear voice: ‘Hallo, old man.’

It might have happened, it almost certainly must have happened, that my mother showed me Martin soon after he was born. But if so I had totally forgotten it, and everything to do with his birth, except that I had been sent to my aunt’s for a couple of days. No, the only days-old baby I remembered seeing was my son. The aimless, rolling eyes, the hands drifting round like an anemone’s fibrils. As a spectacle, this was the same. Perhaps the difference, to a photographic eye, was that this child, under the thin flaxen hair, had a high crown to his head, the kind of steeple crown Muriel’s father had once possessed.

But when I first saw my son it hadn’t been with a photographic eye. It hadn’t even been with emotion, but something fiercer and more animal, so strong that, though it was seventeen years ago, it didn’t need bringing back to memory; it was there. That afternoon in Muriel’s bedroom, perversely, I did watch the pair of them, mother and baby, with something like emotion, the sort of emotion which is more or less tender, more or less self-indulgent, which doesn’t trouble one. My brother’s grandson. Roy Calvert’s grandson. Would this child ever know anything about Roy Calvert, who had passed into a private mythology by now? How much did I recollect of what he had been truly like?

This child would live a different life from ours, and, of course, with any luck, live on when our concerns, and everything about us, had been long since swept away. Did one envy a life that was just beginning? Pity for what might happen, that was there. Pity was deeper than the thought he would live after one. But, yes, the impulse for life was organic; in time it would overmaster all the questions; it would prevail over pity; all one would feel was the strength of a new life.

SEVERAL afternoons that April, Margaret and I walked through the empty flat to an empty bedroom, making quite unnecessary inspections in time for Charles’ return. It was the room he had occupied since he was three years old: not the one where we had watched him in his one grave illness, because after that, out of what was sheer superstition, we had made a change. This was the room, though, to which he had come back on holidays from school.