Charles Snow - Last Things

I said something evasive and putting off.

‘You’ve got something on your mind.’

I hesitated, said no again, and then reached out for the press cutting.

‘I suppose you’ll have to see this sooner or later,’ I said as I handed it over.

With a scrutinising frown, Charles read, and gave a short deep curse.

‘They’re not specially fond of you, are they?’

‘One thing I’m worried about’, I said, ‘is that all this may rebound on you.’

‘I shall have worse than that to cope with.’

‘It may be a drag–’

‘Never mind that.’

‘Easier said than done,’ I told him.

‘You’re not to worry about me.’ Then he said, in an even tone: ‘I told you years ago, didn’t I, I won’t be worried about.’ He said it as though it were a good-natured domestic jibe: that was ninety per cent of the truth, but not quite all.

Then, he tapped the cutting, and said he hadn’t read English newspapers for months until that day. He had got hold of the morning’s editions on the way over. There was one impression that hit him in the eye: how parochial, how inward-looking, this country had become. Parish-pump politics. Politics looked quite different from where he had been living. ‘This isn’t politics,’ he said, looking contemptuously at the cutting. ‘But it’s how this country is behaving. If we’re becoming as provincial as this, how do we get out of it?’

He was saying that vigorously, with impatience, not with gloom. In the same energetic fashion, he said: ‘Well then, is that all the bad news for the present?’

That was an old family joke, derived from the time when he began to read Greek plays.

‘The rest isn’t quite so near home,’ I answered. ‘But still, it’s bad news for someone. You tell him,’ I said to Margaret.

As he heard about Muriel, he was nothing like so impatient. He was concerned and even moved, more than we had been, to an extent which took us by surprise. So far as I knew, he had had little to do with his cousin, and both Pat and Muriel were five years older than he was. Yet he spoke about them as though they were his own kind. Certainly he did not wish to hear us blaming either of them. He didn’t say one word of criticism himself. This was a pity – that was as far as he would go. Still with stored-up energy, poised on the balls of his feet, he declared that he would visit them.

‘They might tell me more than they’ve told you,’ he said.

‘Yes, they might,’ said Margaret. ‘But Carlo, I’m sure it’s gone too far–’

‘You can’t be sure.’

Margaret said that it was Muriel who had to be persuaded, and there weren’t many people with a stronger will. Charles wasn’t being argumentative, but he wouldn’t give up: and, strangely enough, his concern broke through in a different place, and one which, taken by surprise, we had scarcely thought of.

‘If they can’t be stopped,’ he remarked, ‘it’s going to be a blow for Uncle Martin, isn’t it?’

There had always been sympathy between Martin and Charles, and in some ways their temperaments were similar, given that Charles’ was the more highly charged. Charles knew a good deal about Martin’s relation with his son, even though it was one that he wouldn’t have accepted for himself and would, in Pat’s place, have shrugged off. But now he was thinking of what Martin hoped for. Incidentally, where would Pat propose to live? The studio, where he had conscientiously worked at his painting, would be lost along with the Chelsea flat. But there Charles showed a spark of the irony which had for the past half-hour deserted him. He admitted that even he couldn’t pretend that Pat was not a born survivor.

THROUGH the following days and weeks, right into the early summer, there was plenty of toing and froing – the bread and butter of a family trouble, trivial to anyone outside – of which I heard only at second or third hand. I knew that Pat had been to see Margaret two or three times, begging her to intercede, or, in his own phrase, ‘tell her I’m not so bad’. Margaret had, I guessed, been kind and taken the edge off her tongue: but certainly she had told him there was nothing she could do.

Charles spent several evenings with both Muriel and Pat, but kept the secrets to himself, or at least from his mother and me. All I learned was that at one stage he invoked Maurice, at home for a weekend from the hospital. The two of them, and Pat’s sister Nina, now studying music in London, met in Charles’ room at our flat, and I believed that Maurice, who had an influence over his contemporaries, went out to make a plea, though to which of them I didn’t know. One day Martin telephoned me, saying that he was in London and was having a conference with the Schiffs: he made an excuse for not coming to see me afterwards. That was a matter of pride, and it was just as I might have behaved myself.

On an afternoon early in June, I took Charles with me on one of my routine visits to his grandfather. In the taxi, I was warning Charles that he wasn’t going to enjoy it: this wouldn’t be like his last sight of my own father, comic in his own eyes, happy in his stuffy little room. He had been stoical because be didn’t know any other way to be: while Austin Davidson was putting on the face of stoicism, but – without confessing it to anyone round him – was dying, but bitterly. I was warning Charles: in secret I was preparing myself for the next hour. For, though those visits might have seemed a drill by now, I couldn’t get used to them. The cool words I had trained myself to, in reply to Davidson’s, like rallies in a game of ping-pong: but there hadn’t been one single visit when, as soon as I got out of the clinic into the undemanding air, I didn’t feel liberated; as though solitariness and an inadmissible boredom, by the side of someone I admired, had been lifted from me. That was as true or truer, nearly a year later, as when I first saw him after his attempt at death.

In the sunny green-reflecting bedroom, Austin Davidson was in the familiar posture, head and shoulders on high pillows, looking straight in front of him, feet and ankles bare. He didn’t turn his eyes, as the door opened. I said: ‘I’ve brought Carlo to see you.’

‘Oh, have you?’

He looked round, and slowly from under the sheet drew out a thin hand, on which stood out the veins and freckles of old age. As Charles took it, he said: ‘How are you, grandpa?’

Davidson produced a good imitation – perhaps it was more than that – of his old Mephistophelian smile.

‘Well, Carlo, you wouldn’t want me to tell you a lie, would you?’

Their eyes met. They each had the same kind of cheekbones. Even now, it was easy to see what Davidson had looked like as a young man. But, though I might be imagining it, I thought his face had become puffier these last few weeks; some of the bone structure, handsome until he was old, was being smeared out now.

Charles gave a smile, a smile of recognition, in return.

‘Also,’ said Davidson, ‘you wouldn’t like me to give you an honest answer either, don’t you know?’

Charles gave the same firm smile again, and sat down by the bed, on the side opposite to me. For a while Austin Davidson seemed pleased with his own repartee, or, perhaps more exactly, with the performance he was putting up. Then he began to show signs, which I hadn’t expected, of something like disappointment, as though he were a child who, out of good manners, couldn’t protest at not being given a treat. That was a surprise, for he had, even in illness, displayed a liking for Charles, and had occasionally asked for his company. Not that Davidson had much family sense, few men less: but of his descendants and relatives, Charles, I fancied, appeared most like the young men Davidson had grown up with. Yet now he wished that Charles was out of the way.