Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Remember, my friend, she is well provided for. She is independent with her money. We have no sanctions to use against her. Even if we were sure of our own ground.’

All of a sudden, Rosalind went into a tirade, her face forgetting the gentility of years and her voice its dying fall. She began by being furious with her daughter. After all her, Rosalind’s, care. Not to be able to keep a man. To get into a mess like this. No gratitude. No consideration. Making her look like an idiot. But really she was being as protective, or as outraged at not being able to be so, as when her daughter was a child. Rosalind’s sophistication had dropped clean away – her marriages, her remarkable talent for being able to love where it was advantageous to love, her climb from the suburbs of our native town to Eaton Square, her adventures on the way, all gone.

She had forgotten how she had campaigned to capture Muriel’s father, who, when one came down to earth, had not been much more stable with women than Pat himself. As for Pat, Rosalind felt simple hate. Twister. Gigolo. Expecting to be paid for his precious–. Rosalind’s language, when she was calm, could be slightly suggestive, but now there was no suggestion about it. One comfort, he had got what was coming to him. Then he went whining round. Rosalind began to use words that Azik perhaps had never heard, and that I hadn’t since I was young. Mardy. Mardyarse. How any child of hers, Rosalind shouted, could have been taken in by a drip like that – .

‘She has to make her own mistakes, perhaps,’ said Azik, in a tone soothing but not quite assured, as though this violence in his wife was a novelty with which he hadn’t had much practice.

Rosalind: Who was she going to pick up next?

Azik: We have to try and put her in the way of some nice young men.

Rosalind: We’ve done that, since she was seventeen. And look what happens.

Azik: We have to go on trying. These young people don’t like being managed. But perhaps there will be a piece of luck.

Rosalind: She’ll pick another bit of rubbish.

Azik: We must try. As long as she doesn’t know we’re trying.

The dialogue went on across me, like an argument in the marriage bed, Rosalind accusing, Azik consolatory. It wasn’t the first of these arguments, one felt: perhaps the others, like this, faded away into doldrums, when Azik, still anxious to placate his wife, had time to turn to me.

‘There is something I have already said to Martin,’ he told me. ‘Now I shall say it to you, Lewis, my friend.’

I looked at him.

‘I should be sorry if this business of these young people made any break between your family and ours. I must say, I should be sorry. It will not happen from our side.’

He spoke with great dignity. Uxorious as he was, he spoke as though that was his decision, and Rosalind had to obey. Loyally, making herself simmer down, she said that she and I had known each other for thirty years. On the other hand, I was thinking, I should be surprised if she went out of her way to meet Martin in the future.

Just after I had replied, telling him that I felt the same – I should have had to return politeness for politeness, but it happened to be true – young David ran into the room. He was a handsome boy, thin and active, one of those genetic sports who seemed to have no resemblance to either of his parents, olive-skinned. His father looked at him with doting love, and the boy spoke to both of them as though he expected total affection, and gave it back. He was just at the age when the confidence between all three was still complete, with nothing precarious in it, as though the first adolescent storm or secret would never happen. At his school his record was as good as Charles’ had been at the same age, six years before. In some ways, I thought, this boy was the cleverer. It was a triumph for Rosalind, much disapproved of by persons who regarded her as a kind of Becky Sharp, to produce for Azik when she was well over forty a son like this.

As for me, watching (the bonds between the three of them were so strong there wasn’t really room for an outsider there) the happiness of that not specially Holy Family, I couldn’t have found it in me to begrudge it them. But I was thinking of something else. When they had been talking of Muriel, Rosalind had behaved in what Austin Davidson would have called an uncivilised fashion: in fact he would have thought her strident and coarse, and had no use for her. While Azik had been showing all the compassionate virtues.

Well, it was fine to be virtuous, but the truth was, Rosalind minded about her daughter and Azik didn’t. To everyone round them, probably to his wife, possibly even to himself he seemed a good stepfather, affectionate, sympathetic, kind. I had even heard him call himself a Jewish papa, not only in his relation to his son but to his stepdaughter. One had only to see him with that boy, though, to know what he was like as a father – and what he wasn’t to Muriel. Of course he was kind to her, because there weren’t many kinder men. He would do anything practical for her: if she had needed money, he would have been lavish. But as for thinking of her when she was out of his sight, or being troubled about her life, you had just to watch his oneness – animal oneness, spiritual oneness – with his son.

If that had not been so, if his imagination had been working, working father-like, on her behalf, it was unthinkable that he wouldn’t have been more cautious about Pat. At the time (it had happened so quickly, we had all been puzzled that Pat came to know Muriel) I had thought he was taking Pat very easily. Yet Azik was no fool about people. He just wasn’t truly interested, neither in Pat nor in the girl herself. If it had been a business deal, or even more anything concerned with Azik’s son, Pat would never have slid inside the house. As it was, he got away with it: until he discovered, what no one had imagined, that the young woman was more ruthless than he was.

Which began to have other consequences we hadn’t expected. As soon as they knew of Muriel’s resolve, Charles, Maurice and other friends of theirs had been working to bring about a reconciliation. There was a feeling, a kind of age-group solidarity, that Pat had to be helped. He was living in his father’s house in Cambridge; occasionally he came to London, and we heard that he was lent money by some of the young people. Nevertheless, as the summer went on, he was – as it were insensibly – pushed to the edge of their group. One didn’t hear any of them say a harsh word about him: but one ceased to hear him much talked about at all. Whereas Muriel one always saw, when, as occasionally they did, they invited older people to their parties.

Muriel’s own house was modest but smart, the house of a prosperous young married couple, except for the somewhat anomalous absence of a husband. But, instead of entertaining there, she went to the bed-sitting-rooms in which most of that group lived, such as Nina’s in Notting Hill. There seemed to be about a couple of dozen of them drifting round London that summer. Charles, waiting to go up to Cambridge, was the youngest, though some of the others had been at school with him. Young men and girls sometimes called in at our flat for a drink. They were friendly, both with an older generation and each other. They didn’t drink as much as my friends used to at their age: there were all the signs that they took sex much more easily. Certainly there didn’t appear to be many tormented love affairs about. A couple of the girls were daughters of my own friends. I sometimes wondered how much different was the way they lived their lives from their parents’ way: was the gap bigger than other such gaps had been?

Often I was irritated with them as though I were the wrong distance away, half involved, half remote: and it was Charles’ self-control, not mine, which prevented us from quarrelling. He was utterly loyal to his friends and when I criticised them didn’t like it: but he set himself to answer on the plane of reason.