Charles Snow - Last Things

All right, their manners are different from yours: but they think yours are as obsolete as Jane Austen’s. If they don’t write bread-and-butter letters, what of it? It is an absurd convention. If (as once happened) one of them writes on an envelope the unadorned address Lewis Eliot, again what of it?

He wouldn’t get ruffled, and that irked me more. Take your friend Guy Grenfell, I said. They had been at school together. Guy was rich, a member of a squirearchical family established for centuries. He might grow his hair down to his shoulders, but once, when he came to an elderly dinner party, he behaved like the rest of us, and more so. Yet when he was in the middle of their crowd, he appeared to be giving a bad imitation of a barrow boy. Was this to show how progressive he was?

Charles would not let his temper show. Guy was quite enlightened. Some of them were progressive…

I jeered, and threw back at him the record of Lester Ince and his galère . They were just as rude as your friends. Look where they finished. I brought out the old aphorism that when young men rebel against social manners, they end up by not rebelling against anything else.

We shall see, said Charles. Angry that I couldn’t move him, I had let my advocacy go too far: but, still, there were times when, unprovoked, I thought – are these really our successors? Will they ever be able to take over?

Those questions went through my mind when, one day in July, I received the news of George Passant’s death. It had happened weeks before, I was told, very near the time that I had been having that family conference with Azik in Eaton Square. In fact, so far as I could make out the dates, George had had a cerebral haemorrhage the night before, and had died within twenty-four hours. This had taken place in a little Jutland town, where he had exiled himself and was being visited by one of his old disciples. Two or three more of his disciples, faithful to the last, had gone over for the funeral, and they had buried him in a Lutheran cemetery.

It might have seemed strange that it took so long for the news to reach me. After all, he had been my first benefactor and oldest friend. Yet by now be was separated from everyone but his own secret circle in the provincial town: while I, since my father’s death, had no connections in the town any more. There was nothing to take me there, after I resigned from the University Court. It wasn’t my father’s death that cut me off, that was as acceptable as a death could be: but after the trial there were parts of my youth there that weren’t acceptable at all, and this was true for Martin as well as for me. Some of those old scenes – without willing it, by something like a self-protecting instinct – we took care not to see. I still carried out my duty, George’s last legacy, of visiting his niece in Holloway Prison. Occasionally I still had telephone calls, charges reversed, from Mr Pateman, but even his obsessional passion seemed not to have been spent, but at least after a year to be a shade eroded.

So far as I could tell, there had been no announcement of George’s death, certainly not in a London paper. He had been a leader in a strange and private sense, his disciples must be mourning him more than most men are mourned, and yet, except for them, no one knew or cared where he was living, nor whether he was alive or dead.

I heard the news by telephone – a call from the town, would I accept it and reverse the charges? I assumed that it was Mr Pateman, and with my usual worn-down irritation said yes. But it was a different voice, soft, flexible, excited, the voice of Jack Cotery. I had seen him only twice in the past ten years, but I knew that, though he had a job in Burnley, he still visited the town to see his mother, who was living in the same house, the same backstreet, whose existence, when we were young and he was spinning romantic lies about his social grandeur, he had ingeniously – and for some time with success – concealed. Had anyone told me about George, came the eager voice. He, Jack, had just met one of the set. The poor old thing was dead. Jack repeated the dates and such details as he had learned. Until George died, there was someone with him all the time: he knew what was happening, but couldn’t speak.

‘I don’t know what he had to look forward to,’ Jack was saying. ‘But he loved life, in his own way, didn’t he? I don’t suppose he wanted to go.’

To do Jack credit, he would have hurried to tell me the news, even if he hadn’t had an ulterior motive. But that he had. The last time he visited me, he had been trying to convert me to organised religion. Now, over the telephone, he couldn’t explain, it was very complicated, but he had another problem, very important, nothing bad, but something that mattered a very great deal – and it was very important, so, just to come out with it, could I lend him a hundred pounds? I said that I would send a cheque that evening, and did so. After what I had been listening to, it seemed like paying a last debt to the past.

Guy Grenfell and other companions of Charles were in the flat, and as I joined them for a drink I mentioned that I had just heard of the death of an old friend. Who, said Charles, and I told him the name. It meant nothing to the others, but Charles had met George year after year, on his ritual expeditions to London. Charles’ eyes searched into my expression. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. But, though he had never told me so – he was too considerate for that – I was certain that in secret he had found George nothing but grotesque. Diffidence. Formality. Heartiness. Repetitive questions (‘Are you looking after your health?’). Flashes of mental precision. Slow-walking, hard-breathing figure, often falling asleep in an armchair, mouth open. Once, coming in drunk, he had fallen off a chair. That was what Charles had seen, and not many at his age would have seen more. He could not begin to comprehend the effect that George had once had on me and my first friends.

The irony was, that the ‘freedoms’ George – and all the other Georges of his time – had clamoured for, had more or less come true. The life that Charles’ own friends were leading was not that much different from what George had foreshadowed all those years ago. A lot of the young men and girls in the Earl’s Court bedsitters would have fitted, breathing native air, into George’s group. Gentle. Taking their pleasures as they came. Not liking their society any more than George had done. Making their own enclaves. The passive virtues, not the fighting ones. Not much superego (if one didn’t use older words). The same belief, deep down, that most people were good.

That would not suit Charles for long, any more than it had suited me. And yet it had its charm. It seemed at times like an Adamic invention, as though no one had discovered a private clan life before. That was true even with the more strenuous natures among them, like his own. It might have been true, I thought, of Muriel.

So much so that when – some weeks after the news about George, to whom I didn’t refer again – I told Charles that his friends went in for enclave-making, just as much as the bourgeois they despised, he didn’t like it. Once more he felt curiously protective about the whole circle, more so than I remembered being. But he was still not prepared to quarrel and he suspected there might be something in what I said. He had also seen more subsistence poverty than any of us. All over the advanced world, people seemed to be making enclaves. I thought that wasn’t just a fantasy of my own. The rich like Azik and some of our American friends; the professionals everywhere; the apparently rebellious young; they were all drawing the curtains, looking inwards into their own rooms, to an extent that hadn’t happened in my time. The demonstrations (that was the summer when the English young, including Charles’ friends, started protesting about Vietnam), the acts of violence, were deceptive. They too came from a kind of enclave. They were part of a world which, though it could be made less comfortable, or more foreboding, no one could find a way to shake.