Charles Snow - Last Things

Charles listened carefully. This wasn’t an argument, though I had touched on the rift of difference between us. Since he had left school and gone on his new-style grand tour, he had been released, happy and expectant. Inside the family, we had no more cares, possibly less, than most of our own kind. It had been an easy summer, with time to meet his friends and our own. Except that we had to be ready for the death of Margaret’s father, we had nothing that seemed likely to disturb us, not even an examination or a book coming out.

‘How many of your prophecies have gone wrong?’ said Charles, without edge, with detachment.

‘Quite a few.’

‘How right were you in the thirties?’

‘Most of the time we (I was thinking of Francis Getliffe and others) weren’t far off. Anyway, a lot of it is on the record.’

‘In the war? What did you think would be happening now?’

I paused.

‘There I should have been wrong. I thought that, if Hitler could be beaten, then things would go much better than in fact they have.’

‘I hope’, said Charles, ‘that you turn out wrong again. After all, some of us might see the end of the century, mightn’t we?’

He gave a smile, meaning that he and his friends by that time would only be middle-aged.

THE Lords were having a late-night sitting, Francis told me over the telephone (it was the last week in October), a committee stage left over from the summer. He would be grateful if Margaret and I would go along and have supper with him there, just to help him through the hours. Yes, we were free: and it was conceivable that Francis wanted more than sheer company, for one of the political correspondents (not our enemy of the spring) had that morning reported that Lord Getliffe had been called to Downing Street the day before. The same correspondent added with total confidence that S––, the old Commons loyalist who had been given the job when Francis previously refused it, would be going within days. He was being looked after – a nice little pension on one of the nationalised boards.

It sounded like inside information. Just as Hector Rose and my old colleagues used to ask in Whitehall, often with rage, I wondered however it got out. Possibly from S–– himself. Politicians, old Bevill used to say, were the worst keepers of secrets. They will talk to their wives, he added with Polonian wisdom. He might have said, just as accurately, they will talk to journalists: and the habit seemed to be hooking them more every year, like the addiction to a moderately harmless drug.

As we came out of Westminster Underground, the light was shining over Big Ben, there was a smell – foggy? a tinge, or was one imagining it, of burning wood? – in the smoky autumn air. Francis, waiting for us in the peers’ entrance, kissed Margaret and led us up the stairs, over the Jonah’s-whale carpets, straight to the restaurant; we were rescuing him, he said, the parliamentary process could be remarkably boring unless you were brought up to it, man and boy. In fact, he was already occupying a table, one of the first to establish himself, though some men, without guests, were walking through to the inner room. Under the portraits, under the tapestries, taste following the Prince Consort, I noticed one or two faces I vaguely knew, part of a new batch of life peers. Not then, but a little later, when we were settling down to our wine and cold roast beef, there came a face that I more than vaguely knew – Walter Luke, grizzled and jaunty, saying ‘I didn’t expect to see you here, Lew,’ as he passed on. It would have been a fair reply that, a short time before, no one would have expected to see him there. But here he was, as though in honour of science – and, because there already existed a Lord Luke, here he was as Lord Luke of Salcombe.

Francis, who had always been fond of Walter Luke, was saying, once he had got out of hearing, that no one we knew had been unluckier, no one of great gifts, that was. If things had gone right, he would have done major scientific work. But all the chances including the war, had run against him. After all of which, said Francis, he got this curious consolation prize.

Yet he had seemed in highish spirits. As the room filled up, no more divisions till half past eight, most people seemed in highish spirits. Greetings, warm room, food, a certain amount of activity ahead, the kind of activity which soothed men like a tranquilliser. For an instant, I recollected my conversation with Charles in the summer. Enclaves. Perhaps it was right, it was certainly natural, for any of us to hack out what refuges we could, some of the time: none of us was tough enough to live every minute in the pitiless air. This was an enclave in excelsis .

As the noise level rose, and no one could overhear, I asked Francis if he had seen the paragraph about him that morning.

‘I was going to tell you about that,’ he said.

‘How true is it?’

‘Not far off.’

I asked: ‘So S— is really going?’

‘To be more accurate, he’s actually gone.’

‘And you?’

‘Of course, I had to say what I did before. I had to tell him I’d made up my mind.’

That was what I expected.

The Prime Minister had been good, said Francis. He hadn’t pressed too much. But after S—, he needed someone with a reputation abroad. Francis added: ‘I think you’d better make up your own mind, pretty quickly.’

After our talk the previous autumn, that also wasn’t entirely unexpected, either to Margaret or me. Despite the attempt to forestall it. There weren’t many of us who had this sort of special knowledge: and even fewer who had used it in public. One could make a list, not more than three or four, of men likely to be asked. It might have sounded arrogant, or even insensitive, for Francis to assume that he was number one on the list, and the rest of us reserves. But it didn’t sound so to Margaret or me. This wasn’t a matter of feeling, about which Francis had been delicate all our lives: it was as objective as a batting order. He was a scientist of international reputation, and the only one in the field. His name carried its own authority with the American and Soviet scientists. That was true of no one else. He would have been a major catch for the Government, which was, of course, why they had come back to him. Now, as he said, they had to fill the job quickly. It would do them some harm if they seemed to be hawking it round.

‘Well, that’s that,’ he said, dismissing the subject. He was so final that I was puzzled, and to an extent put out. After those hints, it seemed bleak that he should turn quite unforthcoming. I glanced at Margaret and didn’t understand.

Within a short time, however, we were talking intimately again, the three of us. Getting us out of the dining-room early, Francis, with tactical foresight, was able to secure window seats in the bar: there we sat, as the debate continued, the bar became more populated, the division bell rang and Francis left us for five minutes and returned. That went on – the division bell interrupted us twice more – until after midnight, and in the casual hubbub Francis was telling us some family information we hadn’t heard, and asking whether there was any advice he could give his eldest son.

It was one of the oldest of stories. A good many young women might have wondered why Leonard Getliffe hadn’t come their way. He was the most brilliant of the whole Getliffe family, he had as much character as his father, to everyone but one girl he was fun. And that one girl was pleasant, decent but not, to most of us, exciting. He had been in love with her for years. He was in his thirties, but he loved her obsessively, he couldn’t think of other women, in a fashion which seemed to have disappeared from Charles’ circle once they had left school. Whereas she could give him nothing: because she was as completely wrapped up in, of all people, my nephew Pat.