Charles Snow - Last Things

When Pat had deserted her and married Muriel, the girl Vicky (she wasn’t all that young, she must now be twenty-six) had – so Francis now told us – at least not discouraged Leonard from getting in touch with her again. Since I hadn’t visited Vicky and her father since my own father’s death, that was some sort of news, but it was commonplace and natural enough.

‘I must say, of course I’m prejudiced,’ Francis broke out, ‘but I must say that she’s treated him pretty badly.’

Margaret, who knew Vicky and liked her, said yes, but it wasn’t very easy for her – ‘I mean,’ said Francis, ‘she never ought to have done that. Unless she was trying to make a go of it.’

Margaret said, she mightn’t know which way to turn. There were plenty of good women who behaved badly when they were faced with a passion with which they didn’t know how to cope.

‘If I thought she was really trying–’ Then Francis let out something quite new. In the last couple of months, perhaps earlier than that, Pat had been seen with her.

None of the young people had got on to that. Yet, the moment we heard it, it seemed that we ought to have predicted it. Vicky was a doctor, she could earn a living, she would keep him if he needed it. Further, perhaps even Pat wasn’t just calculating on his bed and food: perhaps even he wasn’t infinitely resilient, and after Muriel wanted someone who set him up in his self-esteem again; after all that, he might just want to be loved.

But at that time I wasn’t feeling compassionate about my nephew. Like other persons as quicksilver sympathetic as he could be, as ready to expend himself enhancing life, he had been showing an enthusiasm for revenge just as lively as his enthusiasm for making others cheerful: and he had been searching for revenge against Margaret, feeling, I supposed, that she had done him harm. Anyway he had spread a story which was meant to give Margaret pain. Whether he believed it, or half-believed it, I couldn’t decide. He had one of those imaginations, high-coloured, melodramatic and malicious, that made it easy to believe many things. The story was that, hearing Austin Davidson talk of his ‘sources of supply’, the people who had provided him with drugs to kill himself, Pat had found out their names. They were Maurice and Charles.

To most of us, this bit of gossip wouldn’t matter very much: probably not to the young men themselves. But I knew – it was no use being rational where reason didn’t enter – that it would matter to Margaret. To her it would be something like a betrayal, both by her father and her sons. She would feel that she had lost them all. Maybe Pat also knew what she would feel.

For the time being, I stopped the story from reaching Margaret, which didn’t make me think more kindly of Pat, for it meant both some tiresome staffwork, and also my being less than open with her. So I had to get the truth from Davidson himself before she found out. That, in itself, meant a harsh half-hour. By this time he seemed to be failing from week to week: unless he led the conversation, it was hard to get him to attend. I had to force upon him that this was a family trouble, and might bring suffering for Margaret. He was silent, a long distance from family troubles or his daughter’s pain. For the first time in all those visits, I broke into his silence. He must trust me. He must make an effort. Who had given him the drugs?

At last Davidson said, without interest, that he had made a promise not to tell. That threw me back. I had never known him break a confidence: he wouldn’t change his habit now. After a time, I asked, would he answer two questions in the negative? He gazed at me without expression. Had it been Maurice? With irritation, with something like boredom, Davidson shook his head. Had it been Charles? The same expression, the same shake of the head. (On a later visit, when he was less collected, I was led to infer that the truth was what we might have expected: the ‘source of supply’ had nothing to do with any of the family, but was an old friend and near contemporary of his called Hardisty.)

So that had been settled. Nevertheless, when Francis brought in the name of my nephew, it took some effort to be dispassionate. There were few things I should have liked more that night than to say we could all forget him. There was one thing I should have liked more, and that was to believe that Vicky and Leonard would get married out of hand.

Francis asked us point-blank: ‘Does he stand a chance?’

Margaret and I glanced at each other, and I was obliged to reply, in the angry ungracious tone with which one kills a hope: ‘I doubt it.’

Apparently Leonard, the least expansive of Francis’ children and the one he loved the most, had come to his father with a kind of oblique appeal – ought he to take a job at the Princeton Institute? That wasn’t a professional question; Leonard could name his own job anywhere; he was mutely asking – it made him seem much younger than he was – whether it was all hopeless and he ought at last to get away.

‘You really think that she’ll go back – to that other one?’

‘I’m afraid so.’ She would not only go back, she would run to him, the first time he cricked a finger. Knowing (but also not knowing, as one does in an obsessive love) everything about him. On any terms. She was worth a hundred of Pat, Margaret was saying. On any terms. Nothing would stop her. Would we try to stop her, if we could? It was not for me to talk. I had taken Sheila, my first wife, on terms worse than any this girl would get. I had done wrong to Sheila when I did so: that I had known at the time, and knew now without concealment, after half a lifetime. But if I could have stopped myself, granted absolute free will, should I have done so?

Even now, after half a lifetime, I wasn’t certain. If I had made the other choice, despite the suffering, despite the years of something like maiming, I might have been less reconciled. And that, I thought, could very well prove true for this young woman. If she married Pat (which I regarded as certain, since he wasn’t exactly a spiritual athlete and wouldn’t give up his one patch of safe ground) she would go through all the torments of a marriage without trust. If she didn’t, she would go through another torment, missing – whoever else she married – what she couldn’t help wanting most of all. No, I wouldn’t have stopped her. She might even come out of it better than he did. Sometimes there were ironies on the positive side, one of them being that the faithful were often the more strongly sexed and in the end got the more fun.

It wasn’t often that Francis, who had gone to extreme trouble about our children or Martin’s (in his cheerful patriarchal home he loved to entertain, and it was there, as a bad joke, that Vicky, staying as a guest of Leonard’s, had first met and fallen for Pat), had come for any sort of comfort about his own. But sometimes the kind liked to receive kindness, and he didn’t want us to leave until the house was up.

In the taxi, as it purred up the midnight-smooth tarmac, under the trees to Hyde Park Corner, Margaret was saying, what a bloody mess. That triangle, Vicky, Leonard, Pat. People anything like Pat – even if they were more decent than he was – always did more destruction than anyone else. She broke off: ‘Was Francis sounding you out? Early on. Was he really making you the offer? Had they asked him to?’

No, I said, I didn’t think it would be done like that. ‘Anyway, I hope that doesn’t happen; you know, don’t you?’

That was all she said, before returning to brisk comments upon Pat.

It did happen, and it happened very fast. Late the following night, just as we were thinking it was time for bed, the telephone rang. Private secretary at Downing Street. Apologies, the sharp civil servant’s apologies that I used to hear, from someone whom I used to meet. Could I come along at once? Logistic instructions. I was to be careful not to use the main entrance. Instead, I was to go in through the old Cabinet Offices in Whitehall. There would be an attendant waiting at the door.