Charles Snow - Last Things

It all sounded strangely, and untypically, conspiratorial. Later I recalled what Francis had said about ‘hawking the job round’: they were taking precautions against another visitor being spotted: hence presumably this Muscovite hour, hence the eccentric route. The secretary had asked whether I knew the old office door, next to the Horseguards. Better than he did, it occurred to me, as I went through the labyrinth to the Cabinet room: for it was in the room adjoining the outside door, shabby, coal-fire smoking, that I used to work with old Bevill at the beginning of the war.

I was back again, going past the old offices into Whitehall, within twenty minutes. Time, relaxed time, for the offer and one drink. I had asked, and obtained, forty-eight hours to think it over. Outside, Whitehall was free and empty, as it had been in wartime darkness, when the old minister and I had been staying late and walked out into the street, sometimes exhilarated because we had won a struggle or perhaps because of good news on the scrambled line.

When I opened the door of our drawing-room, Margaret, who was sitting with a book thrown aside, cried out: ‘You haven’t been long!’

Then she asked me, face intent: ‘Well?’

I said, cheerful, buoyed up by the night’s action: ‘It’s exactly what we expected.’

Margaret knew as well as I did the appointment which Francis had turned down: and that this was it.

She said: ‘Yes. I was afraid of that.’

For once, and at once, there was strain between us. She was speaking from a feeling too strong to cover up, which she had to let loose however I was going to take it. She had been preparing herself for the way in which I should take it: if you didn’t quarrel often, quarrels were more dreaded. But even then she couldn’t – and in the end didn’t wish – to hold back.

‘What’s the matter?’ I was put out, more than put out, angry.

‘I don’t want you to make a mistake–’

‘Do you think I’ve decided to take the job?’ I had raised my voice, but hers was quiet, as she replied:

‘Haven’t you?’

It had never been pleasant when we clashed. I didn’t like meeting a will as strong as my own, though hers was formed differently from mine, hers hard and mine tenacious: just as her temper was hot and mine was smouldering. Also I didn’t like being judged – some of my secret vanity had gone by now, but not quite all, the residual and final vanity of not liking to be judged by the one who knew me best.

Just to add an edge to it, I thought that she was misjudging me that night. Not dramatically, only slightly – but still enough. It was true – she had heard me amuse myself at others’ expense as they solemnly professed to wonder whether they should accept a job they had been working towards for years – that most decisions were taken on the spot. When one asked for time to ‘sleep on it’, old Arthur Brown’s immemorial phrase, when one asked for the forty-eight hours’ grace of which I was bad-temperedly telling Margaret – one was, nine times out of ten, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, merely enjoying the situation or alternatively searching for rationalisations and glosses to prettify a decision which was already made.

That wasn’t quite the case with me that night. I had in my mind all the reasons why I should say no. So far Margaret was wrong. But only a little wrong. What I wanted was for her to join in dismissing those reasons, take it all lightly, and push me, just a fraction, into saying yes.

Reasons against – they were the same for me as for Francis, and perhaps by this time a shade stronger. He had said that he couldn’t do much – or any – good. I was as convinced of that as he was, whoever did the job: more so because I had lived inside the government apparatus, as he had never done. That hadn’t made me cynical, exactly (for cynicism came only to those who were certain they were superior to less splendid mortals): but it had made me Tolstoyan, or at least sceptical of the effect that any man could have, not just a junior minister, but anyone who really seemed to possess the power, by contrast to the tidal flow in which he lived. Some sort of sense about nuclear armaments might one day arise: what Francis and David Rubin and the rest of us had said, and within our limits done, might not have been entirely useless: but the decisions – the apparent decisions, the voices in cabinets, the signatures on paper – would be taken by people who couldn’t avoid taking them, because they were swept along, unresisting, on the tide. The tide which we had failed to catch.

That wasn’t a reason for not acting. In fact, Francis and his colleagues believed – and so did I – that, in the times through which we had lived, you had to do what little you could in action, if you were to face yourself at all. But it was a reason, this knowledge we had acquired, for not fooling ourselves: for not pretending to take action, when we were one hundred per cent certain that it was just make-believe. If you were only ninety per cent certain, then sometimes you hadn’t to be too proud to do the donkey work. But, if you were utterly certain, then pretending to take action could do harm. It could even drug you into feeling satisfied with yourself.

By this time, our certainties had hardened, that nothing useful could be done in this job. The year before, when Francis was offered it, we thought we had known all about the limits of government. We had flattered ourselves. The limits were tighter than self-styled realistic men had guessed. Azik Schiff couldn’t resist saying that he had warned us about social democracies. Vietnam was hag-riding us. Bitterly Francis said that a country couldn’t be independent in foreign policy if it wasn’t independent in earning its living. That remark had been made in the presence of some of Charles’ friends, and had scandalised them. To many of us, the window of public hope, which had seemed clearer for a few years past, was being blacked out now.

All this was objective, and I didn’t need so much as mention it to Margaret. Nor the other reason against, which was more compelling than with Francis. He had his research to do, and I had my writing. He had the assurance that any good scientist possessed, that some of what he had done was right (it was no use quibbling about epistemological terms; in the here-and-now, in Francis’ own existence that was so). No writer had that assurance: but, exactly as his work was a private comfort, no, more than comfort, justification, so was mine. And – this was a difference between us – I had more to finish than he had, perhaps because I had started later. I had never liked talking about my books, and should never have considered writing anything about my literary life. I had had my joys and sorrows, like any other writer. In fact, most writing lives were more alike than different, which made one’s own not specially interesting, except to oneself. After all, the books were there.

However, quite as much as ever in my life, as much as in the middle of the war, this preoccupation remained with me. It had been steady all through, it hadn’t lost any of its strength. In the middle of the war, I had been a youngish man, I hadn’t the sense of losing against time. I had been too busy to write anything sustained, but I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It had been like going into a safe and quiet room. If I took this job, I could do the same, but I wasn’t youngish now. I should have liked to count on ten years more to work in.

Ten years with good luck. Margaret knew that was what I was hoping for. She couldn’t bring herself to talk about my lifespan. She did say that this would mean time away from writing. Francis, she forced herself to say, had talked about a year or two in office: and he had said that he couldn’t afford a year or two. She didn’t ask a question, she made the statement in a flat, anxious tone, the lines deep across her forehead.