Charles Snow - Last Things

Yes, in every aspect but one, Francis and I were in the same situation, or near enough not to matter. So that the answer should also be the same. There was just one difference. I should like to do the job. I should enjoy it. It was that, precisely that, which Margaret hated.

She had been utterly loyal throughout our married life. She had tried not to constrict me, even when I was doing things, or showing a vein within myself, which she would have liked to wipe away. It wasn’t that she thought that I was an addict of power. If that had been so, she felt that I should have acquired it. And she had learned enough by now to realise that this job I had been offered carried no power at all: and that the more you penetrated that world, the more you wondered who had the power, or whether anyone had, or whether we weren’t giving to offices a free will that those who held them could never conceivably possess.

Nevertheless, she would have liked me to be nowhere near it. Her own principles, her own scrupulousness, couldn’t have lived in that world, any more than her father’s could. She despised, as much as he did, or his friends, the people who got the jobs, who were ready to scramble, compromise, muck in. She couldn’t accept, she resented my accepting, that any society under heaven would need such people. She was put off by my interest, part brotherly, part voyeuristic, in them – in the Lufkins, the Roger Quaifes, even my old civil-service colleagues, who were nearer in sympathy to her. When I told her that they had virtues not given to her father’s friends, or to her, or to me, she didn’t wish to hear.

‘It’s all second-rate,’ she had said before, and said again that night.

Here was I, out of spontaneity (for, though I had trained myself into some sort of prudence, I was still a spontaneous man), or just for the fun or hell of it, ready to plunge in. I should even have enjoyed fighting a by-election: but that wasn’t on, no government with a majority of three could risk it. Anyway, if I said yes, I should enjoy making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords.

To her, who loved me and in many ways admired me – and wanted to admire me totally – it seemed commonplace and vulgar. As our tempers got higher, she used those words.

‘That’s no news to you,’ I said.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘In your sense, I am vulgar.’

‘I won’t have that.’

‘You’ve got to have it. If you mean that I’m not superior to the people round us, then of course I’m vulgar.’

‘I don’t want you to behave like them, that’s all.’

The quarrel went on, and I, because I was not only angry but raw with chagrin (on the way home, I had been expecting a bit of applause, ironic applause maybe: she spoke about temptation, but she might, so I felt, have granted me that this particular temptation didn’t come to all that many men), was having the worst of it. I betrayed myself by bringing up an argument which in my own mind I had already negated: the necessity for action, for any halfway decent man in our own time. I even quoted Hammarskjöld at her, though none of us would have used his words. She looked at me with sad lucidity.

‘You’ve been sincere in that, I know,’ she said. ‘But you’re not being sincere now, are you?’

‘Why not?’

‘Because this isn’t real, as you know perfectly well. It isn’t going to be any use, and if it were anyone else you’d be the first to say so.’

Since that was precisely what in detachment I had thought, I was the more angry with her.

‘Well,’ she said at last, without expression, ‘I take it that you are going to accept.’

I sat sullen, keeping back the words. Then I crossed over to the sideboard and poured myself a drink, the first either of us had had since I returned. Once more I sat opposite to her, and spoke slowly and bitterly (it was a conflict that neither of us had the language for, after twenty years).

I said, that if anything could have made me decide to accept that night, it was her argument against. But she might do me one minor credit: I hadn’t lost all my capacities. It would be better to decide as though she had said nothing whatever. There were serious arguments against, though not hers. I should want some sensible advice, from people who weren’t emotionally committed either way. There I was going to leave it, for that night.

It was already early morning, and we lay in bed, unreconciled.

AS we were being polite to each other at breakfast, I repeated to Margaret that I should have to take some advice. She glanced at me with a glint which, even after a quarrel, wasn’t entirely unsarcastic. One trouble was, I had made too many cracks about others: how many times had she listened to me saying that persons in search of advisers had a singular gift for choosing the right ones? That is, those who would produce the advice they wanted to hear.

No, I said, as though brushing off a comment, I thought of calling on old Hector Rose. He knew this entire field of government backwards: he was a friendly acquaintance, not even specially well disposed: he would keep the confidence, and was as cool as a man could reasonably be.

Margaret hadn’t expected that name. She gave a faint grin against herself. All she could say was that he would be so perfectly balanced that I might as well toss up for it.

When I telephoned Hector at the Pimlico flat, his greetings were ornate. Pleasure at hearing my voice! Surprise that I should think of him! Cutting through the ceremonial, I asked if he were free that morning: there was a matter on which I should like his opinion. Of course, came the beautiful articulation, he was at my disposal: not that any opinion of his could be of the slightest value –

He continued in that strain, as soon as I arrived in their sitting-room. He was apologising for his wife and himself, because she wasn’t there to receive me, to her great disappointment, but in fact she had to go out to do the morning’s shopping. As so often in the past, facing him in the office, I felt like an ambassador to a country whose protocol I had never been properly taught or where some customs had just been specially invented in order to baffle me. I said: ‘What I’ve come about – it’s very private.’

He bowed from the waist: ‘My dear Lewis.’

‘I want a bit of guidance.’

Protestations of being at my service, of total incompetence and humility. At the first pause I said that it was a pleasant morning (the porticoes opposite were glowing in the autumn sunshine): what about walking down to the garden by the river? What a splendid idea, replied Hector Rose with inordinate enthusiasm – but first he must write a note in case his wife returned and became anxious. Standing by my side, he set to work in that legible italic calligraphy. I could not help seeing, I was meant to see.

Darling, I have gone out for a short stroll with Sir L Eliot (the old Whitehall usage which he had inscribed on his minutes, often, when we were disagreeing, with irritation). I shall, needless to say, be back with you in good time for luncheon. Abiding love. Your H.

It was so mellow out of doors, leaves spiralling placidly down in calm air, that Hector did not take an overcoat. He was wearing a sports coat and grey flannel trousers, as he might have done as an undergraduate at Oxford in the twenties. Now that we were walking together, it occurred to me that he was shorter than he had seemed in his days of eminence: his stocky shoulders were two or three inches below mine. He was making conversation, as though it were not yet suitable to get down to business: his wife and he had been to a concert the night before: they had an agreement, he found it delectable to expatiate on their domestic ritual, to get out of the flat two evenings a week. The danger was, they had both realised when they married – Hector reported this ominous fact with earnestness – that they might tend to live too much in each other’s pockets.