Charles Snow - Last Things

Yet soon I was enjoying the present moment. It began to seem necessary to go on to the attack: Whitman ought to be given something to puzzle him. So I expressed gratitude for his action. This was an exceptionally friendly and unselfish act, I told him. But – weren’t there two ways of looking at it? In the event, the unlikely event, of my ever having to make this choice, then of course I should have to take account of all these warnings. I was certain, I assured him, that he was right. But mightn’t it be cowardly to be put off? In that way, I didn’t think I was specially cowardly. Unpopularity, one learned to live with it. I had had some in my time. One also had to think of (it was time Whitman was properly mystified) duty.

No, Whitman was inclined to persuade me that this was not my duty. He would have liked me to stay longer: there were several points he hadn’t thoroughly explained. He gazed at me with impressive sincerity, but as though wondering whether he could have misjudged me. As he saw me into a taxi, he might have been, so it seemed, less certain of my intentions than when the evening began.

ON the Friday morning I said to Margaret that the forty-eight hours would be up that night, and I should have to give my answer.

‘Do you know what it’s going to be?’

‘Yes,’ I said, in a bad and brooding temper.

She was not sure. She had seen these moods of vacillation before now. Perhaps she had perceived that I was in the kind of temper that came when one was faced by a temptation: saw that it had to be resisted: and saw, at the same time, that if one fell for it one would feel both guilty and liberated. But we were not in a state for that kind of confidence. I was still resentful because she had been so positive, still wishing that I could act in what the existentialists called my freedom. The only comment that I could take clinically had been Hector Rose’s: Hector had his share of corrupt humanity, but not in his judgment: and this was a time when corrupt humanity got in the way. He was, of course – as in lucid flashes I knew as well as he did – dead right.

Yet still, though I had made up my mind, I acted as though I hadn’t. Or as though I were waiting for some excuse or change of fortune to blow my way. I took it for granted that Margaret couldn’t alter her view, much as she might have liked to, for the sake of happiness.

The only time when we were at one came as I told her about Sammikins. She too had an affection for him, like mine mixed up – this was long before his illness – of respect, pity, mystification. He had virtue in the oldest sense of all: in any conceivable fashion, he was one of the bravest of men. And his gallantry, from the time we had first met him, in former days at Basset, had been infectious. Since when we had learned more, through some of our police acquaintances, about his underground existence. Pick-ups in public lavatories, quite promiscuous, as reckless in escalating risks as he was in war. He had been lucky, so they said, to keep out of the courts. Sometimes, without his knowing it, his friends, plus money and influence, had protected him. When he came into the title, he hadn’t become more cautious but had – like George Passant chasing another kind of sensation – doubled his bets.

‘What a waste,’ said Margaret. Strangely enough, before he was ill, he might in his strident voice have said that of himself but not so warmly.

When we had ceased to talk of Sammikins, I became more restless. I went into the study and started to write the letter of refusal which I could as well have drafted on the Wednesday night. But I left it unfinished, staring out over the park, making a telephone call that didn’t matter. Then I went and found Margaret: it might be a good idea if I went to Cambridge for the night, I said.

Temper still not steady, I asked her to call Francis at his laboratory. I was showing her that it was all innocent. While she was close by, I was already talking to Francis – I should like to stay in college that night, no, I didn’t want to bother him or Martin, in fact I should rather like to stay in college by myself. Perhaps he would book the guest room? Francis offered to dine in hall – yes, if it wasn’t a nuisance. No, don’t trouble to send word round to Martin, I shall see him soon anyway. Nor old Arthur Brown, this wasn’t a special occasion. But young Charles – if he would drop in my room soon after hall? Francis would get a message round to Trinity. ‘There,’ I said to Margaret. ‘That ought to be peaceful enough.’

Autumn afternoon. The stations paced by: the level fields, the sun setting in cocoons of mist. From the taxi, the jangled Friday traffic, more shops, brighter windows, than there used to be. When I entered the college, the porter on duty produced my name with a question mark, ready with the key, but not recognising me by sight.

As I crossed the court, I recalled that, when I was first there, at this time of year there would have been leaves of Virginia creeper, wide red leaves, squelching on the cobbles and clinging like oriflammes to the walls. Since then the college had been cleaned, and these first court walls were bare, no longer grey but ochre-bright, looking as they might have done, not when the court was built (there had been two facades since then), but in the eighteenth century.

That was a change. But it made no difference to the curious tang that the court gave one in October, quite independent of one’s deeper moods, springy, pungent, a shade wistful. Was that climatic, or was it because the academic year had the perverse habit of beginning in the autumn? Anyhow, it had been pleasurable when I lived there, and was so visiting the place that night.

The guest room lay immediately under my old sitting-room, and it was up the stairs outside that callers used to climb, as light-footed as Roy Calvert, or ponderous as Arthur Brown, during various bits of college drama. Not that I thought twice, or even once, about that. It was fairly early in the evening, but I had some letter-writing to do. It was already too late to get a written answer to the private office by the time I had promised: but all day I had been half muddling through, half planning that I could telephone the secretary (that is, the principal private secretary) in time enough, and have the letter reach him tomorrow.

I waited till seven o’clock before I called on Francis. The first hall-sitting was noisy, rattle of plates, young men’s voices, the heavy smell of food, as I pushed through the screens. In the second court, the seventeenth-century building stood out clean-lined under a fine specimen of a hunter’s moon, rising over the acacia. Francis’ lights were shining, from rooms which in my time had been the Dean’s. But, now Francis had stripped off the hearty decorations, they were handsome to look at as soon as one stepped inside, moulded panelling, Dutch tiles round the fireplace. Francis gave me a friendly cheek-creased smile, and then, absent-mindedly, as though I were an undergraduate, offered me a glass of sherry. When I said that, except in Cambridge, I didn’t touch that dispiriting drink once a year, Francis’ smile got deeper; but he wasn’t surprised, he was waiting for it, to hear me continue without any break at all.

‘I’ve got the offer of your job, you know,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ said Francis. ‘I was given a pretty firm hint about that. Otherwise I wouldn’t have said anything on Tuesday night.’

We were sitting on the opposite sides of the fireplace. Francis looked at me, eyes lit up over the umber pouches (misleading perhaps, that anyone now so content should carry indelibly all those records of strain) and asked:

‘Well, what about it?’

I hesitated before I replied. Then I said: ‘I’m inclined to think that I ought to give the same answer as you did.’