Charles Snow - Last Things

‘I don’t want to persuade you either way. I just don’t know which is better for you.’

He was speaking with affectionate, oddly gentle, concern. Maybe I had expected, or hoped, even with the letter written, that he would say something different. But I should have known. When he had seemed curt or uninterested in the Lords bar, that was nothing like the truth. He cared a good deal for what happened to me. On the other hand, or really on the same hand, he was too fine-nerved to intrude – unless he was sure that he was discriminating right. Only once or twice in the whole of our lives had he intervened into my private choices. On politics, of course he had. On pieces of external behaviour, yes. But almost never when it would affect my future. The only time I could bring back to mind that night was when he told me, diffidently but exerting all his strength, that whatever the cost and guilt I ought, after Margaret and I had parted and she had married someone else, to get her back and marry her myself.

None of my friends, certainly no one I had known intimately, was as free from personal imperialism as Francis. He didn’t wish to dominate others’ lives, nor even to insinuate himself into them. Sometimes, when we were younger, it had made him seem – side by side with the personal imperialists – to lack their warmth. As they occupied themselves with others, the imperialists were warm for their own benefit. In the same kind of relation, Francis, within the human limits, wasn’t concerned with his own benefit. That was a reason why, after knowing him for a lifetime, one found he wore so well.

‘I think I probably ought to turn it down.’ I still said it as something like a question.

‘I just don’t know for you.’ Francis shook his head. ‘I dare say you’re being sensible.’

A little later, he observed, with amiable malice: ‘Whatever you do, you’ll be extremely cross with yourself for not doing the opposite, won’t you?’

Soon we left it. We could have retraced the arguments, but there was nothing more to say. The quarter chimed from one of the churches beyond the Fellows’ Garden. Francis, opening a cupboard to pick up his gown, said: ‘By the by, the Master’s dining tonight. You can’t say I don’t sacrifice myself for you.’

This was the third Master since Francis was an undergraduate, a man called O S Clark. Francis detested him, and even Martin took his name off the dining list when he found the Master’s on it. Clark was a man of the ultra-right (the present gibe was that he monitored all BBC programmes marking down the names of left-wing speakers, including the Archbishop of Canterbury), and he and his supporters had taken over the college government, so that Martin, as Senior Tutor, was left without power and on his own.

The college bell began to ring, undergraduates were running along the paths, Francis and I walked to the combination room. It was already full, men, most of them young, pushing round the table, panel lights glowing over their heads. When I was a fellow, there had been fourteen of us; now, in 1965, the number was over forty; more often than not, they told me the high table overflowed. Before the butler summoned us into hall, the Master welcomed Francis and me with simple cordiality. ‘We don’t often have the pleasure,’ he said. He had been a cripple since infancy, and had a fresh pink-skinned juvenile face as though affliction, instead of ageing him, had preserved his youth. His smile gave an impression both of sweet nature and obstinacy. Martin and Francis had certain comments to make about the sweet nature. Everyone agreed that he was a strong character, so much so that, although he dragged his useless leg about, no one thought of him as a cripple, or ever pitied him.

By his side stood his chief confidant, an old enemy of mine, the ex-bursar, Nightingale. To my surprise, he insisted on shaking me strongly by the hand.

In fact, the forms were being preserved. As soon as grace was ended and we settled down at high table, at our end, the senior end, conversation proceeded rather as though at an international conference with someone shouting ‘restricted’ when a controversial point emerged. The immemorial college topics took over, bird-watching, putative new buildings, topics in which my interest had always been minimal and was now nil. I turned to my left and talked to a young fellow, whose subject turned out to be molecular biology. He seemed very clever: I suspected that, when he heard the name of one bird trumping another, when he listened to that beautiful display of non-hostility, he was amused. With him and his contemporaries, so Francis and others told me, there was a change. A change for the better, said Francis. These young men were much more genuine academics than their predecessors: most of them were doing good research. They mightn’t be such picturesque examples of free personality as those I used to sit with; but a college, Francis baited me, didn’t exist to be a hothouse of personality. These young men were high-class professionals. I should have liked to know what they thought of relics of less exacting days.

When we arrived back in the combination room, Francis asked me if I wanted to stay for wine. No, I said, the young men were hurrying off; and anyway Charles would presumably be calling at the guest room soon. With a nod, not devoid of relief, Francis led me out into the first court. He said: ‘What was all that in aid of?’

He meant, why had I wanted to dine in hall. I couldn’t have given a coherent answer: it wasn’t sentiment, it had something to do with the confusion of that day.

Francis asked me to let him know when the decision was made.

‘Oh, it is made,’ I said.

‘Good,’ said Francis, and added that he had better leave me alone with Charles. ‘He won’t give you any false comfort.’ Francis broke into an experienced paternal grin before he said good night.

A hard rap at the guest room, Charles punctual but interrogatory. ‘Hallo?’

I thought that he felt he was being inspected: it was his first term, and though he had made himself a free agent so early he was cagey about being visited or disturbed.

‘This is nothing to do with you, Carlo,’ I said.

‘Oh?’

‘It’s entirely about me. I wanted to tell you the news myself.’

‘What have you been doing now?’

‘Nothing very sensational. But I’ve just sent off a letter.’

He was watching me, half-smiling.

‘Refusing a job’, I went on, ‘in the Government.’

‘Have you, by God?’ Charles broke out.

I explained, I should have to make a telephone call later that evening. They wanted to receive an answer that night, and the letter would confirm it. But Charles was not preoccupied with administrative machinery. Of course – he was brooding in an affectionate, reflective manner – it had always been on the cards, hadn’t it? Yes, it could have been different if I had been an American or a Russian, then perhaps I might have been able to do something.

‘Still,’ he said, ‘it isn’t every day that one declines even this sort of job, I suppose.’

He said it protectively, with a trace of mockery, a touch of admiration. He was still protective about my affairs, bitter if he saw me criticised. And he also felt a little envy, such as entered between a father and son like us. But, when I envied him, it was a make-believe and a pleasure: when he envied me, there was an edge to it. I had, for better or worse, done certain things, and he had them all to do.

‘I’m rather surprised you did decline, you know,’ said Charles. ‘You’ve chanced your arm so many times, haven’t you?’

There was the flash of envy, but his spirits were high, his eyes glinting with empathetic glee.

‘I’ve always thought that was because you didn’t have the inestimable privilege of attending one of our famous boarding schools,’ he said. ‘There’s precisely one quality you can’t help acquiring if you’re going to survive in those institutions. I should call it a kind of hard cautiousness. Well, you didn’t have to acquire that when you were young, now did you? And I don’t believe it’s ever come natural to you.’