Charles Snow - Last Things

‘It may not be possible,’ said Charles, after we climbed the stairs to his room, his fervour leaving him. ‘Perhaps it never will be possible. But someone has to try.’

I glanced out of his window, which looked over the old bowling green, neatly bisected, light and dark, by a shadow under the moon. Not wanting to break the current (I hadn’t often heard him so emotional, in the old non-Marxist sense so idealistic), I asked if this was what, when some of his contemporaries were protesting, they were hoping to say or bring about.

‘Oh that. Some of them know what they’re doing. Some are about as relevant as the Children’s Crusade.’

If they had been listening to his tone, which was no longer emotional, I couldn’t help thinking that certain contemporaries referred to would not have been too pleased.

‘Mind you, I shall go out on the streets again myself over Vietnam.’

He gazed at me with dark searching eyes. ‘First, because on that they’re right. Second, because we may need some of those characters. And if you’re going to work with people, you can’t afford to be too different.’

That was a good political maxim, such as old Bevill might have approved of. Charles had not for a long while spoken straight out about the career he hoped for: in fact, I thought that he was still unsure, except in negatives. It would have been easy for him to become an academic, but he had ruled that out. He would work like a professional for a good degree – but that was all he had volunteered. As we were in sympathy, unusually close, that night, I said: ‘Is this what you’re planning for yourself?’

I didn’t have to be explicit. The kind of leader he had been eloquent about, the next impulse in politics.

He gave a disarming, untypically boyish smile.

‘Oh, I’ve had my megalomaniac dreams, naturally I have. The times I used to walk round the fields at school. But no. That’s not for me.’

For an instant, I was surprised that he was so positive. ‘Why not?’

‘Look, you heard me say, a minute ago, that it may not be possible. The whole idea. Well, anyone who’s going to bring it off would never have said that. He’s got to be convinced every instant of his waking life. He’s got to think of nothing else, he’s got to eat and breathe it. That’s how the magic comes. But that’s what I couldn’t do. I’m not made for absolute faith. I’m probably too selfish, or anyway I can’t forget myself enough.’

He had more self-knowledge, or at least more knowledge of his limits, I realised, than I had at his age, and older. But he was young enough to add with a jaunty optimistic air:

‘On the other hand, I wouldn’t say that I mightn’t make a pretty adequate number two. If someone with the real quality came along. I could do a reasonable job as a tactical adviser.’

A little later, still comfortably intimate (it was one of the bonuses of that singular day) Charles and I walked back through the old streets to the gate of my own college. I had told him that I should have to hurry to put through the telephone call; and so he left me there, saying, with a friendly smile, ‘Good luck.’ We each had our superstitions and he would never have wished me that if I had been waiting for news, any more than I should have done to him before an examination. It was just a parting gift.

I had brought with me the private secretary’s home number, but I had to wait a good many minutes before I heard his voice.

‘Hallo, Lewis, are you all right?’ I had known him when I was in Whitehall and he one of the brightest young principals. I apologised for disturbing him so late.

‘I should have been worried if you hadn’t. Well, what do you want me to report?’

I gave all the ritual regrets, but still I had to say no. A letter was on its way. Very slight pause, then the clear Treasury voice. ‘I was rather hoping you’d come down the other way.’ Like most aides-de-camp, he tended to speak as though it was he I had to answer to. I could have a few more hours to think it over, he said, there might be other means of persuasion. At my end, another slight pause. Then, quickly, brusquely: ‘No, this is final, Larry.’ One or two more attempts to put it off – but Larry was used to judging answers, and, though he was duplicating Hector Rose’s career, he didn’t duplicate Hector Rose’s ceremonial. ‘Right,’ came the brisk tone. ‘I’ll pass it on. I am very sorry about this, Lewis. I am very sorry personally.’

All over. No, not quite all over. There was something else to do. I went into my bedroom, and there, shining white on the chest of drawers, was the letter I had not yet sent. I had told a lie to my son. Not a major lie – but still, quite pointlessly, for underneath the resolve was made, I hadn’t brought myself to send the letter off. Had I really hoped that Francis Getliffe would dissuade me, or even Charles, or that there would be some miraculous intervention which would give me the chance to change my mind, pressure from a source unknown?

Probably not. It was just because the wavering was so pointless that I felt a wince of shame. It wasn’t the crimes or vices that made one stand stock-still and shut one’s eyes, it was the sheer sillinesses that one couldn’t stop. Vacillations, silly bits of pretence – those were things one didn’t like to face in oneself: even though one knew that in the end they would make no difference. I wondered whether young Charles, who seemed so strong, went through them too.

It wasn’t that night but later, when I recalled that I behaved in the same manner, ludicrously the same manner, once before. At the time that I was sending my letter of admission to the Bar and a cheque for two hundred pounds (to me, at nineteen, most of the money that I possessed). Then, just as today, the resolve was formed. Everyone I knew was advising me against, but nevertheless, as with Charles, my will was strong and I went through with the risk. But only after nights of hesitations, anxieties, withdrawals: only after a night when I had boasted of the gamble, talking to my friends rather in the vein of Hotspur having a few stiff words with reluctant troops. I explained how the letter – which committed me – had been sent off that day. Then, at midnight, after the celebration, I had returned to my bed-sitting-room and found the letter waiting there, the sight of it reproaching me, telling me there was still time to back out.

Then I had been nineteen. Now I was sixty. That had been, in Charles’ phrase, the beginning of one of my lines (the first letter went off at last, and I duly read for the Bar). Tonight was the end of that line. Delaying a little less than I had done at nineteen, a few hours less, I went out into the empty moonlit street to post the letter.

MARGARET, glad about the outcome, more glad because the quarrel had dissolved, believed with Francis Getliffe that I should be cross with myself. I might have believed that also: certainly I was incredulous, as though I were observing astonishing reactions in some Amazonian Indian when I found how equable I was. True, I had my jags of resentment. As I opened the paper one morning and saw the job had been filled – it had gone to Lord Luke of Salcombe, which added a touch of irony – I pointed to the announcement and said to Margaret: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ On the moment, I was blaming her, it was the kind of gibe which wasn’t all a gibe: but I shouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been serene underneath.

It would be a singular apotheosis for Walter Luke, making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords. Only a few years before he had been denouncing politicians and administrators with fervent impartiality. Stuffed shirts! Those blasted uncles! Out of inquisitiveness and perhaps fellow feeling, I went along to hear his first ministerial speech. Walter’s cubical head looming over the box: the rich West-Country intonation that he had never lost. As for the speech itself, it was competent, neither good nor bad. His civil servants had put in all the safeguards and qualifications which used to evoke his considerable powers of abuse. Walter uttered them now with every appearance of solidarity, as though they were great truths. But, then, so should I have had to utter them.