Charles Snow - Last Things

His conversation, however, was not much like an old clubman’s. He was relaxed, because I was the right distance from him: the right distance, that is, for him to talk and me to listen. I took in more about his friends than I had done before, and believed more, now that I wasn’t conducting a dialectic with him. Yes, they were more serious than I had let myself admit. Their politics (his less than the others) might be utopian, but they were their own. They were probably no better or no worse thought out than ours had been, but they came from a different ground.

The results could be curiously different. Charles and his circle were more genuinely international than any of us had been. The minor nationalisms seemed to have vanished quite. They were not even involved in Europe, though most of them had travelled all over it. It was the poor world that captured their imagination: the Grand Tour had to be uncomfortable and also squalid nowadays, said Charles with a sarcastic smile. That was what he had been conducting in Asia before he was seventeen, and this present vacation he had been rounding it off in Africa.

They weren’t specially illusioned. They didn’t imagine an Elysium existing here and now upon this earth, as young men and women of their kind in the 1930s sometimes imagined Russia or less often the United States. It was true, dark world-views didn’t touch them much. They might bear – in that year 1966 and later – people like Francis Getliffe and me saying that objectively the world looked grimmer than at any time in our lives. They might analyse and understand the reasons which made us say so. But they didn’t in the end believe it. They were alive for anything that was going to happen. That was bound to be so: you live in your own time.

Listening to Charles those evenings, I thought that, not only did his friends’ opinions have more to them than I had been willing to grant, but so had he. He seemed more of a sport – that is, less like me or Martin, less like anyone on Margaret’s side – than I had believed. The family patterns didn’t fit. He wasn’t so easy to domesticate. There were contradictions in him that I hadn’t seen before.

This was striking home all through that week: on one of the last evenings, I could not help but see it clear. We had just crossed the bridge over the water: it was a dense and humid April night, but with no clouds in the darkening sky; Charles suddenly began to press me about, of all subjects, the works of Tolkien. I turned towards him, ready to say something sharp, such as that he ought to know that I had no taste for fancy. His eyes left mine, looked straight ahead.

I met his profile, dolichocephalic, straight-nosed, hair curling close to his head. On the moment he looked unfamiliar, not at all how I imagined him to look. Curious: feature by feature, of course, the genes had played their part, the hair was Martin’s, the profile Austin Davidson’s: but the result was strange. So strange that I might have been gazing at a young man I didn’t recognise, much less understand. The sharp repartee dropped away, I said that naturally I would give this favourite of his a try.

Curious, I was thinking again. He was in many respects more concentrated and practical than I had been at his age, or maybe was now: almost certainly, when he wanted something, he was more ruthless. Yet, if I had no taste for fancy, he had enough for two: whimsies, fantasies, they hadn’t been left behind in childhood. With him they co-existed, and would continue to co-exist with adult desires and adult fulfilments: he was one of those, or would become one, who had the gift of being able to feel guilty with Dostoevsky, innocent with hobbits, passionately insistent with a new girlfriend, all on the same day.

Good, he was saying affectionately, as I promised to read the book.

As we walked on, other contradictions of his became as clear. He had proved his own kind of courage. Whether he had set out to prove it to himself, no one knew: but the fact was, none of my contemporaries, not even those as adventurous as the young Francis Getliffe, would at sixteen have contemplated setting out on solitary expeditions such as his. As for me, it would have seemed about as plausible – for reasons of pennilessness in addition to physical timidity – as trying to round the Horn. Of course, most of Charles’ friends travelled further than we did: but he was the one who had made it into a trial of nerve. Not nerve, just patience, he explained with a straight face. All calculated and singularly deliberate, as though he had reverted to one of those nineteenth-century Englishmen with private means, scholarly tastes, and inordinate self-will.

And yet, he was nervous, more so than most of us, in another old-fashioned, even a primitive sense. When he had arrived back safe after his second trip and had produced some understatements which were not so modest as they sounded, I asked him how much I should have to pay him to sleep ( a ) in a haunted house, ( b ) in a graveyard. Again straight-faced, he said: ‘As for ( a ), more than you could afford. For ( b ), no offers accepted. And I suppose you’d do either for half a bottle of Scotch. Or less. Wouldn’t you?’

He was being, as usual, truthful about himself. He was capable of getting frightened by ghost stories. There were still occasions, after he had been reading, when he carefully forgot to turn off his bedroom lamp.

Walking by his side – lights were coming on in St George’s Hospital – I mentioned, as though by free association, the name of Gordon Bestwick. This was a friend of his, whom I had met, but only casually, at Christmas time. Charles, protective about any of his circle, wasn’t easy about Gordon’s health, and had been suggesting that I should go to Cambridge next term, and meet him again, to see what my opinion was.

‘Why did you think of him?’ said Charles, clear-voiced.

‘Oh, it just occurred to me that he might be more rational than you are.’

Charles chuckled.

‘I’ve told you, he’s a bit like you. He’s our Bazarov, you know.’

That was a complicated private reference. Charles must have picked up from Francis Getliffe or more probably his wife, the impression that I made on the Marches when they first befriended me. A poor young man: positive: impatient with the anxieties of the rich. Making them feel overdelicate, overnurtured, frail by the side of a new force. In fact, their impression was in most respects fallacious. My character seemed to them more all-of-a piece and stronger just because I was poor and driven on: in the long run, much of the frailty was not on their side but mine. Still, they called me after Turgenev’s hero and for a while made a similar legend about me. And that was what Charles and his circle were duplicating in their reception of Gordon Bestwick.

Charles had met him at Trinity, both of them scholars in their first year. He came from a lorry driver’s family in Smethwick. He was extremely clever; according to Charles, brought up in one of the English academic hothouses, at least as clever as anyone he had known at school. Bestwick was reading economics and had much contempt for the soft subjects, which sounded Bazarov-like enough. I had talked to him only for a few minutes, but no one could have missed noticing his talent. Otherwise he had some presence without being specially prepossessing, and if Charles hadn’t forced his name upon me, I doubted whether I should have gone out of my way to see him again.

That evening, as we were turning parallel to Park Lane, Charles reiterated his praise.

‘He may easily be the ablest of us,’ he said. He was pertinacious, prepared to be boring, about someone he believed in. ‘He’s certain to be a very valuable character.’