Charles Snow - Last Things

He added, with an oblique smile: ‘He’s even a very valuable member of the cell.’

They thought of themselves – it didn’t need saying – as student revolutionaries: Charles knew that I knew: though he, on that October night when I told him of what he called my abdication, had defined with political accuracy where he stood.

He was gazing to our left, where, in the west, over the London smoke, one of the first stars had come out. Charles regarded it with simple pleasure, just as my father might have done. I recalled night walks when I was in trouble, getting some peace from looking at the stars.

‘Old Gordon,’ Charles remarked with amusement, ‘says that we’re fooling ourselves about space travel. We shall never get anywhere worthwhile. He says that science fiction is the modern opium of the people.’

He added: ‘Sensible enough for you, isn’t he?’

During that conversation, and the others we had that week, Charles did not leave out the name of Muriel. He brought it in along with a dozen more, without either obtruding it or playing it down. He spoke of her as though she were one of the inner group (which included not only school and Cambridge friends, but also one or two studying in London, such as his cousin Nina), but he didn’t single her out or ask a question about her.

WHEN Muriel herself invited me to her house one evening, shortly after Charles had gone back to Cambridge, she began in very much the same tone as he had used of her: but there came a time when she was not quite so cautious.

She had asked me round for a drink before dinner, on the first Monday of the month, which happened to be a day when Margaret was regularly occupied with her one and only charity. I had been to Chester Row once before, to a party the preceding summer: I had forgotten that Muriel’s house was a long way up the road, near the church, not far from where Matthew Arnold used to repose himself, all seventeen stone of him.

The door was smelling of fresh paint, there was a tub of wallflowers outside, a flower box under the ground-floor windows, everything burnished and neat. The housekeeper told me, in a decorous whisper, as though she had been infected by the house’s hush, that Mrs Calvert was waiting for me in the drawing-room upstairs (Muriel had reverted to her maiden name the day that the divorce came through).

In fact, she was standing at the end of the first-floor corridor.

‘How very good of you to come, Uncle Lewis,’ she called out, light and clear. ‘It’s such a long way to drag you, isn’t it?’

It was not much more than a mile. As usual, following her into the drawing-room, I was put off by her politeness, which seemed like a piece of private fun.

She led me to an armchair beside the window, enquired what she should give me to drink and precisely how I liked it, fitted me with coffee table, glass and cigarettes, and then sat down opposite me in a hard-backed upright chair. She was dressed with Quakerish simplicity, white blouse, dark skirt: and the skirt, though it showed an inch or two of thigh, looked long that year on a woman of twenty-three.

‘I’m so sorry that Aunt Meg couldn’t come too,’ she said. ‘It’s one of her trust days, isn’t it? I ought to have remembered that, it’s very bad of me. One oughtn’t to be careless like that, ought one?’

It was only then that I suspected she hadn’t been so careless. It hadn’t occurred to me that she wanted me by myself, or could have any motive for it.

‘Do please tell Aunt Meg that I am dreadfully sorry. I want to see her so much.’

Muriel fixed me with an intense, undeviating gaze. I had admired her acute green eyes (which others called hazel, or even yellow) before, but I hadn’t met them full on until now. They had a slight squint, such as was required from prize Siamese cats before the trait was bred out. It might have been a disfigurement or even comic, but on the spot it made her eyes harder to escape: more than that, it made one more aware of her presence.

Self-consciously (I was more self-conscious with this girl than I was used to being) I looked round the room.

‘How fine this is,’ I said.

That was a distraction, but also the truth. It was an L-shaped room, running the whole length of the house, the front windows giving on the street, back window onto her strip of garden, from which an ash tree extended itself, three storeys high. Edging through the same back window came the last of the sunlight, falling on two pictures, by painters once thought promising, that I remembered in her father’s college rooms.

‘I’m so glad you like it,’ said Muriel. ‘I do think it’s rather good.’

‘We all envy you, you know.’

She gave a slight shrug. ‘The Victorian middle classes did themselves pretty well, didn’t they?’

‘So do you,’ I replied.

She didn’t like that. For an instant, she was frowning, her face looked less controlled, less young. Her self-possession for once seemed shaken. Then, springing up, graceful, she cried: ‘Look! You’ve never seen the house properly, have you, Uncle Lewis? Please let me show you, now.’

Show me she did, like a house agent taking round a possible though unknowledgeable buyer. It was one of those tall narrow-fronted houses common in that part of London, built (said Muriel precisely) between 1840 and 1845. Built for what kind of family? She wouldn’t guess. Professional? A doctor’s, who had his practice in the grand houses close by?

Anyway, it must have been more immaculate now than ever in the past. Basement flat at garden level, three rooms for the housekeeper, as spotless-fresh, as uninhabited-looking, as Muriel’s drawing-room. Dining-room on the ground floor, table laid for one, silver shining on the rosewood. Second floor, Muriel’s bedroom, scent-smelling, cover smooth in the evening light: as she stood beside me, she said there was another room adjacent, which we would come back to – ‘that is, if you can bear any more’.

She led the way up to the top storey, light-footed as an athlete. The main room was the nursery and I could hear infantile chortles. She hesitated outside the door. I said that I liked very small children. ‘No, forgive me, he’ll be having a feed.’ Instead she showed me two bedrooms on the same floor. That’s where she could put people up, she said. What people, I was wondering. Quick-eyed, she seemed to read my thoughts. American students who were forced out of Berkeley, she said. Those were the last two. They had something to teach us.

She climbed up some iron steps to a balcony garden: she was slim-waisted, she looked slight, but she was nothing like as fragile as she seemed. She gazed across the roofs and gardens before she descended, and took me downstairs again to the second floor. Then she opened the door next to her bedroom: ‘Would you really mind sitting here just for a little while?’

It was something between a boudoir and a study. There were plenty of bookshelves: there was a cupboard from which she brought another tray of drinks, though as before she didn’t take one herself. But also there were what appeared to be other cupboards for her dresses, a long mirror, a smaller looking glass in front of a dressing table. I had noticed another, more sumptuous dressing table in her bedroom: but I guessed that it was here she spent most of her time. It smelt of her scent, which was astringent, not heady: no doubt Lester Ince would have known the name. On the desk stood a large photograph of Azik Schiff and another which later I should have recognised as of Che Guevara, though at the time I had scarcely seen the face. That night I was wondering if this might be a lover: it wasn’t the only time that she sent me on a false direction. There was no picture of her mother, and none of her father, nor any reminder of him at all, except, very oddly, for a copy of the seventeenth-century engraving of our college’s first court, hanging in obscurity on the far wall.