Charles Snow - Last Things

‘I do hope I haven’t tired you,’ she said.

I said that it was a beautiful house. I went on: ‘You’re a lucky girl.’

‘Do you really think I am, Uncle Lewis?’ The question was deferential, but her eyes were once more staring me out.

‘By most people’s standards, yes, I think you are.’

‘Some people’s standards would be different, wouldn’t they? They might think it was wrong for anyone like me to have all this.’ Her eyes didn’t move, but there was a twitch, unapologetic, sardonic, to her mouth. ‘You couldn’t tell me it wasn’t wrong. Could you? It is, you know it, don’t you?’

‘I wasn’t talking about justice,’ I said. ‘I was talking about you.’

‘Isn’t that rather old-fashioned of you, though?’

To say I wasn’t provoked wouldn’t be true. I heard my words get rougher.

‘I don’t know whether you’re unhappy. But if you are, I do know that it’s more tolerable to be unhappy in comfort. You try working behind a counter when you’re miserable, and you’ll see.’

‘Aren’t you being rather feminine, Uncle Lewis? You’re reducing it all to personal things, you know. You can’t believe they matter all that much–’

‘They matter to most of us.’

‘Not if one has anything serious to do.’ Her manner was entirely cool. ‘Perhaps you don’t think I am serious, though. That would be rather old-fashioned of you. I’m very very sorry, but it would. Because I’ve got plenty of money again. Because I’m living a plushy bourgeois life – not so very different from yours, if I may say so. Then it’s artificial if I don’t accept this nice cosy world I’m living in. You don’t trust me if I want to have a hand in getting rid of it and starting something better. You think I’m playing at being discontented, don’t you? Isn’t that it?’

I thought, she was no fool, she was suspicious about me, her suspicions were shrewd. As I watched her face, disciplined except for the eye-flash, I had been reflecting on people like Dolfie Whitman, that invigilator of others’ promotion. Philippe Égalité radical, his enemies had called him. Rich malcontents. I had known a good many. Some had seemed dilettantes, or else too obviously getting compensation for a private wound. Often they weren’t the first allies you would choose to have on your side in a crisis. A few, though, were as unbending and committed as one could be. Such as the scientist Constantine or Charles March’s wife. What about this young woman? I was mystified, I couldn’t make any sort of judgment. I still had no idea why she wanted me in her house. Surely not to sit alone with her in her study, having an academic discussion on student protest, or any variety of New Left, or the place of women with large unearned incomes in radical movements?

It was time, I felt, to stop the fencing.

‘I don’t know you well enough to say.’ I went on: ‘You’re cleverer than I thought.’

‘Thank you,’ she said, gravely, politely, imperturbably, as unruffled as if I had congratulated her on a new dress. It was the manner which I couldn’t break through, and which had made me, not patronising as it might have sounded, but harsh and rude.

‘For all I know,’ I said, ‘you may be absolutely in earnest.’

‘It would be rather upsetting for you, wouldn’t it,’ she replied, ‘if you found I was.’

‘What do you hope for?’

She wasn’t at all put off. Her reply was articulate, much what I had heard from friends of Charles’, less qualified and political than from Charles himself. This country, America, the world she knew, weren’t good enough: there must be a chance of something better. The institutions (they sometimes called them structures) of our world had frozen everyone in their grip: they were dead rigid by now, universities, civil service, parliaments, the established order, the lot. One had to break them up. It might be destructive: you couldn’t write a blueprint for the future: but it would be a new start, it would be better than now.

All that I was used to; the only difference was one thing she didn’t say, which I was used to hearing. She didn’t talk about ‘your generation’, and blame us for the existing structures and the present state of things. Whether that was out of consideration, or whether she was keeping her claws sheathed, I couldn’t tell.

‘What can you do about it? You yourself?’

The question was another attempt to break through. She didn’t mind. Her reply was just as calm as before, and this time businesslike. Money was always useful. So was this house. She could help with the supply work. (I had a flickering thought of young women like her doing the same for the Spanish War and the ‘party’ thirty years before.) Of course she couldn’t do much. In any sort of action, though, one had to do what came to hand: wasn’t that true?

Yes, it was quite true. In fact, I fancied uneasily that I might have said it myself: and that she was impassively quoting it back at me.

‘Why are you in it at all?’

The first flash of anger. ‘You won’t admit I believe in it, will you?’

It was my turn to be calm. ‘I said before, you may be absolutely in earnest.’

‘But you really think it’s a good way to keep some men round me, don’t you? It’s a good way to keep in circulation, isn’t it?’

The words were still precise, the face demure with a kind of false and taunting innocence. But underneath the smooth skin there was a storm of temper only just held back.

‘I might even collect another husband, mightn’t I? If I was lucky. Now that would be a reason for being in it, you’d accept that, wouldn’t you?’

I said (she was suspicious of me again, this time the suspicion had gone wrong): ‘It hadn’t even occurred to me. I should have thought, if you did want another husband, you wouldn’t have to go to those lengths, would you?’

She gave what for her was an open smile, like a woman, utterly confident with men, suddenly enjoying an offhand, not over-flattering remark: ‘But now you’re talking about it,’ I went on, ‘I suppose you will get married again, some time?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I just don’t know.’ Then she added, as though she had spoken too simply: ‘It’s the only thing I was brought up for, you see. And that isn’t a point in its favour, particularly.’

In the same quiet, judicious tone she was blaming her mother for her education, being prepared for nothing but that, protected, watched over. In the quiet judicious tone she wasn’t concealing that she disliked her mother – with not just a daughter’s ambivalence or rebellion, but with plain dislike. If she hadn’t been trained for the marriage stakes, she might have done something. Anyway she had made her own marriage. That hadn’t been a recommendation for trying it again. She didn’t refer to Pat with dislike, as she did her mother, but with detachment, not mentioning his name. She spoke of her marriage as though it had been an interesting historical event or an example of mating habits which she had happened to observe.

‘I don’t intend to make a mess of it again,’ she said. ‘But you needn’t worry about me. I shan’t die of frustration. I can look after myself.’

It seemed as though she was being blunt: but even when she seemed to be, and maybe was, trying to be direct, she could sound disingenuous at the same time. Was she suggesting, or stating, that she wasn’t going to risk another marriage, but took men when she wanted them? Was that true in fact?

There had been a time when I thought the opposite. As I watched her getting rid of Pat, or as the centre of attraction at one of the previous summer’s parties, it seemed to me that she might have had bad luck: the bad luck that goes with beauty. Not that her face was beautiful: people looked at her long nose, wide mouth, didn’t know how to describe her. Pretty? Alluring? But she behaved like others whom everyone called beautiful. It wasn’t good to be so. Those I had met – there were only two or three – had been unable to give love or else were frigid. It wasn’t simply the shape of a face that made others decide that a woman had the gift of beauty. They had to feel some quality which set her apart and came from inside. There was nothing supernatural about it: it might very well be a kind of remoteness, a sensual isolation or a narcissism.