Charles Snow - Last Things

But those were times when Gordon was on duty. During his week with us, especially when he was talking to Margaret, one saw another aspect. He became attentive and anxious to please. Once or twice, trying to entertain her, he looked not mature, as he did addressing Hector Rose, but younger than his years.

In private Margaret told me that, though she liked him, she didn’t find him attractive as a man: and that she believed that would have been the same if she had been his own age. After that I asked Charles how Gordon got on with women. Charles reflected. Perhaps Gordon wasn’t his first choice for sexual confidences. ‘Oh,’ said Charles at length, ‘he’s a bit of a star, you know, he’s had one or two offers. Chiefly from very rich girls–’ Charles grinned. But Gordon, he went on, was pretty concentrated, he didn’t have much time to spare. The only girl in whom he seemed ‘interested’ (the peculiarly anaemic word which they used and which their more inhibited predecessors would have thought genteel) was Nina.

It was thundery, as Gordon sat in the drawing-room with us, and Margaret said she had a headache. I invited Gordon to come out for a drink. He looked hesitant as though we weren’t being solicitous enough or as though there were an etiquette in which he hadn’t been instructed. Margaret said Go on, it’ll do you good, and promised, in case Charles returned, to send him after us.

In the heavy air Gordon and I walked through the backstreets, as I had done with my stepson one Christmas Day. The clouds were thickening, but it hadn’t yet begun to rain, and outside a pub people were sitting round the open-air tables, at one of which Gordon and I settled down with pints of beer. Lightning flashes from the direction of the park. Growls of thunder far away. Close by the pavement kerb, cars, headlights shining in the murk, passed as on a conveyor belt on their way from Paddington.

It used to be a quiet pub, I remarked to Gordon, when I first lived in Bayswater Road. Now we might as well be sitting in a café in one of the noisier spots in Athens.

‘Never been abroad,’ he said, big frame relaxed, ingesting bitter. ‘Come off it, Gordon. We all know there is no sorrow like unto your sorrow. We also know that you could get large grants to travel any time you chose to ask for them. Which is more than I ever could. You’re rather inert physically and rather unadventurous, that’s all.’

He was used to some of my techniques by now, and gave a matey smile. I went on baiting him. He blamed too much on to environment and hoped for too much from environment. That had always been the mistake of romantic optimists. If he and his friends were going to hammer some sense into progressive thought, they had to dispose of that mistake. Gordon didn’t mind a challenge. He didn’t believe in any sort of Calvinism, scientific, intuitive or any other. The only thing you could change was environment. Change the environment of the working class – and he knew what the working class was like, he was born right there, he didn’t romanticise them, he didn’t want them to stay as they were – and they would become better.

Granted, I said: but what you could do by changing environment for anyone or any group of people had its limits.

We’ve got to believe that there are no limits, said Gordon.

In that case you’re in for another of the progressive disillusions.

If so, he said, we’ll all take that when we come to it: we’ve got to act as though we can make a new species.

You’ve got to act like that, but you mustn’t expect it.

It does good to expect the best.

There I wasn’t with him, I said. If you expect the best, then you’re blinding yourself to the truth.

Truth sometimes has to be put into suspended animation.

I don’t believe, I said, that you achieve good action – not for long – if the base is anything but true.

It was an old argument, but new facts were flooding in. He knew them as well as I did. He was an honest controversialist, ready to grope and brood. I had never had a great taste for argument, had lost what little I once had: but it was pleasant arguing with him. In the headaching night we drank more beer, talked on, heard from inside the pub the call of time, and then saw the first half-crowns of rain bombing the pavement.

‘We’d better hurry,’ I said. ‘We’re going to get wet.’

Running in bursts, sheltering under porticoes, lumbering, panting, we reached the main road. He was more mobile than I was, but not a track performer. The storm had broken, water was sploshing up to our shins. We made a last run to the block of flats. There, under cover of the doorway, we halted, so that I could get my breath.

‘Good God,’ said Gordon, pointing up the street towards Marble Arch. There was a solitary figure on the pavement, sauntering very slowly. When it passed into zones illuminated by the arc lamps, one saw it through lances of rain.

‘Carlo,’ said Gordon.

He came towards us, not altering his pace. Watching him, I caught a fresh smell of wet leaves, bringing peace.

When one saw his face, he was wearing a smile, as though satisfaction were brimming over from inside. For an instant I thought that he was drunk.

‘Hallo,’ he called, from a couple of yards away.

He was dead sober.

‘Christ, man,’ Gordon greeted him, ‘you’re wet through.’

It wouldn’t have been possible to be much wetter.

‘So I am,’ said Charles in a mild tone. He looked at us with something like affectionate surprise. He didn’t say any more, but his smile was pressing to return, and he didn’t restrain it.

About a fortnight after Gordon had returned home, in the middle of July, Charles insisted on treating Margaret and me to a show and taking us out to supper afterwards. The show had to be a film, since to him and his circle the theatre was an obsolete art form, which ought to have gone out with the Greeks or certainly with Shakespeare. The show also had to be a film he had seen before so that he could guarantee it. In the cinema he placed himself punctiliously between Margaret and me, whispering to her during the film, showing her an obsessive, and for him unusual, degree of filial attention.

Nothing was said that night. It was the next day, after tea, sitting with both of us in the drawing-room, when he said, quietly but with no introduction at all: ‘As a matter of fact, I’m thinking of moving into Chester Row. I’m sure you don’t mind, do you?’ He was speaking to Margaret, with whom his surface conflict had in the past flared up. ‘Of course you don’t mind, I shall be around, of course.’

‘Chester Row?’ she said in flat surprise.

‘Are you, by God?’ I said. I had a picture of him walking in the rain, the other night: slow, smile of joy, smell of wet leaves. I should never know whether I was right. Had he just come away from her? Was he retracing the history of the race? Did he feel that this was a unique achievement, that it had just been done for the first time?

‘When are you aiming to go?’ said Margaret, as though she were gripping on to practicalities.

‘As a matter of fact, if it doesn’t put anyone out, I was thinking of moving tonight.’

‘How long for?’

‘Indefinite.’ He gave her a smile, reassuring but secretive.

She began to speak and then thought better of it. Charles was giving out happiness, now that he had broken the news, but wasn’t willing to say another word about it. By a curious kind of understanding, almost formal, we all behaved as on the most uneventful of evenings. We looked at the television news at 5.50. Afterwards at dinner Charles made a fuss of his mother. The only references he made to his announcement were strictly practical. He didn’t want anyone at all, including Guy Grenfell, Gordon, his cousins (there were good reasons for that at least, I thought), to hear where he was living. He would collect letters every two or three days. As for telephone calls, we were to say that he was out but would ring back, and then pass the message on to Chester Row. He apologised for the nuisance, but it was necessary.