Charles Snow - Last Things

Then Muriel gazed along the table towards Charles.

‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘will you bring the others up when you’re ready?’

‘Of course,’ said Charles.

Margaret gave me a stupefied glance before she went with the other two women out of the dining-room. Now I felt sure that this evening must have been prepared for, though it seemed due more to Muriel’s sense of – humour? mischief? even impudence? than to Charles’. He might have thought up a charade, but he wouldn’t have carried it so far. He might have considered that last touch inartistic. He knew as well as anyone there that Margaret and I had never separated men from women after dinner since we set up house. Nevertheless, still grave and decorous, he apologised to Azik and me for not being able to offer us port; could we make do with brandy?

Until we left, I didn’t hear an intimate word spoken. Chat when the party re-formed in the drawing-room, Charles having kept us below for a precise fifteen minutes. Chat admirably tailored for a dinner party in a remote diplomatic mission, third secretary and wife doing their duty by elderly compatriots. Once Rosalind asked her daughter: ‘What are you doing for Christmas?’ – where the ‘you’ was intended to be in the singular.

‘Oh,’ said Muriel, ‘we shall have a quiet time, I expect; we shan’t be going away.’ She contrived to make their ménage sound remarkably like the end of Little Dorrit . Occasionally their eyes met. Otherwise they behaved, not only as though they were safely married, but as though they had been so for a long time.

Glances at watches. Goodbyes. Margaret unusually effusive with thanks for a delightful evening. Ritual of gratitude. Ritual of kisses. Margaret and I back home by eleven o’clock.

The departure of their guests so early might have suggested to Muriel and Charles that the party had not been an uproarious success. Presumably that wasn’t weighing on their spirits. And yet, as with so many of Muriel’s father’s exploits, there was a faint, an almost imperceptible doubt. It was a thousand to one against – but what if they had been serious? What if they had been to obsessive trouble and given their first dinner party?

In that case, said Margaret, tender to the embarrassments of the young, it would have been a major disappointment. She didn’t believe it: but she didn’t utterly and absolutely disbelieve it. I laughed at her, and wasn’t unaffected myself. Muriel had a gift for disquiet, I thought: that is, she stayed still and here were we, more mystified about them both than we had been before.

We were not the only people who were mystified that night. Two days later, on the Monday afternoon, Azik’s secretary telephoned me. Mr Schiff would be very grateful if I could spare him a few minutes. When? Straight away, if I could manage it: otherwise – Yes, I was doing nothing, I said, I would come round. Mr Schiff will send a car for you. That wasn’t necessary. Oh, Mr Schiff insists –

Mr Schiff did insist, just as Lord Lufkin used to, and as in Lord Lufkin’s time I was driven in a Daimler to the office. Driven in state for something like eight hundred yards. For Azik, like other tycoons, had moved his office westwards, into the Park Lane fringe of Mayfair, and now inhabited a mansion which in the nineteenth century had been the town house of a Whig grandee. All, including the car, was as sumptuous as Lord Lufkin’s accoutrements used to be: thick carpets on the office floors, Regency decorations restored, regilded. There was just one difference. Of these two, Azik was by far the more outpouring: which wasn’t saying much, since very few men were less outpouring than Lufkin. In fact, Azik was lavish by any standard, his tastes were exuberant, as witness his house in Eaton Square. Yet Lufkin’s personal office had reminded one of the Palazzo Venezia in one of the Duce’s more expansionist phases: whereas Azik’s office in Hertford Street, which I had not visited before that day, must have been something like a closet or at best a dressing-room in the old mansion, much smaller, darker, more shut in than the room of his own secretary, and, apart from a desk and a couple of chairs, almost totally unequipped.

There were no offers of tea, drinks, or even cigarettes. Azik did all his hospitality at home. He shook my hand, and immediately asked: ‘I wanted to hear, what do you think of our young friends?’

‘I suppose you knew about them?’

I meant, did he know, before Saturday night, that they were living together. Azik laid a finger to the side of his nose.

‘My dear Lewis, what do you take me for?’

As a matter of historical fact, it had not required superhuman acumen or any other quality with which I was willing to credit Azik. Muriel had, for some purpose of her own, first raised her mother’s suspicions and then, after various misdirections, had gone into a fit of apparent absent-mindedness and told her.

‘They have presented us with a fait accompli , I should say,’ Azik put it like a question. ‘I don’t understand why they wish to remind us of it, do you?’

That was only one of the things I didn’t understand, I said. Including the whole situation.

Azik nodded.

‘The only certain feature of that situation is that it won’t stand still.’ He went on, he’d never known a situation with a woman which did stand still, until he married Rosalind: and not always then. He spoke with a shamefaced smile, not so unquenchably the hypermasculine or the Jewish papa.

Then he said: ‘Your son is a lucky young man, shouldn’t you say?’

‘Is he?’

‘He loves her, of course. He’d be very hard to please if he didn’t. Believe me, I know more about the girl than you do. He’s very lucky to love and find everything teed up. We didn’t have so much luck, you and I, my friend.’

I said yes. I was thinking – me at Charles’ age, walking the town streets, virgin, craving, about to fall in love without return. As for Azik at that age, I knew nothing: it must have been about the end of Weimar, he might perhaps have been wondering whether he would have the chance, not to love, but simply to live.

‘Well then,’ said Azik. ‘It would be more of a blow to him if she dropped him. And if you’ll listen to me, I have to assure you, that might happen.’

I had a sudden sense of affront, that he should suggest Charles was going to be ill-treated in love. If he said it about me, well and good – so that I was more offhand than I need have been, when I replied: ‘It has happened to better men than him.’ I went on: ‘But I’ve seen no sign of it. Have you? Have you heard anything?’

Azik slowly shook his great head. There was a long pause, as though he were hesitating whether to speak or alternatively was reorganising his case. With the apologetic air of one putting a probing amendment, he said: ‘How would you regard it if they got married?’ I wasn’t prepared. I blurted out: ‘He’s far too young–’

‘As far as that goes, he is grown up. He has grown up very fast. But I didn’t mean now, my friend. Not yet. Not yet.’

‘I haven’t given it a thought.’ That wasn’t true. It had passed through my mind as a possibility, one that seemed unlikely and that I didn’t like.

‘Perhaps you might some day.’ He gave me a cheerful, watchful, evaluating glance. Another pause. ‘I should say, there would be no objection from our side. My side.’ (Was that a correction? Did Rosalind, as I could well believe, disagree with him? Was that why we were meeting in his office?) ‘There would be no objection. No, I should welcome it.’

‘Oh well, there’s no hurry,’ I said, playing for time.

‘I want her to have a good life. She mustn’t make another mistake. That was a disaster, the last one. But this time she has chosen something worth while.’ He broke into a grin.