Charles Snow - Last Things

‘I must say, she is making a habit of being covered by members of your family.’ He had been speaking of his stepdaughter with genuine fondness, something like the affection of the flesh: he was still doing so, though I hadn’t expected that last remark.

He went on: ‘I couldn’t have chosen better for her if she’d asked me, this time. You have a fine boy there.’

‘So have you with yours.’ That was tactical. I wanted to break the conversation up.

‘We have both been luckier than we deserve. Oh yes, David will give me something to live for when I’m an old man. And your Charles is a blessing too.’ The mention of his son hadn’t distracted him for long. He said: ‘You needn’t wonder why my girl is in love with him.’

‘I don’t wonder. I doubt it. I don’t know.’

‘I tell you, Lewis, I do know. I know her. She puts on a front, she wears a mask, she drives you mad. But she feels without anyone seeing. I know. I know because she used to feel for me. She is in love with him.’

This was the direct opposite of anything that Margaret or I had thought. How much did Azik believe it? He was out to persuade me, he did it with fervour. Of course, he was set on making some sort of bargain – though he must have known that I hadn’t any control over Charles. Perhaps he wanted something quite simple, such as that I shouldn’t use my influence against the marriage, if I were asked. He was pressing her claims, softening me by insisting (he could have known no more than I did, I thought) that she was in love.

‘We’d better leave it to them, hadn’t we?’ I said.

‘Tell me, Lewis. We are good enough friends to say anything, I should think. Why are you against her?’

‘Wait a minute. Haven’t you something to explain to me? Not very long ago you were warning me that she might drop him. Now you’re talking about serious love. You can’t have it both ways–’

He didn’t blink, he gave his wide-lipped froglike smile.

‘Oh yes I can. You see, she has been bitten once. If she feels in danger now, if she’s getting in too deep, and doesn’t see marriage at the end, then she would pull out and save herself. She won’t risk another fiasco. If she thought that was happening she’d be capable of cutting her losses. And breaking both their hearts in the process.’

That was altogether too elaborate, I said. When I was young, I invented some labyrinthine explanations for the way I behaved with Sheila. I shouldn’t trust them now. I had come to be suspicious, more than suspicious, of second-order emotions and motives.

Azik shrugged.

‘If they come apart, you may have to see who did it.’ He broke off: ‘But you haven’t told me. Why are you against her?’

What I said wasn’t all I felt. I was afraid, I was speaking without much emphasis, that if he married young she might confine him.

‘What do you mean, confine him?’

‘She won’t alter. She’s set by now–’

‘Are you saying her opinions are set? And that young man is going to adopt them? God in Heaven, Lewis, do you know your own son?’

‘Not quite that. No, they might confine each other. They both happen to have a passion for politics.’ (Did he know that about his stepdaughter?) ‘That might restrict them, they might never get out of the groove–’

‘Politics shmolitics,’ said Azik, who encouraged, irrespective of merit, anything which Gentiles accepted as Jewish jokes.

The meeting, which seemed to have been disappointing for him and was disconcerting for me, ebbed towards, not a conclusion, but an end.

WE shall have a quiet time, I expect,’ Muriel had said in her own drawing-room, when asked about their plans for Christmas. She might have expected it, if she were less shrewd than any of us imagined: what was certain is that she didn’t get it.

Otherwise there was not much one could be certain about. What happened to them in the winter of 1966–7, no one knew in detail but themselves. I received a partial account some time afterwards, from, I kept thinking, the one source I shouldn’t have contemplated. Much of it seemed honest: but it had the disadvantages of all accounts which were given with hindsight. However, some of it I could check against events which I observed for myself. Like most bits of second-hand history, it left one dissatisfied, possibly both too credulous and too sceptical.

Still, that account was all that I had to work on. Later, I sometimes wondered what I should have said if I had had information at the time. Certainly, that they were expecting too much, that they had fallen into the occupational disease, for politicians of any age, of over-optimism. So that they sometimes seemed romantic, if not silly. But if I had known it all I should also have admitted, perhaps only to myself, that some of them were capable. They would sit in my contemporaries’ chairs soon enough, or perhaps in different chairs which they had constructed for themselves.

To begin with, it seemed – and there was nothing surprising here – that during the Christmas period and the New Year they were preoccupied with, or at least spent much of their time upon, what was now in private jargon called ‘the movement’. But they were preoccupied in a complex and sometimes ambiguous fashion. They were taking part in plans for the movement’s operations: the interesting thing was, they and their intimates, including Bestwick, had plans within plans, and these often, for security’s sake, had to be concealed.

Not that they were unrealistic or undisciplined. It was their own choice to join, as very much the junior partners, with a core of London students. A London college was to be the point of action. The Cambridge group hadn’t much to offer, except as a token of goodwill, rather like a contingent of New Zealanders being attached to American forces. They found a leader whom they would in any case have had to accept: but who in fact had a quality none of them possessed or had come across before. He was already a national figure and was to become more so. I did not meet him until much later, and then only casually: but like most other people I was soon used to seeing his face on television and hearing him talk. His name was Olorenshaw. The television interviewers and commentators called him by his Christian name of Antony, or, when they knew him less well, Tony. However, that was something like affable ministers strolling through the smoking-room and addressing backbenchers by the wrong first name. All Olorenshaw’s friends and comrades called him nothing else but ‘Olly’, following a good old lower-class habit, much in use among professional games players. Olly actually was a goodish cricketer, and had played in the Bradford League. His father was a journalist on the Yorkshire Post , and Olly had been brought up in modest comfort. He was a muscular, shortish, low-slung young man, with a snub-nosed face that one wouldn’t have noticed in a crowd.

Yet there was no doubt that he had, to use the fashionable word of that period, charisma. Characters as different as Charles, Gordon Bestwick, Grenfell, Muriel, all recognised it and succumbed to it; perhaps some envied it. Quite why he had it, or what it consisted of, none of them could analyse, even later in cooler blood. He was a fair organiser, though not as competent as some of his student colleagues: he had considerable powers of decision. He possessed some knowledge of the theory, Marcusian and so on, which was running round the student world. His intelligence was better than average, but Gordon and Charles couldn’t have thought him a flier. He was an impassioned but repetitive speaker.

None of that added up to the effect which he produced. Perhaps the answer was quite simple. He really did feel exactly as others round him felt, and had the gift of voicing it an instant before they recognised it for themselves. That night in Trinity, over a year before, Charles had said – with self-knowledge, with inhibiting self-knowledge – in politics you couldn’t afford to be too different from everyone else. In behaviour Charles to some extent acted on that maxim, and Bestwick more so: but not in feeling. Whereas to Olly it came as natural as his strong-muscled walk.