Charles Snow - Last Things

One morning in May, Martin rang me up from Cambridge. What about a day at Lord’s? I didn’t see much inducement, but he pressed me. When I had said yes, I felt cross with him. He must have known that I had given up watching cricket: even if I hadn’t, the match, when I looked it up in the papers, had no attractions either for him or me. It wasn’t even good weather. Although the sky was bright, it wasn’t warm enough to sit with pleasure in the open air.

Waiting for me in front of the pavilion, Martin gave an impassive smile. Not too exciting to be unbearable, he said. We were almost alone, sitting there in the cold sunlight. Above the spring-fresh grass, the stands shone white and empty. Nothing was happening. A few runs, no wickets. From one end a large man with a long run bowled medium-paced inswingers to a legside field. From the other end an almost identical man did almost identically the same. Curious how the game had developed, Martin commented. It was probably still great fun to play. He couldn’t pretend it was great fun to watch.

Yet he continued to watch with absorption. The technique was always interesting, he said. All I admitted was that the fielding looked marvellous, out of comparison better than when I followed the game. The score seeped up to twenty-five after an hour’s play. One wicket fell, to a good catch at leg-slip.

Just before one o’clock Martin said that we had better have a snack before the rush. I was glad to move, but I couldn’t understand where the rush was coming from. In the pavilion bar, under layers of team photographs, stood half a dozen men, one of whom Martin knew. To one of the ledges under the photographs, we carried our sandwiches and glasses. Martin continued to talk cricket. I asked how he had had the inspiration for us to spend the day like this. He looked at me with a fraternal recognitory glance, and then exchanged a word with his acquaintance close by.

As we left the bar, he suggested that we might take a walk round the ground. Through gaps in the stands, one saw the players still moving in the middle, not yet come in for lunch. We arrived at the practice nets, the expanse of turf behind the Nursery end. There was no one anywhere near.

‘Yes, there is something,’ he said.

I was at a loss. Then I realised that he was replying to my question in the bar, which had actually been entirely innocent, just a mock complaint.

‘I’m not sure how reliable my information is,’ he said.

‘What is it?’

‘Had you heard that Charles and company are trying to crash Porton wide open?’

That was the first intimation I had. Those meetings in Muriel’s study, which were later described to me, had not been so much as suspected, and still weren’t, either by Martin or me, that morning at Lord’s. He had been given – so I discovered – only the slimmest of hints.

It was enough for him. Most people would not have taken so long, wouldn’t have eased away time by technical analyses of the game, before they broke the news. But Martin, as he grew older, had developed the habit, not uncommon in men who had seen many things go wrong, of deliberately slowing himself down, of adapting the displeasing to his own pace. It was a habit which I had noticed long before in his predecessor in college office, Arthur Brown.

‘I’ve heard nothing at all,’ I said.

‘Does it make any kind of sense? Is it in their line?’

‘It could be.’

‘How would they get hold of anything? I suppose it mightn’t be impossible.’

He knew very little more. Martin and I exchanged remarks about biological warfare in our old kind of Whitehall shorthand. We might have been back in wartime, talking about the most recent news of the nuclear bomb. In fact, that was why Martin had led me to the practice ground, where we could speak without being overheard, just as in the war we held some secret conversations in the middle of Hyde Park.

‘It could be dangerous,’ said Martin.

‘Who for?’ It didn’t need asking.

‘For anyone who wants to broadcast something he hasn’t any right to know.’

‘Yes. Meaning Charles.’

‘Charles. One or two others as well, I fancy. I’m thinking of Charles.’

We had reached, walking slowly, the rough and piebald grass where, during festive matches, the tents were pitched.

Martin said: ‘He might get into desperate trouble. If he gives them a chance to use the law against him, they could take it. He wouldn’t stand a chance.’

‘They’ll try to keep it quiet–’

‘He might have gone too far for that.’ He was speaking very quietly. ‘Good God, he’s making a nuisance of himself.’

‘That’s the least of it.’

‘Why in hell does he want to set up as the conscience of the world?’

For an instant, I got away from thoughts of Charles.

‘I’m not sure’, I said, ‘that that comes too well from you.’

Neither of us could forget that when Martin had been in his thirties, years older than Charles was now, he had behaved in a fashion that was (if one had been feeling like sarcasm) comically similar. From inside the nuclear project, he had attempted to write a letter of outrage when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I had stopped him, at a cost to our relation which had taken some time to put right. Then later, with the headship of the whole English operation open to him, he had, without flurry and almost without explanation, resigned. All Charles’ friends would have thought Martin a hard and worldly man: he could be both those things. Yet, among the middle-aged people whom Charles knew, Martin was one of the few who had made a sacrifice.

Hearing my gibe, he gave a grim smile, lips pulled down.

‘I should have thought’, he said, ‘that I was in a privileged position.’

He went on talking of the penalties that anyone breaking official secrets might pay. We both knew all about it. Some careers could be closed, or at least impeded: one would find mysterious obstacles if one attempted most kinds of official life. Martin’s concern, and mine, became practical, almost as unethereal as though we were trying to watch over Charles’ health.

To some, it would have seemed puzzling, or even unnatural, that Martin should be so much affected. True, he had shown a glint of brotherly malice, of obscure satisfaction, that, after all his troubles with his own son, I should run into one with mine.

But that glint emerged from feelings which contradicted it. Martin had a family sense much stronger than my own. Charles might have existed for years as an incarnate reproach to Martin’s son: but he was also the chief hope of the whole family. With any luck, Martin believed, he was going to make his independent name. And Martin imagined him making a name in the official world where Martin could himself have been successful. It was noticeable, I thought, that people living inside what Charles’ friends called a ‘structure’ couldn’t easily picture able men fulfilling themselves outside. That had been true of me when I lived, as Martin did now, in a college, or afterwards in Whitehall and Westminster. Somehow these institutions, which had their own charm to those inside, set limits to one’s expectations. Enclaves which made for a comprehensible life. When one left them behind, as I had done, it was a bit of a surprise to find that enclaves weren’t necessary, and that comprehensibility wasn’t such a comfort as one had thought.

So that some of Martin’s hopes for Charles I could get on without, and my concerns, as we walked back and forward across the Nursery turf were less sharp-edged. Yet still I was shaken by thoughts of prosecution – or less than that, plain scandal, almost as my mother would have been. One’s self-sufficiency dropped away. One cared where one didn’t choose to care: often where one ought not to care. Scandal, notoriety, row. He was proposing to act – so far as I could tell – according to his beliefs. To many – what did I think myself? – they were decent beliefs. Scandal, notoriety, row. I wasn’t a stranger to them myself, and had survived.