Charles Snow - Last Things

‘You were told this morning, were you?’ said Margaret. She was quiet but as urgent as I was.

‘Yes,’ said Nina. The previous evening, two visitors had called at Chester Row. One was a conspicuously fat man (that must be Gilbert Cooke, I broke out, he had taken Monteith’s place at number two, the investigation was starting at a very high level).

They had asked all sorts of questions. They had been very friendly and polite –

‘They would be,’ I commented. There was a technique in interrogation. The next interview, if Gilbert took it himself, wouldn’t be quite as friendly.

‘Who did they ask?’

‘Charles. Muriel. They’d seen Olly already, somewhere else. Oh, and Gordon Bestwick was at Chester Row last night too.’

‘What did they seem to be after?’

‘How much they knew about bw (biological warfare). Where they’d been for the last week. Had they been inside the college. Had they seen the files from any of the offices. You know.’

I knew, and Margaret also, that Nina herself was remarkably well informed. She was as cool as any of them. She reported that, early in the proceedings, before they were interrogated separately, Muriel had enquired whether she could send for her solicitor, if it seemed a good idea. Charles had stopped her, saying that it was a very bad idea. That was, Margaret and I agreed without a word spoken, good judgment on his part.

They had parted with cordiality. The next step, the fat man had said, was – if they wouldn’t mind and if it wasn’t too inconvenient – for them to have a talk with his superior. That sounded like Monteith himself: I still couldn’t understand – and if I did understand, I was more troubled – why they should be working this enquiry from the top. Normally it would be done by agents very much junior, though Cooke might have been shown the papers.

Those ‘talks’ were beginning tomorrow: that is, since it was now nearly midnight, in a few hours’ time. Olly and the signatories to the communiqué had been ‘invited’ to attend in the morning, Charles, Muriel, and ‘poor Gordon’ in the afternoon. They were to go to the Admiralty – which everyone else took for granted, but which seemed to me like a piece of mystification for mystification’s sake. Monteith and Cooke had perfectly good offices of their own, together with a dislike for using them.

‘Why “poor Gordon”?’ Margaret was asking.

‘He seems to be taking it harder than the others,’ said Nina, with a sort of clinical kindness. Then she told us, now that she had given us the hard news and could be off duty for a moment:

‘Do you know, when Daddy heard that all this happened at Chester Row, that was the first time he had realised that Charles and Muriel were living together?’

She gave an innocent smile at the innocence of the elderly.

‘What did he think about it?’ Margaret said.

‘I think he was rather shocked.’

As a matter of fact, about a sexual adventure Martin and a none-too-prim citizen of Antonine Rome would have been about equally shockable. If he disliked this one, it was because the woman had been his son’s wife, and he was still capable of blaming her.

I had been thinking, it would be better if Nina, not I, rang up Chester Row. If they were at home, I ought to go there at once. As she was obeying, she hesitated and remarked, as though it were an afterthought: ‘I don’t think anyone mentioned Guy Grenfell last night. I don’t think he’s having to go tomorrow.’

Then she went to the telephone. Those last words seemed curiously inconsequential: but Margaret looked at me with eyes indulgent but sharp. She had no doubt – that Guy Grenfell was Nina’s channel of communication – and very little more that she had brought him into the conversation, partly because she was anxious about him, partly for the pleasure of uttering his name. Uttering his name with people there to hear: she might be self-possessed, an excellent courier, but she wasn’t immune to the softer pleasures. Margaret liked her for it. As for me, in the hurry and tension of the evening, I wondered for a moment whether this also would come as a surprise to Martin, and whether or not he would approve.

In the hall of our block of flats, I waited, Nina beside me, for a taxi. I was feeling the special chagrin of no transport that came upon one in big towns. It was raining as hard as that night the previous summer when Charles had sauntered slowly home, absent-minded with joy. If we walked to the tube station, I said to Nina, we should get drenched. Did she mind? Don’t be silly, Uncle Lewis, she said, taking my arm as physically relaxed as she was shy, dark hair falling from under her hood, cheeks flushed, looking already naiad-like in the rain. I had an irrelevant thought, it was absurd, that on this particular night I should arrive at their house, Muriel’s and my son’s, just as inspissatedly soaked as when I first arrived, long ago, at Sheila’s.

We were, however, rescued. A car drew up – ‘Aren’t you getting wet?’ came a cheerful but not original question. The driver happened to be the one neighbour with whom, after twenty years living there, I was on social terms. Chester Row? No problem. Humming merrily, rosy after a party but driving with care, he took us through the midnight-empty streaming streets.

At the house, Charles opened the door, with Muriel waiting close by, but there was at once a hiatus. He held my coat, but both of them were looking, with glances that were not unfriendly but steady and purposeful, at Nina.

‘How are we going to get you home?’ said Charles, quite affectionately, giving a good impersonation of an elder brother. He didn’t look it, but he was a month younger.

‘I think I’d better order a car. We shan’t get a taxi tonight,’ said Muriel.

They weren’t going to talk in front of Nina. They had realised, it didn’t take much divining, where my information had come from. They didn’t seem to resent my possessing it (in fact they had greeted me with warmth and perhaps relief) but they weren’t giving Nina the chance to transmit any more. They had become, and no one could blame them, as security conscious as the men who had been questioning them.

They were doing less than justice, though, both to themselves and Nina. It wasn’t through their laxness that she had learned any single fact: as I discovered later, Guy Grenfell had of necessity to know all the secrets, and they couldn’t have foreseen that, apparently all of a sudden, he wanted to share everything with this girl. Whereas Nina, who was really as discreet as her father, had spoken only to him. She couldn’t do more, because of her obligations to the others, nor less, because of her duty to do her best for Guy.

Anyway, Muriel did not take her upstairs. We all waited down in the dining-room, Charles pouring me a drink, making a kind of family conversation about Irene’s sciatica and Maurice’s new wife, whom by this time they had all met. Nina, not at all touchy, showed no sign of resentment at being shut out. She had the talent for acceptance which one sometimes found in the happy. We were all listening, me with impatience, for the car to drive up outside.

At last the three of us were alone in the long drawing-room. Charles and Muriel sat on the sofa facing me, his arm round her and fingers interlaced. It was not often that they were demonstrative in public, if by public one meant anyone else’s presence, such as mine.

I said: ‘Well, I’ve heard these people came and questioned you. You’d better tell me what they said.’

Their account, though fuller, agreed with what I had been told already once that night. They both had precise memories, and sometimes they reproduced conversations word by word. There was one point of interest, though it was predictable. When they were being interrogated separately, the two agents had left them for a few minutes, obviously to confer, and returned to concentrate on a day, the preceding Wednesday, for which Charles had already given a story of his movements. She had been taken over the same hours, asked where she had been, how much of the time he had been with her, whether she could sketch out her diary of the day. It was an old trick, and I was surprised that Cooke had used it so blatantly. It had got nowhere. Their reconstructions coincided, and they had demonstrably been telling the truth.