Charles Snow: Last Things

On my left, her daughter Muriel was quiet, cheekbones and jawline softened by pregnancy. Then I caught a flash of her eyes, as though she were surreptitiously making fun of Rosalind or me or both. It was the kind of green-eyed disrespectful flash I had seen often enough in her father, whom she had never known. She was polite to me as she was to everyone, maddeningly polite, but I didn’t begin to understand her. She had not once asked me a question about her father, though she must have known that I had been his closest friend. One day, out of curiosity or provocation, I had tried to talk about him. ‘Did you think that?’ she had said decorously. ‘Oh, I must ask Aunt Meg’ (as she called Margaret, of whom she seemed to be fond). Again, she must have known that Margaret and Roy had never met.

When, for an instant, Pat engaged his mother-in-law in conversation, Muriel asked a few soft-voiced questions about the autumn theatres. She knew that I wasn’t much interested, and rarely went. Was she being obtuse, or amusing herself? She was abnormally self-possessed and strong-willed, that was all I knew about her. Like a good many other men, I found her – in some inexplicable and irritating fashion – very attractive.

Just then – we had finished the fish, Azik was smelling his first glass of claret, for which, in spite of his earlier strictures, he had considerable enthusiasm – I heard Pat utter the name of Margaret’s father. Startled, turning away from Muriel, I looked down the table. Pat was smiling at Margaret with something between protectiveness and triumph. His brown eyes were shining: he had his air of doggy confidence, of one who managed to please but wasn’t easily put down.

‘Yes,’ he was telling her, ‘he was in better spirits, I’m sure he was.’

‘You mean, you’ve seen him?’

‘Of course I have, Aunt Meg.’

It became clear that Pat was telling the truth, which could not invariably be assumed. It also became clear that Austin Davidson had talked with his innocent candour, and that Pat knew everything we knew, and had – certainly to his wife and her mother – passed most of it on. Pat had paid, not one visit, but several: for an instant Margaret looked stupefied, astonished that her father had told us nothing of this. But why should he? He had other visitors besides ourselves, but he didn’t think it relevant to mention them.

The greater mystery was how Pat had learned that Davidson was in the clinic at all, and how he had got inside the place himself. As for the first, he was one of those natural detectives or intelligence agents, whom I had come across, and been disconcerted by, more than once in my life: and, further, he had always been specially inquisitive about Davidson, and anxious to know him. Not from motives which were entirely pure: Pat was an aspiring painter, and he believed that an eminent art critic, even though retired, must have retained some useful acquaintances. Anyway, insatiably curious and also on the make, Pat had somehow obtained the entrée to Davidson’s bedroom, quite possibly using my name without undue fastidiousness.

Once there, it was no mystery at all that Davidson had encouraged him to come again. Pat was on the make, he was a busybody, a gossip, often a mischief-maker and several kinds of a liar: but he was also kind. In the presence of the isolated old man, Pat would try to enliven him, using all his resources, which were considerable: for he was more than kind, to many people he was a life-giver. The unfairness was, he had that talent far more highly developed than persons of better character: when I came to think of it, life-givers of Pat’s species had, so far as I had met them, usually been people who wouldn’t pass much of an examination into their moral nature. That had been true of my boyhood friend Jack Cotery, whom in a good many ways Pat resembled. It was probable, I thought, that Pat’s visits were more of a help to Austin Davidson than either Margaret’s or mine.

‘You must believe me,’ Pat said to Margaret, ‘he’s looking forward to things now, he’s picking up, you’ll see.’

‘I’ve known him longer than you have, haven’t I?’ said Margaret.

‘That’s why you don’t see everything about him now,’ Pat replied, with his mixture of tenderness and cheek. No, he insisted, you have to notice that Davidson was eager for his little pleasures: he was allowed five cigarettes a day, and each one was an occasion; so were his cups of tea. He had made his own timetable to live by. He would go on living for a long time yet.

He had put that ‘other business’ behind him, Pat was persuading her. It had been an incident, that was all. Margaret did not believe him, and yet wanted to. In spite of herself she was feeling grateful. Pat had heard all about Davidson’s plan to kill himself. And yet he could forget it, from one minute to the next: it wasn’t that he was too young to understand, for often the young understood suicide better than the rest of us. Perhaps he was just too surgent. Anyway, his optimism came from every cell of his body. He was positive that Austin Davidson would survive and that his life was worth living.

Azik, left out of this conversation, was giving his wife uncomfortable glances. Not that he hadn’t listened to it all before; not that he was embarrassed for Margaret, or found his son-in-law unduly brash; more, I thought, because Azik had the delicacy of the very healthy, who did not much relish the echoes of mortality. Finally he said to Margaret that he would send her father more flowers, and addressed me down the table on the subject of next week’s general election. Yes, it would be a near thing. The American election wouldn’t be. Things looked a bit more promising all round, said Azik: for about that time, a year or two before and after, he, like other detached and unillusioned men, was letting himself indulge in a patch of hope. That was the case with Francis Getliffe and with me: with Eastern European and American friends, including even David Rubin, the least optimistic of men. In world-outlook, there was more hope about than at any time since the twenties. We did not enjoy being reminded of that afterwards, but it was so.

About our local affairs, Azik was repeating what he often told us: it didn’t much matter who got in. He proceeded to lecture us, with the relish of a born pedagogue, on the limits of political freewill. Margaret was grinning surreptitiously in my direction: she enjoyed hearing me being treated as an innocent. Like me, she was fond of Azik, and his ingrained conviction that we were ignorant, though not entirely unteachable, was one of the endearing things about him. But she couldn’t resist asking him if he wasn’t being disingenuous. After all, it was common knowledge that he had made lavish contributions to Labour Party funds.

Azik was imperturbable. ‘That doesn’t affect the issue, my friends,’ he said. ‘That is a little piece of insurance, you understand?’

Did we? Azik liked playing the game all ways. He was a shrewd operator. If a Labour government came to power, there were advantages in having friends at court. Yet that, I thought, was altogether too simple. Azik wished to pretend to us, and to himself, that he calculated all the time: but he didn’t, any more than less ingenious men. He was an outsider, and he was, in some residual fashion, of which he was half-ashamed, on the side of other outsiders. For all his expansiveness, the luxury in which he revelled, he was never ultimately at ease with his fellow tycoons. He had once told me that, coming to England as an exile, he had felt one irremovable strain: you had to think consciously about actions which, in your own country, you performed as instinctively as breathing. He was also another kind of exile: rich as he had become, he had to think consciously about his actions when he was in the company of other rich men.