Charles Snow - Last Things

‘You know,’ he said, in genuine, unaffected surprise, ‘I didn’t think I should mind – if it came to trouble. I find that I do.’

Muriel broke in fiercely, as though rallying him, though he was much calmer than she was. It couldn’t and didn’t matter practically: nothing would break his academic career for long: anyway, it didn’t matter, he couldn’t really be touched. Anything he had ever talked of doing, was quite outside anyone else’s power.

I sat silent while she stormed at him, once or twice her gaze flashing towards me.

Charles smoothed back her hair, and said: ‘All right. All right. But some of us don’t find it quite so easy to escape from the respectable embrace, you know.’

He said it teasing her, with affection. Yet, strangely enough, though he had made remarks which sounded arrogant once or twice that night, that was the only one which struck me so.

A little later, as I was getting ready to go, he said to me, in an altogether different tone: ‘I’m sorry if all this is a trouble to you. I know it is.’

I said, taken by surprise at his naturalness, more bluff than I usually was, that there were worse things.

Muriel, brilliant with courtesy returned, said: ‘We’ve been very grateful for all your help, Uncle Lewis, you’re much too kind, aren’t you? I’m very sorry if we’re a trouble to you. I am so very sorry.’

NEXT evening, Gordon Bestwick called on me. By this time they had become obsessively careful about telephoning or any other means of communication short of physical presence: thus Charles hadn’t rung me up to report on his interview with Monteith but had sent Gordon round instead.

At least, that was the ostensible reason for the visit, but I soon found that he was consumed with worry. Perhaps Charles thought I might give him some relief.

It was hard work, either when Margaret was present or when she had made an excuse to set Gordon and me free for a walk outside. To begin with, he wouldn’t talk at all about the interview that afternoon. Whether they had resolved not to speak to unauthorised persons, and whether they had decided that Margaret was such a one, I couldn’t tell. It might have been that she still kept an air of something like privilege whereas I was nearer to the ground he knew.

If that was so, it was a classic case of misjudgment. For Margaret, used all her life to her relatives making exhibitions of themselves for conscience sake, was the least disturbed of any of us. After all, her father and his friends had received obloquy and worse through being conscientious objectors in the First World War: they had been under inspection twenty years later as premature anti-Fascists, being used as front men by the other side. They were people who had been brought up – and who had had not negligible encouragement of private means – not to give a damn.

So, though she hadn’t much patience with the students’ cause, she felt in the nature of things that spirited young men would join it. If they didn’t count the risks, well, since her marriage she had come to know so many of my colleagues who (and she had once felt this of me) counted the risks too much. Not that she didn’t count the risks for Charles: but she would have said, except when the superstitious flesh was overruling her, that she hoped he wouldn’t do so for himself.

She did her best to get Gordon talking as he sat sprawled on the sofa, great formidable head back against the cushions, at times fidgeting upwards as though he were trying to take part. The head wasn’t less formidable, but more grotesque, on account of a large acne pustule on his nose. He looked so miserable that we both forgot that he was a man probably stronger, and with the certainty of more powers to come, than either of us. We just saw him lolling there, with the lost-for-ever misery of youth. And it was a double misery. Once he roused himself and asked Margaret when she last saw Nina.

‘Last night, actually,’ said Margaret, speaking the truth, not knowing whether she should.

‘Oh.’ A hard noise. I felt a kind of pity, sentimental perhaps, for young men who had no confidence with girls.

Soon afterwards Margaret left us, and immediately I asked him what had happened yesterday. Even then he did not reply at ease. I had to say, my brother and I felt safer, discussing security affairs in the open air. Would he prefer that? When we were walking up the street towards Lancaster Gate, for the first time his voice lost its dullness.

The interrogations, he said, had lasted about an hour each: there was mention of more to follow. At intervals ‘the man’ (who had not introduced himself) interjected not as questions but as facts, statements about the examinee – ‘where I was, what I had been doing,’ Gordon told me. ‘Irrelevant, a lot of it. But they had collected stuff about me that they seemed to know better than I did.’

They had been to his school, and to people who knew his family. That was standard technique I said. It seemed strange to have it brought up now, he replied. That was standard response, everyone felt that, I said. As for what happened, both in the rising and in the plans, they knew plenty.

‘They’re leaving us guessing in spots. Whether they know or whether they’re bluffing. But they know enough to fix us. If we try to fool ourselves about that, we shall make things worse.’

Apparently one or two of the principals, though not Charles or Muriel, were still self-buoyant with optimism (the adrenalin optimism of action, perhaps; Gordon had spent last night upon them, using his bitterest and most competent tongue). As we walked along, he wasn’t saying anything that couldn’t have been foreseen. Up a side street, people were carrying their tankards outside a pub, standing on the pavement in the warm air. I asked Gordon if he would like a drink. No, he said, he wasn’t feeling much like it. He might be one of those – I could sympathise – who in trouble shied away from any sort of solace.

Except perhaps the solace of making resolutions.

‘This is a lesson for us, anyway,’ he said roughly, not looking towards me, but as though I were a companion who had to be convinced. ‘We mustn’t make the same mistake again. We tried to do two things at once, and that’s because we were too conceited. We made it all too complicated, it was my fault and Carlo’s. It seemed a good idea, but it was an infantile mistake. It mustn’t be repeated–’

He meant, and it was probably true, that without the inner plan of seizing official correspondence the rest would have been a total success. Which to the external world it had already been. Olly and his committee were getting their demands piecemeal: by the end of the summer their whole charter would have been met. But that was easy, Gordon was reflecting with harsh realism. Whatever students wanted as students would be given them on a plate. It was child’s play to make that kind of impact. But when the impact broke through a bit deeper, got right among the things which the society would hold on to like death, then the forces of resistance suddenly crept round you –

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon, ‘why do they always know when to use their blasted advantages?’

I replied, with the kind of sarcasm that I should have used to Charles, that it didn’t seem to me entirely unreasonable. You used your means of offence: established society replied with its own.

‘Damn them to hell,’ said Gordon. ‘I hate them. I hate them and everything they stand for.’

He was not disposed either to dispassion or irony. What was right for him was wicked for the other side. That capacity for anger was a great help to him that day and might, I thought, be a strength in the future. Nearly all men of action possessed it. You had to believe the other side was a hundred per cent wrong, and preferably evil, to be a hundred per cent committed to your own. It was one of the more disagreeable facts of life. I much preferred Gordon when he was sad, trying to cope with a heavyweight temperament, mind sharp, senses rebelling: but it was his talent for anger which acted like a blood transfusion that evening, lifted him out of sadness or even fright, made one simultaneously less engaged by his company and more certain that he would survive.