Charles Snow - Last Things

Security either did find it hard not to accept, or, more likely, for their own reasons were glad to pretend to do so. All that outsiders – including me, at the time – knew was that, suddenly, the fuss about biological warfare disclosures died down. There was an official statement, of a muffled nature, saying that no secrets had been revealed and that precautions about the Official Secrets Act in relation to Government Research Establishments were being enquired into, as a routine precaution. The college issued its own statement saying that, in general principle, contracts from Government departments were not normally undertaken; that the demands of the students for representation had been met: and further that the college and the students had set up a joint committee to examine any further points in dispute.

Some time in July, Charles and Muriel paid us a call, and with meaning but without explanation said that Guy Grenfell would in September be leaving for Harvard and would complete his studies there.

WHEN Muriel asked over the telephone if I ‘could possibly call round’ for a drink, and I said yes, neither of us pretended the invitation was just a casual thought. As before that year, she had chosen Margaret’s evening away from home: arriving at Chester Row, I should have been surprised to find Charles in. At once, as I entered the drawing-room, Muriel apologised blank-faced for his absence. Then she kissed me, not in the happy-go-lucky English fashion, but as though it were a deliberate, an hieratic gesture. Our cheeks parted, and she was standing upright, her eyes not far below mine: I noticed, which I hadn’t before, the first starry lines at the corners, fine and faint on the smooth healthy skin.

She led me to the window seat, where she had been sitting. At the bottom of the window, a few inches were open.

‘Is that too much for you?’ she asked.

‘Not a bit,’ I said, amused by the old-fashioned phrase. Actually, the breath of air was warm: outside it was a beautiful night for late September.

Facing me on the seat she said: ‘I wanted to tell you, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Yes?’

‘We’re fairly certain now that we’re in the clear.’

I nodded. I didn’t ask for evidence. On such a matter, I had confidence in her judgment.

‘We thought of letting you know before this. But he was keeping his fingers crossed a little.’

‘So should I have been.’

‘Would you?’ She looked at me with a flash of interest, as though searching my lineaments for the most vestigial resemblance to my son.

There was a momentary silence. She said: ‘It really is all right, Uncle Lewis.’

‘Excellent.’

As we sat there on the window seat, there was another, and a longer, silence. I was used to her enough by now to feel that this wasn’t the only point of the meeting. Her legs were intertwined, one foot jerking from the ankle. It was rare for her not to have her body, as much as or more than her expression, under complete control.

She said: ‘I wonder if you could possibly bear to have your drinks in the garden? It’s almost nice enough, perhaps. Of course it’s being a terrible nuisance–’

‘Let’s go,’ I replied. She was taking refuge in politeness which didn’t sound like politeness, which might have been mocking. But when I began to move, she leapt up, crossed the room to the sideboard, agile with physical relief. She arranged the tray, and preceded me down the stairs, through her back sitting-room, out to the patio garden. Carrying the tray, she was as poised as a shipboard steward. Some women, I thought, with a figure like hers would have been conscious of it, but that impression she had never given me.

At the end of the garden, table and chairs were waiting under an overhanging rose bush, a bloom or two gleaming out in the twilight. There was a smell, already autumnal, of drying leaves, blended with something less wistful, perhaps – I couldn’t place it – a tobacco plant? She poured out a drink for me, and I sat comfortably sipping. The news was good. Whatever she was intending to say, I was ready to wait. It was getting on for seven o’clock in the evening. In the west, towards the King’s Road, the sky was still luminous. From the houses on each side of Muriel’s, lighted windows were already shining.

Looking at one of them, amber curtains drawn with a chink between them, a standard lamp just visible, for an instant a shape passing across, I felt a curiosity, or something softer like a yearning, which when I was younger I should have thought inadmissible, maudlin and nevertheless undeniable, and which was just as undeniable now. Once, long before, when I was an outsider, gazing at strangers’ windows from the nocturnal streets, it might have been explicable that I should have imagined the hearth glow of homes such as I didn’t have: when I longed for one to return to. Often I had pretended to myself that it was sheer inquisitiveness about others’ lives, trying to feel proud because I wasn’t tamed and was on my own. That wasn’t altogether false. The inquisitiveness was there also. Walking with Maurice on the sombre Christmas afternoon, two or three years ago, I had been oddly gratified – more than the event deserved – as he pointed to lighted rooms in the derelict squares and told me some of the stories that lay behind.

Yet that evening in Muriel’s garden, when curiosity and longing ought both to have been satisfied, I felt the same emotion as I should have felt as a young man. Habits, I had told myself, before this, at a time when I had learned less, lived longer than freedoms. Sometimes they told one more about oneself.

We had been sitting quietly. Muriel gazed up the garden at her own house, so that I could see only her profile, which was becoming softened as the light grew dimmer. Then she said: ‘I’m sorry, but I think you’re misunderstanding me.’ Her tone was clear, but (I thought I heard) not quite composed.

‘What about?’

‘Charles.’

‘What about him?’

‘You won’t see it. But you and I, we’re on the same side.’

‘Are we?’ My voice had become rough and unconceding.

‘I think we are.’

She wasn’t to be beaten down. Her eyes were fixed steadily on me now. She said: ‘You’d like him to make the best of himself, I think you would. And so should I.’

‘We might not agree’, I replied, ‘on what that means.’

‘It means, that we should like him to make the most of his talent. Or wouldn’t you?’ For an instant, she gave a sharp and attacking smile. There was nothing between us, though. Neither age, nor sex, nor subliminal dislike.

‘Of course I should.’

‘Yes. I’m afraid that he may take one risk too many.’

‘You mean, what you’ve just been doing–’

‘No, no, no. We’ve learned something. That’s not the correct way, we shall have to find another method. By the way, I’m not apologising for us. I’m sure he’d be angry with me if I did. And I don’t feel like doing so on my own account.’

‘What is this risk that he’s going to take?’

She shook her head. ‘Haven’t you noticed that he keeps his secrets?’

‘From you?’

‘Oh yes. From me.’

‘What do you know then?’

‘I don’t know. I may be imagining it. You can guess how one does–’ Just then, she lost her crispness.

‘Well, what are you afraid of?’

‘It’s not for tomorrow. It’s not until he’s finished at Cambridge’ (that is, until he graduated in the following June). ‘Then–’

‘Then what?’

‘I think he may be deciding to get away from us all.’

‘Will he leave you?’

‘Men have left women before, haven’t they?’ She added in a level tone: ‘He would also be leaving you.’