Charles Snow - Last Things

Now Maurice, though he made no complaint, seemed no better at waiting than anyone else.

His only sign of the old self-forgetfulness came soon after he had met Charles that evening. Maurice had said, gently but unhesitantly, that he hoped Muriel was well and happy. And that he hoped Charles was ‘looking after her’. No one else would have spoken to Charles like that. It might have seemed impertinent, if it hadn’t been said with so little self-assertion. Anyway, Charles took it, though he didn’t make an explicit reply.

Whether Maurice knew or not, Charles had been sleeping in his old bedroom at the flat since less than a week before we returned from Cambridge.

During the daytime he had been nearly always out, possibly with Muriel: one heard him telephoning her each morning. He seemed in high spirits, with patches of contemplativeness. He gave no indication that he also was in a period of waiting.

That evening, as we sat chatting, chatting to induce the telephone to ring, Margaret occasionally gazed at the two of them – her innocent, her strenuous one – and then at me. She might have been thinking of the time we had talked about them in that room. The events of their growing up, commonplace to everyone else as another family’s photographs, at times dramatic, searing rather than dramatic, to us. I recalled (I didn’t have to bring it back to memory, it was always there) the morning when we sat there, having been told that Charles, then an infant, was recovering from meningitis. In thanksgiving, we didn’t speak about him but about Maurice. We repeated, just as we had said in the hospital, we must save him from everything we can . Margaret had been as good as her vow: her love for Maurice had deepened, not grown less, deepened with the trouble he had caused her, not through conflict but through ineptitude or lack of self. As for me, I had tried to follow her. What will could do, I had done. Other men, I thought again that evening, would have done better.

Two days later, the child, a girl, was born. The first medical reports were encouraging. As a newborn baby, she seemed everything she ought to be. Of course, some disabilities they couldn’t test for, yet. It would be weeks or months before they knew. So that one of Margaret’s anxieties was not eliminated, though for the time being assuaged. She couldn’t let herself go, but, trying to suppress it, she was full of joy.

The baby was born on 2 July. The medical opinions reached her next day. That same evening, I was entertaining a foreign acquaintance at a club. When I arrived home, it was quite early, not yet half past ten, but the drawing-room lights were switched off. Margaret called from our bedroom.

She was not undressed, but was sitting on the chair in front of her dressing-table.

‘Carlo has been talking to me,’ she said. ‘I think he’s gone off to tell Muriel.’

‘What is it?’

‘He asked me to tell you. Of course he’ll see you tomorrow.’

‘What is it?’

I knew her face so well, yet it was difficult to read. Her eyes were bright, her cheeks a little flushed. In a temper she sometimes looked like that, but at that moment her temper was cool. ‘He’s come out with his plans. I ought to say that he was extraordinarily nice. He even waited to talk until he knew that I wasn’t anxious about the baby.’ (Just as, I had a recollection, my first wife had once delayed telling me the most wounding news – until I was in good health.) ‘Mind you, I fancy he’s been certain himself for quite a time.’

‘What is it?’

She made me sit down on the bed. She said: ‘My love, a part of this you’re not going to like. Most of it seems perfectly sensible. Anyway it may be right for him.’

Angrily, I told her that I liked news broken fast. I was already ready to punish her for being the bearer of bad news. Sitting there, she seemed more guilty than Charles could be.

‘He has it all worked out.’

Then, quite quickly, she told me. He had decided that he must make a name within a few years. The world was going too fast, he wanted to have some sort of say before he was middle-aged. He had been studying the careers of the American foreign correspondents in the thirties. They had done their piece. He didn’t see why he shouldn’t do as well. Languages weren’t a problem to him. Politics he knew as much about as most people his age. He had no racial feeling, he could live anywhere. He was used to hard travelling –

‘That’s not very dreadful,’ I said. Yes, it might suit him.

‘You haven’t heard it all.’ He was determined to have his say in the minimum possible time. Other people could do what he proposed to do. He had to get his nose in front. Once he was recognised at all, he could rely on – what he was too cautious to call his talent. Though he was right, Margaret said, he had most of the qualities to become a pundit. He wanted to be a sane voice. But, to do that, he had to start with something a bit out of the ordinary –

‘What is it?’ I cried out again.

‘That’s where the risk comes in,’ said Margaret.

‘What risk?’

He accepted that he couldn’t persuade a paper to use him yet awhile, she said. He had to prove himself. So he was setting off to get near the action: meaning, to begin with, the Middle East. He would have to work himself as near battles as he could. Somehow, within a year or two, he was going to find something to sell: then some paper or other would employ him. It wasn’t going to be pleasant. He insisted that he was extremely cowardly. Still, that was part of the exercise. Brave men weren’t specially good at becoming international pundits. He had worked out the odds, and meant to take his chance.

‘Good God,’ I said, ‘how romantic is all this?’

I asked her, still angry with her because she had borne the news, whether she had tried to dissuade him.

‘I said that it wasn’t what I should have chosen for him,’ said Margaret.

‘What did he say to that?’

‘He said that he realised it. And that you wouldn’t have chosen it for him either.’

He had told her also that he had wished all along that he could settle for something which we should like. But you can live only in your own time, he said.

‘And he’s determined to go on with this?’

‘He didn’t tell me in so many words, but I’m sure that the arrangements are already made.’

That rang clear as truth, as soon as I heard it. As with my brother Martin, Charles’ calculations were performed long before he spoke, perhaps before he knew that his own decision was already final.

‘Does he know’, I said, ‘that I shan’t have an easy night until this is over?’

‘Do you think I shall?’

‘That may be for the rest of my life.’

‘Have you forgotten that he’s mine as well as yours?’

For an instant we were blaming each other. She was appealing for me to come close to her: while in pain and rage I was wishing that everyone round us could be torn down, along with me, if this I had to endure. I felt as savage, as possessed as I had in other miseries, not many of them in my entire life, two deaths perhaps, Charles’ own illness. I felt at that moment without relief or softening from age or any consolation that had come to me.

‘Is he thinking of anyone else at all?’

Margaret did not reply.

‘Does he know what it means to anyone else?’

Margaret said: ‘He’s pretty perceptive, and I’m certain that he does.’

‘Is that why he’s doing it?’

Margaret and I glanced at each other, thinking of how we had protected him in his childhood, knowing that we couldn’t have another, telling ourselves that this was a precious life. The first time I saw him in hospital, I had taken him, rolling-eyed, waving-fingered, into my arms, resolved that no harm should come to him.