Charles Snow - Last Things

‘No,’ said Margaret, ‘you mustn’t take more responsibility than you have already.’

She meant, what I had said to her often enough, that affections, especially in families, didn’t carry the same weight on either side. I ought to have known that, from the way I behaved to my mother. It was a kind of vanity to suspect that another’s choices depended on his relations with oneself. Choices, lives, were lonelier than that. Charles was making a choice lonelier than most of ours had been. That was no consolation for me, sitting there in the bedroom. All I could do was think of him, not with affection, not even with concern, but with anger mixed with a kind of fellow feeling, or a brutal sympathy of the flesh.

It took me a long time before I could say to Margaret that I had been cruel, shutting her out when she spoke about Charles as her son, and that without her to tell it, the news would have been worse.

THE next morning, Charles did not get up for breakfast, but soon after joined me in the drawing-room. After he had uttered a greeting, bright and neutral, he sat in a chair opposite mine across the disused fireplace.

‘I think Mummy has told you, hasn’t she?’ His tone was easy and intimate: the only sign that he might not be free from strain was that he fell back on that term from childhood.

‘Yes, she has. Last night.’

He said: ‘I’m sorry if I’ve disappointed you.’

I did not reply at once and he went on: ‘I’m very sorry. Believe me.’

‘Of course you haven’t disappointed me.’

‘Well,’ he said, more freely now, ‘it isn’t exactly what you might have looked for, is it?’

‘You’ve done far more than I had at your age. With any luck you’ll go on doing more.’

‘I shall need a bit of luck–’

‘Yes, I know that.’

I hadn’t been speaking out of self-control, or even out of resignation. I hadn’t prepared myself for how to meet him, there were none of the speeches which one made up in one’s head and never spoke. In his presence I felt nothing of the anger, or the suspicion, that a few hours before I had projected on to Margaret. To my own astonishment I was buoyed up by – what was it? Maybe his energy or his resolution. Or it might have been his nerve. At no time in my life could I have done what he was committing himself to do. It seemed as though a new force had taken charge.

He must have realised that there were going to be no reproaches. More, he may have seen that a kind of relief, not happiness or content but more like trust, had come into the air between us. Neither of us could have known the reason. Ties, half-memories, the sympathy of those who are close together even where their purposes contradict each other. Later, I wondered whether I was stirred by something of myself which, that morning, had been long forgotten.

When I was younger than Charles, less educated, much less sophisticated, I had once declared my hopes. They had been embarrassing to recall in middle life. Asked by a girl who loved me a little what I wanted, I had said – not to spend my life unknown: love: a better world. Those hopes might have been embarrassing later, but they were true of me at the time I spoke, a good deal truer than any refinements and complications would have been.

Yes, the first of them died on one, or waned. Yet it drove me on for the first half of my life. As for the second, when I said it in that old-fashioned schoolroom, I didn’t have any intimation of where it would lead me, either in the search for sexual love or that other kind, which I felt for my son, sitting there across the fireplace: but it had lasted until now. But the one that I shouldn’t have confessed to, even a few years later, because it sounded so priggish or worse still so innocent, that had been true too.

It wasn’t as passionate as personal desires – nor as haunting as the sense of the ‘I’ alone, oneself alone – but it was there. It had bound Francis Getliffe and me together all our working lives. It led us into defeats and sometimes humiliations, led us either through our temperaments or through a set of chances, into backstairs’ work, secrets, all kinds of closed politics. Of course, it wasn’t pure. Our own self-esteem took part, or certainly mine did. Nevertheless, trying to judge myself as indulgently as Father Ailwyn had instructed me I believed that I had wanted some good things. Whether I had helped to get any, that was another matter. Very little, I had often thought before of Francis and myself. The only work which I was certain had been useful took place in the war, and there we were avoiding a worse world, not making a better one.

Yet some of the pleasure – utterly unanticipated by either of us – which I felt in Charles’ presence that morning, was because he too had the same desire. He too might be rapacious, as much as I had been, and self-absorbed, possibly more. There was, though, something left. It wasn’t the simple and good, such as Maurice, who had vitality to spare for tasks outside themselves. Charles had plenty. He would use it differently from the way I had done. He might be more effective. All might go wrong. He might throw himself away. Still, even the bare desire was like a touch fingertip to fingertip, conducting a phase of life.

I said: ‘I can understand that you’re in a hurry. But can’t you get a footing in some slightly less dramatic way?’

‘You don’t believe I haven’t thought of that?’

‘Well, why not?’

‘It isn’t on.’ Charles gave a rationale, clear and patient, of what he was aiming at. Only in his generation, he said, could you become a spokesman before the age of thirty. But plenty of people, at least as competent as he was, would like to be such a spokesman. To get there, you had to do something special.

‘You’re telling me this is the only way?’

‘I think it is for me. If I were more of a performer, I might find another way in. But I’m not.’

He broke into a friendly smile.

‘Look, you realise that I’m a lot more careful than you are. I have plenty of respect for my valuable life. I don’t even like flying in aircraft much. Let alone in an aircraft which is being pooped at. So you needn’t worry about me going in for heroics. I’m much too sane. I’m only too damned sane.’

Although he was trying to reassure me, he was not pretending. But I knew, and he knew that I knew, that none of that, however much it wasn’t invented, would affect his actions. He would brood over a risk for days or weeks or months, just as he had presumably brooded over this choice of his, calculating all the odds: and then, if he thought it worth while, take it.

I had never been able to disentangle the nature of his courage. In some ways he had, before this, reminded me of Roy Calvert, Muriel’s father. Their minds were similar, precise, concentrated, clear. Their wilfulness was similar. But their courage was different in kind. Roy was a brave man, in a sense that Charles would for himself have totally disclaimed. Roy, though, had a suicidal streak. I had heard him, on a night which I should have liked to forget, tell me during the war how he had tried to throw his life away. He had done it out of despair, out of a melancholia he couldn’t shift. He had made a choice: it wasn’t one which Charles would have considered making. It wasn’t a gamble, it was an abdication. Roy had impressed on me that when he made it, he wasn’t mad. He wasn’t mad, he said, he was lucid. ‘Perhaps if everyone were as lucid as that, they would throw in their hands too.’

I hadn’t to cast back for those words. Charles could never have said them. He would have distrusted Roy’s protestations of not being mad. But it was with absolute confidence that he had made his own simple statement about being ‘too damned sane’.