Charles Snow - Last Things

I believed him, totally. It was I, not he, who was tempted to read a pattern into events which he didn’t even know. If he had known them, he would have repudiated with impatience what I was tempted to see. History wasn’t like that, he would have said. Not personal history. He would have been right. The patterns weren’t real. Perhaps the weaver of the pattern, however, told one something about himself.

Then Charles asked me for an introduction. It was to a Jewish friend of mine who worked at the Weizmann Institute.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘That’s nice of you,’ said Charles.

He was beginning his Levantine journeys on the other side: easier, or at least not impossible, that way round, he said, but despite our connections he might have some explaining to do in Israel.

‘You needn’t write to—,’ the Jewish friend. ‘But I can use your name?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Bless you.’ He looked at me with what appeared like a filial grin. I was gratified that, even at this stage, he was invoking me.

Suddenly I began to think. Of all my acquaintances who might be of use to him, this one was about the most obscure.

‘Carlo,’ I said, ‘what are you up to?’

Bland gaze. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘Why have you just thought of him? What about David Rubin? And–?’

David Rubin, grey eminence in the United States, was also one in Israel: for years he had been an intimate of mine.

The gaze flickered. ‘As a matter of fact, I wrote to David R myself, a little while ago–’

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘What are you up to? Anything this chap can do, Rubin can do a hundred times over. You know that as well as I do.’

‘Yes, but–’

‘But what?’

Another surprise that morning. He blushed. It was a long time ago, when I had last seen him do so. Poise precarious, he broke into a weak smile.

I had it. He had been making an attempt to appease or to soothe me. He wanted to demonstrate that he had finished with his pride; he would use my influence when it was a help; any conflict had gone, he was glad to have me behind him. It was well meant, I thought, as, knowing it all, mocking each other and ourselves, we couldn’t keep our eyes from meeting.

It was well meant, but not quite careful enough in execution. Actually he had been meticulously thorough, not neglecting any contact, and taken the best advice open to either of us. This had been happening for months past, possibly before he admitted to himself that the choice was clinched.

Then, and only then, I realised that his timetable was already fixed: and that he had broken the news only a few days before he was due to leave.

AS a result of Margaret’s persuasion, I telephoned Muriel. Would she care to see me? One of us ought to make the offer, Margaret had said: and, since she herself had at the best of times been uneasy with the young woman, it had better be me. The voice at the other end of the line was polite but frigid. Yes she was by herself. She wouldn’t think of asking me to go out of my way – I must be extremely busy, but of course if I had nothing else to do – When I went to her in her drawing-room, where she had once invited me in a different mood from this, she turned to me a desensitised cheek: as desensitised as Sheila’s, I had a flash of random but chilling memory, as she said goodbye one night at a railway station and had become shut within herself.

There might be some play in the test match, Muriel observed from a distance. It was midday, the rain had stopped earlier in the morning, there was an interval of sunshine. The ground would be pretty wet, I replied, as awkward as a young man not knowing the next move. Perhaps the bowlers would get some help, she said.

I sat silent, rather than go on with spectatorial exchanges. Her hair glistened as though it had been attended to that morning, falling, though not luxuriantly, to her shoulders.

At last she said: ‘So he’s going, is he?’

‘He must have told you?’

‘Yes, he’s told me.’

‘I’m sorry–’

‘You needn’t be sorry. If it hadn’t been for you, this would never have happened.’

Her tone, light, impersonal, was intended to give pain.

‘Do you think I like it?’

‘You made it happen. You made him want to outshine you.’ Her tone was still impersonal, but unrelenting. I tried to answer without expression.

‘That’s not all of it.’ I added: ‘I tell you, it’s not even most of it.’

‘If it hadn’t been for you, he’d be happy here today.’ She had been sitting with her usual stillness. She broke it just enough to spread out her hands.

I said: ‘Are you so sure that you know everything that’s moving him?’

‘I know that if you’d been different and out of his way, he’d have been content.’

She was looking at me, not so much with hatred as with cruelty. She had set out to stop any attempt to console her, or even to share her feelings: up against that, she was opposing a satisfaction of her own.

I was on the point of leaving her. I had had enough of ruthlessness: maybe this was how she had dismissed her husband and was now, in a different situation, dismissing me.

She said: ‘Why didn’t you stop him?’

‘You ought to realise that no one can stop him.’

‘You could have done–’

‘If what you say is right, perhaps me last of all.’

‘You would have stopped him’, she cried, ‘if you’d liked me more.’

That was said with as still a face as her harshest remarks: and yet, it was the nearest she could come to an appeal. So I replied, more gently than I had spoken up to now: ‘That’s nonsense, and you know it.’

‘If you’d thought I was right for him.’

‘That didn’t even enter. If I’d thought you were the most perfect woman in the world, I couldn’t have done any more.’ All of a sudden I felt that she might crack unless I came closer. I said: ‘As for you, I’m not sure whether I like you or not. I never have been. But I admire you a good deal. Charles has been lucky.’

She braced her shoulders, gave something like a smile of recognition. Possibly I had judged right. The silence had become less strained.

After a while she said, quietly, almost placidly: ‘Do you remember, the first time we talked about him here? I said that what he chose to do – it might matter to others. Well, I wasn’t far wrong, was I?’

She went on: ‘And you said something like if he’s lucky, so it might. It’s a peculiar way of being lucky, isn’t it?’

I wondered if she had used that kind of irony on Charles.

She offered me a drink, but I said no, unless she would join me. She shook her head. She said: ‘I suggest we go and sit in the garden. Just for a few minutes. You can have a look at Roy.’

For an instant, the name recalled only her own father, about whom we had not once spoken. Then I grasped that she was speaking of the child. As she led me through the downstairs sitting-room, I saw the pram, open to the sunshine, standing by the garden wall. The little boy had a pile of bricks in front of him. With great Viking shouts, he was methodically hurling them, one at a time, over the side of the pram. The curious thing was, he seemed to be registering regular intervals between each throw, something like thirty seconds, as though he were timing himself by a stopwatch or engaging in some obscure branch of time and motion study.

I burst out laughing.

‘Was is dat de joke?’ young Roy enquired, solemn face ready to grin.

‘Difficult to explain.’

‘Was is dat de joke?’ he asked his mother.

‘Uncle Lewis thinks I shall have to pick up all the bricks,’ she said, like one rational person to another.