Charles Snow - Last Things

He did not return until after the time for Margaret’s departure: it was about half past two and I was sitting alone in the drawing-room.

‘Hallo,’ said Charles, face businesslike, telling nothing of the parting just completed. ‘I’d better hump my stuff along.’

Footsteps, as quick as when he was on holiday from school, up and down the passage. Thump of a rucksack on the drawing-room carpet. His ‘stuff’ was simple enough, just that and a hand case for typewriter and papers.

‘Got everything?’ I said, unable to repress the fatuous pre-journey questions.

Charles, sitting down on the sofa, grinned. ‘I shall soon find out if I haven’t.’ He was experienced in travel, and took it as it came.

He smiled at me. If there had been a clock in the room, I should have begun hearing it ticking time away: but Charles would not let us sit in silence or even endure a hush. One or two practical points, he said, sounding brisk, as though they had all been settled days before. Communications: in case of emergencies at home, journalist acquaintances would trace him. Whatever newspapers couldn’t do, they could find you. Otherwise he would write when he reached a town. Addresses – not to be relied on, but I had them, hadn’t I? All this which we each knew had been established, as though we were obsessively tearing open our own envelope to make sure it didn’t contain the wrong letter, was repeated with the blitheness of a new discovery. The same with money. He wouldn’t need more, he didn’t wish to take another pound from me; but it was sensible to have an arrangement in reserve. This again Charles spun out, as though there were nothing safer than the sedative of facts.

At last his powers of repetition began to fail. Then he gazed round the drawing-room, which he had known all his life, like one playing a memorising game.

‘You’ve never been on your own abroad, have you?’ he asked. ‘Not for a long time.’ Then I had to correct myself. ‘No, never, in the way you have.’

‘It’s curious, the things you hanker after. Nothing dramatic. Nothing like a handsome dinner at the Connaught. No, a sandwich in front of the old television set is nearer the mark.’

With deliberate casualness, he had let his eyes stray to his wristwatch.

‘Good Lord,’ he said, ‘it’s after three o’clock.’

Not much longer to play out. Soon he was able to say: ‘Well, I really think it’s about time we moved.’

In front of the house, waiting for a taxi, Charles beside me, I glanced down towards Marble Arch, the way from which he had walked in the rain, oblivious and triumphant, after his first night with Muriel. He looked in the same direction, but it meant nothing to him: he had not seen himself.

Traffic was sparse and travelling fast: no taxis were passing either way, in the mid-afternoon lull. I felt the same chagrin as when I waited there with Nina. I had offered to order a car to drive him to the airport, but he had said, smiling: ‘No, that’s not quite my style.’ Nowadays, he went on, chaps like him contented themselves by going to the terminal and taking the tumbril (airline bus) ‘like everyone else’.

He was more schooled in travel waiting than I was. Impatient, though there was plenty of time, I searched for taxi lights up and down the road. It was a Wimbledon week, cloud layer very low, weather grey, chilly and in some way protective, such as we had become used to in those Julys. Roses loomed from the bushes in the park opposite; there had been roses standing out in Muriel’s garden a few days before, roses all over the London gardens.

At last a taxi, turning left from the Park Lane drive, on the other side of the road. Charles rushed across waving long arms. Blink of light. As we settled inside, he said: ‘Here we go.’

Passing through the Albion Gate, we could see, without noticing, the grass hillocks and hollows which we knew by heart; that was the way we walked in his holiday two years before, and earlier still, when he was a small child. None of it impinged, it was taken for granted now. Instead, he was recommending a film to which he insisted that I should go.

‘Parting injunction,’ he said, explaining precisely why it was necessary for me, why his friends admired it, and which aspects he required my views about. The long descent down Exhibition Road: still talk of films. Last lap, stop and go, brakes and lights, among the Cromwell Road snarl. For the first time Charles was quiet, sitting forward, as though willing the taxi on.

Then he thought of another request, for a book which he wanted sent after him.

In the terminal, he disappeared, rucksack lurching and bobbing, among the crowd, which was jostling with the random purposefulness of a Brownian movement, faces of as many different anthropological shapes and colours as on the Day of Judgment or on an American campus at midday. It was some time before he returned. All in order. He had made contact with someone else who was flying on the Beirut plane.

On the fringe of the crowd, noise level high, we looked at each other.

‘Well,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said.

The word of all partings. Davidson’s bedside. The old railway station in the town, on my way to London. Liverpool Street. Now the airports. Always, if you were the one staying behind, you were wishing, even though you were saying goodbye to someone you loved, that it was over.

‘Don’t stay,’ said Charles. ‘It’s tiresome waiting.’

‘Well, perhaps–’

We embraced. As Charles went quickly into the crowd, he said: ‘I’ll be seeing you.’

Not quite in his style, as he had said about a private car, but I didn’t think of that, as I watched his head above the others, and then turned away, out into the cool air.

It might have seemed an end. But not to me, and not, perhaps, to him. He might know already, what had taken me so much longer to learn, that we made ends and shapes and patterns in our minds but that we didn’t live our lives like that. We couldn’t do so, because the force inherent in our lives was stronger and more untidy than anything we could tell ourselves about it. Just as a young woman like Muriel believed she could discard affections which she thought she had outlived, so I, growing old, believed that my life had constricted, and that, with not much left of what I had once been hungry for, I should find them – those last demands – weakening their hold on me. We were wrong, and wrong in the same fashion. Muriel was bound to discover that her life was going to surprise her: and mine, even now (no, there was no ‘even now’ about it, time and age didn’t matter), hadn’t finished with me.

Since the nights in the hospital room, when I saw one moment transformed into another, so that one’s feelings were astonishing, and often self-ridiculing, as they created themselves afresh, I hadn’t been certain when I could say – I shall not feel like that again.

Watching my son, I had revived much that I had thought long dead. And even when one came to the last hard core of feeling – interests worn out, both kinds of love (so far as one could believe it) now slackened – when one came to confront oneself alone, then still there was a flux of energy, of transformation, yes tantalisingly an inadmissible hope, getting in the way. I had thought, in some of the crises of my life, that if all went wrong, I should be finally, and once for all, alone. Now I knew that that was one of the shapes and sounds with which we deceived ourselves, giving our life a statuesqueness, perhaps a certain kind of dignity, that it couldn’t in fact possess. In the hospital room I had been as nearly alone as I could get. I had imagined, and spoken of, what it would be like, but what I had imagined was nothing like the here and now, the continuous creation, the thrust of looking for the next moment which belonged to oneself and spread beyond the limits of oneself. When one is as alone as one can get, there’s still no end.