Charles Snow - Homecomings

I did not speak.

‘She suffered too much.’

I cried out: ‘Could any man have made her happy?’

‘Who can say?’ replied Mr Knight.

He was trying to comfort me, but I was bitter because that one cry had escaped against my will.

‘May she find peace,’ he said. For once his heavy lids were raised, he was looking directly at me with sad and acute eyes.

‘Let me say something to you,’ he remarked, his words coming out more quickly than usual, ‘because I suspect you are one of those who take it on themselves to carry burdens. Perhaps one is oneself, perhaps one realizes the danger of those who won’t let themselves forget.’

For an instance his tone was soft, indulgent with self-regard. Then he spoke sharply: ‘I beg you, don’t let this burden cripple you.’

I neither would nor could confide. I met his glance as though I did not understand.

‘I mean the burden of my daughter’s death. Don’t let it lie upon you always.’

I muttered. He made another effort: ‘If I may speak as a man thirty years older, there is this to remember — time heals most wounds, except the passing of time. But only if you can drop the burdens of the past, only if you make yourself believe that you have a life to live.’

I was gazing, without recognition, into the fire; the smell of herb tobacco wafted across. Mr Knight had fallen silent. I reckoned that he would leave me alone now.

I said something about letting the house. Mr Knight’s interest in money did not revive; he had tried for once to be direct, an ordeal for so oblique a man, and had got nowhere.

For minutes, ticked off by the clock, again the only sound in the room, we stayed there; when I looked at him his face was sagging with misery. At last he said, after neither of us had spoken for a long while, that we might as well go to bed. As we went out to the foot of the stairs, he whispered: ‘If one doesn’t take them slowly, they are a strain on one’s heart.’

I made him rest his hand on my shoulder, and cautiously, with trepidation, he got himself from tread to tread. On the landing he averted his eyes from the door of the room in which her body lay.

Again he whispered: ‘Good night. Let us try to sleep.’

IT was three nights later when, blank to all feeling, I went into the bedroom and switched on the light. Blankly, I pulled off the cover from my own bed; then I glanced across at hers, smooth, apple-green under the light, undisturbed since it was made four days before. All of a sudden, sorrow, loss, tore at me like a spasm of the body. I went to the bed and drew my hands along the cover, tears that I could not shed pressing behind my eyes, convulsed in the ravening of grief. At last it had seized me. The bed was smooth under the light. I knelt beside it, and wave after wave of a passion of the senses possessed me, made me grip the stuff and twist it, scratch it, anything to break the surface, shining quietly under the light.

Once, in an exhausted respite, I had a curious relief. The week to come, some friends had invited us to dinner. If she had been alive, she would have been anxious about going, she would have wanted me to make excuses and lie her out of the evening, as I had done so many times.

Then the grief flooded through me again. In the derangement of my senses, there was no time to come: all time was here, in this moment, now, beside this bed.

I learned then, in that devastation, that one could not know such loss without craving for an after-life. My reason would not give me the illusion, not the fractional hope of it — and yet I longed to pray to her.

OUTSIDE the window, in the September sunshine, a couple of elderly men were sitting in deckchairs drinking tea. From my bed, which was on the ground floor of a London clinic, I could just see past them to a bed of chrysanthemums smouldering in the shadow. The afternoon was placid, the two old men drank with the peace of cared-for invalids; for me it was peaceful to lie there watching them, free from pain. True, Gilbert Cooke would be bringing me work, I should have to be on my feet by Thursday; but there was nothing the matter with me, I could lie idle for another twenty-four hours.

That day was Tuesday, and I had only entered the clinic on the previous Saturday afternoon. Since Sheila’s death nearly two years before (this was the September of 1941) I had been more on the move than ever in my life, and the pain in my back had not been giving me much rest. It was faintly ludicrous: but, in the months ahead, I was going to be still more occupied, and it was not such a joke to think of dragging myself through meetings as I had been doing, or, on the bad days, holding them round my office sofa. It was not such a joke, and also it watered one’s influence down: in any kind of politics, men listened to you less if you were ill. So I had set aside three days, and a surgeon had tried manipulating me under an anaesthetic. Although I was incredulous, it seemed to have worked. Waiting for Cooke that afternoon, I was touching wood in case the pain returned.

When Gilbert Cooke came in, he had a young woman with him whose name, when he made an imperious gobbled introduction, I did not catch. In fact, taking from him at once some papers marked urgent, I only realized some moments afterwards, absent in my reading, that I had not heard her name. Then I only asked for it with routine politeness. Margaret Davidson. He had mentioned her occasionally, I recalled; she was the daughter of the Davidson whom he had talked of at the Barbican dinner and whom I had been surprised to hear that Gilbert knew.

I glanced up at her, but she had withdrawn to near the window, getting out of our way.

Meanwhile Gilbert stood by my bed, a batch of papers in his hand haranguing me with questions.

‘What have they been doing to you?’

‘Are you fit for decent company at last?’

‘You realize you must stay here until you’re well enough not to embarrass everyone?’

I said I would take the committee on Thursday. He replied that it was out of the question. When I told him how I should handle that day’s business he said that, even if I were fool enough to attend, I could not use those methods.

‘You can’t get away with it every time,’ he said, jabbing his thumb at me in warning. He stood there, his massive shoulders humped, his plethoric face frowning at me. After the fussy, almost maternal concern with which he looked after my health, as he had done since he came into my office, he turned brusquer still. He was talking to me like a professional no-man, just as he used to talk to Paul Lufkin. He did so for the same reason — because he regarded me as a success.

Working under me for nearly two years of war, Gilbert had seen me promoted; he had his ear close to the official gossip. He magnified both what I had done and what was thought of it, but it was true enough that I had made, in those powerful anonymous couloirs , some sort of reputation. Partly I had been lucky, for anyone as close to the Minister as I was could not help but attract attention: partly, I had immersed myself in the job, my life simplified for the first time since I was a boy, with no one to watch over, no secret home to distract me.

To Gilbert, who had joined my branch soon after Sheila died, I now seemed an important man. As a consequence, he was loyal and predatory about my interests when I was not present, but face to face insisted on back-chat.

On the coming Thursday we should have to struggle with a problem of security. Some people in one of the ‘private armies’ of the time were busy with a project that none of us believed in; but they had contrived so to enmesh themselves in security that we could not control them. I knew about their project: they knew that I knew: but they would not talk to me about it. I told Gilbert that their amour propre might be satisfied if we went through a solemn minuet: they must be asked to explain themselves to the Minister, which they could not refuse to do: he would then repeat the explanation to me: then on Thursday both they and I could hint obliquely at the mystery.