Charles Snow - Homecomings

Then, as if she were making a painful effort, her face became sharp and serious, her glance investigatory. She looked at me, not pleading, but screwing herself up to speak. She said: ‘I want to ask you something. It’s important.’

Since I touched her, I had thought all was going as I imagined it. She was pliant, my reverie was coming true at last. I was totally unprepared to see her face me, a person I did not know.

My face showed my surprise, my let down, for she cried: ‘You don’t think I want to upset you, do you, now of all times?’

‘I don’t see why you should,’ I said.

‘I’ve got to ask — before it’s too late.’

‘What is it?’

‘When you were with Sheila’ — I had not talked much of her, but Margaret spoke as though she knew her — ‘you cared for her, I mean you were protecting her all the while. There wasn’t any more to it, was there?’

After a pause, I said: ‘Not much.’

‘Not many people could have done it,’ she said. ‘But it frightens me.’

Again I did not want to speak: the pause was longer, before I said: ‘Why should it?’

‘You must know that,’ she said.

Her tone was certain, not gentle — my experience and hers might have been open before us.

‘It wasn’t a relationship,’ she went on. ‘You were standing outside all the time. Are you looking for the same thing again?’ Before I had replied, she said: ‘If so—’ Tears had come to her eyes. ‘It’s horrible to say it, but it’s no good to me.’

Still crying, she said: ‘Tell me. Are you looking for the same thing again?’

In my own time, in my own fashion, I was ready to search down into my motives. With pain, certainly with resentment, I knew I had to search in front of her, for her. This answer came slower even than my others, as though it had been dragged out. I said: ‘I hope not.’ After a silence, I added: ‘I don’t think so.’

Her face lightened, colour came back to her cheeks, although the tears still marked them. She did not ask me to repeat or explain: she took the words as though they were a contract. Her spirits bubbled up, she looked very young again, brilliant-eyed, delighted with the moment in which we both stood.

In a sharp, sarcastic, delighted voice, she said: ‘No wonder they all say how articulate you are.’

She watched me and said: ‘You’re not to think I’m rushing you. I don’t want you bound to anything — except just that one thing. I think I could stand any tangle we get into, whatever we do — but if you had just needed someone to let you alone, just a waif for you to be kind to, then I should have had to duck from under before we start.’

She was smiling and crying. ‘You see, I shouldn’t have had a chance. I should have lost already, and I couldn’t bear it.’

She stroked my hand, and I could feel her shaking. She would have let me make love to her, but she had called on her nerves so hard that what she wanted most, for the rest of the night, was a breathing space.

Going out of the flat to dinner, we walked, saying little, as it were absently, along the embankment. It was foggy, and in the blackout, the writhing fog, our arms were round each other; her coat was rough under my hand, as she leant over the parapet, gazing into the high, dark water.

ON the morning of New Year’s Day, when I entered the Minister’s office, he was writing letters. The office was not very grand; it was a cubby hole with a coal fire, the windows looking out over Whitehall. The Minister was not, at a first glance, very grand either. Elderly, slight, he made a profession of being unassuming. When he left the office he passed more unnoticed even than his Civil Servants, except in a few places: but the few places happened to be the only ones where he wanted notice, and included the Carlton Club and the rooms of the party manager.

His name was Thomas Bevill, and he was a cunning, tenacious, happy old man; but mixed with his cunning was a streak of simplicity that puzzled one more the closer one came. That morning of 1 January 1942, for instance, he was writing in his own round schoolboyish hand to everyone he knew whose name was in the Honours List.

No one was more hard-baked about honours than Bevill, and no one was more skilled in obtaining them for recipients convenient to himself. ‘Old Herbert had better have something, it’ll keep him quiet.’ But when on New Year’s Day the names came out, Bevill read them with innocent pleasure, and all the prizewinners, including those he had so candidly intrigued for, went up a step in his estimation. ‘Fifty-seven letters to write, Eliot,’ he said with euphoria, as though knowing that number in the Honours List reflected much credit both on them and him.

A little later his secretary came in with a message: ‘Mr Paul Lufkin would be grateful if the Minister could spare time to see him, as soon as possible.’

‘What does this fellow want?’ Bevill asked me.

‘One thing is certain,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t want to see you just to pass the time of day.’

At that piece of facetiousness, Bevill gave a simple worldly chuckle.

‘I expect he wants to know why his name isn’t in the list this morning.’ His mind wandered back. ‘I expect he wants to be in next time.’

To me, that did not sound in the least like Lufkin’s style. He was after bigger prizes altogether; he was not so much indifferent to the minor rewards as certain they must come.

I had no doubt that he meant business; and I was anxious that we should find out what the business was, before the Minister received him. Make an excuse for today and prepare the ground, I said.

I did not want the Minister to get across Lufkin: even less did I want him to waffle. I had good reasons: Lufkin was rising to power, his opinion was one men listened to, and on the other hand Bevill’s position was nothing like invulnerable. There were those who wanted him out of office. I had many reasons, both selfish and unselfish, for not giving them unnecessary openings.

However, the old man was obstinate. He had made such a technique of unpretentiousness that he liked being available to visitors at an hour’s notice: he was free that morning, why shouldn’t he see ‘this fellow’? On the other hand, he was still suspicious about a personal approach on the Honours List and he did not want a tête-à-tête, so he asked me to be at hand, and, when Lufkin was shown in, remarked lightly: ‘I think you know Eliot, don’t you?’

‘Considering that you stole him from me,’ Lufkin replied, with that off-hand edginess which upset many, but which bounced off the Minister.

‘My dear chap,’ said Bevill, ‘we must try to make up for that. What can I do for you now?’

He settled Lufkin in the armchair by the fire, put on a grimy glove and threw on some coal, sat himself on a high chair and got ready to listen.

To begin with there was not much to listen to. To my surprise, Lufkin, who was usually as relevant as a high Civil Servant, seemed to have come with a complaint in itself trivial and which in any case was outside the Minister’s domain. Some of his key men were being called up: not technicians, whom the Minister could have interfered about, but managers and accountants. Take away a certain number, said Lufkin, and in a highly articulated industry you came to a critical point — efficiency dropped away in an exponential curve.

Bevill had no idea what an exponential curve was, but he nodded wisely.

‘If you expect us to keep going, it doesn’t make sense,’ said Lufkin.

‘We don’t just expect you to keep going, we rely on you,’ said Bevill.

‘Well then.’

‘I don’t mind telling you one thing,’ said Bevill. ‘That is, we mustn’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.’