Charles Snow - Homecomings

Yet she too had rebelled, I knew by now — rebelled against her father’s disbeliefs. It was not as easy as it sounded, when she told me their family life used to be intense and happy, and that anyone who had not known it so could not imagine what they had missed.

It was nine o’clock, and there was another hour before I need go out into the cold. By half past ten I had to be back in my own flat in case the Minister, who was attending a cabinet committee after dinner, wanted me. I had another hour’s grace in which I could hide in this voluptuous safety, untraceable, unknown. Though it was not only to be safe and secret that we came to her room rather than mine, but also because she took pleasure in it, because she seized the chance, for two or three hours among the subterranean airless working days, of looking after me.

I gazed at her face, her cheekbones sharp in the uneven light; she was relaxed because I was happy, just as I had seen her abandoned because she was giving me pleasure. Used as I was to search another’s face for signs of sadness, I had often searched hers, unable to break from the habit, the obsession, sensitive beyond control that she might be miserable.

One night, not long before, this obsession had provoked a quarrel, our first. All that evening she had been subdued, although she smiled to reassure me; as we whispered in each other’s arms, her replies came from a distance. At last she got up to dress, and I lay in bed watching her. Sitting naked in front of the looking-glass, with her back to me, her body fuller and less girlish than it appeared in clothes, she was brushing her hair. As she sat there, I could feel, with the twist of tenderness, how her carelessness about dress was a fraud. She made up little, but that was her special vanity; she had that curious kind of showing-off which wraps itself in the unadorned, even the shabby, but still gleams through. It was a kind of showing-off that to me contained within it some of the allure and mystery of sensual life.

In the looking-glass I saw the reflection of her face. Her smile had left her, the sweet and pleasure-giving smile was wiped away, and she was brooding, a line tightened between her eyebrows. I cried out: ‘What’s the matter?’

She muttered an endearment, tried to smooth her forehead, and said: ‘Nothing.’

‘What have I done?’

I expected her moods to be more even than mine. I was not ready for the temper which broke through her.

She turned on me, the blood pouring up into her throat and cheeks, her eyes snapping.

‘You’ve done nothing,’ she said.

‘I asked you what was the matter.’

‘It’s nothing to do with us. But it soon will be if you assume that you are to blame every time I’m worried. That’s the way you can ruin it all, and I won’t have it.’

Shaken by her temper, I nevertheless pressed her to tell me what was on her mind. She would not be forced. Her wiry will stood against mine. At last, however, seeing that I was still anxious, with resentment she told me; it was ludicrously hard for me to believe. The next day, she was due to go to a committee as the representative of her branch, and she was nervous. Not that she had ambition in her job, but she felt humiliated if she could not perform creditably. She detested ‘not being equal to things’. She was, as the Civil Servants said, ‘good on paper’, but when it came to speaking in committee, which men like me had forgotten could ever be a strain, she was so apprehensive that she spent sleepless hours the night before.

It occurred to me, thinking her so utterly unlike Sheila as to be a diametrical opposite, that I had for once caught her behaving precisely as Sheila would have done.

After she had confided, she was still angry: angry that I was so nervous about causing her unhappiness. It was not a show of temper just for a bit of byplay; it had an edge and foreboding that seemed to me, feeling ill-used, altogether out of proportion.

This night, as we lay together watching the luminescence on the ceiling, the quarrel was buried. When I looked at her face, the habit of anxiety became only a tic, for in her eyes and on her mouth I saw my own serenity. She was lazier than usual; as a rule when I had to make my way back to my telephone at Dolphin Square, she accompanied me so as to make the evening longer, though it might mean walking miles in the cold and dark; that night, stretching herself with self-indulgence, she stayed in bed. As I said good night I pulled the blankets round her, and, looking down at her with peace, saw the hollow of her collar-bone shadowed in the firelight.

IT was not until a Saturday afternoon in May that Margaret could arrange for me to meet her elder sister. At first we were going for a walk in the country, but a despatch-box came in, and I had to visit the Permanent Secretary’s office after lunch. As I sat there answering Hector Rose’s questions, I could see the tops of the trees in St James’s Park, where I knew the young women were waiting for me. It was one of the first warm days of the year and the windows were flung open, so that, after the winter silence in that office, one seemed to hear the sounds of spring.

Before Rose could write his minute to the Minister, he had to ring up another department. There was a delay, and as we sat listening for the telephone Rose recognized the beauty of the afternoon.

‘I’m sorry to bring you back here, my dear chap,’ he said. ‘We ought to be out in the fresh air.’ Disciplined, powerful, polite, he did not really mind; but he was too efficient a man to stay there working for the sake of it, or to keep me. He worked fourteen hours a day in wartime, but there was nothing obsessive about it; he just did it because it was his job and the decisions must be made. The only thing obsessive about him was his superlative politeness. That afternoon, with Margaret and her sister outside in the park, Rose many times expressed his sorrow and desolation at taking up my time.

He was forty-five that year, one of the youngest of heads of departments, and looked even younger. His eyes were heavy-lidded and bleached blue, his fair hair was smoothed back. He was one of the best-thought-of Civil Servants of his day. I had much respect for him, and he some for me, but our private relation was not comfortable, and while we were waiting for the telephone call we had nothing spontaneous to say to each other.

‘I really am most exceedingly sorry,’ he was saying.

The words sounded effusive and silly: in fact he was the least effusive and silly of men, and, of those I knew, he was with Lufkin the one with most aptitude for power. Since the war began he had been totally immersed in it, carrying responsibility without a blink. It was a lesson to me, I sometimes thought, about how wrong one can be. For, in the great political divide before the war, it was not only Lufkin’s business associates who were on the opposite side to me. Bevill, the old aristocratic handyman of a politician, had been a Municheer: so had Rose and other up-and-coming Civil Servants. I had not known Rose then: if I had done, I should have distrusted him when it came to a crisis. I should have been dead wrong. Actually, when war came, Bevill and Rose were as whole-hearted as men could be. Compared with my friends on the irregular left, their nerves were stronger.

Rose continued to apologize until the call came through. Then, with remarkable speed, he asked me for one fact and wrote his comment to the Minister. He wrote it in the form of a question: but it was a question to which only a very brash minister could have given the wrong answer.

‘Ah well,’ said Rose, ‘that seems to conclude your share in the proceedings, my dear Eliot. Many many many thanks. Now I hope you’ll go and find some diversions for a nice Saturday afternoon.’