Charles Snow - Homecomings

‘I’m sure he does.’

‘ Snakes-in-the-grass .’ It was one of Lufkin’s favourite exclamations, confronted with yet another example, perpetually astonishing to him, of others’ duplicity, self-seeking, and ambition. Margaret could not believe that men so able could live cut off from their own experience. It had delighted her, and, searching that night for something for us to remember, she refound the phrase and laughed out loud.

For a while we talked, glad to be talking, of some of the characters I had amused her with. It was a strange use for those figures, so grand in their offices, so firm in their personae, I thought later, to be smiled over by the two of us, clutching on to the strand of a love-affair, late at night out in the park.

We could not spin it out, we fell back into silence. I had no idea of how the time was passing, now that the night had come down. I could feel her fingers in mine, and at last she called my name, but mechanically, as though she were intending an endearment but was remote. She said: ‘A lot has happened to you.’

She did not mean my public life, she meant the deaths of Sheila and Roy Calvert.

‘I suppose so.’

‘It was bound to affect you, I know that.’

‘I wish,’ I said, ‘that I had met you before any of it happened.’

Suddenly she was angry.

‘No, I won’t listen. We met when we did, and this is the only time together we shall ever have.’

‘I might have been more—’

‘No. You’re always trying to slip out of the present moment, and I won’t take it any more.’

I answered sullenly. The present moment, the existent moment — as we sat there, in the sultry darkness, we could neither deal with it nor let it be. We could not show each other the kindness we should have shown strangers: far less could we allow those words to come out which, with the knowledge and touch of intimacy, we were certain could give the other a night’s peace. If she could have said to me, it doesn’t matter, leave it, some day you’ll be better and we’ll start again — If I could have said to her, I will try to give you all you want, marry me and somehow we shall come through — But we could not speak so, it was as though our throats were sewn up.

We stayed, our hands touching, not tired so much as stupefied while the time passed: time not racing hallucinatorily by, as when one is drunk, but just pressing on us with something like the headaching pressure of the thundery air in which we sat. Sometimes we talked, almost with interest, almost as though we were going out for the first time, for the first meal together, about a play that ought to be seen or a book she had just read. After another bout of silence, she said in a different tone: ‘Before we started, I asked what you wanted from me.’

I said yes.

‘You said, you didn’t want anything one-sided, you didn’t want the past all over again.’

I replied: ‘Yes, I said that.’

‘I believed you,’ she said.

Over Park Lane the sky was not so densely black, there was a leaden light just visible over the roofs. The sight struck more chilly than the dark had been. The midsummer night was nearly over. She asked: ‘It looks as though we have come to a dead end?’

Even then, we wanted to hear in each other the sound of hope.

WITHOUT seeing Margaret again I went off travelling on duty, and it was a fortnight before I returned to London. The day I got back, I found a note on my desk. Margaret had telephoned, would I meet her that evening in the foyer of the Café Royal? At once I was startled. We had never gone there before, it was a place without associations.

Waiting, a quarter of an hour before the time she fixed, I stared at the swinging door and through the glass at the glare outside. The flash of buses, the dazzle of cars’ bonnets, the waft of the door as someone entered but not she — I was at the stretch of waiting. When at last the door swung past and showed her, minutes early, I saw her face flushed and set; but her step, as she came across the floor, was quick, light, and full of energy.

As she greeted me her eyes were intent on mine; they had no light in them, and the orbits had gone deeper and more hollow.

‘Why here?’ I broke out.

‘You must know. I hope you know.’

She sat down: I had a drink ready, but she did not touch it.

‘I hope you know,’ she said.

‘Tell me then.’

She was speaking, so was I, quite unlike the choked hours in the park: we were speaking at our closest.

‘I am going to get married.’

‘Who to?’

‘Geoffrey.’

‘I knew it.’

Her face at the table came at me in the brilliant precision of a high temperature, sharp edged, so vivid that sight itself was deafening.

‘It is settled, you know,’ she said. ‘Neither of us could bear it if it wasn’t, could we?’

She was speaking still with complete understanding, as though her concern for me was at its most piercing, and mine for her; she was speaking also as one buoyed up by action, who had cut her way out of a conflict and by the fact of acting was released.

I asked: ‘Why didn’t you write and tell me?’

‘Don’t you know it would have been easier to write?’

‘Why didn’t you?’

‘I couldn’t let you get news like that over your breakfast and by yourself.’

I looked at her. Somehow, as at a long distance the words made me listen to what I was losing — it was like her, maternal, irrationally practical, principled, a little vain. I looked at her not yet in loss, so much as in recognition.

She said: ‘You know you’ve done everything for me, don’t you?’

I shook my head.

‘You’ve given me confidence I should never have had,’ she went on. ‘You’ve taken so many of the fears away.’

Knowing me, she knew what might soften the parting for me.

Suddenly she said: ‘I wish, I wish that you could say the same.’

She had set herself to be handsome and protective to the end, but, she could not sustain it. Her tears had sprung out. With a quick, impatient, resolved gesture, she was on her feet.

‘I hope all goes well with you.’

The words, doubtful and angry in their tone, heavy with her concern, were muffled in my ears. They were muffled, like a sad forecast, as I watched her leave me and walk to the door with a firm step. Not looking back, she pushed the door round, so hard that, after I had lost sight of her, the empty segments sucked round before my eyes, sweeping time away, leaving me with nothing there to see.

AFTER Margaret gave me up, I used to go home alone when I left the office on a summer evening. But I had plenty of visitors to my new flat, people I cared for just enough to be interested to see, friendly acquaintances, one or two protégés. For me they were casual evenings, making no more calls on me than a night’s reading.

Sometimes, in the midst of a long official gathering, I thought, not without a certain enjoyment, of how baffled these people would be if they saw the acquaintances with whom I proposed to spend that night. For now I had been long enough in the office to be taken for granted: since the Minister lost his job, I did not possess as much invisible influence as when I was more junior, but in official eyes I had gone up, and the days were stable, full of the steady, confident voices of power. Then I went home from one of Hector Rose’s committees, back to the dingy flat.

Just after Margaret said goodbye, I had to move out of the Dolphin block and, not in a state to trouble, I took the first rooms I heard of, in the square close by. They took up the ground floor of one of the porticoed Pimlico houses; the smell of dust was as constant as a hospital smell; in the sitting-room the sunlight did not enter, even in high summer, until five o’clock. In that room I listened to the acquaintances who came to see me; it was there that Vera Allen, my secretary, suddenly broke out of her reserve and told me of the young man whom Gilbert had identified. He seemed to love her, Vera cried, but he would neither marry nor make love to her. That was, on the surface, a story commonplace enough, in contrast to some of the others which came my way.