Charles Snow - Homecomings

Even spruced up for the interview, George looked not so much untidy as dowdy, in a blue suit with the trouser legs too tight. His shoes, his tie, separated him from Rose as much as his accent did, and there was not only class, there was success dividing them. George, never at his ease except with protégés or women, was more than ever fiddling for the right etiquette in front of this smooth youngish man, more successful than anyone he had met.

Sitting down, he smiled shyly at Rose, and of all the contrasts between them that in their faces was the sharpest. At forty-six Rose’s was blankly youthful, the untouched front of a single-minded man, with eyes heavy and hard. George, three years younger, looked no more than his age; he was going neither grey nor bald; but there were written on him the signs of one who has found his temperament often too much to manage; his forehead was bland and noble, his nose and mouth and whole expression had a cheerful sensual liveliness — except for his eyes, which, light blue in their deep orbits, were abstracted, often lost and occasionally sad.

With the practised and temperate flow of a Civil Service interview, Rose questioned him.

‘I wonder if you would mind, Mr Passant, just helping us by taking us through your career?’

George did so. He might be shy, but he was lucid as always. His school career: his articles with a Woodbridge solicitor –

‘Forgive me interrupting, Mr Passant, but with a school record like yours I’m puzzled why you didn’t try for a university scholarship?’

‘If I’d known what they were like I might have got one,’ said George robustly.

‘Leaving most of us at the post,’ said Rose with a polite bow.

‘I think I should have got one,’ said George, and then suddenly one of his fits of abject diffidence took him over, the diffidence of class. ‘But of course I had no one to advise me, starting where I did.’

‘I should hope that we’re not wasting material like you nowadays, if you will let me say so.’

‘More than you think.’ George was comfortable again. He went on about his articles: the Law Society examinations; the prizes; the job at Eden and Martineau’s, a firm of solicitors in a midland town, as a qualified clerk.

‘Where you’ve been ever since. That is, since October 1924,’ put in Rose smoothly.

‘I’m afraid so,’ said George.

‘Why haven’t you moved?’

‘You ought to be told,’ said George, without any embarrassment, ‘that I had an unpleasant piece of difficulty ten years ago.’

‘I have been told,’ said Rose, also without fuss. ‘I can perfectly well understand that trouble getting in your way since — but what about the years before?’

George answered: ‘I’ve often asked myself. Of course I didn’t have any influence behind me.’

Rose regarded him as though he wanted to examine his lack of initiative. But he thought better of it, and dexterously switched him on to legal points. Like many high-class Civil Servants, Rose had a competent amateur knowledge of law; I sat by, without any need to intervene, while George replied with his old confidence.

Then Rose said: most countries recruit their bureaucracy almost exclusively from lawyers: our bureaucracy is not fond of them: who is right? It was a topic which Rose knew backwards, but George, quite undeterred, argued as though he had been in Permanent Secretaries’ offices for years: I found myself listening, not to the interview, but to the argument for its own sake: I found also that Rose, who usually timed interviews to the nearest two minutes, was letting this over-run by nearly ten. At last he said, bowing from the waist, as ceremonious as though he were saying goodbye to Lufkin or an even greater boss: ‘I think perhaps we might leave it for the moment, don’t you agree, Mr Passant? It has been a most delightful occasion and I shall see that we let you know whether we can possibly justify ourselves in temporarily uprooting you—’

With a smile George backed out, the door closed, Rose looked not at me but out of the window. His arms were folded on his chest, and it was some moments before he spoke.

‘Well,’ he said.

I waited.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘he’s obviously a man of very high intelligence.’

In that respect, Rose in half an hour could appreciate George’s quality more than his employer in the solicitors’ firm, who had known him half a lifetime. He went on: ‘He’s got a very strong and precise mind, and it’s distinctly impressive. If we took him as a replacement for Cooke, on the intellectual side we should gain by the transaction.’

Rose paused. His summing-up was not coming as fluently as usual.

He added: ‘But I must say, there seems to be altogether too much on the negative side.’

I stiffened, ready to sit it out.

‘What exactly?’

‘Not to put too fine a point on it, a man of his ability who just rests content in a fourth-rate job must have something wrong with him.’

A stranger, listening to the altercation which went on for many minutes, would have thought it business-like, rational, articulate. He might not have noticed, so cool was Rose’s temper, so long had I had to learn to subdue mine, that we were each of us very angry. I knew that I had only to be obstinate to get my way. I could rely on Rose’s fairness. If George had been an impossible candidate, he would have vetoed him. But, although Rose felt him unsuitable and even more alien, he was too fair to rule him out at sight.

That being so, I should get George if I stuck to it; for this was the middle of the war, and I was doing a difficult job. In peace-time, I should have had to take anyone I was given. Rose had been trained not to expect to make a personal choice of a subordinate, any more than of an office chair: it offended him more, because mine was nothing but a personal choice. It was wartime, however; my job was regarded as exacting and in part it was abnormally secret. In the long run I had to be given my head. But I knew that I should have to pay a price.

‘Well, my dear Lewis, I am still distinctly uneasy about this suggestion. If I may say so, I am slightly surprised that you should press it, in view of what I have tried, no doubt inadequately, to explain.’

‘I wouldn’t do so for a minute,’ I replied, ‘if I weren’t unusually certain.’

‘Yes, that’s the impression you have managed to give.’ For once Rose was letting his bitter temper show. ‘I repeat, I am surprised that you should press the suggestion.’

‘I am sure of the result.’

‘Right.’ Rose snapped off the argument, like a man turning a switch. ‘I’ll put the nomination through the proper channels. You’ll be able to get this man started within a fortnight.’

He glanced at me, his face smoothed over.

‘Well, I’m most grateful to you for spending so much time this afternoon. But I should be less than honest with you, my dear Lewis, if I didn’t say that I still have a fear this may prove one of your few errors of judgement.’

That was the price I paid. For Rose, who in disapproval invariably said less than he meant, was telling me, not that I might turn out to have made an error of judgement, but that I had already done so. That is, I had set my opinion against official opinion beyond the point where I should have backed down. If I had been a real professional, with a professional’s ambitions, I could not have afforded to. For it did not take many ‘errors of judgement’ — the most minatory phrase Rose could use to a colleague — docketed in that judicious mind, to keep one from the top jobs. If I became a professional, I should have the future, common enough if one looked round the Pall Mall clubs, of men of parts, often brighter than their bosses, who had inexplicably missed the top two rungs.