Charles Snow - Homecomings

I did not mind. When I was a young man, too poor to give much thought to anything but getting out of poverty, I had dreamed of great success at the Bar; since then I had kept an interest in success and power which was, to many of my friends, forbiddingly intense. And, of course, they were not wrong: if a man spends half of his time discussing basketball, thinking of basketball, examining with passionate curiosity the intricacies of basketball, it is not unreasonable to suspect him of a somewhat excessive interest in the subject.

Yet, over the last years, almost without my noticing it, for such a change does not happen in a morning, I was growing tired of it: or perhaps not so much tired, as finding myself slide from a participant into a spectator. It was partly that now I knew I could earn a living in two or three different ways. It was partly that, of the two I had loved most, Sheila had ignored my liking for power, while Margaret actively detested it. But, although I believed that Margaret’s influence might have quickened the change within me, I also believed it would have happened anyway.

Now that I felt a theme in my life closing, I thought it likely that I had started off with an interest in power greater than that of most reflective men, but not a tenth of Lufkin’s or Rose’s, nothing like enough to last me for a lifetime. I expect that I should keep an eye open for the manoeuvres of others: who will get the job? and why? and how? I expected also that sometimes, as I watched others installed in jobs I might once have liked, I should feel regret. That did not matter much. Beneath it all, a preoccupation was over.

As it vanished step-by-step, so another had filled its place. But this other was genuine; I had been clear about it, although I had had to push it out of sight, even when I was a child. I had known that sooner or later I should have some books to write; I did not worry about it; I was learning what I had to say. In trouble, that knowledge had often steadied me, and had given me a comfort greater than any other. Even after Margaret left me, in the middle of the war, when I was too busy to write anything sustained, nevertheless I could, last thing at night, read over my notebooks and add an item or two. It gave me a kind of serenity; it was like going into a safe and quiet room.

After the cold parting with Rose I went to my own office, where George was sitting by the window smoking a pipe.

‘That will be all right, barring accidents,’ I told him at once.

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me,’ said George enthusiastically, as though the manner of his reception by Rose was much more important than the prosaic matter of the result.

‘You’d expect him to be civil, wouldn’t you?’

‘He was extraordinarily nice to me, right from the minute I went in,’ said George, as though he had anticipated being tripped up inside the door.

I realized that George had not speculated on why Rose and I had been discussing him for so long. He was not given to meeting danger halfway; he had been happy, sitting by my window, looking down into Whitehall, waiting for me to bring the news. He was happy also, later that evening, as we walked through the streets under a frigid moon, though not in the way I was. I was happy that night because it took me back through the years to the time when he and I walked the harsher streets of the provincial town, George making grandiose plans for me, his brightest protégé — to the time which seemed innocent now, before I met Sheila, to those years in the early twenties when the world outside us seemed innocent too.

It was unlikely that George gave a thought to that past, for he was not in the least a sentimental man. No, he was happy because he enjoyed my company, my company as a middle-aged man in the here and now; because he had been received politely by an important person; because he saw work ahead on which he could stretch himself; because he was obscurely scoring against all the people who had kept him dim and unrecognized so long; and because, in the moonlit night, he saw soldiers and women pairing off in the London streets. For George, even in his forties, was one of those men who can find romantic magnificence in sex without trappings; the sight of the slit of light around the nightclub door, and he was absent-minded with happiness; his feet stumped more firmly on the pavement, and he cheerfully twirled his stick.

WE were busy that winter sketching out a new project, and on many nights George Passant and my secretary worked later than I did at the office and then went on to my flat to get a draft finished. At the flat they met some of my acquaintances; George, whose eyes brightened at the sight of Vera Allen, did not know what had happened to me, nor speculate much about it.

It would not have occurred to him that I was getting consolation from being a looker-on. It would have occurred to him even less that, just occasionally, when I was listening, trying to give sensible advice, there came thoughts which I had to use my whole will to shut out. In that rational, looking-on, and on the whole well-intended existence, I would suddenly have my attention drained away, by something more actual than a dream, in which a letter was on the way from Margaret, asking me to join her.

George would have believed none of that. To him I appeared quieter and more sober than I used to be, but still capable of high spirits. He assumed that I must have some secret source of satisfaction, and often, if we were left alone in the flat, he would say with an air of complacence, correct and smug: ‘Well, I won’t intrude on your private life.’

Then he would walk happily off up the square, twiddling his stick and whistling.

On the nights she came home with us, Vera Allen used to leave when she thought George was still occupied, so that he would not have an excuse to walk with her to the bus. He remained good-humoured and aware of her until one evening, when they arrived at the flat half an hour before me, there was a constraint between them so glaring that it was almost tactless not to refer to it. That evening it was George who left first.

When I heard his steps clumping defiantly along the pavement, I gazed with amusement at Vera. She was standing up ready to hand me papers, not showing any tiredness after the night’s work, her figure neat and strong as a dancer’s. It was that figure which made her seem so comely, for her face, with features flattened and open, was not beautiful, was scarcely even pretty; yet behind the openness of her expression, there was some hint — often I had thought it illusory, but that did not matter — of hidden hopes which tempted men, which made a good many speculate on how surprising she might be in one’s arms. But most men, unlike George, knew it was futile.

She was a simple, direct, and modest young woman. Although she was only twenty-seven, her husband had been killed four years before. Now she was in love again, with an absolute blinkered concentration of love, so that she seemed to breathe and eat only as means to the end of having Norman to herself. They were not lovers, but she had not a second’s recognition of the flesh to spare for any other man. She was — as far as I could guess about her — both passionate and chaste. I smiled at her. She trusted me now. I asked: ‘What’s the matter with Mr Passant?’

Vera’s eyes, clear and unblinking, met mine: there might have been a tinge of colour on her cheeks and necks, as she considered.

‘I should have thought he was a little highly strung, Mr Eliot.’

She paused, like a politician issuing a statement, and added: ‘Yes, he is on the highly strung side . I don’t think I can put it better than that.’

I nearly told her I did not think she could have put it worse. Vera, although not sophisticated, was also not coy: but she had a knack of finding insipid words which satisfied herself though no one else, and then of gripping onto them as though they were so many umbrellas. Highly strung. From now on she would firmly produce that egregious phrase whenever George was mentioned. What did it mean? Amorizing, importunate, randy, gallant? Something like that: I doubted if she had made a distinction, or could recognize at sight the difference between a violently sensual man like George and some of her flirtatious hangers-on. She just put them impartially aside. For a woman of her age, she was curiously innocent.