Charles Snow - Homecomings

His information was accurate. Mine was one of four service flats, looked after by a manageress; within the last fortnight, she had gone to bed with a heart-attack.

‘It’s pretty adequate,’ I said, as though apologizing for myself.

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Gilbert.

Like other apolaustic men, he had the knack of making one’s living arrangements sound pitiful. I felt obliged to defend mine.

‘It’s better anyway,’ Gilbert conceded. ‘I grant you that, it’s better.’

Although he had dropped into speaking of my physical comforts with his old concern, he would not volunteer a word about any common friends, anyone I might be interested in, let alone Margaret. The May night, the petrol smell, the aphrodisiac smell: as we walked he talked more, but it was putting-off, impersonal talk, deliberately opaque.

As I watched him stretched out in a leather armchair at my club, just as he had been the night he offered to stand down over Margaret, his body was relaxed but his eyes shone, unsoftened, revengeful. There was nothing for me but to be patient. I set myself to speak as easily as when he was working for me. How was he? What was happening to him? What was he planning for his future? He did not mind answering. It gave him a pleasure edged with malice to go on elaborating about his future, knowing that I was getting nowhere near my object. But also, I thought, he was in a difficulty and glad of an opinion. Now that the war was over, he could not settle what to do. Perhaps the Civil Service would keep him; but, if he had the choice, he would prefer to return to Lufkin.

‘The trouble is,’ said Gilbert, ‘I don’t believe for a second he’ll have me.’

‘Why shouldn’t he?’

‘What about the bit of fun-and-games when I slipped one under his ribs?’

‘It was fair enough.’

‘Paul Lufkin has his own idea of what’s fair. Opposing him isn’t included.’

‘I got in his way as much as you did,’ I said, ‘and I’m on definitely good terms with him now.’

‘What’s that in aid of?’ said Gilbert. He added: ‘The old thug will never have me back. I wish to God he would.’

‘Why do you want to go back so much?’

He said something about money, he said that he might be marrying at last. At that moment he was speaking cordially, even intimately, his face flushed in the clubroom half-light; I believed that the mention of marriage was not a blind, I even wondered (he kept all clues from me) who the woman might be.

I said: ‘As I told you a minute ago, I get on well with Paul Lufkin nowadays. Better than I used to, if it comes to that. Will you let me feel out the ground about you?’

‘Why should you?’ His glance was suspicious, and at the same time hopeful.

‘Why not?’

He cupped his hands round the tankard on the table.

‘Well,’ he said, with a hesitating, unwilling pleasure, ‘if it’s not too much of an infliction, I should be damned relieved if you would.’

The room, not yet lit up, was cool as a church in the summer evening, but Gilbert glowed in his chair: other men had gone up to dinner and we were left alone. He glowed, he swallowed another pint of beer, in the chilly room he seemed to be exuding warmth; but that was all he gave out. Although he had accepted my offer, he was returning nothing.

I was thinking: I should have to play his game, and bring in her name myself. It meant a bit of humiliation, but that did not matter; what did matter was that he would see too much. It was a risk I ought not to take. As I bought myself a drink, I asked: ‘By the way, have you seen Margaret lately?’

‘Now and again.’

‘How is she?’

‘Is there anything wrong with her?’ His eyes were sparkling.

‘How should I know?’ I replied evenly.

‘Isn’t she much as you’d expect?’

‘I’ve quite lost touch.’

‘Oh.’ He was briskly conversational. ‘Of course, I’ve kept my eye on all of them, I suppose I see them once every two months, or something like that.’ He was spinning it out. He told me, what I knew from the newspapers, that Margaret’s mother had died a year before. He went on to say, with an air of enthusiasm and good-fellowship: ‘Of course, I’ve seen quite a lot of Helen and her husband. You did meet him, didn’t you? He’s a decent bird—’

‘Yes, I met him,’ I said. ‘When did you see Margaret last?’

‘It can’t have been very long ago.’

‘How was she?’

‘I didn’t notice much change.’

‘Was the child all right?’

‘I think so.’

I broke out: ‘Is she happy?’

‘Why shouldn’t she be?’ Gilbert asked affably. ‘I should have thought she had done as well as most of us. Of course you can’t tell, can you, unless you’ve known someone better than I ever did Margaret?’

He knew, of course, how my question had been wrung out of me. He had been waiting for something like it: I might as well have confided straight out that I still loved her. But he was refusing to help. His mouth was smiling obstinately and his eyes, merry and malicious, taunted me.

I had to honour my offer to Gilbert, and I arranged to call on Paul Lufkin. When I arrived at the Millbank office, where in the past he had kept me waiting so many stretches of hours and from which I used to walk home to Sheila, he was hearty. He was so hearty that I felt the curious embarrassment which comes from the spectacle of an austere man behaving out of character.

Some of his retinue were waiting in the ante-room but I was swept in out of turn, and Lufkin actually slapped me on the back (he disliked physical contact with other males) and pushed out the distinguished visitors’ chair. Now that I was, in his eyes, an independent success, a power in my own right though still minor compared to him, he gave me the appropriate treatment. The interesting thing was, he also truly liked me more.

He said: ‘Well, old chap, sit down and make yourself comfortable.’

He was sitting at his own desk, showing less effects of the last years than any of us, his handsome skull face unravaged, his figure still as bony as an adolescent’s.

‘Believe it or not,’ he went on, ‘I was thinking of asking you to come to one of my little dinner-parties.

‘We must fix it,’ he said, still acting his impersonation of heartiness. ‘We’ve had some pretty jolly parties in our time, haven’t we?’

I responded.

‘There’s a secret I was going to tell you. But now you’ve given me the pleasure of a visit’ — said Lufkin with an entirely unfamiliar politeness — ‘I needn’t wait, I may as well tell you now.’

I realized that he was delighted to have me sitting there. He wanted someone to talk to.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘these people want to send me to the Lords.’

‘These people’ were the first post-war Labour government, and at first hearing it sounded odd that they should want to give Lufkin a peerage. But although he was one of the most eminent industrialists of his day, he had, with his usual long-sightedness, kept a foot in the other camp. He had never been inside the orthodox Conservative party: he had deliberately put some bets on the other side, and since 1940 that policy had been paying off.

In private his politics were the collectivist politics of a supreme manager, superimposed on — and to everyone but himself irreconcilable with — a basis of old-fashioned liberalism.

‘Shall you go?’

‘I don’t see any good reason for turning them down. To tell you the honest truth, I think I should rather like it.’

‘Your colleagues won’t.’

I meant what he must have thought of, that his fellow-bosses would regard him as a traitor for taking honours from the enemy.