Charles Snow - Homecomings

As I was putting my coat down, he said: ‘I met someone who knew you this morning.’ He gave the name of an elderly acquaintance. ‘She was anxious to get in touch with you. I’d better hand this over before I forget.’ It was a card with an address and telephone number.

I asked if it could wait, but Davidson had discharged his commission and was not interested any more.

‘If you fancy yourself at the telephone, there’s one under the stairs,’ he said. He spoke in a severe minatory voice, as though telephony were a difficult art, and it was presumptuous on my part to pretend to have mastered it. In fact Davidson, who was so often the spokesman of the modern, whose walls were hung with the newest art, had never come to terms with mechanical civilization. Not only did he go deaf if he put a receiver to his ear: even fountain pens and cigarette lighters were white-man’s magic which he would have no dealings with.

While I was making my call, which turned out to be of no possible importance, I was by myself listening to the continuum of noise from the unknown rooms. I felt a prickle of nervousness not, it seemed, because Margaret might be there, but just as though I had ceased to be a man of forty, experienced at going about amongst strangers: I felt as I might have done when I was very young.

When at last I went in I stayed on the outskirts of the room trying to put myself at ease. I looked away from the picture, from the unknown people, out through the window to a night so dark, although it was only nine o’clock in July, that the terrace was invisible: in the middle distance twinkled the lamps along Regent’s Park. Down below the window lights, the pavement was bone-white, the rain had still not fallen.

Then I walked round the room, or rather the two rooms which, for the show, had had their dividing doors folded. There must have been sixty or seventy people there, but apart from Davidson, alert and unpompous among a knot of young men, I did not see a face I knew. Along one long wall were hung a set of non-representational paintings, in which geometrical forms were set in a Turnerian sheen. Along the other were some thickly painted portraits, not quite naturalistic but nearly so. Trying to clamp myself down to study them, I could not settle to it.

I found myself falling back into the refuge I had used at twenty. I used to save my self-respect by the revenges of my observation, and I did so now. Yes, most of the people in these rooms were different animals from those one saw at Lufkin’s dinners or round the committee tables with Hector Rose: different animals in an exact, technical sense: lighter-boned, thinner, less heavily muscled, their nerves nearer the surface, their voices more pent-in: less exalting in their bodies strength than so many of Lufkin’s colleagues — and yet, I was prepared to bet, in many cases more erotic. That was one of the paradoxes which separated these persons from the men of action; I thought of acquaintances of mine in Lufkin’s entourage who walked with the physical confidence, the unself-conscious swagger, of condottieri ; but it was not they who were driven, driven to obsession by the erotic life, but men as it might be one or two I saw round me that night, whose cheeks were sunken and limbs shambling, who looked, instead of bold and authoritative like Lufkin’s colleagues, much younger than their years.

Soon someone recognized me, and, opposite one of the non-representational patterns, I was caught up in an argument. In a group of five or six I was the oldest man, and they treated me with respect, one even called me ‘sir’. It was an argument such as we knew by heart in those years, about the future of abstract art. I was talking with the fluency of having been through those tricks before, talking with the middle-aged voice, the practised party voice. They called me ‘sir’, they thought me heterodox, they were not as accustomed to debating or so ready for shock tactics. None of them knew that, five minutes before, I had been nervous and lost.

All the time I was arguing, I was staring over them and past them, just as though I were a young man on the make, looking out at a party for someone more useful than his present company. I had seen no sign of her, but, as the minutes seeped on, I could not keep my glance still.

At last I saw her. She came out of the crowd by the wall opposite ours and farther down the room; she was speaking to a woman, and she spread out her hands in a gesture I had often seen, which suddenly released her animation and gaiety. As she talked my glance was fixed on her: it was many instants before her eyes came my way.

She hesitated in front of a neglected picture and stood there by herself. A young man at my side was speaking insistently, heckling me with polite questions. She was walking towards us. As she came inside our group, the young man halted his speech.

‘Go on,’ said Margaret.

Someone began to introduce me to her.

‘We’ve known each other for years,’ she said, protectively and gently. ‘Go on, I don’t want to interrupt.’

As she stood, her head bent down and receptive, I saw her for an instant as though it were first sight. Excitement, a mixture of impatience and content, had poured into my nerves — but that seemed disconnected from, utterly uncaused by, this face which might have been another stranger’s. Pale, fine rather than pretty, just missing beauty, lips and nostrils clean-cut, not tender until she smiled — it was an interesting face, but not such a face as in imagination I admired most, not even one that, away from her, I endowed her with.

Then the first sight shattered, as I thought she had changed. Five years before, when I had first met her, she could have passed for a girl: but now, at thirty, she looked her full age. Under the light, among the dark hair glinted a line of silver; her skin which, with her blend of negligence and subfusc vanity she used to leave untouched, was made up now, but there were creases round her mouth and eyes. Suddenly I remembered that when I knew her there were some broken veins just behind her cheekbones, odd for so young and fine-skinned a woman; but now under the powder they were hidden.

Standing in the middle of this group she was not embarrassed, as she would have been once. She rested there, not speaking much nor assertively, but a woman among a crowd of younger men: now there was no disguising her energy, her natural force.

The light seemed brighter on the eyes, the pictures farther away, the crowd in the room noisier, voices were high around me, questions came at me, but I had dropped out of the argument. Once, glancing at Margaret, I met her eyes: I had not spoken to her alone. At last the group moved on, and we were left just for an instant isolated, no one listening to us. But now the chance had come, I could not speak: the questions I wanted to ask, after three years of silence, would not come to the tongue, I was like a stutterer needing to bring out his dreaded consonant. We gazed at each other, but I could not utter. The silence tightened between us.

Foolishly I creaked out some remark about the pictures, asking how she liked them, as banal a question as though she was a boring acquaintance with whom I had to make my ration of conversation. In the midst of that nonsense my voice broke away from me, and I heard it sound intense, intimate and harsh.

‘How are you?’

Her tone was kinder, but just as edged: ‘No, how are you?’

Her eyes would not leave mine. Each willed the other to answer first; I gave way.

‘I haven’t much to tell you,’ I said.

‘Tell me what there is.’

‘It could be worse.’

‘You’ve always been ready to bear it, haven’t you?’

‘No, my life isn’t intolerable,’ I said, trying to tell her the precise truth.