Charles Snow - Homecomings

I was not thinking much about Betty and Gilbert. When I first heard the news I had been piqued because she had not confided in me. Maybe she had, it occurred to me, a year or more ago: more likely than not, this was what she meant by her chance to settle down. Should I have told her that I did not believe the marriage could work? She was so shrewd, she would know what I felt without my saying it. I knew too well, however, that the shrewd and clear-sighted, if they are unhappy and unsettled and lonely enough, as she was, can delude themselves at least as much as, perhaps more than, less worldly people.

Yet, as I went towards the party, the lights from the windows shimmering out into the drizzle, I was aware of other thoughts drifting through my mind, as though this marriage were an oddly final thing. For me it seemed to call out time, it was the end of an epoch. I had known them each so long, Betty for nearly twenty years. We had seen in each other youth passing, causes dribbling out, hopes cutting themselves down to fit our fates: our lives had interleaved, we had seen each other in the resilience of youth’s flesh, on and off for years we had, in the other’s trouble, helped pick up the pieces. Now we saw each other when the covers and disguises were melting away, when the bones of our nature were at last showing through.

Our life of the thirties, our wartime life, was over now. Somehow the gong sounded, the door clanged to, more decisively through her marriage than through any fatality to those who touched me to the roots — through her, who was just a comrade, someone I had been fond of without fuss.

In the house, the first person I recognized was old Bevill, drinking a glass of champagne at the bottom of the stairs and talking to a pretty girl. The downstairs rooms were already full of people, and I had to push my way upstairs to reach the main origin of noise. As I passed him, Bevill told me that Gilbert and his wife were ‘up above’. He said: ‘I always wondered when our friend would succumb. Do you know, Lewis, I’ve been married forty-eight years. It makes you think.’

The old man was radiant with champagne and the company of the young. He began to tell us the story about Betty Vane’s father — ‘We were at school together, of course. We never thought he’d come into the title, because there was that cousin of his who went off his head and stayed off his head for thirty years. So it didn’t look much of a cop for Percy Vane. We didn’t call him Percy, though, we called him Chinaman Vane — though I haven’t the faintest idea why, he didn’t look like a Chinaman, whatever else they could say about him.’

This incongruity struck Bevill as remarkably funny, and his bald head flushed with his chortles: he was content to stand in the hall without inserting himself into the grander circles of the party. But there were others who were not: the main room upstairs was packed with immiscible groups, for Gilbert and Betty had invited guests from all the strata they had lived among. There was Lord Lufkin and some of his court, from Gilbert’s business past: acquaintances from Chelsea before the war, the radicals, the ill-fitting, the lumpen-bourgeoisie.

There were a good many Civil Servants, among them Hector Rose, for once at a disadvantage, abnormally uncomfortable and effusively polite, detesting the sight of any society except in the office and the club. There was George Passant, moving about alone, with that expression unfocused, reverie-laden, absently smiling, which at this time more and more came over him in the proximity of women. There were Gilbert’s relatives, many of them soldiers, small-headed, thin, gravel-voiced. There were Betty’s, the younger women talking in the curious distorted Cockney of their generation of the upper-class, huddled together like a knot of scientists at the British Association anxious not to be interrupted by camp-followers.

In all those faces there was only one I looked for. Soon I discovered her, listening but not participating at the edge of a large circle, her eyes restlessly looking out for me. As at her father’s, we met alone in the crowd.

‘That’s better,’ she said.

‘I wish I could have brought you,’ I said.

‘I was touching wood, I didn’t like to ask for you.’

She was excited; as she lit a cigarette, there was a tremor in her fingers.

‘Who have you been talking to?’

‘Oh, I haven’t got as far as that.’ She was laughing, not only with excitement, but at herself. Even now that she was grown-up, she was still shy. If this had been an ordinary party, not a cover for the two of us to meet, she would still have had to brace herself to cope: though, when once she had started, she revelled in it.

‘We’re here, anyway, and that’s lucky,’ I said.

‘It is lucky,’ she replied with an active restless smile.

I was just telling her that soon we could slip away downstairs and talk, when Betty herself joined us.

‘Lewis, my dear. Won’t you wish me luck?’

She held out her arms, and I kissed her cheek. Then, bright-eyed, she glanced at Margaret.

‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ said Betty.

‘You have,’ I was putting in, when Betty went on: ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, but will you tell me who you are?’

It sounded at best forgetful, it sounded also rude, for Betty’s manner to a stranger was staccato and brusque. Yet she was the least arrogant of women, and I was at the same time astonished by her and upset to see Margaret wilt.

‘My name,’ she said, with her chin sunk down, ‘is Margaret Hollis.’

‘Oh, now I know,’ cried Betty. ‘You used to be Margaret Davidson, didn’t you?’

Margaret nodded.

‘I’ve heard my husband talk about you.’

With the same heartiness, the same apparent lack of perception, Betty went on with meaningless gossip, not caring that Margaret and I were looking strained. Yes, her husband Gilbert was a friend of Margaret’s sister Helen, wasn’t he? Yes, Gilbert had spoken about Helen’s husband. At last Betty broke off, saying to Margaret: ‘Look, there are some people here who I want you to meet. I’ll take you along straightaway.’

Margaret was led off. I had to let her go, without protecting her. It was a bitterness, known only to those in illicit love, not to be able to be spontaneous. I was reckoning how much time I had to allow before I could take her away.

Meanwhile, myself at a loss, I looked round. Gilbert, high-coloured, was surveying his guests with bold, inquisitive eyes. They were the collection of acquaintances of half-a-lifetime; I expected his detective work was still churning on; but I was thinking again, as I had done walking to the house, how this was some sort of end. For Gilbert who, despite his faults, or more precisely because of them, cared as little for social differences as a man can do, had travelled a long way through society, just as I had myself, in the other direction.

So had Betty: the unlucky mattered, politics mattered, friends mattered, and nothing else. When I had first met them both, it had seemed to us all self-evident that society was loosening and that soon most people would be indifferent to class. We had turned out wrong. In our forties we had to recognize that English society had become more rigid, not less, since our youth. Its forms were crystallizing under our eyes into an elaborate and codified Byzantinism, decent enough, tolerable to live in, but not blown through by the winds of scepticism or individual protest or sense of outrage which were our native air. And those forms were not only too cut-and-dried for us: they would have seemed altogether too rigid for nineteenth-century Englishmen. The evidence was all about us, even at that wedding party: quite little things had, under our eyes, got fixed, and, except for catastrophes, fixed for good. The Hector Roses and their honours lists: it was a modern invention that the list should be systematized by Civil Service checks and balances: they had ceased to be corrupt and unpredictable, they were now as hierarchically impeccable as the award of coloured hats at the old Japanese Court. And I did not believe that I was seduced by literary resonances when I imagined that Betty Vane’s and Thomas Bevill’s relatives were behaving like Guermantes.