Charles Snow - Homecomings

The morning was dark: murk hung over the river, and in chambers the lights were on. It might have been one of the autumn mornings nearly twenty years before, when I sat there, looking out of the window, with nothing to do, avid for recognition, bitter because it would not come. But I felt no true memory of that past: somehow, although I had not revisited the place for years, no trigger released the forces of past emotion, my sense of faint regret was general and false. No trigger clicked, even when I read the list of names at the foot of the staircase, a list where my own name had stood as late as the end of the war: Mr Getliffe, Mr W Allen…they had been there before my time. No trigger clicked, even when I went into Getliffe’s room, smelt the tobacco once so familiar, and met the gaze of the bold, opaque and tricky eyes.

‘Why, it’s old L S,’ said Herbert Getliffe, giving me his manly, forthright handshake. He was the only man alive who called me by my initials: he did it with an air both hearty and stern, as though he had just been deeply impressed by a code of gravitas. In fact, he was a man of immense cunning, mercurial and also impressionable. His face was fat and rubbery, his lips red and, despite himself, even in his most magisterial acts there was an imp not far from his eyes. When I had worked in his chambers he had treated me with a mixture of encouragement and lavish unscrupulousness: since then we had kept an affection, desultory and suspicious, for each other. Even now, it surprised me that he was one of the more successful silks at the common law bar: but that was the fact.

I had only seen him once or twice since the night of the Barbican dinner before the war, when I went home to Sheila drunk and elated. I asked how he was getting on.

‘It would be ungrateful to grumble,’ he replied in a stately fashion. ‘One manages to earn one’s bread and butter’ — as usual, he could not keep it up, and he winked — ‘ and a little piece of cake.’

‘What about you, L S?’ He was genuinely curious about others, it was one of his strengths. ‘Every time I hear about you, you seem to be flourishing.’

Yes, I said, things had gone comparatively well.

‘You go from power to power, don’t you? Backstairs secrets and gentlemen in little rooms with XYZ after their names, all clamping collars round our necks,’ he said, with a kind of free association. He broke out: ‘There was a time when I used to think you’d become an ornament here.’ He grinned: ‘In that case, just about this year of grace we should have begun to cut each other’s throats.’

‘I’m sure we should,’ I said.

Getliffe, his mood changing within the instant, looked at me in reproach.

‘You mustn’t say those things, L S. You mustn’t even think them. There’s always room at the top and people like you and me ought to help each other.

‘Do you know,’ he added in a whisper, ‘that just now one has to turn down cases one would like to take?’

‘Too busy?’

‘One’s never too busy for a thousand smackers,’ said Getliffe frowning: he was, unexpectedly so after the first impression he made, one of the most avaricious of men.

‘Well then?’

‘One comes to a stage when one doesn’t want to drop any bricks.’

He was coy, he repeated his allusion, looked at me boldly like a child expecting to be caught out, but would not explain. Then I realized. There would be vacancies on the Bench soon, Getliffe was in the running, and throughout his whole career he would have sacrificed anything, even his great income, to become a judge. As he sat there that morning I thought I was seeing him almost on top of his world, Getliffe in excelsis, one of the few men I had ever seen in sight of all he wanted. It was to him at that moment that I had to let my secret out.

‘Herbert,’ I mentioned it casually, ‘I may want, it isn’t certain but I may, a bit of advice about a divorce case.’

‘I thought your poor wife was dead,’ Getliffe replied, and his next words overlay the first: ‘I’m very sorry to hear it, L S.’

‘I may want some professional advice about how to get it through as painlessly as possible.’

‘ I’ve always been happily married,’ Getliffe reproved me. ‘I’m thankful to say that the thought of divorce has never come into either of our heads.’

‘Anyone would like to be in your position,’ I told him. ‘But—’

‘I always say,’ Getliffe interrupted, ‘that it takes a sense of humour to make a success of marriage. A sense of humour, and do-unto-others — especially one other — as-you-would-they-should-do-unto-you. That’s what it takes.’

‘Some of us aren’t quite as lucky.’

‘Anyway,’ said Getliffe, suddenly curious, ‘what position are you in?’

I knew that, although tricky, he was also discreet. I told him that I had known a woman, whose name did not matter at present, before her marriage: she had been married under four years and had a child not yet three: now she and I had met again, and wished to get married ourselves.

‘Well, L S, I’ve got to tell you what I think as man-to-man, and I’ve got to tell you that your decent course is to get out.’

‘No, I shan’t do that,’ I said.

‘I’ve thought of you as a fellow-sinner, but I’ve never thought of you as heartless, you know.’

He looked at me without expression, and for an instant his tricks, his moral indignation and boasting dropped away: ‘Tell me, old chap, is this desperately important for you?’

I said the one word: ‘Yes.’

‘I see.’ His tone was kind.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s no use saying any more about what I think. I can tell you the best chap to go to, of course, but you probably know that yourself. But, if you must, I should go to — Do you know that he’s pulling in £20,000 a year these days? It’s a very easy side of the profession, L S, and sometimes one wishes that one hadn’t started off with one’s principles.’

‘At this stage,’ I said, ‘I doubt if he could say anything that you and I don’t know. You see, the woman I want to marry has nothing to complain of from her husband.’

‘Will he play? Between you and me and these four walls, I shouldn’t if I were in his shoes.’

‘It wouldn’t be reasonable to ask him, even if we felt able to,’ I replied. ‘He happens to be a doctor.’

Getliffe regarded me with a hot-eyed, flustered look: ‘Tell me, L S, are you co-habiting with her?’

‘No.’

I was not sure that he believed me. He was, at one and the same time, deeply religious, prudish, and sensual: and, as a kind of combined result, he was left with the illusion that the rest of mankind, particularly those not restrained by faith, spent their whole time in regulated sexual activity.

Recovering from his excitement, he became practical about legal ways and means, which I was conversant with, which normally I should have found tiresome or grittily squalid, but which that morning gave me a glow of confidence. The smoke-dark sky, the reading-lamp on Getliffe’s desk, the tobacco smell: the hotel evidence we should want: the delay between the suit being filed and the hearing: the time-lag before the decree absolute: as I discussed them, I had forgotten how much I had invented, talking to Getliffe. It sounded down-to-earth, but for me it was the opposite.

The next afternoon, the November cloud-cap still lay low over the town, and looking out from my flat, past the reflection of the lamp in the window whose curtains were not drawn, I saw the park prematurely grey. Each instant I was listening for the lift outside, for Margaret for the first time had promised to come to me there. She was not yet due, it was only ten to four, but I had begun to listen for her early. With five minutes still to go, I heard the grinding and cranking of the antique machine, and went out on to the dark landing. The lights of the lift slowly moved up; there she was in the doorway, her cheeks pink from the cold air, hands tucked inside her fur coat, her eyes brilliant as though she were relaxed at being in the warm.