Charles Snow - Homecomings

I was incredulous that he had dropped in just because he was in tearing spirits and liked my company.

‘Am I interrupting you?’ he said, and chuckled.

‘That’s an unanswerable question,’ he broke out. ‘What does one say, when one’s quite openly and patently in the middle of work, and some ass crassly asks whether he’s interrupting you?’

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘this can all wait.’

‘The country won’t stop?’ With a gesture as lively as an undergraduate’s, he brushed the quiff of grey hair off his forehead. ‘You see, I’m looking for someone to brag to. And there’s no one else in this part of London whom I can decently brag to, at least for long enough to be satisfactory.’

He had just, calling at the Athenaeum, received the offer of an honorary degree, not from his own university but from St Andrews. ‘Which is entirely respectable,’ said Davidson. ‘Of course, it doesn’t make the faintest difference to anything I’ve tried to do. If in twenty years five people read the compositions of an obsolete critic of the graphic arts, it won’t be because some kind academic gentleman gave him an LL.D. In fact, it’s dubious whether critics ought to get any public recognition whatever. There’s altogether too much criticism now, and it attracts altogether too much esteem. But still, if any criticism is going to attract esteem, I regard it as distinctly proper that mine should.’

I smiled. I had witnessed a good many solid men receive honours, men who would have dismissed Davidson as bohemian and cranky: solid men who, having devoted much attention to winning just such honours, then wondered whether they should accept them, deciding, after searching their souls, that they must for their wives’ and colleagues’ sakes. By their side, Austin Davidson was so pure.

‘The really pressing problem is,’ said Davidson, ‘to make sure that all one’s acquaintances have to realize the existence of this excellent award. They have a curious tendency not to notice anything agreeable which comes one’s way. On the other hand, if someone points out in a very obscure periodical that Austin Davidson is the worst art critic since Vasari, it’s quite remarkable how everyone I’ve ever spoken to has managed to fix his eyes on that.

‘Of course,’ Davidson reflected happily, ‘I suppose one would only be kept completely cheerful if they had a formula to include the name in most public announcements. Something like this. “Since the Provost and Fellows of Eton College have been unable to secure the services of Mr Austin Davidson, they have appointed as Headmaster…” Or even “Since HM has not been successful in persuading Mr Austin Davidson of the truths of revealed religion, he has elevated to the See of Canterbury…”’ He was so light-hearted, I did not want to see him go, the more so as I knew now he had detected nothing about Margaret and me. A few months before, I had been hyper-aesthetized for the opposite reason, hoping to hear him bring out her name.

Enjoying himself, he also did not want to part. It was getting too late for tea in the cafés near Whitehall, and Davidson drank little: so I suggested a place in Pimlico, and, as Davidson had a passion for walking, we started off on foot. He lollopped along, his steps thudded on the dank pavement; his fancies kept flicking out. When we passed the dilapidated rooms-by-the-hour-or-night hotels of Wilton Road, he jerked with his thumb at one, a little less raffish, with its door shut and the name worse for wear over the fanlight.

‘How much should I have to pay you to spend a night there?’

‘You pay the bill too?’

‘Certainly I pay the bill.’

‘Well then, excluding the bill, three pounds.’

‘Too much,’ said Davidson severely, and clumped on.

I had wanted to escape that meeting, and it turned out a surprise: so did another which I did not want to escape — with his daughter Helen. When she telephoned and said, not urgently so far as I could hear, that she would like to see me, I was pleased: and I was pleased when I greeted her on the landing of my flat.

It was years since I had seen her; and, as soon as I could watch her face under my sitting-room light, I wondered if I should have guessed her age. She was by now in her late thirties, and her cheeks and neck were thinning; her features, which had always had the family distinction without her sister’s bloom, had sharpened. Yet, in those ways passing or already passed into scraggy middle-age, she nevertheless had kept, more than any of us, the uncovered-up expression of her youth: she had taken on no pomp at all, not even the simple pomp of getting older: there was nothing deliberate about her, except for the rebellious concern about her clothes, which, I suspected, had by now become automatic, even less thought-about than Margaret’s simplicity. Her glance and smile were as light as when she was a girl.

‘Lewis,’ she said at once, ‘Margaret has told me about you two.’

‘I’m glad of it.’

‘Are you?’ She knew enough about me to be surprised: she knew that, holding this secret, I would not have shared it with my own brother, intimate though we were.

‘I’m glad that someone knows whom we can trust.’

Staring at me over the sofa-head, Helen realized that I meant it, and that this time, unlike all others, the secrecy was pressing me in. The corners of her eyes screwed up: her mouth was tart, almost angry, with the family sarcasm.

‘That’s not the most fortunate remark ever made,’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I wasn’t very anxious to come to see you today.’

‘Have you brought a message from her?’ I cried.

‘Oh, no.’

For an instant I was relieved; she was more tense than I was.

‘Margaret knows that I was coming here,’ she said. ‘And I believe she knows what I was going to say.’

‘What is it?’

She spoke fast, as though beset until she had it out: ‘What you’re planning with Margaret is wrong.’

I gazed at her without recognition and without speaking.

After a time, she said, quite gently, now she had put the worst job behind her: ‘Lewis, I think you ought to answer for yourself.’

‘Ought I?’

‘I think so. You don’t want to frighten me off, do you? You’ve done enough of that with other people, you know.’

I had always had respect for her. After a pause, I said: ‘You make moral judgements more easily than I do.’

‘I dare say I overdo it,’ said Helen. ‘But I think you go to the other extreme. And that has certain advantages to you when you’re planning what you’re planning now.’

‘Do you think I’m specially pleased with myself about it?’

‘Of course you’re worried.’ She studied me with her sharp bright eyes. ‘But I don’t know, I should have said you seemed much happier than you used to be.’

She went on: ‘You know I wish you to be happy, don’t you?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘And I wish it for her too,’ said Helen.

Suddenly, across the grain of feeling she smiled.

‘When a woman comes to anyone in your predicament and says “Of course, I wish both of you well, I couldn’t wish anyone in the world better, but —” it means she’s trying to break it up. Quite true. But still I love her very much, and I was always fond of you.’

There was a silence.

She cried out, sharp, unforgiving: ‘But the child’s there. That’s the end of it.’

‘I’ve seen him—’ I began.

‘It didn’t stop you?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t understand you.’ Then the edge of her voice turned away. ‘I’m ready to believe that you and she could make something more valuable for each other than she and Geoffrey ever could. I always hoped that you’d get married in the first place.’