Charles Snow - Homecomings

She said: ‘But just because you’re probably right for each other, just because you’re capable of being good to and for each other, you can’t go back to it now.’

For the first time I was irritated and confused, I stumbled to find an answer in her own terms.

‘You can’t,’ she said, pushing my retort aside, ‘take the slightest risk about the child. It’s not only for his sake, it’s for hers, because you know what it would mean for her, if anything went wrong with him.’

‘I’m not afraid that anything would go wrong.’

‘You can’t take the risk.’ She went on: ‘If things didn’t go right for the child, then it wouldn’t matter if you felt it wasn’t your fault and that he’d never have coped anyway. What do you think she would feel?’

She said: ‘She must see this as well as I do. I can’t understand her.’

I began to answer her. Whatever Margaret and I did, I said, there was no way open of behaving as we wished to behave. Each of us knew the responsibilities, I said.

‘If anything went wrong with him, she’d never forgive herself.’

‘Whether she does—’

‘It would be there, coming between you, for the rest of your lives,’ Helen said.

‘I’ve imagined even that,’ I replied.

‘You’ve no right to do it,’ she burst out. I had been forcing down anger, but hers had broken loose.

‘You must let us answer for ourselves,’ I said.

‘That’s too easy,’ she cried. She was gentler than her sister; I had seen violent temper released in her before. ‘I’d better tell you now, if you go ahead with this, I won’t give either of you the slightest help, I won’t make things easier for you by half an hour.’

‘Do you hope that will change our minds?’

‘I hope so very much,’ she said. ‘If I can stop her coming to you, I shall do it.’

I tried to control myself, and meet her case.

As I spoke, I was thinking that in Helen maternal love was stronger beyond comparison than any other. It was her unassuageable deprivation that she had not had children, and she still went from doctor to doctor. She had the maternal devotion of a temperament emotional but sexually cool; she could not but help feel that the love for a child was measured on the same plane as sexual love.

To Margaret that would have been meaningless. For her, those loves were different in kind. Almost as maternal as her sister, she had scarcely spoken to me about the boy, and yet all along she had been thinking what Helen had just threatened us with. Her feeling for the child was passionate. It had more ferocity than Helen’s would have had, yet it could not cancel out that other feeling which pulled her as it were at right angles — that feeling which, unlike Helen’s idea of it, was at root neither gentle nor friendly, that feeling which, although it contained an element of maternal love, was in totality no nearer to that love than it was to self-destruction or self-display.

Helen’s insight was acute. I was thinking; she had learnt more than most, and all she said about human actions you could trust — unless they were driven by sex. Then it was as though the drawing-pins had worked loose, the drawing-pins which fitted so accurately when she charted a description of a nephew sucking up to an aunt. Suddenly, if she had to describe sexual feeling, the paper was flapping, she was not hopelessly far away but the point never quite fitted. Somehow she sketched out friendships and trust and a bit of play and imagined that was sexual love. I remembered how many observers I had listened to and read, whose charts flapped loose exactly as hers did — observers wicked as well as high-minded, married as well as Jane Austen’s men and women. Often their observations sounded cosy when you were not in trouble, but when you were they might as well have been nonsense verse.

Yet I could not shrug off Helen’s warning about the child. When I was younger, I might have thought that, by explaining to myself why she felt so deeply, I was explaining it away. Now I could not delude myself so conveniently.

I had to answer something to which there was no straight answer, telling her that for my part I would accept the penalties and guilt, and that I believed the tie between us would bear what the future laid upon it.

I had made up my mind, I told her: I did not know whether Margaret would come to me, but I was waiting for her.

NEXT morning after breakfast — the sky over the park was so brilliant in November sunshine that I hushed the give-away words, the secret irked me more — I rang up Margaret: I had to tell her of my conversation with her sister, without softening any of her sister’s case.

‘I knew she was against us,’ came Margaret’s voice.

‘She said nothing that we hadn’t thought,’ I said, reporting Helen’s words about the child.

‘Perhaps we should have told each other.’

‘It has made no difference.’

‘I never expected her to be so much against us.’ There was a note of rancour in Margaret’s tone, a note almost of persecution, very rare in her. Anxiously, I thought that the weeks of deception were wearing her down: they had begun to tell on me, who was better adapted for them: in so many ways she was tougher, and certainly braver, than I was, but not in this.

I said that we must meet. No, there was no one to look after the child. Tomorrow? Doubtful.

‘We must settle it,’ I said, for the first time forcing her.

‘It will be easier next week.’

‘That’s too long.’

The receiver went dead, as though we had been cut off. Then she said a word and stopped. She, usually so active, could not act: she was in a state I also knew, when it was easier to think of disrupting one’s life, so long as the decision were a week ahead, than to invent an excuse to go for a walk that afternoon.

At last: ‘Lewis.’ Her voice had the hardiness, the hostility of resolve. When I replied, it came again: ‘I’ll go for tea to my father’s on Friday, you can call and find me there.’

For the moment relieved, waiting for the Friday which was two days ahead, I arrived at Whitehall in the dazzling morning: odd, it struck me sometimes, to arrive there after such a scene, to meet one’s colleagues with their shut and public faces, and confront them with one’s own.

That particular morning, as it happened, was not routine: I had to go straight to Rose’s room, where I was required for two interviews of which the second was to be George Passant’s.

On Rose’s desk chrysanthemums bulged from the vases, the burnt smell bit into the clean, hygienic air, along with Rose’s enthusiastic thanks to me for sparing time that morning, which in any case I was officially obliged to do.

‘Perhaps we might as well get round the table,’ he said, as usual punctual, as usual unhurried. The two others took their places, so did I, and the first interview began. I knew already — I had heard Rose and Jones discuss the man — that the result was not in doubt. He was an ex-regular officer who had entered the Department late in the war, and they agreed — his work had not come my way — that he was nowhere near the standard of the administrative class.

Polite, patient, judicious, Rose and the others questioned him, their expressions showing neither encouragement nor discouragement, neither excessive interest nor dismissal. They were all three sensible at judging men, or at least at judging men as creatures to do business with. They were on their own ground, selecting for the bureaucratic skills in which not only Rose, but also the youngest of the three, Osbaldiston, was expert.

The third was John Jones, who was now Sir John and a year off retirement: still looking handsome and high-coloured, and as though bursting with a heterodox opinion, a revelation straight from the heart, but after forty years of anxiety to please hypnotized by his own technique, unable to take his eye away from watching Rose’s response. Rose found him agreeable: granted Jones’ modest degree of talent, he had got on a good deal better as a snurge than he would have done as a malcontent, and it was romantic to think otherwise: but, when it came to serious business, his view did not count with Rose by the side of Osbaldiston’s, who was twenty-five years younger.