Charles Snow - Homecomings

Osbaldiston, a recent arrival, was an altogether more effective man. Unlike Rose or Jones, he had not started in a comfortable professional family, and socially he had travelled a long way farther than me or my friends: born in the East End, a scholarship, Oxford, the Civil Service examination. In the Treasury he had fitted so precisely that it seemed, though it was not, a feat of impersonation: Christian names, the absence of jargon, the touch of insouciant cultivation carried like a volume in the pocket — they all sounded like his native speech. Long, thin, unworn, he seemed to many above the battle and a bit of a dilettante. He was as much above the battle as a Tammany boss and as much a dilettante as Paul Lufkin. He was so clever that he did not need to strain, but he intended to have Rose’s success and more than Rose’s success. My private guess was that he was for once over-estimating himself: nothing could prevent him doing well, one could bet on his honours, one could bet that he would go as high as Jones — but perhaps not higher. It might be that, in the next ten years when he was competing with the ablest, he would just lack the weight, the sheer animal force, to win the highest jobs.

The first interview closed in courtesies from Rose to the candidate. As the door closed, Rose, without expression, looked round the table. Osbaldiston at once shook his head: I shook mine, then Jones shook his.

‘I’m afraid the answer is no,’ said Rose, and without any more talk began writing on the nomination form.

‘He’s a nice chap,’ said Osbaldiston.

‘Charming,’ said Jones.

‘He’s been quite useful within his limits,’ said Rose, still writing.

‘He’s got a service pension of seven hundred pounds, as near as makes no matter,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘He’s forty-six, and he’s got three children, and it’s a bit of a fluke whether he collects another job or not. What I can’t see, Hector, is how on those terms we’re going to recruit an officer corps at all.’

‘It’s not our immediate pigeon,’ replied Rose from his paper, ‘but we shall have to give it a bit of thought.’

The curious thing was, I knew that they would.

‘Well,’ said Rose, signing his name, ‘I think we’ll have Passant in now.’

When George entered, he wore a diffident, almost soapy smile, which suggested that, just as on his first appearance in the room, he expected to be tripped up inside the door. As he sat in the vacant chair, he was still tentatively smiling: it was not until he answered Rose’s first question that his great head and shoulders seemed to loom over the table, and I could, with my uneasiness lulled, for an instant see him plain. His forehead carried lines by now, but not of anxiety so much as turbulence. Looking from Osbaldiston’s face and Rose’s to George’s, one could see there the traces of experiences and passions they had not known — and yet also, by the side of those more disciplined men, his face, meeting the morning light, seemed mysteriously less mature.

Rose had begun by asking him what he considered his ‘most useful contribution so far’ to the work of the Department.

‘The A— job I’m doing now is the neatest,’ said George, as always relishing the present, ‘but I suppose that we got farther with the original scheme for Tube Alloys’ (that is, the first administrative drafts about atomic energy).

‘Would you mind running over the back history, just to get your part and the Department’s part in something like perspective?’ Rose inquired with unblinking politeness. ‘Perhaps you’d better assume that our colleague here’ — he looked at Osbaldiston — ‘is pretty uninformed about the early stages, as he wasn’t in at the beginning.’

‘Perhaps you’d better,’ said Osbaldiston offhandedly. ‘Though as a matter of fact I’ve done some of my homework since.’

Starting to enjoy himself, George gave the history of the atomic energy project from the time he entered the office. Even to me, his feat of memory was fantastic; my own memory was better than most, I had been as close to this stuff as he had, but I could not have touched that display of recapitulation. I could feel that, round the table, they were each impressed, and all took for granted that it was unthinkable for him to give a date or a paper fact wrong. But he was a shade too buoyant, and I was not quite easy. It was partly that, unlike Osbaldiston, he had not taken on a scrap of protective coloration; given the knowledge, he would have made his exposition in the identical manner, in the same hearty voice, when I first met him in a provincial street twenty-five years before. And also — this made me more uneasy — he had not put our part in the project in exact proportion: we had been modestly important, but not quite so important as he thought.

George was beaming and at ease. Jones, who I knew liked him, put in some questions about method which might have been designed to show George at his most competent. George’s answer was lucidly sober. Just then it seemed to me unthinkable that any body of men, so fair-minded as these, could reject him.

Jones had lit a pipe, so that the chrysanthemum smell no longer prevailed over the table; outside the windows at our back, the sun must have been brilliant to make the room so light. Rose continued with the interview: present work? how much could be dispensed with? One answer business-like, another again too buoyant and claiming too much, the third fair and good. At all interviews Rose was more than ever impassive, but he gave a slight acquiescent nod: so at once did Jones.

Then, as though lackadaisically, Osbaldiston spoke.

‘Look here,’ he said to George, ‘there’s something we are bound to have at the back of our minds, and it’s far better to have it in the open, I should have thought. You’re obviously an intelligent chap, if I may say so. But with due respect you don’t seem to have done much with your life until you got dragged here by the war, and then you were forty-three already. It’s bound to strike all of us as curious. Why was it? Can you give us some sort of lead?’

George stared at him.

‘I’m afraid,’ George said, with diffidence, ‘that I didn’t get much of a start.’

‘Nor did a lot of us, you know.’

‘I’ve got to make it clear that my family was very poor.’

‘I bet it wasn’t as poor as mine.’ Osbaldiston made a point of not being snobbish about his origin. It was for that reason that he was more pressing about George’s lack of ambition than Rose had been in the first interview three years ago.

‘And of course,’ said George, ‘everyone at school thought that becoming a solicitor’s clerk was a step up in the world for me, a bit above my station, as a matter of fact. No one ever pointed out, even if they knew, which I’m inclined to doubt, that there was anything else open to me.’

‘I suppose schools were worse in your time,’ said Osbaldiston. ‘And afterwards you were with your firm, Eden and Martineau, for over twenty years and I take it the job is still open for you — I confess I’m still puzzled that you didn’t see your way out.’

‘Perhaps I didn’t give it as much attention as others might have done, but at first there were things which interested me more. Somehow the right chance never seemed to present itself—’

‘Bad luck,’ said Osbaldiston casually, but they were looking at each other with incomprehension, the young man who, wherever you put him, knew how the successful world ticked, George who was always a stranger there.

Osbaldiston told Rose that he had no more questions: punctiliously Rose asked George if he had anything more he wished to tell us. No, said George, he thought he had been given a very full hearing. With a curious unobsequious and awkward grace, George added: ‘I should like to say that I am grateful for your consideration.’