Charles Snow - Homecomings

It was the first time I had seen her alone with her father. I had heard her talk of him very often, but never to him: and now I listened to her sounding gay and very much his daughter. Although I should have known better, I was surprised.

It was true that she felt something stronger than dislike for the beliefs of her father and his friends, and still more for their unbeliefs. She had been passionately convinced ever since she was a child that their view of life left out all that made men either horrible or splendid.

And yet, seeing her with her father, upset because I wanted nothing but to speak to her alone, I had to notice one thing — that she was proud of him. Her language was more like his than mine; in some ways her nerves were too.

I noticed something else, as I tried to calculate when the game might end — that she was disappointed for him. By the standards of his friends, he, who in his youth had been one of the most glittering of them, had not quite come off. He was no sort of creative person, he was not the critic that some of them had been. He had no illusion about it: at times, so Margaret divined, he had suffered because of it, and so did she. She could not help feeling that, if she had been a man, she would have been stronger than he. That protest, born of their relation or edged by it, had been too deep for me to see, in our first time together. I imagined her as other people did: all they imagined was true, she was loving, she was happy to look after those she loved — it was all true: but it was also true (and the origin of much that she struggled with) that her spirit was as strong as her father’s or mine, and in the last resort did not give an inch to either of us.

The game continued. Repeatedly Margaret was glancing at me, until suddenly, as though screwing herself to the threshold edge, she said: ‘I want to talk to Lewis for a minute.’

It was Davidson’s move, and with a faint irritation he nodded. In an instant I followed Margaret into the hall; she led me into the drawing-room, which was dark except for a dim luminescence from the street lamp outside, bleared by the fog: the room struck chilly, but her cheek, as my fingers touched it, was hot, and I could feel my own skin flushed. She switched on a light: she looked up at me, and, although we were alone in the long room, although there was no one else in the house except Davidson, her voice was faint.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said.

‘That’s easy to say.’

‘No, it’s not easy to say.’ She had roused herself. Her face was wide open: it might have been smiling or in pain.

‘I tell you,’ she cried, ‘there’s no need to worry!’

I exclaimed.

‘Do you believe me?’ she cried.

‘I want to believe you.’

‘You can.’ Then she added, in a matter-of-fact but exhausted tone: ‘I’ll do it.’

She went on:‘Yes, I’ll tell him.’

We were standing in the corner of the frigid room. I felt for an instant the rip of triumph, then I shared her tiredness. It was the tiredness which comes after suspense, when the news may be good or bad: suddenly the good news comes, and in the midst of exaltation one is so light-headed with fatigue that one cannot read the letter through. I felt that happiness had sponged my face, taking away care like the smell of soap in the morning: I saw her face, also washed with happiness.

We stood quiet, our arms round each other: then I saw there was another purpose, a trouble, forming underneath the look of peace.

She said: ‘I’ll tell him. But you must wait a little.’

‘I can’t wait any longer.’

‘You must be patient, just this once.’

‘No, you must do it straightaway.’

‘It’s not possible,’ she cried.

‘It’s got to be.’

I was gripping her shoulders.

‘No,’ she said, looking at me with knowledge of us both, ‘I don’t want you to, it would be bad. I promise you, it won’t be long.’

‘What are you waiting for?’ To my bewilderment, she replied in a tone sounding like one of her aunts, astringent, cynical: ‘How often have I told you,’ she said, ‘that if you’re going to hurt anyone, it’s no use being timidly considerate over the time you choose to do it?

‘I always told you,’ she could not leave it alone, ‘that you did more harm by trying to be kind. Well, there’s nothing like practising what one preaches.’

She was trapped, so that she could not bring herself to tell the truth to Geoffrey, or even mildly upset him. By a minor irony, the reason was as prosaic as some which had from time to time determined my own behaviour. It happened that Geoffrey was within a fortnight of sitting his examination for Membership, that is, his qualification as a specialist. It happened also that Geoffrey, so confident in general, was a bad and nervous examinee. She had at least to coax him through, take care of him for this last time: it meant dissimilating, which to her was an outrage, it meant not acting, which was like an illness — and yet not to look after him, just then, when he was vulnerable, would mean a strain she could not take.

‘If you must,’ I agreed at last.

She was relieved, she was abandoned to relief. Soon this would be behind us, she said. Then, as though at random, she cried: ‘Now I want to do something.’

‘What?’

‘I want us to go and tell my father.’

Her cheeks and temples had coloured, her eyes were bright with energy, her shoulders were thrown back. She led me back through the house, her steps echoing excitedly in the empty hall, until we threw open the door of the study where her father, his beautiful head sunk on his chest, was staring with a mathematician’s intensity at the board.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she said.

He made a cordial but uninterested noise.

‘You’ll have to listen. Or have I got to write you a letter about it?’

Reluctantly he looked up, with intelligent, brilliant, opaque eyes. He said: ‘If you’re going to disturb the game, I hope it isn’t something trivial.’

‘Well. Lewis and I want to get married.’

Davidson looked blank-faced. He seemed to have had no intimation whatsoever of the news: she might have been telling him that she had just seen a brontosaurus.

‘Do you, by God?’ he said.

Then he became convulsed with laughter.

‘Perhaps you were within your rights to disturb the game. No, I can’t say that the news is entirely trivial.’

‘I haven’t told Geoffrey yet,’ she said. ‘I can’t for a little while. I don’t know whether he’ll let me go.’

‘He’ll have to,’ said Davidson.

‘It may be difficult.’

‘I should have thought he was a moderately civilized man,’ he replied. ‘In the long run, one’s got no choice in these things, don’t you know?’

She would have preferred her father not to be quite so casual: but telling him had given her the pleasure of action. It was a joy to let us be seen in another’s eyes.

For once her father’s glance had not dropped; he looked at her with a sharp, critical, appreciative smile, and then at me.

‘I’m quite glad,’ he said.

I said: ‘You ought to be prepared for some unpleasantness. We shall be giving anyone who wants plenty to get hold of.’

‘Anyone who wants,’ he replied indifferently, ‘is welcome to it, I should have thought.’

I supposed he did not know our story, but went on: ‘Even well-wishers are going to find it slightly bizarre.’

‘All human relationships are slightly bizarre unless one is taking part,’ said Davidson. ‘I don’t see why yours is any more so than anyone else’s.’

He went on: ‘I’ve never known a situation where it was worth listening to outsiders.’

He was the last man to talk for effect: he meant it. It was a kind of contempt which was much more truly aristocratic than that of Betty Vane’s relatives: it was the contempt of an intellectual aristocracy, who never doubted their values, least of all in sexual matters: who listened to each other, but not at all to anyone outside. Sometimes — it had often alienated his daughter — his lack of regard for opinion implied that those outside the magic ring might as well belong to another species. But, in times of trouble, it made him inflexible, one to whom the temptations of disloyalty did not exist.