Charles Snow: Homecomings

This was the beginning.

‘It may,’ I said.

‘Will that be so with her?’ he asked, still with no emphasis.

‘I do not know.’

‘Nor do I.’ He started off circuitously again. ‘Which ever of us can claim to know a single thought of another human being? Which ever of us can claim that? Even a man like you, Lewis, who has, if I may say so, more than his share of the gift of understanding. And perhaps one might assume that one was not, in comparison with those one meets, utterly deficient oneself. And yet one would not dare to think, and I believe you wouldn’t, that one could share another’s unhappiness, even if one happened to see it under one’s eyes.’

His glance, sly and sad, was on me, and once more he shied off.

‘Perhaps one feels it most,’ he said, ‘when one has the responsibility for a child. One has the illusion that one could know’ — just for a moment the modulated voice hesitated — ‘him or her as one does oneself. Flesh of one’s flesh, bone of one’s bone. Then one is faced by another human being, and what is wrong one can never know, and it is more grievous because sometimes there is the resemblance to one’s own nerves. If ever you are granted a child, Lewis, and you have any cause for anxiety, and you should have to watch a suffering for which you feel responsible, then I think you will grant the accuracy of what I have tried, of course, inadequately, to explain.’

‘I think I can imagine it.’

As he heard my sarcasm, his eyelids dropped. Quietly he said: ‘Tell me, what is her life like?’

‘It hasn’t changed much,’ I said.

He considered. ‘How does she spend her time in this house?’

I said that she had recently found another occupation, she was trying to help a man who had fallen on bad days.

‘She was always good with the unfortunate.’

His mouth had taken on a pursed, almost petulant smile: was he being detached enough to reflect how different she was from himself, with his passionate interest in success, his zest in finding out, each time he met one, exactly what price, on the stock exchange of reputations, one’s own reputation fetched that day?

He began on another circuit, how it might be a danger to become sentimental about failure: but he cut off short, and, his gaze on the middle distance, said: ‘Of course it is not my responsibility any longer, for that has passed to you, which is better for us all, since I haven’t the strength to bear responsibility any longer, and in fact the strain of talking to you confidentially like this means that I am likely to pay the price in my regrettable health. Of course it is your responsibility now, and I know you take it more willingly than most men would. And of course I know my daughter has never been at her best in the presence of my wife. It has been a grief to me, but for the present we must discount that. But even if today has given me a wrong impression, I must not leave undone those things I ought to have done. Because you see, allowing for everything, including the possibility that I may be totally mistaken, there is something which I should feel culpable if I did not say.’

‘What is it?’ I cried out.

‘You told me a few minutes ago that you thought she was much as usual.’

‘Don’t you?’

He said: ‘I’m afraid, I can only hope I’m wrong and I may well be, but I’m afraid that she has gone a little farther from the rest of us than she ever was before.’

He shut his eyes, and as I started speaking shook his head.

‘I can only leave her with you. That’s all I can say,’ he whispered. ‘This room is just a little stuffy, my dear Lewis. Do you think it would be safe to open a window, just the smallest chink?’

ONE evening, soon after the Knights’ visit, I broke my walk home from Millbank at an embankment pub, and there, sitting between the pin-tables and the looking-glass on the back wall, was a group of my acquaintances. As I went up to them, it seemed that their talk damped down; it seemed also that I caught a glance, acute, uneasy, from the one I knew best, a young woman called Betty Vane. Within moments, though, we were all, not arguing, but joining a chorus of politics, the simple, passionate politics of that year, and it was some time before Betty and I left the pub together.

She was a smallish, sharp-featured woman of thirty, with a prow of a nose and fine open eyes. She was not pretty, but she was so warm and active that her face often took on a glow of charm. She did not expect to be admired by men; her marriage had failed, she was so unsure of herself that it prevented her finding anyone to love her.

I had met her first in circumstances very different, at the country house of the Boscastles, to whom she was related. But that whole family-group was savagely split by the political divide, and she was not on speaking terms with half her relations. She had become friendly with me because we were on the same side; she had gone out to find like-minded persons such as the group in the pub. Sometimes it seemed strange to me to meet her in a society which, to Lord Boscastle, would have seemed as incomprehensible as that of the Trobriand Islanders.

Upon the two of us, as we walked by the river, each with private worries, the public ones weighed down too; and yet, I was thinking, in other times Betty would have been as little political as Mrs Knight. She had dropped into her long, jostling stride that was almost mannish; yet there was no woman less mannish than she. It was her immediate self-protective manner, drawn out of the fear that I or any man might think her ready to make advances. It was only as the evening went on that her gait and her speech became relaxed, and she was warmed by the feeling that she had behaved serenely.

We had fallen into silence when I asked: ‘Were you talking about me when I came in just now?’

She had dropped out of step with me: she gave a skip to right herself. ‘Not exactly,’ she said. She looked down. I saw her lips tighten.

‘What about, then?’ As she did not at once reply I repeated: ‘What about?’

It was an effort for her to look up at me, but when she did so her glance was honest, troubled, steady.

‘You must know.’

‘Sheila?’

She nodded. I knew she did not like Sheila: but I asked what was being said.

‘Nothing. Only nonsense. You know what people are.’

I was silent.

She burst out, in a curiously strident, social voice, as if rallying a stranger at a party: ‘I don’t in the least want to tell you!’

‘That makes it harder for me.’

Betty stopped walking, put her hand on the embankment wall, and faced me. ‘If I do tell you I shan’t be able to wrap it up.’ She knew I should be angry, she knew I had a right to hear. She was unwilling to spoil the evening for herself and could not keep out of her voice resentment that I should make her do it.

I told her to go on.

‘Well, then’ — she reverted to her social tone — ‘as a matter of fact , they say she’s as good as left you.’

I had not expected that, and I laughed and said, ‘Nonsense.’

‘Is it nonsense?’

‘Whom is she supposed to be leaving me for?’

She replied, still in the same social, defensive voice: ‘They say she prefers women.’

There was not a word of truth in it, and I told Betty so.

She was puzzled, cross because I was speaking so harshly, though it was only what she had foreseen.

I cross-questioned her. ‘Where did this start?’

‘Everyone says so.’

‘Who does? Where do they get it from?’

‘I’m not making it up,’ she said. It was a plea for herself, but I did not think of her then.

I made her search her memory for the first rumour.