Charles Snow - Homecomings

Looking at them at our dinner table I saw Gilbert, in his middle forties, getting fatter and redder in the face; Betty, well over forty, her eyes still fine, but her nose dominating, more veins breaking through the skin, the flesh thickening on her shoulders. And yet Margaret, in years and looks so much the younger, was older in all else — so that, watching them, one had to keep two time-scales in one’s head, one non-physiological: and on the latter, Betty, with her gestures as unsubdued as when she was young, allied with Gilbert in a conspiracy to secure life’s minor treats, was standing delectably still.

That night they had come a little late, so as to avoid seeing the children; increasingly, like two self-indulgent bachelors, they were cutting out exercises which they found boring. But for politeness’ sake Betty asked questions about the boys, in particular about mine: and Gilbert did his bit by examining and hectoring us about our plans for their education.

‘There’s nothing to hesitate about,’ he said, bullying and good-natured. ‘There’s only one school you need think about,’ he went on, referring to his own. ‘You can afford it, I can’t conceive what you’re hesitating for.

‘That is,’ he said, his detective passion suddenly spurting out, gazing at Margaret with hot eyes, ‘if you’re not going to have a big family—’

‘No, I can’t have any more,’ Margaret told him directly.

‘Well, that’s all right then,’ cried Gilbert.

‘No, it hangs over us a bit,’ she said.

‘Come on, two’s enough for you,’ he jollied her along.

‘Only one is Lewis’,’ she replied, far less tight-lipped, though still far shyer, than I was. ‘It would be safer if he had more than one.’

‘Anyway, what about this school?’ said Betty briskly, a little uneasily, as though shearing away from trouble she did not wish to understand.

‘It’s perfectly obvious they can well afford it, there’s only one school for them.’ Gilbert was talking across the table to her, and across the table she replied.

‘You’re overdoing it,’ she said.

‘What am I overdoing?’

‘You think it’s all too wonderful. That’s the whole trouble, none of you ever recover from the place.’

‘I still insist,’ Gilbert was drawing a curious triumph out of challenging her, he looked plethoric and defiant, ‘that it’s the best education in the country.’

‘Who’s to say so?’ she said.

‘Everyone says so,’ he replied. ‘The world says so. And over these things the world is usually right,’ added Gilbert, that former rebel.

They went on arguing. Betty had reserved her scepticism more than he had; she recalled days when, among aristocrats of her own kind, intellectuals like the Davidsons, it was common form to dislike the class subtleties of English education; she had known friends of ours who had assumed that, when they had families, they would break away from it. She said to Gilbert: ‘You’re just telling them to play the same game with their children as everyone round them.’

‘Why shouldn’t they?’

Betty said: ‘If anyone can afford not to play the same game, Lewis and Margaret can.’

Duty done, with relief they grumbled about their last weekend. But I was absent-minded, as I had been since Margaret spoke about the child. The talk went on, a dinner-party amiable, friendly, without strain, except that which gripped me.

‘It would be safer—’ She had meant something more difficult, I knew clearly, than that it would be a life-long risk, having an only son. That was obvious and harsh enough.

But it was not that alone of which Margaret was afraid. No, she was afraid of something which was not really a secret between us but which, for a curious reason, she would not tell me.

The reason was that she distrusted her motive. She knew that she expected perfection more than I did. She had sacrificed more than I had; it was she who had, in breaking her marriage, taken more responsibility and guilt; she watched herself lest in return she expected too much.

But in fact, though she distrusted herself, her fear was not that I should be compelled to lose myself in my son, but that, in a final sense, I should desire to. She knew me very well. She had recognized, before I did, how much suffering a nature can bring upon itself just to keep in the last resort untouched. She had seen that the deepest experiences of my early life, unrequited love, the care I spent on an afflicted friend, my satisfaction in being a spectator, had this much in common, that whatever pain I went through I need answer to myself alone.

If it had not been for Margaret, I might not have understood. It had taken a disproportionate effort — because under the furrows of such a nature as mine there is hidden an inadmissible self-love — to think that it was not good enough. Without her I should not have managed it. But the grooves were cut deep: how easy it would be, how it would fit part of my nature like a skin, to find my own level again in the final one-sided devotion, the devotion to my son.

When Betty and Gilbert, each half-drunk and voluble, had at last left us, at the moment when, after drawing back the curtains, I should have started gossiping about them, the habit of marriage as soothing as the breath of the night air, I said instead: ‘Yes, it is a pity that we’ve only the one.’

‘You ought to have been a bit of a patriarch, oughtn’t you?’ she said. She was giving me the chance to pass it off, but I said: ‘It needn’t matter to him, though, need it?’

‘He’ll be all right.’

‘I think I’ve learned enough not to get in his way.’

I added: ‘And if I haven’t learned by now, I never shall.’

She smiled, as though we were exchanging ironies: but she understood, the mistakes of the past were before us, she wished she could relieve me of them. And then I seemed to change the subject, for I said: ‘Those two’ — I waved the way Betty and Gilbert had gone ‘— they’ll make a go of it now, of course.’

On the instant, she knew what I was doing, getting ready to talk, through the code of a discussion of another marriage, about our own.

It was stuffy in the room, and we went down into the street, our arms round each other, refreshed: the night was close, cars were probing along the pavement, we struck in towards one of the Bayswater squares and then walked round, near to each other as we spoke of Betty and Gilbert.

Yes, she repeated, it was a triumph in its way. She thought that what had drawn them together was not desire, though they had enough to get some fun, was nothing more exalted than their dread of being lonely. Betty was far too honourable to like Gilbert’s manoeuvres, but they were lonely and humble spirited, they would fly at each other, but in the long run they would confide and she would want him there. If they had had children, or Betty had had a child by her first marriage, they might not have been so glued together, I said: I was trying to tell the truth, not to make things either too easy for myself or too hard: they were going to need each other more, at the price of being more selfish towards everyone else.

In the square, which had once been grand and had now become tenement flats, the last lights were going out. There was no breeze at all: we were holding hands, and talking of those two, we met each other, and spoke of our self-distrust.

AS we walked round the square that night, both children were well. A fortnight later we took them to visit their grandfather, and the only illness on our minds was his. In the past winter Davidson had had a coronary thrombosis: and, although he survived, it was saddening to be with him now. Not that he was not stoical: he was clear-sighted about what he could expect for the rest of his life: the trouble was, he did not like what his clear sight told him, his spirits had gone dark and he would have thought it unreasonable if they had not.