Charles Snow - George Passant

‘I’ve got it in its right proportion.’

‘You were desperately anxious about him. A few days ago. You were more anxious than I’ve seen you about anything else.’

‘You can exaggerate that.’

‘So you expect everything to be always the same?’

‘As far as the progress of my affairs goes,’ said George, ‘yes.’

I burst out: ‘I must say it seems to me optimism gone mad.’

But actually, when George was shelving or assimilating the past, or doing what was in effect the same, comfortably forecasting his own future, I was profoundly moved by a difference of temperament: far more than by a disinterested anxiety. At that age, to be honest, I resented George being self-sufficient, as it seemed to me, able to soften any facts into his own optimistic world. He seemed to have a shield, an unfair shield, against the realities and anxieties that I already felt.

Also, for weeks I had been working with him, sympathising with his strain during the case, arguing against the qualms which oddly seemed to afflict him more than they would a less hopeful man. It had been easier to encourage him over the doubtful nights than to sit isolated from him by this acceptance of success, so blandly complete that the case might have been over a year ago and not that afternoon. And so, guiltily aware of the relief it gave me, I heard my voice grow rancorous. ‘You’re making a dream of it,’ I said, ‘just to indulge yourself. Like too many of your plans. Do you really think it’s obvious that Martineau will stay here for the rest of his life?’

‘I don’t see what else he’s going to do,’ said George, smiling. But I could detect, as often when he was argued against, a change in tone. ‘In any case,’ he said, with his elaborate reasonableness, ‘I don’t propose to worry about that. He’s done almost everything I required of him. He’s stayed in the firm long enough for me to establish my position. He’s given me the chance, and I’ve taken advantage of it. It doesn’t matter particularly what happens now.’

George’s face suddenly became eager and happy.

‘You see,’ he said, ‘I have the right to stay here now. I could always have stayed before. Even Eden would never have seriously tried to get rid of me, whether Martineau was there or not. But I couldn’t really be entirely satisfied until I’d established to myself the right to go on as I am. I’ve never had much confidence, and I knew it would take a triumph to prove to myself that I’ve a right to do as I please. That’s why this is so splendid. I’m perfectly justified in staying, now.’

In my resentful state, I nearly pretended to be mystified. But I thought of Olive’s premonition; and I was captured by his pleasure in his own picture of himself. One could not resist his fresh and ebullient happiness.

‘The people at the School?’ I said.

‘Obviously,’ said George. ‘What would happen to everyone if I went away?’

I replied, as he wanted: ‘One or two of us you’ve affected permanently,’ I said. ‘But the others — in time they’d become what they would have been — if you’d never come.’

‘I won’t have it,’ said George. ‘Good God above, I won’t have it.’ He laughed wholeheartedly. ‘Do you think I’m going to waste my time like that? You’re right, it’s exactly what would happen. And it’s simply inconceivable that it should. I refuse to contemplate it,’ he said. ‘We must go on as we are. God knows, there isn’t much freedom in the world, and I’m damned if we lose what little there is. I’ve started here, and now after this I can go on. I tell you, that’s why this mattered so much to me.’

I looked across the table; his eyes were shining in the twilight, and I was startled by the passionate exultation in his voice. ‘You’ve understood before, I’ve found the only people to whom my existence is important. How can you expect anything else to count beside that fact?’

His voice quietened, he was smiling; the evening light falling from the window at my back showed his face glowing and at rest.

WITH the success behind him, George remarked more often about a partnership ‘being not too far away’. For the first time, he showed some impatience about his own future: but he was no longer worried over Martineau. Both Morcom and I began to think he was right; during July and August, I almost abandoned my fear that Martineau might leave and so endanger George’s prospects in the firm.

Martineau’s behaviour seemed no more eccentric than we were used to. He was still doing everything we wanted of him; we went to Friday nights, we saw him walking backwards and forwards between the sofa and the window, his shadow leaping jerkily into the summer darkness. It was all as it had been last year; just as with any present reality, it was hard to imagine that it would ever cease.

We smiled as we heard him use a mysterious phrase — ‘the little plays’.

‘Of course, the man’s religion is at the bottom of it all,’ said George, back into boisterous spirits which were not damped even when Olive had to leave the town; her father’s health had worsened, and she took him to live by the sea. George compensated himself for that gap by his enormous pride in Jack’s and my performances; for my examination result was a good one, and Jack at last had achieved a business coup.

It added to Jack’s own liveliness. He was warmed by having made a little money and by feeling sure of his flair. And it was like him to signalise it by taking Mrs Passant to the pictures — her who was suspicious of all her son’s friends, who had denounced Jack in particular as an unscrupulous sponger. Yet he became the only one of us she liked.

It was also Jack who brought the next news of Martineau. One evening in September, George and I were walking by the station when we saw Jack hurrying in. He seemed embarrassed to meet us.

‘As a matter of fact,’ he said, ‘I can’t wait a minute. I’m staying at Chiswick for the weekend — my mother’s brother, you know.’

‘There’s no train to London for an hour, surely,’ said George. Jack shook his head, smiled, and ran into the booking hall.

‘Of course there’s no train at this time.’ George chuckled to me. ‘He must be after a woman. I wonder who he’s picked up now.’

The following day was a Saturday; at eight George and I were sitting in the Victoria; I mentioned that at exactly this time last year, within three days, Jack had been presented with a cigarette case. George was still smiling over the story when Jack himself came in.

‘I was looking for you,’ he said.

‘I thought you were staying with your prosperous uncle,’ said George.

Jack did not answer. Instead, he said: ‘I’ve something important to show you.’

He made us leave the public house, and walk up the street; it was a warm September night, and we were glad to. He took us into the park at the end of the New Walk. We sat on a bench under one of the chestnut trees and looked at the lights of the houses across the grass. The moon was not yet up; and the sky, over the cluster of lights, was so dense and blue that it seemed one could handle it. Jack pointed to the lights of Martineau’s. ‘Yes, it’s about him,’ he said.

He added: ‘George, I want to borrow your knife for a minute.’

With a puzzled look, George brought out the heavy pocket knife which he always carried. Jack opened it; then took a piece of paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and pinned it to the tree by the knife blade.

‘There,’ he said. ‘You’d have seen plenty of those last night—’ if we had gone with him to a neighbouring village.

It was too dark to read the poster in comfort. George struck a match, and peered in the flickering light.