Charles Snow - George Passant

‘I was worried.’

‘I think I should have been approached first.’

I half-expected a burst of anger; but instead his manner was more formal than exasperated.

‘If I could have got you alone before she spoke—’

‘I was prepared to believe that might be the reason.’

‘You understood what I meant to ask?’

‘I gathered it.’

‘George, I can speak out with you. I meant — it’s easy to get into financial tangles that are dangerous. If so, you could trust me to help, couldn’t you?’

‘I know exactly what you meant.’

‘Will you let me ask the same question — now?’

‘I’ve got nothing to add.’ Each reply had been stiff and distant.

‘I can’t do this again, you know.’

‘Naturally.’

‘Everything’s completely well with them? With yourself?’

‘I’m happier than I’ve ever been in my life,’ George raised his voice. I put in a question about his position in the firm.

‘I’ve dismissed that business for the time being. I had to make a deliberate choice between the successes I considered important — and the successes’ — he laughed — ‘that an ordinary man with his little house and his little motor car would consider important. I decided that I couldn’t achieve them both, and so I was prepared to sacrifice the trivial ones. Just as you — have sacrificed some successes that I should consider essential. You’ve repressed all your social sense — well, I should simply have found it impossible to make a spiritual hermit of myself. Even — if it does give the Edens of this world a chance to humiliate me for ever.’

As I had often done when George was talking, I listened to the different levels of self-explanation. I heard nothing that bore on the apprehension. After we had talked on for a few moments, I said: ‘The trouble about these choices — I’m not saying that you oughtn’t to have made this one — is that you couldn’t help yourself.’

‘I could certainly help myself—’

‘Anyway it does mean a certain practical inconvenience. Money and so on. How’s that treating you?’

George’s face opened in a chuckle. ‘I’m harassed sometimes, as you might expect. I haven’t borrowed from you recently, but you mustn’t imagine you’re completely immune.’ He passed on to stories of the group in the last years. He got up to close the windows for the night: he said in a quiet voice: ‘I’ve gained more from the last year or two than all the rest of my life. I know you all think I’m incapable of any sort of change. You haven’t noticed that I’m more suggestible than any of you.’ He looked over the fields, in the darkness. ‘I’ve had my effect on these people — and they don’t think it, but they’ve had an effect on me. And I’m better and happier because it’s happened that way.’

MORCOM was away that weekend. I asked Roy to tell him that I had been in the town, and had called on George and Olive.

Through the autumn, a busy time for me, I was often uneasy. The visit had not brought anything like reassurance; but there seemed nothing I could do. As the months passed, though, I began to feel that my anxieties had run away with me. I heard nothing more until a Friday night in December.

I was tired after a day’s work, lying on my sofa with a novel, which, when those moments came to have a significance they did not then possess (through the memory of action, so to speak, which is halfway between involuntary memory — recalled for instance by a smell — and that which we force back), I remembered as Thomas Wolfe’s first book. The telephone bell rang. It was a trunk call, and among the murmurs, clangings, and whispers of the operation, I had the meaningless apprehension that sometimes catches hold as one listens and waits.

Then I heard Roy’s voice: ‘Is that, you, Lewis?’

The words were precise and clear, isolated in sound.

‘Yes.’

‘You should come down tonight. There’s a train in half an hour. It would be good if you caught that.’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘You should come at once. Morcom and I are certain you should come at once. Can you?’

‘Can’t you tell me? Is it necessary?’

‘Yes.’

‘Can’t you tell—?’

‘I’ll meet you at the station.’

Through the carriage window the lights of villages moved past. As my anger with Roy for leaving me uncertain became sharper, the lights became circled in mist and passed increasingly slow. We stopped at a station; the fog whirled under its lamps. At last the platform. The red-brick walls shone in the translucency; as I got out, the raw air caught at the throat.

Roy went quickly by, missing me in the crowd. I caught him by the arm. He turned and his face was serious and excited.

‘Well?’ I said.

‘They’re inquiring into some of George’s and Jack’s business. They questioned them this afternoon — and took away the accounts and books.’

It sounded inevitable as I heard it. It sounded unlike news, it seemed something I had known for a long time.

‘I couldn’t say it on the telephone,’ Roy was talking fast, ‘my parents were too near.’

We went into the refreshment-room on the platform. Roy’s tumbler of whisky rattled in his fingers on the marble table, as he described the last few hours. Morcom heard from Jack, saw Roy immediately and insisted that he let me know. Then Roy called at George’s office, a few minutes before he telephoned to me. George had said: ‘Yes, they’ve had the effrontery to ask me questions,’ and stormed.

‘He was afraid though,’ said Roy. ‘He was anxious to prove that they parted on civil terms.’

‘Morcom didn’t know the best thing to do,’ he said. ‘He had no idea of the legal side. So you had to be fetched.’

‘I’d better see George at once,’ I said.

‘I’ve arranged for him to meet you in my study,’ said Roy. ‘It’s quicker than his lodgings.’

Actually, George’s rooms were nearer. It was a strange trick for Roy to fix this meeting in his father’s house. Yet he was as concerned as I.

His study reminded me that he was the only son of a prosperous family. It was a room more luxurious than one expected to find in the town: and then, again unexpectedly, the bookshelves of this spoilt young man were packed with school and college prizes. I was looking at them when George entered. He came from the door and shook hands with a smile that, on the moment, surprised me with its cordiality, its show of pleasure.

When the smile faded, however, the corners of his mouth were pulled down. Our range of expression is small, so that a smile in genuine pleasure photographs indistinguishably from a grimace of pain; they are the same unless we know their history and their future.

‘This is an unpleasant business,’ he said.

‘Yes. But still—’

‘One’s got to expect attacks. Of course,’ George said, ‘this happens to be particularly monstrous.’

Roy made an excuse, and left us.

‘We ought to go into it,’ I said. I added: ‘We don’t want to leave anything to chance. Don’t you think?’

‘It’s got to be stopped.’

‘Yes. Can’t you tell me what they wanted? It’d be useful to both of us.’

George sat down by the writing-desk. His fingers pushed tobacco into his pipe, and his eyes gazed across the room.

‘It’s absurd we should have to waste our time,’ he said in an angry tone. ‘Well, we may as well get it over. I’ll organise the facts as we go along.’ He began to speak more slowly than usual, emphasising the words, his tone matter-of-fact and yet deliberate with care.

‘Jack Cotery made a suggestion over four years ago—’ George thought for a second and produced the year and then the month. ‘He’d been considering the advertising firm that Martineau went into. He produced some evidence that if it were run more efficiently it could be made to pay. There was a minor advertising paper attached, you remember, called the Arrow . I talked to Martineau when he came back to clear up his affairs. That was the summer of 1928. The paper reached a fairly wide public; some thousands, he convinced me of that. Jack’s case was — that if we could raise the money and buy Exell out, we could pay interest on the loan and make an adequate profit. I saw nothing against it — I see nothing to make me change my view’ — George suddenly burst out — ‘I can’t be expected to live on a few pounds a week and not look round for money if I can get it without sacrificing important things. You know well enough that nothing’s ever made me take money seriously. I’ve never given much attention to it. I’ve never made any concessions for the sake of money. But I’m not an anchorite, there are things I could buy if I had money, and I’m not going to apologise for taking chances when they meant no effort and no interruption to my real activities.’