Charles Snow - Corridors of Power

Defeat can cut into friendships, I was thinking, as much as being on different sides. Francis and I had been intimate for thirty years. Yet now part of the spontaneity had had to go, almost as much as it had gone with Douglas. It was a tiny price to pay for having gone through the struggle: but still, it was a price.

We talked a little, the three of us, of the college and Cambridge. We went to the end of the balcony. Over the garden, over the rooftops, shone the rusty, vivid night-sky of London, the diffused recognition of all those lives. We talked, more eagerly now, of our children, with the special tenderness of old friends, who have seen each other’s families growing up. The memory of the struggle, even the reason for it, dimmed down. We talked of the children, and were happy. The only puzzle remaining to us that night was Penelope. She and Arthur Plimpton were both in the United States and they had both got married, but not to each other. Francis gave a grim, quixotic smile and thought it was a joke against himself.

Under the town’s resplendent sky we talked of the children and their future. We talked as though the future were easy and secure, and as though their lives would bring us joy.