Last Things by C. P. Snow Page A

his son’s had to be, it took two to make a possessive love. With some sons it couldn’t endure; if it did endure, there had to be a signal – sometimes the call for help – the other way. Pat had cost his father disappointment and suffering: there had been quarrels, lies, deceits: but in the midst of it all there was, and still remained, a kind of communication, so that in trouble he went back, shameless and confiding, and gave Martin a new lease of hope.
    The result was that Martin, who was usually as quick as any man to see the lie in life, who had an acute nose for danger, was talking that night as though I were the one to be reassured. He did it – I had heard him speak of his son in this tone before – with an air of apparent realism. Yes, there must be plenty of young men, mustn’t there, who think of amusing themselves elsewhere in the first year of marriage. No one was ever really honest about the sexual life. How many of us made fantasies year after year? There weren’t many who would confess their fantasies, or admit or face what their sexual life had been.
    I didn’t interrupt him, but he could have guessed what I was thinking. Did he remember, earlier that year in our native town, how we had talked during the murder trial? Talked without cover or excuses, unlike tonight. There was a gap between fantasy and action, the psychiatric witnesses had been comfortably saying. It was a gap that only the psychopaths or those in clinical terms not responsible managed to cross. That made life more acceptable, pushed away the horrors into a corner of their own. Martin wouldn’t accept the consolation. It was too complacent for him, he had said, as we sat in the hotel bar, talking more intimately than we had ever done.
    Now, Martin, swirling the whisky in his glass, looked across the study from his armchair to mine.
    ‘I agree,’ he said, as though with fair-mindedness, ‘not so many people act out their fantasies. But still, this business of his must be fairly common, mustn’t it? You know, I’m pretty sure that I could have done the same.’
    Shortly afterwards, he made an effort to sound more fair-minded still.
    ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘we’ve got to face the fact that he might turn into a layabout.’
    He used the objective word, his voice was sternly objective. Yet he was about as much so as Francis Getliffe complaining (with a glow of happiness concealed) that people said his son Leonard was a class better as a scientist than himself. Both of them liked to appear detached. It made Martin feel clear-minded, once he had suggested that the future might be bad. But he didn’t believe it. He was still thinking of his son as the child who had been winning, popular, anxious to make people happy – and capable of all brilliant things.
    ‘I thought they were getting on all right tonight, didn’t you?’ said Martin. ‘He’ll shake down when the baby is born, you know. It will make all the difference, you’ll see.’
    He gave a smile which was open and quite unironic. Anyone who saw it wouldn’t have believed that he was a pessimistic man.

 
     
8:  Sight of a New Life
     
    THE New Year opened more serenely for Margaret and me than many in the past. True, each morning as the breakfast tray came in, she looked for letters from Maurice or Charles, just as one used to in a love affair, when letters counted more. And, as in a love affair, the fact that Charles was thousands of miles away sometimes seemed to slacken his hold on her. Distance, as much as time, did its own work. Reading one of Charles’ despatches, she was relieved that he was well: but she was joyful when she heard from Maurice. Sometimes I wondered, if she and I could have had other children, whom she would have loved the most.
    The flat was quiet, so many rooms empty, with us and the housekeeper living there alone. Mornings working in the study, afternoons in the drawing-room, the winter trees in the park below. Visits to Margaret’s