Free The Malcontents by C. P. Snow

coffee and sandwiches, thick bread, thin ham, edges of fat protruding. Neither of them had eaten, apart from Stephen’s slice of cake at the Kelshalls’, since midday, and they found themselves – appetite having its own tactless way – shamingly hungry. Then Stephen said: ‘Who is it?’
    ‘It might be me.’ Mark looked at him with bold, affectionate eyes, catching precisely the tone in which Stephen had replied to Neil St John.
    Stephen said: ‘It might be. But I tell myself it isn’t.’
    Mark was left with a smile, but the discomforting smile that isn’t shared. To him, that answer had been totally unexpected: he had perceived much about his friend, but not that he had been going through one of those states, almost emotionless, in which everything seemed as likely, or unlikely, as anything else. In Neil’s room Emma had not been the only person who was staring open-eyed with the brilliance of suspicion. Even with Tess: there had been an instant, repudiated now, not to be remembered, when Stephen – it flashed on him like an illumination, not different in kind from an illumination of sense – wondered. Meeting her gaze, candid and devoted. Could she have had a motive – perhaps a loving one?
    That dismissed, he had had, among other thoughts (though they were not so much thoughts as coronas of suspicion), one of Mark. Only half an hour ago, driving through the free night streets. He had remembered Mark acting at random, walking out of an examination because it was all too stupid: acting as though he didn’t care about past or future, just moved by pure free will. He had often shown a strength of resolve, and no one could tell where it came from.
    For the first time in his life, Stephen had been plunged into one of those paranoias, paranoias of secrecy, which come to some, perhaps to most, in crises, especially in claustrophobic crises: when one can read anything into anyone around one, including those one has loved for a lifetime: when one has no faith in one’s instinct or one’s mind, or when they seem not to exist.
    With an effort he had controlled himself. How much an effort he had made, Mark, trying to reach him across the smeared and shiny table, did not realize. As it was, he felt compassion for what the other man was going through: and also, but that he was used to, respect for the nature underneath.
    ‘No,’ said Stephen roughly, as though cutting off someone else’s useless thoughts. ‘We must find out who it is.’
    For Mark, it would have seemed silly, and also unfeeling, to mention Tess’ name. Or to make more jokes about themselves. The sooner they had some ground solid beneath them, the less helpless they would be.
    ‘So there are four possibilities,’ said Mark, with flat common sense. ‘Just four.’
    Stephen gave a nod of recognition. After a moment, he said: ‘That includes Neil. Is he a possibility?’
    ‘What do you think?’
    ‘Could anyone act as well as that?’
    ‘Whoever it is,’ said Mark, ‘someone is acting pretty well.’
    Yet each of them found it difficult, or perverse, to concentrate a suspicion upon Neil. They didn’t so much like him: he was a colleague and ally, not a friend: but in two years they had never seen – not even Mark, so observant of people round him – the slightest sign of deviating from his commitment. In fact, that was for some the forbidding thing about him. And also both Stephen and Mark were with Neil at a moral disadvantage. It was an old story, which other middle-class young men, taking part in a rebel movement, had known long before they did. In a sense, they were lucky: but they were also on their own: they had only their own will or conscience to impel them: while Neil – so they felt and so did he – had the force of his own people behind him. When he talked about the poor there was nothing artificial about it. He could harangue them about class hatred, and it wasn’t pretended: it was the hatred that he felt for their own