Free The New Men by C. P. Snow Page A

prejudices, changed his mind. He had concluded that the other side’s case, in particular Getliffe’s case, was stronger than his own. I wondered with some shame – for I could not like him – whether in his place I should have been so fair.
    So the dispatch boxes went round, Rose lunched with his colleagues at the Athenaeum, the committees sat: on a night early in November, the Minister went off to a meeting. It was not a cabinet, but a sub-committee of ministers; he believed that, one way or the other, this would settle it. I remained in my office, waiting for him to return.
    It was half past eight; in the pool of light from the reading lamp, the foolscap in my desk shone with a blue luminescence; I was too restless to work. I went across the passage to the little room where my new personal assistant was sitting. I had told her to go hours before, but she was over-conscientious; she was a young widow called Vera Allen, comely but reserved, too diffident to chat, stiff at being alone in the building with a man.
    I heard the Minister scamper up the stairs, with the light trotting steps that sounded so youthful. I returned to my room. He put his head in, without taking off his bowler hat.
    ‘Still at it,’ he said.
    He went on: ‘I think it’s all right, Eliot.’
    I exclaimed with relief.
    Bevill was flushed, looking curiously boyish in his triumph. He tipped his hat back on his thin grey hair.
    ‘We mustn’t count our eggs before they’re hatched, but I think it’s in the bag,’ he said.
    In jubilation, he asked if I had eaten and took me off to Pratt’s.
    He had taken me there before, when he was pleased. He only did it because he had a soft spot for me. For business, for talks with Rose, he went elsewhere; Pratt’s was reserved for friends, it was his fortress, his favourite club.
    When he first took me inside, I had thought – it seemed strange – of my mother. She had been brought up in a gamekeeper’s cottage on a Lincolnshire estate; she was proud and snobbish and had great ambitions for me; she was dead years since, she had not seen what happened to me – but just the sight of me with Thomas Bevill, in his most jealously guarded club, eating with men whose names she had read in the papers, would have made her rejoice that her life was not in vain.
    Yet if she could have seen me there, she would have been a little puzzled to observe that we were sitting with some discomfort in rooms remarkably like the cottage where she was born. A basement: a living room with a common table and a check cloth: a smoking kitchen with an open hearth: in fact, a landowner’s idea of his own gamekeeper’s quarters. That was the place to which Thomas Bevill went whenever he wanted to be sure of meeting no one but his aristocratic friends.
    Looking at him after our meal, as he sat by the kitchen hearth, drinking a glass of port, I thought that unless one had the chance to see him so, one might be quite misled. People called him unassuming, unsnobbish, realistic, gentle. Unassuming: yes, that was genuine. Unsnobbish, realistic; that was genuine too; unlike his cousin, Lord Boscastle, he did not take refuge, as society evened itself out, in a fantastic and comic snobbery; yet in secret, he did take refuge with his friends here, in a cave-of-the-past, in a feeling, blended of fear, foresight and contempt, that he could preserve bits of his past and make them last his time. Gentle, a bit of an old woman; that was not genuine in the slightest; he was kind to his friends, but the deeper you dug into him the tougher and more impervious he became.
    ‘Well, if they’re going to sack me, Eliot,’ he said, ‘I’ve left them a nice kettle of fish.’ He was simmering in his triumph over Barford. He ordered more glasses of port.
    ‘One of these days,’ he said, ‘those chaps will blow us all up, and that will be the end of the story.’
    The firelight winked in his glass; he held it up to admire the effect, brought it down