Free Last Things by C. P. Snow

Margaret gave a sharp-eyed, puzzled smile. ‘She seems pretty cool about it. Cooler than I should have been, I tell you, if you’d left me having Charles and done the same.’
    A good many women would have been cooler than that, I told her.
    She burst out laughing. But when I repeated, how had Muriel reacted, her face became thoughtful, not only protective but mystified and sad. In her composed, demure fashion, Muriel had been evasive about her husband during previous visits; this time she had come out with it, still composed but clinical. Not a tear. Not even a show of temper.
    ‘What do they think they’re playing at?’ said Margaret. ‘He wasn’t in love with her, we never believed he was. He was after the main chance, blast him. But what about her? It doesn’t make sense. She must love him, mustn’t she?
    ‘After all,’ she went on, ‘she’s only twenty-two.’
    A silence.
    Margaret said: ‘I don’t understand them, do you?’
    She was upset, and I tried to comfort her: and yet for her it was no use being reflective or resigned. For, though this mess was quite far away from her – it wasn’t all that dramatic or novel, and Muriel was no more than a young woman she knew by chance – it had touched, or become tangled with, some of her own expectations. None of us had expected more from all the kinds of love than Margaret. With her father, those afternoons as she sat by him in his loneliness, she had felt one of them finally denied: and with her sons also, as she grew older, there was another kind of isolation. Maurice passive, gentle, but with no flash of her own spirit coming back: Charles, who had spirit which matched hers, but who responded on his own terms. She had invested so much hope in what they would give her: and now, despite her sense, her irony, she sometimes felt cut off from the young. That was why Pat and his deserted wife became tokens for her: they made romantic love appear meaningless: all her expectations were dismissed, as though she belonged to another species. It wasn’t like that, I tried to tell her, but I did no good. Unlike herself, so strong in trouble close to hand, that night – on the pretext or trigger of an acquaintance’s ill-treatment – she felt lonely and unavailing.
    ‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘you’ll feel different when Carlo (our name for Charles) is back.’
    ‘What will he be like then?’ she said.
    She asked, would he understand the situation of Pat and Muriel better than we did. Neither of us could guess. It was hard to believe that he had much in common with either.

 
     
7:  Fair-mindedness
     
    ON the afternoon of Christmas Day, Margaret and I were sitting in our drawing-room, along with Maurice, who had the day off from his hospital. Over the Park outside, the sky was low, unbroken: no rain, not cold, a kind of limbo of a December day. We had put off the Christmas meal until the evening, since my brother Martin and his wife and daughter were driving down from Cambridge. No newspapers, no letters, a timeless day. I suggested that we should go for a walk: Margaret looked at the cloud cover, and decided that it wasn’t inviting. Maurice, as usual glad to oblige, said that he would come with me.
    We didn’t go into Hyde Park, but instead turned into the maze of streets between our flat and Paddington. Or rather I turned that way, for Maurice didn’t assert himself, and happily took what came. It wasn’t that he was a weak character: in his own fashion, he was a strong one; but it was a fashion so different from mine, or my own son’s, that I was no nearer knowing what he wanted, or where his life would go. Since he came to me, at the age of three, when I married Margaret, he and I had always got on well: there hadn’t been the subliminal conflict of egos that had occasionally broken out in my relation, on the surface ironic and amiable, with young Charles. Sometimes it seemed that Maurice didn’t have an ego. I had been concerned, because it made