Free Last Things by C. P. Snow Page A

Margaret anxious, about his examination failures. I had also been concerned, because I was enough of a bourgeois born, about whether he would ever earn a living. Which had a certain practical interest, since otherwise I should have to go on supporting him.
    He walked at my side, face innocent, good-looking, not feminine but unhardened for twenty-one. As usual, he was unprickly free from self: yet, I had often wondered, was that really true? It was the puzzle that one sometimes met in people who asked very little for themselves. They cared for others: they did good works and got nothing and claimed nothing: they had no rapacity or cruelty: so far as human beings could be, they were kind. Nevertheless, occasionally one felt – at least I did – that underneath they had a core more impregnable than most of ours. Somehow they were protected. Protected as some men are by shields of vanity or self-regard. Certainly Maurice made one feel that he was in less danger than any of us. Maybe it was that, more than his kindness, which made him so comfortable to be with.
    Under the monotone sky, the high houses, also monotone, similar in period to the one where the Roses were living, more run-down. In the square, neon signs of lodging houses. Church built when the square was opulent (a million domestic servants in London then, and the slum-poor nowhere near these parts), Christmas trees lit up outside. Sleazy cafés on the road to Paddington station. A few people walking about, slowly, in the mild gloom. A scrum of West Indians arguing on the pavement. Christmas decorations in closed shops. Here and there on the high house-fronts lighted windows.
    Once or twice Maurice reminded me of stories which he had told about those streets, for he knew them well. In his holidays he used to join a friend of his, the vicar of a local parish, on pastoral visits, making a curious, unsolemn and faintly comic pair, the vicar stout, be-cassocked and birettaed, Maurice as thin as a combination of the idiot prince and a first-class high-jumper. It was their way of enjoying themselves, and they had been inside many more rooms in the Paddington hinterland than the vicar’s duty called for. Yes, some of the sights weren’t pretty, Maurice had reported, unshockable: you could find most kinds of vice without going far. Also most kinds of suffering. Not the mass poverty of the thirties, that had been wiped out. But alcoholic’s poverty, drug addict’s poverty, pensioner’s poverty. Being poor when you’re old, though, that’s not the worst of it, Maurice had said. It’s being alone, day after day, with nothing to look forward to until you die. For once (it had happened one night when he returned home, a couple of years before), Maurice had spoken with something like violence. Genteel poverty behind lace curtains. A lucky person had a television set. If anyone feels like being superior about television, when they’re old they ought to live alone without one. You know, Maurice had gone on, they look forward to seeing Godfrey (the vicar) and me. I suppose one would if one were alone. Of course we can’t do much. We can just stay talking for half an hour. Anyway, Godfrey isn’t much good at conversation. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.
    As we walked along, solitary figures passing us in the empty streets, lighted windows in the houses, I was thinking, he had been behind some of those windows. They weren’t as taunting when one got inside as when one gazed at them from the street as a young man. For an instant, I was, not precisely remembering, but touched by a residual longing from, other Christmas days long past, when I had also gone out for walks on deserted pavements, just to kill time, just to get through the day. That had been so in the provincial town, after my mother died: slipping out after Christmas dinner, necessarily teetotal, at Aunt Milly’s, I used to tramp the streets as the afternoon darkened, gazing up garden paths at bright and