Free Last Things by C. P. Snow Page B

curtained sitting-rooms, feeling a kind of arrogant envy. That had been so again, my first year in London: my friends all at home, no George Passant to pass the evening with, and I with nothing to do. The streets must have looked much as they did that day with Maurice, but that I had forgotten or repressed, and where I finished up the night.
    ‘Not exactly cheerful,’ I said, as though commenting on the present situation, indicating a young man who was dawdling past us.
    ‘Poor old thing,’ said Maurice, who really was commenting on the present situation. ‘He doesn’t look as if he’s got anywhere to go–’
    For any connoisseur of townscapes, that afternoon’s had its own merit. The unvaried sky lay a thousand feet above the houses: the great city stretched all round one, but there was no sense of space: sky, houses, fairy lights on Christmas trees all pressed upon the lost pedestrians in the streets. Yes, the townscape had its own singular merit, but it was good to be back (did Maurice feel this too?) among the lights of our own drawing-room, able to find our own enclave.
    To be realistic, it was not quite such a well-constructed enclave as it might have been. At least, not when we sat down to dinner. Physically all was well. The food was good, there was plenty to drink. But in Margaret, and in me watching her, the nerves were pricking beneath the skin. One reason everyone round the table knew. That was the first Christina. Charles had not been at home. Shortly he would be celebrating his seventeenth birthday in Karachi; for the time being he was static and safe. Then he would start his journey home, all over-land, travelling alone, picking up rides. The whole Eliot family was there, eating the Christmas dinner, except the youngest.
    The whole Eliot family, though, that was a second reason for constraint, which perhaps, I couldn’t be certain, Martin and his wife didn’t realise. They had duly arrived, with their daughter Nina, while Maurice and I were out on our afternoon walk. We hadn’t seen any of them since the summer, at Pat’s wedding, but this family party had been planned long since. So, as a matter of course, Pat and Muriel had been invited. After Muriel’s disclosures, Margaret had asked her if she still wanted the pair of them to come. Yes, Muriel replied, without expression. There they were at dinner, Muriel on my left, by this time heavily pregnant, hazel eyes sharp, face tranquil, Pat on Margaret’s left, working hard to be a social stimulant.
    It was difficult to know whether anything was being given away. Once Pat tried his brand of deferential cheek on Margaret: she was polite, but didn’t play. Pat, whose antennae, always active, were specially so that night, must have known what that meant. But his father and mother did not seem to notice. Maurice tried, like a quiet impresario, to make the best of Pat’s gambits. Margaret didn’t like dissimulating, but when she was keeping a secret she was as disciplined as I was. From the other end of the table, all I could have told – if she hadn’t warned me – was that she laughed very little, and that her laughter didn’t sound free. While Pat, whose brashness was subdued, kept exerting himself to make the party bubble, Martin was attending to him, with a faint amused incredulous smile which I had seen creep on him before in his son’s company – as though astonished that anyone so unguarded could be a son of his.
    By my side, Irene didn’t often meet Pat’s quick frenetic brown-eyed glance, so like her own, but instead kept me engaged with Cambridge gossip. As she did so, I heard Muriel, voice clear and precise, taking part in repartee with Pat: no sign of strain, no disquiet that I could pick up. Later, I observed her talking to Nina, her sister-in-law, inconspicuous in her parents’ presence, more so in Pat’s. She might be inconspicuous, but she was a very pretty girl, so far as one could see her face, for she had hair, in the