Free The Sleep of Reason by C. P. Snow Page A

young man. Though Mr Pateman could not realise it, that acquaintanceship, in which I hadn’t behaved with much loyalty, made me more long-suffering towards him and his family now.
    “How much are they paying you for their room?” I said.
    “If you don’t mind,” Mr Pateman answered, throwing his head back, “we’ll keep our purses to ourselves.”
    Anyway, I was thinking, he couldn’t extract a big amount from them – even though, as I now suspected, he was something of a miser, a miser in the old-fashioned technical sense. I had been watching his negotiations with the tea table food. Between them, the two young women must have money to spend: they could run a car: it was strangely different from my own youth in this town, or the youth of my friends.
    “My position isn’t right,” said Mr Pateman. “I tell you, it isn’t right.” It was true to this extent, that a middle-aged man in a clerical job might be earning less than a trained girl.
    “All I need,” he went on, “is an opportunity.”
    I had to hear him out.
    “What have you got to offer?”
    “If I get an opportunity,” he said, with supreme satisfaction, “I’ll show them what I’ve got to offer.”
    I said, he had better tell me about his career. How old was he? Fifty last birthday.
    “I must say,” I told him, “I should have thought you were younger.”
    “Some people,” said Mr Pateman, “know how to look after themselves.”
    Born in Walsall. His parents hadn’t been “too well endowed with this world’s goods” (they had kept a small shop). They had managed to send him to a grammar school. He had stayed on after sixteen: the intention was that he should one day go to a teachers’ training college.
    “But you didn’t?”
    “Why not?”
    A very slight pause. Then Mr Pateman said defiantly: “Ah, thereby hangs a tale.”
    For the first time that evening, he was dissatisfied with his account of himself. I wondered how often I had heard a voice change in the middle of a life story. A platitude or a piece of jargon suddenly rang out. It meant that something had gone wrong. His “tale” seemed to be that he wanted to make money quick. He had had what he called a “brainwave”. At twenty he had become attached to a second-hand-car firm, which promptly failed.
    “Why did it fail?”
    “It isn’t everyone who is fortunate enough to have capital, you know.”
    Then he had become a clerk in an insurance office in Preston.
    “You may be thinking I’ve had too many posts. I was always looking for the right one.”
    He had got married (“I’m a great believer in taking on one’s responsibilities early”). Unfit for military service. Both children born during the war.
    Another brainwave, making radio sets.
    “My ship didn’t come home that time either,” said Mr Pateman.
    “What happened?”
    “Differences of opinion.” He swept his arm. “You know what it is, when the people in command don’t give a man his head.”
    “What would you have done if they had given you your head?”
    “They never intended to. They asked me there on false pretences. My schemes never got beyond the blueprint stage.”
    A new venture – this time in patent medicines. It looked as though all was well.
    “Then we met a very cold wind. And I don’t want to accuse anyone, but my partner came better than I did out of the financial settlement.”
    By that time, in his early forties, he had lived in a dozen towns and never made more, I guessed, than a few hundred a year. He descended further, and for eighteen months was trying to sell vacuum cleaners house-to-house. He brought it out quite honestly, but as though with stupefaction that this should have happened to him. Then – what he admitted, with a superior smile, had seemed like a piece of luck. An acquaintance from his radio days had introduced him to his present firm. He had moved to the town, and this house, five years before. It was his longest continuous job since his young