Last Things by C. P. Snow Page A

first time I had seen him sunburnt, and he wasn’t over-clean after the travel. He looked healthy but thin, his face, high-cheekboned, masculine, already set in the pattern that would stay until he was old. He stretched out on the sofa, long feet protruding over the end.
    I asked him to have a drink. After Islamic countries, he was out of practice, he said: yes, he would like a gin. He began to describe his route home: we wanted to hear, we were glad to have him there, we were trying to throw off the beginning of the day. He was in high spirits, like one who has made a good voyage. Suddenly he threw his legs off the sofa, sat up straight, gazed at me with alert eyes.
    ‘You’re looking sombre,’ he said.
    Of Margaret and me, I was the one whose face he could read the quicker.
    I said something evasive and putting off.
    ‘You’ve got something on your mind.’
    I hesitated, said no again, and then reached out for the press cutting.
    ‘I suppose you’ll have to see this sooner or later,’ I said as I handed it over.
    With a scrutinising frown, Charles read, and gave a short deep curse.
    ‘They’re not specially fond of you, are they?’
    ‘One thing I’m worried about’, I said, ‘is that all this may rebound on you.’
    ‘I shall have worse than that to cope with.’
    ‘It may be a drag–’
    ‘Never mind that.’
    ‘Easier said than done,’ I told him.
    ‘You’re not to worry about me.’ Then he said, in an even tone: ‘I told you years ago, didn’t I, I won’t be worried about.’ He said it as though it were a good-natured domestic jibe: that was ninety per cent of the truth, but not quite all.
    Then, he tapped the cutting, and said he hadn’t read English newspapers for months until that day. He had got hold of the morning’s editions on the way over. There was one impression that hit him in the eye: how parochial, how inward-looking, this country had become. Parish-pump politics. Politics looked quite different from where he had been living. ‘This isn’t politics,’ he said, looking contemptuously at the cutting. ‘But it’s how this country is behaving. If we’re becoming as provincial as this, how do we get out of it?’
    He was saying that vigorously, with impatience, not with gloom. In the same energetic fashion, he said: ‘Well then, is that all the bad news for the present?’
    That was an old family joke, derived from the time when he began to read Greek plays.
    ‘The rest isn’t quite so near home,’ I answered. ‘But still, it’s bad news for someone. You tell him,’ I said to Margaret.
    As he heard about Muriel, he was nothing like so impatient. He was concerned and even moved, more than we had been, to an extent which took us by surprise. So far as I knew, he had had little to do with his cousin, and both Pat and Muriel were five years older than he was. Yet he spoke about them as though they were his own kind. Certainly he did not wish to hear us blaming either of them. He didn’t say one word of criticism himself. This was a pity – that was as far as he would go. Still with stored-up energy, poised on the balls of his feet, he declared that he would visit them.
    ‘They might tell me more than they’ve told you,’ he said.
    ‘Yes, they might,’ said Margaret. ‘But Carlo, I’m sure it’s gone too far–’
    ‘You can’t be sure.’
    Margaret said that it was Muriel who had to be persuaded, and there weren’t many people with a stronger will. Charles wasn’t being argumentative, but he wouldn’t give up: and, strangely enough, his concern broke through in a different place, and one which, taken by surprise, we had scarcely thought of.
    ‘If they can’t be stopped,’ he remarked, ‘it’s going to be a blow for Uncle Martin, isn’t it?’
    There had always been sympathy between Martin and Charles, and in some ways their temperaments were similar, given that Charles’ was the more highly charged. Charles knew a good deal about Martin’s relation