The Malcontents by C. P. Snow Page B

continued: ‘Getting mixed up with a man like that.’
    ‘He had his uses–’
    ‘You needn’t explain. I know it all.’
    Stephen looked sideways at the sculptured profile, eyes gazing steadily ahead, wondering who had broken security and confided in her. But immediately she told him that she hadn’t received information from any of them, but through her job. Her father, like Mark’s, was a manufacturer, by the town’s standards a wealthy one: she had been to a smart boarding school and to Switzerland: and then, as though not liking to compete, she hadn’t gone with the others to a university but had been trained as a secretary. She wasn’t a bad secretary, she said. As they all knew, she worked in the office of one of the town’s leading solicitors – who handled the business, so she told Stephen, of leading members of the local Conservative Party. That was how she had picked up the news. ‘I know it all,’ she said. ‘No, not quite all. But more than you possibly can.’ What was more, she had come to tell them. That meant betraying confidence, and Stephen assumed that it had taken moral effort, for she was an honourable girl. Now that she had made her resolve, though, she was doing it straightforwardly and without finicking.
    Stephen had no doubt why she was doing it. It wasn’t out of regard or affection for him, though in a temperate way she had a little. It was out of love for Mark. This girl was a puzzle to most of them. She had her looks, money, intelligence: to the Freers, she would have seemed an admirable match for Stephen, far more desirable than Tess, and there had even been colloguing between the families. Sylvia had had numbers of men chasing her: Lance was one of a dozen who had tried to take her to bed, and had failed. At twenty-two (she was a few weeks older than Stephen) she was, her friends believed, still a virgin. Emma, who had been at school with her, regarded her with a mixture of derision, contempt and an element of reverence. She’s so upright, Emma jeered, as she told the others, exuding incredulity, that Sylvia didn’t ‘do that’.
    Whatever the result was going to be, Sylvia was lost in love for Mark. Her self-possession, which impressed all those round her, had to herself utterly failed. It was a love more innocent, younger, purer (despite the fugues of her imagination), less organically warm than Tess’ for Stephen, but still total. For his sake she was behaving dishonourably – which she didn’t like, though she was so exalted about Mark that it cost her less effort than Stephen thought in order to protect him. She would have done much more than that, to serve him much less.
    Sitting in her car, before she started to drive them to the university, she said: ‘I tried to get Mark out of it. Last week.’
    That had been, Stephen was thinking, before he himself had had any warning, before the hints from his father on Saturday afternoon. In everything she said about the imbroglio, Sylvia was firm, efficient, authoritative but apparently, in her first approach to Mark, she had been more tentative, and now was taking the blame for that.
    Stephen had enough friendly feeling to try to console her.
    ‘Whatever you’d said, you ought to know him, it wouldn’t have made any difference,’ he remarked.
    The severe expression didn’t soften.
    ‘I didn’t do it properly,’ she said.
    ‘When he’s on the move, nothing in the world will stop him.’
    ‘I don’t understand,’ said Sylvia. ‘I don’t understand the lot of you, as far as that goes.’ She gave a sharp-edged, deprecating smile. ‘I’ve never been one for causes, though. I just sit back.’
    ‘There’s been someone else who wasn’t one for causes, hasn’t there?’ said Stephen, probing into what she knew.
    She replied, quick on the point: ‘Yes. Someone’s given you away, of course they have.’
    ‘Who? Can you tell me?’
    ‘I’m not certain. I can tell you one thing. It wasn’t that man up