Last Things by C. P. Snow Read Free Book Online

about Charles. And, in fact, the conversation, at least with Margaret and me, tended to repeat itself, as it did that night. David was high-spirited and very clever. He was at a private day school in London: Azik wanted him to go later to a smart boarding school. If so, we kept telling him, he ought to be at a boarding school now. It would be harder for him, much harder, to leave home at thirteen or fourteen. ‘No,’ said Azik, as he had done before, ‘that I could not do. I could not lose him now.’
    It was the old argument, but Azik enjoyed any argument about his son. It even kept him up later than he intended. David. The possibilities with David. David’s education. Azik went over it all again, before his gaze at his wife began to become more intense, more uxorious, and he felt impelled towards his power base, his home.

 
     
5:  Red Carpets
     
    THE chamber of the House of Lords glowed and shone under the chandeliers, the throne-screens picked out in gold, the benches gleaming red, nothing bare nor economical wherever one turned the eye, as though the Victorian Gothic decorators had been told not to be inhibited or as though someone with the temperament of Azik Schiff had been given a free hand to renovate the high altar of St Mark’s.
    It was a Wednesday afternoon, about half past five, the benches not half-full, but, as peers drifted in from tea, not so startlingly empty now as they had been an hour before. I had come to hear Francis Getliffe make a speech, and he had found me a seat just behind the Bar, at ground level. I had heard him speak there several times, but that afternoon there was a difference. This time, as he got up from the back benches, he was on the right hand of the throne, not the left. The election, as we had guessed at the dinner party with the Schiffs, a month before, had been as tight as an election could be: but it had been decided, and a Labour government had come to power. So, for the first time, Francis was speaking from the government side.
    He had never been a good speaker, and he was using what looked like a written text. He wasn’t a good reader. But he was being listened to. The debate was on defence policy, and it was well known that he was a grey eminence: no, not so grey, for his views had been published, in his time he had gained negative popularity because of them. Ever since he was a young man, in fact, he had been an adviser to Labour politicians. As he grew older, no one had more private influence with them on scientific-military affairs. That was when they were in opposition, but now he was being attended to as though this were an official statement.
    As a matter of fact, it was as guarded as though it might have been. Francis was both loyal and punctilious, and, though he had to speak that afternoon, he wasn’t going to embarrass his old colleagues. One had to know the language, the technical detail, and much back history, to interpret what he was, under the courtesies, pressing on them. Under the courtesies – for Francis, whose politeness had always been stylised, had taken with gusto to the singular stylisation of that chamber. In his speech he was passing stately compliments across the floor to ‘the noble Lord, Lord Ampleforth’. One needed a little inside information to realise that Lord Ampleforth, who was something like Francis’ opposite number on the Tory side, was a man with whom Francis had not agreed on a single issue since the beginning of the war; or that Francis was now telling his own government that, in three separate fields, the exact opposite of Lord Ampleforth’s policies ought to be their first priority.
    Polite hear-hears from both sides as Francis sat down. Lord Lufkin, sprawling on the cross-benches, looked indifferent, as though certain he could have done better himself. In the back tier of the opposition benches, I saw the face of Sammikins, hot-eyed, excited, but (since I last met him, twelve months before) startlingly thin.
    The