A Coat of Varnish Read online

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  A Coat Of Varnish

  First published in 1979

  © Philip Snow; House of Stratus 1979-2010

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  The right of C.P. Snow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  This edition published in 2010 by House of Stratus, an imprint of

  Stratus Books Ltd., Lisandra House, Fore Street, Looe,

  Cornwall, PL13 1AD, UK.

  Typeset by House of Stratus.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library and the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 075512006X EAN 9780755120062

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  This is a fictional work and all characters are drawn from the author’s imagination.

  Any resemblance or similarities to persons either living or dead are entirely coincidental.

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  About the Author

  Charles Percy Snow was born in Leicester, on 15 October 1905. He was educated from age eleven at Alderman Newton’s School for boys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for an astounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he became an external student in science of London University, as the local college he attended in Leicester had no science department. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience by working as a laboratory assistant at Newton’s to gain the necessary practical experience needed.

  Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Master of Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research at the famous Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge. There, he went on to become a Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge, in 1930 where he also served as a tutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched into other areas of activity. In 1934, he began to publish scientific articles in Nature, and then The Spectator before becoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he was also writing fiction during this period, with his first novel Death Under Sail published in 1932, and in 1940 ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was published. This was the first of eleven novels in the series and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangers and Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.

  Discovery became a casualty of the war, closing in 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with the Royal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientific talent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He served as the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, he became a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists to work for the government. He also returned to writing, continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels. ‘The Light and the Dark’ was published in 1947, followed by ‘Time of Hope’ in 1949, and perhaps the most famous and popular of them all, ‘The Masters’, in 1951. He planned to finish the cycle within five years, but the final novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.

  He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950 and they had one son, Philip, in 1952. Snow was knighted in 1957 and became a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the City Leicester. He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government as Parliamentary Secretary to the new Minister of Technology. When the department ceased to exist in 1966 he became a vociferous back-bencher in the House of Lords.

  After finishing the Strangers and Brothers series, Snow continued writing both fiction and non-fiction. His last work of fiction was ‘A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fiction included a short life of Trollope published in 1974 and another, published posthumously in 1981, ‘The Physicists: a Generation that Changed the World’. He was also inundated with lecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, he became Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wrote influential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.

  In these later years, Snow suffered from poor health although he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active as a writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died later that day of a perforated ulcer.

  ‘Mr Snow has established himself, on his own chosen ground, in an eminent and conspicuous position among contemporary English novelists’ - New Statesman

  Part One

  1

  About half-past eight on a July evening, Humphrey Leigh was walking along the side of the Square. It was very hot for London, and hot enough for most other places. It had been so for weeks past. This was the summer of 1976, and that day the temperature hadn’t dipped below eighty, and stayed there still. Through the trees in the Square garden, the houses opposite gleamed in the light, an hour or so before sunset, the clear white stucco fronts as unbroken and unyielding as the heat.

  Humphrey Leigh was walking slowly. As a rule, his pace was light-footed, but not smoothly co-ordinated. He remained an active man, although he had retired from his official job the year before. There was nothing conspicuous about him. He was tallish, five feet eleven or so, not one to pick out in a crowd. His face was seamed, lines from nostrils to mouth and a single line across his forehead, but that made him seem observant or amused, rather than grave. Most people meeting him would have guessed him to be years younger than he was.

  A young man and woman were coming towards him, and called out that they would be seeing Humphrey later that night. He was not walking slowly because of the temperature. He had put on a tropical suit, and that was enough concession to discomfort. He was walking slowly because he didn’t want to arrive at his destination. He was having to pay a duty call on an old lady in distress. That would have been bad enough, even if there had been anything to say. There wasn’t. She had telephoned him at dinner-time, telling him that she had been at the hospital for hours that day: they had finished their tests; she would know the verdict, as she called it, within a week or two, she couldn’t tell precisely when.

  She was being stoical, but she asked him to call in for a few minutes, begging for company, which he couldn’t remember her doing before. She was as proud as a woman could be, or at least as any woman he had known. Not that he was a close friend. He was not sure that he even liked her. She was more than twenty years older than he was; from all he had heard, she might have been easier to love than to like. Still, she was a relation, if a remote one, and he had known her, on and off, since he was a boy. If one had known anyone for long enough, one often felt that one liked them more than one truly did.

  On his way to her house, he didn’t make that reflection, though in better spirits he might have done. He was just thinking that there was no conceivable comfor
t to give. The date of that evening was Tuesday, 6 July. That particular day had no significance in anything which was to follow; but there came to be some significance, which strangers didn’t completely understand, in the actual neighbourhood. The square in which Humphrey Leigh was walking was called Aylestone Square. It lay between Chester Square and Eaton Square. All were part of the district known as Belgravia. At this time, Belgravia remained the most homogeneous residential district in any capital city in the world, and in a quiet and seemly fashion the most soothing to the eye. In the centre of a capital city, that is. Belgravia was not a suburb. It had its frontiers, Knightsbridge to the north, Ebury Street about two miles away to the south. Buckingham Palace was just outside its eastern edge, Sloane Square and Chelsea a mile and a half to the west. Westminster and Whitehall were quite near. Within this area were something like three thousand houses and apartments and a population of ten or twelve thousand actual residents.

  It had been built, as a piece of hard-boiled speculation, largely in the generation between 1820 and 1850. The Grosvenor family owned great stretches of these parts of London, and they discovered a remarkable property developer by name of Thomas Cubitt, who was later approved of by the Prince Consort, a fine judge of talent. More than any single man, Cubitt was responsible for the Belgravia as Humphrey Leigh knew it. The land didn’t look over-promising. It consisted of dank water meadows and equally dank kitchen gardens (‘I refuse to live in a swamp,’ said Lady Holland in her old age, offered one of the new houses in Belgrave Square). If one looks at some of the ragged countryside on the way to Heathrow, one can get an impression of what Cubitt had to work on. But, as with Venice, building on swamps seemed to lead to pleasing aesthetic results.

  Cubitt and his associates were very fortunate. They were, of course, out to make money. They were building mainly, though not entirely, for the well-to-do. In Belgrave Square they put up mansions for the aristocracy. In Eaton Square, land being very short, terraces of great houses, mansions joined together. In exile after 1848 Prince Metternich lived in a terraced house; but it was one of those terraced houses (known, by what seemed a somewhat discouraging use of nineteenth-century naval terminology, as second-raters) for the upper middle classes. There were some streets of quite small terraced houses for artisans and clerks, by the nineteen seventies cherished by persons more privileged than their original occupants. Streets of shops and tiny service industries – discreetly renamed by Cubitt. Elizabeth Street, a hundred years later the main shopping quarter of half Belgravia, started life as Eliza Street, disreputable, tarts earning a few pence from the river traffic. Mews for the horses, quarters and cottages for the grooms. It was a mistake to think that the Belgravia of the eighteen seventies was quieter than that of this story. Horses were clattering and clopping all day and a good deal of the night, and the streets were thick with smell.

  There was no reason to think that Cubitt, or anyone else, was self-conscious about the architecture. Belgrave Square was an elegant piece of urban composition, and looked, as it did a century later, as if it came from one architect’s mind. It didn’t. It was the work of at least four. For posterity, here was one of the major pieces of Cubitt’s luck. He and his other builders were all working in a decent unfussy domestic idiom. It wore well. It ought to have looked monotonous. Thousands of houses, none of them much decorated, nearly all shining white up to the second storey.

  In Aylestone Square, in this respect like the whole of the district, permutations had been played with the simplest of means. The building style had been prescribed from the beginning; so had the height – four storeys plus basement for the tallest; so had the frontage, except for the corner houses; so had the colours, where there was an unspectacular choice between stucco over brick or stone, or alternatively naked brick or stone. Plain enough; but people could do their best with unspectacular choices. They could play with the harmony of repetitiveness. Which they had done.

  On his way towards number seventy-two, the house he had to visit, similar to his own and on the same side, Humphrey Leigh hadn’t noticed any of the minuscule variations in the house fronts. That was natural enough. No incumbent was ever likely to. He took it all for granted. In any case, the contrasts were not as dramatic as the first sight of the Grand Canyon. Occasionally, when he had nothing on his mind, he might have thought that this was an enclave, a comfortable and restful enclave to live in and, of course, a privileged one. He probably wouldn’t have recognised that he was glad he could still live there.

  While he hadn’t noticed any of the architectural details along the Square, he had, brooding the minutes away, absently noticed something else. In two of the houses the basements had young men and girls, who looked like students, climbing down the area steps. It was long odds that those basements had been sublet. Once all those basements, which were large enough to hold three or four rooms, had been servants’ quarters and kitchens. By this time, domestic service in London was difficult to get. Some people in the Square were rich enough to buy anything. Usually they acquired Filipino or Spanish couples to live in. A very few were lucky, like Humphrey Leigh himself. He had a housekeeper who had once looked after his mother and needed a home. Many made do on daily help, and some on none at all. Even Lady Ashbrook, the old lady who had called for Leigh’s company, had nothing but a Portuguese ‘daily woman’ as they called her, five mornings a week.

  As in most of Belgravia, Lady Ashbrook’s house might have a narrow front, but was bigger than it looked. Apart from the basement, it had ten rooms, which was about standard for the neighbourhood. Lady Ashbrook was well over eighty. Others wondered how she managed. Of course she could afford, the gossips said, to spend any amount of money on herself. The gossips had been busy on Lady Ashbrook for a lifetime. She was one of those few, and this was more true as she became older, who seemed grander the more she was talked about. It was generally thought that she was living so simply just to lavish gifts on relatives and charities.

  Domestic service unobtainable, it wasn’t surprising that those basements were being sublet, residents turning an honest penny when they could. It was not, however, quite such an honest penny. It was certainly a breach of contract. Humphrey Leigh might not know many of his neighbours, but he had a good idea of their terms of tenure and the value of their property. All those houses had been acquired by leasehold. In his own case, though he had been brought up within the tantalising sight of money, he had never had much. After the war, he had married his second wife, who had died, only two years before these events of July 1976. They had had nothing to live on except his salary. But if one had been brought up within the sight of money, as he was the first to point out, a little sometimes came one’s way. A little did, by way of a legacy. With it, and with a mortgage, they bought a forty-year lease of the house in Aylestone Square. It cost them £15,000. Humphrey Leigh later reflected, that was the only successful financial transaction of his life. Twenty years later, it would have cost five times as much.

  Coming near to number seventy-two, Humphrey Leigh quickened his pace, as though he were at last impelled to get the visit over. When he had rung the bell, sound tinkling distantly back in the house, there was what seemed a long wait. Then slow footsteps, a woman’s steps on stone. The door opened. He didn’t see much, for the hall was in shadow, but he heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Oh, Humphrey,’ Lady Ashbrook was saying, ‘it is nice of you to come.’

  That voice hadn’t changed much with the years. It was at the same time deep and half-strangulated. Humphrey had heard that peculiar tone in the past from other upper-class women, but by now it had gone out of fashion, and none of the young produced such a sound at all.

  Humphrey heard himself being bluffer and heartier than he liked, because he wasn’t much at ease.

  ‘You haven’t got Maria (the Portuguese help) here, then? You know, you ought to have someone with you.’

  ‘Why should I?’ she said.

  Humphrey was repeating himself, but she just sa
id: ‘Come upstairs.’

  In those houses, most people lived as their predecessors had done, a dining-room on the ground floor, drawing-room on the floor above. Humphrey followed Lady Ashbrook up a flight of stairs, passed a bathroom on the half-landing, six more stairs, along a corridor. She did it slowly, and paused once, but her back was straight as a guardsman’s. The drawing-room stretched through the depth of the house, the front windows looking over the Square, the back windows over strips of garden. Each house in the Square and nearly all in the entire district had, this being England, a kind of token garden behind it.

  Originally that room would have been divided into two, with a partition between. Now it was nearly fifty feet long, but still looked cluttered. On other visits there, Humphrey, less preoccupied, had thought that she had accumulated the debris of a lifetime. Tables, whatnots, tallboys, writing-desks, some old, some looking like last year’s presents – even a prie-dieu, though she attended the most evangelical of the Anglican churches nearby. A box of tools, among which a hammer-head protruded, lay in what had once been a fireplace, witnessing that she did her own repairs.

  There was no sign of what her visual taste was, if she had any. True, there were two fine pictures, a Boudin and a Vlaminck, badly hung and close to meaningless landscapes. One academic painting of her second husband, Ashbrook, who, according to some worshipping gossip, had been the great love of her life, from whose death – collapsing over his desk in Whitehall, the perfect way for a Minister to die, said somewhat less worshipping commentators – she was reported not to have recovered. No picture of her first husband, who had been a marquess and much more of a grandee. A painting by Sargent of herself at the age of about twenty, just at the time of that first marriage, a flattering romantic picture of a young woman strong-willed, elegant, beautiful, certain of happiness.