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  The Sleep of Reason

  First published in 1968

  © Philip Snow; House of Stratus 1968-2011

  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 2011 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: 0755120191 EAN 9780755120192

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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 forboys where he excelled in most subjects, enjoying a reputation for anastounding memory and also developed a lifelong love of cricket. In 1923 he becamean external student in science of LondonUniversity, as the local college heattended in Leicester had no sciencedepartment. At the same time he read widely and gained practical experience byworking as a laboratory assistant at Newton’sto gain the necessary practical experience needed.

  Having achieved a first class degree, followed by a Masterof Science he won a studentship in 1928 which he used to research atthe 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 atutor, but his position became increasingly titular as he branched intoother areas of activity.In 1934, he began to publish scientificarticles in Nature, and then The Spectator beforebecoming editor of the journal Discovery in 1937. However, he wasalso 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 theseries and was later renamed ‘George Passant’ when ‘Strangersand Brothers’ was used to denote the series itself.

  Discovery became a casualty of the war, closingin 1940. However, by this time Snow was already involved with theRoyal Society, who had organised a group to specifically use British scientifictalent operating under the auspices of the Ministry of Labour. He servedas the Ministry’s technical director from 1940 to 1944. After the war, hebecame a civil service commissioner responsible for recruiting scientists towork for the government.He also returned to writing,continuing the Strangers and Brothers series of novels.‘TheLight 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 thefinal novel ‘Last Things’ wasn’t published until 1970.

  He married the novelist Pamela Hansford Johnson in 1950and they had one son, Philip, in 1952.Snow was knighted in 1957 andbecame a life peer in 1964, taking the title Baron Snow of the CityLeicester.He also joined Harold Wilson’s first government asParliamentary Secretary to the new Minister ofTechnology.When the department ceased to exist in 1966 hebecame 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 fictionwas ’A Coat of Vanish’, published in 1978. His non-fictionincluded 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 withlecturing requests and offers of honorary doctorates. In 1961, hebecame Rector of St. Andrews University and for ten years also wroteinfluential weekly reviews for the Financial Times.

  In these later years, Snow suffered from poor healthalthough he continued to travel and lecture. He also remained active asa writer and critic until hospitalized on 1 July 1980. He died laterthat 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

  Note

  El sueño de la razón produce monstruos

  The sleep of reason brings forth monsters.

  This is Goya’s title for one of his Caprichos, inscribed on the etching itself.

  Part One

  Tricks of time

  1: Visit to a Grandfather

  THAT afternoon I had been walking with my son in what for me were familiar streets, streets of the town where I was born. I had taken him there only once before, when he was an infant. Now he was nearly fifteen, and we spoke the same language. I was taunting him because he had seen the “pretty England” and nothing of the rest; until that afternoon he had never seen a provincial town like this. He grinned. Whose fault was that? he said.

  And yet the town was not so unpretty: shops glittered and shone, well-dressed women walked the pavements, fresh-skinned girls in their spring frocks: cars jarred and halted, bumper to stern, hoods dazzling in a burst of sunshine. Once I had heard a fellow citizen called Sawbridge saying, with equal disapproval of the United States and his native town, that you could put the place down in the middle of America and no one would know the difference. It was nearly accurate, not quite. You could still, if you knew your way about, trace some of the streets of the old market town: narrow harsh streets with homely names, like Pocklington’s Walk, along which I had gone to work forty years before, craving not to be unknown, craving to get out of here. That I did not explain to my son Charles, who was discreetly puzzled as to why we were wandering through a quarter which, to any unbeglamoured eye, was sombre and quite unusually lacking in romance.

  However, when we returned to one of the bright shopping streets, and someone greeted me by name, he did ask, after we had passed on: “What does that feel like?”

  Probably it had not been an acquaintance from the past: this was 1963, and I had left the town for good in the late twenties: probably it was what Charles was used to, a result of photographs or the mass media. But he was perceptive, he guessed that being picked out in this place might pluck a nerve. Nevertheless, he was surprised by my reply.

  “To tell you the honest truth,” I said, “it makes me want to hide.”

  He glanced at me sidelong with dark searching eyes. He knew that, as a rule, I was not self-conscious and was used to the public life. He did not understand it. But if he didn’t understand it, neither did I. I couldn’t have explained what
I had just said. It seemed perverse and out of character. Yet it was quite true.

  Charles thought of pressing me, then decided against. The clock on the town hall said a quarter to four; it was time for us to make our way to my father’s house, or to be more exact, my father’s room. Charles had seen his grandfather only once, on his one other visit to the town, when he was three years old. To anyone outside, that must have sounded as though we had been heartless, not only without instinctive ties but without responsibility. After all, I had been lucky, my wife and family lived a privileged life. How could I bear neglecting the old man? In fact, my father had his own views. He seemed, and was, the most affable and gentle of human beings. But he just wanted to be left alone, to get on with his own mysterious concerns, whatever they were and if they existed. My brother Martin had tried to persuade him to live with them in Cambridge: I had wanted to have him in London. Not a bit of it. With simple passive resistance, he refused to move. He would not even take money. I had made more than enough, but he would not accept a penny, except for a bottle of port at Christmas. With his old age pension and the rent from his lodger, he had, he said, quite enough for his needs.

  He was, I thought, the most self-sufficient man I had come across. He was amiably and genuinely uninterested in his grandchildren. Even that afternoon, I had had to force him to let Charles and me come to tea. I was having to pay visits to the town every three months or so, on a piece of minor duty. This particular visit coincided with Charles being at home on holiday. So I had brought him up for the day, and had insisted that my father invite us. After all, he was in his late eighties: I had my share of piety (from which my father seemed singularly free), and it might be Charles’ last chance to talk to him.

  We took the bus out to the suburbs, on what in my childhood would have been the old tram route: red brick, the jail, the gasworks, less change here than in the middle of the town. And when we got off and walked into the back streets, there was less change still: the doctor’s house, the cluster of shops, the chapel, the terraced houses up the rise. Not that I was stirred by memory: I had seen it too recently for that. Instead, I looked up at the clouds, low on the south-west wind, breathed in the soft spring air, and said: “I like this Atlantic weather.”

  “Meteorological fiend,” said my son, with a friendly gibing smile. He had developed the theory that I, the child of cities, could not resist an obsessive interest in climatic phenomena: and that this was not shared by all who heard the results, including himself. It was the kind of sarcastic banter that came easily to him. I answered in kind, pointing out that at least one person had shared my meteorological enthusiasm, and that was one of the few men whom I actively detested.

  He was smiling, as we went past the two-storey terrace, front doors opening on to the pavement. It was no use preparing him for what he was going to meet: he would certainly find my father odd, possibly a strain, but that he would have to take. At the end of the row we came to a pair of larger houses, joined together. I pointed to the nearer one, and told him that was where I was born. It was dilapidated, but, to judge from the television aerials on the roof, inhabited by a couple of families. On the strip of earth inside the railings – which my mother used to call the front garden – the laburnum tree had become a blackened stump.

  With a concentrated gaze Charles studied the front room window, the peeling paint, the carved inscription between the houses, Albert Villas 1860, and said nothing at all. Then he asked: “Could we go in, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so, do you?”

  “Perhaps they wouldn’t like it.”

  The next house along the road had been built in the same period, but was larger and stood on its own. In my childhood it had belonged to my Aunt Milly’s husband: he had been a building contractor in a small way, and they were less poor than we were, and had often (offending my mother’s pride) been obliged to support us. When my mother died, by this time nearly forty years before, my father had gone to live with Aunt Milly, who was his sister. There he had stayed. Aunt Milly’s husband died, then she herself. They were childless, and, though she had willed their savings to various temperance societies, the house had come to my father. He had promptly let it off, keeping one room for himself: and there he had lived for the last twenty years.

  I led the way to that single room – down an entry, through a gate, into a yard paved with flagstones. The architecture of Aunt Milly’s house, like that of my mother’s, was bizarre, as though space didn’t matter and the more levels the better, so that there was a one-storey range, with a twenty-foot-high chimney, floors at yard-level: while five steps up was a French window, opening straight into my father’s room, which led into the main body of the house. Behind the French window one could see a glow on the ceiling, fluctuating, not very bright although the afternoon was dark, which must come from my father’s fire.

  “There he is, I expect,” I said to Charles.

  We went up the steps, and I rapped on the window. (There was a much quicker and more orthodox method of entry through the front door, but my father did not like being a trouble to his lodger.) Shuffle of steps. Rattle of handles. The two sides of the window opened, and in between them, facing us, my father stood.

  “Well, I declare,” he said.

  His first action was to peer up at Charles, making tunnels with his fingers over his spectacles as though sighting some far distant object.

  “I shall want a telescope to look at him,” my father said.

  I was six feet, and Charles, at fifteen, was only an inch or two shorter. My father was a little man. In my childhood he had claimed to five feet four: but now, with extreme old age, he had shrunk an inch or more. Standing there, old wide trousers flopping on his boots, his head seemed to come no higher than our chests.

  “I want a telescope, that’s what I do.” He went on clowning. He had always clowned, as far back as I could remember; he had been cheerful in his clowning then, just as he was now.

  After we had sat down in the crowded little room – Charles on a chair on one side of the fireplace, my father on the other, me on the sofa where he slept at night – he was still talking about telescopes, but in a different vein.

  “You know, Lewis, I’ve always thought I should like one.”

  I asked him why: I knew that tone by heart.

  “Well, you never know what you might find out.”

  He had daydreamed all his life. Just for an instant he was the supreme astronomer, discovering – at an advanced age and to his own mild surprise – new secrets of the universe. Or perhaps overturning established conceptions, an activity for which he had always had a secret fancy. All through my boyhood he had read travel books, often the same book over and over again: then he was the fearless single-handed explorer, going where no white man had ever trodden – he had a special feeling that the Amazonian jungle was the place for him. I had discovered, on my last visit, that he still borrowed travel books from the library at the corner of the road. As he sat in his chair, I could see a dozen or so books on the shelf behind him: they seemed the only books in the room, the only ones he possessed or had borrowed. How many of those were about travel? Or what other sorts of daydreams did he have?

  “You never know what you might find out,” he chortled. “But I expect I should find out something wrong!”

  He went on chortling with satisfaction. He hadn’t spoken out of self-pity, or at least, if he had, it was a singular kind of self-pity, which consisted of referring to himself as though he were the most ludicrous of jokes.

  He was, as usual, happy. Sitting beneath the mantelpiece, on which stood a marble clock flanked by photographs, some of the choral society of which he had been secretary so long, together with one of my mother, he did not look his age. His hair was white, but he had lost none of it: his great drooping moustache still, amid the white, kept a touch of ginger: the lenses of his spectacles, which he could not manage to put on straight, had not been changed since middle age. His pop eyes remained
innocently amused. By some genetic fluke, he had missed the deep blue irises which were dominant in the family: his father had had them and all the rest of us: Charles’, as he watched my father vigilantly across the fireplace, in that light looked not indigo but black. My father’s had not faded, but were very light, which made him appear more innocent. Sitting down he also appeared bigger than he was, since his legs were short and his head out of proportion large.

  A kettle was boiling on the hob between them. My father had so far paid no attention to Charles, except once or twice to address him, with impersonal cheerfulness, by my Christian name or my brother Martin’s. Charles, on the other hand, was paying complete attention to him. Charles had met a lot of people, some formidable, many what the world called successful: but his grandfather was different from any. This was a test, not only of instinctual ties, but also of insight. At the same time Charles, I had no doubt, was listening to my father’s soft Midland accent, of which Charles could hear the vestigial overtones in me.

  “Well, young man,” said my father, abandoning nomenclature as he spoke to Charles, “I expect you’re ready for your tea, aren’t you? I know I am.”

  Politely Charles admitted that he was.

  “I’m always ready for my tea,” said my father. “If I can’t do anything else, then I can always get rid of my tea.”

  He hooted with obscure gratification, and sang a few bars of a song I didn’t know, in a voice still disconcertingly strong. Efficiently, neat-fingeredly, like a man used to looking after himself he made the tea.

  “One, two, three spoonfuls – and one for the pot,” he chanted. He shuffled round the room, and produced the tea things. He produced also a large plate of cakes, jam tarts, custard tarts, éclairs, marzipan. “I always say,” my father remarked, “there’s nothing like something sweet to your tea.”