In Their Wisdom by C.P. Snow

Author:C.P. Snow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: In Their Wisdom
ISBN: 9780755120123
Publisher: House of Stratus
Published: 2012-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

21

There were times when Ryle couldn’t repress asking Hillmorton a question about Liz just for the pleasure, or the mirage satisfaction, of mentioning her name. He knew that he could only get evasive exercises in reply, and he knew too by now that Hillmorton had his own private entertainment because his old and sensible friend was not behaving like an old and sensible man.

Ryle didn’t excuse himself: though in fact, apart from those questions to Liz’s father, he didn’t commit other follies in action, even if some filtered through his mind. He had once given Liz advice on this same topic: he must have been one of the few men, it occurred to him, to follow his own advice himself. Yet, sitting in his drawing-room at Whitehall Court, he sometimes felt the spring of the nerves when the telephone rang: only to find that it was his stockbroker or accountant.

Still, he was learning, late in life, what less stable men discover earlier; that any expectation, even a frustrated one, is – at any rate in its first stages – better than none. His spirits were higher than the year before, when he was at peace, anticipating nothing. A couple of days before the Christmas recess he was settled in his place in the Chamber, listening with some approach to content as fellow members expressed themselves.

Ryle sometimes grumbled – rather as Jenny had thought to herself – that to endure the legislative process, either in that House or in the other, you had to be brought up a parliamentarian man and boy. Committee stages, amendments, report, parliamentarians were unborable or appeared so, and Ryle wasn’t. Still, that was how the work got done. On Wednesdays they could talk at large. Someone introduced a general topic and moved for papers (having to withdraw his motion at the end, otherwise there might be embarrassment, since no one knew where, if anywhere, the papers were).

That particular Wednesday they were talking about conservation. As usual in these debates, one or two speakers had expert knowledge. Ryle was learning something. As usual also, one or two speakers were not specially relevant. One peer delivered a very strong allocution about Eskimo languages.

To Ryle’s surprise, he had found that Hillmorton was down to speak. As a rule, elder statesmen, like the working politicians they had once been, didn’t take part in such a discussion. Nevertheless, uncharacteristically, Hillmorton chose to make a speech. He also made – even compared with his October utterance on Europe – an uncharacteristic speech. It wasn’t long, but it was curiously sentimental. Hillmorton was speaking in praise of the English countryside, demanding that it should be left, so far as they could contrive it, exactly as it was.

Now Ryle had heard Hillmorton, when conversing with his normal detachment, remark that that same countryside was every square foot man-made, and that no revenant from as recently as the seventeenth century would be likely to recognise his native spot. Further, Ryle knew for sure that Hillmorton

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