Time of Hope (17 page)

‘All I meant was – you mustn’t damage yourself.’

Wretched after my day, I wanted to leave her. But before I went she made me promise that I would report what Eden said next, whether George came round. ‘You must tell me,’ said Marion. ‘I want to know. You mustn’t let me think I shouldn’t have spoken. I couldn’t help it – but I want everything you want, you know that, don’t you?’

In fact, I soon had good news to tell Marion – and I did so at once, to make amends for having been angry with her. This time she did not stop me describing both George’s words and Eden’s.

George had spoken to me, only three or four days after our quarrel, stiffly, still half-furiously, in great embarrassment. He could not withdraw any single part of his criticisms. He regarded me as lost to reason; but, having once encouraged me to choose a career and offered his help, he felt obliged to honour his word. He would be behind me, so far as lay in his power. If I wanted money, he would do his best, though I must not count on much. He would, naturally, coach me in private for the Bar examinations. ‘I refuse to listen to any suggestion that you won’t find the blasted examinations child’s play,’ said George robustly. ‘That’s the one item in the whole insane project that I’m not worrying about. As for the rest, you’ve heard my opinions. I propose from now on to keep them to myself.’

He spoke with a curious mixture of stubborn irritation, diffidence, rancour, magnanimity, and warmth. I was disarmed and overjoyed.

As for Eden, when I told him that I had not changed my mind, he shook his head, and said: ‘Well, I suppose young men must have their fling. If you are absolutely determined to run your head against a brick wall, I shan’t be able to stop you.’ That did not prevent him from giving me a series of leisurely sensible homilies; but he was willing to sign my certificates of character and to introduce me to a barrister. He wrote the letter of introduction on the spot (there were one or two technical difficulties about my getting admitted to an Inn). The name on the envelope was Herbert Getliffe.

All that was left, I said to Marion, was to pay my fee.

It was a few days later, in the October of 1924, on a beautiful day of Indian summer – I was just nineteen – that I announced that my admission was settled and the fee paid. Now it was irrevocable. I went to Aunt Milly’s house on Friday evening, and proclaimed it first to Aunt Milly and my father. On recent visits there for tea, I had hinted that I might spend the legacy to train myself for a profession. Aunt Milly had vigorously remonstrated; but now I told them that I had paid two hundred pounds in order to start reading for the Bar, she showed, to my complete surprise, something that bore a faint resemblance to approval.

‘Well, I declare,’ said my father, equably, on hearing the news.

Aunt Milly rounded on him. ‘Is that all you’ve got to say, Bertie?’ she said. Having dismissed him, she turned to me with a glimmer of welcome. ‘I shan’t be surprised if it’s just throwing good money after bad,’ said Aunt Milly, automatically choosing to begin with her less encouraging reflections. ‘It’s your mother’s fault that you want a job where you won’t dirty your hands. Still, I’d rather you threw away your money failing in those examinations than see you putting it in the tills of the public houses.’

‘I don’t put it in the tills, Aunt Milly,’ I said. ‘Only the barman does that. I’ve never thought of being a barman, you know.’

Aunt Milly was not diverted.

‘I’d rather you threw your money away failing in those examinations’, she repeated, ‘than see you do several things that I won’t mention. I suppose I oughtn’t to say so, but I always thought your mother might get above herself and put you in to be a parson.’

Aunt Milly seemed to be experiencing what for her was the unfamiliar emotion of relief.

I had arranged to meet George in the town that evening; he liked to have a snack before we made our usual Friday night call at Martineau’s. ‘Drop in for coffee –
or
whatever’s going
,’ George remarked, chuckling, munching a sandwich. He was repeating Martineau’s phrase of invitation, which never varied. ‘I’d been to half a dozen Friday nights before it dawned on me that coffee was always going – by itself.’

I broke in ‘This is a special occasion. The deed’s done.’

‘What deed?’

‘I sent off the money this afternoon.’

‘Did you, by God?’ said George. He gazed at me with a heavy preoccupied stare, and then said ‘Good luck to you. You’ll manage it, of course. I refuse to admit any other possibility.’

The street lamps shimmered through the blue autumnal haze. As we strolled up the New Walk George said, in a tone that was firm, resigned, and yet curiously sad ‘I accept the fact that you’ll manage it. But don’t expect me to forget that you’ve been as big a firebrand as I ever have. Some of the entries in my diary may embarrass you later – when you get out of my sight.’

Very rarely – but they stood out stark against his blazing hopes – George had moments of foresight, bleak and without comfort. In the midst of all his hope, he never pictured any concrete success for himself.

Then he went on heartily: ‘It’s essential to have a drink on it tonight. This calls for a celebration.’

We left Martineau’s before the public houses closed. George, as always, was glad of the excuse to escape a ‘social occasion’: even in that familiar drawing-room, he felt that there were certain rules of behaviour which had paralysingly been withheld from him; even that night, when I was proclaiming my news to Martineau, I noticed George making a conscious decision before he felt able to sit down. But once outside the house, he drank to my action with everyone we met. There was nothing he liked more than a ‘celebration’, and he stood me a great and noisy one.

Arriving at my room after midnight, I saw something on the chest of drawers which I knew to be there, which I had remembered intermittently several times that evening, but which would have astonished all those who had greeted my ‘drastic’ step, George most of all. It was a letter addressed in my own handwriting. After midnight, I was still drunk enough from the celebration, despite our noisy procession through the streets, to find the envelope glaring under the light. I saw it with guilt. It was a letter addressed in my own handwriting to my prospective Inn. Inside was the money. It was the letter, which, for all my boasts, I had not yet screwed up my courage to send off. I had been lying. There was still time to back out.

They thought of me as confident. Perhaps they were right in a sense, and I had a confidence of the fibres. In the very long run, I did not doubt that I should struggle through. But they, who heard me boast, were taken in when they thought I took this risk as lightly as I pretended. They did not see the interminable waverings, the attacks of nerves, the withdrawals, the evenings staring out in nervous despondency over the roofs, the dread of tomorrow so strong that I wished time would stand still. They did not detect the lies which I told myself as well as them. They did not know that I changed my mind from mood to mood; I used an uprush of confidence to hearten myself on to impress Eden that I was absolutely firm. But a few hours later that mood had seeped away and I was left with another night of procrastination. That had gone on for weeks. My natural spirits were high, and my tongue very quick, or else the others would have known. But in fact I concealed from them the humiliating anxieties, the subterfuges, the desperate attempts to find an excuse, and then another, for not committing myself without any chance of return. They could not guess how many times I had shrunk back from paying the fee, so that I could still feel safe till another day. At last, that Friday, I had brought myself to sign the letter and the cheque; in ebullient spirits I had told them all, Aunt Milly, my father, George, Martineau, all the rest, that the plunge was taken, and that I was looking ahead without a qualm; but in the small hours of Saturday the letter was still glaring under the light, on the top of the chest of drawers.

It was Monday before I posted it.

The End of Innocence

My first meeting with Sheila became blotted from my memory. The first sight of her, as Jack and I walked up the London Road and she walked from her car, stayed clear always; so did the sound of her name, echoing in my mind before I had so much as seen her face. But there was a time when we first spoke, and that became buried or lost, irretrievably lost, so that I was never able to recapture it.

It must have been in the summer of 1925, when we were each nearly twenty. During the winter I had heard a rumour that she was abroad – being finished, said someone, for her health, said another. Her name dropped out of the gossip of the group; Jack forgot all about her and talked with his salesman’s pleasure, persuading himself as well as his audience of the charms of other girls. It was the winter after I had taken the plunge, when I was trying to assuage my doubts by long nights of work: days at the office, evenings with George and the group, then nights in my cold room, working like a medieval student with blankets round my knees, in order to save shillings in the gas fire. There were times when, at two or three o’clock, I went for a walk to get my feet warm before I went to bed.

Sheila and I must have met a few months later, in the summer. I did not remember our first calling each other by name. But, with extreme distinctness, a few words came back whenever I tried to force my memory. They had been spoken not at our first meeting, but on an occasion soon after, probably the first or second time I took her out. They were entirely trivial, and concerned who should pay the bill.

We were sitting in a kind of cubicle in an old-fashioned café. From the next cubicle to ours sounded the slide and patter of draughts, for this was a room where boxes of chessmen and draughts stood on a table, and people came in for a late tea and stayed several hours.

Through the tobacco smoke, Sheila was staring at me. Her eyes were large and disconcertingly steady. At the corner of her mouth, there was a twitch that looked like a secret smile, that was in fact a nervous tic.

‘I want to pay my share,’ she said.

‘No, you can’t. I asked you to come out.’

‘I can. I shall.’

I said no. I was insecure, not knowing how far to insist.

‘Look. I’ve got some. You need it more than I do.’

We stared at each other across the table.

‘You’re here. In this town. I’m not far away.’ Her voice was high, and sometimes had a brittle tone. ‘We want to see each other, don’t we?’

‘Of course,’ I said in sudden joy.

‘I can’t unless I pay for myself. I shouldn’t mind you paying – but you can’t afford it. Can you?’

‘I can manage.’

‘You can’t. You know you can’t. I’ve got some money.’

I was still insecure. Our wills had crossed. Already I was enraptured by her.

‘Unless you let me pay for myself each time I shan’t come again.’ She added: ‘I want to.’

If I had met her when I was older, and she had spoken so, I should have wondered how much it was an exercise of her will, how much due to her curious kindness. But that afternoon, after we had parted, I simply said to myself that I was in love. I had no room to think of anything but that.

I said to myself that I was in love. It was different from all I had imagined. I had read my Donne, I had listened to Jack Cotery, that cheerful amorist, and had agreed, out of the certainty of my inexperience, that the root of love was sensual desire, and that all that mattered was the bed. Yet it did not seem so, now that I was in love. Even though each moment had become enhanced, so that I saw faces in the evening light with a tenderness that I had never felt before. The faces of young men and women strolling in the late sunlight – I saw the bloom on the girls’ cheeks, I saw them feature by feature, as though my eyesight had suddenly become ten times as acute, As I watched the steam rising from my teacup the next morning, I felt that I was seeing it for the first time, as though I had just been born with each sense fresh and preternaturally strong. Each moment was sensually enhanced because of the love inside me. Yet for her who inspired that love I had not in those first days a sensual thought.

I did not make dreams of her, as I had done of many other girls. That first state of love was delectable beyond my expectation; in its delight I did not stop to wonder that I had often imagined love, and imagined it quite wrong. I breathed in the delight with every breath, those first mornings. I did not stop to wonder why my thoughts of her were vague, why I was content to let her image – unlike those of everyone else I knew – lie vague within my heart.

It was the same when I pictured her face. I was used already to studying the bones and skin and flesh of those I met, and I could, as a matter of form and habit, have described Sheila much as I should have described Marion or even George or Jack. I could have specified the thin, fine nose; great eyes, which had not the lemur-like sadness of most large eyes, but were grey, steady, caught and held the light; front teeth which only the grace of God saved from protruding, and which sometimes rested on her lower lip. She was fair, and her skin was even, pale, and of the consistency that most easily takes lines – so that one could see, before she was twenty, some of the traces that would deepen in ten years. She was tallish for a woman, strong-boned and erect, with an arrogant toss to her head.

I should have described her in those terms, just as I might have described the others, but to myself I did not see her as I did them. For I thought of her as beautiful. It was an objective fact that others did so too. Few of my friends liked her for long, and almost none was easy with her; yet even George admitted that she was a handsome bitch, and the women in the group did not deny that she was good-looking. They criticized each feature, they were scornful of her figure, and it was all true; but they knew that she had the gift of beauty. At that time I believed it was a great gift – and so did she, proud in her looks and her youth. Neither of us could have credited that there would come a day when I was to see her curse her beauty and deliberately, madly, neglect it.