Time of Hope (21 page)

When I had finished, George made an inquiry about my love affair. He had only two attitudes towards his friends’ attachments. First, he responded with boisterous amusement. Then, when he decided that one was truly in love, he adopted an entirely different manner, circumlocutory, obscure, packed with innuendo, which he seemed to have decided was the height of consideration and tact. In the summer he had jovially referred to Sheila as that ‘handsome bitch’, but for some time past he had spoken of her, with infinite consideration, in his second manner. On that Sunday night his actual opening was ‘I hope you reached your destination safely yesterday afternoon?’

I said that I had.

‘I hope that it all turned out to be’ – George pulled down his waistcoat and cleared his throat – ‘reasonably satisfactory?’

I said that it did.

‘Perhaps I can assume’, said George, ‘that you’re not completely dissatisfied with your progress?’

I could not keep back a smile – and it gave me right away.

Even after that visit to Sheila’s house I still did not tell her simply how much I loved her. Her own style seemed to keep my tongue playful and sarcastic; I made jokes about joy and hope and anguish, as though it were all a game. I was not yet myself released.

Once or twice she kept me waiting at a meeting place. The minutes passed, the quarters; I performed all the tricks that a lover does to cheat time, to make it stand still, to pretend not to notice, so as suddenly to see her there. It was an anguish like jealousy, and, like jealousy, when at last she came, it was drowned in the flood of relief.

I complained. But still my words were light; I did not speak from the angry pain of five minutes before. I scolded her, I asked her not to expose me to looks of
schadenfreude
in the café – but I did it with the playful sarcasm that had become our favourite way of speaking to one another. Nevertheless, it was my first demand. She obeyed. At our next meeting, she was ten minutes early. She was trying to behave, and I was gay; but she was also strained and ill-tempered, as though it were an effort to subdue her pride even by an inch.

During my next visit to eat dinners at the Inn, I was waiting for a letter. It was the beginning of December, I was in London for my usual five nights, and I had made Sheila promise to write to me. Hopefully I looked for a letter on the hall table the morning after I arrived. I used to stay in a boarding house in Judd Street, rather as though, with a provincial’s diffidence, I did not want to be separated too far from my railhead at St Pancras. The dining-room, the hall, the bedroom, all smelt heavily of beeswax and food; the dining-room was dark, and we used to sit down to breakfast at eight o’clock in the winter gloom; there were twelve or so round the table – maiden ladies living there on a pittance, clerks, transients like myself. Through having students pass through the house, the landlady had acquired the patter of examinations. With a booming heartless heartiness, she used to encourage them, and me in my turn, by giving them postcards on the day of their last paper. On the postcard she had already written ‘I got through, Mrs Reed’; she exhorted one to post it to her as soon as the result was known.

After each breakfast on that stay, I went quickly to the hall table. There lay the letters, pale blue in the half-dark – not many in that house: none for me, on the first morning, the second, the third. It was the first time I had been menaced by the post.

Just as when I waited for her, I went through all the calculations of a lover. She could not have written before Monday night, it was more likely she would wait till Tuesday, there was no collection in the village after tea, it was impossible that I could get the letter by Wednesday morning. I was beginning to learn, in those few days, the arithmetic of anxiety and hope.

So, carrying with me that faint ache of worry, knowing that when I returned to the boarding house my eyes would fly to the hall table, I went out to eat my dinners at the Inn. On two of the nights I joined a party of my Cambridge acquaintances, Charles March among them; we went away from dinner to drink and talk, before they caught their train from Liverpool Street.

They were the kind of acquaintances on whom I should have sharpened my wits, if I had gone to a university. I had not yet spoken to Charles March alone, but him I felt kinship with, and wanted for a friend. The others I liked well enough, but no better than many of my friendly acquaintances in the town. I was soon easy among them, and we talked with undergraduate zest. When I was alone I compared their luck and mine. Some of them would be rivals. Now that I knew something of them, how did my prospect look?

I thought that, for intellectual machinery, between me and Charles March there was not much in it. I had no doubt that George Passant, both in mental equipment and in horsepower, was superior to both of us – but Charles March and I had a great deal more sense. Of those other Cambridge acquaintances, I did not believe that any of them, for force and precision combined, could compete with either Charles March or me, much less George Passant.

I was reassured to find it so. And I went on, once or twice, to envy them their luck. One of these young men was the son of an eminent KC, and another of a headmaster: Charles March’s family I guessed to be very rich. With that start, what could I not have done? I should have given any of them a run for their money, I thought. By their standards, by the standards of the successful world from which they came, it would have been long odds on my being a success. Whereas now I had, in my young manhood, to take an effort and endure a strain that they did not even realize. I felt a certain rancour.

I was capable, however, of a more detached reflection. In one way I had a priceless advantage over these new acquaintances of mine. They had known, at first hand, successful men; and it often took away their confidence. They had lived in a critical climate. Their families had been bound to compare them, say, to an uncle who had ‘come off’. There were times, even to a man as vigorous as Charles March, when all achievement seemed already over, all the great things done, all the books written. That was the penalty, and to many of them a crippling penalty, of being born into an old country and an established class. It was incomparably more easy for me to venture on my own. They were held back by the critical voices – or, if they moved at all, they tended to move, not freely, but as though they could only escape the critical voices by the deafening noise of their own rebellion.

I was far luckier. For I was, in that matter, free. From their tradition I could choose what I wanted. I needed neither to follow it completely, nor completely to rebel. I had never lived in a critical climate. There was nothing to hold me back. Far from it; I was pushed forward by the desires, longings, the inarticulate aspirations, of my mother and all her relatives, my grandfather and his companions arduously picking up their artisan culture, all my connexions who had stood so long outside the shop window staring at the glittering toys inside.

Later in my life I should not have wanted to alter any of that reflection. By twenty, in fact, I had a fair conception of most of my advantages and disadvantages, considered as a candidate in worldly affairs. I knew that I was quick-witted and adaptable – after meeting Charles March and the others, I was sure that I could hold my own intellectually. I could get on easily with a large number of human beings, and by nature I knew something of them. That seemed to me my stock-in-trade. But I left something out. Like most young men of twenty I found it impossible to credit that I had much will. George, for example, who had a will of Cromwellian strength, wrote of himself in his diary as being ‘vacillating’ and ‘weak’. Often he thought, with genuine self-condemnation, that he was the most supine of men. It was much the same with me. I should have been surprised if I had been told that I had a tough, stubborn, deep-rooted will, and that it would probably be more use to me than my other qualities all added together.

A letter came. My heart leapt as I saw the envelope on the hall table. But it was the wrong letter. Marion wrote to say that she had a half holiday on the Thursday; she wanted to buy a hat, and she needed an impartial male opinion – she could trust me to be impartial, couldn’t she? Could I spare her an hour that afternoon? And perhaps, if I were free, we might go to a play at eight. She would have to catch the last train home, so I should get her off my hands in good time.

I knew that she was fond of me, but there my imagination stopped. It was still so when I received this letter. I replied by return, saying that of course I should be glad to see her. That was true; but it was also true that I was full of chagrin at finding her letter instead of another, and that made me hasten to reply.

The other arrived, by a coincidence, on the day that Marion was due. It did not say much, it was like Sheila’s speech, shut in, capricious, gnomic. But she referred, with a curious kind of intimacy, brittle and yet trusting, to one or two of our private jokes. That was enough to irradiate the dark hall. That was enough to make me happy all day, to keep the stylised phrases running through my mind, to give me delight abounding and overflowing, so that when Marion arrived I lavished some of it on her.

She told me how well and gay I looked. I smiled and said that I was both those things. She took it as a welcome. Her eyes were bright and I suddenly thought how pretty she could be.

She gave the impression, as usual, of being sloppily dressed. Quite why I could not decide, for she was now spending much attention on her appearance. That afternoon she was wearing the Russian boots fashionable that winter, and a long blue coat. She looked fresh, but nothing could stop her looking also eager and in a hurry. No one had less trace of the remote and arctic.

Practically, competently, she had discovered some hat shops in and near the Brompton Road – they were recommended as smart, she said, and not too dear.

Along we went. Neither she nor I knew much of London, and we traipsed up and down Kensington High Street before we found the first of her addresses. There was a slight fog, enough to aureole the lights and make the streets seem cosier; the shops were decked for Christmas, and inside them one felt nothing but the presence of furs, warm air, and women’s scent. I was half irked, because I hated shopping, half glad to be among the lights and the crowds – cheerful because of the secret pleasure which she did not know, and also cheerful because of her enjoyment. I did not know it then, but I should have felt that second pleasure if I had been a more experienced man and deceiving her less innocently.

Marion tried on hat after hat, while I watched her.

‘You must say what you think,’ she said. ‘My taste is very vulgar. I’m a bit of a slut, you know.’

There was one that I liked.

‘I’m afraid it will show up my complexion,’ she said. ‘My skin isn’t too good, is it?’

She was so straightforward. If Sheila had made that remark, I was thinking, I should have seen her skin as
strange
, transcendentally different from all others. While Marion’s, when she drew my eyes to it, I saw just as skin, with a friendly familiar indifference, with the observant eye untouched by magic, just as I might have viewed my own.

I told her, as was true, that most women would envy her complexion. At last the hat was bought. It was expensive, and Marion grimaced. ‘Still,’ she said philosophically, ‘a good hat ought to take a girl a bit farther. A bit farther than a deep interest in the arts. I always have had a deep interest in the arts, haven’t I? and look what it’s done for me.’

Over tea she tried to find out whether I had been seeing Sheila. But she soon stopped – for she had discovered that I became claustrophobic when she showed a possessive interest in my life. I shied from her just as – I did not realize it then – I shied from the possessive invasion of my mother. That afternoon, she was satisfied that I seemed untroubled and relaxed.

She did not ask a straight question or inquire too hard. We were still natural with each other. She told me stories of an inspector’s visit to her school, and how he was terrified that she was chasing him. Marion had developed a self-depreciating mode of humour, and I found it very funny. The earnestness of manner was disappearing fast, now that she had discovered that she could amuse.

We laughed together, until it became time for me to go to my Inn. I had to score my dinner there, or otherwise I should need to stay an extra night; I left straight after and joined Marion at the theatre. She might be losing her earnestness, but she was still in the
avant garde
of the twenties and she had chosen to see a Pirandello. I bought the tickets. I was cross at her letting me do so; for she had a regular salary, and she knew that each shilling mattered to me. But when I saw her sitting by me, waiting for the curtain to go up, I could not grudge her the treat. She was as naïvely expectant, as blissful to be there, as a child at a pantomime. It was not that she was ungenerous with money, or unthoughtful, but that she consumedly loved being given a treat, being taken out. She was never disappointed. Every treat was always a success. She was disappointed if, immediately afterwards, one said it was a hopeless play. She did not like the gilt taken away at once, though a week later she would be as critical as any of us. That night, on our way to St Pancras by the tube, she was a little tender-minded because I made fun of Pirandello.

I desisted. I did not want to spoil her pleasure. And, on the foggy platform, I was warmed by affection for her – affection the more glowing (it did not seem shameful as I laughed at her) because of a letter in my pocket whose words I carried before my eyes. At St Pancras we coughed in the sulphurous fog.

‘Fancy having to go back tonight,’ said Marion. ‘I shall be hours late. I pity the children tomorrow. I shall smack them and shout at them.’

‘Poor dear, you’ll be tired,’ I said.

‘I shan’t get home till four,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind a bit. And that’s as much in the way of thanks as is good for you.’