Time of Hope (40 page)

After I had thanked him, I said: ‘Can I get up and go?’

‘You’ll be weak.’

‘Not too weak to get out,’ I said; and, in fact, so strong was the suggestion of health, that as I walked out of the hospital, the pavement was firm beneath my feet, for the first time in six months.

The morning air was raw. In the city, people passed anonymously in the mist. I watched a bank messenger cross the road in his top hat and carrying a ledger. I was so light-hearted that I wanted to stop a stranger and tell him my escape. I was light-hearted, not only with relief but with a surge of recklessness. Miseries had passed; so would those to come. Somehow I survived. Sheila, my practice, the next years, danced through my thoughts. It was a time to act. She was at home for Christmas – but there was another thing to do. In that mood, reckless, calculating, and confident, I went to find Percy in order to have it out.

There was no one else in Chambers, but he was sitting in his little room, reading a sporting paper. He said ‘Good morning, Mr Eliot,’ without curiosity, though he must have been surprised to see me. I asked him to come out for a drink. He was not over-willing, but he had nothing to do. ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I must talk to you, Percy. You may as well have a drink while you listen.’

We walked up to the Devereux, and there in the bar-room Percy and I sat by the window. The room was smoky and noisy, full of people shouting new-year greetings. Percy drank from his tankard, and impassively watched them.

I began curtly: ‘I’ve been lying to you.’

Instead of watching the crowd, he watched me, with no change of expression.

‘I’ve been seriously ill. Or at least they thought I was.’

‘I saw you weren’t up to the mark, Mr Eliot,’ he said.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I want us to understand each other. They thought that I might have a fatal disease. It was a mistake. I’m perfectly well. If you need any confirmation,’ I smiled at him, ‘I can produce evidence. From Sir–’ And I said that I had that morning come from the hospital, I told him the story without any palaver.

He asked: ‘Why didn’t you let any of us know?’

‘That’s a bloody silly question,’ I said, ‘How much change should I have got – if everyone heard I was a bad life?’

For once, his eyes flickered.

‘How much work would you have brought me?’ I asked.

He did not answer.

‘Come to that – how much work did you bring me last term?’

He did not prevaricate. He could have counted briefs which passed through his hands but which he had done nothing to gain. But he said, as brutally as I had spoken ‘Not a guinea’s worth. I thought you were fading out.’

‘I don’t grumble,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the game. I don’t want charity. I don’t need it now. But you ought to be careful not to make a fool of yourself.’

I went on. I was well now, I should be strong by the summer, the doctors had no doubt that I should stand the racket of the Bar. I had come through without my practice suffering much. I had my connexions, Henriques and the rest. It would be easy for me to move to other Chambers. A change from Getliffe, a change from Percy to a clerk who believed in me – I should double my income in a year.

Even at the time, I doubted whether that threat much affected him. But I had already achieved my end. He was a cross-grained man. He despised those who dripped sympathy and who expected a flow of similar honey in return. His native language, though he got no chance to use it, was one of force and violence and temper, and he thought better of me for speaking that morning in the language that he understood. He had never done so before, but he invited me to drink another pint of beer.

‘You needn’t worry, Mr Eliot,’ he said. ‘I don’t make promises, but I believe you’ll be all right.’

He stared at me, and took a long gulp.

‘I should like to wish you’, he said, ‘a happy and prosperous new year.’

It was still the first week in January, and I was walking along Worcester Street on my way to Sheila’s. She had returned the day before, and I was saving up for the luxury of telling her my news. I could have written, but I had saved it up for the glow of that afternoon. I was still light-hearted, light-hearted and lazy with relief. The road glistened in the drizzle, the basement lights were gleaming, here and there along the street one could gaze into lighted rooms – books, a table, a lamp-shade, a piano, a curtained bed. Why did those sights move one so, was it the hint of unknown lives? It was luxurious to see the lighted rooms, walking down the wet street on the way to Sheila.

I had no plan ready-made for that afternoon. I did not intend to propose immediately, now all was well. There was time enough now. Before the month was over I should speak, but it was luxurious to be lazy that day, and my thoughts flowed round her as they had flowed when I first fell in love. It was strange that she should be lodging in this street. She had always felt a nostalgia for the scruffy; perhaps she had liked me more, when we first met, because I was a shabby young man living in a garret.

I thought of other friends, like her comfortably off, who could not accept their lives. The social climate was overawing them. They could not take their good luck in their stride. If one had a talent for non-acceptance, it was a bad generation into which to be born rich. The callous did not mind, nor did the empty, nor did those who were able not to take life too hard; but among my contemporaries I could count half a dozen who were afflicted by the sick conscience of the rich.

Sheila was not made for harmony, but perhaps her mother’s money impeded her search for it. If she had been a man, she might, like Charles March, have insisted on finding a job in which she could feel useful; one of Charles’ reasons for becoming a doctor was to throw away the burden of guilt; she was as proud and active as he, and if she had been a man she too might have found a way to live. If she had been a man, I thought idly and lovingly as I came outside her house, she would have been happier. I looked up at her window. The light shone rosy through the curtains. She was there, alone in her room, and in the swell of love my heart sank and rose.

I ran upstairs, threw my arm round her waist, said that it had been a false alarm and that I should soon be quite recovered. ‘It makes me feel drunk,’ I said, and pressed her to me.

‘You’re certain of it?’ she said, leaning back in the crook of my elbow.

I told her that I was certain.

‘You’re going to become tough again? You’ll be able to go on?’

‘Yes, I shall go on,’

‘I’m glad, my dear. I’m glad for your sake.’ She had slipped from my arms, and was watching me with a strange smile. She added: ‘And for mine too,’

I exclaimed. I was already chilled.

She said: ‘Now I can ask your advice.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m in love. Quite honestly. It’s very surprising. I want you to tell me what to do.’

She had often tortured me with the names of other men. There had been times when her eye was caught, or when she was making the most of a new hope. But she had never spoken with this authority. On the instant, I believed her. I gasped, as though my lungs were tight. I turned away. The reading lamp seemed dim, so dim that the current might be failing. I was suddenly drugged by an overwhelming fatigue; I wanted to go to sleep.

‘I had to tell you,’ she was saying.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You weren’t fit to take it,’ she said.

‘This must be the only time on record’, I said, ‘when you’ve considered me.’

‘I may have deserved that,’ she replied. She added: ‘Believe me. I’m hateful. But this time I tried to think of you. You were going through enough. I couldn’t tell you that I was happy.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Just after you went to France,’

I was stupefied that I had not guessed.

‘You didn’t write to me for weeks,’ I said.

‘That was why. I hoped you’d get well quickly.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m no good at deceit.’

I sat down. For a period that may have been minutes – I had lost all sense of time – I stared into the room. I half knew that she had brought up a chair close to mine. At last I said ‘What do you want me to do?’

Her reply was instantaneous ‘See that I don’t lose him.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said roughly.

‘I want you to,’ she said. ‘You’re wiser than I am. You can tell me how not to frighten him away.’ She added: ‘He’s pretty helpless. I’ve never liked a man who wasn’t. Except you. He can’t cope very well. He’s rather like me. We’ve got a lot in common.’

I had heard other ‘we’s’ from her, taunting my jealousy, but not in such a tone as this. She dwelt on it with a soft and girlish pleasure. I was chained there. I fell again into silence. Then I asked peremptorily who he was.

She was eager to tell me. She spoke of him as Hugh. It was only some days later, when I decided to meet him, that I learned his surname. He was a year or two older than Sheila and me, and so was at that time about twenty-seven. He had no money, she said, though his origins were genteel. Some of his uncles were well off, and he was a clerk at a stockbroker’s, being trained to go into the firm. ‘He hates it,’ she said. ‘He’ll never be any good at it. It’s ridiculous.’ He had no direction or purpose; he did not even know whether he wanted to get married.

‘Why is he the answer?’ I could not keep the question back.

She answered: ‘It’s like finding part of myself.’

She was rapt, she wanted me to rejoice with her. ‘I must show you his photograph,’ she said. ‘I’ve hidden it when you came. Usually it stands–’ She pointed to a shelf at the head of the divan on which she slept. ‘I like to wake up and see it in the morning.’

She was more girlish, more delighted to be girlish, than a softer woman might have been. She went to a cupboard, bent over, and stayed for a second looking at the photograph before she brought it out. Each action and posture was, as I had observed the first time I visited that room, more flowing and relaxed than a year ago. When I first observed that change, I did not guess that she was in love. Her profile was hard and clear, as she bent over the photograph; her lips were parted, as though she wanted to gush without constraint. ‘It’s rather a nice face,’ she said, handing me the picture. It was a weak, and sensitive face. The eyes were large, bewildered, and idealistic. I gave it back without a word. ‘You can see’, she said, ‘that he’s not much good at looking after himself. Much less me. I know it’s asking something, but I want you to help. I’ve never listened to anyone else, but I listen to you. And so will he.’

She tried to make me promise to meet him. I was so much beside myself that I gave an answer and contradicted myself and did not know what I intended. It was so natural to look after her; to shield this vulnerable happiness, to preserve her from danger. At the same time, all my angry heartbreak was pent up. I had not uttered a cry of that destructive rage.

She was satisfied. She felt assured that I should do as she asked. ‘Now what shall I do for you?’ she cried in her rapture. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile half-sarcastic, half-innocent as she brought out her anticlimax. ‘I shall continue your musical education.’ Since my first visit to Worcester Street, she had played records each time I went – to disguise her love. Yet it had been a pleasure to her. She knew I was unmusical, often she had complained that it was a barrier between us, and she liked to see me listening. She could not believe that the sound meant nothing. She had only to explain, and my deafness would fall away.

That afternoon, after her cry ‘What shall I do for you?’, she laid out the records of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Side by side, we sat and listened. Sheila listened, her eyes luminous, transfigured by her happiness. She listened and was in love.

The noise pounded round me. I too was in love.

The choral movement opened. As each theme came again, Sheila whispered to make me recognize it. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said, sweeping her hand down, as the first went out. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said twice more. But at the first sound of the human voice, she sat so still that she might have gone into a trance.

She was in love, and rapt. I sat beside her, possessed by my years of passion and devotion, consumed by tenderness, by desire, and by the mania of revenge, possessed by the years whose torments had retraced themselves to breaking point as she stood that night, oblivious to all but her own joy. She was carried away, into the secret contemplation of her love. I sat beside her, stricken and maddened by mine.

A Single Act

That night, after Sheila told me she was in love, I stayed in the street, my eyes not daring to leave her lighted window. The music had played round me; I had said goodbye; but when I came out into the cold night, I could not go home. Each past storm of jealousy or desire was calm compared to this. The evening when I slipped away from George and stood outside the vicarage, just watching without purpose – that was nothing but a youth’s lament. Now I was driven.

I could find no rest until I saw with my own eyes whether or not another man would call on her that night. No rest from the calculations of jealousy: ‘I shall want some tea,’ she had said, and that light phrase set all my mind to work, as though a great piece of clockwork had been wound up by a turn of the key. When would she make him tea? That night? Next day? No test from the torments, the insane reminders, of each moment when her body had allured me; so that standing in the street, looking at her window, I was maddened by sensual reveries.

It was late. A drizzle was falling, silver and sleety as it passed the street lamps. Time upon time I walked as far up the street as I could go, and still see the window. Through the curtains her light shone – orange among the yellow squares of other windows, the softest, the most luxurious, of all the lights in view. Twice a man came down the pavement, and as he approached her house my heart stopped. He passed by. A desolate prostitute, huddled against the raw night, accosted me. Some of the lights went out, but hers still shone.