Time of Hope (24 page)

In the village, I drew up my coat collar. I could not bear the risk of being recognized, if one of the family happened to be out that night. I kept in the shadow, away from the lights of the cottage windows. From the bar parlour came loud and raucous singing. I went past the lych-gate: the spire was dark against the stars. I could see the serene lights of the vicarage. I stopped before the drive, huddled myself against a tree, hidden in case anyone should drive out: there I stood, without moving, without any thought or plan. The drawing room windows were lit up, and so was one on the next floor. I did not even know her room. Was that her room? – the real room, instead of that which, in the first rapture, I had pictured to myself. Was she there, away from anyone who pried, away from anyone who troubled her? Was she there at that moment, writing to me?

No shadow crossed the window. I did not feel the cold. I could not have said how many minutes passed, before I went back again, keeping to the dark side, down the village street.

Back in my room, I slept through broken nights and worked and gazed over the roofs, and all my longings had become one longing – just to be in touch again. The shock of Christmas Eve had been softened by now, and the pain dulled: pride alone was not much of a restraint to keep my hand from the pen, from the comfort of writing Dearest Sheila. Yet I did not write.

Monday went by, after the weekend when I stood outside her house. Tuesday. Wednesday. I longed that we could have some friend in common, so that I could hear of her and drop a remark, as though casually, that I was waiting. A friend could help us both, I thought, could put in a word for me. Apart from our meetings – I was glad to think so, for it shifted the blame outside ourselves, gave me something which could be altered and so a scrap of hope – we had none of the reminders of each other, the everyday gossip, of people who lived in the same circle. My friends inhabited a different world: so far as they knew her, they hated her; while hers I did not know at all.

I was impelled to discover what I could about Tom Devitt. I dug my nails into the flesh, and willed that I must put him out of my mind, together with the scene at the Edens’ – together with Sheila and what I felt for her. On the Monday after I returned from the farm, however, I found myself making an excuse to go to the reference library. There was some point not covered by my textbook. In the library I looked it up, but I could safely have left it; it was of no significance at all, and for such a point I should never have troubled to come. I browsed aimlessly by the shelves which contained
Who’s Who
, Whitaker, Crockford (where I had already long since looked up the Reverend Laurence Knight), and the rest. Almost without looking, I was puffing out the
Medical Directory
.
Devitt A T N
; the letters seemed embossed. It did not say when he was born, but he had been a medical student at Leeds and qualified in 1914 (when she and I were nine years old, I thought with envy). In the war, he had been in the RAMC, and had been given a Military Cross (again I was stabbed with envy). Then he had held various jobs in hospitals: in 1924 he had become registrar at the infirmary; I did not know then what the hospital jobs meant, nor the title registrar. I should have liked to know how good a career it had been, and what his future was.

The Thursday of that week was a bright cold sunny day of early January. In the afternoon I was working in my overcoat, with a blanket round my legs. When I looked up from my notebook I could see, for the table stood close to the window, the pale sunlight silvering the tiles.

Someone was climbing up the attic stairs. There was a sharp knock, and my door was thrown open. Sheila came into the room. With one hand she shut the door behind her, but she was looking at me with a gaze expressionless and fixed. She took two steps into the room, then stopped quite still. Her face was pale, hard, without a smile. Her arms were at her sides. I had jumped up, forgetting everything but that she was here, my arms open for her; but when she stayed still, so did I, frozen.

‘I’ve come to see you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t seen you since that night. You’re thinking about that night.’ Her voice was louder than usual.

‘I’m bound to think of it.’

‘Listen to this: I did it on purpose.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because you made me angry.’ Her eyes were steady, hypnotic in their glitter. ‘I’ve not come to tell you that I’m sorry.’

‘You ought to be,’ I said.

‘I’m not sorry.’ Her voice had risen. ‘I’m glad I did it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said in anger.

‘I tell you, I’m glad I did it.’

We were standing a yard apart. Her arms were still at her sides, and she had not moved. She said ‘You can hit me across the face.’

I looked at her, and her eyes flickered.

‘You should,’ she said.

As I looked at her, in the bright light from the window behind my back, I saw the whites of her eyes turn bloodshot. Then tears formed, and slowly trickled down her cheeks. She did not raise a hand to touch them. As she cried, dreadfully still, the hard fierce poise of her face was dissolved away, and her beauty, and everything I recognized.

I took her by the shoulders, and led her, very gently, to sit on the bed. She came without resistance, as though she were a robot. I kissed her on the lips, told her for the first time in words that I loved her, and wiped away the tears.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you,’ cried Sheila, in a tone that tore my heart open for myself and her. She kissed me with a sudden desperate energy, with her mouth forced on to mine; her arms were convulsively tight; then she let go, pressed her face into the counterpane, and began to cry again. But this time she cried with her shoulders heaving, with relief; I sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand, waiting till she was exhausted; and in those moments I was possessed by the certainty that no love of innocence, no love in which she had been only the idol of my imagination, could reach as deep as that which I now knew.

For now I had seen something frightening, and I loved her, seeing something of what she was. I felt for her a curious detached pity in the midst of the surge of love – and I realized that it was the first ignorant forerunner of pity that I had felt for her in her mother’s drawing-room. I felt a sense of appalling danger for her, and, yes, for me: of a life so splintered and remote that I might never reach it; of cruelty and suffering that I could not soften. Yet I had never felt so transcendentally free. Holding her hand as she cried, I loved her, I believed that she in part loved me, and that we should be happy.

She raised her head, sniffed, blew her nose, and smiled. We kissed again. She said ‘Turn your head. I want to see you.’

She smiled, half-sarcastically, half-tearfully, as she inspected me. She said ‘You look rather sweet with lipstick on.’

I told her that her face, foreshortened as I saw it when I kissed her, was different from the face that others saw: its proportions quite changed, its classical lines destroyed, much more squashed, imperfect, and human.

I asked her again about Christmas Eve.

‘Why did you do it?’

She said ‘I’m hateful. I thought you were too possessive.’

‘Possessive?’ I cried.

‘You wanted me too much,’ said Sheila.

I inquired about Tom. We were sitting side by side, with arms round each other. In the same heartbeat I was jealous and reassured.

‘Do you love him?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sheila. She exclaimed in a high voice: ‘I wish I did. He’s a good man. He’s too good for me He’s a better man than you are.’

‘He loves you,’ I said.

‘I think he wants to marry me,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I don’t love him.’ Then she said: ‘Sometimes I think I shall never love anyone.’

She pulled down my face and kissed me.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you. Get me out of this. I trust you to get me out of this.’

I heard her say once more: ‘I don’t love you, but I trust you.’

I told her that I loved her, the words set free and pouring over: I was forced to speak, able to speak, deliriously happy to speak, as I had never yet spoken to a human being. ‘Get me out of this’ – that cry turned the key in the lock. I did not know what she meant, and yet it lured me on. I was utterly released, there was no pride, no reserve left, as there was when my mother, when Marion, invaded me with love. Seeing her at last as a person, not just an image in a dream, I threw aside my own burden of self. I told her, the words came bursting out, of every feeling that had possessed me since we first met. In this other nature, remote from anything I knew, I could abandon all, except my passion for her. In her arms, hearing that mysterious and remote cry, I lost myself.

The First Surrender

I had thought, when Marion took me shopping in London and talked of her complexion, of how the same words spoken by Sheila would have taken their special place, would have been touched by the enchantment of strangeness: so that I should remember them, as I remembered everything about her, as though they were illuminated. For everything she did, when I was first in love, was separated from all else that I heard or saw or touched; the magic was there, and the magic laid an aura round her; she might have been a creature from another species. For me, that was the overmastering transformation of romantic love. And in part it stayed so – until in middle age, a generation after I first met her, years after she was dead, there were still moments when she possessed my mind, different from all others.

It stayed so, after that January afternoon in my attic. There were nights when we had walked hand in hand through the bitter deserted streets, and I went back alone, rehearing the words spoken half an hour before, but hearing them as though they were magic words. The slightest touch – not a kiss, but the tap of her fingers on my pocket, asking for matches to light a cigarette – I could feel as though there had never been any other hands.

Yet that January afternoon had added much. That I knew even as she stood there, her face dissolved by tears. I could no longer shape her according to my own image of desire. I was forced to try to know her now. She was no longer just my beloved, she was a separate person whose life had crashed head-on into mine. And I was forced to feel for her something quite separate from love, a strange pity, affection, compassion, inexplicable to me then as it was at the first intimation in her mother’s drawing-room.

I began to learn the depth and acuteness of her self-consciousness. She could not believe that I was not tormented likewise. She wondered at it. Whereas she – she smiled sarcastically and harshly, and said: ‘It would be hard to be more so. You can’t deny it. You can’t pretend I’m not.’

She was angry about it. She blamed her parents. Once she said, not angrily, but as a matter of fact: ‘They’ve destroyed my self-confidence for ever.’ She wanted ease at all costs, and used all her will to get it. If I could give her ease, she never thought twice about visiting me in my room. People might think she was my mistress; she knew now that I hungered for her; her parents would stop her if they could; she dismissed each of those thoughts with contempt, when the mood was on her and she felt that I alone could soothe her. Nothing else mattered, when her will was set.

I knew something else, something so difficult for a lover to accept that I could not face it steadily. Yet I knew that she was going round like a sleepwalker. She was looking for someone with whom to fall in love.

I knew that she was desperately anxious, so anxious that the lines deepened and the skin darkened beneath her eyes, that she would never manage it. She did not love me, but I gave her a kind of hope, an illusory warmth, as though through me she might break out into release – either with me or another, for as to that, in her ruthlessness, innocence, and cruelty, she would not give a second’s thought.

Such was the little power I had over her.

She was afraid that she would never love a man as I loved her. It was from that root that came her acts of Christmas Eve, her deliberate cruelty.

For she was cruel, not only through indifference, but also as though in being cruel she could find release. In such a scene as that on Christmas Eve, she could bring herself to the emotional temperature in which most of us naturally lived.

It was hard to take, at that age. The more so, as she played on a nerve of cruelty within myself – which I had long known, which except with her I could forget. Once or twice she provoked my temper, which nowadays I had as a rule under control. She made me quarrel: quarrels were an excitement to her, a time in which to immerse herself, to swear like a fishwife; to me, except in the height of rage, they were – because I had so little power over her – like death.

It was harder for me, because now I longed for her completely. The time was past when I could be satisfied, thinking of her alone in her room; each scrap of understanding, each wave either of compassion or anger, and the more I wanted her. On that January afternoon, when I had the first sight of her as a living creature, driven by her nature, I felt not only the birth of affection, as something distinct from love – but also I was trembling with desire. And that was the first of many occasions when she felt my hand shake, when she felt in me a passion which left her unmoved, which made her uneasy and cruel. For now I wanted her in the flesh. Although everything I knew made nonsense of the thought, I wanted her as my wife.

I had not enough confidence to tell her so. I had always been afraid that I had no charm for her. Sometimes, now that I wanted her so much, I hoped I had a little; sometimes, I thought, none at all. Occasionally she was warm and active and laughing in my arms; then, at our next meeting, irritated by my need for her, she would smoke cigarette after cigarette in an endless chain so as to give me no excuse to kiss her. I could not face the cold truth she might tell me if I took the cigarette away.