Time of Hope (28 page)

‘I can’t do that.’

‘Are you too proud?’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

She took my hand.

‘If I’d made you happier’, she said, ‘and then asked if I could give you a present – would you still be too proud?’

‘Perhaps not,’ I said.

‘Darling,’ she said. It was rare for her to use the word. ‘I can’t be articulate like you when you let yourself go. But if I ask you to let me do it – because of what’s happened between us?’

In a brand new dinner jacket, I arrived with the Knights at the charity ball. It was held in the large hall, close by the park, a few hundred yards away from where Martineau used to live. Perhaps that induced me at supper to tell the story of Martineau, so far as I then knew it; I had seen him leave the town on foot, with a knapsack on his back, only a few days before.

I told the story because someone had to talk. The supper tables were arranged in the corridors all round the main hall, and the meal was served before the dance began. As a party of four, we were not ideally chosen. Sheila was looking tired; she was boldly made up, much to her mother’s indignation, but the powder did not hide the rings under her eyes, and the painted lips were held in her involuntary smile. She was strained in the presence of her parents, and some of her nervousness infected me, the more so as I was still not well. With her usual directness and simplicity, Mrs Knight resented my presence. She produced a list of young men who, in her view, would have been valuable additions – some of whom Sheila had been seeing in the last few months, though she had resisted the temptation to let fall their names. As for Mr Knight, he was miserable to be there at all, and he was not the man to conceal his misery.

He was miserable for several reasons. He refused to dance, and he hated others enjoying fun which he was not going to share. His wife and Sheila were active, strong women, who loved using their muscles (Sheila, once set on a dance floor, forgot she had not wanted to come, and danced for hours); Mr Knight was an excessively lazy man, who preferred sitting down. He also hated to be at any kind of disadvantage. In his own house, backed by everything Mrs Knight could buy for him, he was playing on his home ground. He did not like going out, where people might not recognize him or offer the flattery which sustained him.

I picked up an example right at the beginning of supper. Mrs Knight announced that the bishop had brought a party to the hall. Shouldn’t they call on him during the evening? I could feel that she had not abandoned hope of getting her husband some preferment.

‘Not unless he asks us, darling,’ said Mr Knight faintly.

‘You can’t expect him to remember everyone,’ said Mrs. Knight, with brisk common sense.

‘He ought to have
remembered me
,’ said Mr Knight. ‘He
ought
to have.’

I guessed that conversation had been repeated often. She had always planned for him to go far in the Church; he was far more gifted than many who had climbed to the top. When she married him, she was prepared to find ways of getting all the bishops on the bench to meet him. But he would not do his share. As he grew older, he could not humble himself at all. He had too much arrogance, too much diffidence, to play the world’s game. Later on, I ran across a good many men who had real gifts but who, in the worldly sense, were failures; and in most of them there was a trace of Mr Knight; like him, they were so arrogant and so diffident that they dared not try.

Mr Knight was miserable; Mrs Knight indignant; Sheila strained. We did not talk much for the first half of supper, and then, in desperation, I brought out the story of Martineau.

‘He must be a crank,’ said Mrs Knight as soon as I finished. ‘Well, Mrs Knight,’ I said, ‘no one could call him an ordinary man.’

‘Harry Eden’, she decided, ‘must be glad to see the back of him.’

‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘Mr Eden is devoted to him.’

‘Harry Eden was always a loyal person,’ said Mrs Knight.

Sheila broke in, clearly, as though she were thinking aloud: ‘He’ll enjoy himself!’

‘Who will?’ her mother asked obtusely.

‘Your Martineau.’ Sheila was looking at me. ‘He’ll enjoy every minute of it! It’s not a sacrifice.’

‘Of course’, said Mr Knight, in his most beautifully modulated voice, ‘many religions have sprung up from sources such as this. We must remember that there are hundreds of men like Martineau in every century, Those are the people who start false religions, but I admit that many of them have felt something true.’ Mr Knight was theologically fair-minded; but his nose was out of joint. If anyone was to act as raconteur to that party, he should do so. He proceeded to tell a long story about the Oneida community. He told it with art, far better than I had told mine, and as we chuckled, he became less sulky. I thought (for I was irritated at not being allowed to shine in front of Sheila) that his story had every advantage, but that mine was at any rate first-hand.

After supper I danced with Sheila and Mrs Knight alternately. They had many acquaintances there, who kept coming up to claim Sheila. As I watched her round the hall, my jealous inquisitiveness flew back, like a detective summoned to an unpleasant duty: was this one with whom she had threatened me last year? But, when I danced with her, she did not mention any of her partners. Her father was behaving atrociously, she said with her usual ruthlessness. And she had to talk to all these other people; she wanted to be quiet with me. So, much of the night, we danced in a silence that to me was languorous.

It was far otherwise in my alternate dances. Mrs Knight disapproved of me, but she demanded her exercise, and dancing with her became vigorous and conversational. She took it heartily, for she had a real capacity for pleasure. I was an unsatisfactory young man, but I was better than no one to whirl her round. She got hot and merry, and as we passed her friends on the floor she greeted them in her loud horsy voice. And she surprised me by issuing instructions that I was to take care of myself.

‘You’re not looking so well as you did,’ she said, in a brusque maternal stand-no-nonsense manner.

I explained that I had been working hard.

‘You’re not keeping fit. You’re pale,’ she said. ‘How long is it to your exam?’

I knew that exactly. ‘Ten weeks.’

‘You mustn’t crock up, you know.’

I knew that too. Yet, though I wished she was not Sheila’s mother, I was coming to like her. And, dancing with her at that ball early in 1927, I had a curious thought. George and I and thoughtful persons round us used to predict that our lives were going to see violent changes in the world. At the ball, inside the Knights’ house, those predictions seemed infinitely remote, a bubble no more real than others that George blew. Yet if they came true, if Mrs Knight lost all, lost servants and house and had to work with her hands and cook for her husband, I could imagine her doing it as heartily as she was dancing now. I should not like to be within the range of her indignation, but she would survive.

For one dance, both she and Sheila were taken off by others and I was left at our table with Mr Knight. Out of the corner of his eye, he must have noticed that my own glance was drawn time and again to follow Sheila. He was still bad-tempered at being ignored so much that night, and he did not intend to let me sit and dream. He required me as an audience and I had to listen to the main points of a letter that he thought of writing to
The Times
. Then, half-maliciously, he made me look at a dark-haired girl in a red dress, just dancing by our corner of the hall.

‘I’m not certain of your standards, Eliot,’ he said, ‘but should you say that she was pretty?’

‘Very,’ I said.

‘They live in my parish, but they don’t attend. I’m afraid that she’s broken a good many hearts.’

He was being deliberately oblique, I knew. He did not appear to be watching me, but he was making sure that I concentrated on the girl in the red dress.

‘She ought to get married,’ he said. ‘She ought to get married. It’s bad for anyone to break too many hearts. It shows there’s something’ – he paused – ‘shall I say torn? inside their own.’

He was, of course, talking in code. That was the nearest he would come to mentioning Sheila. But he was so subtle and oblique that I could not be certain what he was telling me. Was he giving me a warning? Was he trying to share a worry, knowing that I loved her, feeling that I too was lost and concerned for what might happen to her? Was he, incredibly, encouraging me? Or was he just being malicious at my expense? I had no idea. In his serious moments, when he gave up acting, I never knew where I was with Mr Knight.

Soon after, Sheila said that she wanted some air. Instead of dancing, we walked outside the hall. There was nowhere to sit out, except in the colonnades which looked over the park. She took my arm, and we stood there. Couples were strolling behind us, though the March night was sharp. Right round the other side of the park, the tram-standards made a necklace of lights (we were looking in the direction that I walked, feet light with hope, the last Christmas Eve but one).

‘Rather pretty,’ said Sheila. Then she asked, unexpectedly: ‘What does Martineau believe?’

I had to collect myself before I replied.

I said: ‘I’m not sure that he knows himself. I think he’d say that the only way to live a Christian life was to live like Christ. But–’

‘He’s doing it because he wants to do it,’ said Sheila. From the lights of the hall behind, I could see her face. She was lined, harassed, concentrated, and rapt. Her beauty was haggard; she was speaking with absolute certainty. ‘All people are selfish, Though they make a better show of it than I do. He’ll go about humbly helping his fellow men because it makes him feel good to do it.’

Looking into the dark stretches of the park, she said: ‘What do you believe?’

I gripped her arm, but she said, in the same tone: ‘I don’t want to hear anything nice. What do you believe?’

I told her – and anything I said seemed flat after the rapt question – that I had no faith in any of the faiths. For me, there was something which took their place; I wanted to find some of the truths about human beings.

‘Yes,’ said Sheila. In a moment, she said: ‘I believe in something.’

‘What?’

She said: ‘I believe in joy.’

We did not speak again before we returned to the Knights’ table. The dance that we had left was not yet ended, and Mrs Knight looked gratified that we had come back so soon. Mr Knight reclined heavily in his chair, spreading himself in the company of his womenfolk. I had just heard an affirmation which sounded in my mind throughout Sheila’s life and after, as clear, as thrilling, as vulnerable, and as full of hope, as when she stared over the park and spoke into the darkness. Yet that evening it vanished as quickly as a childhood dread. Just then it seemed only a remark, past and already half-forgotten, as, tired and subdued, she took her place by her father. Mr Knight’s splendid voice rose, and we all listened to him.

There were nights when it was a pleasure to lie awake. Outside, a train would rattle and roar over the bridge (I remembered, in the Zeppelin raids, my mother saying: ‘The trains are our friends. When you can hear them, you feel that everything is going on all right.’). I had finished another textbook, and lay there, with a triumphant surge of mastery, because I knew it inside out; I would ask myself a question, answer it as though I were already in the examination hall, and then switch on the light to see if I had any detail wrong.

And, night after night, I did not want to sleep until I had re-cherished, like a collector going over his prints, each moment and each word of that absurd scene in the Knights’ drawing-room, with Sheila snuffling her m’s and n’s, and saying ‘I wadt you to cub to the ball.’

As I thought of her so, my prayers were cut in two, and my longings contradicted each other. On the one side, I begged: let me stay here, having known that comical delight, having known loving peace; let me stay cherishing it, for that afternoon was so delicate that it would perish at a touch. On the other, I wanted all, not just the tantalizing promise: I wanted to be sure of her, to fight my way Past the jealousies, to rely on such afternoons for the staple of my life, to risk any kind of pain until I had her for my own.

The first time we met after the ball, neither of us said a word that was not trivial. I was happy; it was an hour in a private world, in which we lived inside a crystal shell, so fragile that either of us could speak and shatter it.

At our next meeting, she did speak. Although she was ‘trying to behave’, she had to let slip, for the first time since our reconciliation, that a new admirer was trying to rush her. After one dinner he was demanding some fixture for each day of the next week.

‘Shall you go?’

‘I shall go once,’ Sheila said.

‘Shall you go more than once?’

‘It depends on how much I like him.’ She was getting restive, and there was a harsh glint in her eyes.

There and then I knew I must settle it. I could not go on in this suspense. Even though, before we parted, Sheila said awkwardly: ‘He’s probably not a very useful young man.’

I must settle it, I thought. I decided how I must talk to her. We had arranged our next assignation in the usual place. I copied her action when she had her cold, and wrote to say that I was laid up. I could borrow some crockery from my landlady – would Sheila come and make some tea for me?

The March afternoon was cloudy; I turned the gas fire full on, and it snored away, brilliant in the dark room. I had tried to work, but gave it up, and was sitting on the bed, listening, for each footstep on the stairs.

At last I heard her. At last, but it was only a minute past the hour. The nerves at my elbows seemed stretched like piano strings. Sheila entered, statuesque in the light from the gas fire.

‘You needn’t have asked me to make tea,’ she began without any preliminary. ‘I should have done it without asking.’

We kissed. I hoped that she did not notice that my hands were shaking. She patted my shoulder.