Time of Hope (35 page)

Charles was working in the Chambers of a relation by marriage, and the case was arranged through other connections of his family. Nothing could be more natural as a start for a favourably born young man. As he told me, I was devoured by envy. Sheer rancorous envy, the envy of the poor for the rich, the unlucky for the lucky, the wallflower for the courted. I tried to rejoice in his luck, and I felt nothing but envy.

I hated feeling so. I had been jealous in love, but this envy was more degrading. In jealousy there was at least the demand for another’s love, the sustenance of passion – while in such envy as I felt for Charles there was nothing but the sick mean stab. I hated that I should be so possessed. But I was hating the human condition. For as I saw more of men in society I thought in the jet-black moments that envy was the most powerful single force in human affairs – that, and the obstinate desire of the flesh to persist. Given just those two components to build with, one could construct too much of the human scene.

I tried to make conscious amends. I offered to help him on the brief; the case was a breach of contract, and I knew the subject well. Charles let me help, and I did a good share of the work. He was himself awkward and conscience-stricken. Once, as we were studying the case, he said ‘I’m just realizing how true it is – that it’s not so easy to forgive someone, when you’re taking a monstrously unfair advantage over him.’

The case was down to be heard in January. I sat by the side of Charles’ father and did not miss a word. The judge had only recently gone to the bench, and was very alert and sharp-witted, sitting alone against the red upholstery of the Lord Chief Justice’s court. Mr March and I placed ourselves for a day and a half near the door, so as not to catch Charles’ eye. Charles’ loud voice resounded in the narrow room; his face looked thinner under his new, immaculate wig. The case was a hopeless one from the start. Yet I thought that he was doing well. He impressed all in court by his cross-examination of an expert witness. In the end he lost the case, but the judge went out of his way to pay a compliment: the losing side might, the judge hoped, take consolation from the fact that their case could not have been more lucidly presented.

It was a handsome compliment. It should have been mine, I felt again. Men stood around Charles, congratulating him, taking his luck for granted. I went to join them, to add my own congratulations. Partly I meant them, partly I was pleased – but I would not have dared to look deep into my heart.

I went back to Chambers and told Getliffe the result. It happened that his half-brother, Francis, had been a contemporary and friend of Charles’ at Cambridge. Getliffe scarcely knew Charles, but he had a healthy respect for the powerful, and he assured me earnestly ‘Mark my words, Eliot, that young friend of ours will go a long way.’

‘Of course he will.’

‘Mind you,’ said Getliffe, ‘he’s got some pull. He is old Philip March’s nephew, isn’t he? It helps in our game, Eliot, one can’t pretend it doesn’t help.’

Getliffe gazed at me, man to man.

‘Don’t you wish you were in that racket, Eliot?’

I explained, clearly and with some force, how the brief had arrived at Charles. As a pupil, he had not done much work for his master, Albert Hart, who stood to Charles as Getliffe did to me; but Hart had used much contrivance to divert this brief to Charles.

‘I’ve been thinking’, said Getliffe, his mood changing like lightning, ‘that you ought to do some shooting yourself before very long. Would you like to, L S?’

‘Wouldn’t you in my place? Wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, one’s roping in quite a bit of paper nowadays. I must look through them and see if there’s one you could tackle. I should advise you not to start if you can help it with anything too ambitious. If you drop too big a brick, it means there’s one firm of solicitors who won’t leave their cards on you again.’

Then he looked at his most worried, and his voice took on a strident edge.

‘I must see if I can find you a snippet for yourself one of these days. The trouble is, one owes a duty to one’s clients. One can’t forget that, much as one would like to.’

He pointed his pipe at me.

‘You see my point, Eliot,’ he said defiantly. ‘One would like to distribute one’s briefs to one’s young friends. Why shouldn’t one? What’s the use of money if one never has time to enjoy it? I’d like to give you a share of my work tomorrow. But one can’t help feeling a responsibility to one’s clients. One can’t help one’s conscience.’

Soon after Charles’ case, the temperature stayed below freezing point for days on end. For the first time since I went to London, I stayed away from Chambers. There was nothing to force me there. During two whole days I only went out into the iron frost for my evening meal, and came back to lie, as I had done all the afternoon, on my sofa in front of the fire.

The cold was at its most intense when Sheila visited me. It was nine o’clock on a bitter February night. She came and sat on the hearth rug, close to the fire; I lay still on the sofa.

We were quiet. For a moment there was noise, as she rattled the shovel in the coal scuttle. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll do it,’ she said, and knelt, shovelling the coals. Then she stared at the fire again, the darkened fire, cherry-red between the bars, with spurts of gas from the new coal.

We were quiet in the room, and outside the street was silent in the extreme cold.

I watched. She was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, her back straight; I could see her face in profile, softer than when she met me with her full gaze. The curve of her cheek was smooth and young, and a smile pulled on the edge of her mouth.

The fire was burning through, tinting her skin. She took the poker, stoked through the bars, then left it there. She studied the cave that formed as the poker began to glow.

‘Queer,’ she said.

The cave enlarged, radiant, like a landscape on the sun.

‘Oh, handsome,’ she said.

She was sitting upright. I saw the swell of her breast, I saw only that.

I gripped her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed me back. For a moment we pressed together; then, as I became more violent, she struggled and shrank away.

In the firelight she stared up at me.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she cried. ‘No.’

I said: ‘I want you.’

I seized her, forced her towards me, forced my lips upon her. She fought. She was strong, but I was possessed. ‘I can’t,’ she cried. I tore her dress at the neck. ‘I can’t,’ she cried, and burst into a scream of tears.

That sound reached me at last. Appalled, I let her go. She threw herself face downwards on the rug and sobbed and then became silent.

We were quiet in the room again. She sat up and looked at me. Her brow was lined. It was a long time before she spoke.

‘Am I absolutely frigid?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘Shall I always be?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. No.’

‘I’m afraid of it. You know that.’

Then suddenly she rose to her feet.

‘Take me for a walk,’ she said. ‘It will do me good.’

I said that it was intolerably cold. I did not want to walk: I had injured my heel that morning.

‘Please take me,’ she said. And then I could not refuse.

Before we went out she asked for a safety pin to hold her dress together. She smiled, quite placidly, as she asked, and as she inspected a bruise on her arm.

‘You have strong hands,’ she said.

Outside my room the cold made us catch our breath. On the stairs, where usually there wafted rich waves of perfume from the barber’s shop, all scent seemed frozen out. In the streets the lights sparkled diamond-sharp.

We walked apart, down the back streets, along Tottenham Court Road. My heel was painful, and on that foot I only trod upon the sole. She was not looking at me, she was staring in front of her, but on the resonant pavement she heard me limping.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and took my arm.

In snatches she began to talk. She was a little released because I had tried to ravish her, She could not talk consecutively – so much of her life was locked within her; especially she could not bring out the secret dread and daydream in which she was obsessed by physical love. Yet, after her horror by the fireside, she was impelled to speak, flash out some fragment from her past, in the trust that I would understand. How she had, more ignorant than most girls, wondered about the act of love. How she dreaded it. There was nothing startling in what she said. But, for her, it was a secret she could only let out in a flash of words, then silence, then another flash. For what to another woman would have been matter-of-fact, for her was becoming an obsession, so that often, in her solitary thoughts, she believed that she was incapable of taking a man’s love.

Trafalgar Square was almost empty to the bitter night, as she and I walked across arm in arm.

I did not know enough of the region where flesh and spirit touch. I did not know enough of the aberrations of the flesh, nor how, the more so because they are ridiculous except to the sufferer, they can corrode a life. If I had been older, I could perhaps have soothed her just a little. If I had been older and not loved her; for all my thoughts of love, all my sensual hopes and images of desire, belonged to her alone. My libido could find no other home; I had got myself seduced by a young married woman, but it had not deflected my imagination an inch from the girl walking at my side, had not diluted by a drop that total of desire, erotic and amorous, playful and passionate, which she alone invoked. Hers was the only body I wanted beside me at night. And so I was the wrong man to listen to her. If I had been twice my age, and not loved her, I could have told her of other lives like her own; I should have been both coarser and tenderer and I should have told her that, at worst, it is wonderful how people can come to terms and make friends of the flesh. But I was not yet twenty-three, I loved her to madness, I was defeated and hungry with longing.

So she walked, silent again, down Whitehall and I limped beside her. Yet it seemed that she was soothed. It was strange after that night, but she held my hand. Somehow we were together, and she did not want to part. We stood on Westminster Bridge, gazing at the black water; it was black and oily, except at the banks, where slivers of ice split and danced in the light.

‘Too cold to jump,’ she said. She was laughing. Big Ben struck twelve.

‘How’s the foot?’ she said. ‘Strong enough to walk home?’

I could scarcely put it to the ground, but I would have walked with her all night. She shook her head. ‘No. I’m going to buy us a taxi.’

She came back to my room, where the fire was nearly out. She built it up again, and made tea. I lay on the sofa, and she sat on the hearthrug, just as we had done two hours before, and between us there was a kind of peace.

In the early summer of 1929 I had my first great stroke of luck. Charles March intervened on my behalf. He was a proud man; for himself he could not have done what he did for me. No man was more sensitive to affronts, but for me he risked them. He was importunate with some of his connexions. I was invited to a garden party and scrutinized by men anxious to oblige Sir Philip March’s nephew. I was asked to dinner, and met Henriques, one of the most prosperous of Jewish solicitors. Charles sat by as impresario, anxious to show me at my best. As it happened, I was less constrained than he. The Harts and Henriques were shrewd, guarded, professional men, but I was soon at my ease, as I had been with Eden. I had everything in my favour; they wished to please Charles, and I had only to pass muster.

In June the first case arrived. It lay on my table, in the shadow. Outside the window the gardens were brilliant in the sunlight, and a whirr came from a lawnmower cutting grass down below. I was so joyful that for a second I left the papers there, in the shadow. Then it all seemed a matter of everyday, something to act upon, no longer a novelty. The brief came from Henriques, bore the figures 20 + 1. The case was a libel action brought by a man called Chapman. It looked at a first reading straightforward and easy to win.

But there was little time to prepare. It was down for hearing in three days’ time. Percy explained that the man to whom the case had first gone was taken suddenly ill; and Henriques had remembered me. It got him out of a difficulty, and did me a good turn, and after all I was certain to have three days completely free.

I was sent a few notes from the barrister who had thrown up the brief, and worked night and day. My four or five hours’ sleep was broken, as I woke up with a question on my mind. I switched on the light, read through a page, made a jotting, just as I used to when preparing for an examination. I was strung-up, light-headed as well as lucid, and excessively cheerful.

Henriques behaved with a consideration that he did not parade, though it came from a middle-aged and extremely rich solicitor to a young and penniless member of the Bar. He called for a conference in person, instead of sending one of his staff; he acted as though this were a weighty brief being studied by the most eminent of silks. Getliffe was so much impressed by Henriques’ attention that he found it necessary to take a hand himself, and with overflowing cordiality pressed me to use his room for the conference.

Henriques made it plain that we were expected to win. Unless I were hopelessly incompetent, I knew that we must. The knowledge made me more nervous: when I got on my feet in court, the judge’s face was a blur, so were the jurors’; I was uncertain of my voice. But, as though a record was playing, my arguments came out. Soon the judge’s face came clear through the haze, bland, cleft-chinned. I saw a juror, freckled, attentive, frowning. I made a faint joke. I was beginning to enjoy myself.

Our witnesses did all I wanted of them. I had one main fact to prove: that the defendant knew Chapman well, not merely as an acquaintance. As I finished with our last witness, I thought, though still anxious, still touching wood, that our central point was unshakable. The defence’s only hope was to smear it over and suggest a coincidence. Actually my opponent tried that tack, but so tangled himself that he never made it clear. He seemed to have given up hope before the case began, and his speech was muddled and ill-arranged. He was a man of Allen’s standing, with more force and a larger practice, but nothing like so clever. He only called three witnesses, and by the time two had been heard I was aglow. It was as good as over.