Time of Hope (39 page)

That was a risk I must take. I might contrive to save myself exhaustion. To some extent, I could pick and choose my cases; I could eliminate the police courts straight away. I should have to alter the régime of my days, and use my energies for nothing but the cardinal hours in court.

Whatever came of it, I must return.

On my last evening the sun was falling across the terrace, shining in the pools left by the day’s rain. The arbutus smelt heavily as my friend and I came to the end of our last walk. ‘We shall meet again,’ she said. ‘If not next year, then some other time.’ Neither of us believed it.

When the car drove through the gates, and I looked back at the sea, I felt the same distress that, years before, overcame me when I left the office for the last time. But on that shore I had been more unhappy than ever in my youth, and so was bound more tightly. More than ever in my youth, I did not know what awaited me at the end of my journey. So, looking back at the sea, I felt a stab of painful yearning, as though all I wanted in the world was to stay there and never be torn away.

My luck in practical affairs was remarkable. Looking back from middle-age, I saw how many chances had gone in my favour; and I felt a kind of vertigo, as though I had climbed along a cliff, and was studying the angle from a safe place. How well should I face it, if required to do the same again?

My luck held that autumn, as, dragging my limbs, I made my way each morning across the Temple gardens. Mist lay on the river, the grass sparkled with dew in the October sunshine. They were mornings that made me catch my breath in exhilaration. I was physically wretched, I was training myself to disguise my weakness, but the sun shone through the fresh mist and I caught my breath. And I got through the days, the weeks, the term, without losing too much credit. I managed to carry off what I had planned by the sea at Mentone; I took defeats, strain, anxiety, and foreboding, but, with extraordinary luck, I managed to carry off enough to save my practice.

I met some discouragement. Each time I saw him, Getliffe made a point of asking with frowning man-to-man concern about my health. ‘I’m very strong, L S,’ he told me, as though it were a consolation. ‘I’ve always been very strong.’

What was more disturbing, I had to persuade Percy that it was sensible to cut myself off from the county court work. It was not sensible, of course. My income was not large enough to bring any such step within the confines of sense. My only chance was to persuade Percy that I was arrogantly sure of success, so sure that I proposed to act as though I were already established, It was bad enough to have to convince him that I had not lost my head; it was worse, because I believed that he suspected the true reason. If so, I knew that I could expect no charity. Percy’s judgement of my future had been – I had long since guessed – professional ability above average, influence nil, health doubtful; as a general prospect, needs watching for years. He would be gratified to have predicted my bodily collapse. It was more important to be right than to be compassionate.

‘If you don’t want them, Mr Eliot,’ said Percy, ‘there are plenty who do. In my opinion, it’s a mistake. That is, if you’re going on at the Bar.’

‘In five years,’ I said, ‘you’ll be able to live on my briefs.’

‘I hope so, sir,’ said Percy.

Going away that afternoon, so tired that I took a taxi home, I knew that I had handled him badly. All through that Michaelmas Term, although briefs came to me from solicitors whose cases I had previously fought, there was not a single one which Percy had foraged for. He had written me off.

Fortunately, there were a number of solicitors who now sent work to me. I received several briefs, and there was only one case that autumn where my physical state humiliated me. That was a disgrace. My stamina failed me on the first morning, I could not concentrate, my memory let me down, I was giddy on my feet; I lost a case that any competent junior should have won. Some days afterwards, a busy-body of an acquaintance told me there was a whisper circulating that Eliot was ill and finished. In my vanity I preferred them to say that than take that performance as my usual form,

But, as I have said, by good luck I wiped out most of that disaster. The whispers became quieter. First I nursed myself through a case of Henriques’, where, though I lost again, I knew I did pretty well. Charles March said it was my best case yet, and Henriques was discreetly satisfied. And then I had two magnificent strokes of fortune. In the same week I received two cases of a similar nature; in each the arguments were intricate and needed much research, and the cases were unlikely to come to court. Nothing could have been better designed for my condition. There was every chance to cover my deficiency. In actual fact, I made some backers through one of those cases; the other was uneventful; each was settled out of court, and I earned nearly two hundred and fifty pounds for the two together. They made the autumn prosperous. They hid my illness, or at least they prevented it becoming public. I thought I had lost little ground so far. It was luck unparalleled.

In November, without giving me any warning, Sheila came to live in London. She had compelled her father, so she wrote, to guarantee her three hundred pounds a year. An aunt had just died and left her some money in trust, and so she was at last independent. She had taken a bed-sitting-room in Worcester Street, off Lupus Street, where I could visit her. It was unexpected and jagged, like so many of her actions – like our last meeting, at Victoria Station on my return from France. The train was hours late; she had sent no word; but there she was, standing patiently outside the barrier.

Fog was whirling round the street lamps on the afternoon that I first went to Worcester Street. The trees of St George’s Square loomed out of the white as the bus passed by. From the pavement, it was hard to make out the number of Sheila’s house. She was living on the first floor: there was a little cardboard slip against her bell – MISS KNIGHT – for all the world like some of my former clients, prostitutes down on their luck, whom for curiosity’s sake I had visited in those decaying streets.

Her room struck warm. It was large, with a substantial mantelpiece and obsolete bell pushers by the side. In the days of the house’s prosperity, this must have been a drawing-room. Now the gas fire burned under the mantelpiece, and, near the opposite wall, an oil stove was chugging away and throwing a lighted pattern on the ceiling.

‘How are you?’ said Sheila. ‘You’re not better yet.’

I had come straight from the courts, and I was exhausted. She put me in a chair with an awkward, comradely kindness, and then opened a cupboard to give me a drink. I had never been in a room of hers before; and I saw that the glasses in the cupboard, the crockery and bottles, were marshalled with geometrical precision, in neat lines and squares. That was true of every piece of furniture; she had only been there three days, but all was tidy, was more than tidy, was so ordered that she became worried if a lamp or book was out of its proper line.

I chaffed her: how had she stood my disarray?

‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘We’re different.’ She seemed content, secretively triumphant, to be looking after me in a room of her own. As she knelt by the glasses and poured the whisky, her movements had lost their stylised grace. She looked more fluent, comfortable, matter-of-fact, and warm. Perhaps I was seeing what I wanted to see. I was too tired to care, too happy to be sitting there, with her waiting upon me.

‘It’s time you got better,’ said Sheila, as I was drinking. ‘I’m waiting for you to get better.’

I took her hand. She held mine, but her eyes were clouded.

‘Never mind,’ I said.

‘I must mind,’ she said sharply.

‘I may be cheating myself,’ I said, ‘but some days I feel stronger.’

‘Tell me when you’re sure.’ There was an impatient tone in her voice, but I was soothed and heartened, and promised her, and, so as not to spoil the peace of the moment, changed the subject.

I reminded her how often she had talked of breaking away from home and ‘doing something’; the times that we had ploughed over it; how I had teased her about the sick conscience of the rich, and how bitterly she had retorted. Like her father, I wanted to keep her as a toy. My attitude to her was Islamic, I had no patience with half her life. Now here she was, broken away from home certainly, but not noticeably listening to her sick conscience. Instead, she was living like a tart in Pimlico.

Sheila grinned. It was rarely that she resented my tongue. She answered good-humouredly: ‘I wish I’d been thrown out at sixteen, though. And had to earn a living. It would have been good for me.’

I told her, as I had often done before, that the concept of life as a moral gymnasium could be overdone.

‘It would have been good for me,’ said Sheila obstinately. ‘And I should have been quite efficient. I mightn’t have had time–’ She broke off. That afternoon, as I lay tired out in my chair (too tired to think of making love – she knew that; did it set her free?), she did not mind so much being absurd, She even showed me her collection of coins. I had heard of it before, but she had shied off when I pressed her. Now she produced it, blushing but at ease. It stood under a large glass case by the window: the coins were beautifully mounted, documented, and indexed; she showed me her scales, callipers, microscope, and weights. The collection was restricted to Venetian gold and silver from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic occupation. Mr Knight, who begrudged her money for most purposes, had been incongruously generous over this one, and she had been able to buy any coin that came into the market. The collection was, she said, getting on towards complete.

When she had mentioned her coins previously, I had found it sinister – to imagine her plunged into such a refuge. But as I studied her catalogue, in the writing that I had so often searched for a word of love, and listened to her explanations, it seemed quite natural. She was so knowledgeable, competent, and curiously professional. She liked teaching me. She was becoming gayer and more intimate. If only her records had arrived, she would have begun educating me in music, as she had long wanted to do. She insisted that she must do it soon. As it was, she said she had better instruct me in the science of numismatics. She drew the curtains and shut out the foggy afternoon. She stood above me, looking into my eyes with a steady gaze, affectionate and troubled; then she said: ‘Now I’ll show you how to measure a coin.’

After that afternoon, I imagined the time when I could tell her that I was well. Would it come? As soon as I came back to London, my doctors had examined me again. They had shaken their heads, The blood count was perceptibly worse than when I went to France. The treatment had not worked, and, apart from advising me to rest, they were at a loss. In the weeks that followed I lost all sense of judgement about my physical state. Sometimes I thought the disease was gaining. There were mornings, as I told Sheila, when I woke and stretched myself and dared to hope. I had given up taking any blood counts on my own. It was best to train myself to wait. With Sheila, with my career, I thought, I had had some practice in waiting. In time I was bound to know whether I should recover. It would take time to see the answer, yes or no.

But others were not so willing to watch me being stoical. I had let the truth slip out, bit by bit, to Charles March as well as to Sheila. Charles was a man whose response to misery or danger or anxiety was very active. He could not tolerate my settling down to endure – before he had dragged me in front of any doctor in London who might be useful. I told him it would waste time and money. Either this was a psychosomatic condition, I said, which no doctor could reach and where my insight was probably better than theirs. If that was the explanation, I should recover. If not, and it was some rare form of pernicious anaemia untouched by the ordinary treatments, I should in due course die. Either way, we should know soon enough. It would only be an irritation and distress to have more doctors handling me and trying to make up their minds.

Charles would not agree. His will was strong, and mine was weakened, after that November afternoon, by Sheila’s words. And also there were times just then when I wanted someone to lean on. So I gave way. Until the end of term I should keep up my bluff; but I was ready to be examined by any of his doctors during the Christmas vacation.

Charles organized it thoroughly. At the time, December 1930, he was, by a slight irony, a very junior medical student, for he had recently renounced the Bar and started what was to be his real career. He had not yet taken his first MB – but his father and uncle were governors of hospitals. It did not take long to present me to a chief physician. I was installed in a ward before Christmas. The hospital had orders to make a job of it: I became acquainted with a whole battery of clinical tests, not only those, such as barium meals, which might be relevant to my disease.

I loathed it all. It was hard to take one’s fate, with someone forcing a test-meal plunger down one’s throat. I could not sleep with others round me. I had lost my resignation. I spent the nights dreading the result.

On the first day of the new year, the chief physician talked to me.

‘You ought to be all right,’ he said. ‘It’s much more likely than not.’

He dropped his eyelids.

‘You’d better try to forget the last few months. Forget about this disease. I’m confident you’ve not got it. Forget what you were told,’ he said. ‘It must have been a shock. It wasn’t a good experience for you.’

‘I shall get over it,’ I said, in tumultuous relief.

‘I’ve known these things leave their mark.’

Having set me at rest, he went over the evidence. Whatever the past, there were now no signs of pernicious anaemia; no achlorhydria; nothing to support the diagnosis. I had had a moderately severe secondary anaemia, which should improve. That was the optimistic view. No one could be certain, but he would lay money on it. He talked to me much as Tom Devitt had once done – with more knowledge and authority but less percipience. Much of the history of my disease was mysterious, he said. I had to learn to look after myself. Eat more. Keep off spirits. Find yourself a good wife.