Time of Hope (42 page)

He should be here in ten minutes. I was feeling exalted, braced, active with physical well-being; there was a tremor in my hands.

Hugh was a quarter of an hour late. I was standing up as he came in. He gave his bright, flickering smile. I said that it was a nasty night, and asked if he were soaked. He replied that he had found a taxi, but that his trousers were damp below the knees. Could he dry them by the fire? He sat in a chair with his feet in the fireplace. He remarked, sulkily, that he had to take care of his chest.

I invited him to have a drink. First he said no, then he changed his mind, then he stopped me and asked for a very small one. He sat there with glass in hand while I stood on the other side of the hearth. Steam was rising from his trousers, and he pushed his feet nearer to the grate.

‘I’m sorry to have brought you out on a night like this,’ I said.

‘Oh well, I’m here.’ His manner, when he was not defending himself, was easy and gentle.

‘If you had to turn out tonight,’ I said, ‘it’s a pity that I’ve got to tell you unpleasant things.’

He was looking at me, alert for the next words. His face was open.

I said casually: ‘I wonder if you’d rather we went out and ate first. If so, I won’t begin talking seriously until we come back. I must have you alone for what I’ve got to say. I don’t know what the weather’s like now.’

I left the fireplace, went to the window, and lifted the bottom of the blind. The rain was tapping steadily. Now that our eyes were not meeting, he raised his voice sharply ‘It can’t possibly take long, can it? I haven’t the faintest idea what it’s all about–’

I turned back.

‘You’d rather I spoke now?’ I said,

‘I suppose so.’

I sat down opposite to him. The steam was still wafted by the draught, and there was a smell of moist clothes. His eyes flickered away, and then were drawn back. He did not know what to expect.

‘Sheila wants to marry you,’ I said. ‘She wants to marry you more than you want to marry her.’

His eyelids blinked. He looked half-surprised that I should begin so.

‘Perhaps that’s true,’ he said.

‘You’re quite undecided,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

‘You’re absolutely undecided,’ I said. ‘You can’t make up your mind. It’s very natural that you shouldn’t be able to.’

‘I shall make it up.’

‘You’re not happy about it. You’ve got a feeling that there’s something wrong. That’s why you’re so undecided.’

‘How do you know that I feel there’s something wrong?’

‘By the same instinct that is warning you,’ I said. ‘You feel that there are reasons why you shouldn’t marry her. You can’t place them, but you feel that they exist.’

‘Well?’

‘If you knew her better’, I said, ‘you would know what those reasons are.’

He was leaning back in the chair with his shoulders huddled.

‘Of course, you’re not unprejudiced,’ he said.

‘I’m not unprejudiced,’ I said. ‘But I’m speaking the truth, and you believe that I’m speaking the truth.’

‘I’m very fond of her,’ he said. ‘I don’t care what you tell me. I shall make up my mind for myself.’

I waited, I let his eyes dart towards me, before I spoke again.

‘Have you any idea’, I said, ‘what marriage with her would mean?’

‘Of course I’ve an idea.’

‘Let me tell you. She has little physical love for you – or any man.’

‘More for me than for anyone.’ He had a moment of certainty.

I said: ‘You’ve made love to other women. What do you think of her?’

He did not reply. I repeated the question. He was more obstinate than I had counted on – but I was full of the joy of power, of revenge, of the joy that mine was the cruel will. Power over him, that was nothing, except to get my way. He was an instrument, and nothing else. In those words I took revenge for the humiliation of years, for the love of which I had been deprived. It was she to whom I spoke.

I said: ‘She has no other love to give.’

‘If I feel like marrying her,’ he said, ‘I shall.’

‘In that case,’ I said, and now I knew the extreme of effort, the extreme of release, ‘you’ll be marrying an abnormal woman.’

He misunderstood me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean that. I mean that she is hopelessly unstable. And she’ll never be anything else.’

I could feel his hate. He hated me, he hated the force and violence in my voice. He longed to escape, and yet he was fascinated.

‘But you’d take her on,’ he said. ‘If only she’d have you. You can’t deny it, can you?’

‘It is true,’ I said. ‘But I love her, which is the bitterest fate in my life. You don’t love her, and you know it. I couldn’t help myself, and you can. And if I married her, I should do it with my eyes open. I should marry her, but I should know that she was a pathological case.’

He avoided my gaze.

‘You’ve got to know that too,’ I said.

‘Are you saying that she will go mad?’

‘Do you know’, I said, ‘when madness begins or ends?’ I went on: ‘If you ask me whether she’ll finish in an asylum, I should say no. But if you ask me what it would be like to go home to her after you were married, I tell you this: you would never know what you would find.’

I asked him if he had ever heard the word schizoid. I asked if he had noticed anything unusual about her actions. I told him stories of her. All the time my exultation was mounting higher still; from his whole bearing, I was certain that I had not misjudged him. He would never marry her, He wanted to escape, as soon as he decently could, from a storm of alien violence. He was out of his depth with both her and me. His feeling for her had always been mild; his desire to marry her not much more than a fancy; now I had destroyed it. He hated me, but I had destroyed it.

I despised him, in the midst of passionate triumph, in the midst of my mastery over her, for not loving her more. At that moment I felt nothing but contempt for him. I was on her side as I watched him begin to extricate himself.

‘I shall have to think it over,’ he said. ‘I suppose that it’s time I made up my mind.’

He knew that his decision was already taken. He knew that it was surrender. He knew that he would slip from her, and that I was certain of it.

I demanded that, as soon as he told her, he should tell me too.

‘It’s only between her and me,’ he said with an effort of defiance.

‘I must know.’

He hated me, but for the last time he gave way.

Right at the end, he asserted himself. He would not come with me to dinner, but went off on his own.

The next morning I went into court to hear a judgement. It was in one of the London police courts; the case was a prosecution for assault which I had won the week before; the defendant had been remanded for a medical report. He had been pronounced sane, and now the stipendiary sentenced him. There was a shadow of blackmail in the case, and the magistrate was stern. ‘It passes my comprehension how anyone can sink to such behaviour. No words are too strong to express the detestation which we all feel for such men as you–’

It had often seemed to me strange that men should be so brazen with their moral indignation. Were they so utterly cut off from their own experience that they could utter these loud, resounding, moral brays and not be forced to look within? What were their own lives like, that they could denounce so enthusiastically? If baboons learned to talk, the first words they spoke would be stiff with moral indignation. I thought it again, without remorse, as I sat in court that Thursday morning.

Without either remorse or regret, though fourteen hours had passed. I was still borne up by my excitement, I was waiting to hear from Hugh, but I had no doubt of the answer. Just then, I had one anxiety about my action, and only one: would Sheila learn of it? If so, should I have lost her for good? How could I get her back?

Hugh called on me early the following Sunday, while I was at my breakfast.

‘I said that I’d tell you, didn’t I?’ he said, in a tone weary and unforgiving. He would not sit down. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I’ve written to tell her that I’m walking out.’

‘What have you said?’

‘Oh, the usual things. We shouldn’t get on for long, and it would be mostly my fault. What else could I say?’

‘Have you seen her’, I asked, ‘since we talked?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did she guess what was coming?’

‘I didn’t tell her.’ Then he said, with a flash of shrewdness: ‘You needn’t worry. I haven’t mentioned you. But you’ve given me some advice, and I’m going to do the same to you. You’d better leave her alone for a few months. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.’

Within two days, I was telephoning her. At first, when I got no answer but the ringing tone, I thought nothing of it. She must be out for the evening. But when I had put through call after call, late into the night, I became alarmed. I had to imagine the bell ringing on and on in her empty room. I tried again the next morning as soon as I woke, and went straight round to Worcester Street. Sheila’s landlady opened the door to me in the misty morning twilight. Miss Knight had gone away the day before. She hadn’t said where she was going, or left an address. She might come back or she might not, but she had paid three months’ rent in advance (my heart leapt and steadied with relief).

I asked if I might glance at Sheila’s room. There was a book I had lent her, I went on persuading. The landlady knew me, and had a soft spot for Sheila, like everyone who waited on her; so I was allowed to walk round the room, while the landlady stood at the door, and the smell of frying bacon came blowing up the stairs. The room looked high in the cold light. The coins had gone, the records, her favourite books.

I wrote to her, and sent the letter to the vicarage address. I heard nothing, and within a week wrote again. Then I made inquiries through friends in the town – not George Passant and the group, but others who might have contact with the Knights. Soon one of them, a girl called Rosalind, sent me some news. Sheila was actually living at home. She was never seen outside the house. No one had spoken to her. She would not answer the telephone. No one knew how she was.

I could see no way to reach her. That weighed upon me, it was to that thought that I woke in the night, not to the reproach that this had happened through my action.

Yet I sometimes faced what I had done. Perhaps sometimes I exaggerated it. Many years later I could at last ask fairly: would he really have transformed her life? How much difference had my action made? Perhaps I wanted to believe that I had done the maximum of harm. It took away some of the reproach of staying supine for so long.

Often I remembered that evening with remorse. Perhaps, as I say, I cherished it. But at other times I remembered it with an utterly different, and very curious, feeling. With a feeling of innocence, puzzled and incredulous.

I had noticed this in others who performed an action which brought evil consequences on others and themselves. But I had to undergo it myself before I understood. The memory came back with the innocence of fact…an act of the flesh, bare limbs on a bed…a few words on a sheet of paper…was it possible that such things could shake a life? So it was with me. Sometimes I remembered that evening, not with remorse, but just as words across the fireplace, steam rising from the other man’s trousers, some words spoken as I might have spoken them on any evening. All past and gone. How could such facts hag-ride me now, or hold out threats for the years to come?

The summer began, and quite irrelevantly, I had another stroke of practical luck. Getliffe at last took silk. Inevitably, much of his practice must come to me.

For years he had bombarded us with the arguments for and against. He had threatened us with his own uncertainties; he had taken advice from his most junior pupil as well as his eminent friends at the Bar. He had delayed, raised false hopes, changed his mind, retracted. I had come to think that he would never do it – certainly not that summer, 1931, with a financial crisis upon us and the wise men prophesying that legal work would shrink by half.

He told me on an evening in June. I was alone in Chambers, working late; he had spent all the day since lunchtime going from one acquaintance to another. He called me into his room.

It was a thundery overcast evening, the sky black beyond the river, with one long swathe of orange where the clouds had parted. Getliffe sat magisterially at his desk. In the dark room his papers shone white under the lamp. He was wearing a raincoat, the collar half-turned up. His face was serious and also a little rebellious.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve torn it now. I’m taking the plunge. If –– is going to be one of His Majesty’s counsel, I might as well follow suit. One has to think of one’s duty.’

‘Is it definite?’ I said.

‘I never bore my friends with my intentions’, Getliffe reproved me, ‘until they’re cut and dried.’

Getliffe gave me his fixed man-to-man stare.

‘Well, there’s the end of a promising junior,’ he said. ‘Now I start again. It will ruin me, of course. I hope you’ll remember that I expect to be ruined.’

‘In three years’, I said, ‘you’ll be making twice what you do now.’

He smiled.

‘You know, L S, you’re rather a good sort.’ Then his tone grew threatening again. ‘It’s a big risk I’m taking. It’s the biggest risk I’ve ever had to take.’

He enjoyed his ominous air; he indulged himself in his pictures of sacrifice and his probable disaster. Yet he was not much exaggerating the risk. At that moment, it was a brave step. I was astonished that he should do it. I admired him, half-annoyed with myself for feeling so. In that last year as a junior his income was not less than five thousand pounds. Even if the times were prosperous, his first years as a silk were bound to mean a drop. In 1931, with the depression spreading, he would be fortunate if he made two thousand pounds: he might not climb to his old level for years, perhaps not ever.

It could have deterred many men not overfond of money. Whereas Getliffe was so mean that, having screwed himself to the point of taking one to lunch, he would arrive late so that he need not buy a drink beforehand. It must have been an agony for him to face the loss. He can only have endured it because of a force that I was loath to give him credit for – his delight in his profession, his love of the legal honours not only for their cash value but for themselves. If ever the chance came, I ought to have realized, he would renounce the most lucrative of practices in order to become Getliffe J, to revel in the glory of being a judge.