Time of Hope (48 page)

I knew what I should hear.

‘It’s no use,’ she said. ‘I can’t go tonight. You’d better cry off.’

I had long since ceased to persuade and force her. I said nothing, but went at once to the telephone. I was practised in excuses: how many lies had I told, to save her face and mine? This one, though, was not believed. I could hear the disappointment at the other end. It was an affront. We had outgrown them. They did not believe my story that she was ill. They were no more use or interest to us, and without manners we cancelled a date.

I went back to her. I looked out of the window, over the embankment. It was a grey, warm, summer evening, and the trees were swaying wavelike in the wind.

This was the time.

I drew up a chair beside her.

‘Sheila,’ I said, ‘this is becoming difficult for me.’

‘I know.’

There was a pause. The wind rustled.

I said slowly: ‘I think that we must part.’

She stared at me with her great eyes. Her arm was still hanging down, but inch by inch her fingers clenched.

She replied: ‘If you say so.’

I looked at her. A cherishing word broke out of me, and then I said: ‘We must.’

‘I thought you mightn’t stand it.’ Her voice was high, steady, uninflected. ‘I suppose you’re right.’

‘If I were making you happy, I could stand it,’ I said. ‘But – I’m not. And it’s ruining me. I can’t even work–’

‘I warned you what it would be like,’ she said, implacably and harshly.

‘That is not the same as living it.’ I was harsh in return, for the first time that night.

She said: ‘When do you want me to go?’

No, I said, she should stay in the house and I would find somewhere to live.

‘You’re turning me out,’ she replied. ‘It’s for me to leave.’ Then she asked: ‘Where shall I go?’

Then I knew for certain that she was utterly lost. She had taken it without a blench. She had made none of the appeals that even she, for all her pride, could make in lesser scenes. She had not so much as touched my hand. Her courage was cruel, but she was lost.

I said that she might visit her parents.

‘Do you think I could?’ she flared out with hate. ‘Do you think I could listen to them?’ She said: ‘No, I might as well travel.’ She made strange fantasies of places she would like to see. ‘I might go to Sardinia. I might go to Mentone. You went there when you were ill, didn’t you?’ she asked, as though it were infinitely remote. ‘I made you unhappy there.’ All of a sudden, she said clearly: ‘Is this your revenge?’

I was quiet while the seconds passed. I replied: ‘I think I took my revenge earlier, as you know.’ Curiously, she smiled.

‘You’ve worried about that, haven’t you?’

‘Yes, at times.’

‘You needn’t.’

She looked at me fixedly, with something like pity.

‘I’ve wondered whether that was why you’ve stood me for so long,’ she said. ‘If you hadn’t done that, you might have thrown me out long ago.’

Again I hesitated, and then tried to tell the truth.

‘I don’t think so,’ I said.

Then she said: ‘I shall go tonight.’

I said that it was ridiculous.

She repeated: ‘I shall go tonight.’

I said: ‘I shan’t permit it.’

She said: ‘Now it is not for you to permit.’

I was angry, just as I always had been when she was self-willed to her own hurt. I said that she could not leave the house with nowhere to go. She must stay until I had planned her movements. She said the one word, no. My temper was rising, and I went to take hold of her. She did not flinch away, but said: ‘You cannot do that, now.’

My hands dropped. It was the last stronghold of her will.

Without speaking, we looked at each other.

She got up from her chair.

‘Well, it’s over,’ she remarked. ‘You’d better help me pack.’

Her attention was caught by the wind, as mine had been, and she glanced out of the window. The trees swayed to and fro under the grey sky. They were in full June leaf, and the green was brilliant in the diffuse light. Through the window blew the scent of lime.

‘I liked this house,’ she said, and with her strong fingers stroked the window sill.

We went into her sitting-room. It was more dishevelled than I had noticed it; until that evening, I had not fully realized how her finicky tidiness had broken down; just as a husband might not observe her looks deteriorate, when it would leap to the eye of one who had not seen her for a year.

She walked round the room. Though her dress was uncared for, her step was still active, poised, and strong. She asked me to guard her coins. They were too heavy, and too precious, to take with her if she was moving from hotel to hotel. The first thing she packed was her gramophone.

‘I shall want that,’ she said. Into the trunk she began to pack her library of records. As I handed some to her, she gave a friendly smile, regretful but quite without rancour. ‘It’s a pity you weren’t musical,’ she said.

I wanted her to think of clothes.

‘I suppose I shall need some,’ she said indifferently. ‘Fetch me anything you like.’

I put a hand on her shoulder.

‘You must take care of yourself.’ Despite the parting, I was scolding her as in our occasional light-hearted days.

‘Why should I?’

‘You’re not even troubling about your face.’

‘I’m tired of it,’ she cried.

‘For all you can do, it is still beautiful.’ It was true. Her face was haggard, without powder, not washed since that morning or longer, but the structure of the bones showed through; there were dark stains, permanent now, under her eyes, but the eyes themselves were luminous.

‘I’m tired of it,’ she said again.

‘Men will love you more than ever,’ I said, ‘but you mustn’t put them off too much.’

‘I don’t want it.’

‘You know that you’ve always attracted men–’

‘I know. If I had attracted them less, it might have been better for me. And for you as well.’

She went on stacking books in the trunk, but I stopped her.

‘Listen to me once more. I hope you will find a man who will make you happy. It is possible, I tell you.’

She looked at me, her face still except for the faint grimace of a smile.

‘You must believe that,’ I said urgently. ‘We’ve failed. But this isn’t the end.’

She said: ‘I shan’t try again.’

She sat down and began, with the competence that had once surprised me, to discuss the matter-of-fact arrangements. She would finish packing within an hour, and would spend that night at an hotel. I did not argue any more. Her passport was in order, and she could travel tomorrow. I would transfer money to her in Paris. It was summer, too hot for her to go south immediately. I thought it strange that, even now, she should be governed by her dislike of the heat. She would probably spend the summer in Brittany, and wait till October before she made her way to Italy. After that, she had no plans. She assumed that sooner or later I should want to marry again. If so, I could divorce her whenever I wished.

‘If you are in trouble,’ I said, ‘you must send for me.’

She shook her head.

‘I shan’t do that.’

‘I should want you to.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I might want to, but I shan’t. I’ve done you enough harm.’

She rose and turned her face from me, looking out of the window, away from the room. Her shoulders were rigid, and her back erect.

‘You may need–’

‘It doesn’t matter what I need.’

‘Don’t say that,’

Quite slowly she turned again to face me.

‘It doesn’t matter.’ She spoke with absolute control. Her head was high. ‘For a good reason. You said that this wasn’t the end for me, didn’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You were wrong.’

She was seeing her future; she was asking for nothing. She did not move an inch towards me. She stood quite straight, with her arms by her sides.

‘Leave me alone,’ she said in a clear voice. ‘I’ll call you when I go.’

I walked in the garden. As I turned at the bottom, by the street gate, I saw that Sheila had switched on a light, so that her window shone into the premature dusk. Out of doors, in the moist air, the scent of lime was overpoweringly sweet. Sometimes the warm wind carried also a whiff of the river smell; but over all that night hung the sweet and heavy scent, the scent of a London June.

I could not send her away. I could not manage it. I knew with complete lucidity what it meant. If I were ever to part from her, this was the time. I should not be able to change my mind again. This had been my chance: I could not take it. I was going to call her back, and fall into the old habit. I was about to sentence myself for life.

Yet there was no conflict within me. I was not making a decision. Like all the other decisions of my life, this had been taken before I admitted it – perhaps when I knew that she was lost, certainly when I saw her, upright in her pride, asserting that there was nothing for her. She faced it without pretence. I had never known her pretend. And she would set her will to live accordingly. She would move from hotel to hotel, lonely, more eccentric as each year passed.

I could not bear to let her. There was no more to it than that. Whatever our life was like, it was endurable by the side of what she faced. I must stay by her. I could do no other. I accepted it, as the warm wind blew in my face and I smelt the lime. There was no getting out of it now. Somehow I should have to secure some rest for myself: now it was for life, I must find some way of easing it. In my practical and contriving fashion, I was already casting round – I could bear it better if she did not imprison me quite. But that would be only a relief. It was for life, and I must be there when she wanted me.

I sneezed. Some pollen had touched my nostrils. Perhaps it brought back the sensation of the chalky air in Marion’s classroom, ten years before. Anyway, for a second, I remembered how I had challenged the future then. I had longed for a better world, for fame, for love. I had longed for a better world; and this was the summer of 1933. I had longed for fame: and I was a second-rate lawyer. I had longed for love: and I was bound for life to a woman who never had love for me and who had exhausted mine.

As I remembered, I was curiously at one with myself. I smiled. No one could call it a good record. The world’s misfortunes, of course, had nothing to do with me – but my own, yes, they were my fault. Another man in my place would not have chosen them. I had not seen enough of my life yet to perceive the full truth of what my nature needed. I could not distinguish the chance from the inevitable. But I already knew that my bondage to Sheila was no chance. Somehow I was so made that I had to reject my mother’s love and all its successors. Some secret caution born of a kind of vanity made me bar my heart to any who forced their way within. I could only lose caution and vanity, bar and heart, the whole of everything I was, in the torment of loving someone like Sheila, who invaded me not at all and made me crave for a spark of feeling, who was so wrapped in herself that only the violence and suffering of such a love as mine brought the slightest glow.

My suffering over Sheila was the release of my vanity. At twenty-eight, walking in the garden on that night after I had tried to escape, they were the deepest parts of myself that I had so far seen. It was not the picture that others saw, for I passed as a man of warm affections, capable of sympathy and self-effacingness. That was not altogether false – one cannot act a part for years; but I knew what lay in reserve. It was not tenderness that was to stop me sending Sheila away, at this time when I knew the cost of keeping her and when my passion was spent. It was simply that she touched the depth of my vanity and suffering, and that this was my kind of love. Yet, like George after his trial, I was still borne up by hope. More realistic than he was, I had seen something of myself, and something of my fate. In detail, I did not burke the certain truths. I should never be able to shelve my responsibility for her. That was permanent – but did I think that one day I should find true love in another? I should now never make a success at the Bar – did I think one day I might get a new start?

I was twenty-eight, and I could still hope. Those random encouragements were blowing in the warm wind, and I felt, as well as the strength of acceptance, a hope of the fibres, a hope of young manhood. That night, I had come to terms with what I must do. But I breathed the scent of the limes, and the half-thought visited me: ‘She said that she had come to the end. As for me, I am nowhere near the end.’

I looked up at her window. I had delayed going in to her, but I could delay no longer. The house was quiet. I opened the door of her room. She was standing, so still that she might have been frozen, by the trunk.

She said: ‘I told you to leave me alone.’

I said: ‘I can’t let you go.’

For a second her face was smooth as though with shock. Then it hardened again.

‘I’ve told you, I shall go tonight.’

I said: ‘I can’t let you go at all.’

She asked: ‘Do you know what you’re saying?’

I said: ‘I know very well.’ I added: ‘I’m saying that I shall never speak to you as I did tonight. Not as long as we live.’

‘You know what you’ll lose?’

I repeated: ‘I know very well.’

‘I trust you,’ she cried. ‘I trust you.’ Her control was near to snapping, but suddenly she braced herself again and said harshly: ‘It won’t be any different. I can’t make it any easier for you.’

I nodded my head, and then smiled at her.

In the same harsh tone, she said: ‘You’re all I’ve got.’ Her face was working. She said again: ‘You’re all I’ve got.’

She crumpled up, almost as if she were fainting. I sat on the sofa, and she sank her head into my lap, without another word or sound. Time and time again I stroked her hair. Outside the window, the tops of the trees were swaying in the wind.

Series in broad chronological ‘story’ order (see Synopses below for ‘Series order’)

Dates given refer to first publication dates