Time of Hope

Part Three The End of Innocence

My first meeting with Sheila became blotted from my memory. The first sight of her, as Jack and I walked up the London Road and she walked from her car, stayed clear always; so did the sound of her name, echoing in my mind before I had so much as seen her face. But there was a time when we first spoke, and that became buried or lost, irretrievably lost, so that I was never able to recapture it.

It must have been in the summer of 1925, when we were each nearly twenty. During the winter I had heard a rumour that she was abroad — being finished, said someone, for her health, said another. Her name dropped out of the gossip of the group; Jack forgot all about her and talked with his salesman’s pleasure, persuading himself as well as his audience of the charms of other girls. It was the winter after I had taken the plunge, when I was trying to assuage my doubts by long nights of work: days at the office, evenings with George and the group, then nights in my cold room, working like a medieval student with blankets round my knees, in order to save shillings in the gas fire. There were times when, at two or three o’clock, I went for a walk to get my feet warm before I went to bed.

Sheila and I must have met a few months later, in the summer. I did not remember our first calling each other by name. But, with extreme distinctness, a few words came back whenever I tried to force my memory. They had been spoken not at our first meeting, but on an occasion soon after, probably the first or second time I took her out. They were entirely trivial, and concerned who should pay the bill.

We were sitting in a kind of cubicle in an old-fashioned café. From the next cubicle to ours sounded the slide and patter of draughts, for this was a room where boxes of chessmen and draughts stood on a table, and people came in for a late tea and stayed several hours.

Through the tobacco smoke, Sheila was staring at me. Her eyes were large and disconcertingly steady. At the corner of her mouth, there was a twitch that looked like a secret smile, that was in fact a nervous tic.

‘I want to pay my share,’ she said.

‘No, you can’t. I asked you to come out.’

‘I can. I shall.’

I said no. I was insecure, not knowing how far to insist.

‘Look. I’ve got some. You need it more than I do.’

We stared at each other across the table.

‘You’re here. In this town. I’m not far away.’ Her voice was high, and sometimes had a brittle tone. ‘We want to see each other, don’t we?’

‘Of course,’ I said in sudden joy.

‘I can’t unless I pay for myself. I shouldn’t mind you paying — but you can’t afford it. Can you?’

‘I can manage.’

‘You can’t. You know you can’t. I’ve got some money.’

I was still insecure. Our wills had crossed. Already I was enraptured by her.

‘Unless you let me pay for myself each time I shan’t come again.’ She added: ‘I want to.’

If I had met her when I was older, and she had spoken so, I should have wondered how much it was an exercise of her will, how much due to her curious kindness. But that afternoon, after we had parted, I simply said to myself that I was in love. I had no room to think of anything but that.

I said to myself that I was in love. It was different from all I had imagined. I had read my Donne, I had listened to Jack Cotery, that cheerful amorist, and had agreed, out of the certainty of my inexperience, that the root of love was sensual desire, and that all that mattered was the bed. Yet it did not seem so, now that I was in love. Even though each moment had become enhanced, so that I saw faces in the evening light with a tenderness that I had never felt before. The faces of young men and women strolling in the late sunlight — I saw the bloom on the girls’ cheeks, I saw them feature by feature, as though my eyesight had suddenly become ten times as acute, As I watched the steam rising from my teacup the next morning, I felt that I was seeing it for the first time, as though I had just been born with each sense fresh and preternaturally strong. Each moment was sensually enhanced because of the love inside me. Yet for her who inspired that love I had not in those first days a sensual thought.

I did not make dreams of her, as I had done of many other girls. That first state of love was delectable beyond my expectation; in its delight I did not stop to wonder that I had often imagined love, and imagined it quite wrong. I breathed in the delight with every breath, those first mornings. I did not stop to wonder why my thoughts of her were vague, why I was content to let her image — unlike those of everyone else I knew — lie vague within my heart.

It was the same when I pictured her face. I was used already to studying the bones and skin and flesh of those I met, and I could, as a matter of form and habit, have described Sheila much as I should have described Marion or even George or Jack. I could have specified the thin, fine nose; great eyes, which had not the lemur-like sadness of most large eyes, but were grey, steady, caught and held the light; front teeth which only the grace of God saved from protruding, and which sometimes rested on her lower lip. She was fair, and her skin was even, pale, and of the consistency that most easily takes lines — so that one could see, before she was twenty, some of the traces that would deepen in ten years. She was tallish for a woman, strong-boned and erect, with an arrogant toss to her head.

I should have described her in those terms, just as I might have described the others, but to myself I did not see her as I did them. For I thought of her as beautiful. It was an objective fact that others did so too. Few of my friends liked her for long, and almost none was easy with her; yet even George admitted that she was a handsome bitch, and the women in the group did not deny that she was good-looking. They criticized each feature, they were scornful of her figure, and it was all true; but they knew that she had the gift of beauty. At that time I believed it was a great gift — and so did she, proud in her looks and her youth. Neither of us could have credited that there would come a day when I was to see her curse her beauty and deliberately, madly, neglect it.

To me she was especially beautiful. And, in the first astonishment of love, I saw her, and thought of her, just like that. I did not see her, as I was to see her in the future, with the detailed fondness of an experienced love, in which I came to delight in her imperfections, the front teeth, the nervous, secret-smiling tic. No, I saw her as beautiful, and I was filled with love.

I did not mind, I noticed as it were without regarding, how in company she was apt to fall constrained and silent, pallid faced, the smile working her mouth as though she were inwardly amused. The first time Jack Cotery saw her and me together, we were alone, and she was laughing; afterwards, Jack proceeded to congratulate me. ‘You’re getting on,’ he said good-naturedly. He was glad to witness me at last a captive. He was glad that I was sharing in his human frailty. He had always been half-envious that I was less distracted than he. And he was also glad that I was happy: like most carnal men, he was sorry if his friends were fools enough not to enjoy the fun. ‘She’s not my cup of tea.’ He grinned. ‘And I’m not hers. She’d just look through me with those searchlight eyes. But clearly she’s the best-looking girl round here. And you seem to have made a hit. Just let yourself go, Lewis, just let yourself go.’

One day, however, she came with me to the group. She greeted them all high-spiritedly enough, and then, though they were talking of books which she and I had discussed together, she fell into an inhibited silence and scarcely spoke a word. Jack cross-questioned me about her. ‘Is she often like that? Remember, they sometimes give themselves away, when they’re not trying. It’s easy to shine when someone’s falling in love with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I hope she isn’t going to be much of a handful. If she is, the best thing you can do is cut your losses and get out of it straight away.’

I smiled.

‘It’s all very well to smile. I know it would be a wrench. But it might be worse than a wrench if you get too much involved — and you can’t trust the girl to behave.’

I paid no attention. Nor did I to the curious incidents which I noticed soon after we met, when, instead of seeing her silent and pallid in company, I found her sitting on the area-steps of my lodging house, chatting like a sister to the landlady. The landlady was a slattern, who came to life when she broke into ruminations about her late husband or the Royal Family. Sheila listened and answered, relaxed, utterly at ease. And she did the same with the little waitress in the café, who liked her and took her for granted as she did no other customer. Somehow Sheila could make friends, throw her self-consciousness away, if she was allowed to choose for herself and go where no one watched her.

But I did not try, or even want, to think what she was truly like. If Marion had performed those antics, I should have been asking myself, what kind of nature was this? In the first weeks of my love for Sheila, I was less curious about her than about any other person. It even took me some time to discover the simple facts, such as that she was my own age within a month, that she was an only child, the daughter of a clergyman, that her mother had money, that they lived in a village twelve miles outside the town.

Walking in the windy autumn nights, I thought of her with the self-absorption of young love. I chose to be alone on those nights, so that I could cherish my thoughts, with the lights twinkling and quivering in the wind.

I was self-absorbed, yet with the paradox of such a love I had not begun to ask, even in my thoughts, anything for myself. I had not kissed her. It was enough just then that she should exist. It was enough that she should exist, who had brought me to this bliss, who had transformed the streets I walked in so that, looking down the hill at the string of lights, I felt my throat catch with joy.

I thought of her as though she alone were living in the world. I had never seen her house, but I imagined her within it, in her own room, high and light. She sat with a reading lamp at her side, and for a time she was still. Then she crossed the room and knelt by the bookshelves: her hair was radiant in the shadow. She went back to her chair, and her fingers turned the page.

I saw her so, and that was all I asked, just then.

I was diffident in making the first approach of love. It was not only that the magic was too delicate to touch. I was afraid that I had no charm for her. I had none of Jack’s casual confidence that he could captivate nine women out of ten; and I had not that other confidence which underlay George’s awkwardness and which was rooted in his own certainty of his great sensual power. At twenty I did not know whether any woman would love me with her whole heart. Most of all I doubted it with Sheila.

I tried to dazzle her, not with what I was, but with what I could do. I boasted of my plans. I told her that I should be a success. I held out the lure of the prizes I should win by my wits. She was quite unimpressed. She was clever enough to know that it was not just a young man’s fantasy. She believed that I might do as I said. But she believed it half with amusement, half with envy.

‘You ought to bring off something,’ she teased me. ‘With your automatic competence.’

It amused her that I could work in the office all day, talk to her at the café over pot after pot of tea until she caught her train, and then go off and apply my mind for hours to the law of torts. But it was an envious amusement. She had played with music and painting, but she had nothing to do. She felt that she too should have been driven to work.

‘Of course you’ll get somewhere,’ she said. ‘What happens when you’ve got there? You won’t be content. What then?’

She would not show more than that faint interest in my workaday hopes. She had none of Marion’s robust and comradely concern for each detail of what I had to achieve. Marion had learned the syllabuses, knew the dates of the examinations, had a shrewd idea of when I must begin to earn money unless I was to fail. Sheila had faith in my ‘automatic competence’, but her tone turned brittle as I tried to dazzle her, and it hurt me, in the uncertainty of love.

She was still amused, not much more than that, when I brought her a piece of good news. In September that year, just after I began to meet her regularly, I had a stroke of fortune, the kind of practical fortune that was a bonus I did not count on and had no right to expect. It happened through the juxtaposition, the juxtaposition which became a most peculiar alliance, of Aunt Milly and George Passant. The solicitor who dealt with Aunt Milly’s ‘bit of property’ (as my mother used to describe it, in a humorous resentful fashion) had not long since died.

By various chances, Aunt Milly found her way to the firm of Eden and Martineau, and so into George’s office; and there she kept on going.

Aunt Milly was aware that I knew him. It did not soften her judgement. As a matter of course, it was her custom to express disapproval after her first meeting with any new acquaintance. Since she knew George was my closest friend, she felt morally impelled to double the pungency of her expression.

‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but that young fellow Passant was smelling of beer. At half past two in the afternoon. It might be doing everyone a service if I told his employers what I thought of it.’ She went on to give a brief sketch of George’s character.

To my surprise, it did not take long before her indignation moderated. After a visit or two, she was saying darkly and grudgingly: ‘Well, I can’t say that he’s as hopeless as that other jackass — which is a wonder, considering everything.’

Nevertheless, it came out of the blue when George told me, as though it were nothing particularly odd, that they had been discussing me and my future. ‘I found her very reasonable,’ said George. ‘Very reasonable indeed.’ And again it did not strike him as particularly odd, though he was looking discreet and what my mother would have called chuff, with the self-satisfaction of one holding a pleasant secret, when he summoned me to meet her one lunchtime.

‘She’s asked me to attend, as a matter of fact,’ said George complacently, swinging his stick.

Our meeting place was the committee room of one of Aunt Milly’s temperance organizations. It was in the middle of the town, on the third floor above a vegetarian café; Aunt Milly was not a vegetarian, but she did not notice what she ate, and when she was working in that room she always sent down for a meal. Our lunch that morning was nut cutlets, and Aunt Milly munched away impassively.

Eating that lunch, we sat, all three of us, at a long committee table at the end of the room, Aunt Milly in the chair, George at her right hand like a secretary, and me opposite to them. The room was dark and filled with small tables, each covered with brochures, pamphlets, charts, handbills, and maps. Near our end of the room was a special stand, on which were displayed medical exhibits. The one most visible, a yard or so from our lunch, was a cirrhosed liver. I caught sight of Aunt Milly’s gaze fixed upon it, and then on George and me. She went on eating steadily.

On the walls were flaunted placards and posters; one of them proclaimed that temperance was winning. George noticed it, and asked Aunt Milly how many people had signed the pledge in 1924.

‘Not enough,’ said Aunt Milly. She added, surprisingly, in her loud voice: ‘That poster’s a lie. Don’t you believe it. The movement is going through a bad time. We’ve gone downhill ever since the war, and we shan’t do much better till those people stop running away from the facts.’

‘You made the best of your position in the war,’ said George, with an abstract pleasure in political chess. ‘You couldn’t possibly have hoped to keep your advantage.’

‘That is as may be,’ said Aunt Milly.

George argued with her. She was completely realistic and matter of fact about details. She did not shut her eyes to any setback, and yet maintained an absolute and unqualified faith that the cause would triumph in the end.

She broke off brusquely ‘This isn’t what I wanted you for. I haven’t got all the afternoon to waste. It’s time we got down to brass tacks.’

Aunt Milly was offering to make me a loan. Presumably at George’s instigation, certainly after consulting him about my chances in the Bar examinations, she had decided to help. George sat by her side, in solid if subdued triumph. I began to thank her, with real spontaneous delight, but she stopped me.

‘You wait till I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘You may not like my conditions as much as all that. You can take it or leave it.’

The ‘conditions’ referred to the date of the loan. Aunt Milly would, if she got her own way, lend me two hundred pounds. When would it be most useful to me? She had her view, I had mine: they were, as usual, different. And they were the opposite of what one might have expected. Aunt Milly had got it into her head that I did not stand a dog’s chance in Bar Finals unless I could give up the office and spend the next eighteen months reading law ‘as though you were at college, like your mother wanted for you’. I could never understand how Aunt Milly became fixed in this opinion; her whole family had picked up their education at night classes, and she was the last woman to be moved by the claims of social pretension. Perhaps it was through some faint memory of my mother’s longings, for Aunt Milly was capable of a certain buried sentiment. Perhaps it was that I was looking overtired: she was always affected by physical evidence, about which there was no doubt or nonsense, which she could see with her own eyes. Anyway, for whatever reason, she had got the idea into her head, and held it as obstinately as all her other ideas.

My view was the exact opposite. I could, I said, survive my present life until Bar Finals. I would take care, however much sleep I lost, that it would make no difference to the result. Whereas two hundred pounds, once I was in Chambers, would keep me going for two years and might turn the balance between failure and success.

George took up the argument with both of us. He was himself a very strong man physically, and he had no patience with the wear and tear that the effort might cost me. That was one against Aunt Milly. On the other hand, he told me flatly that I was underestimating the sheer time that I needed for work. If I did not leave the office now and have my days clear, I could not conceivably come out high in the list. That was a decisive one against me. On the other hand, he fired a broadside against Aunt Milly — it was ridiculous to insist that the whole loan should be used on getting me through the Bar Finals, when a little capital afterwards would be of incalculable value.

Aunt Milly liked to be argued with by George, powerfully, loudly, and not too politely. It was a contrast to the meek silences of her husband and her brother. Maybe, I thought, she would have been more placid married to such a man. Was that why, against all the rules, they got on so well?

But, despite her gratification at meeting her match, she remained immovably obstinate. Either I left the office within a month, or the loan was off. Aunt Milly had the power of the purse, and she made the most of it.

At last George hammered out a solution, although Aunt Milly emerged victoriously with her point. I was to leave the office at once: Aunt Milly nodded her head, her eyes protruding without expression, as though it were merely a recognition of her common sense. Aunt Milly would lend me a hundred pounds ‘at three per cent, payments to begin in five years,’ said Aunt Milly promptly.

‘On any terms you like,’ said George irascibly. The hundred pounds would just carry me through, doing nothing but study law, until Bar Finals. Then, if I secured a first in the examination, she would lend me the other hundred pounds to help towards my first year in Chambers.

George chuckled as we walked back to Bowling Green Street. ‘I call that a good morning’s work,’ he said. ‘She’s a wonderful woman.’

He hinted that I need not worry about taking the money. Even if all went wrong, it would not cripple her. She and her husband were among those of the unpretentious lower middle-class who had their nest eggs tucked away. George would not tell me how much. He was always professionally discreet, in a fashion that surprised some who only knew him at night. But I gathered that they were worth two or three thousand. I also gathered that I was not to expect anything from her will. That did not depress me — two hundred pounds now was worth two thousand pounds in ten years’ time. But I should have liked to know how she was leaving her money.

I wanted Sheila to rejoice with me when I told her the news. I did not write to her; I saved it up for our next meeting. She came into the town on a Saturday afternoon, a warm and beautiful afternoon in late September. We met outside the park, not far from Martineau’s house, walked by the pavilion, and found a couple of chairs near the hard tennis courts. The park was full of people. All round the tennis courts there were children playing on the grass, women sitting on the seats with perambulators in front of them, men in their shirtsleeves. On the asphalt court there were two games of mixed doubles, youths in grey flannels, girls in cotton dresses.

Sheila sat back with the sunshine on her face, watching the play.

‘I’m about as good as she is,’ she said. ‘I’m no good at tennis. But I can run quite fast.’

She spoke with a secret pleasure, far away, as though she were gazing at herself in a mirror, as though she were admiring her reflection in a pool. I looked at her — and, in the crowded park, for me we were alone, under the milk-blue sky.

Then I told her that I was leaving the office. She smiled at me, a friendly, sarcastic smile.

‘Gentleman of leisure, are you?’ she said.

‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘What in the world will you do with yourself? Even you can’t work all day.’

I could not leave it, I could not bear that she was not impressed. I told her, I exaggerated, the difference it ought to make to my chances.

‘You’ll do well anyway,’ she said lightly.

‘It’s not quite as easy as all that.’

‘It is for you.’ She smiled again. ‘But I still don’t see what you’re going to do with yourself all day. I’m sure you’re not good at doing nothing. I’m much better at that than you are. I’m quite good at sitting in the sun.’

She shut her eyes. She looked so beautiful that my heart turned over.

Still I could not leave it. My tongue ran away, and I said that it was a transformation, it was a new beginning. She looked at me; her smile was still friendly, sarcastic, and cool.

‘You’re very excited about it, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Then so am I,’ she said.

But she responded in a different tone to another story that I told her, as we sat there in the sun. It concerned a piece of trouble of Jack’s, which had sprung up almost overnight. It arose because Jack, not for the first time, had evoked an infatuation; but this time he was guiltless, and ironically this was the only time that might do him an injury. For the one who loved him was not a young woman, but a boy of fifteen. The boy’s passion had sprung up that summer, it was glowing and innocent, but the more extravagant because it was so innocent. He had just given Jack an expensive present, a silver cigarette case; and by accident his family had intercepted a letter of devotion that was coming with it. There were all kinds of practical repercussions, which worried us and against which we were trying to act: Jack’s future in his firm was threatened; there were other consequences for him, and, in the long run, most of all for George, who had thrown himself, with the whole strength of a man, into Jack’s support.

Sheila listened with her eyes alight. She was not interested in the consequences, she brushed them impatiently aside. To her the core of the story, its entire significance, lay in the emotion of the boy himself.

‘It must be wonderful to be swept away. He must have felt that he had no control over himself at all. I wonder what it was like,’ she said. She was deeply moved, and our eyes met.

‘He won’t regret it.’ She added, gently, ‘I wish it had happened to me at his age.’

We fell into silence: a silence so charged that I could hear my heart beating. Between her fingers a cigarette was smouldering blue into the still air.

‘Who is he, Lewis?’ she said.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second. She was very quick. ‘Tell me. If I know him, I might help. I shall go and say that I envy him.’

‘He’s a boy called Roy Calvert,’ I said.

I had only met him for a few minutes in the middle of this crisis. What struck me most was that he seemed quite unembarrassed and direct. He was more natural and at ease than the rest of us, five years older and more, who questioned him.

Sheila shook her head, as though she were disappointed.

‘He must be a cousin of your friend Olive, mustn’t he?’ (Olive was a member of the group.)

I told her yes, and that Olive was involved in the trouble.

‘I can’t get on with her,’ said Sheila. ‘She pretends not to think much of herself. It isn’t true.’

Suddenly Sheila’s mood had changed. Talking of Roy, she had been gentle, delicate, self-forgetful. Now, at the mention of Olive, whom she scarcely knew, but who mixed gaily and could forget herself in any company, Sheila turned angry and constrained.

‘I once went to a dance at Olive’s,’ she said. ‘We didn’t stay long. We went by ourselves to the palais. That was a lot better.’

For the first time, I was learning the language of a beloved. I was learning the tension, the hyperaesthesia, with which one listens to the tone of every word, And I was learning too, in the calm of that September afternoon, the first stab of jealousy. That ‘we’, said so clearly, that reiterated ‘we’: was it deliberate, was her companion a casual acquaintance, was she threatening me with someone for whom she cared?

She looked at me. At the sight of my face, her tone changed again.

‘I’m glad you told me about Roy,’ she said.

‘Why are you glad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sheila, why are you glad?’

‘If I knew, I shouldn’t tell you.’ Her voice was high. Then she smiled, and said with all simplicity and purity: ‘No, I should tell you. I should want to. It would mean I had found something important, wouldn’t it?’

When she was not there, I was happy in my thoughts. They were pierced, it is true, by the first thrusts of jealousy, the sound of that clear ‘we’ in the calm air, not so much a memory but as though the sound stayed in my ears. They were troubled by the diffidence of my love, so that I could not always think of her alone in her room, without needing some sign of love to calm me. But the rapture was so strong, it swept back after those intrusions; she existed, she walked the same earth, and I should see her in three days’ time.

Once, meeting her after a week’s absence, I felt incredulous, all the excitement deflated, all the enchantment dead. Her face seemed, at the first glance, not different in kind from other faces — pale, frigid, beaky, ill-tempered. Her voice was brittle, and grated on my nerves. Everything she thought was staccato. There was no flow or warmth about her, or about anything she said or did. I was, for a few minutes, nothing but bored. Nothing deeper than that, just bored. Then she gazed at me — not with a smile, but with her eyes steady and her face quite still; on the instant, the dead minutes were annihilated and I was once more possessed.

Later that day, I happened to tell her that the group were spending the following weekend out at the farm. She always took a curious, half-envious, half-mocking interest in the group’s affairs. That afternoon she was speculating, like one left outside a party, about how we should pass the weekend. I knew her house was only two or three miles from the farm, and I begged her to drop in.

‘I can’t stand crowds,’ she said. Then, as though covering herself, she retorted: ‘Why shouldn’t you come and see me? It’s no further one way than the other.’

I was overjoyed.

She added: ‘You’ll have to meet my parents. You can study them, if you like.’

We arranged that I should walk over for tea on the Saturday afternoon. That Saturday, in the middle of October, was my last day in the office; and I was thinking of the afternoon as I said all my goodbyes. Mr Vesey reminded me that I was under his control until one o’clock; he told me three times not to be careless about leaving my papers in order, then he shook my hand, and said that he had not yet been provided with my successor, and that some people had never realized his difficulties. How could he be expected to run his section well if his one good clerk went and left him? Why did he never get a chance himself? ‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said bravely, shaking my hand again. ‘I don’t expect to be in the limelight. I just carry on.’

I was thinking of the afternoon; but, stepping out of the office on to the wet pavement, leaving for the last time a place which for years had been a prison, I felt an ache of nostalgia, of loss, and of regret.

George and I went out by bus, through a steady drizzle, At half past three, when I started out from the farm, the rain was heavier; I was getting wet as I cut across the fields, down the country lanes, to Sheila’s house. I was happy and apprehensive, happy because she had asked me, apprehensive because I was sensible enough to know that I could not possibly be welcome. She had asked me in innocence: that I took for granted. She would not care what her parents thought, if she wanted to see me. Through her actions there shone so often a wild and wilful innocence. And I, far more realistic than she in all other ways, had for her and with her the innocence of romantic love. So that, tramping through the mud that afternoon, I was happy whatever awaited me. I wanted nothing but the sight of her; I knew it, she knew it, and in that state of love there were no others.

But I assumed that her parents would see it differently. I might not have given a conscious thought to marrying her — and that, strange as it later seemed, was true, Her parents would never believe it. To them, I must appear as a suitor — possibly a suitor with an extremely dim outside chance, but nevertheless a suitor, and a most undesirable one. For they were rich, Sheila had both looks and brains; they were bound to expect her to make a brilliant marriage. They were not likely to encourage me. I had nothing whatever with which to mollify them. Some parents might have endured me because I was not a fool, but I guessed that even my wits were suspect. Sheila was capable of recounting my opinions, and then saying that she shared them. I did not know how I was going to carry it off. Yet I was joyful, walking those two miles through the rain.

The vicarage was a handsome Georgian house, lying back behind the trees at the end of the village. I was not far wrong about my welcome. But before Mrs Knight could start expressing herself there was a faintly farcical delay. For I arrived wet through. The maid who let me in did not know how to proceed; Sheila and her mother came out into the hall. Mrs Knight at once took charge. She was prepared to greet me coldly, but she became solicitous about my health. She was a heavily built woman, bigger than Sheila, but much more busy and fussy. She took me into the bathroom, sent the maid for some of the vicar’s clothes, arranged to have mine dried. At last I entered the drawing-room dressed in a cricket shirt, grey flannels, pullover, dressing gown, and slippers, all belonging to Sheila’s father, all the clothes much too wide for me and the slippers two sizes too big.

‘I hope you won’t take cold,’ Mrs Knight rattled on busily. ‘You ought to have had a good hot bath. I think you ought to have a nice stiff whisky. Yes, that ought to keep off the cold.’

She had none of her daughter’s fine, chiselled features. She was broad-faced, pug-nosed, with a loud quacking voice; she was coarse-grained and greatly given to moral indignation; yet her eyes were wide open and childlike, and one felt, as with other coarse-grained women, that often she was lost and did not know her way about the world.

However, she was very far from lost when it came to details of practical administration. I was made to put down a couple of fingers of neat whisky. She decided that I was not wearing enough clothes, and Sheila was sent for one of the vicar’s sports coats.

‘He’s upstairs in his study,’ said Mrs Knight, talking of her husband with a rapt, childlike devotion, accentuating the ‘he’ in her worship. ‘He’s just polishing a sermon for tomorrow. He always likes to have them polished. He’ll join us later for his tea, if he finishes in time. I should never think of disturbing him, of course.’

We sat down by the fire and began our tea, a very good one, for Mrs Knight liked her food. She expected everyone round her to eat as heartily as she did, and scolded Sheila for not getting on with the toast and honey. I watched Sheila, as her mother jockeyed her into eating. It was strangely comfortable to see her so, by the fireside. But she was silent in her mother’s presence — as indeed it was hard not to be, since Mrs Knight talked without interruption and loud enough to fill any room. Yet Sheila’s silence meant more than that; it was not the humorous silence of a looker-on.

The more I could keep Mrs Knight on the theme of physical comfort, the better, I thought to myself; and so I praised the house, the sight of it from the village, the drawing-room in which we sat. Mrs Knight forcefully agreed.

‘It’s perfect for our small family,’ she said. ‘As I was obliged to explain to my neighbour, Mrs Lacy, only yesterday. Do you know what she had been saying, Sheila? I shouldn’t have believed my ears, if I hadn’t heard Doris Lacy talk and talk and talk for the last twenty years. Of course, she’s a great friend of mine and I’m devoted to her and I know she’d say the same of me’ — Mrs Knight put in this explanation for my benefit — ‘but the trouble is that she will talk without thinking. And she can’t have been thinking at all — even she couldn’t have said it if she’d thought for a single moment — she can’t have been thinking at all when she talked about this house. She actually said’ — Mrs Knight’s voice was mounting louder as her indignation grew — ‘that this house wa dark. She said that this house was dark. She who doesn’t get a ray of sun till half past three!’

She got fairly started on the misdeeds, the preposterous errors of judgement, the dubious gentility and mercenary marriage, of Mrs Lacy. She kept asking Sheila for her support and then rushing off into another burst of indignation. It was some time before she turned on me. She collected herself, regarded me with open eyes, said how gallant it was for me to visit them on such an afternoon. Then, with elaborate diplomacy, she said ‘Of course, it doesn’t feel like living in the country, now Sheila is growing up. She brings people to see us who are doing all kinds of interesting things. Why, it was only the other day we saw one of her friends who they say has a great future in his firm—’

The knife of jealousy twisted. Then I felt a flood of absolute relief, for Sheila said clearly: ‘He’s dense.’

‘I don’t think you can say that, Sheila.’

‘I can.’

‘You mustn’t be too hard on your friends,’ said Mrs Knight busily. ‘You’ll be telling me next that Tom Devitt isn’t interesting. He’s a specialist at the infirmary,’ said Mrs Knight to me, and continued with enthusiasm, ‘and they say he’s the coming man. Sheila will be telling us that he’s dense too. Or—’

The involuntary smile had come to Sheila’s mouth, and on her forehead I could see the lines. The jealous spasm had returned, with Tom Devitt’s name, with the others’ (for Mrs Knight had by no means finished), but it merged, as I watched Sheila, into a storm of something that had no place in romantic love, something so unfamiliar in my feeling for her that I did not recognize it then. It only lasted for a moment, but it left me off my balance for Mrs Knight’s next charge.

‘I think I remember Sheila saying that you were kept very busy,’ she remarked. ‘Of course, I know we can’t all choose exactly what we want, can we? Some of us have got to be content—’

‘I’ve chosen what I want, Mrs Knight,’ I said, a little too firmly.

‘Have you?’ She seemed puzzled.

‘I’m a law student. That’s what I’ve chosen to do.’

‘In your spare time, I suppose?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m reading for the Bar. Full-time. I shan’t do anything else until I’m called.’ It was technically true. It had been true since one o’clock that day. ‘I shan’t earn a penny till I’m called.’

Mrs Knight was not specially quick in the uptake. She had to pause, so as to readjust her ideas.

‘I do my reading in the town,’ I said. ‘Then I go up to my Inn once a term, and get through my dinners in a row. It saves money — and I shall need it until I get a practice going, you know.’

It was the kind of career talk she was used to hearing; but she was baffled at hearing it from me.

‘All the barristers I’ve known’, she said, ‘have eaten their dinners while they were at college. I remember my cousin used to go up when he was at Trinity—’

‘Did he ever get through an examination?’ asked Sheila.

‘Perhaps he wasn’t clever at his books,’ said Mrs Knight, becoming more cross, ‘but he was a good man, and everyone respected him in the county.’

‘My friends at the Inn’, I put in, ‘nearly all come from Cambridge.’ Here I was stretching the truth. I had made one or two friendly acquaintances there, such as Charles March, who were undergraduates, but I often dined with excessively argumentative Indians.

Mrs Knight was very cross. She did not like being baffled and confused — yet somehow I had automatically to be promoted a step. She had to say, as though Sheila had met me at the house of one of their friends ‘I’ve always heard that a barrister has to wait years for his briefs. Of course, I suppose you don’t mind waiting—’

I admitted that it would take time. Mrs Knight gave an appeased and comforted sigh, happy to be back on firm ground.

Soon after, there was a footfall outside the room, a slow footfall. Mrs Knight’s eyes widened. ‘He’s coming!’ she said. ‘He must have finished!’

Mr Knight entered with an exaggeratedly drooping, an exaggeratedly languid step. He was tall, massive, with a bay window of a stomach that began as far up as his lower chest. He was wearing a lounge suit without a dog collar, and he carried a sheaf of manuscript in his hand. His voice was exaggeratedly faint. He was, at first glance, a good deal of an actor, and he was indicating that the virtue had gone out of him.

He said faintly to his wife: ‘I’m sorry I had to be late, darling,’ sat in the armchair which had been preserved for him, and half closed his eyes.

Mrs Knight asked with quacking concern whether he would like a cup of tea. It was plain that she adored him.

‘Perhaps a cup,’ he whispered. ‘Perhaps just a cup.’

The toast had been kept warm on the hotplate, she said anxiously. Or she could have some fresh made in three minutes.

‘Ican’t eat it, darling,’ he said. ‘I can’ eat it, I can’t eat anything.’

The faintness with which he spoke was bogus, Actually his voice was rich, and very flexible in its range of tone. He had a curious trick of repeating a phrase, and at the second turn completely altering the stress. Throughout his entry, which he enjoyed to the full, he had paid no attention to me, had not thrown me an open glance, but as he lay back with heavy lids drawn down he was observing me from the corner of an eye that was disturbingly sly and shrewd.

When at last he admitted to a partial recovery, Mrs Knight introduced me. She explained volubly the reason for my eccentric attire, taking credit for her speed of action. Then, since they seemed still to be worrying her, she repeated my statements about doing nothing but read for the Bar, as though trusting him to solve the problem.

Unlike his wife, Mr Knight was indirect. He gazed at Sheila, not at me.

‘You never tell me anything, do you, my dear girl,’ he said. ‘You never tell me anything.’

Then slyly, still looking at her, he questioned me. His voice stayed carefully fatigued, he appeared to be taking a remote interest in these ephemeral things. In fact, he was astute. If he had been present, I should never have succeeded for a minute in putting up my bluff with Mrs Knight. Without asking me outright, he soon got near the truth. He took a malicious pleasure in talking round the point, letting me see that he had guessed, not giving me away to his wife.

‘Isn’t there a regulation’, he inquired, his voice diminishing softly, ‘by which you can’t read for the Bar if you’re following certain occupations? Does that mean one has to break away? I take it, you may have had to select your time to break away — from some other occupation?’

It was not the reason, but it was a very good shot. We talked for a few minutes about legal careers. He was proud of his ability to ‘place’ people and he was now observing me with attention. Sometimes he asked a question edged with malice. And I was learning something about him.

He and his wife were each snobbish, but in quite different fashions. Mrs Knight had been born into the comfortable moneyed middle class; she was a robust woman without much perception, and accepted those who seemed to arrive at the same level; just as uncritically, she patronized those who did not. Mr Knight’s interest was far more subtle and pervading. To begin with, he was no more gently born than I was. I could hear the remains of a northern dialect in that faint and modulated voice. Mr Knight had met his wife, and captured her for good, when he was a young curate. She had brought him money, he had moved through the social scene, he had dined in the places he had longed for as a young man — in the heart of the county families and the dignitaries of the Church. The odd thing was, that having arrived there, he still retained his romantic regard for those very places. All his shrewdness and suspicion went to examine the channels by which others got there. On that subject he was accurate, penetrating, and merciless.

He was a most interesting man. The time was getting on; I was wondering whether I ought to leave, when I witnessed another scene which, though I did not know it, was a regular feature of the vicarage Saturday teas. Mrs Knight looked busily, lovingly, at her husband.

‘Please, darling, would you mind giving us the sermon?’ she said.

‘Ican’t do it, darling. I can’t do it. I’m too exhausted.’

‘Please. Just give us the beginning. You know Sheila always likes to hear the sermon. I’m sure you’d like to hear the sermon.’ Mrs Knight rallied me. ‘It will give you something to think over on the way home. I’m sure you want to hear it.’

I said that I did.

‘I believe he’s a heathen,’ said Mr Knight maliciously, but his fingers were playing with the manuscript.

‘You heard what he said, darling,’ urged Mrs Knight. ‘He’ll be disappointed if you don’t give us a good long piece.’

‘Oh well.’ Mr Knight sighed. ‘If you insist, If you insist.’

Mrs Knight began to alter the position of the reading lamp. She made her husband impatient. He was eager to get to it.

The faintness disappeared from his voice on the instant. It filled the room more effortlessly than Mrs Knight’s. He read magnificently. I had never heard such command of tone, such control, such loving articulation. And I had never seen anyone enjoy more his own reading; occasionally he peered over the page to make sure that we were not neglecting to enjoy it too. I was so much impressed with the whole performance that I could not spare much notice for the argument.

He gave us a good long piece. In fact, he gave us the whole sermon, twenty-four minutes by the clock. At the end, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes. Mrs Knight broke into enthusiastic, worshipping praise. I added my bit.

‘Water, please, darling,’ said Mr Knight very faintly, without opening his eyes. ‘I should like a glass of water. Just water.’

As I changed into my own clothes in the bathroom, I was wondering how I could say goodbye to Sheila alone. In the general haze of excitement, I was thinking also of her father. He was vain, preposterously and superlatively vain, and yet astute; at the same time theatrical and shrewd; malicious, hypochondriac, and subtle; easy to laugh at, and yet exuding, through it all, a formidable power. He was a man whom no one would feel negligible. I believed that it was not impossible I could get on with him. I should have to suffer his malice, he would be a more effective enemy than his wife. But I felt one thing for certain, while I hummed tunelessly in the bathroom: he was worried about Sheila, and not because she had brought me there that afternoon; he was worried about her, as she sat silently by the fire; and there had been a spark, not of liking, but of sympathy, between him and me.

On my way downstairs I heard Mrs Knight’s voice raised in indignation.

‘It’s much too wet to think of such a thing,’ came through the drawing-room door. When I opened it, Mrs Knight was continuing: ‘It’s just asking to get yourself laid up. I don’t know when you’ll begin to have a scrap of sense. And even if it were a nice night—’

‘I’m walking back with you,’ said Sheila to me.

‘I want you to tell her that it’s quite out of the question. It’s utterly absurd,’ said Mrs Knight.

‘I don’t know what it’s like outside,’ I said half-heartedly. ‘It does sound rather wild.’

The wind had been howling round the house.

‘If it doesn’t hurt you, it won’t hurt me,’ said Sheila.

Mr Knight was still lying back with his eyes closed.

‘She oughtn’t to do it,’ a whisper came across the room. ‘She oughtn’t to do it.’

‘Are you ready?’ said Sheila.

Her will was too strong for them. It suddenly flashed across my mind, as she put on a mackintosh in the hall, that I had no idea, no idea in the world, how she felt towards either of them.

The wind blew stormily in our faces; Sheila laughed aloud. It was not raining hard, for the gale was too strong, but one could taste the driven rain. Down the village street we were quiet; I felt rapturously at ease, she had never been so near. As we turned down a lane, our fingers laced, and hers were pressing mine.

We had not spoken since we left the house. Her first words were accusatory, but her tone was soft ‘Why did you play my mother’s game?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Pretending to be better off than you are.’

‘All I said was true.’

‘You gave her a wrong impression,’ she said. ‘You know you did.’

‘I thought it was called for.’ I was smiling.

‘Stupid of you,’ she said. ‘I’d rather you said you were a clerk.’

‘It would have shocked her.’

‘It would have been good for her,’ said Sheila.

The gale was howling, the trees dashed overhead, and we walked on in silence, in silence deep with joy.

‘Lewis,’ she said at last. ‘I want to ask you something.’

‘Darling?’

‘Weren’t you terribly embarrassed—?’

‘Whatever at?’

‘At coming in wet. And meeting strangers for the first time in that fancy dress.’

She laughed.

‘You did look a bit absurd,’ she added.

‘I didn’t think about it,’ I said.

‘Didn’t you really mind?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t understand you,’ she said. ‘I should have curled up inside.’ Then she said: ‘You are rather wonderful.’

I laughed at her. I said that, if she were going to admire me for anything, she might choose something more sensible to admire. But she was utterly serious. To her self-conscious nerves, it was incredible that anyone should be able to master such a farce.

‘I curled up a bit myself this afternoon,’ she said, a little later.

‘When?’

‘When they were making fools of themselves in front of you.’

‘Good God, girl,’ I said roughly, lovingly, ‘they’re human.’

She tightened her grip on my hand.

At the end of a lane we came in sight of the farm. There was one more field to cross, and the lights blazed out in the windy darkness. I asked her to come in.

‘I couldn’t,’ she said. I had an arm round her shoulders as we stood. Suddenly she hid her face against my coat. I asked her again.

‘I must go,’ she said. She looked up at me, and for the first time I kissed her, while the wind and my own blood sang and pounded in my ears. She drew away, then threw her arms round my neck, and I felt her mouth on mine.

‘I must go,’ she said. I touched her cheek, wet in the rain, and she pressed my hand. Then she walked down the lane, dark that night as a tunnel-mouth, her strong, erect stride soon losing her to sight against the black hedges. I waited there until I could hear nothing, no footsteps, nothing but the sound of the wind.

I returned to the group, who were revelling in a celebration. Jack was starting on his new business, and after supper George sat in our midst, predicting success for us all, for me most of all, complacent with hope about all our futures. It was not until the next, Sunday, night I spoke to George alone. The others had gone back by the last bus; I was staying till the morning, in order to have the first comfort of my emancipation. That night, when we were left alone, George confided more of his own strange, violent, inner life than he had ever done before. He gave me part of his diary, and there I sat, reading by the light of the oil lamp, while George smoked his pipe by my side.

When I had finished, George made an inquiry about my love affair. He had only two attitudes towards his friends’ attachments. First, he responded with boisterous amusement. Then, when he decided that one was truly in love, he adopted an entirely different manner, circumlocutory, obscure, packed with innuendo, which he seemed to have decided was the height of consideration and tact. In the summer he had jovially referred to Sheila as that ‘handsome bitch’, but for some time past he had spoken of her, with infinite consideration, in his second manner. On that Sunday night his actual opening was ‘I hope you reached your destination safely yesterday afternoon?’

I said that I had.

‘I hope that it all turned out to be’ — George pulled down his waistcoat and cleared his throat — ‘reasonably satisfactory?’

I said that it did.

‘Perhaps I can assume’, said George, ‘that you’re not completely dissatisfied with your progress?’

I could not keep back a smile — and it gave me right away.

Even after that visit to Sheila’s house I still did not tell her simply how much I loved her. Her own style seemed to keep my tongue playful and sarcastic; I made jokes about joy and hope and anguish, as though it were all a game. I was not yet myself released.

Once or twice she kept me waiting at a meeting place. The minutes passed, the quarters; I performed all the tricks that a lover does to cheat time, to make it stand still, to pretend not to notice, so as suddenly to see her there. It was an anguish like jealousy, and, like jealousy, when at last she came, it was drowned in the flood of relief.

I complained. But still my words were light; I did not speak from the angry pain of five minutes before. I scolded her, I asked her not to expose me to looks of schadenfreude in the café — but I did it with the playful sarcasm that had become our favourite way of speaking to one another. Nevertheless, it was my first demand. She obeyed. At our next meeting, she was ten minutes early. She was trying to behave, and I was gay; but she was also strained and ill-tempered, as though it were an effort to subdue her pride even by an inch.

During my next visit to eat dinners at the Inn, I was waiting for a letter. It was the beginning of December, I was in London for my usual five nights, and I had made Sheila promise to write to me. Hopefully I looked for a letter on the hall table the morning after I arrived. I used to stay in a boarding house in Judd Street, rather as though, with a provincial’s diffidence, I did not want to be separated too far from my railhead at St Pancras. The dining-room, the hall, the bedroom, all smelt heavily of beeswax and food; the dining-room was dark, and we used to sit down to breakfast at eight o’clock in the winter gloom; there were twelve or so round the table — maiden ladies living there on a pittance, clerks, transients like myself. Through having students pass through the house, the landlady had acquired the patter of examinations. With a booming heartless heartiness, she used to encourage them, and me in my turn, by giving them postcards on the day of their last paper. On the postcard she had already written ‘I got through, Mrs Reed’; she exhorted one to post it to her as soon as the result was known.

After each breakfast on that stay, I went quickly to the hall table. There lay the letters, pale blue in the half-dark — not many in that house: none for me, on the first morning, the second, the third. It was the first time I had been menaced by the post.

Just as when I waited for her, I went through all the calculations of a lover. She could not have written before Monday night, it was more likely she would wait till Tuesday, there was no collection in the village after tea, it was impossible that I could get the letter by Wednesday morning. I was beginning to learn, in those few days, the arithmetic of anxiety and hope.

So, carrying with me that faint ache of worry, knowing that when I returned to the boarding house my eyes would fly to the hall table, I went out to eat my dinners at the Inn. On two of the nights I joined a party of my Cambridge acquaintances, Charles March among them; we went away from dinner to drink and talk, before they caught their train from Liverpool Street.

They were the kind of acquaintances on whom I should have sharpened my wits, if I had gone to a university. I had not yet spoken to Charles March alone, but him I felt kinship with, and wanted for a friend. The others I liked well enough, but no better than many of my friendly acquaintances in the town. I was soon easy among them, and we talked with undergraduate zest. When I was alone I compared their luck and mine. Some of them would be rivals. Now that I knew something of them, how did my prospect look?

I thought that, for intellectual machinery, between me and Charles March there was not much in it. I had no doubt that George Passant, both in mental equipment and in horsepower, was superior to both of us — but Charles March and I had a great deal more sense. Of those other Cambridge acquaintances, I did not believe that any of them, for force and precision combined, could compete with either Charles March or me, much less George Passant.

I was reassured to find it so. And I went on, once or twice, to envy them their luck. One of these young men was the son of an eminent KC, and another of a headmaster: Charles March’s family I guessed to be very rich. With that start, what could I not have done? I should have given any of them a run for their money, I thought. By their standards, by the standards of the successful world from which they came, it would have been long odds on my being a success. Whereas now I had, in my young manhood, to take an effort and endure a strain that they did not even realize. I felt a certain rancour.

I was capable, however, of a more detached reflection. In one way I had a priceless advantage over these new acquaintances of mine. They had known, at first hand, successful men; and it often took away their confidence. They had lived in a critical climate. Their families had been bound to compare them, say, to an uncle who had ‘come off’. There were times, even to a man as vigorous as Charles March, when all achievement seemed already over, all the great things done, all the books written. That was the penalty, and to many of them a crippling penalty, of being born into an old country and an established class. It was incomparably more easy for me to venture on my own. They were held back by the critical voices — or, if they moved at all, they tended to move, not freely, but as though they could only escape the critical voices by the deafening noise of their own rebellion.

I was far luckier. For I was, in that matter, free. From their tradition I could choose what I wanted. I needed neither to follow it completely, nor completely to rebel. I had never lived in a critical climate. There was nothing to hold me back. Far from it; I was pushed forward by the desires, longings, the inarticulate aspirations, of my mother and all her relatives, my grandfather and his companions arduously picking up their artisan culture, all my connexions who had stood so long outside the shop window staring at the glittering toys inside.

Later in my life I should not have wanted to alter any of that reflection. By twenty, in fact, I had a fair conception of most of my advantages and disadvantages, considered as a candidate in worldly affairs. I knew that I was quick-witted and adaptable — after meeting Charles March and the others, I was sure that I could hold my own intellectually. I could get on easily with a large number of human beings, and by nature I knew something of them. That seemed to me my stock-in-trade. But I left something out. Like most young men of twenty I found it impossible to credit that I had much will. George, for example, who had a will of Cromwellian strength, wrote of himself in his diary as being ‘vacillating’ and ‘weak’. Often he thought, with genuine self-condemnation, that he was the most supine of men. It was much the same with me. I should have been surprised if I had been told that I had a tough, stubborn, deep-rooted will, and that it would probably be more use to me than my other qualities all added together.

A letter came. My heart leapt as I saw the envelope on the hall table. But it was the wrong letter. Marion wrote to say that she had a half holiday on the Thursday; she wanted to buy a hat, and she needed an impartial male opinion — she could trust me to be impartial, couldn’t she? Could I spare her an hour that afternoon? And perhaps, if I were free, we might go to a play at eight. She would have to catch the last train home, so I should get her off my hands in good time.

I knew that she was fond of me, but there my imagination stopped. It was still so when I received this letter. I replied by return, saying that of course I should be glad to see her. That was true; but it was also true that I was full of chagrin at finding her letter instead of another, and that made me hasten to reply.

The other arrived, by a coincidence, on the day that Marion was due. It did not say much, it was like Sheila’s speech, shut in, capricious, gnomic. But she referred, with a curious kind of intimacy, brittle and yet trusting, to one or two of our private jokes. That was enough to irradiate the dark hall. That was enough to make me happy all day, to keep the stylised phrases running through my mind, to give me delight abounding and overflowing, so that when Marion arrived I lavished some of it on her.

She told me how well and gay I looked. I smiled and said that I was both those things. She took it as a welcome. Her eyes were bright and I suddenly thought how pretty she could be.

She gave the impression, as usual, of being sloppily dressed. Quite why I could not decide, for she was now spending much attention on her appearance. That afternoon she was wearing the Russian boots fashionable that winter, and a long blue coat. She looked fresh, but nothing could stop her looking also eager and in a hurry. No one had less trace of the remote and arctic.

Practically, competently, she had discovered some hat shops in and near the Brompton Road — they were recommended as smart, she said, and not too dear.

Along we went. Neither she nor I knew much of London, and we traipsed up and down Kensington High Street before we found the first of her addresses. There was a slight fog, enough to aureole the lights and make the streets seem cosier; the shops were decked for Christmas, and inside them one felt nothing but the presence of furs, warm air, and women’s scent. I was half irked, because I hated shopping, half glad to be among the lights and the crowds — cheerful because of the secret pleasure which she did not know, and also cheerful because of her enjoyment. I did not know it then, but I should have felt that second pleasure if I had been a more experienced man and deceiving her less innocently.

Marion tried on hat after hat, while I watched her.

‘You must say what you think,’ she said. ‘My taste is very vulgar. I’m a bit of a slut, you know.’

There was one that I liked.

‘I’m afraid it will show up my complexion,’ she said. ‘My skin isn’t too good, is it?’

She was so straightforward. If Sheila had made that remark, I was thinking, I should have seen her skin as strange, transcendentally different from all others. While Marion’s, when she drew my eyes to it, I saw just as skin, with a friendly familiar indifference, with the observant eye untouched by magic, just as I might have viewed my own.

I told her, as was true, that most women would envy her complexion. At last the hat was bought. It was expensive, and Marion grimaced. ‘Still,’ she said philosophically, ‘a good hat ought to take a girl a bit farther. A bit farther than a deep interest in the arts. I always have had a deep interest in the arts, haven’t I? and look what it’s done for me.’

Over tea she tried to find out whether I had been seeing Sheila. But she soon stopped — for she had discovered that I became claustrophobic when she showed a possessive interest in my life. I shied from her just as — I did not realize it then — I shied from the possessive invasion of my mother. That afternoon, she was satisfied that I seemed untroubled and relaxed.

She did not ask a straight question or inquire too hard. We were still natural with each other. She told me stories of an inspector’s visit to her school, and how he was terrified that she was chasing him. Marion had developed a self-depreciating mode of humour, and I found it very funny. The earnestness of manner was disappearing fast, now that she had discovered that she could amuse.

We laughed together, until it became time for me to go to my Inn. I had to score my dinner there, or otherwise I should need to stay an extra night; I left straight after and joined Marion at the theatre. She might be losing her earnestness, but she was still in the avant garde of the twenties and she had chosen to see a Pirandello. I bought the tickets. I was cross at her letting me do so; for she had a regular salary, and she knew that each shilling mattered to me. But when I saw her sitting by me, waiting for the curtain to go up, I could not grudge her the treat. She was as naïvely expectant, as blissful to be there, as a child at a pantomime. It was not that she was ungenerous with money, or unthoughtful, but that she consumedly loved being given a treat, being taken out. She was never disappointed. Every treat was always a success. She was disappointed if, immediately afterwards, one said it was a hopeless play. She did not like the gilt taken away at once, though a week later she would be as critical as any of us. That night, on our way to St Pancras by the tube, she was a little tender-minded because I made fun of Pirandello.

I desisted. I did not want to spoil her pleasure. And, on the foggy platform, I was warmed by affection for her — affection the more glowing (it did not seem shameful as I laughed at her) because of a letter in my pocket whose words I carried before my eyes. At St Pancras we coughed in the sulphurous fog.

‘Fancy having to go back tonight,’ said Marion. ‘I shall be hours late. I pity the children tomorrow. I shall smack them and shout at them.’

‘Poor dear, you’ll be tired,’ I said.

‘I shan’t get home till four,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind a bit. And that’s as much in the way of thanks as is good for you.’

Instead of going straight from the station to Judd Street, I found a coffee stall along the Euston Road. The fog, thickening every minute, swirled in front of the lamp, and one inhaled it together with the naphtha fumes and the steam. As I drank a cup of tea, I felt the glow of affection with me still. Then I took out Sheila’s letter and read it, though I knew it by heart and word for word, in the foggy lamplight. I felt giddy with miraculous content. The name stood out in the dim light, like no other name. I felt giddy, as though the perfection of the miracle would happen now, and I should have her by my side, and we should walk together through the swirling fog.

When I next met Sheila she was strangely excited. I saw it before she spoke to me, saw it while she made her way through the café towards our table. She was electric with excitement; yet what she had to say, though it filled me with pleasure, did not explain why. Without any preliminary she broke out: ‘You know the Edens, don’t you?’

‘I know him, of course. I’ve never been to the house.’

‘We drink punch there every Christmas Eve,’ she said, and added: ‘I love punch,’ with that narcissistic indrawn satisfaction which took her far away. Then, electric-bright again, she said: ‘I can take anyone I like. ‘Will you come with me?’

I was open in my pleasure.

‘I want you to,’ she said, and I still noticed the intensity of her excitement. ‘Make a note of it. I shan’t let you forget.’

I could not understand, in the days between, why she laid so much stress on it, but I looked forward happily to Christmas Eve. The more happily, perhaps, because it was like an anticipation in childhood; it was like waiting for a present that one knew all the time one was safely going to receive. I imagined beforehand the warmth of a party, Harry Eden’s surprise, the flattery of being taken there by the most beautiful young woman in the room — but above all the warmth of a party and the certain joy of her presence by my side among the drinks and laughter.

On the day before Christmas Eve I was having a cup of tea alone in our habitual café. A waitress came up and asked if I was Mr Eliot: a lady wanted me on the telephone.

‘Is that you?’ It was Sheila’s voice, though I had never heard it before at the other end of a wire. It sounded higher than in life, and remote, as though it came from the far side of a river.

‘I didn’t think they’d recognize you from my description. I didn’t think I should find you.’

She sounded strung up but exhilarated, laughing to herself.

‘It’s me all right,’ I said.

‘Of course it’s you.’ She laughed. ‘Who else could it be?’ I grumbled that this was like a conversation in a fairy tale. ‘Right. Business. About tomorrow night.’ Her voice was sharp. My heart dropped.

‘You’re corning, darling?’ I pleaded. I could not keep the longing back: she had to hear it. ‘You must come. I’ve been counting on it—’

‘I’ll come.’

I exclaimed with relief and delight.

‘I’ll come. But I shall be late. Go to the party by yourself. I’ll see you there.’

I was so much relieved that I would have made any concession. As a matter of form, I protested that it would have been nice to go together.

‘I can’t. I can’t manage it. You can make yourself at home. You won’t mind. You can make yourself at home anywhere.’ She laughed again.

‘But you will come?’

‘I’ll come.’

I was vaguely upset. Why was she keyed up to a pitch of excitement even higher than when she first invited me? I felt for a moment that she was a stranger. But she had never failed me. I knew that she would come. The promise of love, of romantic love, of love where one’s imagination makes the beloved fit all one’s hope, enveloped me again. Once more I longed for tomorrow night, the party, for her joining me as I sat among the rest.

The Edens lived outside the middle of the town, in the fashionable suburb. I strolled slowly across the park on Christmas Eve, up the London Road; I heard a clock strike; the party began at nine o’clock, and I was deliberately a little late. A church stood open, light streaming through the doors. Cars rushed by, away from the town, but the pavement was almost empty, apart from an occasional couple standing beneath the trees in the mild night.

I came to where the comfortable middle-class houses stood back from the main road, with their hedges, their lawns, their gravel drives. Through the curtains of the drawing-rooms the lights glowed warm, and I felt curious; as I often did, walking any street at night, about what was going on behind the blinds. That Christmas Eve, the sight of those glowing rooms made me half-envious, even then, going to a rendezvous in my limitless expectancy; here seemed comfort, here seemed repose and a safe resting place; I envied all behind the blinds, even while, in the flush of youth and drunkenness of love, I despised them also, all those who stayed in the safe places and were not going out that night; I envied them behind the glowing curtains, and I despised them for not being on their way to a beloved.

The Edens’ drawing-room was cheerful with noise when I entered. There was a great fire, and the party sitting round. On the hearth stood an enormous bowl, with bottles beside it, glinting in the firelight. All over the drawing-room there wafted a scent of rum, oranges, and lemons. Under the holly and mistletoe and tinsel drifted that rich odour.

Eden was sitting, with an air of extreme permanence, in an armchair by the fireplace. He greeted me warmly. ‘I’m very glad to see you, Eliot. This is the young man I told you about—’ He introduced me to his wife. ‘He’s a friend of Sheila Knight’s — but I’ve known him on my own account for, let me see, it must be well over a year. When you get to my age, Eliot, you’ll find time goes uncomfortably fast.’ He went on explaining me to his wife. ‘Yes, I gave him some excellent advice which he was much too enterprising to take. Still, there’s nothing like being a young man in a hurry.’

Mrs Eden was kneeling on the hearthrug, busy with hieratic earnestness at the mixing of the punch. The liquid itself was steaming in the hearth; she had come to the point of slicing oranges and throwing in the pieces. She was pale-faced, with an immensely energetic, jerky, and concentrated manner. She had bright, brown eyes, opaque as a bird’s. She fixed them on me as she went on slicing.

‘How long have you known Sheila, Mr Eliot?’ she asked, as though the period were of the most critical importance.

I told her.

‘She has such style,’ said Mrs Eden with concentration.

Mrs Eden was enthusiastic about most things, but especially so about Sheila. She was quite unembarrassed by her admiration; it was easy to think of her as a girl, concentrated and intent, unrestrained in a schwärmerei, bringing some mistress flowers and gifts. At any rate, I wondered (I might be distorting her remarks through my own emotion) whether she too was not impatient for Sheila’s arrival. With hieratic seriousness she went on cutting the oranges, dropping in the peel. It was luxuriously warm by the fire, the punch was smoking, Eden lay back with a sigh of reminiscent well-being, and began to talk to us — in those days,’ he said, meaning the days of his youth, the turn of the century. I looked at the clock. It was nine-twenty. The others were listening to Eden, watching his wife prepare the punch. They were jolly and relaxed. I could scarcely wait for the minutes to pass and my heart was pounding.

To all of them except to Eden I was someone who Sheila Knight had picked up, how they did not know. They were a different circle from ours, more prosperous and more comfortably middle class. The Edens liked entertaining, and they had a weakness for youth, so nearly all the people round the fire were young, the sons and daughters of some of Eden’s clients. The young men were beginning in their professions and in the local firms. Eden had once, with his fair-minded sense of etiquette, invited George to join one of the parties, but George, horrified at the prospect, had made a stiff excuse and kept away. So there were no links between us — they had never heard my name. Sheila, however, had visited the house quite often, possibly owing to the enthusiasm of Mrs Eden, and everyone there had either met her or knew her family — for Mrs Knight was prepared to include the prosperous town families in her ambit, as well as her county friends.

One or two of them inspected me inquisitively. I was quiet, apart from keeping Eden’s reminiscences going. I was watching the clock. I did not take much part in the circle; the voices round were loud and careless, but as the minutes passed I was not listening to them, only for a ring at the bell outside.

‘Punch is ready,’ said Mrs Eden, suddenly and with energy.

‘Ah well,’ said Eden, ‘I like the sound of that.’

‘Shall we wait for Sheila?’ Mrs Eden’s eyes darted round the circle.

Cheerily, the circle voted against.

‘I really don’t see why we should,’ said Eden. ‘Last come, last served. What do you think, Eliot? I fancy your friend Sheila won’t mind if we proceed to the business of the meeting. You can explain to her afterwards that it’s what happens to young women when they’re late.’

The seconds were pounding on, but under Eden’s affable badinage I felt proprietorial. I answered that I was sure she would not mind. The circle cheered. Mrs Eden dipped a ladle in the bowl and intently filled each glass but one.

The punch was hot, spiced, and strong. After the first round the circle became noisier, Eden’s reminiscences had to give way, someone suggested a game. All the time I was listening. It was past ten o’clock. At last I heard, I heard unmistakably after the false hopes, the sound of a car in the drive. On the instant, I felt superlative content.

‘Sheila,’ said Mrs Eden with bright eyes.

For minutes I basked in well-being. I could sit back now she would soon be here, and not stare each moment at the door. I did not even need to listen too hard to the sounds outside.

The door opened. Sheila came in, radiant. Behind her followed a man.

Sheila came up to Mrs Eden, her voice sharp with excitement. ‘I’m being extremely rude,’ she said. ‘Will you let me stay if I bring someone else? We’ve been having dinner, and I thought you wouldn’t mind giving him some punch too. This is Doctor Devitt. He works at the infirmary.’

I heard Mrs Eden saying ‘We need another glass. That’s all. Sit down, Dr Devitt. I’ll get a glass for you.’

Her first response was always action. Perhaps she had not given a thought to what was happening. In any case, she could not resist Sheila, who only had to ask.

Through the haze I watched Eden smile politely, not his full, bland, melon-lipped smile, at Sheila and the other man. Eden looked at me. Was he puzzled? Did he understand? Was he looking at me with pity?

I had known, from the instant I saw her enter. It was not chance. It was deliberate. It was planned.

The room swam, faces came larger than life out of the mist, receded, voices were far away, then crashingly near. Somehow I managed to speak to Eden, to ask him some meaningless question.

The circle was being expanded, to bring in two more chairs. Sheila and Devitt sat down, Sheila between him and me. As Mrs Eden filled two glasses, Sheila said: ‘Can Lewis have another one? Let me pass it.’ She took my tumbler without a word between us. Intently, Mrs Eden filled it and gave it back to Sheila, who turned and put it into my hand. ‘There,’ she said.

Her face was smoother than I had ever seen it. It was open before me, and there seemed no trace or warning of her lines. Until her eyes swept up from the glass, which she watched into my fingers as though anxious not to spill a drop, until her eyes swept up and I could see nothing else, I watched (as if it had nothing to do with the mounting tides of pain, the sickness of misery, the rage of desire) her face — open, grave, pure and illuminated.

The circle went on with a game. It was a game in which one had to guess words. The minutes went by, they might have been hours, while I heard Sheila shouting her guesses from my side. Sometimes I shouted myself. And afterwards I remembered Eden, sitting quietly in his armchair, a little put out because the party chose to play this game instead of listening to him; Eden sitting quietly because he was not quick at guessing and so withdrew.

Midnight struck.

‘Christmas Day,’ said Mrs Eden; and, with her usual promptness, went on: ‘Merry Christmas to you all.’

I heard Sheila, at my side, return the greeting.

Soon after, people began to stand up, for the party was ending. At once Sheila went to the other side of the hearth, and started to talk to Mrs Eden. Tom Devitt and I were standing close together — and, through the curious intimacy of rivals, we were drawn to speak.

He was much older than I was, and to me looked middle-aged. He was, I later found, in the middle thirties. His face was heavy, furrowed, kind, and intelligent. We were both tall, and our eyes met at the same level, but already he was getting fat, and his hair was going.

Awkwardly, with kindness, he asked about my studies. He said that Sheila had told him how I was working. He said, with professional concern, that I looked as though I might be overdoing it. Was I short of sleep? Had I anything to help me through a bad night?

I replied that it did not matter, and retaliated by telling him there was a crack in one of his spectacles: oughtn’t he to have it mended?

‘It’s too near the eye to affect vision,’ said Tom Devitt. ‘But I do need another pair.’

In the, clairvoyance of misery, I knew some vital things about him. I knew that he was in love with Sheila. I knew that he was triumphant to be taking her out that night. He was concerned for me because of his own triumph at being the preferred one. But I knew too that he was a kind, decent man, not at all unperceptive; he realized the purpose for which she had used him, and was angry; he had had no warning until he arrived in that room, and saw that I had already been invited as her partner.

We stood there, talking awkwardly — and we felt sorry for each other. We felt that, with different luck, we should have been friends.

Sheila beckoned to him. I followed them out of the room: at all costs I must speak to her. Any quarrel, any bitterness, was better than this silence.

But they were putting on their coats, and she stayed by Tom Devitt.

‘I’m driving him to the infirmary,’ she said to me, ‘Can we give you a lift?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh well.’ She gazed at me. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

They went out of the door together. Just as they got to the car, I saw Devitt turn towards her, as though asking a question. His face was frowning, but at her reply it lightened with a smile.

The hum of the car died at last away. While I could hear it, she was not quite gone. Then I went home the way I had come, four hours before. I was blind with misery; yet as I crossed the park under the dark, low, starless sky, there were moments when I could not believe it, when absurdly I was invaded by the hope that had uplifted me on the outward journey. It was like those times in misery when one is cheated by a happy dream.

Blindly I came home to my room. Under the one bare light the chair and table and bed stood blank before my eyes. They were blank as the darkness into which I stared for hours, lying awake that night. I stared into the darkness while mood after mood took hold of me, as changeable as the fever and chill of an illness, as ravaging and as much beyond my control. I could have cried, if only the tears would come. I twisted about in a paroxysm of longing. I was seized by a passion of temper, and I could have strangled her.

I had been humiliated once before — on that morning as a child, the memory of which possessed me for a moment in the night, when I offered my mother’s ten-shilling note. As a rule, I did not look for or find humiliation. I was no George Passant, going through the world expecting affronts and feeling them to the marrow of his bones. For my age, I got off lightly, in being free from most of the minor shames. But when humiliation came, it seared me, so that all my hidden pride shrieked out, and in bitterness I vowed that this must be the end, that I would make sure that I never so much as saw her again, that I would act as though she had never been. Yet, turning over on to the other side, praying for sleep, I hoped, hoped for a word that would put it right. It had been an accident, I thought; she was remote, she lived in a world of her own; she had just happened to see him that night. There must be a simple explanation. With the foolish detailed precision of love, I recalled each word between us since she invited me to go to the Edens’; and I proved to myself in that armistice of hope, that it was a series of coincidences, and none of it was meant. Tomorrow, no, the day after, I should receive a letter which would resolve it all. She might not know how I had been hurt. At the Edens’ she had been light and friendly to me, as though we should meet soon after on our usual terms. Her manner had been the same to both of us. She had not looked at him lovingly.

Then I knew jealousy. Where had they gone after the car drove away? Had he kissed her? Had he slept with her? Were they, at this moment when I was lying sleepless, in each other’s arms? For the first time in my thoughts of Sheila, my sensual imagination was active, merciless, gave me no rest.

The night ticked by, slower than my racing heart. Again I knew that it was all planned. Again, with detailed precision, but with another purpose, I went over each word that she had spoken since her invitation — her excitement when she first asked me to go, her tense exaltation, the tone in which she had telephoned at the cafe. It was the edge of cruelty. I had been hurt by motiveless cruelty on that morning of childish humiliation — but this was the first time I had felt cruelty in love. Did I know that night that it was the end of innocence? I felt much that I had imagined of love stripped from me by her outrage, and in the darkness, I saw in her and in myself a depth which was black with hate, and from which, even in misery, I shrank back appalled. I had always known it in myself, but kept my eyes away; now her outrage made me look.

In the creeping winter dawn, my thoughts had become just two. The first was, I must dismiss her from my mind, I must forget her name — and, as I got more tired, I kept holding to that resolve. The second was, how soon would she write to me, so that I could see her again?

The days passed; and, working in my room, a veil kept coming between my eyes and the page. When the veil came, I would hear some phrase of Sheila’s, and that set going my thoughts as through the sleepless night I sat there at my books, but I could not force my eyes to clear.

I heard nothing, I saw no one, I received no letter, for day after day. George and Jack and I had arranged to meet to see the new year in; but after one drink George went off to an ‘important engagement’, and Jack and I were left alone.

‘He must have found somebody,’ said Jack. ‘Good luck to him.’

We argued about how we should spend the night. Jack’s idea was that there could be no better way than of going to the local palais-de-danse and picking up two girls; but, at the mention of the word, I re-heard Sheila saying ‘we went to the palais’, and I could not face the faintest chance, the one chance in ten thousand, of seeing her there.

I wanted to stay in the public house, drinking. Jack was discontented, but, in his good-natured way, agreed. For him, it was a sacrifice. It was only to be convivial, and because he liked us, that he endured long drinking parties with George and me.

Amiably he sipped at his whisky, and made a slight face. He was so accommodating that I wanted to explain why I could not go to the palais; I was also longing to confide, and I knew that I should get sympathy and some kind of understanding; yet when I began, my pride clutched me, and the story came out, thin, half-humorous, so garbled that he could get no inkling either of my humiliation or my aching emptiness as each day passed. Even so, I got some relief, perhaps more than if I had exposed the truth.

‘We all have lovers’ quarrels,’ said Jack.

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

‘It’s sweet when you make it up,’ said Jack.

He smiled at me.

‘You’ve got to be a bit firm,’ he said. ‘See that she apologizes. Box her ears and make her feel a little girl. Then be specially nice to her.’ He went on: ‘It’s all right as long as you don’t take it too tragically. You watch yourself, Lewis. Mind you don’t get all the anguish and none of the fun. You’d better get her where you want her this time. I’ll tell you how I managed it last week—’

Thus I spent the last hours of 1925 listening to Jack Cotery on the predicaments and tactics of a love affair; of how he had changed a reverse into a victory; of comic misfortune, of tears that were part of the game, of tears that turned into luxurious sighs. And, listening to his eloquence, I was solaced, I half believed that things would go that way for me.

The first days of January. Not a word. The voice of sense gave way, and I began to write a letter. Then my pride held me on the edge, and I tore it up. When I could not sleep, I dragged myself out of bed to work. I did not know how long such a state could last. I had nothing to compare it with. I went on — with ‘automatic competence’, a clear high voice taunted me, more piercing than any voice of those I met. I worked to tire myself, so that I should sleep late into the morning. I was living always for the next day.

Before Christmas the group had arranged to go out to the farm for the first weekend of the year. I had promised to join the party. But now I recoiled from company, I told George that I could not go. ‘You’re forgetting your responsibilities,’ he said stiffly. There were other times when I craved for any kind of human touch. I went the round of pubs, talking to barmaids and prostitutes, anything for a smile. It was in one of those storms that I changed my mind again. On the Friday night I sought George out, and told him that I should like to come after all. ‘I’m glad to see you’re back in your right mind,’ said George. Then he asked formally: ‘Nothing seriously wrong with your private affairs, I hope?’

For George, it was a great weekend. Everyone was there, and he could bask right in the heart of his ‘little world’, surrounded by people whom he loved and looked after, where all his diffidence, prickles, suspiciousness, and angry defiance were swept away, where he felt utterly serene. At the farm, surrounded by his group, one saw George at his best. He was a natural leader, though, because of the quirks of his nature, it had to be a leader in obscurity, a leader of a revolt that never came off. He was a strange character — many people thought him so bizarre as to be almost mad: yet no one ever met him, however much they suppressed their own respect, without thinking that he was built on the lines of a great man.

Seated at the supper table, outside the golden circle of the oil lamp, George was at his best. Each word he spoke was listened to, even in the gossip, chatter, and argument of the group. That night he talked to us of freedom — how, if we had the will (and that it would never have occurred to him to doubt), we could make our children’s lives the best there had ever been in the world. Not only by making a better society, in which they would stand a fair chance, but also by bringing them up free and happy. ‘The good in men is incomparably more important than the evil,’ said George. ‘Whatever happens, we’ve always got to remember that.’

The whole group was moved, for he had spoken from a great depth. That was his message, and it came from a man who struggled with himself. When Jack, the most impudent person there, twitted him and said the evil could be very delectable, George shouted: ‘I don’t call that evil. It’s half the trouble that for hundreds of years all the priests and parents and pundits have tried to make us miserable by a load of guilt.’

I had not said much that supper time, for my mind was absent, thinking of a recent supper at that table, when I came in wet, alight with a secret happiness. For a moment I shook off my preoccupation, my own load, and looked at George. For I knew that he, more than most of us, was burdened by a sense of guilt — and so he demanded that we should all be free.

After supper, we broke into twos and threes, and Marion and I began to talk out in the window bay. She had just returned from her Christmas holidays, and it was three weeks since we had met.

‘I need your help,’ she said at once.

‘What about?’

‘I’ve got a problem for you.’ Then she added: ‘What were you thinking about just now?’

‘What’s your problem, Marion?’ I said, wanting to evade the question.

‘Never mind for a minute. What were you thinking about? I’ve never seen you look so far away.’

‘I was thinking about George.’

‘Were you?’ she said doubtfully. ‘When you’re thinking of someone, you usually watch them — with those damned piercing eyes of yours, don’t you? You weren’t watching George. You weren’t watching any of us.’

I had had time to collect myself, and I told her that I had been thinking of George’s message of freedom compared with the doctrine of original sin. Often she would have been interested, for she tried to get me to talk about people; but just then she did not believe a word of it, she was angry at being put off. Impatiently, as though irrelevantly, she burst out ‘Why in heaven’s name don’t you learn to keep your tie straight? You’re a disgrace.’

It was really a bitter cry, because I would not confide. I felt ashamed of myself because I was fond of her — but also I felt the more wretched, the more strained, because she was pressing me. It was by an effort that I kept back a cold answer. Instead, I said, as though we were both joking about our untidiness: ‘I must say, that doesn’t come too well from you.’

Jack was close by, talking to another girl, with an ear cocked in our direction. He moved away, as though he had not overhead anything of meaning in our words.

Again I asked about her problem.

‘You won’t be very interested,’ said Marion.

‘Of course I’m interested,’ I said.

She hesitated about telling me; but she wanted to, she had it ready. She had been offered a job in her own town. It was a slightly better job, in a central school. If she were to make a career of teaching, it would be sensible to take it. She could live with her sister, and save a good deal of money.

She wanted me to say, without weighing any of her arguments, just: you’re not to go. Increasingly I felt myself constrained, the offender (increasingly I longed for the lightness that came over me as I talked to Sheila), because I could not. I was tongue-tied, and all I had to say came heavily. My spontaneity had deserted me quite. Yet I should miss her, miss her with an ache of affection, if she went. I knew that somehow I relied on her, even as I tried to speak fairly and she watched me with mutinous eyes and gave me curt, rude answers. I tried to think only of what was best for her — and for that she could not listen to me or forgive me.

George called out heartily: ‘Lewis, are you coming for a constitutional?’

This was a code invitation, devised to meet the need of his curious sense of etiquette in front of the young women: a ‘constitutional’ meant going down the road to the public house, sitting there for an hour or so, and then coming back, ready to talk until the next morning. That night I was glad to escape from the house; no one else stirred, and George and I went across the field together.

Suddenly, on an impulse that I could not drive down, I said: ‘George, I’m going to leave you for an hour. I’m going for a walk.’

At first George was puzzled. Then, with extreme quickness, with massive tact, he said ‘I quite understand, old chap. I quite understand.’ He gave a faint, sympathetic, contented chuckle. He proceeded to go through one of his elaborate wind-ups: ‘I take it you might prefer me to practise a little judicious prevarication? If we walk back from the pub together, there’s no compelling reason why our friends should realize that you’ve been engaged on — other activities.’

In fact, I had no thought of seeing Sheila. Alone in the dark, I made my way through the lanes, drawn as though by instinct towards her house. I could not have said why I was going except that each yard I covered gave me some surcease. I knew that I should not see her with the relic of reason and pride, I knew that it would have been disastrous to see her. Yet on the way, across the same fields that I had first seen in a downpour with so much joy, surrendered to the impulse that drew me across the fields, down the lanes, towards her house, I felt a peace, such as I had not known since Christmas Eve. It was a precarious peace, it might break at any moment; but I was closer to her, and my whole body melted into the mirage of well-being.

In the village, I drew up my coat collar. I could not bear the risk of being recognized, if one of the family happened to be out that night. I kept in the shadow, away from the lights of the cottage windows. From the bar parlour came loud and raucous singing. I went past the lych-gate: the spire was dark against the stars. I could see the serene lights of the vicarage. I stopped before the drive, huddled myself against a tree, hidden in case anyone should drive out: there I stood, without moving, without any thought or plan. The drawing room windows were lit up, and so was one on the next floor. I did not even know her room. Was that her room? — the real room, instead of that which, in the first rapture, I had pictured to myself. Was she there, away from anyone who pried, away from anyone who troubled her? Was she there at that moment, writing to me?

No shadow crossed the window. I did not feel the cold. I could not have said how many minutes passed, before I went back again, keeping to the dark side, down the village street.

Back in my room, I slept through broken nights and worked and gazed over the roofs, and all my longings had become one longing — just to be in touch again. The shock of Christmas Eve had been softened by now, and the pain dulled: pride alone was not much of a restraint to keep my hand from the pen, from the comfort of writing Dearest Sheila. Yet I did not write.

Monday went by, after the weekend when I stood outside her house. Tuesday. Wednesday. I longed that we could have some friend in common, so that I could hear of her and drop a remark, as though casually, that I was waiting. A friend could help us both, I thought, could put in a word for me. Apart from our meetings — I was glad to think so, for it shifted the blame outside ourselves, gave me something which could be altered and so a scrap of hope — we had none of the reminders of each other, the everyday gossip, of people who lived in the same circle. My friends inhabited a different world: so far as they knew her, they hated her; while hers I did not know at all.

I was impelled to discover what I could about Tom Devitt. I dug my nails into the flesh, and willed that I must put him out of my mind, together with the scene at the Edens’ — together with Sheila and what I felt for her. On the Monday after I returned from the farm, however, I found myself making an excuse to go to the reference library. There was some point not covered by my textbook. In the library I looked it up, but I could safely have left it; it was of no significance at all, and for such a point I should never have troubled to come. I browsed aimlessly by the shelves which contained Who’s Who, Whitaker, Crockford (where I had already long since looked up the Reverend Laurence Knight), and the rest. Almost without looking, I was puffing out the Medical Directory. Devitt A T N; the letters seemed embossed. It did not say when he was born, but he had been a medical student at Leeds and qualified in 1914 (when she and I were nine years old, I thought with envy). In the war, he had been in the RAMC, and had been given a Military Cross (again I was stabbed with envy). Then he had held various jobs in hospitals: in 1924 he had become registrar at the infirmary; I did not know then what the hospital jobs meant, nor the title registrar. I should have liked to know how good a career it had been, and what his future was.

The Thursday of that week was a bright cold sunny day of early January. In the afternoon I was working in my overcoat, with a blanket round my legs. When I looked up from my notebook I could see, for the table stood close to the window, the pale sunlight silvering the tiles.

Someone was climbing up the attic stairs. There was a sharp knock, and my door was thrown open. Sheila came into the room. With one hand she shut the door behind her, but she was looking at me with a gaze expressionless and fixed. She took two steps into the room, then stopped quite still. Her face was pale, hard, without a smile. Her arms were at her sides. I had jumped up, forgetting everything but that she was here, my arms open for her; but when she stayed still, so did I, frozen.

‘I’ve come to see you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t seen you since that night. You’re thinking about that night.’ Her voice was louder than usual.

‘I’m bound to think of it.’

‘Listen to this: I did it on purpose.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because you made me angry.’ Her eyes were steady, hypnotic in their glitter. ‘I’ve not come to tell you that I’m sorry.’

‘You ought to be,’ I said.

‘I’m not sorry.’ Her voice had risen. ‘I’m glad I did it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said in anger.

‘I tell you, I’m glad I did it.’

We were standing a yard apart. Her arms were still at her sides, and she had not moved. She said ‘You can hit me across the face.’

I looked at her, and her eyes flickered.

‘You should,’ she said.

As I looked at her, in the bright light from the window behind my back, I saw the whites of her eyes turn bloodshot. Then tears formed, and slowly trickled down her cheeks. She did not raise a hand to touch them. As she cried, dreadfully still, the hard fierce poise of her face was dissolved away, and her beauty, and everything I recognized.

I took her by the shoulders, and led her, very gently, to sit on the bed. She came without resistance, as though she were a robot. I kissed her on the lips, told her for the first time in words that I loved her, and wiped away the tears.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you,’ cried Sheila, in a tone that tore my heart open for myself and her. She kissed me with a sudden desperate energy, with her mouth forced on to mine; her arms were convulsively tight; then she let go, pressed her face into the counterpane, and began to cry again. But this time she cried with her shoulders heaving, with relief; I sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand, waiting till she was exhausted; and in those moments I was possessed by the certainty that no love of innocence, no love in which she had been only the idol of my imagination, could reach as deep as that which I now knew.

For now I had seen something frightening, and I loved her, seeing something of what she was. I felt for her a curious detached pity in the midst of the surge of love — and I realized that it was the first ignorant forerunner of pity that I had felt for her in her mother’s drawing-room. I felt a sense of appalling danger for her, and, yes, for me: of a life so splintered and remote that I might never reach it; of cruelty and suffering that I could not soften. Yet I had never felt so transcendentally free. Holding her hand as she cried, I loved her, I believed that she in part loved me, and that we should be happy.

She raised her head, sniffed, blew her nose, and smiled. We kissed again. She said ‘Turn your head. I want to see you.’

She smiled, half-sarcastically, half-tearfully, as she inspected me. She said ‘You look rather sweet with lipstick on.’

I told her that her face, foreshortened as I saw it when I kissed her, was different from the face that others saw: its proportions quite changed, its classical lines destroyed, much more squashed, imperfect, and human.

I asked her again about Christmas Eve.

‘Why did you do it?’

She said ‘I’m hateful. I thought you were too possessive.’

‘Possessive?’ I cried.

‘You wanted me too much,’ said Sheila.

I inquired about Tom. We were sitting side by side, with arms round each other. In the same heartbeat I was jealous and reassured.

‘Do you love him?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sheila. She exclaimed in a high voice: ‘I wish I did. He’s a good man. He’s too good for me He’s a better man than you are.’

‘He loves you,’ I said.

‘I think he wants to marry me,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I don’t love him.’ Then she said: ‘Sometimes I think I shall never love anyone.’

She pulled down my face and kissed me.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you. Get me out of this. I trust you to get me out of this.’

I heard her say once more: ‘I don’t love you, but I trust you.’

I told her that I loved her, the words set free and pouring over: I was forced to speak, able to speak, deliriously happy to speak, as I had never yet spoken to a human being. ‘Get me out of this’ — that cry turned the key in the lock. I did not know what she meant, and yet it lured me on. I was utterly released, there was no pride, no reserve left, as there was when my mother, when Marion, invaded me with love. Seeing her at last as a person, not just an image in a dream, I threw aside my own burden of self. I told her, the words came bursting out, of every feeling that had possessed me since we first met. In this other nature, remote from anything I knew, I could abandon all, except my passion for her. In her arms, hearing that mysterious and remote cry, I lost myself.