Time of Hope

Part Five The Hard Way

I was early for my first interview with Herbert Getliffe. It was raining, and so I could not spin out the minutes in the Temple gardens; I arrived at the foot of the staircase, and it was still too wet to stay there studying the names. Yet I gave them a glance.

Lord Waterfield

Mr H Getliffe

Mr W Allen

and then a column of names, meaningless to me, some faded, some with the paint shining and black. As I rushed into the shelter of the staircase, I wondered how they would find room for my name at the bottom, and whether Waterfield ever visited the Chambers, now that he had been in the cabinet for years.

The rain pelted down outside, and my feet clanged on the stone stairs. The set of Chambers was three flights up, there was no one on the staircase, the doors were shut, there was no noise except the sound of rain. On the third floor the door was open, a light shone in the little ball; even there, though, there was no one moving, I could hear no voices from the rooms around.

Then I did hear a voice, a voice outwardly deferential, firm, smooth, but neither gentle nor genteel.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

I said that I had an appointment with Getliffe.

‘I’m the clerk here. Percy Hall.’ He was looking at me with an appraising eye, but in the dim hall, preoccupied with the meeting to come, I did not notice much about him.

‘I suppose’, he said, ‘you wouldn’t happen to be the young gentleman who wants to come here as a pupil, would you?’

I said that I was.

‘I thought as much,’ said Percy. He told me that Getliffe was expecting me, but was not yet back from lunch; meanwhile I had better wait in Getliffe’s room. Percy led the way to the door at the end of the hall. As he left me, he said ‘When you’ve finished with Mr Getliffe, sir, I hope you’ll call in for a word with me.’

It sounded like an order.

I looked round the room. It was high, with panelled walls, and it had, so Percy had told me, been Waterfield’s. When Waterfield went into politics, so Percy again had told me, Getliffe had moved into the room with extreme alacrity. It smelt strongly that afternoon of a peculiar brand of tobacco. I was not specially nervous, but that smell made me more alert; this meeting mattered; I had to get on with Getliffe. I thought of the photograph that Eden had shown me, of himself and Getliffe, after a successful case. Getliffe had appeared large, impassive, and stern.

I was impatient now. It was a quarter of an hour past the time he had given me. I got up from the chair, looked at the briefs on the table and the picture over the fireplace, the books on the shelves. I stared out of the windows, high and wide and with their shutters folded back. Alert, I stared down at the gardens, empty in the dark, rainy, summer afternoon. And beyond was the river.

As I was standing by the window, there was a bustle outside the room, and Getliffe came in. My first sight of him was a surprise. In the photograph he had appeared large, impassive, and stern. In the flesh, as he came bustling in, late and flustered, he was only of middle height, and seemed scarcely that because of the way he dragged his feet. He had his underlip thrust out in an affable grin, so that there was something at the same time gay and shamefaced about his expression. He suddenly confronted me with a fixed gaze from brown opaque and lively eyes.

‘Don’t tell me your name,’ he began, in a slightly strident, breathless voice. ‘You’re Ellis—’

I corrected him.

With almost instantaneous quickness, he was saying: ‘You’re Eliot.’ He repeated: ‘You’re Eliot,’ with an intonation of reproof, as though the mistake had been my fault.

He sat down, lit his pipe, grinned, and puffed out smoke. He talked matily, perfunctorily, about Eden. Then he switched on his fixed gaze. His eyes confronted me. He said: ‘So you want to come in here, do you?’

I said that I did.

‘I needn’t tell you, Eliot, that I have to refuse more pupils than I can take. It’s one of the penalties of being on the way up. Not that one wants to boast. This isn’t a very steady trade that you and I have chosen, Eliot. Sometimes I think we should have done better to go into the Civil Service and become deputy-under-principal secretaries and get two thousand pounds a year at fifty-five and our YMCA or XYZ some bright new year.’

At this time I was not familiar with Getliffe’s allusive style, and I was slow to realize that he was referring to the orders of knighthood.

‘Still one might be doing worse. And people seem to pass the word round that the briefs are coming in. I want to impress on you, Eliot, that I’ve turned down ten young men who wanted to be pupils — and that’s only in the last year. It’s not fair to take them unless one has the time to look after them and bring them up in the way they should go. I hope you’ll always remember that.’

Getliffe was full of responsibility, statesmanship, and moral weight. His face was as stern as in the photograph. He was enjoying his own seriousness and uprightness, even though he had grossly exaggerated the number of pupils he refused. Then he said: ‘Well, Eliot, I wanted you to understand that it’s not easy for me to take you. But I shall. I make it a matter of principle to take people like you, who’ve started with nothing but their brains. I make it a matter of principle.’

Then he gave his shamefaced, affable chuckle. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘it keeps the others up to it.’ He grinned at me: his mood had changed, his face was transformed, he was guying all serious persons.

‘So I shall take you,’ said Getliffe, serious and responsible again, fixing me with his gaze. ‘If our clerk can fit you in. I’m going to stretch a point and take you.’

‘I’m very grateful,’ I said. I knew that, as soon as the examination result was published, he had insisted to Eden that I was to be steered towards his Chambers.

‘I’m very grateful,’ I said, and he had the power of making me feel so.

‘We’ve got a duty towards you,’ said Getliffe, shaking me by the hand. ‘One’s got to look at it like that.’ His eyes stared steadily into mine.

Just then there was a knock on the door, and Percy entered. He came across the room and laid papers in front of Getliffe.

‘I shouldn’t have interrupted you, sir,’ said Percy. ‘But I’ve promised to give an answer. Whether you’ll take this. They’re pressing me about it.’

Getliffe looked even more responsible and grave.

‘Is one justified in accepting any more work?’ he said. ‘I’d like to see my wife and family one of these evenings. And some day I shall begin neglecting one of these jobs.’ He tapped the brief with the bowl of his pipe and looked from Percy to me. ‘If ever you think that is beginning to happen, I want you to tell me straight. I’m glad to think that I’ve never neglected one yet.’ He gazed at me. ‘I shouldn’t be so happy if I didn’t think so.

‘Shall I do it?’ Getliffe asked us loudly.

‘It’s heavily marked,’ said Percy.

‘What’s money?’ said Getliffe.

‘They think you’re the only man for it,’ said Percy.

‘That’s more like talking,’ said Getliffe. ‘Perhaps it is one’s duty. Perhaps I ought to do it. Perhaps you’d better tell them that I will do it — just as a matter of duty.’

When Percy had gone out, Getliffe regarded me.

‘I’m not sorry you heard that,’ he said. ‘You can see why one has to turn away so many pupils? They follow the work, you know. It’s no credit to me, of course, but you’re lucky to come here, Eliot. I should like you to tell yourself that.’

What I should have liked to tell myself was whether or not that scene with Percy was rehearsed.

Then Getliffe began to exhort me: his voice became brisk and strident, he took the pipe out of his mouth and waved the stem at me.

‘Well, Eliot,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a year here as a pupil. After that we can see whether you’re ever going to earn your bread and butter. Not to speak of a little piece of cake. Mind you, we may have to tell you that it’s not your vocation. One mustn’t shirk one’s responsibilities. Not even the painful ones. One may have to tell you to move a bit farther up the street.’

‘Of course,’ I said, in anger and pride.

‘Still,’ said Getliffe, ‘you’re not going to sink if you can help it. You needn’t tell me that. You’ve got a year as a pupil. And a year’s a long time. Your job is to be as useful as you can to both of us. Start whenever you like. The sooner the better. Start tomorrow.’

Breathlessly, with immense zest, Getliffe produced a list of cases and references, happy with all the paraphernalia of the law, reeling out the names of cases very quickly, waving his pipe as I copied them out.

‘As for the root of all evil,’ said Getliffe, ‘I shall have to charge you the ordinary pupil’s fees. You see, Eliot, one’s obliged to think of the others. Hundred guineas for the year. October to October. If you start early, you don’t have to pay extra,’ said Getliffe with a chuckle. ‘That’s thrown in with the service. Like plain vans. A hundred guineas is your contribution to the collection plate. You can pay in quarters. The advantage of the instalment system’, he added, ‘is that we can reconsider the arrangement for the third and fourth quarters. You may have saved me a little bit of work before then. You may have earned a bit of bread and butter. The labourer is worthy of his hire.’ He smiled, affably, brazenly, and said: ‘Yes! The labourer is worthy of his hire.’

I think I had some idea, even then, of the part Herbert Getliffe was going to play in my career. He warmed me, as he did everyone else. He took me in often, as he did everyone else. He made me feel restrained, by the side of the extravagant and shameless way in which he exhibited his heart. On the way from his room to the clerk’s, I was half aware that this was a tricky character to meet, when one was struggling for a living. I should not have been astonished to be told in advance the part he was going to play. But Percy Hall’s I should not have guessed.

Percy’s room was a box of an office, which had no space for any furniture but a table and a chair; Percy gave me the chair and braced his haunches against the edge of the table. He was, I noticed now, a squat powerful man, with the back of his head rising vertically from his stiff collar. No one ever bore a more incongruous Christian name; and it was perverse that he had a job where, according to custom, everyone called him by it.

‘I want to explain one or two points to you, sir. If you enter these Chambers, there are things I can do for you. I could persuade someone to give you a case before you’ve been here very long. But’ — Percy gave a friendly, brutal, good-natured smile — ‘I’m not going to until I know what you’re like. I’ve got a reputation to lose myself. The sooner we understand each other, the better.’

With a craftsman’s satisfaction, Percy described how he kept the trust of the solicitors; how he never overpraised a young man, but how he reminded them of a minor success; how he watched over a man who looked like training into a winner, and how gradually he fed him with work; how it was no use being sentimental and finding cases for someone who was not fitted to survive.

Percy was able, I was thinking. He liked power and he liked his job — and he liked himself. It was a pleasure to him to be hard and shrewd, not to succumb to facile pity, to be esteemed as a clear-headed man. And he cherished a certain resentment at his luck. He had not had the chances of the men for whose work he foraged; yet he was certain that most of them were weaklings beside himself.

‘I want to know what strings you can pull, sir,’ said Percy. ‘Some of our young gentlemen have uncles or connexions who are solicitors. It turns out very useful sometimes. It’s wonderful how the jobs come in.’

‘I can’t pull any strings,’ I said. He was not a man to fence with. He was rough under the smooth words, and it was wiser to be rough in return.

‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy.

‘I was born poor,’ I said. ‘I’ve got no useful friends. Apart from my studentship — you knew I’d got one?’

‘I see Mr Getliffe’s correspondence, sir,’ said Percy complacently.

‘Apart from that, I’m living on borrowed money. If I can’t earn my keep within three years, I’m finished — so far as this game goes.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Percy. Our eyes met. His face was expressionless.

He said nothing for some moments. He seemed to be assessing the odds. He did not indulge in encouragement. He had, however, read Eden’s letters and, with his usual competence, remembered them in detail. He reminded me that here was one solicitor with whom I had some credit. I said that Eden’s was a conservative old firm in a provincial town.

‘Never mind. They’ve paid Mr Getliffe some nice little fees.’

‘Eden’s got a very high opinion of him.’

‘I suppose so, sir,’ said Percy.

I was fishing for his own opinion, but did not get a flicker of response.

He had asked enough questions for that afternoon, and looked content. He banished my future from the conversation, and told me that he bred goldfish and won prizes for them. Then he decided to show me the place where I should sit for the next year. It was in a room close to Getliffe’s, and the same size. There were already four people in it — Allen, a man well into middle age, who was writing at a roll-top desk, and two young men, one reading at a small table and two others playing chess. Percy introduced me, and I was offered a small table of my own, under one of the windows. The view was different from that in Getliffe’s room: one looked across the gardens to another court, where an occasional light was shining, though it was teatime on a summer afternoon. The river was not visible from this window, but, as I turned away and talked to Allen and the others, I heard a boat hoot twice.

I came to know the view from that window in Chambers very well. I spent weeks in the long vacation there, though it was not realistic to do so. I learned little, and the others had gone away. Getliffe had asked me to produce some notes for him, but I could have taken my books anywhere. Yet I was restless, away from my place: it was as though I had to catch a train.

I was restless through that autumn and winter, through days when, with nothing to do, I gazed down over the gardens and watched the lights come on in the far court. There was nothing to do. Though Getliffe was good at filling in one’s time, though I marked down every case in London that was not sheer routine, still there were days, stretches of days, when all I could do was read as though I were still a student and, instead of gazing from my garret over the roofs, look out instead over the Temple gardens. Some days, in that first year, when I was eating my heart out, that seemed the only change: I had substituted a different view, that was all.

I was too restless to enjoy knowing the others in Getliffe’s chambers. At any other time I should have got more out of them. I struck up an acquaintance, it was true, with Salisbury, who worked in the other room; he had three years’ start on me and was beginning to get a practice together. He boasted that he was earning seven hundred pounds a year, but I guessed that five hundred pounds was nearer the truth. Our acquaintance was a sparring and mistrustful one; he was a protégé of Getliffe’s, which made me envy him, and in turn he saw me as a rival. I half knew that he was a kind, insecure, ambitious man who craved affection and did not expect to be liked; but I was distracted by the sight of his vulpine pitted face bent over his table, as I speculated how he described me to Getliffe behind my back.

Quite often we had a meal together, which was more than I ever did with any of the others. Of the three in my room, Allen was a precise spinster of a man, curiously happy, who said with simple detachment that he had none of the physical force and vitality of a successful barrister; he lived at his club, marked thousands of examination papers, edited volumes of trials, and for ten years past had averaged eight hundred or nine hundred pounds a year; he had a hope, at forty-five, of some modest permanent job, and made subfusc, malicious, aunt-like jokes at Getliffe’s expense; they were cruel, happy jokes, all the happier because they got under Salisbury’s skin. The other two were both pupils, only a term senior to me. One, Snedding, was hard-working and so dense that Percy erased him from serious consideration in his first month. The other, Paget, was a rich and well-connected young man who was spending a year or two at the Bar before managing the family estates. He was civil and deferential to us all in Chambers, and played an adequate game of chess; but outside he lived a smart social life, and politely evaded all invitations from professional acquaintances, much to the chagrin of Salisbury, who was a headmaster’s son and longed for chic.

Paget was no fool, but he was not a menace. I was lucky, I told myself, that neither of those two was a competitor, for it meant that I might get more than my share of the minor pickings. I told myself that I was lucky. But all the luck was put off till tomorrow, and I fretted, lost to reason in my impatience, because tomorrow would not come.

No one was better than Getliffe at keeping his pupils occupied. So Salisbury said, who was fervently loyal to Getliffe and tried to counter all the gossip of the Inn dining table. There were plenty of times when I was too rancorous to hear a word in Getliffe’s favour; yet in fact this one was true. From the day I entered the Chambers, he called me into his room each afternoon that he was not in court. ‘How are tricks?’ he used to say; and, when I mentioned a case, he would expound on it with enthusiasm. It was an enthusiasm that he blew out like his tobacco smoke; it was vitalizing even when, expounding impromptu on any note I wrote for him, he performed his maddening trick of getting every second detail slightly wrong. Usually not wrong enough to matter, but just wrong enough to irritate. He had a memory like an untidy magpie; he knew a lot of law, but if he could remember a name slightly wrong he — almost as though on purpose — managed to. That first slip with my surname was just like him; and afterwards, particularly when he was annoyed, apprehensive, or guilty because of me, he frequently called me Ellis.

So, in the smell of Getliffe’s tobacco, I listened to him as he produced case after case, sometimes incomprehensibly, because of his allusive slang, often inaccurately. He loved the law. He loved parading his knowledge and giving me ‘a tip or two’. When I was too impatient to let a false date pass, he would look shamefaced, and then say: ‘You’re coming on! You’re coming on!’

Then he got into the habit, at the end of such an afternoon, of asking me to ‘try a draft’ — ‘Just write me a note to keep your hand in,’ said Getliffe. ‘Don’t be afraid to spread yourself. You can manage three or four pages. Just to keep you from rusting.’

The first time it happened I read for several afternoons in the Inn library, wrote my ‘opinion’ with care, saw Getliffe flicker his eyes over it and say ‘You’re coming on!’, and then heard nothing more about it. But the second time I did hear something more. Again I had presented the opinion as professionally as I could. Then one morning Getliffe, according to his custom, invited all three of us pupils to attend a conference. The solicitors and clients sat round his table; Getliffe, his pipe put away, serious and responsible, faced them. He began the conference with his usual zest. ‘I hope you don’t think that I’m a man to raise false hopes,’ he said earnestly. ‘One would rather shout the winners out at the back door. But frankly I’ve put in some time on this literature, and I’m ready to tell you that we should be just a little bit over cautious if we didn’t go to court.’ To my astonishment, he proceeded firmly to give the substance of my note. In most places he had not troubled to alter the words.

At the end of that conference, Getliffe gave me what my mother would have called an ‘old-fashioned’ look.

He repeated this manoeuvre two or three times, before, during one of our afternoon tête-à-têtes, he said ‘You’re doing some nice odd jobs for me, aren’t you?’

I was delighted. He was so fresh and open that one had to respond.

‘I wanted to tell you that,’ said Getliffe. ‘I wanted to tell you something else,’ he added with great seriousness. ‘It’s not fair that you shouldn’t get any credit. One must tell people that you’re doing some of the thinking. One’s under an obligation to push your name before the public.’

I was more delighted still. I expected a handsome acknowledgement at the next conference.

I noticed that, just before the conference, Getliffe looked at the other pupils and not at me. But I still had high hopes. I still had them, while he recounted a long stretch from my latest piece of devilling. He had muddled some of it. I thought. Then he stared at the table, and said ‘Perhaps one ought to mention the help one sometimes gets from one’s pupils. Of course one suggests a line of investigation, one reads their billets-doux, one advises them how to express themselves. But you know as well as I do, gentlemen, that sometimes these young men do some of the digging for us. Why, there’s one minor line of argument in this opinion — it’s going too far to say that I shouldn’t have discovered it, in fact I had already got my observations in black and white, but I was very glad indeed, I don’t mind telling you, when my Mr Ellis hit upon it for himself.’

Getliffe hurried on.

I was enraged. That night, with Charles March, I thrashed over Getliffe’s character and my injuries. This was the first time he had taken me in completely. I was too much inflamed, too frightened of the future, to concede that Getliffe took himself in too. Actually, he was a man of generous impulses, and of devious, cunning, cautious afterthoughts. In practice, the afterthoughts usually won. I had not yet found a way to handle him. The weeks and months were running on. I did not know whether he would keep any of his promises, or how he could be forced.

He could not resist making promises — any more than he could resist sliding out of them. Charles March, who was a pupil in another set of Chambers, often went with me to hear him plead: one day, in King’s Bench 4, it was all according to the usual pattern. Getliffe was only just in time. In he hurried, dragging his feet, slightly untidy and flurried — looking hunted as always, his wig not quite clean nor straight, carrying papers in his hand. As soon as he began to speak, he produced the impression of being both nervous and at ease. He was not a good speaker, nothing like so good as his opponent in this case; the strident note stayed in his voice, but it sounded thin even in that little court; yet he was capturing the sympathy of most people there.

At lunchtime, walking, in the gardens, Charles March and I were scornful of his incompetence, envious of his success, incredulously angry that he got away with it.

That night in his room I was able to congratulate him on winning the case. He looked at me with his most responsible air.

‘One is glad to pull off something for the clients’ sakes,’ he said. ‘It’s the easiest fault to forget that they’re the people most concerned. One has to be careful.’

‘Still, it’s very nice to win,’ I said.

Getliffe’s face broke into a grin.

‘Of course it’s nice,’ he said. ‘It gives me a bigger kick than anything in the world.’

‘I expect I shall find it the same,’ I said. ‘If ever I manage it.’

Getliffe laughed merrily.

‘You will, my boy, you will. You’ve got to remember that this ancient Inn wasn’t born yesterday. It was born before HM Edward Three. No one’s ever been in a hurry since. You’ve just got to kick your heels and look as though you like it. We’ve all been through it. It’s good for us in the end. But I’ll tell you this, Eliot’ — he said confidentially — ‘though I don’t often tell it to people in your position, that I don’t see why next year you shouldn’t be able to keep yourself in cigarettes. And even a very very occasional cigar.’ He smiled happily at me. ‘When all’s said and done, it’s a good life,’ he said.

Years afterwards, I realized that, when I was his pupil, I crassly underestimated Getliffe as a lawyer. It was natural for me and Charles March to hold our indignation meetings in the Temple gardens; but, though it was hard for young men to accept, some of Getliffe’s gifts were far more viable than ours. We overvalued power and clarity of mind, of which we both had a share, and we dismissed Getliffe because of his muddiness. We had not seen enough to know that, for most kinds of success, intelligence is a very minor gift. Getliffe’s mind was muddy, but he was a more effective lawyer than men far cleverer, because he was tricky and resilient, because he was expansive with all men, because nothing restrained his emotions, and because he had a simple, humble, tenacious love for his job.

It was too difficult, however, for Charles March and me, in the intellectual arrogance of our youth, to see that truth, much less accept it. And I had a good deal to put up with. I had just discovered Getliffe’s comic and pathological meanness with money. He had a physical aversion from signing a cheque or parting with a coin. In the evening, after a case, we occasionally went to the Feathers for a pint of beer. His income was at least four thousand a year, and mine two hundred, but somehow I always paid.

My pupil’s year was a harassing one. I was restless. Often I was unhappy. Those nights with Charles March were my only respite from anxiety. They were also much more. Charles became one of the closest friends of my life, and he introduced me into a society opulent, settled, different from anything I had ever known. His story, like George Passant’s, took such a hold on my imagination that I have chosen to tell it in full, separated from my own. All that I need say here is that, during my first year in London, I began to dine with Charles’ family in Bryanston Square and his relatives in great houses near. It seemed my one piece of luck in all those months.

I had to return from those dinner parties to my bleak flat. Apart from the evenings with Charles, I had no comfort at all. On other nights I used to stay late in Chambers, and then walk up Kingsway and across Bloomsbury, round Bedford Square under the peeling plane trees, past the restaurants of Charlotte Street, up Conway Street to number thirty-seven, where there was a barber’s shop on the ground floor and my flat on the third. Whenever I threw open the door, I looked at the table. The light from the landing fell across it, before I could reach the switch. There might be a letter or telegram from Sheila.

The sitting-room struck cold each night when I returned. I could not afford to have a fire all day, and my landlady, amiable but scatter-brained, could never remember which nights I was coming home. Most evenings the table was empty, there was no letter, my hopes dropped, and the room turned darker. I knelt on the hearth and lit a firelighter, before going out to make my supper off a sandwich at the nearest bar. Even when the fire had caught, it was a desolate room. There were two high-backed armchairs, covered with satin which was wearing through; an old hard sofa which stood just off the hearthrug and on which I kept papers and books; the table, with two chairs beside it; and an empty sideboard. My bedroom attained the same standard of discomfort, and to reach it I had to walk across the landing. The tenants of the fourth floor also walked across the same landing on their way upstairs.

I need not have lived so harshly. For an extra twenty pounds a year, I could have softened things for myself; and, by the scale of my debts, another twenty pounds paid out meant nothing at all, as I well knew. But, as though compelled by a profound instinct, I paid no attention to the voice of sense. Somehow I must live so as constantly to remind myself that I had nowhere near arrived. The more uncomfortable I was, the more will I could bend to my career. This was no resting place. When I had satisfied myself, it would be time to indulge.

I sat by the fire on winter nights, working on one of Getliffe’s ‘points’, forcing back the daydreams, forcing back the anxious hope that tomorrow there would be a letter from Sheila. For I was waiting for letters more abjectly than for briefs. When I asked her to come back, I had surrendered. I had asked for her on her own terms, which were no terms at all. I had no power over her. I could only wait for what she did and gave.

It suited her. She came to see me quite often, at least once a month. With her nostalgia for the dingy, she used to take a room at a shabby Greek hotel a couple of streets away. And she came, out of her own caprices and because of her own needs. Her caprices had her usual acid tone, which I could not help but like. A telegram arrived: CANNOT BEAR MY FATHER’S VOICE PREFER YOURS FOR TWO DAYS SHALL APPEAR THIS EVENING. Once, without any warning, I found her sitting in my room when I got back late at night.

Occasionally we were happy, as though she were on the edge of falling in love with me. But she was flirting with man after man, lit up each time with the familiar hope that here at last was someone who could hypnotize her into complete love. I had to listen to that string of adventures, for she used her power over me to compel me into the role of confidant. She trusted me, she thought I understood her better than the others, she found me soothing. Sometimes I could smooth her forehead and lift the dread away. In part she relished playing on my jealousy, hearing me in torment as I questioned her, seeing me driven to another masochistic search.

One morning in February there was a postcard on my breakfast tray. At the sight of the handwriting my heart leaped. Then I read: ‘I want you to dine with me at the Mars tomorrow (Tuesday). I may have a man with me I should like you to meet.’

I went as though I had no will.

The glass of the restaurant door was steamed over in the cold. Inside, I stared frenziedly round. She was sitting alone, her face pallid and scornful.

Still in my hat and coat, I went to her.

‘Where is this man?’ I said.

She said: ‘He was useless.’

We talked little over the meal. But I could not rest without asking some questions. He was another of her lame dogs: she thought he was deep and mysterious, and then that he was empty. She was dejected. I tried to console her. I was stifling the rest, and fell silent.

Afterwards we walked into Soho Square, on the way home. Abruptly she said: ‘Why don’t you get rid of me?’

‘It’s too late.’

‘You’d like to, wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t you think I should?’ I said flatly, in utter tiredness. She pressed my fingers, and there was no more to say.

All through those months when I was struggling to get started, I could not talk to her about my worries. It was to Charles March that I had to trace and retrace the problems, boring to anyone else, acutely real to me. Was Percy giving me my share of the guinea and two-guinea briefs? Would Getliffe let me off the last instalments of my pupil’s fees? Had I won any kind of backing yet? Would Getliffe give me a hand, if it cost him nothing, or would he stand in my way?

Sheila could not imagine that daily life of trivial manoeuvre, contrivance, petty gains and setbacks. She concerned herself about my need for money, and she bought presents which saved me dipping into my scholarship. In that way she was generous, for, since Mr Knight parted with money only a little more easily than Getliffe, she had to go without dresses, which she did not mind, and beg her father for an extra allowance, which she minded painfully. But the frets and intrigues — those she could not enter. Since we first met, she had taken it for granted that I should prevail. As for my struggles with Getliffe, they did not matter. She could not believe that I cared so much.

Percy did me no favours in my first year. But he did me no disfavours either. He was neutral, as though I were still under supervision, might be worth backing or might have to be written off. I received my share of the ‘running down’ cases, the insignificant defences of motoring prosecutions, that came Percy’s way. Percy also advised me how to pick up more at the police courts. I used to attend several, on the off chance of a guinea. Those courts were only a few miles apart, but in society the distance was vast — from the smart businessmen showing off their cars on the way home from the tennis court, to the baffled, stupid, foreign prostitutes, the ponces and bullies, the street bookmakers, the blowsy landladies of the Pimlico backstreets.

From that police-court work, in the year from October 1927 to July 1928, I earned just under twenty-five pounds. And that was my total professional income for the year. I mentioned the fact to Percy.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said impassively. ‘It’s just about what I should have expected.’

He took pleasure in being discreet. But he relented to the extent of telling me that many men, perhaps the majority of men, did worse. And he said, by way of aside, that I ought not to start lecturing or marking papers; I had plenty of energy, but I might need it all; this was a long-distance race, not a sprint, said Percy. It was then I realized that Percy was judiciously, cold-bloodedly, watching my health.

I intended to press Getliffe about my last instalment of fees. He had promised to remit it if I had earned my keep; I had done more than that, I had saved him weeks of work, and he must not be allowed to think that I was easy prey. I knew more of him now. The only way to make him honour a bargain, I thought, was to play on his general impulse and at the same moment to threaten: to meet expansiveness with expansiveness, to say that he was a fine fellow who could never break his word — but that he would be a low confidence trickster if he did.

The trouble was, as the time came near I found it impossible to get an undisturbed half an hour with him. He could smell danger from afar, or see it in one’s walk. Somehow he became busier than ever. When, for want of any other opportunity, I caught him on the stairs, he said reprovingly and matily: ‘Don’t let’s talk shop out of hours, Ellis. It can wait. Tomorrow is also a day.’

At the beginning of the long vacation he went abroad for a holiday; the first I knew of it was a genial wave from the door of our room and a breathless, strident shout: ‘Taxi’s waiting! Taxi’s waiting!’ He left with nothing settled, I still had not edged in a word. He also left me with a piece of work, arduous and complex, on a case down for October.

Two days after his return, at last I seized the chance to talk.

‘I’ve not paid you my last quarter’s fees,’ I said. ‘But—’

‘All contributions thankfully received,’ said Getliffe.

‘I’d like to discuss my position,’ I said. ‘I’ve done some work for you, you know, and you said—’

Getliffe met my eyes with his straightforward gaze.

‘I’m going to let you pay that quarter, Eliot,’ he said. ‘I know what you’re going to say. I know you’ve done things for me, I know that better than you do. But I’m thinking of my future pupils, Eliot. I’ve tried to give you more experience than you’d have got in the Chambers of most of our learned friends. I make it a matter of principle to give my pupils experience, and I hope I always shall. But if I start letting them off their fees when they take advantage of their opportunities — well, I know myself too well, Eliot, I shall just stop putting things in their way. So I’m going to accept your cheque. Of course this next year we must have a business arrangement. This just wipes the slate clean.’

Before I could reply, he told me jollyingly that soon he would be inviting me to a party.

That party was dangled in front of me in many conversations afterwards. Now that my pupil’s year was over, I was not called so often into Getliffe’s room. For his minor devilling, he was using a new pupil called Parry. But for several cases he relied on me, for I was quick and had the knack of writing an opinion so that he could master its headings in the midst of his hurrying magpie-like raids among his papers. In return, I wanted to be paid — or better, recommended to a solicitor to take a brief for which Getliffe had no time. Some days promised one reward, some days another. When I was exigent, he said with his genial, humble smile that soon I should be receiving an invitation from his wife. ‘We want you to come to our party’ he said. ‘We’re both looking forward to it no end, L S’ (He was the only person alive who called me by my initials.)

It was nearly Christmas before at last I was asked to their house in Holland Park. I found my way through the Bayswater streets, vexed and rebellious. I was being used, I was being cheated shamelessly — no, not shamelessly, I thought with a glimmer of amusement, for each of Getliffe’s bits of sharp practice melted him into a blush of shame. But repentance never had the slightest effect on his actions. He grieved sincerely for what he had done, and then did it again. He was exploiting me, he was taking the maximum advantage of being my only conceivable patron. And now he fobbed me off with a treat like a schoolboy. Did he know the first thing about me? Was it all unconsidered, had he the faintest conception of the mood in which I was going to my treat?

Their drawing-room was large and bright and light. Getliffe himself looked out of place, dishevelled, boyishly noisy, his white tie not clean and a little bedraggled. He wife was elegantly dressed; she clung to my hand, fixed me with warm spaniel-like eyes, close to mine, and said: ‘It is nice to see you. Herbert has said such a lot about you. He’s always saying how much he wishes I had the chance of seeing you. I do wish I could see more of you all—’

Watching her later at the dinner table, I thought she was almost a lovely woman, if only she had another expression beside that of eager, cooing fidelity. She was quite young: Getliffe at that time was just over forty and she was a few years less. They were very happy. He had, as usual, done himself well. They talked enthusiastically about children’s books, Getliffe protruding his underlip and comparing Kenneth Grahame and A A Milne, his wife regarding him with an eager loving stare, their warmth for each other fanned by the baby talk.

Once Mrs Getliffe prattled: ‘Herbert always says you people do most of his work for him.’ We laughed together.

They talked of pantomimes: they had two children, to what show should they be taken? Getliffe remarked innocently how, when he was an undergraduate, he had schemed to take his half-brother Francis to the pantomime — not for young Francis’ enjoyment, but for his own.

That was the party. I said goodbye, in a long hand clasp with Mrs Getliffe. Getliffe took me into the hall. ‘I hope you’ve enjoyed yourself, L S,’ he said.

When I thanked him, he went on: ‘We may not be the best Chambers in London — but we do have fun!’

His face was merry. On the way home, grinning at my own expense, I could not be certain whether his eyes were innocent, or wore their brazen, defiant stare.

In that bitterly cold winter of 1928-9 I reached a depth of discontent. I ached for this suspense to end. In my memory it remained one of the periods I would least have chosen to live through again. And yet there must have been good times. I was being entertained by the Marches, I was making friends in a new society. Long afterwards Charles March told me that I seemed brimming with interest, and even he had not perceived how hungry and despondent I became. That is how I remembered the time, without relief — I remembered myself dark with my love for Sheila, fretting for a sign of recognition in my job, poor, seeing no sign of a break. It was worse because Charles himself, in that December, was given his first important case. It was nothing wonderful — it was marked at twenty-five guineas — but it was a chance to shine, and for such a chance just then I would have begged or stolen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course he will.’

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

Getliffe gazed at me, man to man.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He pointed his pipe at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Queer,’ she said.

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

‘Oh, handsome,’ she said.

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

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

In the firelight she stared up at me.

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

I said: ‘I want you.’

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

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

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

‘Am I absolutely frigid?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘Shall I always be?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. No.’

‘I’m afraid of it. You know that.’

Then suddenly she rose to her feet.

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

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

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

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

‘You have strong hands,’ she said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Their last witness came to the box. All I had to do was to make him admit that he and Chapman and the defendant had often met together. It was obviously so he could not deny it; it left our main point unassailable, and the case was clear. But I made a silly mistake. I could not let well alone; I thought the witness was malicious and had another interest in attacking Chapman. I began asking him about it. I was right in my human judgement, but it was bad tactics in law. First, it was an unnecessary complication: second, as the witness answered, his malice emerged — but so also did his view that Chapman was lying and I was sweating beneath my wig. I perceived what he was longing for the chance to say. I pulled up sharp. It was better to leave that line untidy, and bolt to the safe one; sweating, flustered, discomfited, I found my tongue was not forsaking me, was inventing a bridge that took me smoothly back. It happened slickly. I was cool enough to wonder how many people had noticed the break.

With the jury out, I sat back, uneasy. I went over the case: surely it stood, surely to anyone it must have appeared sound? Foolishly I had done it harm, but surely it had affected nothing?

The jury were very quick. Before I heard the verdict, I knew all was well. I did not want to shout aloud: I just wanted to sink down in relief.

‘Very nice,’ said Henriques, who had, with his usual courtesy, made another personal appearance. ‘My best thanks. If I may say so, you had it in hand all the way. I apologize again for giving you such short notice. Next time we shan’t hurry you so much.’

Charles took my hand, and, as Henriques left, began to speak.

‘I’m glad,’ he said. ‘But whatever possessed you to draw that absurd red herring?’

Just then, I should have liked to be spared Charles’ tongue. No one expressed the unflattering truth more pointedly. I thought that I had recovered well, I should have liked some praise.

‘I’m very glad,’ said Charles. ‘But you realize that it might have been a serious mistake? You missed the point completely, don’t you agree?’

On the other hand, Getliffe assumed responsibility for my success. He came into my room in Chambers (I still had my table in Allen’s room) and spoke at large as though he had done it himself. He decided to organize a celebration. While I was writing to Sheila, Getliffe booked a table at the Savoy for dinner and telephoned round to make the party. They were gathered in Getliffe’s haphazard manner — some were friends of mine, some I scarcely knew, some, like Salisbury, were acquaintances none too well pleased that at last I should begin to compete. That did not worry Getliffe. Incidentally, though the members of the party were invited haphazard, there was nothing haphazard about the arrangements for payment: Getliffe made sure that each of the guests came ready to pay for himself.

Charles did not come. He was already booked for a dinner party, but Getliffe expressed strong disapproval. ‘He ought to have put anything else off on a night like this! Still,’ said Getliffe, ‘it’s his loss, not ours. We’re going to have a good time!’ Then Getliffe added, in his most heartfelt tone: ‘And while we’re talking, L S, I’ve always thought young March might have done a bit more for you. He might have pulled a rope or two to get you started. Instead of leaving everything to your own devices — plus, of course, the bits and pieces I’ve been able to do for you myself.’

I wondered if I had heard aright. It was colossal, Yet, as he spoke, Getliffe was believing every word. That was one of his gifts.

At the party I was seated next to a good-looking girl. Tired, attracted to her, half-drunk, triumphant, I spread myself in boasting, as I had not boasted since my teens.

‘I feel extremely jubilant,’ I said.

‘You look it,’ she replied.

‘I’ve often wished that I’d chosen a different line,’ I went on. ‘I mean, something where one got started quicker. But this is going to be worth waiting for when it comes.’

Provocatively she talked about friends at the Bar.

‘I could have done other things,’ I went on bragging. ‘I’d have backed myself to come off in several different jobs!’

The irony of the party made me laugh aloud. My first victory — and here I was being drunk to by Getliffe, his smile merry, wily, and open. My first victory — not an intimate friend there, but a good many rivals instead. My first victory — instead of having Sheila in my arms, I was boasting wildly to this cool and pretty girl. Yet I had won, and I laughed aloud.

Within three days I received something more than congratulations. Percy spoke to me one morning in the hall, in his usual manner, authoritative under the servility ‘I should like a word with you, Mr Eliot.’

I went into his cubby hole.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said.

As I thanked him, Percy’s smile was firm but gratified, the smile of power, the smile of a conferrer of benefits.

‘Well, sir,’ said Percy, ‘you’ve given me a bit to go on now. I can tell them that you won the Chapman case for Henriques. It’s not much, but it’s better than nothing!

In fact, Percy had decided that it was safe to give me a minor recommendation. He had been watching me for two years, with interest, never letting his sympathy — though whether he had sympathy I was not sure — interfere with his judgement. He had eked out the driblets, the guineas and the two guineas, to keep me from despair, but he would go no further. Now someone else had taken the risk, Percy was ready to speak in my favour just as much as the facts justified.

This case came from solicitors who had no contact at all with my Jewish friends. It was a case which happened to be rather like Charles’ first. It would bring me thirty guineas.

Between July 1928 and July 1929, I had earned eighty-eight pounds. But of this sum, fifty-two pounds ten had arrived since June, on my first two cases. It was more promising than it looked. I dared not tell myself so, but the hope was there. I hoped I was coming through.

I began to see how luck attracts luck. Before the long vacation, I received my biggest case so far, from one of Charles March’s connexions, and, at the same time heard that another was coming from Henriques. In high spirits, I felt the trend ought to be encouraged, and so I set to work playing on Getliffe’s better nature. I was determined not to let him wriggle out of every promise; now the stream was running with me, I intended to make Getliffe help. We had several most moving and heartfelt conversations. I told him that I could not afford a holiday, unless I was certain of earning three hundred pounds next year.

Getliffe said: ‘You know, L S, it’s an uncertain life for all of us. How much do you think I’m certain of myself? Only a few hundred. That’s the meal ticket, you understand. I manage to rake in a bit more by way of extras. But as a steady income I can’t count on as much as the gentleman who reads my income tax return.’ He was grave with emotion at this thought. ‘Then I think of taking silk!’ he said. ‘It’d be just throwing the steady bread and butter out of the window. I expect I shall some day. One never counts one’s blessings. And I can tell you this,’ he added, ‘if and when I do take silk, there’ll be plenty of confetti coming into the Chambers for chaps like you.’

‘I’d like a bit more now,’ I said.

‘So should we all, L S,’ said Getliffe reprovingly.

But I was becoming more practised with him.

‘Look,’ I said. ‘I’m getting a few briefs now. Charles March has done more than his share. So has Henriques. I think you should do yours now. You’ve promised to find me some work. I think this would be a good time.’

Getliffe looked at me with a sudden, earnest smile.

‘I’m very glad you’ve spoken like that, L S. I believe you’ve spoken like a friend. People sometimes tell me I’m selfish. I get worried. You see, I’m not conscious of it. I should hate to think of myself like that. I want my friends to pull me up if ever they think I’m doing wrong.’

Next day, though, he might think better of it. There was a very strong rumour — I never knew whether it was true — that whenever he took a holiday he tried to divert any cases which might be on the way. He did not divert them to bright young men, but to a middle-aged and indifferently competent figure who came so seldom into Chambers that I scarcely knew him. That rumour might be true, I thought: Getliffe did not welcome the sound of youth knocking at the door. Still, I should make him keep his promise.

As I told Getliffe, I could not afford a holiday, but I spent a week that summer with my old friends in the town. I had been in close touch with them since I came to London, George Passant visited me regularly once a quarter, but I had only returned myself for odd days, when Eden sent me a two-guinea brief on the Midland Circuit. To many people it seemed strange, and they thought me heartless.

That was not accurate. I was an odd fish, but my affections were strong; my friendship with George, like all my others, would only end with death. When I stayed in London and avoided the town, it was for a complex of reasons — partly I had to think of the railway fare, partly I was shy of dogging Sheila’s tracks, partly I had an instinct to hide until I could come back successful. But the strongest reason was also the simplest: George and the group did not particularly want me. They loved me, they were proud of me, they rejoiced in any victory I won — but I had gone from their intense intimate life, I was no longer in the secrets of the circle, and it was an embarrassment, almost an intrusion, when I returned. So, as the train drew into the station on an August evening, I was unreasonably depressed. From the carriage window I had seen the houses gleam under the clear night sky; the sulphurous smell of the station, confined within the red brick walls, was as it used to be, when I returned home from dining at the Inn; my heart sank. George greeted me like a conquering hero, and so did the group. In my mood that night, it made me worse to have others overconfident about my future. I explained sharply that I had made an exceptional start for an unknown young man, but that was all. I had been lucky in my friends, I had the advantage in solicitors’ eyes of looking older than I was — but the testing time was the next two years. It was too early to cheer. George would not listen to my disclaimers. Robustly, obtusely, he shouted them away. He was not going to be deprived of his drinking party. They all drank cheerfully; they were drinking harder than ever, now that they were a little less impoverished; they would rather have been at the farm, without a revenant from earlier days, but nevertheless they were happy to get drunk. But it was sadly that I got drunk that night.

Afterwards, George and I walked by ourselves to his lodgings. I asked about some of our old companions: then I felt the barrier come between us. George was content and comfortable in my presence so long as I left the group alone. I asked about Jack, who had not met me that evening.

‘Doing splendidly, of course,’ said George, and hurried to another subject.

But it was George who volunteered information on one old friend. Marion was engaged to be married. George did not know the man, or the story, and had scarcely seen her, but he had heard that she was overwhelmingly happy.

I should have wished to be happy for her. But I was not. In the pang with which I heard the news, I learned how infinitely voracious one is. Any love that comes one’s way — it is bitter to let go. I had not seen Marion for eighteen months, all my love was given to another. Yet it was painful to lose her. It was the final weight on that sad homecoming.

But I was soon cheered up by a ridiculous lunch at the Knights’. Sheila and I had gone through no storms that summer; she had been remotely affectionate, and she had not threatened me with the name of any other man. And she was pleased at my success. In front of her parents she teased me about the income I should soon be earning, about the money and honours on which I had my eye. It seemed to her extremely funny.

It did not seem, however, in the least funny to her father and mother. It seemed to them a very serious subject. And at that lunch I found myself being regarded as a distinctly more estimable character.

They were beginning to be worried about Sheila. Mrs Knight was a woman devoid of intuition, and she could not begin to guess what was wrong. All Mrs Knight observed were the rough-and-ready facts of the marriage market. Sheila was already twenty-four and, like me, often passed for thirty. For all her flirtations, she had given no sign of getting married. Lately she had brought no one home, except me for this lunch. To Mrs Knight, those were ominous facts. Whereas her husband had been uneasy about Sheila’s happiness since her adolescence, and had suppressed his uneasiness simply because in his selfish and self-indulgent fashion he did not choose to be disturbed.

Thus they were each prepared, if not to welcome me, at least to modify their discouragement. Mr Knight went further. He took me into the rose garden, lit a cigar, and, as we both sat in deckchairs, talked about the careers of famous counsel. It was all done at two removes from me, with Mr Knight occasionally giving me a sideways glance from under his eyelids. He showed remarkable knowledge, and an almost Getliffian enthusiasm, about the pricing of briefs. I had never met a man with more grasp of the financial details of another profession. Without ever asking a straightforward question he was guessing the probable curve of my own income. He was interested in its distribution — what proportion would one earn in High Court work, in London outside the High Court, on the Midland Circuit? Mr Knight was moving surreptitiously to his point.

‘I suppose you will be appearing now and then on circuit?’

‘If I get some work.’

‘Ah. It will come. It will come. I take it’, said Mr Knight, looking in the opposite direction and thoughtfully studying a rose, ‘that you might conceivably appear some time at the local assizes?’

I agreed that it was possible.

‘If that should happen,’ said Mr Knight casually, ‘and if ever you want a quiet place to run over your documents, it would give no trouble to slip you into this house.’

I supposed that was his point. I hoped it was. But I was left half-mystified, for Mr Knight glanced at me under his eyelids, and went on: ‘You won’t be disturbed. You won’t be. My wife and daughter might be staying with their relations. I shan’t disturb you. I’m always tired. I sleep night and day.’

Whatever did he mean by Sheila and her mother staying with relations, I thought, as we joined them. Was he just taking away with one hand what he gave with the other? Or was there any meaning at all?

I was very happy. Sheila was both lively and docile, and walked along the lanes with me before I left. It was my only taste of respectable courtship.

The Michaelmas Term of 1929 was even more prosperous than I hoped. I lost the case Percy had brought me, but I made them struggle for the verdict, and the damages were low. Percy went so far as to admit that the damages were lower than he expected, and that we could not have done much better in this kind of breach of contract. Henriques’ second case was, like the first, straightforward, and I won it. I earned most money, however, from the case in which I did nothing but paperwork: this was the case which had come from connexions of Charles March just before the vacation. It took some time to settle, and in the end we brought in a KC as a threat. The engineering firm of Howard and Hazlehurst were being sued by one of their agents for commission to which he might be entitled in law though not in common sense. The case never reached the courts, for we made a compromise: the KC’s brief was marked at one hundred and fifty guineas, and according to custom I was paid two-thirds that fee.

After those events, and before the end of term, at last I scored a point in my long struggle of attrition with Getliffe. I kept reminding him of his promise to unload some of his briefs; I kept telling him, firmly, affectionately, reproachfully, in all the tones I could command, that I still had not made a pound through his help. As a rule, I disliked being pertinacious, but with Getliffe it was fun. The struggle swayed to and fro. He promised again; then he was too busy to consider any of his briefs; then he thought, almost tearfully, of his clients; then he offered to pay me a very small fee to devil a very large case. At last, on a December afternoon, his face suddenly became beatific. ‘Old H-J (a solicitor named Hutton-Jones) is coming in soon! That means work for Herbert. Well, L S, I’m going to do something for you. I’m going to say to H-J that there’s a man in these Chambers who’ll do that job as well as I should. L S, I can’t tell you how glad I am to do something for you. You deserve it, L S, you deserve it.’

He looked me firmly in the eyes and warmly clasped my hand.

It happened. A ten-guinea brief in the West London County Court came to me from Hurton-Jones: and it had, unquestionably, been offered to Getliffe. Later on, I became friendly with Hutton-Jones, and his recollection was that the conversation with Getliffe went something like this: ‘H-J, do you really want me to do this? Don’t get me wrong. Don’t think I’m too high-hat to take the county court stuff. It’s all grist that comes to the mill, and you know as well as I do, H-J, that I’m a poor man. But I have got a young chap here — well, I don’t say he could do this job, but he might scrape through. Mind you, I like Eliot. Of course, he hasn’t proved himself. I don’t say that he’s ripe for this job—’

Hutton-Jones knew something of Getliffe, and diverted the brief to me. I argued for a day in court, and then we reached a settlement. I had saved our clients a fair sum of money. Getliffe congratulated me, as man to man.

It was a long time before another of his cases found its way to me, but now, by the spring of 1930, I was well under way. Percy judged that he could back me a little farther; Henriques and the Harts were speaking approvingly of me in March circles; Hurton-Jones was trying me on some criminal work, legally dull but shot through with human interest. I was becoming busy. I even knew what it was, as summer approached, to have to refuse invitations to dinner because I was occupied with my briefs.

Just about that time a letter came from Marion, out of the blue. I had written to congratulate her on her engagement, and I had heard that she was married. Now she said that she would much like to visit me. I had a fleeting notion, flattering to my vanity, that she might be in distress and had turned to me for help. But the first sight of her, as she entered my sitting-room, was enough to sweep that daydream right away. She looked sleek, her eyes were shining, she had become much prettier, and she was expensively dressed: though, just as I remembered, she had managed to leave a patch of white powder or scurf on the shoulder of her jacket.

‘Not that you can talk,’ she grumbled, as I dusted it off.

‘I needn’t ask whether you’re happy,’ I said.

‘I don’t think you really need,’ she said.

She was all set to tell me her story. Before we went out to dinner she had to describe exactly how it all happened. She had met Eric at a drama festival and had fallen romantically in love with him, body and soul, she said. And he with her. They fell passionately in love, and decided to get married. According to her account, he was modest, shy, very active physically. It was only after they were engaged that she discovered that he was also extremely rich.

‘That’s the best example of feminine realism I’ve ever heard,’ I said.

Marion threw a book at me.

They were living in a country house in Suffolk. It was all perfect, she said. She was already with child.

‘What’s the use of waiting?’ said Marion briskly.

‘I must say, I envy you.’

She smiled. ‘You ought to get married yourself, my boy.’

‘Perhaps,’ I said.

She asked suddenly: ‘Are you going to marry that woman?’

I was slow to answer. At last I said ‘I hope so.’

Marion sighed.

‘It will be a tragedy,’ she said. ‘You must realize that. You’re much too sensible not to see what it would be like. She’ll ruin you. Believe me; Lewis, this isn’t sour grapes now.’

I shook my head.

‘I hate her,’ Marion burst out. ‘If I could poison her and get away with it, I’d do it like a shot.’

‘You don’t know all of her,’ I said.

‘I know the effect she’s had on you. No, I don’t want you for myself, my dear. I shall love Eric for ever. But there’s a corner in my heart for you.’ She looked at me, half-maternally. ‘Eric’s a much better husband than you’d ever have been,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose I shan’t meet another man like you.’

As we parted she gave me an affectionate kiss.

She had come to show off her happiness, I thought. It was no more than her right. I did not begrudge it. I felt somewhat desolate. It made me think of my own marriage.

For, as I told Marion, I had never stopped hoping to marry Sheila. Since my first proposal I had not asked her again. But she knew, of course, that, whether I was too proud to pester her or not, she had only to show the slightest wish. In fact, we had lately played sometimes with the future. For months past she had seemed to think more of me; her letters were sometimes intimate and content. She had told me, in one of the phrases that broke out from her locked heart: ‘With you I don’t find joy. But you give me so much hope that I don’t want to go away.’

That exalted me more than the most explicit word of love from another woman. I hoped, I believed as well as hoped, that the bond between us was too strong for her to escape, and that she would marry me.

And marriage was at last a practical possibility. I did my usual accounting at the beginning of July 1930. In the last year I had made nearly four hundred and fifty pounds. The briefs were coming in. Without touching wood, I reckoned that a comfortable income was secure. More likely than not, I should earn a large one.

Just a week after I went through my accounts I woke in the morning with an attack of giddiness. It was like those I used to have, at the time of the Bar Finals. I was a little worried, but did not think much of it. It took me a day or two to accept the fact that I was unwell. I was forced to remember that I had often felt exhausted in the last months. I had gone home from court, stretched myself on the sofa, been too worn out to do anything but watch the window darken. I tried to pretend it was nothing but fatigue. But the morning giddiness lasted, my limbs were heavy; as I walked, the pavement seemed to sink.

By instinct, I concealed my state from everyone round me. I asked Charles March if he could recommend a doctor; I explained that I had not needed one since I came to London, but that now I had a trivial skin complaint.

I went to Charles’ doctor, half anxious, half expecting to be reassured as Tom Devitt had reassured me. I got no decision on the first visit. The doctor was waiting for a blood count. Then the result came; it was not clear-cut. I explained to the doctor, whose name was Morris, that I had just established my practice, and could not leave it. I explained that I was hoping to get married. He was kindly and worried. He tried to steady me, ‘It’s shocking bad luck,’ he said. ‘But I’ve got to tell you. You may be rather ill.’

In the surgery, my first concern was to put on a stoical front. Alone in my room, I stared out at the summer sky. The doctor had been vague, he was sending me to a specialist. How serious was it? I was enraged that no one should know, that the disaster should be so nebulous, that instead of having mastered the future I could no longer think a month ahead. Sometimes, for moments together, I could not believe it — just as, after Sheila’s first cruel act, I walked across the park and could not credit that it had happened. Then I was chilled with dread. How gravely was I ill? I was afraid to die.

Already that afternoon, however, and all the time I was visiting the specialist, there was one direction in which my judgement was clear. No one must know. It would destroy my practice if the truth were known. No one would persevere with a sick young man. That might not matter, I thought grimly. But it was necessary to act as though I should recover. So no one must know, not even my intimates.

I kept that resolve throughout the doctors’ tests, Fortunately, it was the Long Vacation, and Getliffe was away; his inquisitive eyes might have noticed too much. Fortunately also, although I was very pale, I did not look particularly ill; in fact, having had more money and so eating better, I had put on some weight in the past year. I forced myself to crawl tiredly to Chambers, sit there for some hours, make an effort to work upon a brief. I thought that Percy had his suspicions, and I tried to deceive him about my spirits and my energy. I mentioned casually that I felt jaded after a hard year and that I might go away for a holiday and miss the first few days of next term.

‘Don’t be away too long, sir,’ said Percy impassively. ‘It’s easy to get yourself forgotten. It’s easy to do that.’

From the beginning the doctors guessed that I had pernicious anaemia. They stuck to the diagnosis even when as I afterwards realised — they should have been more sceptical. There was some evidence for it. There was no doubt about the anaemia; my blood counts were low and getting lower; but that could have happened (as Tom Devitt had said years ago) through strain and conflict. But also some of the red cells were pear-shaped instead of round, and some otherwise misshapen; and since the doctors were ready to believe in a pernicious anaemia, that convinced them.

But the reason why they originally guessed so puzzled me for a long time. For they were sound, cautious doctors of good reputation. It was much later that Charles March, after he had changed his profession and taken to medicine, told me that my physical type was common among pernicious anaemia cases — grey or blue eyes set wide apart, smooth tough skin, thick chest, and ectomorphic limbs. Then at last their diagnosis became easy to understand.

They were soon certain of it, assured me that it ought to be controllable, and fed me on hog’s stomach. But my blood did not respond: the count went down; and then they did not know what to do. All they could suggest was that I should go abroad and rest, and continue, for want of any other treatment, to eat another protein extract.

This was at the beginning of August. I could leave, as though it were an ordinary holiday. I still kept my secret, although there were times when my nerve nearly broke, or when I was beyond caring. For my resistance was weakening now. Charles March, who knew that I was ill, but not what the doctor had told me, bought my tickets, and booked me a room at Mentone: I was tired out, and glad to go.

I had not seen Sheila since I went to be examined. Now I wrote to her. I was not well, I said, and was being sent abroad for a rest. I was travelling the day after she would receive this letter. I was anxious to see her before I left.

It was my last afternoon in England, and I waited in my room. I knew her trains by heart, That afternoon I did not have long to wait. Within ten minutes of the time that she could theoretically arrive, I heard her step on the stairs.

She came and kissed me. Then she stood back and studied my face.

‘You don’t look so bad,’ she said.

‘That’s just as well,’ I said.

‘Why is it?’

I told her it was necessary to go on being hearty in Chambers. It was the kind of sarcastic joke that she usually enjoyed, but now her eyes were strained.

‘It’s not funny,’ she said harshly.

She was restless. Her movements were stiff and awkward. She sat down, pulled out a cigarette, then put it back in her case. Timidly she laid a hand on mine.

‘I’d no idea there was anything wrong,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘It must have been going on for some time,’ she said.

‘I think it has.’

‘I’m usually fairly perceptive,’ she said in a tone aggrieved, conceited, and remorseful. ‘But I didn’t notice a thing.’

‘I expect you were busy,’ I said.

She lost her temper. ‘That’s the most unpleasant thing you’ve ever told me.’

She was white with anger, right at the flashpoint of one of her outbursts of acid rage. Then, with an effort, she calmed herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know—’

In the lull we talked for a few minutes, neutrally, of where we should dine that night.

Sheila broke away from the conversation, and asked: ‘Are you ill?’

I did not reply.

‘You must be, or you wouldn’t let them send you away. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ I said.

‘How badly are you ill?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. The doctors don’t know either.’

‘It may be serious?’

‘Yes, it may be.’

She was staring full at me.

‘I don’t think you’ll die in obscurity,’ she said in a high, level voice, with a curious prophetic certainty. She went on: ‘You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Somehow, in her bleak insistence, she made it easier for me. Her eyes were really like searchlights, I thought, picking out things that no one else saw, then swinging past and leaving a gulf of darkness.

She tried to talk of the future. She broke away again: ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you’re more frightened than I should be.’ She considered. ‘Yet you can put on a show to fool your lawyer friends. There are times when you make me feel a child.’

The day went on. Once she said, without any preliminary: ‘Darling, I wish I were a different woman.’

She knew that I was begging her for comfort.

‘Why didn’t you love someone else? No decent woman could let you go like this.’

I had said not a word, I had not embraced her that day. She knew that I was begging for the only comfort strong enough to drive out fear. She knew that I craved for the solace of the flesh. She had to let me go without.

At Mentone I sat on the terrace by the sea, happy in the first few days as though I were well again, as though I were sure of Sheila. I had never been abroad before, and I was exhilarated by the sight of the warm sea, the quickening of all the senses which I felt by that shore. Some of my symptoms dropped away overnight, as I basked in the sun. The sea was so calm that it lost its colour. Instead it stretched like a mirror with a soft and luminous sheen to the edge of the horizon, where it darkened to a stratum of grey silk. It stretched like a mirror without colour, except where, in the wake of each boat that was painted on the surface, there was pencilled, heightening the calm, a dark unbroken line.

And when the Mediterranean summer broke into storms, I still had a pleasure, a reassurance of physical well-being, as I stood by the bedroom window at night and, through the rain and wind, smelt the bougainvillea and the arbutus. Turning back to see my bed in the light of the reading lamp, I was ready to forget my fears and sleep.

An old Austrian lady was living in the hotel. Because of her lungs she had spent the last ten years by the Mediterranean; she had a viperine tongue and a sweet smile, and I enjoyed listening to her talk of Viennese society in the days of the Hapsburgs. Inside a fortnight we became friends. I used to take her for gentle walks through the gardens, and I confided in her. I told her as much about my career as I had told Charles March; and I told her more of my love for Sheila and my illness than I had told anyone alive.

Slowly that respite ended. Slowly the illness returned, at first by stealth, so that I did not know whether a symptom was a physical fact or just an alarm of the nerves; one day I would be abnormally fatigued, and then, waking refreshed next morning, I could disbelieve it. Gradually but certainly, after the first mirage-like week, the weakness crept back, the giddiness, the sinking of the ground underfoot. I had provided myself with an apparatus so that I could make a rough measure of my blood count. While I felt better, I left it in my trunk. Later, as I became suspicious of my state, I tried to keep away from it. Once I had used the apparatus, quite unrealistically I began going through the process each day, as though in hope or dread I expected a miracle. It was difficult to be accurate with the little pipette, I had not done many scientific experiments, I longed to cheat in my own favour, and then overcompensated in the other direction. By the third week in August I knew that the count was lower than in July. It seemed more likely than not that it was still going down.

I used to wake hour by hour throughout the night. Down below was the sound of the sea, which in my first days had given me such content. I was damp with sweat. I thought of all I had promised to do — instead, I saw nothing but the empty dark. In my schooldays I had seen a master in the last stage of pernicious anaemia — yellow-skinned, exhausted, in despair. I had not heard of the disease then. Now I knew what his history must have been, step by step. I had read about the intermissions which now, reconstructing what I remembered, I realised must have visited him. For six months or a year he had come back to teach, and seemed recovered. If one were lucky — I thought how brilliant my luck had been, how, despite all my impatience and complaints, no one of my provenance had made a more fortunate start at the Bar — one might have such intermissions for periods of years. Lying awake to the sound of the sea, I felt surges of the fierce hope that used to possess my mother and which was as natural to me. Even if I had this disease, then still I might make time to do something.

Sometimes, in those nights, I was inexplicably calmed. I woke up incredulous that this could be my fate. The doctors were wrong. I was frightened, but still lucid, and they were confused. Apart from the misshapen cells, I had none of the true signs of the disease. There were no sores on my tongue. Each time I woke, I tested my tongue against my teeth. It became a tic, which sometimes, when I felt a pain, made me imagine the worst, which sometimes gave me the illusion of safety.

In those hot summer nights, with the sea slithering and slapping below, I thought of death. With animal fear, once or twice with detachment. I should die hard, I knew. If the time was soon to come, or whenever it came, I was not the kind to slip easily from life. Like my mother, I might manage to put a face on it, while others were watching: but in loneliness, in the extreme loneliness before death, I should, again like her, be cowardly and struggling, begging on my knees for every minute I could wrench out of the final annihilation. At twenty-five, when this blow struck me, I begged more ravenously. It would be bitterly hard to die without knowing, what I had longed for with all the intensity of which I was capable, any kind of achievement or love fulfilled. But once or twice, I thought, with a curious detachment, that I should have held on as fearfully and tenaciously if it came twenty or forty years later. When I had to face the infinite emptiness, I should never be reconciled, and should cry out in my heart ‘Why must this happen to me?’

After such a night, I would get up tired, prick my finger, extract a drop of blood and go through my meaningless test, then I had breakfast on the terrace, looking out at the shining sea. My Austrian friend would come slowly along, resting a hand on the parapet. She used to look at me and ask: ‘How is it this morning, my dear friend?’

I said often ‘A little better than yesterday, I think. Not perfect—’ For it was difficult to disappoint her. A bright concern came to her eyes, intensely alive in the old face.

‘Ah,’ she said, ‘when autumn is here, perhaps we shall both be better.’

Then each day I had to wait for the post from England. It arrived just before teatime; and as soon as it arrived I was waiting for the next day. I had written to Sheila on my first morning there, a long, loving, hopeful letter; the days passed, the days became weeks, August was turning into September, and I had heard nothing. For a time it did not worry me. But suddenly, one afternoon, as I waited while the porter ran through the bundle, it seemed that all depended on the next day — and so through afternoons of waiting, of watching the postman bicycle along the road, of the delay while they were sorted. At last, each afternoon, the sad and violent anger when there was nothing from her.

In cold blood, knowing her, I could not understand it. Was she ill herself? She could have told me. Had she found another man? In all her caprices she had never neglected a kind of formal etiquette towards me. Was it an act of cruelty? Had I thrown myself too abjectly on her mercy, that last day? It seemed incredible, even for her, I thought, with my temper smouldering, on those evenings as the lights came out along the shore. I had loved her for five years. I would not have treated the most casual acquaintance so, let alone one in my state. Whatever she was feeling, she knew my state. I could not forgive her. I wanted her to suffer as I did.

I wrote again, and then again.

There were other letters from England, some disquieting rumours about George’s indiscretions in the town; the news of the birth of Marion’s child, a girl; a story of Charles March’s father; and, surprisingly, a letter from Salisbury, saying that he had thought I was not so tireless as usual last term and that — if this was not just his imagination — I might like to know that he himself had a minor collapse just after he began to make a living at the Bar. Was he probing, I thought? Or was it a generous impulse? Perhaps both.

From all that news I got no more than a few minutes’ distraction. I was more self-centred than ever in my life. I had no room for anything but my two concerns — my illness, and my obsession with Sheila. All else was trivial; I was utterly uninterested in the passing scene and, for once, in other human beings. I knew that my two miseries played on each other. I had the sense, which all human beings dread, which I was to see dominate another’s existence, of my life being outside my will. However much we may say and know that we are governed by forces outside our control, and that the semblance of volition is only an illusion to us all, yet that illusion, when it is challenged, is one of the things we fight for most bitterly. If it is threatened, we feel a horror unlike anything else in life.

In its extreme form, this horror is the horror of madness, and most of us know its shadow, for moments anyway, when we are in the grip of an overmastering emotion. The emotion may give us pleasure or not, for most of its duration we can feel ourselves in full control; but there are moments, particularly in love, particularly in such a love as mine for Sheila, when the illusion is shattered and we see ourselves in the hands of ineluctable fate, our voices, our protests, our reasons as irrelevant to what we do as the sea sounding in the night was to my wretchedness, while I lay awake.

It was in such moments that I faced the idea of suicide. Not altogether in despair — but with the glint of a last triumph. And I believed the idea had come in that identical fashion to other men like me, and for the same reason. Not only as a relief from unhappiness, but also a sign, the only one possible, that the horror is not there, and that one’s life is, in the last resort, answerable to will. At any rate, it was so with me.

In much the same spirit as I entertained the idea of suicide, I made plans for the future that ignored both physical health and Sheila. I’ve been unhappy for long enough, I thought. I’m going to forget her and get better. I must settle what steps to take. Framing plans that assumed that the passion was over, that I could make myself well by a resolution, plans of all the things I should never be able to do.

Beyond the horror of having lost my will, there was another, a simpler companion of those days. That was suffering. Suffering unqualified and absolute, so that at times the anger fled, the complaints and assertions became squallings of my own conceit, and there was nothing left but unhappiness. It was a suffering simple, uneventful, and complete. It lay upon me as weakness lay on my body. I thought I could never be as unhappy again.

It was the middle of September. I had known this suffering for some weeks, during which it was more constantly with me than any emotion I had known. I was sitting by the rocks, looking over to the mountains, arid in brown and purple, overhung by rotund masses of cloud. The water was as calm as in my first days there, and the clouds threw long reflections towards me — thin strips of white across the burnished sea. Mechanically I puzzled why these lattice-like separate strips should be reflected from clouds which, seen from where I sat, were flocculent masses above the hills.

It was as tranquil a sight as I had seen.

Then, for a moment, I knew that I was crying out against my fate no more. I knew that I was angry with Sheila no more (I was thinking of her protectively, reflecting that she must be restless and distressed); that all my protests and plans and attempts to revive my will were as feeble as a child’s crying to drown the storm; that my arrogance and spirit had left me, that I could no longer keep to myself the pretence of self-respect. I knew that I had been broken by unhappiness. In that clear moment — whatever I protested to myself next day — I knew that I had to accept my helplessness, that I had been broken and could do nothing more.

October came. Term would begin in a few days. I had to make a practical decision, Should I return?

In the past weeks letters had arrived from Sheila, one every other day, remotely apologetic, without any reason for her silence, yet intimate with a phrase or two that seemed to ask my help. I tried to dismiss those letters as I made my decision. I had to dismiss all I had felt by that shore or seen within myself.

My physical condition was no better, but not much worse. Or rather my blood count was descending, though the rate of descent seemed to have slowed. In other respects I was probably better. I was deeply sunburned, which caused me to look healthy except to a clinical eye. That would be an advantage, I thought, if I tried to brazen it out.

If I were not going to get better, it did not matter what I did.

For any practical choice, I had to assume that I should get better.

That assumed, was it wiser to return to Chambers, persist in concealing that I was ill, and try to carry it off? Or to stay away until I had recovered?

There was no doubt of the answer. If, at my stage, I stayed away long, I should never get back. One term’s absence would do me great harm, and two would finish me. I might scrape a living or acquire a minor legal job, but I should have been a failure.

No, I must return. Now, before the beginning of term, as though nothing had happened.

There were grave risks. I was very weak. I might, with discipline and good management, struggle through the paper work adequately; but I was in no physical state to fight any case but the most placid. I might disgrace myself. Instead of losing my practice by absence, I might do so by presence.

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

Whatever came of it, I must return.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I hope so, sir,’ said Percy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I chaffed her: how had she stood my disarray?

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

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

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

‘Never mind,’ I said.

‘I must mind,’ she said sharply.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He dropped his eyelids.

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

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

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

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

After I had thanked him, I said: ‘Can I get up and go?’

‘You’ll be weak.’

‘Not too weak to get out,’ I said; and, in fact, so strong was the suggestion of health, that as I walked out of the hospital, the pavement was firm beneath my feet, for the first time in six months.

The morning air was raw. In the city, people passed anonymously in the mist. I watched a bank messenger cross the road in his top hat and carrying a ledger. I was so light-hearted that I wanted to stop a stranger and tell him my escape. I was light-hearted, not only with relief but with a surge of recklessness. Miseries had passed; so would those to come. Somehow I survived. Sheila, my practice, the next years, danced through my thoughts. It was a time to act. She was at home for Christmas — but there was another thing to do. In that mood, reckless, calculating, and confident, I went to find Percy in order to have it out.

There was no one else in Chambers, but he was sitting in his little room, reading a sporting paper. He said ‘Good morning, Mr Eliot,’ without curiosity, though he must have been surprised to see me. I asked him to come out for a drink. He was not over-willing, but he had nothing to do. ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I must talk to you, Percy. You may as well have a drink while you listen.’

We walked up to the Devereux, and there in the bar-room Percy and I sat by the window. The room was smoky and noisy, full of people shouting new-year greetings. Percy drank from his tankard, and impassively watched them.

I began curtly: ‘I’ve been lying to you.’

Instead of watching the crowd, he watched me, with no change of expression.

‘I’ve been seriously ill. Or at least they thought I was.’

‘I saw you weren’t up to the mark, Mr Eliot,’ he said.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I want us to understand each other. They thought that I might have a fatal disease. It was a mistake. I’m perfectly well. If you need any confirmation,’ I smiled at him, ‘I can produce evidence. From Sir—’ And I said that I had that morning come from the hospital, I told him the story without any palaver.

He asked: ‘Why didn’t you let any of us know?’

‘That’s a bloody silly question,’ I said, ‘How much change should I have got — if everyone heard I was a bad life?’

For once, his eyes flickered.

‘How much work would you have brought me?’ I asked.

He did not answer.

‘Come to that — how much work did you bring me last term?’

He did not prevaricate. He could have counted briefs which passed through his hands but which he had done nothing to gain. But he said, as brutally as I had spoken ‘Not a guinea’s worth. I thought you were fading out.’

‘I don’t grumble,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the game. I don’t want charity. I don’t need it now. But you ought to be careful not to make a fool of yourself.’

I went on. I was well now, I should be strong by the summer, the doctors had no doubt that I should stand the racket of the Bar. I had come through without my practice suffering much. I had my connexions, Henriques and the rest. It would be easy for me to move to other Chambers. A change from Getliffe, a change from Percy to a clerk who believed in me — I should double my income in a year.

Even at the time, I doubted whether that threat much affected him. But I had already achieved my end. He was a cross-grained man. He despised those who dripped sympathy and who expected a flow of similar honey in return. His native language, though he got no chance to use it, was one of force and violence and temper, and he thought better of me for speaking that morning in the language that he understood. He had never done so before, but he invited me to drink another pint of beer.

‘You needn’t worry, Mr Eliot,’ he said. ‘I don’t make promises, but I believe you’ll be all right.’

He stared at me, and took a long gulp.

‘I should like to wish you’, he said, ‘a happy and prosperous new year.’

It was still the first week in January, and I was walking along Worcester Street on my way to Sheila’s. She had returned the day before, and I was saving up for the luxury of telling her my news. I could have written, but I had saved it up for the glow of that afternoon. I was still light-hearted, light-hearted and lazy with relief. The road glistened in the drizzle, the basement lights were gleaming, here and there along the street one could gaze into lighted rooms — books, a table, a lamp-shade, a piano, a curtained bed. Why did those sights move one so, was it the hint of unknown lives? It was luxurious to see the lighted rooms, walking down the wet street on the way to Sheila.

I had no plan ready-made for that afternoon. I did not intend to propose immediately, now all was well. There was time enough now. Before the month was over I should speak, but it was luxurious to be lazy that day, and my thoughts flowed round her as they had flowed when I first fell in love. It was strange that she should be lodging in this street. She had always felt a nostalgia for the scruffy; perhaps she had liked me more, when we first met, because I was a shabby young man living in a garret.

I thought of other friends, like her comfortably off, who could not accept their lives. The social climate was overawing them. They could not take their good luck in their stride. If one had a talent for non-acceptance, it was a bad generation into which to be born rich. The callous did not mind, nor did the empty, nor did those who were able not to take life too hard; but among my contemporaries I could count half a dozen who were afflicted by the sick conscience of the rich.

Sheila was not made for harmony, but perhaps her mother’s money impeded her search for it. If she had been a man, she might, like Charles March, have insisted on finding a job in which she could feel useful; one of Charles’ reasons for becoming a doctor was to throw away the burden of guilt; she was as proud and active as he, and if she had been a man she too might have found a way to live. If she had been a man, I thought idly and lovingly as I came outside her house, she would have been happier. I looked up at her window. The light shone rosy through the curtains. She was there, alone in her room, and in the swell of love my heart sank and rose.

I ran upstairs, threw my arm round her waist, said that it had been a false alarm and that I should soon be quite recovered. ‘It makes me feel drunk,’ I said, and pressed her to me.

‘You’re certain of it?’ she said, leaning back in the crook of my elbow.

I told her that I was certain.

‘You’re going to become tough again? You’ll be able to go on?’

‘Yes, I shall go on,’

‘I’m glad, my dear. I’m glad for your sake.’ She had slipped from my arms, and was watching me with a strange smile. She added: ‘And for mine too,’

I exclaimed. I was already chilled.

She said: ‘Now I can ask your advice.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m in love. Quite honestly. It’s very surprising. I want you to tell me what to do.’

She had often tortured me with the names of other men. There had been times when her eye was caught, or when she was making the most of a new hope. But she had never spoken with this authority. On the instant, I believed her. I gasped, as though my lungs were tight. I turned away. The reading lamp seemed dim, so dim that the current might be failing. I was suddenly drugged by an overwhelming fatigue; I wanted to go to sleep.

‘I had to tell you,’ she was saying.

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘You weren’t fit to take it,’ she said.

‘This must be the only time on record’, I said, ‘when you’ve considered me.’

‘I may have deserved that,’ she replied. She added: ‘Believe me. I’m hateful. But this time I tried to think of you. You were going through enough. I couldn’t tell you that I was happy.’

‘When did it happen?’

‘Just after you went to France,’

I was stupefied that I had not guessed.

‘You didn’t write to me for weeks,’ I said.

‘That was why. I hoped you’d get well quickly.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m no good at deceit.’

I sat down. For a period that may have been minutes — I had lost all sense of time — I stared into the room. I half knew that she had brought up a chair close to mine. At last I said ‘What do you want me to do?’

Her reply was instantaneous ‘See that I don’t lose him.’

‘I can’t do that,’ I said roughly.

‘I want you to,’ she said. ‘You’re wiser than I am. You can tell me how not to frighten him away.’ She added: ‘He’s pretty helpless. I’ve never liked a man who wasn’t. Except you. He can’t cope very well. He’s rather like me. We’ve got a lot in common.’

I had heard other ‘we’s’ from her, taunting my jealousy, but not in such a tone as this. She dwelt on it with a soft and girlish pleasure. I was chained there. I fell again into silence. Then I asked peremptorily who he was.

She was eager to tell me. She spoke of him as Hugh. It was only some days later, when I decided to meet him, that I learned his surname. He was a year or two older than Sheila and me, and so was at that time about twenty-seven. He had no money, she said, though his origins were genteel. Some of his uncles were well off, and he was a clerk at a stockbroker’s, being trained to go into the firm. ‘He hates it,’ she said. ‘He’ll never be any good at it. It’s ridiculous.’ He had no direction or purpose; he did not even know whether he wanted to get married.

‘Why is he the answer?’ I could not keep the question back.

She answered: ‘It’s like finding part of myself.’

She was rapt, she wanted me to rejoice with her. ‘I must show you his photograph,’ she said. ‘I’ve hidden it when you came. Usually it stands—’ She pointed to a shelf at the head of the divan on which she slept. ‘I like to wake up and see it in the morning.’

She was more girlish, more delighted to be girlish, than a softer woman might have been. She went to a cupboard, bent over, and stayed for a second looking at the photograph before she brought it out. Each action and posture was, as I had observed the first time I visited that room, more flowing and relaxed than a year ago. When I first observed that change, I did not guess that she was in love. Her profile was hard and clear, as she bent over the photograph; her lips were parted, as though she wanted to gush without constraint. ‘It’s rather a nice face,’ she said, handing me the picture. It was a weak, and sensitive face. The eyes were large, bewildered, and idealistic. I gave it back without a word. ‘You can see’, she said, ‘that he’s not much good at looking after himself. Much less me. I know it’s asking something, but I want you to help. I’ve never listened to anyone else, but I listen to you. And so will he.’

She tried to make me promise to meet him. I was so much beside myself that I gave an answer and contradicted myself and did not know what I intended. It was so natural to look after her; to shield this vulnerable happiness, to preserve her from danger. At the same time, all my angry heartbreak was pent up. I had not uttered a cry of that destructive rage.

She was satisfied. She felt assured that I should do as she asked. ‘Now what shall I do for you?’ she cried in her rapture. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile half-sarcastic, half-innocent as she brought out her anticlimax. ‘I shall continue your musical education.’ Since my first visit to Worcester Street, she had played records each time I went — to disguise her love. Yet it had been a pleasure to her. She knew I was unmusical, often she had complained that it was a barrier between us, and she liked to see me listening. She could not believe that the sound meant nothing. She had only to explain, and my deafness would fall away.

That afternoon, after her cry ‘What shall I do for you?’, she laid out the records of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Side by side, we sat and listened. Sheila listened, her eyes luminous, transfigured by her happiness. She listened and was in love.

The noise pounded round me. I too was in love.

The choral movement opened. As each theme came again, Sheila whispered to make me recognize it. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said, sweeping her hand down, as the first went out. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said twice more. But at the first sound of the human voice, she sat so still that she might have gone into a trance.

She was in love, and rapt. I sat beside her, possessed by my years of passion and devotion, consumed by tenderness, by desire, and by the mania of revenge, possessed by the years whose torments had retraced themselves to breaking point as she stood that night, oblivious to all but her own joy. She was carried away, into the secret contemplation of her love. I sat beside her, stricken and maddened by mine.