Time of Hope

Part Six A Single Act

That night, after Sheila told me she was in love, I stayed in the street, my eyes not daring to leave her lighted window. The music had played round me; I had said goodbye; but when I came out into the cold night, I could not go home. Each past storm of jealousy or desire was calm compared to this. The evening when I slipped away from George and stood outside the vicarage, just watching without purpose — that was nothing but a youth’s lament. Now I was driven.

I could find no rest until I saw with my own eyes whether or not another man would call on her that night. No rest from the calculations of jealousy: ‘I shall want some tea,’ she had said, and that light phrase set all my mind to work, as though a great piece of clockwork had been wound up by a turn of the key. When would she make him tea? That night? Next day? No test from the torments, the insane reminders, of each moment when her body had allured me; so that standing in the street, looking at her window, I was maddened by sensual reveries.

It was late. A drizzle was falling, silver and sleety as it passed the street lamps. Time upon time I walked as far up the street as I could go, and still see the window. Through the curtains her light shone — orange among the yellow squares of other windows, the softest, the most luxurious, of all the lights in view. Twice a man came down the pavement, and as he approached her house my heart stopped. He passed by. A desolate prostitute, huddled against the raw night, accosted me. Some of the lights went out, but hers still shone.

The street was deserted, At last — in an instant when I turned my eyes away — her window had clicked into darkness. Relief poured through me, inordinate, inexpressible relief. I turned away; and I was drowsing in the taxi before I got home.

For days in Chambers I was driven, as violently as I had been that night. Writing an opinion, I could not keep my thoughts still. At a conference, I heard my leader talk, I heard the clients inquiring — between them and me were images of Sheila, images of the flesh, the images that tormented my senses and turned jealousy into a drill within the brain. And in the January nights I was driven to walk the length of Worcester Street, back and forth, hypnotized by the lighted window; it was an obsession, it was a mania, but I could not keep myself away.

One night, in the tube station at Hyde Park Corner, I imagined that I saw her in the crowd. There was a thin young man, of whom I only saw the back, and a woman beside him. She was singing to herself. Was it she? They mounted a train in the rush, I could not see, the doors slid to.

Soon afterwards — it was inside a week since she broke her news — the telephone rang at my lodgings. The landlady shouted my name, and I went downstairs. The telephone stood out in the open, on a table in the hall. I heard Sheila’s voice: ‘How are you?’

I muttered.

‘I want to know: how are you, physically?’

I had scarcely thought of my health. I had been acting as though I were tireless. I said that I was all right, and asked after her.

‘I’m very well.’ Her voice was unusually full. There was a silence, then she asked: ‘When am I going to see you?’

‘When you like.’

‘Come here tonight. You can take me out if you like.’

Once more an answer broke out.

‘Shall you be alone?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ In the telephone the word was clear; I could hear neither gloating nor compassion.

When I entered her room that evening she was dressed to dine out, in a red evening frock. Since I had begun to earn money, we had taken to an occasional treat. It was the chief difference in my way of life, for I had not changed my flat, and still lived as though in transit. She let me do it; she knew that I had my streak of childish ostentation, and that it flattered me to entertain her as the Marches might have done. For herself, she would have preferred our old places in Soho and round Charlotte Street; but, to indulge me, she would dress up and go to fashionable restaurants, as she had herself proposed that night.

She was bright-eyed and smiling. Before we went out, however, she said in a quiet voice: ‘Why did you ask whether I should be alone?’

‘You know.’

‘You’re thinking’, she said, her eyes fixed on me, ‘of what I did to you once? At the Edens’ that night — with poor Tom Devitt?’

I did not reply.

‘I shan’t do that again,’ she said. She added: ‘I’ve treated you badly. I don’t need telling it.’

She walked into the restaurant at the Berkeley with me behind her. Just then, at twenty-five, she was at the peak of her beauty. For a young girl, her face had been too hard, lined, and over-vivid. And I often thought, trying to see the future, that long before she was middle-aged her looks would be ravaged. But now she was at the age which chimed with her style. That night, as she walked across the restaurant, all eyes followed her, and a hush fell. She made the conversation. Each word she said was light with her happiness, more than ever capricious and sarcastic. Sometimes she drew a smile, despite myself. Then, in the middle of the meal, she leaned across the table, her eyes full on me, and said, quietly and simply: ‘You can do something for me.’

‘What?’

‘Will you?’ she begged.

I stared at her.

‘You can be some good to me,’ she said.

‘What do you want?’

She said: ‘I want you to see Hugh.’

‘I can’t do it,’ I burst out.

‘It might help me,’ she said.

My eyes could not leave hers.

‘You’re more realistic than I am,’ she said. ‘I want you to tell me what he feels about me. I don’t know whether he loves me.’

‘What do you think I am?’ I cried, and violent words were quivering behind my lips.

‘I trust you,’ she said. ‘You’re the only human being I’ve ever trusted.’

There was silence. She said ‘There is no one else to ask. No one else would be worth asking.’

In exhaustion, I replied at last: ‘All right. I’ll see him.’

She was docile with delight. When could I manage it? She would arrange any time I liked. ‘I’m very dutiful to Hugh,’ she said, ‘but I shall make him come — whenever you can manage it.’ What about that very night? She could telephone him, and bring him to her room. Would I mind, that night?

‘It’s as good as any other,’ I said.

She rang up. We drove back to Worcester Street. In the taxi I said little, and I was as sombre while we sat in her room and waited.

‘He’s highly strung,’ she said. ‘He may be nervous of you.’

A car passed along the street, coming nearer, and I listened. Sheila shook her head.

‘No,’ she said. ‘He’ll come by bus.’ She asked: ‘Shall I play a record?’

‘If you like.’

She grimaced, and began to search in her shelf. As she did so, there pattered a light step down below. ‘Here he is,’ she said.

He came in with a smile, quick and apologetic. Sheila and I were each standing, and for a second he threw an arm round her waist. Then he faced me, as she introduced us.

‘Lewis, this is Hugh Smith.’

He was as tall as me, but much slighter. His neck was thin and his chest sunken. He was very fair. His upper lip was petulant and vain, but when he smiled his whole face was merry, boyish, and sweet. He looked much younger than his years, much younger than either Sheila or me.

He was taken up with Sheila’s dress.

‘I’ve not seen you in that before, have I?’ he said. ‘Yes, it’s very very nice. Let me see. Is it quite right at the back—?’ he went on with couturier’s prattle.

Sheila laughed at him.

‘You’re much more interested than my dressmaker,’ she said.

Hugh appealed to me: ‘Aren’t you interested in clothes?’

His manner was so open that I was disarmed.

He went on talking about clothes, and music, and the plays we had seen. Nothing could have been lighter-hearted, more suited to a polite party. She made fun of him, more gentle fun than I was used to. I asked a question about his job, and he took at once to the defensive; I gave it up, and he got back to concerts again. Nothing could have been more civilized.

I was watching them together. I was watching them with a desperate attention, more concentrated than I had ever summoned and held in all my life before. Around them there was no breath of the heaviness and violence of a passion. It was too friendly, too airy, too kind, for that. Towards him she showed a playful ease which warmed her voice and set her free. When she turned to him, even the line of her profile seemed less sharp. It was an ease that did not carry the deep repose of violent love; it was an ease that was full of teasing, half-kittenish and half-maternal. I had never seen her so for longer than a flash.

I could not be sure of what he felt for her. He was fond of her, was captivated by her charm, admired her beauty, liked her high spirits — that all meant little. I thought that he was flattered by her love. He was conceited as well as vain. He lapped up all the tributes of love. He was selfish; very amiable; easily frightened, easily overweighted, easily overborne.

Sheila announced that she was going to bed. She wanted Hugh and me, I knew, to leave together, so that I could talk to him. It was past midnight; the last buses had gone; he and I started to walk towards Victoria. It was a crisp frosty night, the black sky glittering with stars.

On the pavement in Lupus Street, he spoke, as though for safety, of the places we lived in and how much we paid for our flats. He was apprehensive of the enmity not yet brought into the open that night. He was searching for casual words that would hurry the minutes along. I would have welcomed it so. But I was too far gone. I interrupted ‘How long have you known her?’

‘Six months.’

‘I’ve known her six years.’

‘That’s a long time,’ said Hugh, and once more tried to break on to safe ground. We had turned into Belgrave Road.

I did not answer his question, but asked: ‘Do you understand her?’

His eyes flickered at me, and then away.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

‘Do you understand her?’

‘She’s intelligent, isn’t she? Don’t you think she is?’ He seemed to be probing round for answers that would please me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I think she’s very sweet. She is sweet in her way, isn’t she?’

Our steps rang in the empty frost-bound street.

‘She’s not much like the other girls I’ve known!’ he ventured. He added with his merry childlike smile: ‘But I expect she wants the same things in the end. They all do, don’t they?’

‘I expect so.’

‘They want you to persuade them into bed. Then they want you to marry them.’

I said: ‘Do you want to marry her?’

‘I think I’d like to settle down, wouldn’t you?’ he said. ‘And she can be very sweet, can’t she?’ He added: ‘I’ve always got out of it before. I suppose she’s a bit of a proposition. Somehow I think it might be a good idea.’

The lights of the empty road stretched ahead, the lights under the black sky.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘I’m frightfully sorry if I’ve been poaching. I am sorry if I’ve got in your way. These things can’t be helped, though, can they?’

For minutes the lights, the sky, had seemed shatteringly bright, reelingly dark, as though I were dead drunk.

Suddenly my mind leapt clear.

‘I should like to talk about that,’ I said. ‘Not tonight. Tomorrow or the next day.’

‘There isn’t much to talk about, is there?’ he said, again on the defensive.

‘I want to say some things to you.’

‘I don’t see that it’ll do much good, you know,’ he replied.

‘It’s got to be done,’ I said.

‘I’m rather full up this week—’

‘It can’t be left,’ I said.

‘Oh, if you want,’ he gave way, with a trace of petulance. Before we parted, we arranged to meet. He was shy of the place and time, but I made him promise — my flat, not tomorrow but the evening after.

The fire was out when I returned to my room. I did not think of sleep, and I did not notice the cold. Still in my overcoat, I sat on the head of the sofa, smoking.

I stayed without moving for many minutes. My thoughts were clear. They had never seemed so clear. I believed that this man was right for her. Or at least with him she might get an unexacting happiness. Knowing her with the insight of passionate love, I believed that I saw the truth. He was lightweight, but somehow his presence made her innocent and free. Her best chance was to marry him.

Would he marry her? He was wavering. He could be forced either way. He was selfish, but this time he did not know exactly what he wanted for himself. He had made love to her, but was not physically bound. She had little hold on him; yet he was thinking of her as his wife. He was irresolute. He was waiting to be told what to do.

Thinking back on that night, as I did so often afterwards, I had to remember one thing. It was easy to forget, but in fact many of my thoughts were still protective. Her best chance was to marry him. I thought of how I could persuade him, the arguments to use, the feelings to play on. Did he know that she would one day be rich? Would he not be flattered by my desire to have her at any price, would not my competition raise her value? I imagined her married to him, light and playful as she had been that night. It was a sacrificial, tender thought.

If I played it right, my passion to marry her would spur him on.

Yes. Her best chance was to marry him. I believed that I could decide it. I could bring it off — or destroy it.

With the cruellest sense of power I had ever known, I thought that I could destroy it.

I had two days to wait. Throughout that time, wherever I was, to whomever I was speaking, I had my mind fixed, my whole spirit and body, bone and flesh and brain, on the hour to come. The sense of power ran through my bloodstream. As I prepared for the scene, my thoughts stayed clear. Underneath the thoughts, I was exultant. Each memory of the past, each hope and resolve remaining — they were at one. All that I was, fused into the cruel exultation.

I went into Chambers each of those mornings, but only for an hour. I conferred with Percy. On Thursday we were to hear judgement in an adjourned case: that would be the morning after Hugh’s visit, I thought, as Percy and I methodically arranged my timetable. February would be a busy month.

‘They’re coming in nicely,’ said Percy.

Those two days were cold and wet, but I did not stay long in Chambers or in my room. I was not impatient, but I was active. It was a pleasure to jostle in the crowds. My mind was planning, and at the same time I breathed in the wet reek of Covent Garden, the whispers of a couple behind me at the cinema, the grotesque play of an enraged and pompous woman’s face.

I did not hurry over my tea on the second day. He was due at half past six; I had to buy a bottle of whisky on the way home, but there was time enough. I had been sitting about in cafés most of that afternoon, drinking tea and reading the evening papers. Before I set off for home, I bought the latest edition and read it through. As people came into the café their coats were heavy with the rain, and at the door men poured trickles of water from their hat-brims.

When I reached my door the rain had slackened, but I was very wet. I had to change; and as I did so I thought with sarcastic tenderness of the first occasion that I arrived at Sheila’s house. In the mirror I saw myself smiling. Then I got ready for Hugh’s visit. I made up the fire. I had not yet drawn the blinds, and the reflections of the flames began to dance behind the window panes. I put the bottle of whisky and a jug of water and glasses on the table, and opened a box of cigarettes. Then at last I pulled down the blinds and shut the room in.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I turned back.

‘You’d rather I spoke now?’ I said,

‘I suppose so.’

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

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

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

‘Perhaps that’s true,’ he said.

‘You’re quite undecided,’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’

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

‘I shall make it up.’

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

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

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

‘Well?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Of course I’ve an idea.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He misunderstood me.

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

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

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

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

He avoided my gaze.

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

‘Are you saying that she will go mad?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘I must know.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What have you said?’

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

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

‘Yes.’

‘Did she guess what was coming?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Is it definite?’ I said.

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

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

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

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

He smiled.

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

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

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

Whatever the results for Getliffe, his move was certain to do me good, now and henceforward. His work still flowed into our Chambers: much of it, as a silk, he could not touch. His habits were too strong to break; he was no more reconciled to youth knocking at the door, and he did his best, in his furtive ingenious fashion, to direct the briefs to those too dim to be rivals. But he could not do much obstruction, and Percy took care of me. In the year 1930–1, despite my illness, I had earned seven hundred and fifty pounds. The moment Getliffe took silk I could reckon on at least a thousand pounds for each year thereafter. It was a comfort, for these last months I had half felt some results of illness and my private grief. I had not thrown myself into my cases with the old absorption. I did not see it clearly then, but I was not improving on my splendid start. I should still have backed my chances for great success, but a shrewd observer would have doubted them. Still, I had gone some distance. I was now certain of a decent income. For the first time since I was a child, I was sure of my livelihood.

Once I imagined that I should be overjoyed, when that rasp of worry was conquered. I had looked forward to the day, ever since I began to struggle. It should have marked an epoch. Now it had come, and it was empty. She was not there. All that I had of her came in the thoughts of sleepless nights. On the white midsummer nights, those thoughts gave me no rest. The days were empty. My bit of success was the emptiest of all. Right to the last I had hoped that when it came she would be with me. This would have been the time for marriage. In fact, I had not the slightest word from her. I tried to accept that I might never see her again.

I went out, on the excuse of any invitation. Through the Marches and acquaintances at the Bar, my name was just finding a place on some hostesses’ lists. I was a young man from nowhere, but I was presumably unattached and well thought of at my job. I went to dances and parties, and sometimes a girl there seemed real and my love a nightmare from which I had woken. I liked being liked; I lapped up women’s flattery; often I half-resolved to find myself a wife. But I was not a man who could marry without the magic being there. Leaving someone who should have contented me, I was leaden with the memory of magic. With Sheila, I should have remembered each word and touch, whereas this — this was already gone.

One morning in September, soon after I had returned from a holiday, a letter stared from my breakfast tray. My heart pounded as I saw the postmark of her village; but the letter had been redirected from my Inn, and the handwriting was a man’s. It came from Mr Knight, and read:

The letter was signed with a flamboyant ‘Lawrence Knight’.

The ‘club’ was the Athenaeum. I knew that from private jokes with Sheila. He had devoted intense pertinacity to get himself elected, and then never visited it. It was like him to pick up the jargon, particularly the arrogant private-world jargon, of any institution, and become a trifle too slick with it.

He must want to talk of Sheila. He must be deeply troubled to get in touch with me — and he had done it without her knowledge, for she would have told him my address. Reading his elaborate approach again, I guessed that he was making a special journey. He was so proud and vain that only a desperate trouble would make him humble himself so. Was she ill? But if so, surely even he, for all his camouflage, would have told me.

In some ways I was as secretive as Mr Knight, but my instinct in the face of danger was not to lose a second in knowing the worst. When I entered the Athenaeum, I was on tenterhooks to have all my anxieties settled. How was she? What was the matter? Had she spoken of me? But Mr Knight was too adroit for me. I was shown into the smoking-room and he began at once ‘My dear fellow, before we do anything else, I insist on your drinking a glass of this very indifferent sherry. I cannot recommend it. I cannot recommend it. I expect you to resolve my ignorance upon the position of our poor old pound—’

He did not speak hurriedly, but he gave me no chance to break in. He appeared intent on not getting to the point. I listened with gnawing impatience. Of all the interviews at which I had been kept waiting for news, this was the most baffling. Mr Knight was not at home in the Athenaeum, and it was essential for him to prove that no one could be more so. He called waiters by their names, had our table changed, wondered why he kept up his subscription, described a long talk that morning with the secretary. He proceeded over lunch to speculate intricately about the gold standard. On which — though no talk had ever seemed so meaningless — he was far more detached than most of my acquaintances. ‘Of course we shall go off it,’ said Mr Knight, with surprising decision and energy. ‘They’re talking complete nonsense about staying on it. It’s an economic impossibility. At least I should have thought so, but I never think about these things. I gave up thinking long ago, Eliot. I’m just a poor simple country parson. No doubt this nonsense about the gold standard was convenient for removing our late lamented government, that is, if one had no high opinion of their merits.’

Mr Knight went on, with one of his sly darts, to wonder how warmly I regarded them. It was remarkable, in his view, how increased prosperity insensibly produced its own little effect, its own almost imperceptible effect, on one’s political attitude…‘But it’s not for me to attribute causes,’ said Mr Knight.

No talk had ever seemed so far away, as though I were going deaf. At last he took me upstairs for coffee, and we sat outside on one of the small balconies, looking over the corner of Waterloo Place and Pall Mall. The sunshine was hot. Buses gleamed in the afternoon light. The streets smelt of petrol and dust.

Suddenly Mr Knight remarked in an aside: ‘I suppose you haven’t had any experience of psychiatrists, professional or otherwise? They can’t have come your way?’

‘No, but…’

‘I was only asking because my daughter — you remember that she brought you to my house once or twice, perhaps? — my daughter happened to be treated by one recently.’

I was riven by fear, guilt, sheer animal concern.

‘Is she better?’ I cried out of it all.

‘She wouldn’t persevere,’ said Mr Knight. ‘She said that he was stupider than she was. I am inclined to think that these claims to heal the soul…’ He was taking refuge in a disquisition on psychology and medicine, but I had no politeness left.

‘How is she?’ I said roughly. ‘Tell me anything. How is she?’

Mr Knight had been surveying the street. For a moment he looked me in the face. His eyes were self-indulgent but sad.

‘I wish I knew,’ he said.

‘What can I do for her?’

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘how well do you know my daughter?’

‘I have loved her ever since I met her. That is seven years ago. I have loved her without return.’

‘I am sorry for you,’ he said.

For the first time I had heard him speak without cover.

In an instant he was weaving his circumlocutions, glancing at me only from the corner of his eye.

‘I am an elderly man,’ he remarked, ‘and it is difficult to shoulder responsibility as one did once. There are times when one envies men like you, Eliot, in the prime of your youth. Even though one may seem favoured not to be bearing the heat and burden of the day. If my daughter should happen to live temporarily in London, which I believe she intends to, it would ease my mind that you should be in touch with her. I have heard her speak of you with respect, which is singular for my daughter. If she has no reliable friends here, I should find my responsibility too much of a burden.’

Mr Knight looked down his nose, and very intently, at the passers-by across the place.

‘It is just possible’, he said, in an offhand whisper, ‘that my daughter may arrive in London this week. She is apt to carry out her intentions rather quickly. She speaks of returning to a house which she has actually lived in before. Yes, she has lived in London for a few months. I think I should like to give you the address, then perhaps if you ever find yourself near — The address is 68 Worcester Street SW1.’

He wrote it on a piece of club paper which he pulled from his pocket. He wrote it very legibly, realizing all the time that I knew that address as well as my own.

I rang the familiar number on the day that Mr Knight hinted that it was ‘just possible’ she might return. She answered. Her voice was friendly. ‘Come round,’ she said, as she might have done at any previous time. ‘How did you guess? I don’t believe it was clairvoyance.’ But she did not press me when we met. She took it for granted that I should be there, and seemed herself unchanged. She made no reference to Hugh, nor to her visit to the psychiatrist.

We sauntered hand in hand that night. For me, there was no future. This precarious innocent happiness had flickered over us inexplicably for a few days, perhaps adding up to a week in all, in our years together. Now it had chosen to visit us again.

She was sometimes airy, sometimes remote, but that had always been so. I did not want to break the charm.

For several days it seemed like first love. I said no word of her plans or mine. If this were an illusion, then let it shine a little longer. People called me clear-sighted, but if this were an illusion I did not want to see the truth.

On a warm September night we dawdled round St James’s Park, and sat by the water at the palace end. It was the calmest and most golden of nights. The lamps threw bars of gold towards us, and other beams swept and passed from cars driving along the Mall. On the quiet water, ducks moved across the golden bars and left a glittering shimmer in their wake.

‘Pretty,’ she said.

The sky was lit up over the Strand. From the barracks the Irish bagpipers began to play in the distance, marched round until the music was loud, and receded again.

We were each silent, while the band made several circuits. She was thinking. I was enchanted by the night.

She said: ‘Was it you who sent him away?’

I answered: ‘It was.’

The skirling came near, died away, came near again. Our silence went on. Her fingers had been laced in mine, and there stayed. Neither of us moved. We had not looked at each other, but were still gazing over the water. A bird alighted close in front of us, and then another.

She said: ‘It makes it easier.’

I asked: ‘What does it make easier?’

She said: ‘I’m no good now. I never shall be. I’ve played my last cards. You can have me. You can marry me if you like.’

Her tone was not contemptuous, not cruel, not bitter. It was resigned. Hearing her offer in that tone. I was nevertheless as joyful as though, when I first proposed to her in my student’s attic, she had said yes. I was as joyful as though we had suffered nothing — like any young man in the park that halcyon night, asking his girl to marry him and hearing her accept. At the same time, I was melted with concern.

‘I want you,’ I said. ‘More than I’ve ever done. But you mustn’t come to me if you could be happier any other way.’

‘I’ve done you great harm,’ she said. ‘Now you’ve done the same to me. Perhaps we deserve each other.’

‘That is not all of us,’ I said. ‘I have loved you. You have immeasurably enriched my life.’

‘You have done me great harm,’ she said, relentlessly, without any malice, speaking from deep inside. ‘I might have been happy with him. I shall always think it.’

I cried: ‘Let me get him back for you. I’ll bring him back myself. If you want him, you must have him.’

‘I forbid you,’ she said, with all her will.

‘If you want him—’

‘I might find out that it was not true. That would be worse.’

I exclaimed in miserable pity, and put my arm round her. She leant her head on my shoulder; the band approached; a long ripple ran across the pond, and the reflections quivered. I thought she was crying. Soon, however, she looked at me with dry eyes. She even had the trace of a sarcastic smile.

‘No,’ she said. ‘We can’t escape each other. I suppose it’s just.’

She stared at me.

‘I know it’s useless,’ she said. ‘But I want to tell you this. You need a wife who will love you. And look after you. And be an ally in your career. I can do none of those things.’

‘I know.’

‘I’ll try to be loyal,’ she went on. ‘That’s all I can promise. I shan’t be much good at it.’

A couple, arms round each other’s waists, passed very slowly in front of us. When they had gone by, I looked once more at the lights upon the water, and then into her eyes.

‘I know all this,’ I said. ‘I am marrying you because I can do nothing else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why are you marrying me?’

I expected a terrible answer — such as that we had damaged each other beyond repair, that, by turning love into a mutual torment, we were unfit for any but ourselves. In fact, she said: ‘It’s simple. I’m not strong enough to go on alone.’