Джеймс Хилтон - So Well Remembered

We sat over coffee in the club smoke-room discussing the matter throughout most of the afternoon.

“But do you really think she was speaking the truth?” I asked.

“I think she could have been,” he answered, with no kind of reluctance. “But I also think she could have made up the story.”

“But what motive could she possibly have had? A girl fresh from England —how could Livia have had any concern with whether she lived or died?”

“Jealousy,” Jeffrey answered. “She saw in this girl some menace to her own life with me—or so she said when she made the confession.”

“But that’s equally absurd!” I persisted. “How long had you known the girl? A few hours, I suppose… Had you had any chance to… but of course it’s preposterous… and what sort of a girl was she? I suppose you hardly remember—even the name didn’t stay in your mind—”

Jeffrey nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, I’d almost forgotten that, but I do remember HER—she had reddish hair and a rather calm face.”

“Not pretty, though?”

“No, but calm… CALM.”

“And Livia was with you the whole of the time—”

“Oh yes. The three of us just talked during dinner, that’s all.”

“Well, it’s still absurd,” I repeated. “Even for Livia it’s absurd. How could she possibly imagine there was anything for her to be jealous of?”

He nodded again, but then suddenly moved restlessly in the club armchair. “You know,” he said at length, “I’ll be perfectly frank with you, since you deserve that much for all you’ve done for me lately… It’s true of course that there was nothing between me and that girl. Yet… there almost might have been… eventually. I knew that, in a queer sort of way, while we were just chatting during dinner. Nothing special or exciting or significant or provocative—and yet—and I was aware of it—that girl’s calmness came over to me… and Livy intercepted it, just as later on she intercepted the cable.” He got up, clenching and unclenching his hands. “That’s the really frightening thing about it,” he exclaimed, when he had let me order a second brandy. “Livy KNEW. She ALWAYS knew. She doesn’t miss a thing…”

The Mayor of Browdley sat for a long time in silence after Millbay had finished. He was—and he was aware of it—a little out of his depth. This world of rubber-planters and Sultans and five-foot kraits was so foreign to him, or seemed so when he tried to get it into extempore focus; how different from that other world of cotton mills and council meetings! And yet, after all, it was the same world, governed by the same passions, the same greeds, the same basic gulf between those who take and those who give. True, there were no snakes in Browdley, but there was diphtheria that could kill (and had killed, hadn’t it?) just as effectively; and there had once been a murder in a street not far from Mill Street, a particularly lurid murder that had made headlines in all the Sunday papers. From Browdley to Kemalpan and Tanjong Palai was only a matter of miles, but from Livia’s mind to his own… how far was that?

Millbay interrupted his musings. “Well, Boswell, you stipulated for my story first. Now what about yours?”

George answered at length: “Aye… but I haven’t one. Nothing to match what you’ve told me, anyhow. I can’t say I’m glad to have heard it, but it’s been good of you to give me so much time.”

“No need to be grateful. I’d rather know how it all strikes you.”

“That’s just it,” George answered. “It DOES strike me. It strikes me all of a heap.”

“You mean you don’t altogether believe it?”

“I don’t disbelieve it, because I’ve been struck all of a heap before by some of the things Livia did.”

“Oh, you have?”

“Aye… When she left me I was a bit like that for years. But I got over it…”

And that was all. Millbay, though disappointed, was tactful enough not to press him. “Seems to me,” he said later, “that those who want to plan the future with everything neatly laid out in squares and rectangles are going to find the Livias of this world sticking out like a sore thumb.”

“Maybe,” replied George. “But maybe also if the world was planned a bit better there wouldn’t be so many Livias.”

“You evidently accept that as a desirable state.”

“Nay,” said George quickly. “I’ll not say too much against her. We had some good times. And this jealousy you’ve talked about—I never noticed it particularly…”

Millbay smiled. “May I be very personal?”

“Anything you want.”

“It’s perhaps such ancient history that you won’t feel hurt if I suggest it… that perhaps she wasn’t as jealous in your case because she didn’t… love you… as much.”

“Aye, that might have been it.”

It was getting late and George took his leave soon after that. He thanked Millbay again, walked from Smith Square to his hotel in a street behind the Strand, and rather to his surprise slept well and did not dream. The next day was a Saturday and he was busy at a conference. The conference was about nothing more or less momentous than the coordination of local authorities in the grouping of road-transport services throughout the northern industrial areas; and George, again to his surprise, found it quite possible to intervene in the discussion and secure for Browdley favourable treatment in the proposed set-up. The conference then adjourned till Monday, and with a day to spare George could not think of anything better to do than visit Cambridge. He had never been there before, and thought it would be a good opportunity to compare it with Oxford, which he had visited once, in a mood of envy and adoration, thirty years earlier. So he took the train at Liverpool Street and eventually arrived, after a journey in which war-time and Sunday discomforts were incredibly combined, at a railway station whose form and situation roused in him the most drastic instincts of the rebuilder. He then took a bus into the town, got off at the Post Office, had a late and rather bad lunch at a restaurant, and entered the nearest of the colleges.

Here at last he felt an authentic thrill that years had scarcely dimmed; for George still worshipped education and could still think nostalgically of never-tasted joys. To be young, to live in one of these old colleges, to have years for nothing but study, and then to emerge into the world’s fray already armoured with academic letters after one’s name—this was the kind of past George would like to have had for himself, and the kind of future he would have wanted for his own boy, if his own boy had lived. The multiple disillusionments of the inter-war years had not dulled this dream, because it had been a dream only—for George, in Browdley, had never heard about fully-trained university men having to cadge jobs as vacuum-cleaner salesmen. So he could pass through the college archway and stare across the quadrangle at sixteenth-century buildings with the feeling that here, at any rate, was something almost perfect in a far from perfect world.

Civilian sightseers being rare in war-time, the college porter, scenting a tip, came out of his office to ask George if he would like to be shown over. George said yes, with some enthusiasm, and for the next hour was piloted through various courts, and into a quiet garden containing a famous mulberry-tree; he was also shown the rooms in which there had lived, during the most impressionable years of their lives, such varied personages as John Milton and Jan Smuts. George was entranced with all this, and by the time the tour was completed had absorbed much assorted information about the habits of undergraduates in pre-war days. It did not entirely conform to what he had imagined, or even thought desirable. But perhaps after the war things would be a little different in some respects. He soon found that everything the porter was afraid of, he himself most warmly hoped for; and presently he summed the man up as an incurable snob, of a kind almost never met in Browdley. However, all that did not matter in war-time, since the man, from his own statements, was an air-raid warden and doubtless doing his duty like everyone else. George gave him five shillings, which he thought was enough; and the man took it as if he thought it just about enough.