Джеймс Хилтон - Morning Journey

“I hope I’ll look as young when I’m his age.”

“Young? YOU?” He said shyly, and with a different kind of embarrassment: “I can’t imagine you anything but young at any age.”

He looked at her across the low table on which all the equipment of afternoon tea was laid out—silver and china sparkling in the firelight; outside, beyond the curtains not yet drawn, snow was beginning to fall in dark slanting flakes against the window. The book he had been reading lay open on another table near his chair, and an interrupted page was in his typewriter. The deep green walls, with their few pictures, framed the red carpet in a way that was striking yet warm; bookshelves made their own pattern of colours carelessly mixed. She had a curious impulse she had had before when wakened in the night by something that might be a distant explosion or a minor earthquake shock—an impulse to note the hour and the minute, so that the next day, if she saw it in the papers, she could tell herself: That was IT… She looked at the clock now; seventeen minutes past four. It was the word ‘young’ that had exploded—but not shatteringly at all, just enough to waken her into a new awareness.

She said with a half smile: “I’m forty, Norris, and how have I devoted myself? I wonder if acting’s any better than banking, from your point of view?”

“Oh, but of course it is. And I haven’t got a point of view—I wish I had. I’m just fumbling around trying to find one.”

When she saw him across the dinner-table that evening it seemed somehow like the day after and she was reading in the papers about that special moment of the earthquake. He and Austen conversed politely, and after the meal they both listened to music on the radio.

She did not sleep well, and in the morning, not knowing quite why, she told Norris she had some shopping to do. “Last-minute things for Christmas —perhaps you’d better not come with me—there’ll be crowds.”

She drove the car herself, as she often did, but not to the shops. It was a hard, bright, icy day, and before she realized it she was on the ramp leading up to the Washington Bridge. There was nothing for it then but to cross, and afterwards she turned north along the familiar road to Newburgh. She came to a small town some thirty miles out and had a sandwich at a lunch counter. Then she drove back, without much awareness of time. She was in New York again by mid-afternoon, and along Riverside Drive she passed the street that Paul had given as his address. Impulse was too late for her to make the turn, but by a couple of streets further it had become a definite whim to see where he lived. She turned and drove there, already unhopeful about it. Yet in New York you could never be sure, that was one reason why the city was so endlessly fascinating—each street, if you knew it well enough, so subtly different from its neighbours that even number itself acquired unmathematical attributes. Presently she identified a red-brick, sham-Gothic apartment building, several decades newer than the decaying brown-stone houses that enclosed it, and possibly at one time a spearhead of social change now merged and indistinguishable amidst the general slatternliness of the district. Children swarmed along the sidewalks and gutters, and when she pulled up they stopped their games, not because the car was anything special (an old Buick in days when every bookie had a new Cadillac), but from some instinctive curiosity that met her own as she stepped out. Even then she had no plan to visit Paul—merely to ask for his new address, for she could not imagine he would have stayed long in such a place. But she found there was no one to ask—neither doorman nor desk nor elevator; merely a cluster of mail-boxes, some of them broken and open. She studied the name-cards, hardly expecting to find Paul’s; yet it was there—“Paul Saffron 4K”—and immediately the thought of him, crippled with arthritis and living on a fourth floor without an elevator, became a challenge to pity and then to action. Surely, if he were in, she could at least pay him a Christmas call, and with such an excuse the idea of seeing him grew warmly, easing her mind from the strain that had held it clenched all day after the almost sleepless night.

Paul opened the door to her ring, and his first exclamation was not so much surprise to see her as at her looks. “Carey! What have you done to yourself? Climbing stairs must suit you… Come in. I was wondering if you’d ever accept my invitation.”

“Your invitation?”

“To see some foreign films. They run them at a theatre round the corner from here. Nothing worth seeing this week, though.”

“You invited ME?”

“Sure, I’ve written several times, but no answer. Too bad I didn’t know you were coming today, I’d have bought some tea. Will you drink coffee?”

“Why, yes, but don’t go to any trouble. This is just a Christmas visit.”

“Good. What would we poor people do, I wonder, without you rich people to give us a helping hand?”

Then she noticed the room, inventory-making as she always did: the scuffed Edwardian furniture, ugly types of an ugly period; an oblong of threadbare carpet in the centre of the floor, wallpaper peeling off at the corners, an ancient gas chandelier wired for electricity, the imitation marble mantelpiece surmounting a radiator, a contraption on one of the walls that was presumably a pull-down bed. A further door led to a dark bathroom, and the view from the window was of ancient balks of timber buttressing a half- demolished property.

Meanwhile she was asking Paul about his arthritis, which he said was much better, and his prospects of a job, which he said were non-existent.

“I just thought you might have had some luck. I—I don’t know how you’d feel about—about talking to Austen. Directly, I mean— now that you’ve met him. He knows people, and if he could help you to get something—”

“It would give him a kick, would it, to turn me into a Hollywood office-boy?… No, Carey—thanks to your own generosity I’ve so far managed not only to keep the wolf from the door but also the termites out of my brain.”

“But I know how it used to get on your nerves to be idle.”

“Who says I’ve been idle?” He pointed to a pile of manuscript on a table under the window. “See that? I’ve been hard at work… My life story. I tell the whole truth, that’s what makes it unique. Probably a best seller. Full of big names when I get to the successful years. Already I’m as far as Othello at Hampstead—remember that? Here, take it with you when you go —I’d like your honest opinion.”

“But if this is your only copy—”

“I have an earlier one in rough, and my typing’s not so bad. I WANT you to read it. After all, it’s your bounty that’s enabling me to write it.”

“I wish you wouldn’t keep on talking like that, Paul.”

But she knew that in his own way he was enjoying the situation. From his earlier word ‘generosity’, to this last one, ‘bounty’, she could read the progress of a drama in which he was already richly casting himself.

“But you WILL read it if I ask you?”

“Certainly, though I’m no judge of writing, as I tell Norris.”

“Norris? Ah, the boy who liked my pictures. I remember. How is he?”

“He’s grown up now—back home from the Army. He was injured in Germany after the war ended—a car smash. Not badly.”

“And Austen?”

“The same as when you saw him three weeks ago.”

“How could he ever be different?”

“You were being so charming to him that afternoon I guessed you didn’t really like him.”

“Why should I like him any more than he likes me?”

“All right, let’s leave it at that.”