Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘And you want me to be frank?’ Charnock continued.

‘Well, yes, of course, sir.’

Charnock nodded and shrugged. He slowly lit the cigar that Havelock offered; it was as if Havelock were gently prompting him to exploit the fullest possible drama of the occasion. Then Charnock began, puffing between the words: ‘In that case, my boy, the answer is fortunately simple. You have nothing but a talent. A nice talent, and one that may continue to give yourself and others pleasure, but beyond that…’ He shrugged again.

Havelock turned to Charles. ‘I hope it isn’t a big disappointment, Charles, but I think you’ll agree it’s far better to have it now than nourish an impossible hope.’

‘I never had such a hope, so there isn’t any disappointment,’ Charles answered.

Which was true, and yet in a way not entirely true. For there was always the hope that one admitted to be preposterous—like wondering what one would do with the money if one’s sweepstake ticket won the first prize. Charles, had he ever been asked, would have told anybody (and sincerely) that he doubted if he had more than talent; but he did not enjoy being assured of it by a man whose opinion he valued but hadn’t sought, and in front of his father, who (he was now convinced) had planned the whole thing as some kind of personal humiliation. Later he began to wonder if it might be simply revenge for the week he had spent away from Beeching with Brunon.

One day in the spring of 1921 Charles left Cambridge by an early train to spend the day in London. His researches into the Seljuk Turks had reached a point where Cambridge libraries had nothing more to offer, but there were several sources at the British Museum that he thought might yield something. The morning was wet and he was glad to exchange the chill of London streets for the leathery warmth of the great Reading Room under the dome. After he had searched the catalogue and filled in slips he found a desk and read the paper while he waited; there was nothing much in the news—riots in Vienna, famine in Russia, Anglo-French squabbling about German reparations, a murder at Golders Green—just an average cross-section of daily mishap. It was really more satisfying to stare about and observe the familiar types—students planning success in examinations, as he was; droll characters probing crannies of knowledge for the strangest morsels; tired-looking gleaners who Charles imagined might be freelance journalists gathering material for the kind of article they would never sell. Once the Museum official who brought his books had leaned over to whisper: ‘Know who used to sit at your desk, young man? KARL MARX… And you know where Lenin first met Trotsky?… In the street—in the middle of the night —just round the corner from here.’

Charles had been interested, though Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were no particular heroes of his. But he was young enough to find a thrill in feeling so close to the kind of history that seemed alive in newspapers rather than dead in books.

The books arrived, and Charles busily made notes till one o’clock, when he stacked his material where he could return to it later and strolled along the corridor to the Museum restaurant. It looked full, so he reclaimed his hat and coat and scampered down the long Grecian flight into the open air. He was in a mood for scampering. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was pushing aside the edges of cloud and trying to dry the streets. He felt happy.

He could have painted those clouds. He had done a good morning’s work, and he would do more during the afternoon and then catch the 7.15 back to Cambridge, eating dinner on the train. That would give him plenty of time to be in college before midnight; and the next day he could sort out his notes and fit them into the thesis where they best belonged. It seemed a shadowless programme as he entered the stream of hurrying Londoners outside the Museum. There was a Lyons teashop nearby, but this too was crowded and the only vacant chair he could see was at a table already in use. It was better than waiting, though, and as he only wanted a sandwich and a cup of coffee he threaded his way across the room. Suddenly he saw that the other occupant was a girl; or rather, the girl whom he saw to be the other occupant gave him a sudden emotion. There was no special reason for it; she was not prettier than average, and in her rather shabby mackintosh and with wisps of rain-wet hair a little disarranged over her forehead she must be aware, if she were giving it a thought, of not looking her best. Clearly she was not giving it a thought. She was reading a book and seemed engrossed; when Charles sat down she did not look up, and this gave him a chance to observe her more carefully. All the time the emotion he had had on first seeing her persisted, and meanwhile something else happened that he would not have noticed except at a moment of heightened intensity—the sun broke the edge of another cloud and a single ray pierced the interior of the teashop. He saw the scene then as he would always remember it—the slopped tables and muddied floor, the clothes-rack hung with coats and dripping umbrellas, the sign pasted on a mirror that read ‘Baked Beans on Toast Now Reduced to Fivepence’. He also saw that the book she was reading was a novel by Compton Mackenzie called Guy and Pauline. She was rather pale, and though her eyes were on the book he guessed they were large; the small finger that turned the pages had a dark stain on the tip. He felt like a detective when he decided that this was not merely from ink but from typewriter-ribbon ink.

He gave his order to the waitress and continued the diagnosis till the sandwich and cup of coffee arrived. Then he ate and drank slowly, and throughout all this time she had not once looked up. The book, he thought, must be surpassingly readable. But he was glad, in a way, because it enabled him to continue his detective role. She had had a cup of tea, he noted, and a bath bun. That was not much of a midday meal for an office girl— perhaps it was all she could afford. But then he imagined the same deduction being made about himself, from similar evidence on the table; and he wished it were she who would look up and be interested enough to make the mistake. She didn’t. Presently, though, she glanced at the clock on the wall behind, put a marker at the page she had reached, grabbed her bill, and hurried to the cash desk.

Charles stayed for a few minutes, then picked up his own bill and left. ‘Just like April,’ said the cashier as she gave him change. He was puzzled for a moment till he saw that the sun had gone in and another shower was beginning. He had to walk through it back to the Museum.

All afternoon, and during the train journey to Cambridge, and on and off during the days of work that followed, Charles found himself thinking of the girl in the Lyons teashop. Indeed, he had never thought so persistently of any girl before. Amorous adventure had so far in his life been of a kind to make him think its pleasures exaggerated, or at least over-compensated for by regrets and confusions; and the girls he met fairly often were mostly the daughters of Beeching neighbours, horsy or hockey-playing. They thought him shy, which he was, and dull, which he was not; he had sometimes hoped that one of them might discover this. As for the Newnham and Girton girls who attended the university lectures, he hardly knew any of them except by sight, and the sight was rarely blood-tingling. Perhaps, he feared, he was impossibly hard to please, since he did not seem to care for either the bluestocking or the sportswoman type.

One thing he did with a promptness that startled him; he bought Guy and Pauline at Heffer’s and read it at a sitting. It was charmingly written, but he thought Guy was a bit of a prig, and an Oxford prig at that—which put him at odds with the entire idyll. His surviving interest, when he came to the last page, was with the girl in the teashop—why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn’t. Maybe she merely preferred a novel—any novel—to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that—with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.