Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘Japanese mail?’

‘Yes, we do a lot of business with Japan. AND China.’

‘Are your hours long?’

‘Nine till six.’

‘Hard work?’

‘Not so bad. It comes in rushes. That’s why I’m so late today. I have to go, really. It’s been awfully nice talking to you.’

‘You say you always come here to lunch?’

‘Well, sometimes I go to the A.B.C. in Holborn. But mostly here. It’s nearer.’ She picked up the bill.

‘No, no, let ME…’

‘Oh, I couldn’t… no, really…’

The bill was only a few pence, and he thought it too unimportant to argue about, the more so as he didn’t know whether she had protested conventionally or because he had said his father had no job. So he said, testing the matter from another angle: ‘All right, THIS time—but I must see you again. Will you have lunch with me next week—one day?’

‘I’ll be here, yes. Every day.’

He followed her to the cash desk, paying his own bill. He still stayed with her when they reached the street. A clock outside was either five minutes fast or else the one in the teashop had been slow. She noticed it with alarm. ‘Oh, look, I’m terribly late.’

So they scampered together, half running and half walking, along a zigzag of side streets to Kingsway, making plans meanwhile. When they reached the office doorway another clock, confirming the one in the teashop, seemed to give them a moment miraculously their own. He said: ‘You won’t be late —not now—and why don’t I meet you HERE next week, instead of at the Lyons? We don’t really have to go there at all, do we?’

‘All right.’

‘Here, then, next Wednesday, at one?’

‘Yes.’ She gave him a bright breathless smile. ‘And I’ll try not to be late, Charlie, but if I am, you’ll know it’s Mr. Graybar.’

She ran inside and he stood on the pavement, watching the swinging doors till they were still. She had called him Charlie, so promptly and easily, and no one else ever had—neither family nor friends. At Brookfield most boys used last names, except intimates, and those had called him ‘Andy’ —a nickname that had then been transplanted to his circle of Cambridge friends because one of them had also known him at Brookfield.

She had told him her name was Lily—Lily Mansfield, but he had not used it yet, aloud.

On the train from Paddington he could hardly find perspective in a world so changed. He ate the Great Western dinner, his appetite now briskly restored, and staring through the window was almost glad there was a full week before he would see her again—a full week to taste the new dimension of events. Towards the latter part of the journey night fell, and then he got out his notes and found to his relief that he could concentrate magnificently. She cosily made room for the Seljuk Turks in his mind.

At Stow Magna he took a taxi to Beeching. As the cab swung past the lodge gates into the half-mile of carriage drive he saw a tall figure pacing in circles on the front lawn at a rate that, with its lack of purpose, suggested frenzy rather than exercise. Charles knew it must be his father in one of his ‘moods’, though what kind of mood was not yet apparent. Maybe deep depression, or maybe a high excursion on the crest of a mind-wave; ‘plunging’ and ‘vaulting’ were the adjectives which, for want of anything more scientific, Charles gave to the two extremes. The difference between them and the quickened intervals of their recurrence had already become as obvious as the fact that Havelock’s eccentricities were increasing as he grew older and as the years denied him more than they offered. It was as if the slowing tempo of a powerful physicality had liberated him for forays while it barred the grand offensives of earlier days.

Havelock stopped his pacing when he saw Charles arrive. The first words of greeting as they entered the house together revealed that the mood was ‘vaulting’ this time, which was certainly, of the two, more cheerful to live with. But not always more tranquil. During what was left of the evening Charles discovered the nature of the latest foray. Havelock, it seemed, had just contributed to The Times a letter that was not about birds or tombstones, but ventured into new territory—political. Beginning with a reference to ‘my son, who is at Cambridge’, it had gone on to mention an honorary degree recently conferred there on a leading politician (named) and the list of this man’s virtues, as enumerated in the usual Latin speech delivered on such occasions in the Senate House. Havelock’s contention was that the Latin had not been well translated, and after quoting it he supplied his own ‘better’ version as follows: ‘Sagacity, Willpower, Integrity, Nobility, Experience’. All of which could have been called a piece of harmless pedantry till Havelock had gleefully pointed out (to friends, neighbours, and fellow members of his London club) that the initials of the enumerated qualities spelt the word ‘swine’, and that The Times editor had thus been magnificently duped. Havelock now expounded this crčme de la crčme of the jest to Charles in the real or assumed expectation that he would derive equal enjoyment.

Of course Charles thought the whole thing preposterous and a disturbing symptom of his father’s heightened irresponsibility. He could not decide on the motive; whether Havelock by the completely unnecessary reference to ‘my son’ had sought deliberately to involve him in unpleasantness; or whether he had merely surrendered to some euphoria in which his mind (not for the first time) operated without judgment. Charles told him frankly that if the story got around it couldn’t exactly help a budding diplomatic or any other kind of career. ‘The fellow you called a swine may be the one I’ll be having to ask for a job one of these days.’

Suddenly deflated, Havelock then claimed that this had never occurred to him, and that in any case the risk of real harm was trivial. Perhaps it was, Charles admitted; only time would show. When later the whole incident seemed without result of any kind, Charles could only conclude that the letter had attracted absolutely no attention, and that people to whom his father had talked had merely disregarded him as a crank. Full relief came later still, when The Times proved its unawareness by printing Havelock’s next letter, which was innocuously concerned with the migratory behaviour of the green sandpiper.

But for the time, during that first week of the Easter vacation, it was only behind a curtain of exasperation that Charles could savour his own private happiness—the thought of the Wednesday ahead, the Wednesday he had chosen as just a random day for meeting Lily again, but which already he wished had been Monday or Tuesday.

As soon as he saw her pushing through the swing-doors of the Kingsway office he knew she had dressed up, and though she would have looked just as well to him in what she had worn at their first meeting, he was touched. Naturally, as a man, but still more as a man of his class, he had not thought to do anything similar. There were certain things one wore in the country and slightly different fashions at Oxford or Cambridge, and a third set of rules for London—none of them more difficult than the task of choosing a good tailor and paying his bills. Charles had indeed been in a state of high excitement as he dressed at Beeching that morning, but so far as clothes were concerned, he was just going up to town for the day, and anyone who saw him waiting on the platform at Stow Magna would have known exactly that.

They shook hands and for a moment were both of them nervous and almost speechless till he raised his arm to halt a passing taxi. ‘We’ll decide where we’ll go while we’re going,’ he said gaily. And then to the driver: ‘Trafalgar Square, to begin with.’