Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

But he found she had very few ideas about lunch. It seemed that on certain gala occasions she had been to the Strand Palace and the Regent Palace, which she had thought very splendid; but they were not his style, and since he could not afford Claridge’s or the Ritz, he wondered if she would be disappointed with the kind of restaurant that suited both his tastes and his pocket pretty well. There was one he and Brunon had discovered, called Le Beau Soleil, in Soho—a small foreign place with no marble and gilt about it, just a few tables in a plain room, rather grubby menus, and a good cuisine for the price. So he said, taking her arm in the taxi: ‘Let’s go somewhere I once went to—nothing much, but at least it’s quiet and we can talk.’ It wasn’t even quiet; what he meant was that there was no six-piece orchestra booming out popular tunes to drown conversation or to fill the gap of silence between people who had nothing to say.

It troubled him to think that Le Beau Soleil might disappoint her; but soon he realized how willing she was, at all times beginning with that first one, to go where he took her and to be actively, not merely passively, happy about it. There was a sense, indeed, in which everything that ever happened to her was a gala occasion, needing no particular background to make her enjoy it to the full.

They had the plat du jour and she refused wine but drank several cups of coffee. The room was downstairs from the street level, in a sort of semi-basement whose windows looked up beyond a railed area to the pavement. One saw the legs of people passing continuously, but no more of them than that without craning one’s neck. Sometimes a pair of legs would stop— perhaps to rest, or during the lighting of a cigarette, or for no special reason at all—and then proceed again. Sometimes a pair of legs would stop close to another pair of legs—a meeting. It was amusing to guess, and then to lean sideways to verify. Once a man stooped and stared, presumably to see if the restaurant was full; it was the only outside face they saw, and behind the railings it looked like that of some strange crouching animal in a cage. ‘But HE sees US through the bars,’ she said. ‘Maybe to him it looks as if WE’RE in the cage.’

‘I’ve often had the same thought at the Zoo… You like the Zoo?’

‘I’ve never been,’ she answered.

That seemed to him quite amazing. ‘You’ve never been to the Zoo?’

‘I’ve never been anywhere much—except round about where I live.’

He found, by closer questioning, that this was true—she had visited hardly any of London’s famous sights; all she really knew of the city was the daily route by bus or tube from the station to the office, plus a few jaunts to cinemas and theatres. She had never been to the British Museum, though it was only a short stroll from where she usually had lunch. But she had been to Madame Tussaud’s, and Charles hadn’t. ‘Reg took me. He wanted to see the Chamber of Horrors.’ She didn’t explain who Reg was, and Charles didn’t ask; but the mere existence of a Reg stirred in him a desire to be the first to take her to all the places that Reg had so far neglected.

He got an impression that she had lived a very sheltered life at home —and of course there had been the war years during which sightseeing wasn’t easy or always possible. She said she had reached the top class at Linstead High School for Girls, and had gone straight to an office job on leaving. ‘We learned French at school,’ she said proudly, ‘but I don’t remember much now.’ This came out when the proprietor greeted them at their table and Charles addressed him in fluent French, resulting in the discovery that Le Beau Soleil was owned and managed by a Greek, and Charles did not know any modern Greek. He realized then from his dismay how much he had been wanting to show off in that particular fashion.

Suddenly, over a third cup of coffee, she noticed the clock. ‘Oh, my goodness—a quarter to three. I’ll have to run. Mr. Graybar…’

‘May I say damn Mr. Graybar?’

She giggled. ‘I’ve said that many a time… It’s all right, though— we’re not so busy today and I’ll work late tonight to make up for it… But whatever could we have been talking about all this time?’

And that was a question hard to answer. For they had talked unceasingly, yet not about anything important. Just their own everyday affairs, which interested each other the more they were revealed, though Charles was still reluctant to be as frank as she was. It was strange; he did not mind impressing her with news of Cambridge, and the work he was doing, and his fluent French, but he did not want her to know much about Beeching. Yet perhaps he had been less reticent than he supposed, or else she had intuition about it, for in the taxi on the way back to Kingsway she said: ‘Your family are rather well off, aren’t they?’

‘Oh no, not really. You can be poor nowadays if you own land. My father often has trouble paying his bills.’

‘Do you own a lot of land?’

‘Just farmland. All of it wouldn’t be worth as much as a few square feet round here.’ That was an exaggeration, but he wanted to minimize certain differences between them. Other differences he didn’t mind—some even amused him. Her na veté, for instance, and her lack of the pseudo-sophistication that most girls had—a lack which he knew had nothing to do with primness or being straitlaced. He noticed this when she declined a cigarette. ‘You don’t smoke or drink, Lily?’

‘Well, I’ve tried them both, but dad doesn’t like me to, till I’m older. And it costs money.’

‘How much do you earn—if it isn’t something I oughtn’t to ask?’

‘Why not?… Two pounds fifteen a week.’ Charles was shocked; he had no idea that wages in offices were so low. But she seemed to think she was well paid. ‘I’ll say that for Mr. Graybar, he’s not mean if you can do your job. He gave me the extra five shillings last New Year without even being asked. Of course I live at home, that makes it easy. I give my mum thirty shillings —she won’t take any more. She’s awfully good to me.’

He was beginning to realize already that Lily found most people ‘awfully good’ and therefore easy to excuse, forgive, appreciate, and love. And if love were too strong a word, surely any other would not have been strong enough for the emotion that radiated from her in all human directions. She loved her mother and father, her sisters and brother, the girls she worked with at the office; she even loved, in a sort of way, the redoubtable Mr. Graybar. And she had a bright cloudless mind that threaded the love into the pattern of all her behaviour. He could tell that from an incident when the cab waited in a traffic block at the corner of Aldwych. A queue was lined up for the gallery of a theatre and the usual buskers were doing their turns at the kerbside. One of them, singing in a cracked voice almost inaudible above street noises, turned to the cab and thrust his cap through the open window. The manner of the appeal was impertinent and the driver gestured him off, as Charles would have also had he not seen Lily fishing in her handbag.

‘No, no, let ME…’ He managed to find a shilling in his pocket and dropped it in the man’s cap.

‘You shouldn’t have done that,’ she said, when the cab moved away.

‘Why not? YOU were going to.’

‘But a SHILLING!’ she protested. ‘They don’t expect that much. Goodness, nobody could afford to, if it had to be a shilling.’

‘So you always give to them?’

‘If I’m passing I sometimes do. Some of them are really good singers, and if they aren’t you feel sorry for them… Only a few coppers, of course.’

‘I’ll bet that fellow didn’t need money as much as you do. I’ll bet he makes more in a day than you earn in a week.’