Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘But if people always thought like that they’d never give anything to anybody.’ The cab was making the turn into Kingsway. ‘Oh, Charlie, I’ve had such a wonderful time. I can’t remember when I’ve talked so much. Next time I’ll try not to.’

He took her hand in an uprush of exultation that gave his voice a tremor. ‘Well, when shall it be—NEXT TIME? TONIGHT? What time do you leave the office?’

‘Oh no, I’ll be working late, and besides, they’ll expect me at home.’

‘You could telephone.’

‘We haven’t got a telephone at home—’

‘How can you work late then, if they expect you—’

‘Just an hour or so late doesn’t matter—they’re used to that. But if I went out for the evening—’

‘That’s what we’ll do, the next time. The whole evening. The next time I come to the Museum. That’ll be soon.’ (But how soon? Not before the term began again? Could he endure such a delay?) ‘What about the week after next? Wednesday again? We’ll have dinner.’

They fixed a time and a place. There wasn’t a whiff of coquetry in the way she agreed to what she was so willing and happy to do, and for that matter both ‘the next time’ and ‘the evening’ had been her words before his. It was also comforting, up to a point, to think that she probably loved him no less —and perhaps more already—than some of the other inhabitants of her world.

He did not overwork at the Museum that afternoon, and at Beeching, during the ensuing fortnight, he began to assemble the thesis into final shape. There was much more to be done for the Tripos examination than just that, but he would have all the following term for the rest of it once the thesis was out of the way. He found it hard to work at Beeching, and several times after breakfast he walked the dogs or rode his bicycle a few miles to some hill with a view or a tree-shaded river bank where he could concentrate on a book till distractions came—rain or a chill wind or his own thoughts tempting him to dream.

One morning he received a wire from Brunon suggesting a meeting somewhere immediately, since Brunon had accepted a post in France and would soon be leaving England. Charles had the idea to invite him to Beeching, and it was arranged that he should come to lunch and dinner and stay overnight. Brunon duly arrived and met Havelock, who turned on the charm and proved an entirely delightful host. There were such times as this when Charles felt, not so much that he loved his father, as that the emotion of loving a father would have been a satisfying one if he could ever have been given long enough to develop it.

During the drive to the station the next morning Brunon hinted at another holiday in France during the coming summer. ‘We might go to the Cevennes and see those towns built on the tops of hills. I think you would find things to paint there.’

Charles answered vaguely, not because the idea did not attract but because his thoughts of Lily made the future hard to delimit. Brunon noticed this and continued: ‘Well, let me know if you can manage it… Or perhaps you have lost a little of your interest in painting since our Normandy excursion?’

‘Not a bit. It’s just that I’m working so hard and don’t have as much time.’

‘But you have scarcely mentioned painting while I have been here?’

‘I don’t often talk about it in front of my father. He isn’t very interested.’ Then Charles told Brunon about Charnock’s visit and the opinion of Charles’s work he had expressed.

Brunon snorted. ‘That old pompier! What could you have expected? Pretty ladies on chocolate-box lids—it is all he is good enough for.’

‘He did a portrait of my mother. I don’t know if you noticed it— over the mantelpiece in the hall.’

‘I did, but I did not know it was your mother. A very beautiful woman —though not, in my opinion, a very notable painting. Just competent and commercial. And who am I, you may ask, to despise either quality? You are right: I am nobody, and my opinion, as I have often told you, is of no value whatever.’

Charles smiled. ‘I have a feeling it is, if only because you’ve never told me I have any genius.’

‘Genius is a foolish word. It is not a label to be pinned on like a medal. Most likely you haven’t got it, whatever it is—that I will readily admit. Maybe I would not recognize it even if you had it. I can only say that one of your paintings—the one of the ruins at Jumičges on that day when the white clouds were so big—you remember?—I showed that to a friend in Paris.’ He mentioned the name of a well-known dealer who had made a fortune by commissioning and marketing the work of the newer school of post-impressionists.

Charles forced a mask of nonchalance over his excitement. ‘And did he say I had any genius?’

‘No.’

‘Did he even offer you a price for the picture?’

‘No. But he said something he would not have said if he had been quite sure you had only talent. He said you should go on painting for ten years and then, if he was still alive, let him see something else.’

Charles laughed and took Brunon’s arm affectionately. ‘Ten years, André… that’s quite a time to wait, isn’t it? Not that I’d mind a bit.’

Wednesday came and he went to London and took Lily to dinner at Le Beau Soleil. They talked till he had to leave to catch the last train that would get him back to Beeching that night (or rather, early the next morning); and this decided him that next time he would stay overnight at a hotel. He did so the following week, but then there was HER train home to consider; it left Liverpool Street at five minutes past midnight. ‘Oh no, it isn’t the last one, Charlie—trains go to Chilford every hour all night— that’s the station after Linstead—but Dad doesn’t like me to miss the twelve- five.’ Of course he suggested seeing her home, which she wouldn’t hear of at first—she said there was really no need, she was used to the journey alone and her parents’ house was only a few minutes’ walk from Linstead station. But it wasn’t merely politeness, he explained; he really wanted that extra time with her, and since she also wanted it with him she soon relented. So it came about that at one o’clock on a spring morning, full of the scent of trees just breaking into bud, Charles saw Linstead for the first time.

Linstead is one of those huge dormitory suburbs of London that have spread till they touch other suburbs on all sides, like adjacent blobs of ink on blotting paper. You never know when you have entered or left Linstead unless you notice the slightly different ornamentation on the lamp-posts or a faint change in the texture of the road surfaces. The town has a core of history at its centre—a few old cottages in the widened High Road and a parish church rebuilt on the site of an earlier one; but for the most part (say ninety-nine per cent) Linstead is recent without being modern. Streets of small two-storied houses were pushed into a then open countryside by the speculative builder during the first decade of the century, their names sufficiently dating them—Kitchener, Roberts, Mafeking, Ladysmith. Lily lived in Ladysmith Road—Number 214, which was exactly like Numbers 212 and 216, to which it was physically joined, sharing the walls of both. For that matter it was exactly like every other house in Ladysmith Road, beginning on one side with Number 2 and going up to 278, and on the other side from 1 to 277.

Charles had never explored a suburb of this kind, never before having known anybody who lived in one, but he knew something of what they were like because every railway out of London in every direction ran through miles of them. The backs of the joined houses passed before the train traveller’s eye in long successions, with gardens reaching to within a few feet of the tracks. Nobody could visit London frequently without sometimes, in sheer idleness, observing these back gardens, for they showed all the evidence of individuality that the houses so totally withheld. A paradise of flowers could succeed a littered wasteland in a second of train time; and on fine days the occupants were all so differently busy—boys mending bicycles, men digging, women chattering to neighbours across fences or hanging up clothes. Even an animal population throve variously—cats and dogs, rabbits in hutches, birds in cages; and once Charles had seen a monkey in a red jacket strutting along a garden path with its proud owner.