Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘I don’t know if dad would let me.’

‘But it’s only fair—for you to come and see me once after all the times I’ve come to see you.’

‘Yes, I know… Oh, I’d love to, Charlie, but I’ll have to ask dad first.’

‘Fine. Ask him. I don’t think he’ll mind. He and I got along all right.’

‘Yes, you did, didn’t you?’ At last they had found something to agree and be glad about, and on this happier note could time their separation. ‘I knew it when he took you to the Prince Rupert. He only does that with people he likes.’ The train was beginning to move.

At Cambridge Charles was thereafter sustained a good deal by thoughts of Lily’s visit. Those were the days just before the examination that (with the Diplomatic in mind) might make or mar his career; and he had better not think it absurd, while he girded himself for last-minute cramming, that what he would be doing thirty years hence might depend on a few thousand facts so chancily selected and forcibly absorbed. The days entered a tunnel of eventlessness, but once the actual examination started the tunnel became dreamlike, streamlike, a silent aqueduct of time. Every evening, after the six-hour ordeal, an entire section of knowledge was banished from his mind as if it had no longer any business there, so that concentration on the remainder could become more intense. His tutor had warned him not to overdo the cramming, but Charles found he could not sleep even if he went to bed, and it was no harder to read than to lie awake. By the end of the third of the five crucial days he could roughly estimate how he was faring, and he did not think too well. Many questions he had been unable to answer confidently, and there had been few he would have chosen for a display of what he knew. One afternoon he half collapsed over the desk; the day was hot and the examination hall airless—all that, plus lack of sleep, probably accounted for it. An invigilator went out with him for a spell in the open, and Charles found it a strange effort to make conversation, knowing they must avoid mention of anything remotely connected with the questions. There was one about the Amphictyonic Council that Charles had been answering at the moment he slumped forward. He was afraid he had leaked his fountain pen all over the page, and he wondered if, in the circumstances, this would matter —whether, for instance, he should asterisk the smear with a note of apology—‘Here I fainted owing to the heat’.

‘If there is any relief you wish for, please suggest it,’ said the invigilator, after they had walked twice round a small quadrangle. Charles did not guess what he meant till he added: ‘Though I am unfortunately compelled to accompany you, even to the humblest abode.’ He was a lean elderly professor whom Charles had never seen before and whose name he did not know.

‘Oh no, thanks—I’m all right now. I think I can go back.’

‘I hope so, Anderson. When I mark your paper I shall try not to be unduly influenced by sympathy.’

Charles smiled, wondering what made university dons grow up like that. Yet he was aware of genuine friendliness behind the man’s tee-heeish manner.

Back in the hall he found the ink smear already dry and the atmosphere sultrier than ever, but he managed to endure it without further mishap. He had lost half an hour, though, and didn’t have time to finish all the questions.

One evening, as by some gorgeous miracle of light and air, it was all over and he returned to his rooms after the last paper had been consigned to whatever fate might be in store for it and for him. He felt somewhat as he had done when the war ended—a sense of anticlimax following hard on the heels of relief. But the emptiness soon filled with thoughts of Lily’s visit, which was by now a definite arrangement. Mr. Mansfield had given permission, and even Mr. Graybar had been persuaded to let her leave the office an hour earlier to catch a better train. In a recent note to Charles confirming all these matters both handwriting and spelling had betrayed her excitement.

Saturday (almost to his unbelief) was the day following, and he spent half the night sleepless for thinking of it, but quite pleasantly awake for the same reason. In the morning, which was warm and fine, he rose early and bought armfuls of fresh-cut flowers at the stalls in the Market Square. Then he made plans with the college kitchen for special meals to be sent to his rooms. He had planned a small dinner party for that evening, inviting his two best friends—a man named Weigall whose rooms were on the same staircase across the landing, and another man from Sidney Sussex whom he had got to know at history lectures. Since the cost of this party would come on the college bill at the end of term he could indulge himself without any immediate financial problem, and with all the examinations over he felt he had earned the right to do so. His allowance from his father was not inadequate, but it had been stretched pretty far of late by all the travelling back and forth to London and the dinners and lunches and excursions there; he was beginning to look forward to his next birthday (his twenty-first) if only because he would then come into some money of his own. He had already borrowed a little from his Cambridge tailor (a wealthy and knowing tradesman) on the strength of this.

He felt very proud of her as they rode in an open taxi from Cambridge station to the Lion Hotel. Other students had been meeting girls on the same train, and he could not avoid the comparison; Lily was not so well dressed as many, nor so strikingly pretty as a few, but she had poise and grace and some quality for him of sheer radiance. It was so personal that he was often relieved when he saw others—and not only men—aware of it; this seemed to prove he was no victim of love’s illusion, though it also showed that the radiance was not for him alone. Anyhow, her own extreme of pleasure now cast a special halo round it, and he felt doubly exultant. ‘You’re really here—at last!’ he kept saying in the cab, as if the distance to Linstead and London were reckonable in thousands of miles.

‘Charlie, I always wanted to come here to see you.’

‘Then why didn’t you suggest it? Or why didn’t I—sooner? It’s so obvious—and yet wonderful.’

‘I thought perhaps you didn’t want me mixed up with your work.’

‘You already are mixed up. I see you on every page of Stubbs and Maitland.’

She laughed gaily. ‘And I see you on every page of Mr. Graybar’s dictation.’

‘Forget Mr. Graybar—for two whole days.’ He squeezed her arm and thought that possibly in his own room, sometime during her stay, they would enjoy the privacy they had sought till then in streets that happened to be dark or train-compartments that happened to be empty between stations; he knew this Cambridge visit was bound to mark a stage in their relationship.

He began to point out the colleges. ‘That’s the first one, Downing— I mean the first on the way from the station. The next is Emmanuel… They’re all separate, and together they make up the University. So you see why you can’t say Cambridge College—there isn’t such a thing—if you talk of a college you have to use its own special name—like Downing or Emmanuel.’ He had always wanted to explain that to her.

‘How many colleges are there?’

‘Over a dozen, I should think—yes, at least a dozen.’

‘Don’t you know exactly?’

‘I don’t believe I do, unless I counted them on my fingers… This is Christ’s—John Milton’s college. We’ll look round some of them later… Here’s Petty Cury—this narrow street, where your hotel is. I think you’ll be comfortable.’

He had engaged a room, even going so far as to inspect it before approval; it overlooked Petty Cury and might be noisy till late at night, but she wouldn’t be using it till then. While she took her bag to it he waited in the glass-roofed lounge. Then she came down, spruced and tidied, and his heart melted to see her against this new background, but at the same time he felt tense, as if the full significance of her visit was only just dawning on him. He also hoped he could sleep better during the coming night; it was a need, like others he was beginning to be aware of, that went deeper than a desire. Suddenly he wondered what on earth had made him ask Tony Weigall and Bill Peters that evening—how much cosier just to have dinner on their own, with no strangers intruding when once Debden had cleared away and said goodnight.