Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

They crossed the centre of the town to his college, which he was anxious to show her first, as a sample, though it was not the oldest or one of those most visited by sightseers. She was much impressed by the salute the porter gave him as they passed into the First Court, and surprised by the narrow staircase they had to climb and the double doors he had to open to get to his top-floor rooms, and entranced by the rooms themselves—so much larger and grander than she had imagined. He then took her to the Chapel and the Library and the Hall, where he showed her the ancient tables and the Holbein and the piece of wood, shaped like a hand-mirror, that had printed on it the college grace which he had taken his turn to read aloud until, with no particular effort of memory, he had come to know the long Latin paragraph by heart. Then they strolled along the Backs and looked into King’s Chapel till it was time to return to his rooms, when it was revealed to her (by the most plausible of circumstances) that seventeenth-century college rooms lacked some of the basic conveniences of the modern house. She was surprised again, but agreeably unshy about such things and therefore amused. Perhaps because of this he decided to conquer his own shyness about something very different, but in its own way just as intimate; he got out some of his paintings. He was always reluctant to do this—too often he had read in the eyes of people looking at other people’s paintings neither enthusiasm nor distaste, but merely a desperate struggle to think of something to say that was clever or at least flattering. It was a test, therefore, that he shrank from putting his friends to, because he shrank from putting himself to it. But now with Lily, acting on impulse, he took the risk. He fixed the easel and placed the canvases on it one by one, saying nothing about any of them, while she sat curled in the window seat viewing them equally without word or gesture.

When she had seen the lot and he had put them away again he poured himself a glass of sherry. She still didn’t speak, and he began to approve of her silence in a miserable sort of way. At least she wasn’t dealing out insincere and meaningless compliments. Presently she said: ‘Charlie, I’m so glad you let me see the pictures. It’s no good my trying to tell you what I think of them because I don’t know. I liked some better than others. I liked the one of the windy day.’

‘Which one was that?’

‘The third, I think, or the fourth.’

He knew the one she meant; it was a fenland scene, mainly clouds—a windy day, to be sure (the canvas had been blown down by one of the gusts), but there were no obvious clues like bending trees or drifting smoke. What he had tried to do, but did not think he had succeeded in doing, was to get the wind into his lighting of the sky, into the whole surface texture of the picture. And now she was telling him he had succeeded.

Never had he felt such a moment of utter and blissful reassurance. He went over to her and put his arm round her in full view of anyone who might be passing across the court, and in a curious way he hoped he might be seen, as the finder of a new truth wants to proclaim it.

‘Lily, my little one—my darling…’

‘Did I say the wrong thing about the pictures? Oh, I’m sorry, Charlie.’

‘Nothing you say is ever the wrong thing. It’s I who DO the wrong things. Tonight, for instance, we ought to have been alone.’

‘But you asked some friends of yours, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did, and I—but no, it’s all right, you’ll like them. They’re good fellows.’

‘Of course I’ll like them.’

The college clock began to strike the hour, followed by other clocks all over the town. The miscellaneous near and distant chiming lasted for some time, many of the clocks being minutes fast or slow, and he told her it would all begin again, for the quarter, after about a ten-minute interval. ‘They’ll probably keep you awake all night.’

‘I won’t mind. I’m so excited to be here. Charlie, d’you know this is the first time I’ve ever been away from home by myself?’

‘You’re not by yourself.’

‘I mean at night… without a friend.’

‘What friend? I didn’t know you had any other particular friend.’

‘Of course I have. I mean girls. There’s Ethel at the office—we always go away on our holidays together. And there’s Phyllis Baxter I used to go with at school. You haven’t met them because every time you’re free I’d much rather be with you.’

‘A good answer.’

‘Don’t you believe me?’

‘I do. And it WAS a windy day in that picture. It was indeed.’

In the mood he was in, torn between exultation and regret, between the wish that they were alone and the hope that his friends would like her, and over it all the tensions that had not been eased by sleep, he could hardly understand himself, much less expect her to understand him.

‘Charlie, what’s the matter? You sound so sharp, as if you were nervous about something.’

It was because he had heard Weigall and Peters coming up the stairs.

Within a few minutes he was relieved at least on one count. Weigall had draped his long legs from the far end of the couch and Peters was at the nearer end, and in between, laughing and chatting as if she had known them for years, was Lily. It came out that Weigall’s family were from Norfolk and that Lily, too, had relatives there; they talked about Norwich and Sandringham and other places they both knew. With Peters, who was a historian, Lily found less in common at first; but soon they discovered a shared interest in films, Peters being something of a highbrow while Lily was just an ordinary regular patron of whatever the Linstead cinema offered. Peters seemed to find her comments both amusing and delightful, and when Debden announced that soup was served Peters insisted on sitting next to Lily although Charles had planned to have Weigall there. But with only four persons at a small table it really didn’t much matter how they sat. What did matter, as Charles began to notice it, was that Peters was bringing Lily to a kind of life Charles had never seen in her before. Charles even wondered whether he had ever been jealous before, for the glum and spiritually disabling sensation he felt was new in his experience.

Lily was telling Peters about a dog they had had at Ladysmith Road when she was a child, and it appeared that Peters also liked dogs and that his family had had one of the same breed. ‘There’s nothing like a dog,’ Peters assured her.

‘Except a cat,’ said Lily. ‘We have a lovely cat.’

‘But a cat isn’t really like a dog,’ said Peters.

Weigall winked at Charles. ‘Too intellectual for me—this conversation,’ he commented.

‘We have two Airedales at Beeching,’ said Charles, suddenly desperate to assert himself.

Peters laughed. ‘You see, Lily, we can’t win! TWO Airedales! Think of that… and how many horses, cows, housemaids, butlers, grooms, and other domestic pets? I don’t suppose Andy knows—he’s never bothered to count.’

‘He didn’t even know how many colleges there are in Cambridge,’ said Lily, extending the joke. ‘Did you, Charlie? And you never told me they called you Andy, either.’

Charles was concerned lest she should gain an exaggerated impression of Beeching from Peters’ nonsense, but he was also astonished—and perhaps dismayed—that Lily seemed to be impressed so little. It was the ‘Andy’ she had picked up. ‘It’s just a nickname I had at school,’ he explained, adding rather foolishly: ‘From Anderson.’

‘Really?’ Weigall gave himself an ironic poise. ‘I think we can accept that as a hypothesis.’ He intoned in imitation of some professor. ‘And as for how many colleges there are, does ANYBODY know?’