Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘Oh dear no, not at all. I had thought of a jaunt to town, perhaps— just the two of us. We never have had that, have we? Dinner at my club and then perhaps a theatre.’

‘Oh, let’s decide later.’

‘I thought I’d mention it, though, to stake out my claim before you plan anything else.’

‘I’m not planning. I can’t make plans. I don’t know what I’m going to do. Everything seems uncertain. How can it be otherwise just now?’

‘You mean that your future depends a great deal on the results of the Tripos Examination?’

‘God, no, I wasn’t even thinking of that—but of course it’s true. And I may as well tell you, I haven’t done well. In fact I’ve done damn badly. Maybe I haven’t even passed—and I don’t care. I want some happiness in life. I don’t see why it all has to be broken. I don’t see —I can’t—I—’

He became speechless and incoherent, breaking down a little, and his father summoned an old and rather decrepit waiter who presided over the hotel dining-room. ‘My son is ill,’ he said. ‘Would you kindly help me to take him to my car?’

Charles soon pulled himself together at that. ‘I don’t need any help,’ he said roughly. ‘I’m all right. I can walk—there’s nothing the matter with me.’ But the old waiter had taken his arm by that time and Charles did not want to push him aside and perhaps off his feet, so before he properly knew what was happening he was taking part in a spectacle that moved slowly through the dining-room and across the hotel lobby and down the steps to the car, in front of the curious stares of a score or more onlookers. Probably they thought he was drunk. He reflected afterwards that his father must have staged it suddenly and for a mere whim before such an utterly random audience, since nobody in Banbury knew them and they were unlikely to stop there again.

Charles was ill at Beeching for several weeks, of no ailment that the local doctor could diagnose, and with no particular symptoms except a high temperature. But it was easy for Doctor Somerville to ascribe the trouble to recent overstudy, and to recommend rest and a holiday as the only but a very certain cure. Havelock was sympathetic and talked of a European trip if Charles would enjoy it later in the summer. Or perhaps he would rather stay at Beeching and do nothing except paint whenever he had the mood. But to Charles the thought of painting was a signal for despair, and the first day he got up after being in bed he collected all his paraphernalia— easel, brushes, paints and finished canvases—and packed them in an old trunk in the loft over the stables.

Only one positive decision had emerged from the confusion of notions and emotions that had sent his temperature to fever height, and that was to visit Ladysmith Road. He had sent several letters there, addressed to Lily, and had not been surprised when they were unanswered. He knew that a personal visit might be just as fruitless, the Mansfields might refuse to admit him or discuss anything, there might be an unpleasant scene, they might even call the police (though knowing their respectabilities he did not really think there was much risk of this); but whatever happened or did not happen, some points would be elucidated, or at least removed from the sphere of total doubt. One of these questions was how far, if at all, his father’s story was untrue or exaggerated. He did not expect to find much discrepancy, nevertheless the visit to Ladysmith Road became somehow obligatory in his mind, a scčne ŕ faire that had to be acted out.

One day he went up to London without telling his father, leaving merely a message with Cobb that he might be back late that evening or the next day. On arrival at Paddington he made a routine test by telephoning the Kingsway office; a girl’s voice answered that Miss Mansfield was no longer working there. This again was no astonishment. He next called in person and asked to see somebody named Ethel. Ethel, it seemed, had gone to lunch at the Lyons teashop near the British Museum where he had first set eyes on Lily. He was told to ask the girl at the cashier’s desk to point out Ethel to him, and all this procedure, which normally he would have found devious and embarrassing, he went through in sombre misery that was aware of nothing but itself. Ethel was hostile; she would tell him nothing (perhaps she did not know much), but it was clear she held him responsible for at least the interruption of a friendship. After a few moments Charles left her and wandered vaguely through the streets till he found himself in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. He sat down on a bench and tried to think of a way to get the afternoon over. He did not think he could concentrate on a film, still less on a revisiting of any of the places he had been to with Lily (and these had included practically everything in the guide-book), so he took an early train to Linstead and spent the intervening hours in that suburb. He knew it was no use calling on Mr. Mansfield before seven, by which time he would have finished his evening meal. Oddly, perhaps, Charles had seen little of Linstead with Lily. Except for the walk from the station to Ladysmith Road, less than half a mile and by an unchanging route, they had never made it a background of adventure or experience; they had always been hurrying somewhere else or home again afterwards. Yet Charles knew that Lily liked the place, and had shown pride in it on that first occasion he had gone there with her; but, as was her nature, she had let the matter drop when she found in him no special response. So now he walked about Linstead streets as if by so doing he could commune with something that had shared with him Lily’s affections. It did not work out very well. He still found Linstead dull and featureless, its long roads of bay-windowed houses infinitely depressing. And yet, he realized, there were streets of Regency houses in the better parts of London almost as long and as uniform, and those houses too had been put up by speculative builders at a time of boom and with no aim but profit. So where, then, lay the difference that made the one style so much less deplorable than the other? The answer, which was only the beginning of other questions, gave his mind a focus for a while; but soon he was in dim perspectives again, wondering if and how he could trace a thin line of happiness for himself on the blind face of the future. Towards evening he entered a restaurant in the High Road near the station. He wasn’t hungry but he wanted a cup of coffee. A first-floor window offered a view of trains that arrived every few minutes from London; he saw the countless doors open before the trains came to a halt and the crowd spill out like burst liquid, then shape into a stream, thickening and congesting as it reached the station exit; but once beyond this bottleneck the mass suddenly unliquefied—human beings with separate aims dispersing in every direction. Charles watched till after six; then he picked up his bill and left. On the way out to the cash desk he passed a big mirror and saw himself like any other fellow walking across a restaurant with his hand in his pocket feeling for change; he wondered what he would think of himself as a stranger met thus for the first time. Medium height, brown hair and eyes, no distinguishing marks—the passport specifications came easily. Or would it be no marks of distinction? Just a tired look and a worried face. But not even that; he did not think the stranger in the mirror looked more than averagely bothered about anything. A man he passed in the street outside had an air of far greater harassment, and Charles watched him for a few seconds, saw him buy an evening paper and turn to the stop-press column that gave the racing results. Charles smiled to himself; the incident was calming. People, it would seem, were apt to be neither as happy nor as unhappy as they looked; and he was one of them. The anonymity of being anybody nudged his mind with the first touch of philosophic comfort he had been able to muster. The world’s end was a long way off, further even than Ladysmith Road. But then, thinking this, there came to him an echo from a forgotten source—something he had read somewhere, he wished he could remember where—‘It is not many miles to Mantua, no further than the end of this mad world’.