Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘Tell me about Lily,’ he kept saying more insistently as the drinks affected him. ‘Tell me about her. You say she’s all right—but is she happy?’

‘Well, now, you know Lily,’ Mr. Mansfield temporized. ‘She ain’t wot you might call an un’appy gel by nature. She was upset, like we all was, but you don’t ‘ave to worry. She’ll get over it.’

Charles was more worried that she might than that she mightn’t. And then through the undulating lens of alcohol, he saw Lily as incomparably fair and lovely, beckoning to him from some distant land where she would be happy anyway, with him if he joined her or without him if he didn’t. Yes, he knew Lily. She liked people. She LOVED people. She loved EVERYBODY. She loved her father and mother and Bert and Evelyn and Maud. She loved Reg. She loved Mr. Graybar and Ethel and the busker outside the theatre who had stuck his cap through the window of their taxi. She loved Weigall and Peters. She even loved his father. It was easy for her to do all she could to please all these people because she loved them all. And for the same reason it had been easy for her to do anything she could to please him, Charles. Why, she even loved places too. She loved Linstead. She loved Cambridge. And she would doubtless love that nice place in the country whose whereabouts Mr. Mansfield would not disclose.

‘But surely we can write to each other,’ Charles pleaded. ‘If I send a letter won’t you forward it?’

‘I give my word I wouldn’t, Charlie.’

‘But what if she writes to me? Can’t I answer? You can’t stop her from writing.’

‘Well, now, Charlie, we was all ‘opin’ you’d understand.’

‘I’m damned if I do. I don’t think you do either. Because—don’t you realize?—I want to marry her. I asked her and she said she would if you consented. I’m twenty-one this month, so I don’t need my father’s consent after that.’

Mr. Mansfield stroked his chin and was about to reply when someone pushed through the crowd and clapped him violently on the shoulder. There followed the inevitable greetings and introductions and respectful references to Sir ‘Avelock and another round of bitters; it was half an hour before Charles had a chance to repeat what he had said, though somewhat less coherently.

So Mr. Mansfield stroked his chin again. ‘Charlie, wot you say does you credit. Maybe you wasn’t a gentleman that once, but you tike after your dad, like ‘Arry Byfield said, and your dad’s a gentleman if ever there was one. That’s why I give ‘im my word. It’s right wot ‘e said too. Lily’s a nice gel, as nice a gel as a father could wish to ‘ave, but she wouldn’t be a ‘elp to you, Charlie, not in your kind of life. Man to man, and speakin’ as men of the world, your dad and I agreed about that. Not that I ain’t just as proud of my own family, mind you—my great-granddad was in the Battle of Waterloo—we got a ‘istory, too, the Mansfields ‘ave. Only, as your dad said, with all your ejucation and the position you’ll ‘ave later on —’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Charles interrupted, ‘will you let me tell you the plain truth? I’m not going to have the kind of future my father’s planning for me. I’ve done so badly in my examinations I couldn’t have it even if I wanted it.’

‘That’s wot Lily said, and it upset ‘er, thinkin’ she was part responsible.’

‘Let me finish. There’s no reason for anybody to be upset. When I’m twenty-one I shall have enough money and I’m going to live abroad and if Lily will marry me we can both be happy. Now then, will you consent?’

‘Charlie, it ain’t a bit o’ good you carryin’ on about it. I give my word to your dad. You’re too ‘eadstrong, that’s wot’s the matter with you. But I tike back wot I said when I said you wasn’t a gentleman…’ Mr. Mansfield also was beginning to feel the effects of six or seven bitters. It was almost ten o’clock; the barman was already blinking lights and calling for the last reorders; Mrs. Webber and Milly were rolling up their sleeves for a final crescendo of service. ‘Gawlummy, look at the time! Charlie, boy—one more, just to show there’s no ill feelin’. And call me Fred… Easy now, mind them glarsses… Goo’ night, ‘Arry… Goo’ night, Mr. Wilkinson… Two more, please, Mrs. Webber, when you’ve a minute… But wot I was sayin’, Charlie, you’re too ‘eadstrong. She’s only a gel yet, but like I said to the wife, a gel of sixteen can go around with an older feller, provided ‘e’s a gentleman, and that’s wot I thought you was, Charlie.’ Mr. Mansfield seemed to have some vague awareness that he had said that before and the memory troubled him in a wispy sort of way. His eyes were red and wet, but probably owing to the smoke.

The bitters came. Charles raised his glass and saw past the brown liquid to something on the opposite wall that brought him to a jerk of attention —the picture of a pretty girl holding up a glass of beer just as he was, and the girl reminded him of Lily, and Lily reminded him of a word that Mr. Mansfield had just spoken about her.

‘Sixteen,’ Charles muttered. ‘You said SIXTEEN…’

‘Sixteen THEN—when you was first seein’ ‘er… Goo’ night, Mr. Beale—remember me to Mrs. Beale… Goo’ night, Scotty… Seventeen now—seventeen a week ago larst Sunday.’

‘She never told me.’

‘You never told ‘er things neither. But I tike back wot I said, remember that.’ Mr. Mansfield raised his own glass and for the first time that evening offered a toast. ‘Well, Charlie… ‘Ere’s to us and our dear ones…’

Charles did not remember much of what happened during the next few hours. He had an impression that they left the Prince Rupert together, but their conversation, if any, did not stay in his mind. Later he woke up in darkness with a terrific headache and an enormous confrontation of difficulties —physical difficulty in finding a light switch and, when he had found one and pressed it, mental difficulty in recognizing the scene and visual difficulty in facing any kind of illumination. At length he decided he had been asleep on the couch in the parlour at Ladysmith Road. He was fully dressed except for jacket and shoes, which were beside him.

Feeling parched he fumbled his way to the kitchen sink. Along the lobby he could hear loud snores from upstairs. He drank several glasses of water and returned to the parlour to put on his shoes, but this was too much of an undertaking, so he leaned back on the couch. Doubtless more time passed, because when he looked again there was light beyond the Ficus elastica as well as dangling from the ceiling. He remembered then that Lily had said there were trains every hour throughout the night between Linstead and London. So it really didn’t matter what time it was. This seemed an enormous boon as he laced his shoes and put on his coat. In the pocket he found a pencil and his Cambridge tailor’s bill that had arrived at Beeching the previous morning; he hadn’t opened it, but he did so now, merely to use the envelope. On the back of this he wrote: ‘Dear Mr. Mansfield, Thanks, I’m all right. Best wishes, C.’ He left the note on top of the radio-gramophone.

As he went to the front door he could still hear snores from upstairs. They reminded him of something that sent him back to the parlour and the radio-gramophone. He crossed out ‘Mr. Mansfield’ and wrote ‘Fred’.

In the street the cool air, which he had hoped might be refreshing, merely invited a fuller onslaught of nausea. He had been drunk a few times before, but never like this. His last act in Ladysmith Road was to vomit, monumentally, into the gutter a few yards from the corner of the High Road. Then, with some relief, he was able to catch the 4.23 at Linstead station. From Liverpool Street, where he felt worse again after the train journey, he took a taxi to an all-night Turkish bath in a street near the Haymarket. But even after every ministration it could offer, including a long doze in the steam room, he still felt far from himself when he left it around noon. Or rather, he speculated, perhaps he did feel himself, and what he had felt before had never been himself at all. A rather grim change, as if he had grown out of something, but not yet into something else.