Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

When Charles unfolded this letter after an interval of a good many years, the memory it gave him was predominantly of the Rhineland village where he had first read it—a cold twilight with snow in the air and Brunon handing him a batch of mail picked up at the post office. He remembered his own distress with something of the sad contentment that time always brings; so that he even paused to light a cigarette, as if to savour the re-reading.

Dearest Charlie,

I don’t know how to write this, but I must, and I hope you won’t be hurt. Perhaps you won’t be after all this time, it seems years and years to me. Reg and I are engaged. Oh Charlie, please don’t be upset. It’s for the best, like your dad and my dad both told me, and especially now you’ve done so well in all the examinations and are going to have such a wonderful future. I was so happy when I heard about that, really I was. You know it was the one thing that had been worrying me all along, that you’d spent too much time with me when you ought to have been studying. But now that’s all right. I’ll bet you were pleased when you heard the news. My dad told me about it and I wanted to write then to congratulate you, but he said no, he’d given his word. But he said I could write this. Oh Charlie, I can’t say much more. I’ll always remember you and hope you’ll go on having great success, I’m sure you will. I can’t say all I would like to in a letter, perhaps it wouldn’t reach you if I did, so better not, eh? I know you never liked Reg, but he really is all right when you get to know him. Charlie, I did love that visit to Cambridge. Dear Charlie, this is all I can say.

Yours affectionately

Lily

Charles put the letter back in the envelope, and of all the emotions revived and reviving in his heart the only one he could express in the words of thought was a rueful: Poor old Reg, so you didn’t get her after all, did you?

A week or so later Charles gave up the Chelsea flat for good and, since he could not stay at his club indefinitely, found a house in Westminster, near the river and within walking distance of the Foreign Office. It was a larger establishment than he needed for himself alone, and after much speculation as to how such a plan would work, he invited his father and Cobb to share it with him. One of his reasons was that Cobb, though too old for much personal activity, would excellently supervise and supplement any other domestic staff that Charles might be lucky enough to get; he hoped at least for a woman to cook and clean. But the chief reason was Havelock who at last, in his eighties, was beginning to experience that slight diminution of the life-force which often visits men as early as their forties. Also, according to the doctor, he had had an almost imperceptible stroke; it made him cut down his daily walking from five or six miles to two or three. Even more importantly, it clouded his mind to a merely dull inertia at times when formerly he would have been zestfully foolish; it stilled the riot in his veins to a mere fracas. All of this Charles considered, without cynicism, to be a great improvement. Certainly a household arrangement that had many other advantages was thus made possible.

There was an added consideration in the likelihood that Charles himself would be away a good deal in the foreseeable future. He had been told, informally, that a delegation to America was on the cards and that he would be a member of it.

Charles went to America in the autumn of the year. Most of his time was spent in Washington, but he had the chance of a weekend at Parson’s Corner, Connecticut, where Gerald was living with the Fuesslis. The leaves were turning and the country round Parson’s Corner was very beautiful. Aunt Birdie had already returned to England and before doing so had told the boy about his mother; as everyone had hoped, he had taken it well. Almost too well, indeed, for Charles’s equanimity; it made him realize that Jane, like himself, had had little chance to enjoy parenthood during the rootless years imposed by his career, and that losing her for ever had been easier for Gerald than separation from Aunt Birdie when the latter left Parson’s Corner —for then, Mrs. Fuessli said, had occurred the real privation. But even that had only been temporary; Gerald had soon recovered. Throughout the weekend with the Fuesslis his son’s innocent happiness made Charles both sad and glad. It also made him act, perversely, the role of the Galsworthian English gentleman that the Fuesslis expected him to be even while they laughed at him for it—as if this laughter was the only return he could give for their kindness and generosity. They would never guess it, he knew, but the social freedom of America was something he passionately envied —or rather, it was something he wished he could have been involved in from his own early youth; as it was, there were all the conditioned reflexes of his upbringing hard at work to point out the flaws—one of which was the mood in which the local paper reported his arrival under the headline ‘British Blueblood Visits Parson’s Corner’. It took him ten minutes to explain to Mrs. Fuessli that he had no blue blood, that his family was rather boastful of not having any, that blue blood was all nonsense anyhow, and that his father’s title was the equivalent of Woolworth rather than Tiffany. But it took him the same ten minutes to realize that she would always continue to think of him as an English aristocrat, that she thought of all aristocrats as idlers and fortune-hunters even though they might appear to be rich themselves or to have jobs, and that her warm affection for Gerald was invincibly joined with a relish in sending Fauntleroy to the local nursery school where he mixed with all the other children of the town and was (everyone fortunately could agree on this) having a rare good time.

So Charles left Parson’s Corner in deep gratitude and slight dismay, thinking alternately that Gerald’s life in America would not matter much when the war was over and he could return to England, and the next moment hoping that it WOULD matter, very much indeed, and that the boy would get something out of it of lasting value. Of course there was nothing for him, Charles, to do but wait. That joke he had had with the Fuesslis about taking Gerald to dinner on his seventeenth birthday was really a symbol of a father as well as a son growing up.

Charles reached London a few days before Pearl Harbour. It was another turning point of the war, and the second that year. He kept thinking of Parson’s Corner and how the news must have reached the Fuesslis—how they would doubtless be trying to explain to Gerald what had happened. He wrote them a long letter immediately, a letter so warmly personal and intimate he hoped it would finally convince them that, blueblood or not, he was a human being. He didn’t know (until years later, when he didn’t mind) that they had proudly sent it to the local paper in which, printed verbatim and with editorial endorsement, it had convinced the whole neighbourhood that he was a great English statesman and patriot.

Now that Hitler’s chief embroilment was with Russia, air-raids on London had almost ceased, though no one could forecast the duration of the respite and it was clearly impossible to relax any precautions. There was, however, an immediate burgeoning of social life—a pale but defiant shadow of what it had been before the war, yet in many ways pleasanter than those last sepulchral dinner parties of 1939, the tables then loaded with food and the conversation heavy with foreboding. Now, at the close of 1941, the tables were lighter but the talk was at least that of people who had proved something, if only the nature of themselves. Even the disasters of 1942 did not bring back the mood of that dismal year after Munich.