Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

Charles still took his turn at fire-watching but the absence of raids gave him more time off, and he was frequently invited out. Jane had made him a good talker, often by knowing when and how to talk to him; but now, he must presume, it was for his own sake and for his own unaided efforts he was sought after—which surprised him at first. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was because his work placed him near the centre of events, and people hoped he would spill secrets (it amused him to pretend to be doing this while actually avoiding it with great care). Or else it was because he was alone and easy to fit in. The real reason was one so simple that he hardly considered it—people liked him. His manners were rather pre-war, they admitted, and the things he said were sometimes a bit too clever in an older-fashioned way, but he was a decent fellow, always ready to do you a favour, and really, some of the things he said were sound enough, if only they had been put less elegantly. He was also, people thought, quite tolerably happy after a tragedy that might well have broken him; but in this they were wrong. Charles was not tolerably happy; he was tolerably unhappy. That is to say, he was unhappy, but he had found or made it tolerable.

When his name was in the New Year Honours List there was much professional raillery. ‘Oh God, look who’s down for a C.B.E… STUFFY ANDERSON!’ But then, as an afterthought: ‘Well, it was about time he got something.’

Havelock had another stroke in the summer of 1944; this one was more disabling, affecting his left side and preventing him from taking more than a stumbling walk around the neighbouring streets. Gradually his world contracted to the room in which he spent most of his time, and from which he could see Big Ben and the twin towers of the Abbey. His mind had achieved a level of tranquillity that had not much impaired the quality of the brain, and it was odd to speculate on the difference in his fortunes if this mental change could have been inflicted in early life, and without the physical. Charles formed the habit of visiting his father for an hour or so before going to bed, no matter how late he returned from work or a social engagement; the old man enjoyed it, being fairly sleepless and fairly sleepy at all hours of the day and night. He liked to hear Charles’s comments on the events of the evening, and Charles would repeat any special titbits of conversation he could remember. Charles found that he often enjoyed these post-mortems himself—so one-sided compared with those that he and Jane had shared, yet an agreeable way to sort out one’s own impressions aloud and over a final drink.

The buzz-bombs and V2s arrived, several within noisy distance of the house, but Havelock, though they failed to excite him in the old way, did not dislike them nearly as much as Charles did, and was able to rationalize the situation in terms that Charles had to admit were very rational indeed. ‘At eighty-four you haven’t got a life to lose. You have only a fraction of a life—and nobody would bet on it being more than a very small and vulgar fraction. So why should I worry?’

‘Or I,’ said Charles, ‘if I could look at it your way. My own fraction’s climbing down. Couldn’t possibly be much more than a half—and not the better half.’

‘Why not?’

Charles laughed and parried the question, but when he was alone it was one he put to himself. WHY NOT? He thought of his life up to date; it wasn’t hard to imagine a future that might be luckier. On the other hand, with buzz-bombs putt-putting overhead, it sometimes wasn’t easy to imagine a future at all. Perhaps only old people and youths were always ready to indulge such a luxury.

Havelock grew weaker gradually, and with the weakness came passionlessness, so that he could talk over old days and old issues without rancour. He told Charles once, quite calmly, that he had always been doubtful whether he were really his father at all, because the dates of his wife’s return to him after their separation and of Charles’s birth permitted the suspicion. Charles was not as shocked, or even as concerned, as he might have expected to be, but he was interested—and mainly because the idea seemed to offer a possible clue to many hitherto puzzling facets of Havelock’s behaviour. He found also that the idea brought him closer to his father in sympathy, as if the spiritual tie of a revealed neurosis could be stronger than that of the body. He was almost disappointed when, on mentioning the matter to Cobb, the latter discounted it. The dates, Cobb said, made it nearly (though not quite) impossible, and besides that, there had been no whisper at the time, as would certainly have happened if any other man had been involved in the separation.

‘Then why DID she leave him?’ Charles asked.

‘She couldn’t stand him,’ Cobb answered.

They were both unwilling to discuss the matter further, except that Cobb brought up the matter of the family likeness. ‘It’s not just looks, sir —as it was with Mr. Lindsay—it’s something hard to explain, but it’s there, and I notice it more as you grow older. Of course you’re nothing like your father in tastes and disposition, and yet… well, I wouldn’t have any doubts if I were you, sir.’ Cobb added, perhaps as an implied compliment (or else the reverse, Charles could not be certain): ‘He was very handsome at your age.’

‘He still is.’

‘Yes—and there’s a look about him now—sometimes when he’s dozing in a chair with the sun on his face—he looks—well, sir, he looks just like a SAINT.’

Cobb smiled at the notion, and Charles also smiled. SIR Havelock, yes —but SAINT Havelock was a bit too much.

When he next saw his father Charles gave him what he hoped was the good news, expecting him to take more comfort from it than Charles could himself, for he knew by now that if he had been supplied with irrefutable proof that Havelock was not his father, his chief feeling would have been curiosity about who had been. He often wondered why his relationship with the old man had entered a phase of such warm indifference, such affectionately cynical toleration. He supposed it was largely because it was too late for anything else, yet still in time to realize that if you forgive people enough you belong to them, and they to you, whether either person likes it or not… the squatter’s rights of the heart.

There came the days of the German collapse, when a future— personal, national, and world-wide—seemed to emerge from the clouds of doubt that had hung heavily for a decade. Presently Japan surrendered also; the war was totally over. It was the second such occasion in Charles’s life, as in that of millions of others, and completely different from the first. There were no wild scenes, no bonfires to scorch the lions in Trafalgar Square, no celebrations that became riots. To Charles the big personal event was Gerald’s return—a boy of nine with a decided American accent and a tendency to find fault with the way things were done in England. Charles knew no easy cure for this, but could not regard it as too deplorable, remembering as he did that England (and for that matter America too) had been made great by people who had found fault with the way things were done in England. But he felt there was some need to lessen a child’s disappointment with a country whose cars and trains and ice-cream sodas were so small, so he took Gerald for a seaside holiday and hoped it made him feel happier. He could not be sure; the boy was not one for showing his emotions. Charles also talked to the headmaster of the prep school where Gerald would begin his first term in September. The head told him there would be several other new boys who had spent recent years across the Atlantic. ‘They’ll probably be ragged a bit at first.’ (But later he wrote to Charles that it hadn’t happened like that at all. ‘So far from being at any disadvantage, the boys who have lived in the Great Democracy seem to have made themselves a sort of aristocracy that the other boys look up to. Remarkable.’ Charles agreed that it was, but he was also much relieved.)