Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

My name is Charles Anderson. I belong to a somewhat out-of-date profession called diplomacy. This is a relic of the days when even wars were polite, so I’m naturally polite myself and also a bit of a relic. I’m supposed to have certain ‘immunities’ under international law, which means that in a foreign country I can drive a car to the common danger without being prosecuted. If, however, that country gets into a war, then I must share the common danger, since a neutral flag painted on a roof can’t be seen at night from four miles high. And if my own country gets into a war and loses, I might be hanged as a criminal if I were important enough—so thank goodness I’m not. The whole thing would have been so unforeseeable a century ago that I doubt whether my own guesses about the coming century can be much better. Anyhow, one of them (fathered by the wish, of course) is that England will survive —and not only as an inheritance like Greece and Rome. We’re such a damned peculiar people, such a mixed bag of stout fellahs and decent idiots, with a smattering of high-minded hypocrites and brainy saints. We don’t quite fit the theories—Spengler’s or Toynbee’s or Marx’s or anybody’s. So we can’t be counted on by the theorists—or counted out either. Perhaps God isn’t bored with us yet (Victor Hugo’s phrase, not mine). Perhaps we shall solve the trick of all tricks for this millennium—how to step down without falling over backwards, and then how to build the new must-be on the foundations of the old has-been. I won’t see it happen, but my son may.

Another guess is that what I’m writing now won’t stay under a stone till 2050. (Funny how the other fellows here seem to be taking that for granted.) But there’s another kind of stone my father once came across in the churchyard at Pumphrey Basset—an ancient gravestone of a female dwarf with the inscription on it—‘Parva sed apta Domino’. Somehow I wouldn’t mind betting that will outlast an atomic research plant, and perhaps in the long run mean more…

In his minute script, and writing fast because he did not take the occasion too seriously, Charles was having an easier time (he surmised) than the other five, on whom posterity and the ticking clock seemed to impose a gruelling test. When the ten minutes were up and he had almost filled both sides of the paper, he passed it over without rereading and reached for the port while the others were begging an extra minute to make corrections.

Musing thus on the future had set him thinking about Gerald, whom he would send in due course to Brookfield and Cambridge if only because he could not, in England at the middle of the twentieth century, think of anything better to do with the boy. I just as he preferred a dinner to be ‘black tie’, not because he was a snob, but because it avoided the problem of what else.

It was about this time that he took up painting again with full knowledge not only that his work would never be of consequence, but that even his talent was less than it had been thirty years before. His pleasure, though, was nearly as great, and perhaps enhanced by the small amateur reputation he acquired among people who really did not know much about art at all. Once, on a wet Sunday in a Mediterranean city, he painted—from memory and in his bedroom at the Legation—a curiously attractive portrait of his father, as he remembered him during the old man’s last years. Havelock was sitting by the window of the Westminster house, staring out over wet pavements and the tops of umbrellas, with Big Ben and the Abbey towers in the misty twilight. ‘I made it rain for him,’ Charles later explained to friends who had known Havelock and admired the portrait, ‘just as I’d put a Sicilian peasant in the sun. His life was like a day that starts well, but then the clouds come up and it begins to pour and all the things you’d rather do have to be cancelled, but by the time evening comes you’ll have found something else to do and you won’t even look to see if the sky has stars in it. But it may have.’

Later that year (1950) Charles again half expected promotion. He was beguiled by a rumour that proved false, and in the dispassionate mood that followed he began to think of retirement. But then he was offered the chance of another switch to the Foreign Office, which suited him because he liked to live in London; so he put off the retirement and found the prospect of it an increasing comfort and even a mental stimulus. He felt mildly ambitious to do something, within the nearer reach, that would bring back the feeling of innocent schoolboy credit; on this, perhaps, he could make his bow at the Prizegiving of life and receive a smattering of applause from those who did not expect to see him again.

And yet the very mildness of the ambition made it hard to accomplish. The feeling of near-success, which is also near-failure, followed him to Paris, where, as member of the British delegation to a somewhat second-string international conference, he could believe that his career had reached a peak —perhaps not its highest, perhaps not even high, but still a peak of sorts, and very likely the last.

These things were in his mind during dinner at the Cheval Noir on Gerald’s seventeenth birthday; they were in his mind as he followed the boy in a taxi across the city; they were in his mind as he sat in Rocher’s ice-cream dispensary, facing his son and the girl his son had gone there to meet. ‘He thinks it’s wonderful,’ she had said, ‘that you should be representing England at the Conference.’ How could he live up to or down to such an image in his son’s eyes? It was just another thing to please and plague him, and suddenly he saw the gulf between father and son far wider than he had imagined, part of some structural rift of humanity.

It might have bothered him further had he not just then received a second shock of a far more peremptory kind. For outside, only a few inches beyond the plate-glass windows, and peering in upon their little group with riveted attention, was the face of a man whom Charles least of all wanted to think about, much less encounter in the flesh. And the apparition, having seen that he was seen, began immediately to wave the kind of greeting Charles could not possibly ignore.

So Charles waved back and was only able to explain that the intruder was one of the Conference delegates by the time that Palan, plump and clumsy, yet curiously notable as always, came threading his way amongst the tables towards them. ‘This WOULD happen,’ Charles muttered to himself.

It was not only that Charles did not want to see Palan; he would have been embarrassed to be discovered at a place like Rocher’s by anybody. At the Cheval Noir a surprise of such a kind would have been barely tolerable, little as he wished to spread the news of that restaurant to outsiders; and at any ordinary Parisian pavement café, however proletarian, he could have summoned enough aplomb to meet even Sir Malcolm Bingay’s eye. But to be spotted in an ice-cream parlour sucking a pink concoction through a straw… it simply did not add up to anything he could take in stride; it was like those dreams he sometimes had in which he realized, at the moment of being presented to a chef de cabinet at a garden party, that he was completely nude from the waist down.

Nor did he expect that Palan would miss the ludicrousness of the situation. Doubtless it would stand him in good stead at the Conference in the morning—would acidify his attitude, revitalize his sarcasms. He had already found so much in Charles to poke fun at; from now on there would be more. Charles braced himself for an effort of courtesy as the fellow waited; clearly there was no alternative but to introduce him. He did so. Palan then bowed and stooped to kiss Miss Raynor’s hand in a way that would please her all the more (Charles reflected) if she were unaware that in correct European circles one did not kiss the hands of unmarried women. And it was like Palan, who must certainly know that himself, to take the impertinent liberty or else to have sized her up as a susceptible American who would feel such gallantry to be one of the perquisites of foreign travel. Meanwhile Palan’s eyes were roving over the scene with a certain ironic detachment. ‘It looks very good, what you all have got in the glasses. What do they call it?’ To Charles’s regret Miss Raynor smiled and told him. ‘Just a Raspberry frappé.’