Charles Snow - Time of Hope

He knew that I did not believe a word of it. I was amused by him and fond of him, and I envied his impudence and confidence with women, and of course his success. Chiefly, though, he carried with him a climate in which, just at that time, I wanted to bask; because he was so amorous, because everything he said was full of hints, revelations, advice, fantasies, reminiscences, forecasts, all of love, he brought out and magnified much that I was ready to feel.

For at this stage in our youth we can hold two kinds of anticipation of love, which seem contradictory and yet coexist and reinforce each other. We can dream, delicately because even to imagine it is to touch one of the most sacred of our hopes, of searching for the other part of ourselves, of the other being who will make us whole, of the ultimate and transfiguring union. At the same time we can gloat over any woman, become insatiably curious about the brute facts of the pleasures which we are then learning or which are just to come. In that phase we are coarse and naked, and anyone who has forgotten his youth will judge that we are too tangled with the flesh ever to forget ourselves in the ecstasy of romantic love. But in fact, at this stage in one’s youth, the coarseness and nakedness, the sexual preoccupations, the gloating over delights to come, are — in the secret heart where they take place — themselves romantic. They are a promise of joy. Much that Jack Cotery and I said to each other would have been repulsive to a listener who forgot that we were eighteen. The conversations would not stand the light of day. Yet at the time they drove from my mind both the discontents and the ambitions. They enriched me as much as my hope, my anticipation, of transfiguring love.

Autumn came, and I was restless, full of expectation. The School reopened. In the bright September nights I walked down the Newarke to George Passant’s classes, full of a kind of new-year elation and resolve. Going back to my lodgings under the misty autumn moon, I wondered about the group that Passant was collecting round him. They were all students at the School, some of whom I knew by name; young women who attended an occasional class, one or two youths who were studying full-time for an external London degree. They gathered round him at the end of the evening, and moved noisily back into the town.

Their laughter rang provocatively loud as they jostled along, a compact group, on the other side of the road. I felt left out. I was chagrined that George Passant had never asked me to join them. I felt very lonely.

Not long afterwards I took my chance and forced myself upon him. It happened in October, a week after my eighteenth birthday. I had come out of the office late. There, on the pavement ten yards ahead, George Passant was walking deliberately with his heavy tread, whistling and swinging his stick.

I caught him up and fell into step beside him. He said good evening with amiable, impersonal cordiality. I said that it was curious we had not met before, since we worked on opposite sides of the street. George agreed that it was. He was half-abstracted, half-shy; I was too intent to mind. He knew my name, he knew that I attended his class. That was not enough. I was going to cut a dash. We passed the reference library, and I referred airily to the hours I spent there, the amount of reading I had done in the last few months; I expounded on Freud, Jung, Adler, Tolstoy, Marx, Shaw. We came to a little bookshop at the corner of Belvoir Street. The lights in the shop window shone on glossy jackets, the jackets of the best sellers of the day, A S M Hutchinson and P C Wren and Michael Arlen, with some copies of The Forsyte Saga in an honourable position on the right.

‘What can you do?’ I demanded of George Passant. ‘If that’s what you give people to read?’ I waved my arm at the window. ‘If that’s what they’re willing to take? I don’t suppose there’s a volume of poetry in the shop. Yeats is one of the greatest poets of the age, and you couldn’t go into that shop and buy a single word of his.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t know anything about poetry,’ said George Passant, quickly and defensively, in the tone of a man without an ounce of blague in his whole nature. ‘I’m afraid it’s no use expecting me to give an opinion about poetry.’ Then he said: ‘We ought to have a drink on it, anyway. I take it you know the pubs of this town better than I do. Let’s go somewhere where we shan’t be cluttered up with the local bell-wethers.’

I was bragging, determined to make an impression, roaring ahead without much care of what he thought. George Passant was five years older, and many men of his age would have been put off. But George’s nerves were not grated by raw youth. In a sense, he was perpetually raw and young himself. Partly because of his own diffidence, partly because of his warm, strong fellow feeling, he took to me as we stood outside the bookshop. Shamelessly I lavished myself in a firework display of boasting, and he still took to me.

We sat by the fire at the Victoria. When we arrived, it was early enough for us to have the room to ourselves: later it filled, but we still kept the table by the fire. George sat opposite me, his face flushed by the heat, his voice always loud, growing in volume with each pint he drank. He paid for all the beer, stood the barmaids a drink and several of the customers. ‘I believe in establishing friendly relations. We shall want to come back here. This is a splendid place,’ George confided to me, with preternatural worldly wisdom and a look of extreme cunning: while in fact he was standing treat because he was happy, relaxed, off his guard, exhilarated, and at home.

It was a long time that night before I stopped roaring ahead with my own self-advertisement. The meeting mattered to me — I knew that while living in it, though I did not know how much. I was impelled to go on making an impression. It was a long time before I paid any attention to George.

At close quarters, his face had one or two surprises. The massive head was as impressive as in the lecture room. The great forehead, the bones of the jaw under the blanket of heavy flesh — they were all as I expected. But I was surprised, having only seen him tense and concentrated, to realize that he could look so exuberantly relaxed. As he drank, he softened into sensual content. And I was more surprised to catch his eyes, just for a moment, in repose. His whole being that night exuded power, and happiness, and excitement at having someone with whom to match his wits. He smacked his lips after each tankard, and billowed with contented laughter. But there was one interval, perhaps only a minute long, when each of us was quiet. It was the only silent time between us, all that night. George had put his tankard down, and was staring past me, down the room and into vacant space. His eyes were large, blue, set in deep orbits; in excitement they flashed, but for that moment they were mournful and lost.

In the same way, I heard occasional tones in his speech that seemed to come from different levels from the rest. I listened with all my attention, as I was to go on listening for a good many years. He was more articulate than anyone I had heard, the words often a little stiff and formal, his turns of phrase rigid by contrast to the loud hearty voice with its undertone of a Suffolk accent. He described his career to me in that articulate fashion, each bit of explanation organized and clear. He was the son of a small town postmaster, had been articled to an Ipswich firm, had done well in his solicitors’ examinations. George did not conceal his satisfaction; everything he said of his training was cheerful, abounding in force, rational, full of his own brimming optimism. Then he came to the end of his articles, and there was a change in tone that I was to hear so often. ‘I hadn’t any influence, of course ,’ said George Passant, his voice still firm, articulate, but sharp with shrinking diffidence. I recognized that trick in the first hour we talked, but there were others that puzzled me for years, to which I listened often enough but never found the key.