Charles Snow - Time of Hope

We were sitting in a kind of cubicle in an old-fashioned café. From the next cubicle to ours sounded the slide and patter of draughts, for this was a room where boxes of chessmen and draughts stood on a table, and people came in for a late tea and stayed several hours.

Through the tobacco smoke, Sheila was staring at me. Her eyes were large and disconcertingly steady. At the corner of her mouth, there was a twitch that looked like a secret smile, that was in fact a nervous tic.

‘I want to pay my share,’ she said.

‘No, you can’t. I asked you to come out.’

‘I can. I shall.’

I said no. I was insecure, not knowing how far to insist.

‘Look. I’ve got some. You need it more than I do.’

We stared at each other across the table.

‘You’re here. In this town. I’m not far away.’ Her voice was high, and sometimes had a brittle tone. ‘We want to see each other, don’t we?’

‘Of course,’ I said in sudden joy.

‘I can’t unless I pay for myself. I shouldn’t mind you paying — but you can’t afford it. Can you?’

‘I can manage.’

‘You can’t. You know you can’t. I’ve got some money.’

I was still insecure. Our wills had crossed. Already I was enraptured by her.

‘Unless you let me pay for myself each time I shan’t come again.’ She added: ‘I want to.’

If I had met her when I was older, and she had spoken so, I should have wondered how much it was an exercise of her will, how much due to her curious kindness. But that afternoon, after we had parted, I simply said to myself that I was in love. I had no room to think of anything but that.

I said to myself that I was in love. It was different from all I had imagined. I had read my Donne, I had listened to Jack Cotery, that cheerful amorist, and had agreed, out of the certainty of my inexperience, that the root of love was sensual desire, and that all that mattered was the bed. Yet it did not seem so, now that I was in love. Even though each moment had become enhanced, so that I saw faces in the evening light with a tenderness that I had never felt before. The faces of young men and women strolling in the late sunlight — I saw the bloom on the girls’ cheeks, I saw them feature by feature, as though my eyesight had suddenly become ten times as acute, As I watched the steam rising from my teacup the next morning, I felt that I was seeing it for the first time, as though I had just been born with each sense fresh and preternaturally strong. Each moment was sensually enhanced because of the love inside me. Yet for her who inspired that love I had not in those first days a sensual thought.

I did not make dreams of her, as I had done of many other girls. That first state of love was delectable beyond my expectation; in its delight I did not stop to wonder that I had often imagined love, and imagined it quite wrong. I breathed in the delight with every breath, those first mornings. I did not stop to wonder why my thoughts of her were vague, why I was content to let her image — unlike those of everyone else I knew — lie vague within my heart.

It was the same when I pictured her face. I was used already to studying the bones and skin and flesh of those I met, and I could, as a matter of form and habit, have described Sheila much as I should have described Marion or even George or Jack. I could have specified the thin, fine nose; great eyes, which had not the lemur-like sadness of most large eyes, but were grey, steady, caught and held the light; front teeth which only the grace of God saved from protruding, and which sometimes rested on her lower lip. She was fair, and her skin was even, pale, and of the consistency that most easily takes lines — so that one could see, before she was twenty, some of the traces that would deepen in ten years. She was tallish for a woman, strong-boned and erect, with an arrogant toss to her head.

I should have described her in those terms, just as I might have described the others, but to myself I did not see her as I did them. For I thought of her as beautiful. It was an objective fact that others did so too. Few of my friends liked her for long, and almost none was easy with her; yet even George admitted that she was a handsome bitch, and the women in the group did not deny that she was good-looking. They criticized each feature, they were scornful of her figure, and it was all true; but they knew that she had the gift of beauty. At that time I believed it was a great gift — and so did she, proud in her looks and her youth. Neither of us could have credited that there would come a day when I was to see her curse her beauty and deliberately, madly, neglect it.

To me she was especially beautiful. And, in the first astonishment of love, I saw her, and thought of her, just like that. I did not see her, as I was to see her in the future, with the detailed fondness of an experienced love, in which I came to delight in her imperfections, the front teeth, the nervous, secret-smiling tic. No, I saw her as beautiful, and I was filled with love.

I did not mind, I noticed as it were without regarding, how in company she was apt to fall constrained and silent, pallid faced, the smile working her mouth as though she were inwardly amused. The first time Jack Cotery saw her and me together, we were alone, and she was laughing; afterwards, Jack proceeded to congratulate me. ‘You’re getting on,’ he said good-naturedly. He was glad to witness me at last a captive. He was glad that I was sharing in his human frailty. He had always been half-envious that I was less distracted than he. And he was also glad that I was happy: like most carnal men, he was sorry if his friends were fools enough not to enjoy the fun. ‘She’s not my cup of tea.’ He grinned. ‘And I’m not hers. She’d just look through me with those searchlight eyes. But clearly she’s the best-looking girl round here. And you seem to have made a hit. Just let yourself go, Lewis, just let yourself go.’

One day, however, she came with me to the group. She greeted them all high-spiritedly enough, and then, though they were talking of books which she and I had discussed together, she fell into an inhibited silence and scarcely spoke a word. Jack cross-questioned me about her. ‘Is she often like that? Remember, they sometimes give themselves away, when they’re not trying. It’s easy to shine when someone’s falling in love with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I hope she isn’t going to be much of a handful. If she is, the best thing you can do is cut your losses and get out of it straight away.’

I smiled.

‘It’s all very well to smile. I know it would be a wrench. But it might be worse than a wrench if you get too much involved — and you can’t trust the girl to behave.’

I paid no attention. Nor did I to the curious incidents which I noticed soon after we met, when, instead of seeing her silent and pallid in company, I found her sitting on the area-steps of my lodging house, chatting like a sister to the landlady. The landlady was a slattern, who came to life when she broke into ruminations about her late husband or the Royal Family. Sheila listened and answered, relaxed, utterly at ease. And she did the same with the little waitress in the café, who liked her and took her for granted as she did no other customer. Somehow Sheila could make friends, throw her self-consciousness away, if she was allowed to choose for herself and go where no one watched her.

But I did not try, or even want, to think what she was truly like. If Marion had performed those antics, I should have been asking myself, what kind of nature was this? In the first weeks of my love for Sheila, I was less curious about her than about any other person. It even took me some time to discover the simple facts, such as that she was my own age within a month, that she was an only child, the daughter of a clergyman, that her mother had money, that they lived in a village twelve miles outside the town.