Charles Snow - Time of Hope

Walking in the windy autumn nights, I thought of her with the self-absorption of young love. I chose to be alone on those nights, so that I could cherish my thoughts, with the lights twinkling and quivering in the wind.

I was self-absorbed, yet with the paradox of such a love I had not begun to ask, even in my thoughts, anything for myself. I had not kissed her. It was enough just then that she should exist. It was enough that she should exist, who had brought me to this bliss, who had transformed the streets I walked in so that, looking down the hill at the string of lights, I felt my throat catch with joy.

I thought of her as though she alone were living in the world. I had never seen her house, but I imagined her within it, in her own room, high and light. She sat with a reading lamp at her side, and for a time she was still. Then she crossed the room and knelt by the bookshelves: her hair was radiant in the shadow. She went back to her chair, and her fingers turned the page.

I saw her so, and that was all I asked, just then.

I was diffident in making the first approach of love. It was not only that the magic was too delicate to touch. I was afraid that I had no charm for her. I had none of Jack’s casual confidence that he could captivate nine women out of ten; and I had not that other confidence which underlay George’s awkwardness and which was rooted in his own certainty of his great sensual power. At twenty I did not know whether any woman would love me with her whole heart. Most of all I doubted it with Sheila.

I tried to dazzle her, not with what I was, but with what I could do. I boasted of my plans. I told her that I should be a success. I held out the lure of the prizes I should win by my wits. She was quite unimpressed. She was clever enough to know that it was not just a young man’s fantasy. She believed that I might do as I said. But she believed it half with amusement, half with envy.

‘You ought to bring off something,’ she teased me. ‘With your automatic competence.’

It amused her that I could work in the office all day, talk to her at the café over pot after pot of tea until she caught her train, and then go off and apply my mind for hours to the law of torts. But it was an envious amusement. She had played with music and painting, but she had nothing to do. She felt that she too should have been driven to work.

‘Of course you’ll get somewhere,’ she said. ‘What happens when you’ve got there? You won’t be content. What then?’

She would not show more than that faint interest in my workaday hopes. She had none of Marion’s robust and comradely concern for each detail of what I had to achieve. Marion had learned the syllabuses, knew the dates of the examinations, had a shrewd idea of when I must begin to earn money unless I was to fail. Sheila had faith in my ‘automatic competence’, but her tone turned brittle as I tried to dazzle her, and it hurt me, in the uncertainty of love.

She was still amused, not much more than that, when I brought her a piece of good news. In September that year, just after I began to meet her regularly, I had a stroke of fortune, the kind of practical fortune that was a bonus I did not count on and had no right to expect. It happened through the juxtaposition, the juxtaposition which became a most peculiar alliance, of Aunt Milly and George Passant. The solicitor who dealt with Aunt Milly’s ‘bit of property’ (as my mother used to describe it, in a humorous resentful fashion) had not long since died.

By various chances, Aunt Milly found her way to the firm of Eden and Martineau, and so into George’s office; and there she kept on going.

Aunt Milly was aware that I knew him. It did not soften her judgement. As a matter of course, it was her custom to express disapproval after her first meeting with any new acquaintance. Since she knew George was my closest friend, she felt morally impelled to double the pungency of her expression.

‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but that young fellow Passant was smelling of beer. At half past two in the afternoon. It might be doing everyone a service if I told his employers what I thought of it.’ She went on to give a brief sketch of George’s character.

To my surprise, it did not take long before her indignation moderated. After a visit or two, she was saying darkly and grudgingly: ‘Well, I can’t say that he’s as hopeless as that other jackass — which is a wonder, considering everything.’

Nevertheless, it came out of the blue when George told me, as though it were nothing particularly odd, that they had been discussing me and my future. ‘I found her very reasonable,’ said George. ‘Very reasonable indeed.’ And again it did not strike him as particularly odd, though he was looking discreet and what my mother would have called chuff, with the self-satisfaction of one holding a pleasant secret, when he summoned me to meet her one lunchtime.

‘She’s asked me to attend, as a matter of fact,’ said George complacently, swinging his stick.

Our meeting place was the committee room of one of Aunt Milly’s temperance organizations. It was in the middle of the town, on the third floor above a vegetarian café; Aunt Milly was not a vegetarian, but she did not notice what she ate, and when she was working in that room she always sent down for a meal. Our lunch that morning was nut cutlets, and Aunt Milly munched away impassively.

Eating that lunch, we sat, all three of us, at a long committee table at the end of the room, Aunt Milly in the chair, George at her right hand like a secretary, and me opposite to them. The room was dark and filled with small tables, each covered with brochures, pamphlets, charts, handbills, and maps. Near our end of the room was a special stand, on which were displayed medical exhibits. The one most visible, a yard or so from our lunch, was a cirrhosed liver. I caught sight of Aunt Milly’s gaze fixed upon it, and then on George and me. She went on eating steadily.

On the walls were flaunted placards and posters; one of them proclaimed that temperance was winning. George noticed it, and asked Aunt Milly how many people had signed the pledge in 1924.

‘Not enough,’ said Aunt Milly. She added, surprisingly, in her loud voice: ‘That poster’s a lie. Don’t you believe it. The movement is going through a bad time. We’ve gone downhill ever since the war, and we shan’t do much better till those people stop running away from the facts.’

‘You made the best of your position in the war,’ said George, with an abstract pleasure in political chess. ‘You couldn’t possibly have hoped to keep your advantage.’

‘That is as may be,’ said Aunt Milly.

George argued with her. She was completely realistic and matter of fact about details. She did not shut her eyes to any setback, and yet maintained an absolute and unqualified faith that the cause would triumph in the end.

She broke off brusquely ‘This isn’t what I wanted you for. I haven’t got all the afternoon to waste. It’s time we got down to brass tacks.’

Aunt Milly was offering to make me a loan. Presumably at George’s instigation, certainly after consulting him about my chances in the Bar examinations, she had decided to help. George sat by her side, in solid if subdued triumph. I began to thank her, with real spontaneous delight, but she stopped me.

‘You wait till I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘You may not like my conditions as much as all that. You can take it or leave it.’

The ‘conditions’ referred to the date of the loan. Aunt Milly would, if she got her own way, lend me two hundred pounds. When would it be most useful to me? She had her view, I had mine: they were, as usual, different. And they were the opposite of what one might have expected. Aunt Milly had got it into her head that I did not stand a dog’s chance in Bar Finals unless I could give up the office and spend the next eighteen months reading law ‘as though you were at college, like your mother wanted for you’. I could never understand how Aunt Milly became fixed in this opinion; her whole family had picked up their education at night classes, and she was the last woman to be moved by the claims of social pretension. Perhaps it was through some faint memory of my mother’s longings, for Aunt Milly was capable of a certain buried sentiment. Perhaps it was that I was looking overtired: she was always affected by physical evidence, about which there was no doubt or nonsense, which she could see with her own eyes. Anyway, for whatever reason, she had got the idea into her head, and held it as obstinately as all her other ideas.