Charles Snow - Time of Hope

My view was the exact opposite. I could, I said, survive my present life until Bar Finals. I would take care, however much sleep I lost, that it would make no difference to the result. Whereas two hundred pounds, once I was in Chambers, would keep me going for two years and might turn the balance between failure and success.

George took up the argument with both of us. He was himself a very strong man physically, and he had no patience with the wear and tear that the effort might cost me. That was one against Aunt Milly. On the other hand, he told me flatly that I was underestimating the sheer time that I needed for work. If I did not leave the office now and have my days clear, I could not conceivably come out high in the list. That was a decisive one against me. On the other hand, he fired a broadside against Aunt Milly — it was ridiculous to insist that the whole loan should be used on getting me through the Bar Finals, when a little capital afterwards would be of incalculable value.

Aunt Milly liked to be argued with by George, powerfully, loudly, and not too politely. It was a contrast to the meek silences of her husband and her brother. Maybe, I thought, she would have been more placid married to such a man. Was that why, against all the rules, they got on so well?

But, despite her gratification at meeting her match, she remained immovably obstinate. Either I left the office within a month, or the loan was off. Aunt Milly had the power of the purse, and she made the most of it.

At last George hammered out a solution, although Aunt Milly emerged victoriously with her point. I was to leave the office at once: Aunt Milly nodded her head, her eyes protruding without expression, as though it were merely a recognition of her common sense. Aunt Milly would lend me a hundred pounds ‘at three per cent, payments to begin in five years,’ said Aunt Milly promptly.

‘On any terms you like,’ said George irascibly. The hundred pounds would just carry me through, doing nothing but study law, until Bar Finals. Then, if I secured a first in the examination, she would lend me the other hundred pounds to help towards my first year in Chambers.

George chuckled as we walked back to Bowling Green Street. ‘I call that a good morning’s work,’ he said. ‘She’s a wonderful woman.’

He hinted that I need not worry about taking the money. Even if all went wrong, it would not cripple her. She and her husband were among those of the unpretentious lower middle-class who had their nest eggs tucked away. George would not tell me how much. He was always professionally discreet, in a fashion that surprised some who only knew him at night. But I gathered that they were worth two or three thousand. I also gathered that I was not to expect anything from her will. That did not depress me — two hundred pounds now was worth two thousand pounds in ten years’ time. But I should have liked to know how she was leaving her money.

I wanted Sheila to rejoice with me when I told her the news. I did not write to her; I saved it up for our next meeting. She came into the town on a Saturday afternoon, a warm and beautiful afternoon in late September. We met outside the park, not far from Martineau’s house, walked by the pavilion, and found a couple of chairs near the hard tennis courts. The park was full of people. All round the tennis courts there were children playing on the grass, women sitting on the seats with perambulators in front of them, men in their shirtsleeves. On the asphalt court there were two games of mixed doubles, youths in grey flannels, girls in cotton dresses.

Sheila sat back with the sunshine on her face, watching the play.

‘I’m about as good as she is,’ she said. ‘I’m no good at tennis. But I can run quite fast.’

She spoke with a secret pleasure, far away, as though she were gazing at herself in a mirror, as though she were admiring her reflection in a pool. I looked at her — and, in the crowded park, for me we were alone, under the milk-blue sky.

Then I told her that I was leaving the office. She smiled at me, a friendly, sarcastic smile.

‘Gentleman of leisure, are you?’ she said.

‘Not quite,’ I said.

‘What in the world will you do with yourself? Even you can’t work all day.’

I could not leave it, I could not bear that she was not impressed. I told her, I exaggerated, the difference it ought to make to my chances.

‘You’ll do well anyway,’ she said lightly.

‘It’s not quite as easy as all that.’

‘It is for you.’ She smiled again. ‘But I still don’t see what you’re going to do with yourself all day. I’m sure you’re not good at doing nothing. I’m much better at that than you are. I’m quite good at sitting in the sun.’

She shut her eyes. She looked so beautiful that my heart turned over.

Still I could not leave it. My tongue ran away, and I said that it was a transformation, it was a new beginning. She looked at me; her smile was still friendly, sarcastic, and cool.

‘You’re very excited about it, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘Then so am I,’ she said.

But she responded in a different tone to another story that I told her, as we sat there in the sun. It concerned a piece of trouble of Jack’s, which had sprung up almost overnight. It arose because Jack, not for the first time, had evoked an infatuation; but this time he was guiltless, and ironically this was the only time that might do him an injury. For the one who loved him was not a young woman, but a boy of fifteen. The boy’s passion had sprung up that summer, it was glowing and innocent, but the more extravagant because it was so innocent. He had just given Jack an expensive present, a silver cigarette case; and by accident his family had intercepted a letter of devotion that was coming with it. There were all kinds of practical repercussions, which worried us and against which we were trying to act: Jack’s future in his firm was threatened; there were other consequences for him, and, in the long run, most of all for George, who had thrown himself, with the whole strength of a man, into Jack’s support.

Sheila listened with her eyes alight. She was not interested in the consequences, she brushed them impatiently aside. To her the core of the story, its entire significance, lay in the emotion of the boy himself.

‘It must be wonderful to be swept away. He must have felt that he had no control over himself at all. I wonder what it was like,’ she said. She was deeply moved, and our eyes met.

‘He won’t regret it.’ She added, gently, ‘I wish it had happened to me at his age.’

We fell into silence: a silence so charged that I could hear my heart beating. Between her fingers a cigarette was smouldering blue into the still air.

‘Who is he, Lewis?’ she said.

I hesitated for a fraction of a second. She was very quick. ‘Tell me. If I know him, I might help. I shall go and say that I envy him.’

‘He’s a boy called Roy Calvert,’ I said.

I had only met him for a few minutes in the middle of this crisis. What struck me most was that he seemed quite unembarrassed and direct. He was more natural and at ease than the rest of us, five years older and more, who questioned him.

Sheila shook her head, as though she were disappointed.

‘He must be a cousin of your friend Olive, mustn’t he?’ (Olive was a member of the group.)

I told her yes, and that Olive was involved in the trouble.

‘I can’t get on with her,’ said Sheila. ‘She pretends not to think much of herself. It isn’t true.’

Suddenly Sheila’s mood had changed. Talking of Roy, she had been gentle, delicate, self-forgetful. Now, at the mention of Olive, whom she scarcely knew, but who mixed gaily and could forget herself in any company, Sheila turned angry and constrained.