Charles Snow - Time of Hope

‘I once went to a dance at Olive’s,’ she said. ‘We didn’t stay long. We went by ourselves to the palais. That was a lot better.’

For the first time, I was learning the language of a beloved. I was learning the tension, the hyperaesthesia, with which one listens to the tone of every word, And I was learning too, in the calm of that September afternoon, the first stab of jealousy. That ‘we’, said so clearly, that reiterated ‘we’: was it deliberate, was her companion a casual acquaintance, was she threatening me with someone for whom she cared?

She looked at me. At the sight of my face, her tone changed again.

‘I’m glad you told me about Roy,’ she said.

‘Why are you glad?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Sheila, why are you glad?’

‘If I knew, I shouldn’t tell you.’ Her voice was high. Then she smiled, and said with all simplicity and purity: ‘No, I should tell you. I should want to. It would mean I had found something important, wouldn’t it?’

When she was not there, I was happy in my thoughts. They were pierced, it is true, by the first thrusts of jealousy, the sound of that clear ‘we’ in the calm air, not so much a memory but as though the sound stayed in my ears. They were troubled by the diffidence of my love, so that I could not always think of her alone in her room, without needing some sign of love to calm me. But the rapture was so strong, it swept back after those intrusions; she existed, she walked the same earth, and I should see her in three days’ time.

Once, meeting her after a week’s absence, I felt incredulous, all the excitement deflated, all the enchantment dead. Her face seemed, at the first glance, not different in kind from other faces — pale, frigid, beaky, ill-tempered. Her voice was brittle, and grated on my nerves. Everything she thought was staccato. There was no flow or warmth about her, or about anything she said or did. I was, for a few minutes, nothing but bored. Nothing deeper than that, just bored. Then she gazed at me — not with a smile, but with her eyes steady and her face quite still; on the instant, the dead minutes were annihilated and I was once more possessed.

Later that day, I happened to tell her that the group were spending the following weekend out at the farm. She always took a curious, half-envious, half-mocking interest in the group’s affairs. That afternoon she was speculating, like one left outside a party, about how we should pass the weekend. I knew her house was only two or three miles from the farm, and I begged her to drop in.

‘I can’t stand crowds,’ she said. Then, as though covering herself, she retorted: ‘Why shouldn’t you come and see me? It’s no further one way than the other.’

I was overjoyed.

She added: ‘You’ll have to meet my parents. You can study them, if you like.’

We arranged that I should walk over for tea on the Saturday afternoon. That Saturday, in the middle of October, was my last day in the office; and I was thinking of the afternoon as I said all my goodbyes. Mr Vesey reminded me that I was under his control until one o’clock; he told me three times not to be careless about leaving my papers in order, then he shook my hand, and said that he had not yet been provided with my successor, and that some people had never realized his difficulties. How could he be expected to run his section well if his one good clerk went and left him? Why did he never get a chance himself? ‘Never mind, Eliot,’ he said bravely, shaking my hand again. ‘I don’t expect to be in the limelight. I just carry on.’

I was thinking of the afternoon; but, stepping out of the office on to the wet pavement, leaving for the last time a place which for years had been a prison, I felt an ache of nostalgia, of loss, and of regret.

George and I went out by bus, through a steady drizzle, At half past three, when I started out from the farm, the rain was heavier; I was getting wet as I cut across the fields, down the country lanes, to Sheila’s house. I was happy and apprehensive, happy because she had asked me, apprehensive because I was sensible enough to know that I could not possibly be welcome. She had asked me in innocence: that I took for granted. She would not care what her parents thought, if she wanted to see me. Through her actions there shone so often a wild and wilful innocence. And I, far more realistic than she in all other ways, had for her and with her the innocence of romantic love. So that, tramping through the mud that afternoon, I was happy whatever awaited me. I wanted nothing but the sight of her; I knew it, she knew it, and in that state of love there were no others.

But I assumed that her parents would see it differently. I might not have given a conscious thought to marrying her — and that, strange as it later seemed, was true, Her parents would never believe it. To them, I must appear as a suitor — possibly a suitor with an extremely dim outside chance, but nevertheless a suitor, and a most undesirable one. For they were rich, Sheila had both looks and brains; they were bound to expect her to make a brilliant marriage. They were not likely to encourage me. I had nothing whatever with which to mollify them. Some parents might have endured me because I was not a fool, but I guessed that even my wits were suspect. Sheila was capable of recounting my opinions, and then saying that she shared them. I did not know how I was going to carry it off. Yet I was joyful, walking those two miles through the rain.

The vicarage was a handsome Georgian house, lying back behind the trees at the end of the village. I was not far wrong about my welcome. But before Mrs Knight could start expressing herself there was a faintly farcical delay. For I arrived wet through. The maid who let me in did not know how to proceed; Sheila and her mother came out into the hall. Mrs Knight at once took charge. She was prepared to greet me coldly, but she became solicitous about my health. She was a heavily built woman, bigger than Sheila, but much more busy and fussy. She took me into the bathroom, sent the maid for some of the vicar’s clothes, arranged to have mine dried. At last I entered the drawing-room dressed in a cricket shirt, grey flannels, pullover, dressing gown, and slippers, all belonging to Sheila’s father, all the clothes much too wide for me and the slippers two sizes too big.

‘I hope you won’t take cold,’ Mrs Knight rattled on busily. ‘You ought to have had a good hot bath. I think you ought to have a nice stiff whisky. Yes, that ought to keep off the cold.’

She had none of her daughter’s fine, chiselled features. She was broad-faced, pug-nosed, with a loud quacking voice; she was coarse-grained and greatly given to moral indignation; yet her eyes were wide open and childlike, and one felt, as with other coarse-grained women, that often she was lost and did not know her way about the world.

However, she was very far from lost when it came to details of practical administration. I was made to put down a couple of fingers of neat whisky. She decided that I was not wearing enough clothes, and Sheila was sent for one of the vicar’s sports coats.

‘He’s upstairs in his study,’ said Mrs Knight, talking of her husband with a rapt, childlike devotion, accentuating the ‘he’ in her worship. ‘He’s just polishing a sermon for tomorrow. He always likes to have them polished. He’ll join us later for his tea, if he finishes in time. I should never think of disturbing him, of course.’

We sat down by the fire and began our tea, a very good one, for Mrs Knight liked her food. She expected everyone round her to eat as heartily as she did, and scolded Sheila for not getting on with the toast and honey. I watched Sheila, as her mother jockeyed her into eating. It was strangely comfortable to see her so, by the fireside. But she was silent in her mother’s presence — as indeed it was hard not to be, since Mrs Knight talked without interruption and loud enough to fill any room. Yet Sheila’s silence meant more than that; it was not the humorous silence of a looker-on.