Charles Snow - Time of Hope

Later in my life I should not have wanted to alter any of that reflection. By twenty, in fact, I had a fair conception of most of my advantages and disadvantages, considered as a candidate in worldly affairs. I knew that I was quick-witted and adaptable — after meeting Charles March and the others, I was sure that I could hold my own intellectually. I could get on easily with a large number of human beings, and by nature I knew something of them. That seemed to me my stock-in-trade. But I left something out. Like most young men of twenty I found it impossible to credit that I had much will. George, for example, who had a will of Cromwellian strength, wrote of himself in his diary as being ‘vacillating’ and ‘weak’. Often he thought, with genuine self-condemnation, that he was the most supine of men. It was much the same with me. I should have been surprised if I had been told that I had a tough, stubborn, deep-rooted will, and that it would probably be more use to me than my other qualities all added together.

A letter came. My heart leapt as I saw the envelope on the hall table. But it was the wrong letter. Marion wrote to say that she had a half holiday on the Thursday; she wanted to buy a hat, and she needed an impartial male opinion — she could trust me to be impartial, couldn’t she? Could I spare her an hour that afternoon? And perhaps, if I were free, we might go to a play at eight. She would have to catch the last train home, so I should get her off my hands in good time.

I knew that she was fond of me, but there my imagination stopped. It was still so when I received this letter. I replied by return, saying that of course I should be glad to see her. That was true; but it was also true that I was full of chagrin at finding her letter instead of another, and that made me hasten to reply.

The other arrived, by a coincidence, on the day that Marion was due. It did not say much, it was like Sheila’s speech, shut in, capricious, gnomic. But she referred, with a curious kind of intimacy, brittle and yet trusting, to one or two of our private jokes. That was enough to irradiate the dark hall. That was enough to make me happy all day, to keep the stylised phrases running through my mind, to give me delight abounding and overflowing, so that when Marion arrived I lavished some of it on her.

She told me how well and gay I looked. I smiled and said that I was both those things. She took it as a welcome. Her eyes were bright and I suddenly thought how pretty she could be.

She gave the impression, as usual, of being sloppily dressed. Quite why I could not decide, for she was now spending much attention on her appearance. That afternoon she was wearing the Russian boots fashionable that winter, and a long blue coat. She looked fresh, but nothing could stop her looking also eager and in a hurry. No one had less trace of the remote and arctic.

Practically, competently, she had discovered some hat shops in and near the Brompton Road — they were recommended as smart, she said, and not too dear.

Along we went. Neither she nor I knew much of London, and we traipsed up and down Kensington High Street before we found the first of her addresses. There was a slight fog, enough to aureole the lights and make the streets seem cosier; the shops were decked for Christmas, and inside them one felt nothing but the presence of furs, warm air, and women’s scent. I was half irked, because I hated shopping, half glad to be among the lights and the crowds — cheerful because of the secret pleasure which she did not know, and also cheerful because of her enjoyment. I did not know it then, but I should have felt that second pleasure if I had been a more experienced man and deceiving her less innocently.

Marion tried on hat after hat, while I watched her.

‘You must say what you think,’ she said. ‘My taste is very vulgar. I’m a bit of a slut, you know.’

There was one that I liked.

‘I’m afraid it will show up my complexion,’ she said. ‘My skin isn’t too good, is it?’

She was so straightforward. If Sheila had made that remark, I was thinking, I should have seen her skin as strange , transcendentally different from all others. While Marion’s, when she drew my eyes to it, I saw just as skin, with a friendly familiar indifference, with the observant eye untouched by magic, just as I might have viewed my own.

I told her, as was true, that most women would envy her complexion. At last the hat was bought. It was expensive, and Marion grimaced. ‘Still,’ she said philosophically, ‘a good hat ought to take a girl a bit farther. A bit farther than a deep interest in the arts. I always have had a deep interest in the arts, haven’t I? and look what it’s done for me.’

Over tea she tried to find out whether I had been seeing Sheila. But she soon stopped — for she had discovered that I became claustrophobic when she showed a possessive interest in my life. I shied from her just as — I did not realize it then — I shied from the possessive invasion of my mother. That afternoon, she was satisfied that I seemed untroubled and relaxed.

She did not ask a straight question or inquire too hard. We were still natural with each other. She told me stories of an inspector’s visit to her school, and how he was terrified that she was chasing him. Marion had developed a self-depreciating mode of humour, and I found it very funny. The earnestness of manner was disappearing fast, now that she had discovered that she could amuse.

We laughed together, until it became time for me to go to my Inn. I had to score my dinner there, or otherwise I should need to stay an extra night; I left straight after and joined Marion at the theatre. She might be losing her earnestness, but she was still in the avant garde of the twenties and she had chosen to see a Pirandello. I bought the tickets. I was cross at her letting me do so; for she had a regular salary, and she knew that each shilling mattered to me. But when I saw her sitting by me, waiting for the curtain to go up, I could not grudge her the treat. She was as naïvely expectant, as blissful to be there, as a child at a pantomime. It was not that she was ungenerous with money, or unthoughtful, but that she consumedly loved being given a treat, being taken out. She was never disappointed. Every treat was always a success. She was disappointed if, immediately afterwards, one said it was a hopeless play. She did not like the gilt taken away at once, though a week later she would be as critical as any of us. That night, on our way to St Pancras by the tube, she was a little tender-minded because I made fun of Pirandello.

I desisted. I did not want to spoil her pleasure. And, on the foggy platform, I was warmed by affection for her — affection the more glowing (it did not seem shameful as I laughed at her) because of a letter in my pocket whose words I carried before my eyes. At St Pancras we coughed in the sulphurous fog.

‘Fancy having to go back tonight,’ said Marion. ‘I shall be hours late. I pity the children tomorrow. I shall smack them and shout at them.’

‘Poor dear, you’ll be tired,’ I said.

‘I shan’t get home till four,’ she said. ‘And I don’t mind a bit. And that’s as much in the way of thanks as is good for you.’

Instead of going straight from the station to Judd Street, I found a coffee stall along the Euston Road. The fog, thickening every minute, swirled in front of the lamp, and one inhaled it together with the naphtha fumes and the steam. As I drank a cup of tea, I felt the glow of affection with me still. Then I took out Sheila’s letter and read it, though I knew it by heart and word for word, in the foggy lamplight. I felt giddy with miraculous content. The name stood out in the dim light, like no other name. I felt giddy, as though the perfection of the miracle would happen now, and I should have her by my side, and we should walk together through the swirling fog.