Charles Snow - Time of Hope

Someone was climbing up the attic stairs. There was a sharp knock, and my door was thrown open. Sheila came into the room. With one hand she shut the door behind her, but she was looking at me with a gaze expressionless and fixed. She took two steps into the room, then stopped quite still. Her face was pale, hard, without a smile. Her arms were at her sides. I had jumped up, forgetting everything but that she was here, my arms open for her; but when she stayed still, so did I, frozen.

‘I’ve come to see you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I haven’t seen you since that night. You’re thinking about that night.’ Her voice was louder than usual.

‘I’m bound to think of it.’

‘Listen to this: I did it on purpose.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘Because you made me angry.’ Her eyes were steady, hypnotic in their glitter. ‘I’ve not come to tell you that I’m sorry.’

‘You ought to be,’ I said.

‘I’m not sorry.’ Her voice had risen. ‘I’m glad I did it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said in anger.

‘I tell you, I’m glad I did it.’

We were standing a yard apart. Her arms were still at her sides, and she had not moved. She said ‘You can hit me across the face.’

I looked at her, and her eyes flickered.

‘You should,’ she said.

As I looked at her, in the bright light from the window behind my back, I saw the whites of her eyes turn bloodshot. Then tears formed, and slowly trickled down her cheeks. She did not raise a hand to touch them. As she cried, dreadfully still, the hard fierce poise of her face was dissolved away, and her beauty, and everything I recognized.

I took her by the shoulders, and led her, very gently, to sit on the bed. She came without resistance, as though she were a robot. I kissed her on the lips, told her for the first time in words that I loved her, and wiped away the tears.

‘I love you,’ I said.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you,’ cried Sheila, in a tone that tore my heart open for myself and her. She kissed me with a sudden desperate energy, with her mouth forced on to mine; her arms were convulsively tight; then she let go, pressed her face into the counterpane, and began to cry again. But this time she cried with her shoulders heaving, with relief; I sat on the bed beside her, holding her hand, waiting till she was exhausted; and in those moments I was possessed by the certainty that no love of innocence, no love in which she had been only the idol of my imagination, could reach as deep as that which I now knew.

For now I had seen something frightening, and I loved her, seeing something of what she was. I felt for her a curious detached pity in the midst of the surge of love — and I realized that it was the first ignorant forerunner of pity that I had felt for her in her mother’s drawing-room. I felt a sense of appalling danger for her, and, yes, for me: of a life so splintered and remote that I might never reach it; of cruelty and suffering that I could not soften. Yet I had never felt so transcendentally free. Holding her hand as she cried, I loved her, I believed that she in part loved me, and that we should be happy.

She raised her head, sniffed, blew her nose, and smiled. We kissed again. She said ‘Turn your head. I want to see you.’

She smiled, half-sarcastically, half-tearfully, as she inspected me. She said ‘You look rather sweet with lipstick on.’

I told her that her face, foreshortened as I saw it when I kissed her, was different from the face that others saw: its proportions quite changed, its classical lines destroyed, much more squashed, imperfect, and human.

I asked her again about Christmas Eve.

‘Why did you do it?’

She said ‘I’m hateful. I thought you were too possessive.’

‘Possessive?’ I cried.

‘You wanted me too much,’ said Sheila.

I inquired about Tom. We were sitting side by side, with arms round each other. In the same heartbeat I was jealous and reassured.

‘Do you love him?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Sheila. She exclaimed in a high voice: ‘I wish I did. He’s a good man. He’s too good for me He’s a better man than you are.’

‘He loves you,’ I said.

‘I think he wants to marry me,’ she said. ‘I can’t. I don’t love him.’ Then she said: ‘Sometimes I think I shall never love anyone.’

She pulled down my face and kissed me.

‘I don’t love you, but I trust you. Get me out of this. I trust you to get me out of this.’

I heard her say once more: ‘I don’t love you, but I trust you.’

I told her that I loved her, the words set free and pouring over: I was forced to speak, able to speak, deliriously happy to speak, as I had never yet spoken to a human being. ‘Get me out of this’ — that cry turned the key in the lock. I did not know what she meant, and yet it lured me on. I was utterly released, there was no pride, no reserve left, as there was when my mother, when Marion, invaded me with love. Seeing her at last as a person, not just an image in a dream, I threw aside my own burden of self. I told her, the words came bursting out, of every feeling that had possessed me since we first met. In this other nature, remote from anything I knew, I could abandon all, except my passion for her. In her arms, hearing that mysterious and remote cry, I lost myself.

I had thought, when Marion took me shopping in London and talked of her complexion, of how the same words spoken by Sheila would have taken their special place, would have been touched by the enchantment of strangeness: so that I should remember them, as I remembered everything about her, as though they were illuminated. For everything she did, when I was first in love, was separated from all else that I heard or saw or touched; the magic was there, and the magic laid an aura round her; she might have been a creature from another species. For me, that was the overmastering transformation of romantic love. And in part it stayed so — until in middle age, a generation after I first met her, years after she was dead, there were still moments when she possessed my mind, different from all others.

It stayed so, after that January afternoon in my attic. There were nights when we had walked hand in hand through the bitter deserted streets, and I went back alone, rehearing the words spoken half an hour before, but hearing them as though they were magic words. The slightest touch — not a kiss, but the tap of her fingers on my pocket, asking for matches to light a cigarette — I could feel as though there had never been any other hands.

Yet that January afternoon had added much. That I knew even as she stood there, her face dissolved by tears. I could no longer shape her according to my own image of desire. I was forced to try to know her now. She was no longer just my beloved, she was a separate person whose life had crashed head-on into mine. And I was forced to feel for her something quite separate from love, a strange pity, affection, compassion, inexplicable to me then as it was at the first intimation in her mother’s drawing-room.

I began to learn the depth and acuteness of her self-consciousness. She could not believe that I was not tormented likewise. She wondered at it. Whereas she — she smiled sarcastically and harshly, and said: ‘It would be hard to be more so. You can’t deny it. You can’t pretend I’m not.’

She was angry about it. She blamed her parents. Once she said, not angrily, but as a matter of fact: ‘They’ve destroyed my self-confidence for ever.’ She wanted ease at all costs, and used all her will to get it. If I could give her ease, she never thought twice about visiting me in my room. People might think she was my mistress; she knew now that I hungered for her; her parents would stop her if they could; she dismissed each of those thoughts with contempt, when the mood was on her and she felt that I alone could soothe her. Nothing else mattered, when her will was set.