Charles Snow - Time of Hope

‘Toasts,’ cried George, in furious cheerfulness, and at the end of each threw his glass into the fireplace. The barmaids clacked and threatened, but we had been customers for years, we were the youngest of their regulars, they had a soft spot for us, and finally George, with formidable logic, demonstrated to them that this was, and nothing else could possibly be, the climacteric of our society.

It went on late. At midnight there was a crowd of us shouting in the empty streets. It was the last of my student nights in the town. George and I walked between the tramlines up to the park, with an occasional lorry hooting at us as it passed. There, in the middle of the road, I expressed my eternal debt to George. ‘I take some credit,’ said George magnificently. ‘Yes, I take some credit.’

I watched him walk away between the tramlines, massive under the arc lights, setting down his feet heavily, carefully, and yet still with a precarious steadiness, whistling and swinging his stick.

All the congratulations poured in except the one I wanted. There was no letter from Sheila. Yet, though that made me sad, I knew with perfect certainty what I was going to do.

I went to London to arrange my new existence. I arranged my interview with Herbert Getliffe, whose Chambers I was entering, on Eden’s advice; I found a couple of rooms in Conway Street, near the Tottenham Court Road. The rooms were only a little less bleak than my attic, for I was still cripplingly short of money, and might be so for years.

In something of the same spirit in which I had abandoned Aunt Milly’s and spent money living on my own, I treated myself to a week in a South Kensington hotel. Then, since it was the long vacation, I should return to the attic for my last weeks in the town — and in October I was ready for another test of frugality in Conway Street. But in this visit, when I was arranging the new life, I deserted Mrs Reed’s and indulged myself in comfort — just to prove that I was not frightened, that I was not always touching wood.

It was from that hotel that I wrote to Sheila, asking her to meet me.

I wrote to Sheila. Since the examination I had known that if she did not break the silence, I should. Despite the rebellion of my pride. Despite Jack Cotery’s cautionary voice, saying: ‘Why must you fall in love with someone who can only make you miserable? She’ll do you harm. She can only do you harm.’ Despite my sense of self-preservation. Despite any part of me that was sensible and controlled. Prom within myself and without, I was told the consequences. Yet, as I took a sheet of the hotel notepaper and began to write, I felt as though I were coming home.

It was surrender to her, unconditional surrender. I had sent her away, and now I was crawling back. She would be certain in the future that I could not live without her. She would have nothing to restrain her. She would have me on her own terms. That I knew with absolute lucidity.

Was it also another surrender, a surrender within myself? I was writing that letter as a man in love. That was the imperative I should have found, however thoroughly I searched my heart. I should have declared myself ready to take the chances of unrequited love. And all that was passionately true. Yet was it a surrender within myself?

I did not hear that question. If I had heard it, writing to Sheila when I was not yet twenty-two, I should have laughed it away. I had tasted the promise of success. I was carving my destiny for myself. Compared with the ordinary run of men, I felt so free. I was ardent and sanguine and certain of happiness. It would have seemed incredible to hear that, in the deepest recess of my nature, I was my own prisoner.

I wrote the letter. I addressed it to the vicarage. There was a moment, looking down at it upon the writing table, when I revolted. I was on the point of tearing it up. Then I was swept on another surge, rushed outside the hotel, found a pillar box, heard the flop of the letter as it dropped.

I had written the first night of that week in London, asking Sheila to meet me in five days’ time at Stewart’s in Piccadilly. I was not anxious whether she would come. Of that, as though with a telepathic certainty, I had no doubt. I arrived at the café before four, and captured window seats which gave on to Piccadilly. I had scarcely looked out before I saw her striding with her poised, arrogant step, on the other side of the road. She too had time to spare; she glanced at the windows of Hatchard’s before she crossed. Waiting for her, I was alight with hope.

I was early for my first interview with Herbert Getliffe. It was raining, and so I could not spin out the minutes in the Temple gardens; I arrived at the foot of the staircase, and it was still too wet to stay there studying the names. Yet I gave them a glance.

Lord Waterfield

Mr H Getliffe

Mr W Allen

and then a column of names, meaningless to me, some faded, some with the paint shining and black. As I rushed into the shelter of the staircase, I wondered how they would find room for my name at the bottom, and whether Waterfield ever visited the Chambers, now that he had been in the cabinet for years.

The rain pelted down outside, and my feet clanged on the stone stairs. The set of Chambers was three flights up, there was no one on the staircase, the doors were shut, there was no noise except the sound of rain. On the third floor the door was open, a light shone in the little ball; even there, though, there was no one moving, I could hear no voices from the rooms around.

Then I did hear a voice, a voice outwardly deferential, firm, smooth, but neither gentle nor genteel.

‘Can I help you, sir?’

I said that I had an appointment with Getliffe.

‘I’m the clerk here. Percy Hall.’ He was looking at me with an appraising eye, but in the dim hall, preoccupied with the meeting to come, I did not notice much about him.

‘I suppose’, he said, ‘you wouldn’t happen to be the young gentleman who wants to come here as a pupil, would you?’

I said that I was.

‘I thought as much,’ said Percy. He told me that Getliffe was expecting me, but was not yet back from lunch; meanwhile I had better wait in Getliffe’s room. Percy led the way to the door at the end of the hall. As he left me, he said ‘When you’ve finished with Mr Getliffe, sir, I hope you’ll call in for a word with me.’

It sounded like an order.

I looked round the room. It was high, with panelled walls, and it had, so Percy had told me, been Waterfield’s. When Waterfield went into politics, so Percy again had told me, Getliffe had moved into the room with extreme alacrity. It smelt strongly that afternoon of a peculiar brand of tobacco. I was not specially nervous, but that smell made me more alert; this meeting mattered; I had to get on with Getliffe. I thought of the photograph that Eden had shown me, of himself and Getliffe, after a successful case. Getliffe had appeared large, impassive, and stern.

I was impatient now. It was a quarter of an hour past the time he had given me. I got up from the chair, looked at the briefs on the table and the picture over the fireplace, the books on the shelves. I stared out of the windows, high and wide and with their shutters folded back. Alert, I stared down at the gardens, empty in the dark, rainy, summer afternoon. And beyond was the river.

As I was standing by the window, there was a bustle outside the room, and Getliffe came in. My first sight of him was a surprise. In the photograph he had appeared large, impassive, and stern. In the flesh, as he came bustling in, late and flustered, he was only of middle height, and seemed scarcely that because of the way he dragged his feet. He had his underlip thrust out in an affable grin, so that there was something at the same time gay and shamefaced about his expression. He suddenly confronted me with a fixed gaze from brown opaque and lively eyes.