Charles Snow - Time of Hope

The sitting-room struck cold each night when I returned. I could not afford to have a fire all day, and my landlady, amiable but scatter-brained, could never remember which nights I was coming home. Most evenings the table was empty, there was no letter, my hopes dropped, and the room turned darker. I knelt on the hearth and lit a firelighter, before going out to make my supper off a sandwich at the nearest bar. Even when the fire had caught, it was a desolate room. There were two high-backed armchairs, covered with satin which was wearing through; an old hard sofa which stood just off the hearthrug and on which I kept papers and books; the table, with two chairs beside it; and an empty sideboard. My bedroom attained the same standard of discomfort, and to reach it I had to walk across the landing. The tenants of the fourth floor also walked across the same landing on their way upstairs.

I need not have lived so harshly. For an extra twenty pounds a year, I could have softened things for myself; and, by the scale of my debts, another twenty pounds paid out meant nothing at all, as I well knew. But, as though compelled by a profound instinct, I paid no attention to the voice of sense. Somehow I must live so as constantly to remind myself that I had nowhere near arrived. The more uncomfortable I was, the more will I could bend to my career. This was no resting place. When I had satisfied myself, it would be time to indulge.

I sat by the fire on winter nights, working on one of Getliffe’s ‘points’, forcing back the daydreams, forcing back the anxious hope that tomorrow there would be a letter from Sheila. For I was waiting for letters more abjectly than for briefs. When I asked her to come back, I had surrendered. I had asked for her on her own terms, which were no terms at all. I had no power over her. I could only wait for what she did and gave.

It suited her. She came to see me quite often, at least once a month. With her nostalgia for the dingy, she used to take a room at a shabby Greek hotel a couple of streets away. And she came, out of her own caprices and because of her own needs. Her caprices had her usual acid tone, which I could not help but like. A telegram arrived: CANNOT BEAR MY FATHER’S VOICE PREFER YOURS FOR TWO DAYS SHALL APPEAR THIS EVENING. Once, without any warning, I found her sitting in my room when I got back late at night.

Occasionally we were happy, as though she were on the edge of falling in love with me. But she was flirting with man after man, lit up each time with the familiar hope that here at last was someone who could hypnotize her into complete love. I had to listen to that string of adventures, for she used her power over me to compel me into the role of confidant. She trusted me, she thought I understood her better than the others, she found me soothing. Sometimes I could smooth her forehead and lift the dread away. In part she relished playing on my jealousy, hearing me in torment as I questioned her, seeing me driven to another masochistic search.

One morning in February there was a postcard on my breakfast tray. At the sight of the handwriting my heart leaped. Then I read: ‘I want you to dine with me at the Mars tomorrow (Tuesday). I may have a man with me I should like you to meet.’

I went as though I had no will.

The glass of the restaurant door was steamed over in the cold. Inside, I stared frenziedly round. She was sitting alone, her face pallid and scornful.

Still in my hat and coat, I went to her.

‘Where is this man?’ I said.

She said: ‘He was useless.’

We talked little over the meal. But I could not rest without asking some questions. He was another of her lame dogs: she thought he was deep and mysterious, and then that he was empty. She was dejected. I tried to console her. I was stifling the rest, and fell silent.

Afterwards we walked into Soho Square, on the way home. Abruptly she said: ‘Why don’t you get rid of me?’

‘It’s too late.’

‘You’d like to, wouldn’t you?’

‘Don’t you think I should?’ I said flatly, in utter tiredness. She pressed my fingers, and there was no more to say.

All through those months when I was struggling to get started, I could not talk to her about my worries. It was to Charles March that I had to trace and retrace the problems, boring to anyone else, acutely real to me. Was Percy giving me my share of the guinea and two-guinea briefs? Would Getliffe let me off the last instalments of my pupil’s fees? Had I won any kind of backing yet? Would Getliffe give me a hand, if it cost him nothing, or would he stand in my way?

Sheila could not imagine that daily life of trivial manoeuvre, contrivance, petty gains and setbacks. She concerned herself about my need for money, and she bought presents which saved me dipping into my scholarship. In that way she was generous, for, since Mr Knight parted with money only a little more easily than Getliffe, she had to go without dresses, which she did not mind, and beg her father for an extra allowance, which she minded painfully. But the frets and intrigues — those she could not enter. Since we first met, she had taken it for granted that I should prevail. As for my struggles with Getliffe, they did not matter. She could not believe that I cared so much.

Percy did me no favours in my first year. But he did me no disfavours either. He was neutral, as though I were still under supervision, might be worth backing or might have to be written off. I received my share of the ‘running down’ cases, the insignificant defences of motoring prosecutions, that came Percy’s way. Percy also advised me how to pick up more at the police courts. I used to attend several, on the off chance of a guinea. Those courts were only a few miles apart, but in society the distance was vast — from the smart businessmen showing off their cars on the way home from the tennis court, to the baffled, stupid, foreign prostitutes, the ponces and bullies, the street bookmakers, the blowsy landladies of the Pimlico backstreets.

From that police-court work, in the year from October 1927 to July 1928, I earned just under twenty-five pounds. And that was my total professional income for the year. I mentioned the fact to Percy.

‘Yes, sir,’ he said impassively. ‘It’s just about what I should have expected.’

He took pleasure in being discreet. But he relented to the extent of telling me that many men, perhaps the majority of men, did worse. And he said, by way of aside, that I ought not to start lecturing or marking papers; I had plenty of energy, but I might need it all; this was a long-distance race, not a sprint, said Percy. It was then I realized that Percy was judiciously, cold-bloodedly, watching my health.

I intended to press Getliffe about my last instalment of fees. He had promised to remit it if I had earned my keep; I had done more than that, I had saved him weeks of work, and he must not be allowed to think that I was easy prey. I knew more of him now. The only way to make him honour a bargain, I thought, was to play on his general impulse and at the same moment to threaten: to meet expansiveness with expansiveness, to say that he was a fine fellow who could never break his word — but that he would be a low confidence trickster if he did.

The trouble was, as the time came near I found it impossible to get an undisturbed half an hour with him. He could smell danger from afar, or see it in one’s walk. Somehow he became busier than ever. When, for want of any other opportunity, I caught him on the stairs, he said reprovingly and matily: ‘Don’t let’s talk shop out of hours, Ellis. It can wait. Tomorrow is also a day.’

At the beginning of the long vacation he went abroad for a holiday; the first I knew of it was a genial wave from the door of our room and a breathless, strident shout: ‘Taxi’s waiting! Taxi’s waiting!’ He left with nothing settled, I still had not edged in a word. He also left me with a piece of work, arduous and complex, on a case down for October.