Charles Snow - Time of Hope

I went back to Chambers and told Getliffe the result. It happened that his half-brother, Francis, had been a contemporary and friend of Charles’ at Cambridge. Getliffe scarcely knew Charles, but he had a healthy respect for the powerful, and he assured me earnestly ‘Mark my words, Eliot, that young friend of ours will go a long way.’

‘Of course he will.’

‘Mind you,’ said Getliffe, ‘he’s got some pull. He is old Philip March’s nephew, isn’t he? It helps in our game, Eliot, one can’t pretend it doesn’t help.’

Getliffe gazed at me, man to man.

‘Don’t you wish you were in that racket, Eliot?’

I explained, clearly and with some force, how the brief had arrived at Charles. As a pupil, he had not done much work for his master, Albert Hart, who stood to Charles as Getliffe did to me; but Hart had used much contrivance to divert this brief to Charles.

‘I’ve been thinking’, said Getliffe, his mood changing like lightning, ‘that you ought to do some shooting yourself before very long. Would you like to, L S?’

‘Wouldn’t you in my place? Wouldn’t you?’

‘Well, one’s roping in quite a bit of paper nowadays. I must look through them and see if there’s one you could tackle. I should advise you not to start if you can help it with anything too ambitious. If you drop too big a brick, it means there’s one firm of solicitors who won’t leave their cards on you again.’

Then he looked at his most worried, and his voice took on a strident edge.

‘I must see if I can find you a snippet for yourself one of these days. The trouble is, one owes a duty to one’s clients. One can’t forget that, much as one would like to.’

He pointed his pipe at me.

‘You see my point, Eliot,’ he said defiantly. ‘One would like to distribute one’s briefs to one’s young friends. Why shouldn’t one? What’s the use of money if one never has time to enjoy it? I’d like to give you a share of my work tomorrow. But one can’t help feeling a responsibility to one’s clients. One can’t help one’s conscience.’

Soon after Charles’ case, the temperature stayed below freezing point for days on end. For the first time since I went to London, I stayed away from Chambers. There was nothing to force me there. During two whole days I only went out into the iron frost for my evening meal, and came back to lie, as I had done all the afternoon, on my sofa in front of the fire.

The cold was at its most intense when Sheila visited me. It was nine o’clock on a bitter February night. She came and sat on the hearth rug, close to the fire; I lay still on the sofa.

We were quiet. For a moment there was noise, as she rattled the shovel in the coal scuttle. ‘Don’t get up. I’ll do it,’ she said, and knelt, shovelling the coals. Then she stared at the fire again, the darkened fire, cherry-red between the bars, with spurts of gas from the new coal.

We were quiet in the room, and outside the street was silent in the extreme cold.

I watched. She was kneeling, sitting back on her heels, her back straight; I could see her face in profile, softer than when she met me with her full gaze. The curve of her cheek was smooth and young, and a smile pulled on the edge of her mouth.

The fire was burning through, tinting her skin. She took the poker, stoked through the bars, then left it there. She studied the cave that formed as the poker began to glow.

‘Queer,’ she said.

The cave enlarged, radiant, like a landscape on the sun.

‘Oh, handsome,’ she said.

She was sitting upright. I saw the swell of her breast, I saw only that.

I gripped her by the shoulders and kissed her on the mouth. She kissed me back. For a moment we pressed together; then, as I became more violent, she struggled and shrank away.

In the firelight she stared up at me.

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ she cried. ‘No.’

I said: ‘I want you.’

I seized her, forced her towards me, forced my lips upon her. She fought. She was strong, but I was possessed. ‘I can’t,’ she cried. I tore her dress at the neck. ‘I can’t,’ she cried, and burst into a scream of tears.

That sound reached me at last. Appalled, I let her go. She threw herself face downwards on the rug and sobbed and then became silent.

We were quiet in the room again. She sat up and looked at me. Her brow was lined. It was a long time before she spoke.

‘Am I absolutely frigid?’ she said.

I shook my head.

‘Shall I always be?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. No.’

‘I’m afraid of it. You know that.’

Then suddenly she rose to her feet.

‘Take me for a walk,’ she said. ‘It will do me good.’

I said that it was intolerably cold. I did not want to walk: I had injured my heel that morning.

‘Please take me,’ she said. And then I could not refuse.

Before we went out she asked for a safety pin to hold her dress together. She smiled, quite placidly, as she asked, and as she inspected a bruise on her arm.

‘You have strong hands,’ she said.

Outside my room the cold made us catch our breath. On the stairs, where usually there wafted rich waves of perfume from the barber’s shop, all scent seemed frozen out. In the streets the lights sparkled diamond-sharp.

We walked apart, down the back streets, along Tottenham Court Road. My heel was painful, and on that foot I only trod upon the sole. She was not looking at me, she was staring in front of her, but on the resonant pavement she heard me limping.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, and took my arm.

In snatches she began to talk. She was a little released because I had tried to ravish her, She could not talk consecutively — so much of her life was locked within her; especially she could not bring out the secret dread and daydream in which she was obsessed by physical love. Yet, after her horror by the fireside, she was impelled to speak, flash out some fragment from her past, in the trust that I would understand. How she had, more ignorant than most girls, wondered about the act of love. How she dreaded it. There was nothing startling in what she said. But, for her, it was a secret she could only let out in a flash of words, then silence, then another flash. For what to another woman would have been matter-of-fact, for her was becoming an obsession, so that often, in her solitary thoughts, she believed that she was incapable of taking a man’s love.

Trafalgar Square was almost empty to the bitter night, as she and I walked across arm in arm.

I did not know enough of the region where flesh and spirit touch. I did not know enough of the aberrations of the flesh, nor how, the more so because they are ridiculous except to the sufferer, they can corrode a life. If I had been older, I could perhaps have soothed her just a little. If I had been older and not loved her; for all my thoughts of love, all my sensual hopes and images of desire, belonged to her alone. My libido could find no other home; I had got myself seduced by a young married woman, but it had not deflected my imagination an inch from the girl walking at my side, had not diluted by a drop that total of desire, erotic and amorous, playful and passionate, which she alone invoked. Hers was the only body I wanted beside me at night. And so I was the wrong man to listen to her. If I had been twice my age, and not loved her, I could have told her of other lives like her own; I should have been both coarser and tenderer and I should have told her that, at worst, it is wonderful how people can come to terms and make friends of the flesh. But I was not yet twenty-three, I loved her to madness, I was defeated and hungry with longing.

So she walked, silent again, down Whitehall and I limped beside her. Yet it seemed that she was soothed. It was strange after that night, but she held my hand. Somehow we were together, and she did not want to part. We stood on Westminster Bridge, gazing at the black water; it was black and oily, except at the banks, where slivers of ice split and danced in the light.