Charles Snow - Time of Hope

I had not seen Sheila since I went to be examined. Now I wrote to her. I was not well, I said, and was being sent abroad for a rest. I was travelling the day after she would receive this letter. I was anxious to see her before I left.

It was my last afternoon in England, and I waited in my room. I knew her trains by heart, That afternoon I did not have long to wait. Within ten minutes of the time that she could theoretically arrive, I heard her step on the stairs.

She came and kissed me. Then she stood back and studied my face.

‘You don’t look so bad,’ she said.

‘That’s just as well,’ I said.

‘Why is it?’

I told her it was necessary to go on being hearty in Chambers. It was the kind of sarcastic joke that she usually enjoyed, but now her eyes were strained.

‘It’s not funny,’ she said harshly.

She was restless. Her movements were stiff and awkward. She sat down, pulled out a cigarette, then put it back in her case. Timidly she laid a hand on mine.

‘I’d no idea there was anything wrong,’ she said.

I looked at her.

‘It must have been going on for some time,’ she said.

‘I think it has.’

‘I’m usually fairly perceptive,’ she said in a tone aggrieved, conceited, and remorseful. ‘But I didn’t notice a thing.’

‘I expect you were busy,’ I said.

She lost her temper. ‘That’s the most unpleasant thing you’ve ever told me.’

She was white with anger, right at the flashpoint of one of her outbursts of acid rage. Then, with an effort, she calmed herself.

‘I’m sorry,’ she cried. ‘I don’t know—’

In the lull we talked for a few minutes, neutrally, of where we should dine that night.

Sheila broke away from the conversation, and asked: ‘Are you ill?’

I did not reply.

‘You must be, or you wouldn’t let them send you away. That’s true, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose it is,’ I said.

‘How badly are you ill?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know. The doctors don’t know either.’

‘It may be serious?’

‘Yes, it may be.’

She was staring full at me.

‘I don’t think you’ll die in obscurity,’ she said in a high, level voice, with a curious prophetic certainty. She went on: ‘You wouldn’t like that, would you?’

‘No,’ I said.

Somehow, in her bleak insistence, she made it easier for me. Her eyes were really like searchlights, I thought, picking out things that no one else saw, then swinging past and leaving a gulf of darkness.

She tried to talk of the future. She broke away again: ‘You’re frightened, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you’re more frightened than I should be.’ She considered. ‘Yet you can put on a show to fool your lawyer friends. There are times when you make me feel a child.’

The day went on. Once she said, without any preliminary: ‘Darling, I wish I were a different woman.’

She knew that I was begging her for comfort.

‘Why didn’t you love someone else? No decent woman could let you go like this.’

I had said not a word, I had not embraced her that day. She knew that I was begging for the only comfort strong enough to drive out fear. She knew that I craved for the solace of the flesh. She had to let me go without.

At Mentone I sat on the terrace by the sea, happy in the first few days as though I were well again, as though I were sure of Sheila. I had never been abroad before, and I was exhilarated by the sight of the warm sea, the quickening of all the senses which I felt by that shore. Some of my symptoms dropped away overnight, as I basked in the sun. The sea was so calm that it lost its colour. Instead it stretched like a mirror with a soft and luminous sheen to the edge of the horizon, where it darkened to a stratum of grey silk. It stretched like a mirror without colour, except where, in the wake of each boat that was painted on the surface, there was pencilled, heightening the calm, a dark unbroken line.

And when the Mediterranean summer broke into storms, I still had a pleasure, a reassurance of physical well-being, as I stood by the bedroom window at night and, through the rain and wind, smelt the bougainvillea and the arbutus. Turning back to see my bed in the light of the reading lamp, I was ready to forget my fears and sleep.

An old Austrian lady was living in the hotel. Because of her lungs she had spent the last ten years by the Mediterranean; she had a viperine tongue and a sweet smile, and I enjoyed listening to her talk of Viennese society in the days of the Hapsburgs. Inside a fortnight we became friends. I used to take her for gentle walks through the gardens, and I confided in her. I told her as much about my career as I had told Charles March; and I told her more of my love for Sheila and my illness than I had told anyone alive.

Slowly that respite ended. Slowly the illness returned, at first by stealth, so that I did not know whether a symptom was a physical fact or just an alarm of the nerves; one day I would be abnormally fatigued, and then, waking refreshed next morning, I could disbelieve it. Gradually but certainly, after the first mirage-like week, the weakness crept back, the giddiness, the sinking of the ground underfoot. I had provided myself with an apparatus so that I could make a rough measure of my blood count. While I felt better, I left it in my trunk. Later, as I became suspicious of my state, I tried to keep away from it. Once I had used the apparatus, quite unrealistically I began going through the process each day, as though in hope or dread I expected a miracle. It was difficult to be accurate with the little pipette, I had not done many scientific experiments, I longed to cheat in my own favour, and then overcompensated in the other direction. By the third week in August I knew that the count was lower than in July. It seemed more likely than not that it was still going down.

I used to wake hour by hour throughout the night. Down below was the sound of the sea, which in my first days had given me such content. I was damp with sweat. I thought of all I had promised to do — instead, I saw nothing but the empty dark. In my schooldays I had seen a master in the last stage of pernicious anaemia — yellow-skinned, exhausted, in despair. I had not heard of the disease then. Now I knew what his history must have been, step by step. I had read about the intermissions which now, reconstructing what I remembered, I realised must have visited him. For six months or a year he had come back to teach, and seemed recovered. If one were lucky — I thought how brilliant my luck had been, how, despite all my impatience and complaints, no one of my provenance had made a more fortunate start at the Bar — one might have such intermissions for periods of years. Lying awake to the sound of the sea, I felt surges of the fierce hope that used to possess my mother and which was as natural to me. Even if I had this disease, then still I might make time to do something.

Sometimes, in those nights, I was inexplicably calmed. I woke up incredulous that this could be my fate. The doctors were wrong. I was frightened, but still lucid, and they were confused. Apart from the misshapen cells, I had none of the true signs of the disease. There were no sores on my tongue. Each time I woke, I tested my tongue against my teeth. It became a tic, which sometimes, when I felt a pain, made me imagine the worst, which sometimes gave me the illusion of safety.

In those hot summer nights, with the sea slithering and slapping below, I thought of death. With animal fear, once or twice with detachment. I should die hard, I knew. If the time was soon to come, or whenever it came, I was not the kind to slip easily from life. Like my mother, I might manage to put a face on it, while others were watching: but in loneliness, in the extreme loneliness before death, I should, again like her, be cowardly and struggling, begging on my knees for every minute I could wrench out of the final annihilation. At twenty-five, when this blow struck me, I begged more ravenously. It would be bitterly hard to die without knowing, what I had longed for with all the intensity of which I was capable, any kind of achievement or love fulfilled. But once or twice, I thought, with a curious detachment, that I should have held on as fearfully and tenaciously if it came twenty or forty years later. When I had to face the infinite emptiness, I should never be reconciled, and should cry out in my heart ‘Why must this happen to me ?’