Charles Snow - Time of Hope

That was a risk I must take. I might contrive to save myself exhaustion. To some extent, I could pick and choose my cases; I could eliminate the police courts straight away. I should have to alter the régime of my days, and use my energies for nothing but the cardinal hours in court.

Whatever came of it, I must return.

On my last evening the sun was falling across the terrace, shining in the pools left by the day’s rain. The arbutus smelt heavily as my friend and I came to the end of our last walk. ‘We shall meet again,’ she said. ‘If not next year, then some other time.’ Neither of us believed it.

When the car drove through the gates, and I looked back at the sea, I felt the same distress that, years before, overcame me when I left the office for the last time. But on that shore I had been more unhappy than ever in my youth, and so was bound more tightly. More than ever in my youth, I did not know what awaited me at the end of my journey. So, looking back at the sea, I felt a stab of painful yearning, as though all I wanted in the world was to stay there and never be torn away.

My luck in practical affairs was remarkable. Looking back from middle-age, I saw how many chances had gone in my favour; and I felt a kind of vertigo, as though I had climbed along a cliff, and was studying the angle from a safe place. How well should I face it, if required to do the same again?

My luck held that autumn, as, dragging my limbs, I made my way each morning across the Temple gardens. Mist lay on the river, the grass sparkled with dew in the October sunshine. They were mornings that made me catch my breath in exhilaration. I was physically wretched, I was training myself to disguise my weakness, but the sun shone through the fresh mist and I caught my breath. And I got through the days, the weeks, the term, without losing too much credit. I managed to carry off what I had planned by the sea at Mentone; I took defeats, strain, anxiety, and foreboding, but, with extraordinary luck, I managed to carry off enough to save my practice.

I met some discouragement. Each time I saw him, Getliffe made a point of asking with frowning man-to-man concern about my health. ‘I’m very strong, L S,’ he told me, as though it were a consolation. ‘I’ve always been very strong.’

What was more disturbing, I had to persuade Percy that it was sensible to cut myself off from the county court work. It was not sensible, of course. My income was not large enough to bring any such step within the confines of sense. My only chance was to persuade Percy that I was arrogantly sure of success, so sure that I proposed to act as though I were already established, It was bad enough to have to convince him that I had not lost my head; it was worse, because I believed that he suspected the true reason. If so, I knew that I could expect no charity. Percy’s judgement of my future had been — I had long since guessed — professional ability above average, influence nil, health doubtful; as a general prospect, needs watching for years. He would be gratified to have predicted my bodily collapse. It was more important to be right than to be compassionate.

‘If you don’t want them, Mr Eliot,’ said Percy, ‘there are plenty who do. In my opinion, it’s a mistake. That is, if you’re going on at the Bar.’

‘In five years,’ I said, ‘you’ll be able to live on my briefs.’

‘I hope so, sir,’ said Percy.

Going away that afternoon, so tired that I took a taxi home, I knew that I had handled him badly. All through that Michaelmas Term, although briefs came to me from solicitors whose cases I had previously fought, there was not a single one which Percy had foraged for. He had written me off.

Fortunately, there were a number of solicitors who now sent work to me. I received several briefs, and there was only one case that autumn where my physical state humiliated me. That was a disgrace. My stamina failed me on the first morning, I could not concentrate, my memory let me down, I was giddy on my feet; I lost a case that any competent junior should have won. Some days afterwards, a busy-body of an acquaintance told me there was a whisper circulating that Eliot was ill and finished. In my vanity I preferred them to say that than take that performance as my usual form,

But, as I have said, by good luck I wiped out most of that disaster. The whispers became quieter. First I nursed myself through a case of Henriques’, where, though I lost again, I knew I did pretty well. Charles March said it was my best case yet, and Henriques was discreetly satisfied. And then I had two magnificent strokes of fortune. In the same week I received two cases of a similar nature; in each the arguments were intricate and needed much research, and the cases were unlikely to come to court. Nothing could have been better designed for my condition. There was every chance to cover my deficiency. In actual fact, I made some backers through one of those cases; the other was uneventful; each was settled out of court, and I earned nearly two hundred and fifty pounds for the two together. They made the autumn prosperous. They hid my illness, or at least they prevented it becoming public. I thought I had lost little ground so far. It was luck unparalleled.

In November, without giving me any warning, Sheila came to live in London. She had compelled her father, so she wrote, to guarantee her three hundred pounds a year. An aunt had just died and left her some money in trust, and so she was at last independent. She had taken a bed-sitting-room in Worcester Street, off Lupus Street, where I could visit her. It was unexpected and jagged, like so many of her actions — like our last meeting, at Victoria Station on my return from France. The train was hours late; she had sent no word; but there she was, standing patiently outside the barrier.

Fog was whirling round the street lamps on the afternoon that I first went to Worcester Street. The trees of St George’s Square loomed out of the white as the bus passed by. From the pavement, it was hard to make out the number of Sheila’s house. She was living on the first floor: there was a little cardboard slip against her bell — MISS KNIGHT — for all the world like some of my former clients, prostitutes down on their luck, whom for curiosity’s sake I had visited in those decaying streets.

Her room struck warm. It was large, with a substantial mantelpiece and obsolete bell pushers by the side. In the days of the house’s prosperity, this must have been a drawing-room. Now the gas fire burned under the mantelpiece, and, near the opposite wall, an oil stove was chugging away and throwing a lighted pattern on the ceiling.

‘How are you?’ said Sheila. ‘You’re not better yet.’

I had come straight from the courts, and I was exhausted. She put me in a chair with an awkward, comradely kindness, and then opened a cupboard to give me a drink. I had never been in a room of hers before; and I saw that the glasses in the cupboard, the crockery and bottles, were marshalled with geometrical precision, in neat lines and squares. That was true of every piece of furniture; she had only been there three days, but all was tidy, was more than tidy, was so ordered that she became worried if a lamp or book was out of its proper line.

I chaffed her: how had she stood my disarray?

‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘We’re different.’ She seemed content, secretively triumphant, to be looking after me in a room of her own. As she knelt by the glasses and poured the whisky, her movements had lost their stylised grace. She looked more fluent, comfortable, matter-of-fact, and warm. Perhaps I was seeing what I wanted to see. I was too tired to care, too happy to be sitting there, with her waiting upon me.