Charles Snow - Time of Hope

‘It’s time you got better,’ said Sheila, as I was drinking. ‘I’m waiting for you to get better.’

I took her hand. She held mine, but her eyes were clouded.

‘Never mind,’ I said.

‘I must mind,’ she said sharply.

‘I may be cheating myself,’ I said, ‘but some days I feel stronger.’

‘Tell me when you’re sure.’ There was an impatient tone in her voice, but I was soothed and heartened, and promised her, and, so as not to spoil the peace of the moment, changed the subject.

I reminded her how often she had talked of breaking away from home and ‘doing something’; the times that we had ploughed over it; how I had teased her about the sick conscience of the rich, and how bitterly she had retorted. Like her father, I wanted to keep her as a toy. My attitude to her was Islamic, I had no patience with half her life. Now here she was, broken away from home certainly, but not noticeably listening to her sick conscience. Instead, she was living like a tart in Pimlico.

Sheila grinned. It was rarely that she resented my tongue. She answered good-humouredly: ‘I wish I’d been thrown out at sixteen, though. And had to earn a living. It would have been good for me.’

I told her, as I had often done before, that the concept of life as a moral gymnasium could be overdone.

‘It would have been good for me,’ said Sheila obstinately. ‘And I should have been quite efficient. I mightn’t have had time—’ She broke off. That afternoon, as I lay tired out in my chair (too tired to think of making love — she knew that; did it set her free?), she did not mind so much being absurd, She even showed me her collection of coins. I had heard of it before, but she had shied off when I pressed her. Now she produced it, blushing but at ease. It stood under a large glass case by the window: the coins were beautifully mounted, documented, and indexed; she showed me her scales, callipers, microscope, and weights. The collection was restricted to Venetian gold and silver from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic occupation. Mr Knight, who begrudged her money for most purposes, had been incongruously generous over this one, and she had been able to buy any coin that came into the market. The collection was, she said, getting on towards complete.

When she had mentioned her coins previously, I had found it sinister — to imagine her plunged into such a refuge. But as I studied her catalogue, in the writing that I had so often searched for a word of love, and listened to her explanations, it seemed quite natural. She was so knowledgeable, competent, and curiously professional. She liked teaching me. She was becoming gayer and more intimate. If only her records had arrived, she would have begun educating me in music, as she had long wanted to do. She insisted that she must do it soon. As it was, she said she had better instruct me in the science of numismatics. She drew the curtains and shut out the foggy afternoon. She stood above me, looking into my eyes with a steady gaze, affectionate and troubled; then she said: ‘Now I’ll show you how to measure a coin.’

After that afternoon, I imagined the time when I could tell her that I was well. Would it come? As soon as I came back to London, my doctors had examined me again. They had shaken their heads, The blood count was perceptibly worse than when I went to France. The treatment had not worked, and, apart from advising me to rest, they were at a loss. In the weeks that followed I lost all sense of judgement about my physical state. Sometimes I thought the disease was gaining. There were mornings, as I told Sheila, when I woke and stretched myself and dared to hope. I had given up taking any blood counts on my own. It was best to train myself to wait. With Sheila, with my career, I thought, I had had some practice in waiting. In time I was bound to know whether I should recover. It would take time to see the answer, yes or no.

But others were not so willing to watch me being stoical. I had let the truth slip out, bit by bit, to Charles March as well as to Sheila. Charles was a man whose response to misery or danger or anxiety was very active. He could not tolerate my settling down to endure — before he had dragged me in front of any doctor in London who might be useful. I told him it would waste time and money. Either this was a psychosomatic condition, I said, which no doctor could reach and where my insight was probably better than theirs. If that was the explanation, I should recover. If not, and it was some rare form of pernicious anaemia untouched by the ordinary treatments, I should in due course die. Either way, we should know soon enough. It would only be an irritation and distress to have more doctors handling me and trying to make up their minds.

Charles would not agree. His will was strong, and mine was weakened, after that November afternoon, by Sheila’s words. And also there were times just then when I wanted someone to lean on. So I gave way. Until the end of term I should keep up my bluff; but I was ready to be examined by any of his doctors during the Christmas vacation.

Charles organized it thoroughly. At the time, December 1930, he was, by a slight irony, a very junior medical student, for he had recently renounced the Bar and started what was to be his real career. He had not yet taken his first MB — but his father and uncle were governors of hospitals. It did not take long to present me to a chief physician. I was installed in a ward before Christmas. The hospital had orders to make a job of it: I became acquainted with a whole battery of clinical tests, not only those, such as barium meals, which might be relevant to my disease.

I loathed it all. It was hard to take one’s fate, with someone forcing a test-meal plunger down one’s throat. I could not sleep with others round me. I had lost my resignation. I spent the nights dreading the result.

On the first day of the new year, the chief physician talked to me.

‘You ought to be all right,’ he said. ‘It’s much more likely than not.’

He dropped his eyelids.

‘You’d better try to forget the last few months. Forget about this disease. I’m confident you’ve not got it. Forget what you were told,’ he said. ‘It must have been a shock. It wasn’t a good experience for you.’

‘I shall get over it,’ I said, in tumultuous relief.

‘I’ve known these things leave their mark.’

Having set me at rest, he went over the evidence. Whatever the past, there were now no signs of pernicious anaemia; no achlorhydria; nothing to support the diagnosis. I had had a moderately severe secondary anaemia, which should improve. That was the optimistic view. No one could be certain, but he would lay money on it. He talked to me much as Tom Devitt had once done — with more knowledge and authority but less percipience. Much of the history of my disease was mysterious, he said. I had to learn to look after myself. Eat more. Keep off spirits. Find yourself a good wife.

After I had thanked him, I said: ‘Can I get up and go?’

‘You’ll be weak.’

‘Not too weak to get out,’ I said; and, in fact, so strong was the suggestion of health, that as I walked out of the hospital, the pavement was firm beneath my feet, for the first time in six months.

The morning air was raw. In the city, people passed anonymously in the mist. I watched a bank messenger cross the road in his top hat and carrying a ledger. I was so light-hearted that I wanted to stop a stranger and tell him my escape. I was light-hearted, not only with relief but with a surge of recklessness. Miseries had passed; so would those to come. Somehow I survived. Sheila, my practice, the next years, danced through my thoughts. It was a time to act. She was at home for Christmas — but there was another thing to do. In that mood, reckless, calculating, and confident, I went to find Percy in order to have it out.