Charles Snow - Time of Hope

I had heard other ‘we’s’ from her, taunting my jealousy, but not in such a tone as this. She dwelt on it with a soft and girlish pleasure. I was chained there. I fell again into silence. Then I asked peremptorily who he was.

She was eager to tell me. She spoke of him as Hugh. It was only some days later, when I decided to meet him, that I learned his surname. He was a year or two older than Sheila and me, and so was at that time about twenty-seven. He had no money, she said, though his origins were genteel. Some of his uncles were well off, and he was a clerk at a stockbroker’s, being trained to go into the firm. ‘He hates it,’ she said. ‘He’ll never be any good at it. It’s ridiculous.’ He had no direction or purpose; he did not even know whether he wanted to get married.

‘Why is he the answer?’ I could not keep the question back.

She answered: ‘It’s like finding part of myself.’

She was rapt, she wanted me to rejoice with her. ‘I must show you his photograph,’ she said. ‘I’ve hidden it when you came. Usually it stands—’ She pointed to a shelf at the head of the divan on which she slept. ‘I like to wake up and see it in the morning.’

She was more girlish, more delighted to be girlish, than a softer woman might have been. She went to a cupboard, bent over, and stayed for a second looking at the photograph before she brought it out. Each action and posture was, as I had observed the first time I visited that room, more flowing and relaxed than a year ago. When I first observed that change, I did not guess that she was in love. Her profile was hard and clear, as she bent over the photograph; her lips were parted, as though she wanted to gush without constraint. ‘It’s rather a nice face,’ she said, handing me the picture. It was a weak, and sensitive face. The eyes were large, bewildered, and idealistic. I gave it back without a word. ‘You can see’, she said, ‘that he’s not much good at looking after himself. Much less me. I know it’s asking something, but I want you to help. I’ve never listened to anyone else, but I listen to you. And so will he.’

She tried to make me promise to meet him. I was so much beside myself that I gave an answer and contradicted myself and did not know what I intended. It was so natural to look after her; to shield this vulnerable happiness, to preserve her from danger. At the same time, all my angry heartbreak was pent up. I had not uttered a cry of that destructive rage.

She was satisfied. She felt assured that I should do as she asked. ‘Now what shall I do for you?’ she cried in her rapture. ‘I know,’ she said, with a smile half-sarcastic, half-innocent as she brought out her anticlimax. ‘I shall continue your musical education.’ Since my first visit to Worcester Street, she had played records each time I went — to disguise her love. Yet it had been a pleasure to her. She knew I was unmusical, often she had complained that it was a barrier between us, and she liked to see me listening. She could not believe that the sound meant nothing. She had only to explain, and my deafness would fall away.

That afternoon, after her cry ‘What shall I do for you?’, she laid out the records of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Side by side, we sat and listened. Sheila listened, her eyes luminous, transfigured by her happiness. She listened and was in love.

The noise pounded round me. I too was in love.

The choral movement opened. As each theme came again, Sheila whispered to make me recognize it. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said, sweeping her hand down, as the first went out. ‘Dismisses it,’ she said twice more. But at the first sound of the human voice, she sat so still that she might have gone into a trance.

She was in love, and rapt. I sat beside her, possessed by my years of passion and devotion, consumed by tenderness, by desire, and by the mania of revenge, possessed by the years whose torments had retraced themselves to breaking point as she stood that night, oblivious to all but her own joy. She was carried away, into the secret contemplation of her love. I sat beside her, stricken and maddened by mine.

That night, after Sheila told me she was in love, I stayed in the street, my eyes not daring to leave her lighted window. The music had played round me; I had said goodbye; but when I came out into the cold night, I could not go home. Each past storm of jealousy or desire was calm compared to this. The evening when I slipped away from George and stood outside the vicarage, just watching without purpose — that was nothing but a youth’s lament. Now I was driven.

I could find no rest until I saw with my own eyes whether or not another man would call on her that night. No rest from the calculations of jealousy: ‘I shall want some tea,’ she had said, and that light phrase set all my mind to work, as though a great piece of clockwork had been wound up by a turn of the key. When would she make him tea? That night? Next day? No test from the torments, the insane reminders, of each moment when her body had allured me; so that standing in the street, looking at her window, I was maddened by sensual reveries.

It was late. A drizzle was falling, silver and sleety as it passed the street lamps. Time upon time I walked as far up the street as I could go, and still see the window. Through the curtains her light shone — orange among the yellow squares of other windows, the softest, the most luxurious, of all the lights in view. Twice a man came down the pavement, and as he approached her house my heart stopped. He passed by. A desolate prostitute, huddled against the raw night, accosted me. Some of the lights went out, but hers still shone.

The street was deserted, At last — in an instant when I turned my eyes away — her window had clicked into darkness. Relief poured through me, inordinate, inexpressible relief. I turned away; and I was drowsing in the taxi before I got home.

For days in Chambers I was driven, as violently as I had been that night. Writing an opinion, I could not keep my thoughts still. At a conference, I heard my leader talk, I heard the clients inquiring — between them and me were images of Sheila, images of the flesh, the images that tormented my senses and turned jealousy into a drill within the brain. And in the January nights I was driven to walk the length of Worcester Street, back and forth, hypnotized by the lighted window; it was an obsession, it was a mania, but I could not keep myself away.

One night, in the tube station at Hyde Park Corner, I imagined that I saw her in the crowd. There was a thin young man, of whom I only saw the back, and a woman beside him. She was singing to herself. Was it she? They mounted a train in the rush, I could not see, the doors slid to.

Soon afterwards — it was inside a week since she broke her news — the telephone rang at my lodgings. The landlady shouted my name, and I went downstairs. The telephone stood out in the open, on a table in the hall. I heard Sheila’s voice: ‘How are you?’

I muttered.

‘I want to know: how are you, physically?’

I had scarcely thought of my health. I had been acting as though I were tireless. I said that I was all right, and asked after her.

‘I’m very well.’ Her voice was unusually full. There was a silence, then she asked: ‘When am I going to see you?’

‘When you like.’

‘Come here tonight. You can take me out if you like.’

Once more an answer broke out.

‘Shall you be alone?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ In the telephone the word was clear; I could hear neither gloating nor compassion.

When I entered her room that evening she was dressed to dine out, in a red evening frock. Since I had begun to earn money, we had taken to an occasional treat. It was the chief difference in my way of life, for I had not changed my flat, and still lived as though in transit. She let me do it; she knew that I had my streak of childish ostentation, and that it flattered me to entertain her as the Marches might have done. For herself, she would have preferred our old places in Soho and round Charlotte Street; but, to indulge me, she would dress up and go to fashionable restaurants, as she had herself proposed that night.