Charles Snow - Time of Hope

The summer began, and quite irrelevantly, I had another stroke of practical luck. Getliffe at last took silk. Inevitably, much of his practice must come to me.

For years he had bombarded us with the arguments for and against. He had threatened us with his own uncertainties; he had taken advice from his most junior pupil as well as his eminent friends at the Bar. He had delayed, raised false hopes, changed his mind, retracted. I had come to think that he would never do it — certainly not that summer, 1931, with a financial crisis upon us and the wise men prophesying that legal work would shrink by half.

He told me on an evening in June. I was alone in Chambers, working late; he had spent all the day since lunchtime going from one acquaintance to another. He called me into his room.

It was a thundery overcast evening, the sky black beyond the river, with one long swathe of orange where the clouds had parted. Getliffe sat magisterially at his desk. In the dark room his papers shone white under the lamp. He was wearing a raincoat, the collar half-turned up. His face was serious and also a little rebellious.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve torn it now. I’m taking the plunge. If — is going to be one of His Majesty’s counsel, I might as well follow suit. One has to think of one’s duty.’

‘Is it definite?’ I said.

‘I never bore my friends with my intentions’, Getliffe reproved me, ‘until they’re cut and dried.’

Getliffe gave me his fixed man-to-man stare.

‘Well, there’s the end of a promising junior,’ he said. ‘Now I start again. It will ruin me, of course. I hope you’ll remember that I expect to be ruined.’

‘In three years’, I said, ‘you’ll be making twice what you do now.’

He smiled.

‘You know, L S, you’re rather a good sort.’ Then his tone grew threatening again. ‘It’s a big risk I’m taking. It’s the biggest risk I’ve ever had to take.’

He enjoyed his ominous air; he indulged himself in his pictures of sacrifice and his probable disaster. Yet he was not much exaggerating the risk. At that moment, it was a brave step. I was astonished that he should do it. I admired him, half-annoyed with myself for feeling so. In that last year as a junior his income was not less than five thousand pounds. Even if the times were prosperous, his first years as a silk were bound to mean a drop. In 1931, with the depression spreading, he would be fortunate if he made two thousand pounds: he might not climb to his old level for years, perhaps not ever.

It could have deterred many men not overfond of money. Whereas Getliffe was so mean that, having screwed himself to the point of taking one to lunch, he would arrive late so that he need not buy a drink beforehand. It must have been an agony for him to face the loss. He can only have endured it because of a force that I was loath to give him credit for — his delight in his profession, his love of the legal honours not only for their cash value but for themselves. If ever the chance came, I ought to have realized, he would renounce the most lucrative of practices in order to become Getliffe J, to revel in the glory of being a judge.

Whatever the results for Getliffe, his move was certain to do me good, now and henceforward. His work still flowed into our Chambers: much of it, as a silk, he could not touch. His habits were too strong to break; he was no more reconciled to youth knocking at the door, and he did his best, in his furtive ingenious fashion, to direct the briefs to those too dim to be rivals. But he could not do much obstruction, and Percy took care of me. In the year 1930–1, despite my illness, I had earned seven hundred and fifty pounds. The moment Getliffe took silk I could reckon on at least a thousand pounds for each year thereafter. It was a comfort, for these last months I had half felt some results of illness and my private grief. I had not thrown myself into my cases with the old absorption. I did not see it clearly then, but I was not improving on my splendid start. I should still have backed my chances for great success, but a shrewd observer would have doubted them. Still, I had gone some distance. I was now certain of a decent income. For the first time since I was a child, I was sure of my livelihood.

Once I imagined that I should be overjoyed, when that rasp of worry was conquered. I had looked forward to the day, ever since I began to struggle. It should have marked an epoch. Now it had come, and it was empty. She was not there. All that I had of her came in the thoughts of sleepless nights. On the white midsummer nights, those thoughts gave me no rest. The days were empty. My bit of success was the emptiest of all. Right to the last I had hoped that when it came she would be with me. This would have been the time for marriage. In fact, I had not the slightest word from her. I tried to accept that I might never see her again.

I went out, on the excuse of any invitation. Through the Marches and acquaintances at the Bar, my name was just finding a place on some hostesses’ lists. I was a young man from nowhere, but I was presumably unattached and well thought of at my job. I went to dances and parties, and sometimes a girl there seemed real and my love a nightmare from which I had woken. I liked being liked; I lapped up women’s flattery; often I half-resolved to find myself a wife. But I was not a man who could marry without the magic being there. Leaving someone who should have contented me, I was leaden with the memory of magic. With Sheila, I should have remembered each word and touch, whereas this — this was already gone.

One morning in September, soon after I had returned from a holiday, a letter stared from my breakfast tray. My heart pounded as I saw the postmark of her village; but the letter had been redirected from my Inn, and the handwriting was a man’s. It came from Mr Knight, and read:

My dear Eliot, Even one who hides himself in the seclusion of a remote life and simple duties cannot always avoid certain financial consultations. Much as I dislike coming to London I shall therefore be obliged to stay at the club for the nights of Monday and Tuesday next week. Owing to increasing age and disinclination, I know few people outside my immediate circle, and shall be free from all engagements during this enforced visit. It is, of course, too much to hope that you can disentangle yourself from your professional connexions, but if you should remember me and be available, I should be glad to give you the poor hospitality the club can offer at luncheon on either of those days.

The letter was signed with a flamboyant ‘Lawrence Knight’.

The ‘club’ was the Athenaeum. I knew that from private jokes with Sheila. He had devoted intense pertinacity to get himself elected, and then never visited it. It was like him to pick up the jargon, particularly the arrogant private-world jargon, of any institution, and become a trifle too slick with it.

He must want to talk of Sheila. He must be deeply troubled to get in touch with me — and he had done it without her knowledge, for she would have told him my address. Reading his elaborate approach again, I guessed that he was making a special journey. He was so proud and vain that only a desperate trouble would make him humble himself so. Was she ill? But if so, surely even he, for all his camouflage, would have told me.

In some ways I was as secretive as Mr Knight, but my instinct in the face of danger was not to lose a second in knowing the worst. When I entered the Athenaeum, I was on tenterhooks to have all my anxieties settled. How was she? What was the matter? Had she spoken of me? But Mr Knight was too adroit for me. I was shown into the smoking-room and he began at once ‘My dear fellow, before we do anything else, I insist on your drinking a glass of this very indifferent sherry. I cannot recommend it. I cannot recommend it. I expect you to resolve my ignorance upon the position of our poor old pound—’