Charles Snow - Time of Hope

There was another care which had become darker since the summer. Hints kept reaching me of a scandal breaking round George Passant and the group. I had made inquiries, and they did not reassure me. George would not confide, but I felt there was danger creeping up. Oblivious and obstinate, George shut me out. I was terrified of what might happen to him.

With those cares upon me, I would leave Chambers at last, and set out home. I wanted someone to talk to, with the comfort of letting the despondency overflow. ‘My girl,’ I wanted to say, ‘things are going badly. My bit of success may have been a flash in the pan. And there’s worse news still.’ I wanted someone to talk to, and, in fact, when I got home, I might find a stranger. A stranger to whom I was bound, and with whom I could not rest until I had coaxed her to find a little peace. She might, at the worst, be absolutely still, neither reading nor smoking, just gazing into the room. She might have gone out to one of her down-at-heel friends. I could never sleep until she returned, although she tiptoed into the spare room, there to spend the night on the divan. Once or twice I had found her there in the middle of the night, smoking a chain of cigarettes, playing her records still fully dressed.

There was not one night that autumn of 1932, when I could reckon on going back to content.

My unperceptive friends saw me married to a beautiful and accomplished woman, and envied me. My wiser friends were full of resentment. One or two, guessing rightly that I was less a prisoner than before my marriage, dangled other women in front of me. They thought that I was being damaged beyond repair. Not even Charles March, whose temperament was closest to my own, had much good to say of her. No one was wise enough to realize that there was one sure way to please me and to win my unbreakable gratitude: that was to say not that they loved her — she received enough of that — but simply that they liked her. I wanted to hear someone say that she was sweet, and tried to be kind, and that she was harming only herself. I wanted them to be sorry for her, not for me.

Yet, lying beside her, I did not know how long I could stand it.

I was facing the corrosion of my future.

What idea had she of my other life? It seemed to her empty, and my craving for success vulgar. She did not invade me, she did not possess me, she did not wish to push me on. She knew me as a beseeching lover: she turned to me because I knew her and was not put off. For the rest, she left me inviolate and with my secrets. There was none of the give and take of equal hearts.

Lying beside her in the silver light of the October dawn, I did not know how long I could stand it.

She bore the same sense of formal duty to me as to her parents. Just as she visited them for Christmas, so she offered, once or twice, to entertain some legal acquaintances. ‘You want me to. I shall do it,’ she said. I did want it, but I knew before her first dinner party that nothing would be more of an ordeal. It was only recently that I had let her try again: and the result had been our dinner of the previous night.

I had mentioned that it was months since Henriques sent me a brief. She made some indifferent response; and then, some days later, she asked if she should invite the Henriques to the flat. I was so touched by the sign of consideration that I said yes with gusto, and told her (for the sake of some minor plan) to ask the Getliffes as well. For forty-eight hours before the dinner, she was wretched with apprehension. It tore open her diffidence, it exposed her as crippled and inept.

Before they arrived, Sheila stood by the mantelpiece; I put an arm round her, tried to tease her into resting, but she was rigid. She drank four or five glasses of sherry standing there. It was rare for her to drink at all. But for a time the party went well. Mrs Getliffe greeted us with long, enthusiastic stares from her doglike brown eyes, and cooed about the beauties and wonders of the flat. Her husband was the most valuable of guests; he was always ready to please, and he conceived it his job to make the party go. Incidentally, he provided me with a certain amusement, for I had often heard him profess a cheerful anti-Semitism. In the presence of one of the most influential of Jewish solicitors, I was happy to see that his anti-Semitism was substantially modified.

We gave them a good meal. With her usual technical competence, Sheila was a capable cook, and though I knew little of wine I had learned where to take advice. At any party, Getliffe became half-drunk with his first glass, and stayed in that expansive state however much he drank. He sat by Sheila’s side; he had a furtive eye for an attractive woman, and a kindly one for a self-conscious hostess who needed a bit of help. He chatted to her, he drew the table into their talk. He was not the kind of man she liked, but he set her laughing. I had never felt so warm to him.

Henriques was his subdued, courteous, and observant self. I hoped that he was approving. With his wife, I exchanged gossip about the March family. I smiled down the table at Sheila, to signal that she was doing admirably, and she returned the smile.

It was Getliffe, in the excess of his bonhomie, who brought about the change. We had just finished the sweet, and he looked round the table with his eyes shining and his face open.

‘My friends,’ he said, ‘I’m going to call you my friends at this time of night’ — he gazed at Henriques with his frank man-to-man regard. ‘I’ve just had a thought. When I wake up in the night, I sometimes wonder what I should do if I could have my time over again. I expect we all do, don’t we?’

Someone said yes, of course we did.

‘Well then,’ said Getliffe triumphantly, ‘I’m going to ask you all what you’d really choose — if God gave you the chance on a plate. If He came to you in the middle of the night and said “Look here, Herbert Getliffe, you’ve seen round some of this business of life by now. You’ve done a lot of silly little things. Now you can have your time over again. It’s up to you. You choose.”’

Getliffe gave a laugh, fresh, happy, and innocent.

‘I’ll set the ball rolling,’ he said. ‘I should make a clean sweep. I shouldn’t want to struggle for the prizes another time. Believe me, I should just want to do a bit of good. I should like to be a country parson — like your father’ — he beamed at Sheila: she was still — ‘ready to stay there all my life and giving a spot of comfort to a few hundred souls. That’s what I should choose. And I bet I should be a happier man.’

He turned to Mrs Henriques, who said firmly that she would devote herself to her co-religionists, instead of trying to forget that she was born a Jewess. I came next, and said that I would chance my luck as a creative writer, in the hope of leaving some sort of memorial behind me.

On my left, Mrs Getliffe gazed adoringly at her husband. ‘No, I shouldn’t change at all. I should ask for the same again, please. I couldn’t ask anything better than to be Herbert’s wife.’

Surprisingly, Henriques said that he would elect to stay at Oxford as a don.

We were all easy and practised talkers, and the replies had gone clockwise round at a great pace. Now it was Sheila’s turn. There was a pause. Her head was sunk on to her chest. She had a wineglass between her fingers; she was not spinning it, but tipping it to and fro. As she did so, drops of wine fell on the table. She did not notice. She went on tipping her glass, and the wine fell.

The pause lasted. The strain was so acute that they turned their eyes from her.

At last: ‘I pass.’ The words were barely distinguishable, in that strangulated tone.

Quick to cover it up, Getliffe said: ‘I expect you’re so busy taking care of old L S — you can’t imagine anything else, either better or worse, can you! For better, for worse,’ he said, cheerfully allusive. ‘Why, I remember when L S first pottered into my Chambers—’