Charles Snow: Time of Hope

It astonished me, but that night she caught almost hysterically at the idea. She searched through the newspapers, and would have liked me to telephone one agent without waiting till the morning. Midnight had gone, but she was full of plans. To buy a house — it seemed to her like a solution. She felt the pathetic hope that sets the heartbroken off to travel.

So, on the next few afternoons, I had to get away early from Chambers in order to inspect houses along the Chelsea reach. The wind was gusty, and the autumn leaves were being whirled towards the bright cloud-swept sky. I begrudged the time. Once again, it meant a brief prepared ten per cent less completely than if I were settled. Yet it was a joy, in those windy evenings, to see her safe. She had decided on Chelsea; she had decided that we must have a view of the river; and we looked at houses all along the embankment from Antrobus Street to Battersea Bridge. In a few days she discovered what she wanted, at the east end of Cheyne Walk, It was a good-looking early-Victorian house with a balcony and a strip of garden, thirty yards by ten, running down to the pavement. I had to pay for a fifteen-year lease. I borrowed the money from Mr Knight. He agreed with me that, if this house might make her tranquil, she must have it. Avaricious as he was, he would have lent more than that so as not to have her on his conscience.

As I signed the lease, I wondered where she and I would be living in fifteen years.

We moved in by the middle of November. On our first evening the fog rolled up from the river, so thick that, walking together up and down the garden, we could not make out people passing by outside. We heard voices, very clear, from a long way down the embankment. Now and then the fog was gilded as a car groped past. We were hidden together as we walked in the garden; we might have been utterly alone; and there, in the cold evening, in the dark night, I embraced her.

When we went in to dinner, we left the curtains undrawn, so that the fire shone on the writhing fog behind the panes. On the river a boat’s horn gave a long stertorous wail. We were at peace.

That visitation of happiness remained for a few days. Then all became as it had been in the flat. Once more I dreaded to go home, for fear of what awaited me. The familiar routine took charge. Once more the night was not over until I knew she was asleep. In the new house, she sat alone beside her gramophone in a high bright room.

One December evening, I was reading, trying to pluck up the fortitude to go into that room and calm her, when the telephone rang. It was to tell me that the police had begun their inquiries into George Passant’s affairs, that I was needed that night and must catch the next train.

George’s friends had sent for me because I was a lawyer. Before I had talked to him for half an hour that night, I thought it more likely than not that he would be prosecuted. I was relieved that I had something to do, that I was forced to think of professional action. It would have been harder just to listen helplessly to his distress.

He was both massive and persecuted. He was guarding his group: sometimes he showed his old unrealistic optimism, and believed that this ‘outrage’ would blow over. I could not be certain how much he was concealing from me, though he was pathetically grateful for my affection. Even in the fear of disgrace, his mind was as powerful and precise as ever. It was astonishing to listen to a man so hunted, and hear a table of events, perfectly clear and well ordered, in which he and Jack Cotery had taken part for four years past.

I did not understand it all until near the end of the trial; but from George’s account, in that first hour, I could put together most of the case that might be brought against them.

George and Jack had been engaged in two different schemes for making money; and the danger was a charge of obtaining this money by false pretences, and (for technical reasons) of conspiracy to defraud.

The schemes were dissimilar, though they had used the same financial technique. After giving up his partnership with Eden, Martineau had played with some curious irrelevant ventures before he finally made his plunge and renounced the world; one of those was a little advertising agency, which had attached to it the kind of small advertising paper common in provincial towns.

Jack Cotery had persuaded George that, if they could raise the money and buy out Martineau’s partner, the agency was a good speculation. In fact, it had turned out to be so. They had met their obligations and made a small, steady profit. It looked like a completely honest business, apart from a misleading figure in the statement on which they had raised money. No sensible prosecution, I thought both then and later, would bring a charge against them on that count — if there existed one single clinching fact over the other business.

They had gone on from their first success to a project bigger altogether; they had decided to buy the farm and some other similar places and run them as a chain of youth hostels. In George’s mind it was clear that one main purpose had been to possess the farm in private, so as to entertain the group. Jack had ranged about among their acquaintances, given all kinds of stories of attendances and profits, and on the strength of them borrowed considerable sums of money. I could imagine him doing it; I had little doubt that, whatever George knew of those stories, Jack Cotery had not kept within the limits of honesty, though he might have been clever enough to have covered his tracks. From the direction of the first inquiries, there seemed a hope that nothing explicitly damning had come to light. Looking at the two businesses together, however, I was afraid that the prosecution would have enough to go on. I went from George to Eden’s house, where I was staying the night; and there, by the fireside in the drawing-room, where I had once waited with joy for Sheila, I told Eden the story to date, and what I feared.

‘These things will happen,’ said Eden, with his usual impenetrable calm. ‘Ah well! These things will happen.’

‘What do you think?’

‘You’re right, of course, we’ve got to be prepared.’

His only sign of emotion was a slight irritability; I was surprised that he was not more upset about the credit of his firm. ‘I must say they’ve been very foolish. They’ve been foolish whatever they’ve been doing. They oughtn’t to try these things without experience. It’s the sort of foolishness that Passant would go in for. I’ve told you that before—’

‘He’s one of the biggest men I’ve met. That still holds after meeting a few more,’ I said, more harshly than I had ever spoken to Eden. For a moment, his composure was broken.

‘We won’t argue about that. It isn’t the time to argue now. I must consider what ought to be done,’ he said; his tone, instead of being half-friendly, half-paternal, as I was used to, had become the practised cordial one of his profession. He did not like his judgement questioned, especially about George. ‘I can’t instruct you myself. My firm can’t take any responsible part. But I can arrange with someone else to act for Passant. And I shall give instructions that you’re to be used from the beginning. That is, if this business develops as we all hope it won’t…’

I wanted to take the case. For, above all, I knew what to conceal.

I knew that the case might turn ugly. George was frightened of his legal danger: he was a robust man, and it was the simple danger of prison that frightened him most; but there was another of which he was both terrified and ashamed. The use of the farm; the morals and ‘free life’ of the group; they might all be dragged through the court. It would not be pretty, for the high thinking and plain living of my time had changed by now. The flirtations which had been the fashion in the idealistic days had not satisfied the group for long. Jack’s influence had step by step played on George’s passionate nature. Jack had never believed in George’s ideals for an instant; and in that relation there could only be one winner. George had his great gift for moral leadership, but he was weak, a human brother, a human hypocrite, uncertain of the intention of his own desires. With someone like Jack who had no doubt of his desires or George’s or any man’s, George was in the long run powerless. And so it happened that he, who was born to be a leader, was in peril of being exposed to ridicule and worse than ridicule as the cheapest kind of provincial Don Juan.