Time and Time Again

by James Hilton

  (Those were the days when Kolchak marshalled cavalry against the masters of the Kremlin; those were also the days when, hardly more than a stone's throw from Charles's college, Rutherford was plotting the split of the atom. But nobody threw that stone.)

  Charles spent all his vacations (except part of one) at Beeching. The exception was a week in Normandy with Brunon during the August of 1920. They landed at Dieppe and hired an old Citroën; then they drove to Yvetot and Jumičges, loitering and painting wherever they saw what they wanted. The whole week was full of wonderful weather, warm and sunny but not cloudless, ideal for obtaining a variety of light and colour. Charles had never in his life been so happy, not only because he liked Brunon but because for the first time he was beginning to sense a relationship with paint which could be called control, though it was far from anything that could be called mastery. 'It is just possible,' said Brunon, 'that you might be fairly good some day. Probably not VERY good, but at any rate better than I am. But of course I am not really good at all. After all, I just amuse myself.'

  Charles returned to Beeching bronzed from the sun, and with a new confidence in himself that expanded far outside the realms of art into the traffic of everyday life. Havelock was quick to recognize it and asked many questions about Brunon. 'He sounds a decent sort of fellow,' he remarked. 'To admit that he's not a good painter and that he has a bad French accent--a rather surprising modesty in one who has so much influence over you.'

  'It isn't exactly an influence,' Charles said. 'We just like each other and have similar interests.'

  'And no doubt similar opinions.'

  'On some things, yes. We exchange opinions a great deal because it helps my French.'

  'Naturally.' Havelock mused a moment. 'Which reminds me. . . . Charnock will be here next week. I told him the portrait of your mother seems to be fading a little--he wants to see it and tell me what to do. Perhaps you'll be equally interested in HIS opinions.'

  'Why, of course. I'll enjoy meeting him.'

  Charnock had been one of the fashionable portraitists of an earlier day; he had painted Charles's mother soon after her marriage, and the full-length canvas hung over the hall mantelpiece at Beeching in deserved pride of place, for there was no other picture in the house of any value. It showed her standing on the terrace holding in leash the two Airedales who were ancestors of the animals they now had (there was an Airedale tradition at Beeching). Charles had often admired the portrait, not only with his eyes but with his fingers touching the brush-work. Charnock was old now, in his seventies, and nobody took much notice of what he still regularly sent to the Academy, but he was sometimes asked for his views of younger exhibitors, and these were often pungent enough to make good copy in the newspapers. His own style was somewhat after Millais and the pre-Raphaelites, paying much attention to dress. Nobody could, or would, paint a fold of velvet to look more like a fold of velvet.

  Charles had no intention whatever of showing Charnock his work, any more than an amateur pianist meeting Schnabel at dinner would ask him to sit by the piano afterwards to hear a Beethoven sonata. Besides which, Charles rarely painted at Beeching, feeling the place curiously out of bounds for doing so with any pleasure. Many of his canvases, including several he liked, were stored in his rooms at Cambridge; others were in a studio in St. John's Wood that Brunon rented during school vacations. Brunon had promised to find frames for some of the recent Normandy paintings and had kept them for this purpose. Not only therefore was Charles surprised when Charnock after dinner asked to see some of his work, but there wasn't much to show him. He went to his room, nevertheless, and found a few samples--water-colours of Cambridge scenes, a head of an old man dozing in a café at Lillebonne--sketched and then painted from part-memory; a still life improvised on a wet day in his college rooms; a landscape in oils of the fens near Waterbeach. He showed these to Charnock with embarrassment, partly because he hated to impose on a guest, but also because it was the first time his father could have seen most if not all of them.

  Charnock kept silence for a long interval when the display was over and while Charles thankfully stacked the pictures against the wall. Presently the old man cleared his throat and commented: 'Well, my boy, you certainly must have had a lot of fun.'

  'Yes,' agreed Charles. 'I wouldn't have done them if I hadn't.'

  Havelock smiled a slow smile. 'I'm afraid the great painters had more serious motives . . . wouldn't you say so, Charnock?'

  'Oh yes, but fun's all right too.' Charnock grinned. 'I never found it did any harm to a painting to enjoy painting it. . . . But I suppose what you really want me to tell you, my boy, is whether you ought to take it up for a living.'

  Charles hadn't wanted this at all; he had no intention of trying to become a professional painter, and if this were the assumption he felt himself to be falsely a suppliant for Charnock's opinion. Evidently his father had caused the misunderstanding and there was no way now of clearing it up without being rude to a man whose work Charles admired and respected. So he just smiled back and said nothing.

  'And you want me to be frank?' Charnock continued.

  'Well, yes, of course, sir.'

  Charnock nodded and shrugged. He slowly lit the cigar that Havelock offered; it was as if Havelock were gently prompting him to exploit the fullest possible drama of the occasion. Then Charnock began, puffing between the words: 'In that case, my boy, the answer is fortunately simple. You have nothing but a talent. A nice talent, and one that may continue to give yourself and others pleasure, but beyond that . . .' He shrugged again.

  Havelock turned to Charles. 'I hope it isn't a big disappointment, Charles, but I think you'll agree it's far better to have it now than nourish an impossible hope.'

  'I never had such a hope, so there isn't any disappointment,' Charles answered.

  Which was true, and yet in a way not entirely true. For there was always the hope that one admitted to be preposterous--like wondering what one would do with the money if one's sweepstake ticket won the first prize. Charles, had he ever been asked, would have told anybody (and sincerely) that he doubted if he had more than talent; but he did not enjoy being assured of it by a man whose opinion he valued but hadn't sought, and in front of his father, who (he was now convinced) had planned the whole thing as some kind of personal humiliation. Later he began to wonder if it might be simply revenge for the week he had spent away from Beeching with Brunon.

  * * * * *

  One day in the spring of 1921 Charles left Cambridge by an early train to spend the day in London. His researches into the Seljuk Turks had reached a point where Cambridge libraries had nothing more to offer, but there were several sources at the British Museum that he thought might yield something. The morning was wet and he was glad to exchange the chill of London streets for the leathery warmth of the great Reading Room under the dome. After he had searched the catalogue and filled in slips he found a desk and read the paper while he waited; there was nothing much in the news-- riots in Vienna, famine in Russia, Anglo-French squabbling about German reparations, a murder at Golders Green--just an average cross-section of daily mishap. It was really more satisfying to stare about and observe the familiar types--students planning success in examinations, as he was; droll characters probing crannies of knowledge for the strangest morsels; tired-looking gleaners who Charles imagined might be freelance journalists gathering material for the kind of article they would never sell. Once the Museum official who brought his books had leaned over to whisper: 'Know who used to sit at your desk, young man? KARL MARX. . . . And you know where Lenin first met Trotsky? . . . In the street--in the middle of the night--just round the corner from here.'

  Charles had been interested, though Marx, Lenin and Trotsky were no particular heroes of his. But he was young enough to find a thrill in feeling so close to the kind of history that seemed alive in newspapers rather than dead in books.

  The books arrived, and Charles busily made notes till one o'clock, when he stacked his m
aterial where he could return to it later and strolled along the corridor to the Museum restaurant. It looked full, so he reclaimed his hat and coat and scampered down the long Grecian flight into the open air. He was in a mood for scampering. The rain had stopped and a watery sun was pushing aside the edges of cloud and trying to dry the streets. He felt happy.

  He could have painted those clouds. He had done a good morning's work, and he would do more during the afternoon and then catch the 7.15 back to Cambridge, eating dinner on the train. That would give him plenty of time to be in college before midnight; and the next day he could sort out his notes and fit them into the thesis where they best belonged. It seemed a shadowless programme as he entered the stream of hurrying Londoners outside the Museum. There was a Lyons teashop nearby, but this too was crowded and the only vacant chair he could see was at a table already in use. It was better than waiting, though, and as he only wanted a sandwich and a cup of coffee he threaded his way across the room. Suddenly he saw that the other occupant was a girl; or rather, the girl whom he saw to be the other occupant gave him a sudden emotion. There was no special reason for it; she was not prettier than average, and in her rather shabby mackintosh and with wisps of rain-wet hair a little disarranged over her forehead she must be aware, if she were giving it a thought, of not looking her best. Clearly she was not giving it a thought. She was reading a book and seemed engrossed; when Charles sat down she did not look up, and this gave him a chance to observe her more carefully. All the time the emotion he had had on first seeing her persisted, and meanwhile something else happened that he would not have noticed except at a moment of heightened intensity--the sun broke the edge of another cloud and a single ray pierced the interior of the teashop. He saw the scene then as he would always remember it--the slopped tables and muddied floor, the clothes-rack hung with coats and dripping umbrellas, the sign pasted on a mirror that read 'Baked Beans on Toast Now Reduced to Fivepence'. He also saw that the book she was reading was a novel by Compton Mackenzie called Guy and Pauline. She was rather pale, and though her eyes were on the book he guessed they were large; the small finger that turned the pages had a dark stain on the tip. He felt like a detective when he decided that this was not merely from ink but from typewriter-ribbon ink.

  He gave his order to the waitress and continued the diagnosis till the sandwich and cup of coffee arrived. Then he ate and drank slowly, and throughout all this time she had not once looked up. The book, he thought, must be surpassingly readable. But he was glad, in a way, because it enabled him to continue his detective role. She had had a cup of tea, he noted, and a bath bun. That was not much of a midday meal for an office girl--perhaps it was all she could afford. But then he imagined the same deduction being made about himself, from similar evidence on the table; and he wished it were she who would look up and be interested enough to make the mistake. She didn't. Presently, though, she glanced at the clock on the wall behind, put a marker at the page she had reached, grabbed her bill, and hurried to the cash desk.

  Charles stayed for a few minutes, then picked up his own bill and left. 'Just like April,' said the cashier as she gave him change. He was puzzled for a moment till he saw that the sun had gone in and another shower was beginning. He had to walk through it back to the Museum.

  * * * * *

  All afternoon, and during the train journey to Cambridge, and on and off during the days of work that followed, Charles found himself thinking of the girl in the Lyons teashop. Indeed, he had never thought so persistently of any girl before. Amorous adventure had so far in his life been of a kind to make him think its pleasures exaggerated, or at least over-compensated for by regrets and confusions; and the girls he met fairly often were mostly the daughters of Beeching neighbours, horsy or hockey- playing. They thought him shy, which he was, and dull, which he was not; he had sometimes hoped that one of them might discover this. As for the Newnham and Girton girls who attended the university lectures, he hardly knew any of them except by sight, and the sight was rarely blood-tingling. Perhaps, he feared, he was impossibly hard to please, since he did not seem to care for either the bluestocking or the sportswoman type.

  One thing he did with a promptness that startled him; he bought Guy and Pauline at Heffer's and read it at a sitting. It was charmingly written, but he thought Guy was a bit of a prig, and an Oxford prig at that--which put him at odds with the entire idyll. His surviving interest, when he came to the last page, was with the girl in the teashop--why had she found the story so absorbing? Of course it was quite possible she hadn't. Maybe she merely preferred a novel--any novel--to reading a newspaper or chatting with the girls she worked with all day. And maybe she always read like that--with an air of having surrendered totally to a spell.

  The following week term ended for the Easter vacation and Charles decided to put in another hour or so at the Museum on his way home. He planned to catch an afternoon train from Paddington to Stow Magna, which was the station for Beeching; but while he was making his notes, with one eye on the clock, it occurred to him that he needn't hurry unless he wanted to, since there were later trains and it was of small consequence when he arrived. Relaxing, he then forgot the time till he began to feel hungry. Of course he had known all along he would revisit the Lyons teashop.

  He found a table near the one he had had before, but he could not see the girl anywhere, and while he watched the entrance the whole thing seemed to become both fantastic and of increasing importance. How absurd, he reflected; but WHAT was absurd? Was it not his own folly, if it mattered to him so much, in not speaking to her when he had had the chance? The thought made him decide not to repeat the absurdity if ever he were granted a second chance. An hour passed. The appetite he had felt at the Museum had deserted him; he could hardly finish his coffee and sandwich. He told himself he would leave at a quarter past two and that would be the end of it. Quarter past two came, and he still stayed. She walked in five minutes later.

  The shop was half empty by then, and of course she went to another table, but not far away. She had a book which she began to read as before. The waitress knew her and they exchanged a friendly greeting. Her smile was somehow what he had expected, except for a little gap between one upper tooth and the next one, at the left side; this was pure caprice, unimaginable beforehand in any mind's eye. When the waitress had gone he left his table and went over to hers with a deliberation he knew would be hard to explain when she looked up, as she must; and almost in panic he realized he had no explanation at all except the truth which could not be spoken. For the truth was simply that he loved her, if ever the word had, or had had, or would have, any complete meaning for him. She looked up. He blushed, pulled a chair, and said with stammering inspiration: 'I wondered if you were still reading Guy and Pauline. . . . Why, yes, so you are.'

  She stared for a few seconds, then glanced round as if to verify, without displeasure, all the vacant tables. 'Are you Ethel's friend?' she asked.

  'Ethel?'

  'Oh, then . . .' She looked apologetic, as if it were she and not he who had precipitated the encounter. 'You see, Ethel's friend lent it to her, and then she lent it to me--Ethel's MY friend--and I liked it so much she told him. He said he'd like to meet me and talk about it, so she said I was always here for lunch--well, nearly always. That's why I thought--but of course--if you're not . . .'

  He said: 'No, no. I just happened to be here the other day and noticed what you were reading. You didn't see me. I was interested because--well . . .' He struck out for a reason like a swimmer for the shore. 'Well, I'd read the book myself and was interested.'

  Her eyes widened and he had been right about them too--they were large. They were also a deep violet in colour.

  'Oh yes, it's a lovely story, isn't it? Even my dad liked it. He said it was so good about gardens.'

  Charles did not know what to say to this, but it was time to come to terms with her voice, which was not quite what he had expected. Or rather, perhaps, he had simply not used his brains abou
t what to expect--for he had already deduced her as an office girl with not too good a job. If one didn't know English, he reflected whimsically, one would have found her voice as delightful as her eyes--soft and warm and altogether pleasing; but since one did know the language, one had to admit that her voice was also rather Cockney, and Charles wished it wasn't, a few seconds before he asked himself why it mattered. For he had been brought up with that crucial consciousness of accent which is so much in the air of English public schools that a boy with the wrong kind would feel outcast till, by conscious mimicry or slow absorption, he could conform to pattern. And the pattern, of course, was the clipped unregional utterance associated by name with Oxford rather than Cambridge, an utterance based on upper-class standardizations achieved over a period long enough to acquire tradition.

  She went on, smiling now with complete friendliness: 'I've nearly finished it. Don't tell me how it ends.'

  'It's a sad ending.'

  'I don't mind sad endings if they're real. I mean, I don't like a happy ending to be dragged in.'

  'Mackenzie wouldn't do that--he's too good a writer. But I don't think Guy and Pauline is his best book. You ought to read Carnival.'

  'Carnival? I'll remember that. . . . Are YOU a writer?'

  'Oh no.' But then he recollected what he was in London for. 'Not of novels, but at present I'm working on a thesis.' It was clear she didn't know what a thesis was, and he didn't hold it against her. 'Something I have to do at Cambridge.'