Time and Time Again

by James Hilton

  During this period the façade grew over the structure of his life in a thin crust of mannerism. He was aware of it, ruefully but with resignation, while memory reminded him of the danger. That memory was of the elderly professor who had taken him out for a breath of fresh air when he had collapsed over the desk on that hot day of his Cambridge Tripos examinations. Why, he had speculated then, did university dons grow up like that--finicky, desiccated, tee-heeish? Now he knew, or could guess; and the understanding was a warning. He found a corrective in thinking (as he could now without too much distress) of Jane, imagining her comments on this and that, hearing her voice exclaim, if he went too far in the dangerous direction: 'Oh, now, Andy, come off it!' Or she had said, as they went to a dinner party: 'If the Langlons are there, don't tell that story about the Dragoman and the Archbishop--you told it at the Nungessers' last year and the Langlons were there then.' (And it was a very amusing but long story which he told very well indeed.) Such things, among so many others, had made her a treasure; and he felt this absence every time he put on or took off his dress shirt. For those had been the moments, not the most important or profound in their lives, but the ones at which Jane had been most of all Jane--before or after a party.

  He did not get transferred to a more important post, and this made the prospect of an eventual Legation so dim that he quenched his hopes about it. It was not so much that he was past the age, meaning his own age, as that the age, meaning the post-war age, had in some sense passed him. It was hard but interesting to reckon why this was so, and he had a number of theories. Perhaps it was because in some frozen corner of the hierarchic mind there still lingered a breath of prejudice against him on account of that old misbehaviour of Havelock's. Perhaps it was because he did not know the correct people who were new, or the new people who were correct. Perhaps it was because at some dinner party there had been no Jane to stop him from being just too amusing about something or somebody. Perhaps it was because he dined out too often and knew too many people altogether. Perhaps it was because of the nickname, or the handwriting--which for some reason had tended to become even smaller with the years. Perhaps it was because he had been to Brookfield instead of Eton, or (in this new era of topsyturviness) because he had been to Brookfield at all instead of starting out with proletarian virtue from a state elementary school. Or perhaps it was simply because the world was changing. He had begun his career in an age when it was still an asset to a diplomat to be suave and witty and impeccably dressed; and he had lived into an age when the striped trousers and morning coat had become a symbol to many of all that was blameworthy for human ills, and when, perhaps because of this, generals and politicians and journalists were apt to take over from professional diplomats at every crisis. But the IGNORANCE of some of the

  supplanters--politicians especially! How often Charles had had to explain to elected representatives in the privacy of the Foreign Office facts of history and geography that were more appropriate to the lower fourth! And he had once had contact with an M.P. of much volubility on foreign affairs who mixed up Colombia with the District of Columbia and British Columbia; and of this man, when he became also a director of a large industrial combine, a lady admirer exclaimed: 'Don't you think, Mr. Anderson, he's a splendid example of how far a man can get nowadays without any of the advantages of upbringing or education?' To which Charles was unable to resist the reply: 'Yes, indeed--except that you should perhaps have said "DISadvantages".' It was possibly incidents like this that did not help Charles to become an Ambassador.

  He sometimes recalled what his old friend Weigall had said at Cambridge: 'You and I, Andy, are stuck in between--we weren't born at Chatsworth or Blenheim, nor did we starve in tenements or pick crusts out of gutters--we just come from country homes with bits of land and families that go back a couple of centuries or so. . . .' But when he reached as far as that in diagnosing his own case, a sense of proportion as well as of humour came to the rescue. For what if he had found, at the time when the matter cropped up, that Havelock had NOT been his father? Would he have cared much? He knew he wouldn't. Then where was his pride of ancestry, apart from his pride in what he could claim as ancestry? As for the bit of land, it was now a disused airfield, and as for the country home, it had been bombed and burned, and a score of young Englishmen (so he had been told) had met death in those old rooms with cards and glasses and billiard cues in their hands. To believe that blood mattered, in any sense that did not include theirs, was surely to be bloodguilty.

  During one of his leaves in London his boss at the Foreign Office invited him to a small bachelor dinner at which the other guests were a Minister of the Crown, a famous historian, a millionaire motor manufacturer, and a soldier who had held a position in the Middle East that enabled him to refer to Pontius Pilate as 'one of my predecessors'. Conversation was at times brilliantine if not brilliant; it was also more pessimistic about the future than Charles found pleasant to hear--his own favourite pessimisms being of a much gayer kind. The Minister of the Crown complained of a lack of potential leaders among the younger men in government, the motor manufacturer said Coventry could not seriously compete in world markets with Detroit, the soldier said the Russians would reach the Atlantic in three weeks if they set their army moving, and the historian offered comfort in the reminder that both Greece and Rome were much more powerful in the inheritance they left to succeeding ages than ever in their own actual heyday. Charles said next to nothing. Over the port the Minister further remarked that one of the most popular of all errors was to confuse prophecy with advocacy, so that a wise man often refrained from saying publicly what he thought would happen lest he be widely supposed to wish it to happen. The historian agreed and said it would be interesting to collect a few prophecies from persons who could feel, as they made them, completely unhampered by such a consideration--if, for instance, a man could set down honestly on a single sheet of paper what he forecast for the next century, the paper to be signed, put away, and guaranteed hidden till the year 2050. The Minister replied that by a curious coincidence he would be laying the foundation stone of an atomic research plant the following week, and it had already been arranged to seal under the stone such miscellaneous articles as current copies of The Times, ration books, coins, theatre programmes, and bus tickets. If those present that evening cared to write a few lines as the historian had suggested (devoting not more than, say, ten minutes to the task), he personally would undertake to place them along with the other items. . . . The idea was taken up with an alacrity that soon became an absorption; rarely could an after-dinner argument have been so effectively launched and stifled. The butler brought paper, pens, and ink, the time was noted, and the six men began to write. As the least distinguished of the group, Charles knew his inclusion was only by courtesy, but this seemed to free him for a special kind of inspiration. He began as follows:

  My name is Charles Anderson. I belong to a somewhat out-of-date profession called diplomacy. This is a relic of the days when even wars were polite, so I'm naturally polite myself and also a bit of a relic. I'm supposed to have certain 'immunities' under international law, which means that in a foreign country I can drive a car to the common danger without being prosecuted. If, however, that country gets into a war, then I must share the common danger, since a neutral flag painted on a roof can't be seen at night from four miles high. And if my own country gets into a war and loses, I might be hanged as a criminal if I were important enough--so thank goodness I'm not. The whole thing would have been so unforeseeable a century ago that I doubt whether my own guesses about the coming century can be much better. Anyhow, one of them (fathered by the wish, of course) is that England will survive--and not only as an inheritance like Greece and Rome. We're such a damned peculiar people, such a mixed bag of stout fellahs and decent idiots, with a smattering of high-minded hypocrites and brainy saints. We don't quite fit the theories--Spengler's or Toynbee's or Marx's or anybody's. So we can't be counted on by the theorists--or counted out eith
er. Perhaps God isn't bored with us yet (Victor Hugo's phrase, not mine). Perhaps we shall solve the trick of all tricks for this millennium--how to step down without falling over backwards, and then how to build the new must-be on the foundations of the old has-been. I won't see it happen, but my son may.

  Another guess is that what I'm writing now won't stay under a stone till 2050. (Funny how the other fellows here seem to be taking that for granted.) But there's another kind of stone my father once came across in the churchyard at Pumphrey Basset--an ancient gravestone of a female dwarf with the inscription on it--'Parva sed apta Domino'. Somehow I wouldn't mind betting that will outlast an atomic research plant, and perhaps in the long run mean more. . . .

  * * * * *

  In his minute script, and writing fast because he did not take the occasion too seriously, Charles was having an easier time (he surmised) than the other five, on whom posterity and the ticking clock seemed to impose a gruelling test. When the ten minutes were up and he had almost filled both sides of the paper, he passed it over without rereading and reached for the port while the others were begging an extra minute to make corrections.

  Musing thus on the future had set him thinking about Gerald, whom he would send in due course to Brookfield and Cambridge if only because he could not, in England at the middle of the twentieth century, think of anything better to do with the boy. I just as he preferred a dinner to be 'black tie', not because he was a snob, but because it avoided the problem of what else.

  * * * * *

  It was about this time that he took up painting again with full knowledge not only that his work would never be of consequence, but that even his talent was less than it had been thirty years before. His pleasure, though, was nearly as great, and perhaps enhanced by the small amateur reputation he acquired among people who really did not know much about art at all. Once, on a wet Sunday in a Mediterranean city, he painted--from memory and in his bedroom at the Legation--a curiously attractive portrait of his father, as he remembered him during the old man's last years. Havelock was sitting by the window of the Westminster house, staring out over wet pavements and the tops of umbrellas, with Big Ben and the Abbey towers in the misty twilight. 'I made it rain for him,' Charles later explained to friends who had known Havelock and admired the portrait, 'just as I'd put a Sicilian peasant in the sun. His life was like a day that starts well, but then the clouds come up and it begins to pour and all the things you'd rather do have to be cancelled, but by the time evening comes you'll have found something else to do and you won't even look to see if the sky has stars in it. But it may have.'

  * * * * *

  Later that year (1950) Charles again half expected promotion. He was beguiled by a rumour that proved false, and in the dispassionate mood that followed he began to think of retirement. But then he was offered the chance of another switch to the Foreign Office, which suited him because he liked to live in London; so he put off the retirement and found the prospect of it an increasing comfort and even a mental stimulus. He felt mildly ambitious to do something, within the nearer reach, that would bring back the feeling of innocent schoolboy credit; on this, perhaps, he could make his bow at the Prizegiving of life and receive a smattering of applause from those who did not expect to see him again.

  And yet the very mildness of the ambition made it hard to accomplish. The feeling of near-success, which is also near- failure, followed him to Paris, where, as member of the British delegation to a somewhat second-string international conference, he could believe that his career had reached a peak--perhaps not its highest, perhaps not even high, but still a peak of sorts, and very likely the last.

  These things were in his mind during dinner at the Cheval Noir on Gerald's seventeenth birthday; they were in his mind as he followed the boy in a taxi across the city; they were in his mind as he sat in Rocher's ice-cream dispensary, facing his son and the girl his son had gone there to meet. 'He thinks it's wonderful,' she had said, 'that you should be representing England at the Conference.' How could he live up to or down to such an image in his son's eyes? It was just another thing to please and plague him, and suddenly he saw the gulf between father and son far wider than he had imagined, part of some structural rift of humanity.

  It might have bothered him further had he not just then received a second shock of a far more peremptory kind. For outside, only a few inches beyond the plate-glass windows, and peering in upon their little group with riveted attention, was the face of a man whom Charles least of all wanted to think about, much less encounter in the flesh. And the apparition, having seen that he was seen, began immediately to wave the kind of greeting Charles could not possibly ignore.

  So Charles waved back and was only able to explain that the intruder was one of the Conference delegates by the time that Palan, plump and clumsy, yet curiously notable as always, came threading his way amongst the tables towards them. 'This WOULD happen,' Charles muttered to himself.

  PARIS IV

  It was not only that Charles did not want to see Palan; he would have been embarrassed to be discovered at a place like Rocher's by anybody. At the Cheval Noir a surprise of such a kind would have been barely tolerable, little as he wished to spread the news of that restaurant to outsiders; and at any ordinary Parisian pavement café, however proletarian, he could have summoned enough aplomb to meet even Sir Malcolm Bingay's eye. But to be spotted in an ice- cream parlour sucking a pink concoction through a straw . . . it simply did not add up to anything he could take in stride; it was like those dreams he sometimes had in which he realized, at the moment of being presented to a chef de cabinet at a garden party, that he was completely nude from the waist down.

  Nor did he expect that Palan would miss the ludicrousness of the situation. Doubtless it would stand him in good stead at the Conference in the morning--would acidify his attitude, revitalize his sarcasms. He had already found so much in Charles to poke fun at; from now on there would be more. Charles braced himself for an effort of courtesy as the fellow waited; clearly there was no alternative but to introduce him. He did so. Palan then bowed and stooped to kiss Miss Raynor's hand in a way that would please her all the more (Charles reflected) if she were unaware that in correct European circles one did not kiss the hands of unmarried women. And it was like Palan, who must certainly know that himself, to take the impertinent liberty or else to have sized her up as a susceptible American who would feel such gallantry to be one of the perquisites of foreign travel. Meanwhile Palan's eyes were roving over the scene with a certain ironic detachment. 'It looks very good, what you all have got in the glasses. What do they call it?' To Charles's regret Miss Raynor smiled and told him. 'Just a Raspberry frappé.'

  'So?' answered Palan, regarding it judicially. 'But I think not for me.' His loud and bad French was already drawing attention from nearby tables. 'I shall have Banane Split.' He sat down and shouted the order to the nearest waitress. Then he pulled out a handkerchief and began mopping his forehead. 'I must explain that this is just bonne chance. I am walking along and I see M'sieur Anderson through the window. He looks so happy, eating his ice cream. It is a sign of the times, is it not, that the French are acquiring so many of your American habits . . . It used to be English--the rosbif--the afternoon tea . . . but now it is all American--ice cream, soda fountain, jukebox. But you, M'sieur Anderson--somehow I did not think of you as an addict--yet why not, after all? It is doubtless a treat for you too.' He turned again to Miss Raynor. 'I am a great admirer of things American!'

  The girl looked as if much of this had escaped her, but she caught its complimentary flavour and responded with a second smile that gave Charles a twinge of jealousy. It was not that he thought himself less physically attractive than Palan--on the contrary; but he could not help feeling that Palan's style of success with women should somehow be picketed as unfair to gentlemen.

  'It's Gerald's seventeenth birthday,' he said in French, relieved to have found an opening for a personal alibi. 'We were just celebrating.' />
  'But of course.' Palan now turned his attention to Gerald. 'Seventeen! Ah, a wonderful age! And how long are you to be in Paris, Gerald?'

  (He called him Gerald already--and as easily as that! To Charles this was something else to be jealous of, yet confusingly to be appreciated as well.) Charles answered: 'He's leaving for England tonight.' He added: 'And Miss Raynor has to leave for America-- also tonight.' He felt as if he were quietly closing doors in Palan's face.

  Palan then transferred his attention to Charles. 'Leaving us two old fogies here in Paris,' he commented; and Charles did not like the phrase, for he was sure Palan was nearer sixty than fifty.

  'But SEVENTEEN!' Palan was continuing. 'Can you guess where I was at seventeen? . . . In a military hospital--already I was wounded in battle. That was the Balkan War.' (Charles did the mental arithmetic--1911--it would make him fifty-eight.) 'I was what they called a hothead in those days--at sixteen I ran away from home to enlist--I lied about my age. I have told many lies since, but never one as crazy as that.' He suddenly rolled up his sleeve. 'You see? I have it still.' Along the whole length of a hairy forearm there ran a scar like a highway between forests. 'You think I was a great patriot, eh? But no, I ran away because I thought I would prefer war to being at home. But I found war was even worse. My father used to beat us when we were young. He was very rich and loved to beat people. One day at last I beat him-- and that was why I had to run away. . . . They killed him after the Revolution. So you have trains to catch tonight, both of you? If my father had caught his train he would not have been killed. But he was late at the station and the train had gone. There were no more trains. That time comes in all our lives some day--when there are no more trains. But I hated him. And now--just to make things equal--my son hates me.'