by C. P. Snow
Fog was whirling round the street lamps on the afternoon that I first went to Worcester Street. The trees of St George’s Square loomed out of the white as the bus passed by. From the pavement, it was hard to make out the number of Sheila’s house. She was living on the first floor: there was a little cardboard slip against her bell – MISS KNIGHT – for all the world like some of my former clients, prostitutes down on their luck, whom for curiosity’s sake I had visited in those decaying streets.
Her room struck warm. It was large, with a substantial mantelpiece and obsolete bell pushers by the side. In the days of the house’s prosperity, this must have been a drawing-room. Now the gas fire burned under the mantelpiece, and, near the opposite wall, an oil stove was chugging away and throwing a lighted pattern on the ceiling.
‘How are you?’ said Sheila. ‘You’re not better yet.’
I had come straight from the courts, and I was exhausted. She put me in a chair with an awkward, comradely kindness, and then opened a cupboard to give me a drink. I had never been in a room of hers before; and I saw that the glasses in the cupboard, the crockery and bottles, were marshalled with geometrical precision, in neat lines and squares. That was true of every piece of furniture; she had only been there three days, but all was tidy, was more than tidy, was so ordered that she became worried if a lamp or book was out of its proper line.
I chaffed her: how had she stood my disarray?
‘That’s you,’ she said. ‘We’re different.’ She seemed content, secretively triumphant, to be looking after me in a room of her own. As she knelt by the glasses and poured the whisky, her movements had lost their stylised grace. She looked more fluent, comfortable, matter-of-fact, and warm. Perhaps I was seeing what I wanted to see. I was too tired to care, too happy to be sitting there, with her waiting upon me.
‘It’s time you got better,’ said Sheila, as I was drinking. ‘I’m waiting for you to get better.’
I took her hand. She held mine, but her eyes were clouded.
‘Never mind,’ I said.
‘I must mind,’ she said sharply.
‘I may be cheating myself,’ I said, ‘but some days I feel stronger.’
‘Tell me when you’re sure.’ There was an impatient tone in her voice, but I was soothed and heartened, and promised her, and, so as not to spoil the peace of the moment, changed the subject.
I reminded her how often she had talked of breaking away from home and ‘doing something’; the times that we had ploughed over it; how I had teased her about the sick conscience of the rich, and how bitterly she had retorted. Like her father, I wanted to keep her as a toy. My attitude to her was Islamic, I had no patience with half her life. Now here she was, broken away from home certainly, but not noticeably listening to her sick conscience. Instead, she was living like a tart in Pimlico.
Sheila grinned. It was rarely that she resented my tongue. She answered good-humouredly: ‘I wish I’d been thrown out at sixteen, though. And had to earn a living. It would have been good for me.’
I told her, as I had often done before, that the concept of life as a moral gymnasium could be overdone.
‘It would have been good for me,’ said Sheila obstinately. ‘And I should have been quite efficient. I mightn’t have had time–’ She broke off. That afternoon, as I lay tired out in my chair (too tired to think of making love – she knew that; did it set her free?), she did not mind so much being absurd, She even showed me her collection of coins. I had heard of it before, but she had shied off when I pressed her. Now she produced it, blushing but at ease. It stood under a large glass case by the window: the coins were beautifully mounted, documented, and indexed; she showed me her scales, callipers, microscope, and weights. The collection was restricted to Venetian gold and silver from the fifteenth century to the Napoleonic occupation. Mr Knight, who begrudged her money for most purposes, had been incongruously generous over this one, and she had been able to buy any coin that came into the market. The collection was, she said, getting on towards complete.
When she had mentioned her coins previously, I had found it sinister – to imagine her plunged into such a refuge. But as I studied her catalogue, in the writing that I had so often searched for a word of love, and listened to her explanations, it seemed quite natural. She was so knowledgeable, competent, and curiously professional. She liked teaching me. She was becoming gayer and more intimate. If only her records had arrived, she would have begun educating me in music, as she had long wanted to do. She insisted that she must do it soon. As it was, she said she had better instruct me in the science of numismatics. She drew the curtains and shut out the foggy afternoon. She stood above me, looking into my eyes with a steady gaze, affectionate and troubled; then she said: ‘Now I’ll show you how to measure a coin.’
After that afternoon, I imagined the time when I could tell her that I was well. Would it come? As soon as I came back to London, my doctors had examined me again. They had shaken their heads, The blood count was perceptibly worse than when I went to France. The treatment had not worked, and, apart from advising me to rest, they were at a loss. In the weeks that followed I lost all sense of judgement about my physical state. Sometimes I thought the disease was gaining. There were mornings, as I told Sheila, when I woke and stretched myself and dared to hope. I had given up taking any blood counts on my own. It was best to train myself to wait. With Sheila, with my career, I thought, I had had some practice in waiting. In time I was bound to know whether I should recover. It would take time to see the answer, yes or no.
But others were not so willing to watch me being stoical. I had let the truth slip out, bit by bit, to Charles March as well as to Sheila. Charles was a man whose response to misery or danger or anxiety was very active. He could not tolerate my settling down to endure – before he had dragged me in front of any doctor in London who might be useful. I told him it would waste time and money. Either this was a psychosomatic condition, I said, which no doctor could reach and where my insight was probably better than theirs. If that was the explanation, I should recover. If not, and it was some rare form of pernicious anaemia untouched by the ordinary treatments, I should in due course die. Either way, we should know soon enough. It would only be an irritation and distress to have more doctors handling me and trying to make up their minds.
Charles would not agree. His will was strong, and mine was weakened, after that November afternoon, by Sheila’s words. And also there were times just then when I wanted someone to lean on. So I gave way. Until the end of term I should keep up my bluff; but I was ready to be examined by any of his doctors during the Christmas vacation.
Charles organized it thoroughly. At the time, December 1930, he was, by a slight irony, a very junior medical student, for he had recently renounced the Bar and started what was to be his real career. He had not yet taken his first MB – but his father and uncle were governors of hospitals. It did not take long to present me to a chief physician. I was installed in a ward before Christmas. The hospital had orders to make a job of it: I became acquainted with a whole battery of clinical tests, not only those, such as barium meals, which might be relevant to my disease.
I loathed it all. It was hard to take one’s fate, with someone forcing a test-meal plunger down one’s throat. I could not sleep with others round me. I had lost my resignation. I spent the nights dreading the result.
On the first day of the new year, the chief physician talked to me.
‘You ought to be all right,’ he said. ‘It’s much more likely than not.’
He dropped his eyelids.
‘You’d better try to forget the last few months. Forget about this disease. I’m confident you’ve not got it. Forget what you were told,’ he said. ‘It must have been a shock. It wasn’t a good experience for you.’
‘I shall get over it,’ I said, in tumultuous relief.
‘I’ve known these things leave their mark.’
Having set me at rest, he went over the evidence. Whatever the p
ast, there were now no signs of pernicious anaemia; no achlorhydria; nothing to support the diagnosis. I had had a moderately severe secondary anaemia, which should improve. That was the optimistic view. No one could be certain, but he would lay money on it. He talked to me much as Tom Devitt had once done – with more knowledge and authority but less percipience. Much of the history of my disease was mysterious, he said. I had to learn to look after myself. Eat more. Keep off spirits. Find yourself a good wife.
After I had thanked him, I said: ‘Can I get up and go?’
‘You’ll be weak.’
‘Not too weak to get out,’ I said; and, in fact, so strong was the suggestion of health, that as I walked out of the hospital, the pavement was firm beneath my feet, for the first time in six months.
The morning air was raw. In the city, people passed anonymously in the mist. I watched a bank messenger cross the road in his top hat and carrying a ledger. I was so light-hearted that I wanted to stop a stranger and tell him my escape. I was light-hearted, not only with relief but with a surge of recklessness. Miseries had passed; so would those to come. Somehow I survived. Sheila, my practice, the next years, danced through my thoughts. It was a time to act. She was at home for Christmas – but there was another thing to do. In that mood, reckless, calculating, and confident, I went to find Percy in order to have it out.
There was no one else in Chambers, but he was sitting in his little room, reading a sporting paper. He said ‘Good morning, Mr Eliot,’ without curiosity, though he must have been surprised to see me. I asked him to come out for a drink. He was not over-willing, but he had nothing to do. ‘In any case,’ I said, ‘I must talk to you, Percy. You may as well have a drink while you listen.’
We walked up to the Devereux, and there in the bar-room Percy and I sat by the window. The room was smoky and noisy, full of people shouting new-year greetings. Percy drank from his tankard, and impassively watched them.
I began curtly: ‘I’ve been lying to you.’
Instead of watching the crowd, he watched me, with no change of expression.
‘I’ve been seriously ill. Or at least they thought I was.’
‘I saw you weren’t up to the mark, Mr Eliot,’ he said.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I want us to understand each other. They thought that I might have a fatal disease. It was a mistake. I’m perfectly well. If you need any confirmation,’ I smiled at him, ‘I can produce evidence. From Sir–’ And I said that I had that morning come from the hospital, I told him the story without any palaver.
He asked: ‘Why didn’t you let any of us know?’
‘That’s a bloody silly question,’ I said, ‘How much change should I have got – if everyone heard I was a bad life?’
For once, his eyes flickered.
‘How much work would you have brought me?’ I asked.
He did not answer.
‘Come to that – how much work did you bring me last term?’
He did not prevaricate. He could have counted briefs which passed through his hands but which he had done nothing to gain. But he said, as brutally as I had spoken ‘Not a guinea’s worth. I thought you were fading out.’
‘I don’t grumble,’ I said. ‘It’s all in the game. I don’t want charity. I don’t need it now. But you ought to be careful not to make a fool of yourself.’
I went on. I was well now, I should be strong by the summer, the doctors had no doubt that I should stand the racket of the Bar. I had come through without my practice suffering much. I had my connexions, Henriques and the rest. It would be easy for me to move to other Chambers. A change from Getliffe, a change from Percy to a clerk who believed in me – I should double my income in a year.
Even at the time, I doubted whether that threat much affected him. But I had already achieved my end. He was a cross-grained man. He despised those who dripped sympathy and who expected a flow of similar honey in return. His native language, though he got no chance to use it, was one of force and violence and temper, and he thought better of me for speaking that morning in the language that he understood. He had never done so before, but he invited me to drink another pint of beer.
‘You needn’t worry, Mr Eliot,’ he said. ‘I don’t make promises, but I believe you’ll be all right.’
He stared at me, and took a long gulp.
‘I should like to wish you’, he said, ‘a happy and prosperous new year.’
40: Listening to Music
It was still the first week in January, and I was walking along Worcester Street on my way to Sheila’s. She had returned the day before, and I was saving up for the luxury of telling her my news. I could have written, but I had saved it up for the glow of that afternoon. I was still light-hearted, light-hearted and lazy with relief. The road glistened in the drizzle, the basement lights were gleaming, here and there along the street one could gaze into lighted rooms – books, a table, a lamp-shade, a piano, a curtained bed. Why did those sights move one so, was it the hint of unknown lives? It was luxurious to see the lighted rooms, walking down the wet street on the way to Sheila.
I had no plan ready-made for that afternoon. I did not intend to propose immediately, now all was well. There was time enough now. Before the month was over I should speak, but it was luxurious to be lazy that day, and my thoughts flowed round her as they had flowed when I first fell in love. It was strange that she should be lodging in this street. She had always felt a nostalgia for the scruffy; perhaps she had liked me more, when we first met, because I was a shabby young man living in a garret.
I thought of other friends, like her comfortably off, who could not accept their lives. The social climate was overawing them. They could not take their good luck in their stride. If one had a talent for non-acceptance, it was a bad generation into which to be born rich. The callous did not mind, nor did the empty, nor did those who were able not to take life too hard; but among my contemporaries I could count half a dozen who were afflicted by the sick conscience of the rich.
Sheila was not made for harmony, but perhaps her mother’s money impeded her search for it. If she had been a man, she might, like Charles March, have insisted on finding a job in which she could feel useful; one of Charles’ reasons for becoming a doctor was to throw away the burden of guilt; she was as proud and active as he, and if she had been a man she too might have found a way to live. If she had been a man, I thought idly and lovingly as I came outside her house, she would have been happier. I looked up at her window. The light shone rosy through the curtains. She was there, alone in her room, and in the swell of love my heart sank and rose.
I ran upstairs, threw my arm round her waist, said that it had been a false alarm and that I should soon be quite recovered. ‘It makes me feel drunk,’ I said, and pressed her to me.
‘You’re certain of it?’ she said, leaning back in the crook of my elbow.
I told her that I was certain.
‘You’re going to become tough again? You’ll be able to go on?’
‘Yes, I shall go on,’
‘I’m glad, my dear. I’m glad for your sake.’ She had slipped from my arms, and was watching me with a strange smile. She added: ‘And for mine too,’
I exclaimed. I was already chilled.
She said: ‘Now I can ask your advice.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’m in love. Quite honestly. It’s very surprising. I want you to tell me what to do.’
She had often tortured me with the names of other men. There had been times when her eye was caught, or when she was making the most of a new hope. But she had never spoken with this authority. On the instant, I believed her. I gasped, as though my lungs were tight. I turned away. The reading lamp seemed dim, so dim that the current might be failing. I was suddenly drugged by an overwhelming fatigue; I wanted to go to sleep.
‘I had to tell you,’ she was saying.
‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’
‘You weren’t fit to take it,’ she said.
‘This must be the only time on record’, I said, ‘when you’ve considered me.’
‘I may have deserved that,’ she replied. She added: ‘Believe me. I’m hateful. But this time I tried to think of you. You were going through enough. I couldn’t tell you that I was happy.’
‘When did it happen?’
‘Just after you went to France,’
I was stupefied that I had not guessed.
‘You didn’t write to me for weeks,’ I said.
‘That was why. I hoped you’d get well quickly.’ She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I’m no good at deceit.’
I sat down. For a period that may have been minutes – I had lost all sense of time – I stared into the room. I half knew that she had brought up a chair close to mine. At last I said ‘What do you want me to do?’
Her reply was instantaneous ‘See that I don’t lose him.’
‘I can’t do that,’ I said roughly.
‘I want you to,’ she said. ‘You’re wiser than I am. You can tell me how not to frighten him away.’ She added: ‘He’s pretty helpless. I’ve never liked a man who wasn’t. Except you. He can’t cope very well. He’s rather like me. We’ve got a lot in common.’
I had heard other ‘we’s’ from her, taunting my jealousy, but not in such a tone as this. She dwelt on it with a soft and girlish pleasure. I was chained there. I fell again into silence. Then I asked peremptorily who he was.
She was eager to tell me. She spoke of him as Hugh. It was only some days later, when I decided to meet him, that I learned his surname. He was a year or two older than Sheila and me, and so was at that time about twenty-seven. He had no money, she said, though his origins were genteel. Some of his uncles were well off, and he was a clerk at a stockbroker’s, being trained to go into the firm. ‘He hates it,’ she said. ‘He’ll never be any good at it. It’s ridiculous.’ He had no direction or purpose; he did not even know whether he wanted to get married.