James Hilton: Collected Novels (80 page)

“You understand that I’m anxious to help
both
of you?”

“Yes, I understand. But I don’t know how you can.”

“Anyhow, there’s a sort of chilly comfort in thinking how unimportant all one’s personal affairs are these days.”

She got up and began walking to the door. “Yes, but when that sort of comfort has chilled one quite thoroughly, the warmth comes—the feeling that nothing matters
except
personal feelings … the what-if-the-world-should-end-tonight mood.”

We shook hands at the doorway, and there she added, smiling: “Perhaps our world
is
ending tonight. …”

I stayed in the drawing room a little while after she had gone; then I thought it would be only civil to find Woburn. He was in the library, listening to the radio. “Still nothing definite. You know, if there’s a war, I want to get in the Air Force.” We had another drink and talked for about an hour before going upstairs.

I had asked Sheldon to call me at seven; he did so, bringing in a cup of tea. “I thought you’d wish to know the news—it just came over the wireless.” Then he told me.

I got up hurriedly. It was a perfect late-summer morning, cool and fresh, with a haze of mist over the hills. Woburn had brought a small radio into the breakfast room; we hardly exchanged a greeting, but sat in front of the instrument, listening as the first reports came through. Presently Mrs. Rainier entered, stood in the doorway to hear a few sentences, then joined us with the same kind of whispered perfunctory good-morning. The bulletin ended with a promise of more news soon, then merged into music.

That was how we had breakfast on that first morning of the second war—to the beat of a dance band and with the sunlight streaming through the windows of Stourton.

After breakfast we heard the news repeated, and found the strain almost intolerable. We strayed about the gardens, the three of us, then came back to the radio again; this time there were a few extra items, reports of half the world’s grim awakening.

The newspapers came, but they were already old—printed hours before.

I telephoned the City office, and had to wait twenty minutes before the line was clear.

Then Woburn, after wandering restlessly in and out of rooms, said he would take a long walk. I think he would have liked either Mrs. Rainier or myself or both of us to suggest accompanying him, but we stayed each other with a glance. “He’s a nice boy,” she said, when he had gone.

“Yes, very.”

“Does Charles like him?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I always hoped he would. I feel we’ve almost adopted him, in one sense.”

“I sometimes think he feels that too.”

“I’d like him to feel that … I once had a child, a boy, but he died. …”

“I never knew that.”

“Charles would have made a good father, don’t you think?”

“Yes … he must have been terribly disappointed.”

“What will Woburn do now?”

“He said he’d join the Air Force.”

She moved restlessly to the radio, where the music had suddenly stopped. Another news item: the Germans had crossed the Polish frontiers at many places; the war machine was already clanking into gear.

“I can’t stand this—I half wish now we’d gone with him for the walk. Don’t leave me alone here—you don’t have to return to the City, do you?”

“No, not yet, anyhow. I just rang up the office. They haven’t had any news or message.”

“Oh … let’s go somewhere then. I’ll drive you. There’s nothing else to do—we’ll go mad if we sit over the radio all day.”

We took her car, which was an open sports Bentley, and set out. The Stourton parkland had never looked more wonderful; it was as if it had the mood to spread its beauty as a last temptation to remain at peace, or, failing that, as a last spendthrift offering to a thankless world. We passed quickly, then threaded the winding gravel roads over the estate to an exit I had not known of before—it opened on to the road to Faringdon. Through the still misty morning we raced westward and northward; but at Lechlade the sun was bright and the clock showed ten minutes past ten. A few miles beyond Burford the country rolled into uplands, and presently we left the main road altogether, slowing for tree-hidden corners and streams that crossed the lanes in wide sandy shallows, till at last in the distance we saw a rim of green against the blue.

“Perhaps it will be a simpler England after the war,” was one of the things she said.

“You’re already thinking of
after
the war?”

“Of course. The
next
Armistice Day, whenever it comes.”

“It’ll be a different England, that’s very certain. Not so rich, and not so snobbish—but maybe we can do without some of the riches and all the snobbery.”

She nodded: “Maybe we can do without Stourton—and Bentleys.”

“And two-for-one bonus issues.”

“And guinea biographies like the one somebody once wrote about Charles’s father.”

“And parties for His Excellency to meet the winners of the Ladies’ Doubles.”

She laughed. “And champagne when you’ve already had enough champagne.”

“How
can
we be so absurd—on a day like this?”

“Maybe it isn’t so absurd.”

“Where are you taking me?”

“Oh, just somewhere in England, as the war bulletins may say one of these days.”

We drove on, mile after mile, till at a turn of the road the hills ahead of us sharpened into a ridge and at the same turn also there was a signpost which made me cry out, with a sudden catch of breath: “Did you see
that?”

“I know. I wanted to come here.”

“But—you shouldn’t—it’s only torturing yourself—”

“No, no. I promise I won’t be upset—see, I’m quite calm.”

“But all this probing of the past—”

“That’s where the future will take us, maybe—back to the past. A simpler England. Old England.”

And then we came upon the gray cottages fronting the stream, the square-towered church, the ledge in the stream where the water sparkled. We parked our car by the church and walked along the street. A postman late on his morning rounds stared with friendly curiosity at us and the car, then said “Good morning.” A fluff of wind blew tall hollyhocks towards us. Somebody was clipping a hedge; an old dog loitered into a fresh patch of shade. Little things—but I shall remember them long after much else has been forgotten.

There seemed no special significance anywhere, no sign that a war had begun.

But as we neared the post office I caught sight of something that to me was most significant of all—a small brown two-seater car. I walked over to it; a man saw me examining the license. “If you’re looking for the tall gentleman,” he came over to say, “I think he took a walk up the hill.”

I turned to Mrs. Rainier.
“Charles?”
was all she whispered.

“Might be. It meets the Club porter’s description and it was hired from a London firm.”

We turned off the main road by a path crossing an open field towards the hill; as we were climbing the chime of three quarters came up to us, blown faint by the breeze. The slope was too steep for much talk, but when we came within a few yards of the ridge she halted to gain breath, gazing down over the village.

“Looks as if it has never changed.”

“I don’t suppose it has, much, in a thousand years.”

“That makes twenty seem only yesterday.”

“If we meet him, what are you going to say?”

“I don’t know. I can’t know—before I see him.”

“He’ll wonder why on earth we’ve come
here,
of all places.”

“Then well ask him why on earth
he’s
here. Perhaps well both have to pretend we came to look at the five counties.”

She resumed the climb, and in another moment we could see that the summit dipped again to a further summit, perhaps higher, and that in the hollow between lay a little pond. There was a man lying beside it with arms outstretched, as if he had flung himself there after the climb. He did not move as we approached, but presently we saw smoke curling from a cigarette between his fingers. “He’s not asleep,” I said. “He’s just resting.” I saw her eyes and the way her lips trembled; something suddenly occurred to me. “By the way, how did you know there were
five
counties?”

But she didn’t answer; already she was rushing down the slope. He saw her in time to rise to his feet; she stopped then, several yards away, and for a few seconds both were staring at each other, hard and still and silent. Then he whispered something I couldn’t hear; but I knew in a flash that the gap was closed, that the random years were at an end, that the past and the future would join. She knew this too, for she ran into his arms calling out: “Oh, Smithy—Smithy—it may not be too late!”

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

I
N A SMALL CATHEDRAL
town where changes are few, there are always people who remember who used to live in a particular house, what happened to them there and afterwards, and so on. Thus, when a chain-store company bought a site at the corner of Shawgate and sent men to break up the old Georgian frontage, there were reminders all over the town—“That was where the little doctor lived.” It was a long time ago. The house had never been occupied since, and for a reason that made passers-by stare curiously as the picks swung through the dust clouds. In due course the job reached a stage when the whole of an inside wall was exposed, and on it, still hanging, a smashed picture which a workman sold for half a crown to a bystander. It proved on examination to be a faded etching of angels grouped around an arch of flowers, but when viewed at more than arm’s length the whole design took on the likeness of a human skull. Some forgotten Victorian artist must have thought this clever; he could hardly have imagined that it would ever be so appropriate.

For the little doctor, who had lived in that house for years, was finally hanged for the murder of his wife. A young woman was charged with him, and she too was sentenced to death. The case attracted a good deal of attention at the time, not only amongst the general public but in legal circles also. “The framing of the indictment to include both prisoners,” says one authority, “was perfectly logical and proper, for English law holds that if murder is committed, joint responsibility can be established against any number of persons without regard to the question of who struck the fatal blow. Thus it was possible throughout the Newcome trial to ignore the problem (interesting but perhaps insoluble) of individual behavior during the crucial hours. All the same, the defense seems to me to have been somewhat mismanaged; indeed, it was generally admitted afterwards that Sir Guy Lockhead made a cardinal mistake in putting Dr. Newcome in the witness box to face a Crown cross-examination. My own plan, had I been defending Newcome, would have been to stress the undoubted fact that all the evidence was circumstantial, and to urge that it was the duty of the prosecution to prove it to the hilt rather than expect my client to refute it. I am inclined to think that if this had been done, an opposite verdict might have been returned (even against the racial and political feeling that was aroused by the nationality of the female prisoner); for there was much in the doctor’s favor had not his hesitations, inconsistencies, and farfetched explanations created such a bad impression.”

Thus one of the leading jurists of the day. He was not present at the trial, nor is it likely that his balanced scrutiny would have been affected by the picture I have in my own mind, of a grey day, herald of winter, the gas jets in the courtroom dimmed and flickering, so that as daylight faded, the shapes of judge, jury, and prisoners swam in a greenish twilight: the muffled Cathedral chimes each quarter hour, the hissing of the heating apparatus, voices that droned on more and more slowly as if they must die at last in darkness.

The little doctor, as I saw him then, was very quiet and still. But once, during some evidence of a particularly repetitive kind, there came into his quietude a sudden emptying of consciousness that could only mean one thing, and that an extremely shocking thing in a man on trial for his life.
He had dozed off!
His head nodded for a moment, till a warder tapped him so vigorously on the shoulder that he nearly slid to the floor.