To me she was especially beautiful. And, in the first astonishment of love, I saw her, and thought of her, just like that. I did not see her, as I was to see her in the future, with the detailed fondness of an experienced love, in which I came to delight in her imperfections, the front teeth, the nervous, secret-smiling tic. No, I saw her as beautiful, and I was filled with love.
I did not mind, I noticed as it were without regarding, how in company she was apt to fall constrained and silent, pallid faced, the smile working her mouth as though she were inwardly amused. The first time Jack Cotery saw her and me together, we were alone, and she was laughing; afterwards, Jack proceeded to congratulate me. ‘You’re getting on,’ he said good-naturedly. He was glad to witness me at last a captive. He was glad that I was sharing in his human frailty. He had always been half-envious that I was less distracted than he. And he was also glad that I was happy: like most carnal men, he was sorry if his friends were fools enough not to enjoy the fun. ‘She’s not my cup of tea.’ He grinned. ‘And I’m not hers. She’d just look through me with those searchlight eyes. But clearly she’s the best-looking girl round here. And you seem to have made a hit. Just let yourself go, Lewis, just let yourself go.’
One day, however, she came with me to the group. She greeted them all high-spiritedly enough, and then, though they were talking of books which she and I had discussed together, she fell into an inhibited silence and scarcely spoke a word. Jack cross-questioned me about her. ‘Is she often like that? Remember, they sometimes give themselves away, when they’re not trying. It’s easy to shine when someone’s falling in love with you.’ He shook his head. ‘I hope she isn’t going to be much of a handful. If she is, the best thing you can do is cut your losses and get out of it straight away.’
I smiled.
‘It’s all very well to smile. I know it would be a wrench. But it might be worse than a wrench if you get too much involved – and you can’t trust the girl to behave.’
I paid no attention. Nor did I to the curious incidents which I noticed soon after we met, when, instead of seeing her silent and pallid in company, I found her sitting on the area-steps of my lodging house, chatting like a sister to the landlady. The landlady was a slattern, who came to life when she broke into ruminations about her late husband or the Royal Family. Sheila listened and answered, relaxed, utterly at ease. And she did the same with the little waitress in the café, who liked her and took her for granted as she did no other customer. Somehow Sheila could make friends, throw her self-consciousness away, if she was allowed to choose for herself and go where no one watched her.
But I did not try, or even want, to think what she was truly like. If Marion had performed those antics, I should have been asking myself, what kind of nature was this? In the first weeks of my love for Sheila, I was less curious about her than about any other person. It even took me some time to discover the simple facts, such as that she was my own age within a month, that she was an only child, the daughter of a clergyman, that her mother had money, that they lived in a village twelve miles outside the town.
Walking in the windy autumn nights, I thought of her with the self-absorption of young love. I chose to be alone on those nights, so that I could cherish my thoughts, with the lights twinkling and quivering in the wind.
I was self-absorbed, yet with the paradox of such a love I had not begun to ask, even in my thoughts, anything for myself. I had not kissed her. It was enough just then that she should exist. It was enough that she should exist, who had brought me to this bliss, who had transformed the streets I walked in so that, looking down the hill at the string of lights, I felt my throat catch with joy.
I thought of her as though she alone were living in the world. I had never seen her house, but I imagined her within it, in her own room, high and light. She sat with a reading lamp at her side, and for a time she was still. Then she crossed the room and knelt by the bookshelves: her hair was radiant in the shadow. She went back to her chair, and her fingers turned the page.
I saw her so, and that was all I asked, just then.
I was diffident in making the first approach of love. It was not only that the magic was too delicate to touch. I was afraid that I had no charm for her. I had none of Jack’s casual confidence that he could captivate nine women out of ten; and I had not that other confidence which underlay George’s awkwardness and which was rooted in his own certainty of his great sensual power. At twenty I did not know whether any woman would love me with her whole heart. Most of all I doubted it with Sheila.
I tried to dazzle her, not with what I was, but with what I could do. I boasted of my plans. I told her that I should be a success. I held out the lure of the prizes I should win by my wits. She was quite unimpressed. She was clever enough to know that it was not just a young man’s fantasy. She believed that I might do as I said. But she believed it half with amusement, half with envy.
‘You ought to bring off something,’ she teased me. ‘With your automatic competence.’
It amused her that I could work in the office all day, talk to her at the café over pot after pot of tea until she caught her train, and then go off and apply my mind for hours to the law of torts. But it was an envious amusement. She had played with music and painting, but she had nothing to do. She felt that she too should have been driven to work.
‘Of course you’ll get somewhere,’ she said. ‘What happens when you’ve got there? You won’t be content. What then?’
She would not show more than that faint interest in my workaday hopes. She had none of Marion’s robust and comradely concern for each detail of what I had to achieve. Marion had learned the syllabuses, knew the dates of the examinations, had a shrewd idea of when I must begin to earn money unless I was to fail. Sheila had faith in my ‘automatic competence’, but her tone turned brittle as I tried to dazzle her, and it hurt me, in the uncertainty of love.
She was still amused, not much more than that, when I brought her a piece of good news. In September that year, just after I began to meet her regularly, I had a stroke of fortune, the kind of practical fortune that was a bonus I did not count on and had no right to expect. It happened through the juxtaposition, the juxtaposition which became a most peculiar alliance, of Aunt Milly and George Passant. The solicitor who dealt with Aunt Milly’s ‘bit of property’ (as my mother used to describe it, in a humorous resentful fashion) had not long since died.
By various chances, Aunt Milly found her way to the firm of Eden and Martineau, and so into George’s office; and there she kept on going.
Aunt Milly was aware that I knew him. It did not soften her judgement. As a matter of course, it was her custom to express disapproval after her first meeting with any new acquaintance. Since she knew George was my closest friend, she felt morally impelled to double the pungency of her expression.
‘I suppose I oughtn’t to tell you,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘but that young fellow Passant was smelling of beer. At half past two in the afternoon. It might be doing everyone a service if I told his employers what I thought of it.’ She went on to give a brief sketch of George’s character.
To my surprise, it did not take long before her indignation moderated. After a visit or two, she was saying darkly and grudgingly: ‘Well, I can’t say that he’s as hopeless as that other jackass – which is a wonder, considering everything.’
Nevertheless, it came out of the blue when George told me, as though it were nothing particularly odd, that they had been discussing me and my future. ‘I found her very reasonable,’ said George. ‘Very reasonable indeed.’ And again it did not strike him as particularly odd, though he was looking discreet and what my mother would have called chuff, with the self-satisfaction of one holding a pleasant secret, when he summoned me to meet her one lunchtime.
‘She’s asked me to attend, as a matter of fact,’ said George complacently, swinging his stick.
Our meeting place was the committee room of one of Aunt Milly’s temperance organizations. It was in the middle of the town, on the third floor above a vegetarian café; Aunt Milly was not a vegetarian, but she did not notice what she ate, and when she was working in that room she always sent down for a meal. Our lunch that morning was nut cutlets, and Aunt Milly munched away impassively.
Eating that lunch, we sat, all three of us, at a long committee table at the end of the room, Aunt Milly in the chair, George at her right hand like a secretary, and me opposite to them. The room was dark and filled with small tables, each covered with brochures, pamphlets, charts, handbills, and maps. Near our end of the room was a special stand, on which were displayed medical exhibits. The one most visible, a yard or so from our lunch, was a cirrhosed liver. I caught sight of Aunt Milly’s gaze fixed upon it, and then on George and me. She went on eating steadily.
On the walls were flaunted placards and posters; one of them proclaimed that temperance was winning. George noticed it, and asked Aunt Milly how many people had signed the pledge in 1924.
‘Not enough,’ said Aunt Milly. She added, surprisingly, in her loud voice: ‘That poster’s a lie. Don’t you believe it. The movement is going through a bad time. We’ve gone downhill ever since the war, and we shan’t do much better till those people stop running away from the facts.’
‘You made the best of your position in the war,’ said George, with an abstract pleasure in political chess. ‘You couldn’t possibly have hoped to keep your advantage.’
‘That is as may be,’ said Aunt Milly.
George argued with her. She was completely realistic and matter of fact about details. She did not shut her eyes to any setback, and yet maintained an absolute and unqualified faith that the cause would triumph in the end.
She broke off brusquely ‘This isn’t what I wanted you for. I haven’t got all the afternoon to waste. It’s time we got down to brass tacks.’
Aunt Milly was offering to make me a loan. Presumably at George’s instigation, certainly after consulting him about my chances in the Bar examinations, she had decided to help. George sat by her side, in solid if subdued triumph. I began to thank her, with real spontaneous delight, but she stopped me.
‘You wait till I’ve finished,’ she said. ‘You may not like my conditions as much as all that. You can take it or leave it.’
The ‘conditions’ referred to the date of the loan. Aunt Milly would, if she got her own way, lend me two hundred pounds. When would it be most useful to me? She had her view, I had mine: they were, as usual, different. And they were the opposite of what one might have expected. Aunt Milly had got it into her head that I did not stand a dog’s chance in Bar Finals unless I could give up the office and spend the next eighteen months reading law ‘as though you were at college, like your mother wanted for you’. I could never understand how Aunt Milly became fixed in this opinion; her whole family had picked up their education at night classes, and she was the last woman to be moved by the claims of social pretension. Perhaps it was through some faint memory of my mother’s longings, for Aunt Milly was capable of a certain buried sentiment. Perhaps it was that I was looking overtired: she was always affected by physical evidence, about which there was no doubt or nonsense, which she could see with her own eyes. Anyway, for whatever reason, she had got the idea into her head, and held it as obstinately as all her other ideas.
My view was the exact opposite. I could, I said, survive my present life until Bar Finals. I would take care, however much sleep I lost, that it would make no difference to the result. Whereas two hundred pounds, once I was in Chambers, would keep me going for two years and might turn the balance between failure and success.
George took up the argument with both of us. He was himself a very strong man physically, and he had no patience with the wear and tear that the effort might cost me. That was one against Aunt Milly. On the other hand, he told me flatly that I was underestimating the sheer time that I needed for work. If I did not leave the office now and have my days clear, I could not conceivably come out high in the list. That was a decisive one against me. On the other hand, he fired a broadside against Aunt Milly – it was ridiculous to insist that the whole loan should be used on getting me through the Bar Finals, when a little capital afterwards would be of incalculable value.
Aunt Milly liked to be argued with by George, powerfully, loudly, and not too politely. It was a contrast to the meek silences of her husband and her brother. Maybe, I thought, she would have been more placid married to such a man. Was that why, against all the rules, they got on so well?
But, despite her gratification at meeting her match, she remained immovably obstinate. Either I left the office within a month, or the loan was off. Aunt Milly had the power of the purse, and she made the most of it.
At last George hammered out a solution, although Aunt Milly emerged victoriously with her point. I was to leave the office at once: Aunt Milly nodded her head, her eyes protruding without expression, as though it were merely a recognition of her common sense. Aunt Milly would lend me a hundred pounds ‘at three per cent, payments to begin in five years,’ said Aunt Milly promptly.
‘On any terms you like,’ said George irascibly. The hundred pounds would just carry me through, doing nothing but study law, until Bar Finals. Then, if I secured a first in the examination, she would lend me the other hundred pounds to help towards my first year in Chambers.
George chuckled as we walked back to Bowling Green Street. ‘I call that a good morning’s work,’ he said. ‘She’s a wonderful woman.’
He hinted that I need not worry about taking the money. Even if all went wrong, it would not cripple her. She and her husband were among those of the unpretentious lower middle-class who had their nest eggs tucked away. George would not tell me how much. He was always professionally discreet, in a fashion that surprised some who only knew him at night. But I gathered that they were worth two or three thousand. I also gathered that I was not to expect anything from her will. That did not depress me – two hundred pounds now was worth two thousand pounds in ten years’ time. But I should have liked to know how she was leaving her money.