We went to a tea-shop close by. We were both very hot, and I was giddy with fatigue and the release from strain. We drank tea, spread the examination paper on the table and compared what we had done. Charles returned to my remark about touching wood: ‘It’s rather monstrous accusing me of that. If I’d shown the slightest sign of ordinary human competence—’ Then he looked at me. ‘But I don’t know why we should talk about my performances. They’re fairly dingy and they’re not over-important. While yours must matter to you, mustn’t they? I mean, matter seriously?’
‘Yes, very much,’ I said.
‘Just how much? Can you tell me?’
In the light of his interest, which had become both kind and astringent, I was able to tell the truth: that I had spent the hundred-or-two pounds I had been left in order to read for the Bar; that I had been compelled to borrow some more, and was already in debt. There was no one, literally no one, I had to make it clear, to whom I could turn for either money or influence. So it rested upon this examination. If I did exceptionally well, and won a scholarship that would help me over the first years at the Bar, I might pull through; if not, I did not know what was to become of me.
‘I see,’ said Charles. ‘Yes, it’s too much to invest in one chance. Of course it is.’ He paused. ‘You’ve done pretty well, of course, you know that, don’t you? I’m sure you have.’ He pointed to the examination paper, still lying on the tablecloth. ‘You’re pretty confident up to a point, aren’t you? Whether you’ve done well enough — I don’t see that anyone can say.’
He gave me no more assurance than I could stand. It was exactly what I wanted to hear said. The tea-shop had grown darker as the sun dipped behind the buildings across the street. We both felt very much at ease. Charles suggested that we should have a meal and go to a theatre; he hesitated for a moment. Then he said: ‘I should like you to be my guest tonight.’ I demurred: because of the flicker, just for an instant, of some social shame. I remembered the things I usually forgot, that he was rich, elegantly dressed, with an accent, a manner in ordering tea, different from mine. Hurriedly Charles said: ‘All right. I’ll pay for the meal and you can buy the tickets. Do you agree? Will that be fair?’ For a few minutes we were uncomfortable. Then Charles went to telephone his father’s house, and came back with a friendly smile. Our ease returned. We walked through the streets towards the west, tired, relaxed, talkative. We talked about books. Charles had just finished the last volume of Proust. We talked about politics; we made harsh forecasts full of anger and hope. It was 1927, and we were both twenty-two.
He took me to a restaurant in Soho. Carefully, he studied the menu card; he looked up from it with a frown; he asked if his choice would suit me and ordered a modest dinner for us both. I knew that he had not forgotten my reluctance to be treated. But now, as we sat by the window (below, the first lights were springing up in the warm evening), his meticulous care seemed familiar, a private joke.
An hour later, we were walking down Shaftesbury Avenue to the theatre. When we arrived at the box office, Charles said: ‘Just a minute.’ He spoke to the girl inside: ‘We asked you to keep seats for Mr Lewis Eliot. Have you got them ready?’
He turned to me, and said in an apologetic tone: ‘I thought of it when I was ringing up my father. I decided we might as well be safe. You don’t mind too much, do you?’
He stood aside from the grille in order that I could pay for the tickets. The girl gave them to me in an envelope. They were for the pit.
I could not help smiling as I joined him; his manoeuvres seemed now even more of a joke. They had made it impossible for me to be extravagant, that was all. As he caught my eye he also began to smile. As we stood in the foyer people passed us, one couple breaking into grins at the sight of ours.
We took our places as the house was filling up. The orchestra was playing something sweet, melancholy, and facile. I did not make an attempt to listen, but suddenly the music took me in charge. As I sat down, I had begun to think again of the examination — but on the instant all anxieties were washed away. Not listening as a musician would, but simply basking in the sound, I let myself sink into the sensation that all I wanted had come to pass. The day’s apprehension disappeared within this trance; luxury and fame were drifting through my hands.
Then, just before the curtain went up, I glanced at Charles. Soon the play started, and his face was alive with attention; but for a second I thought that he, whom I had so much envied a few hours before, looked careworn and sad.
2: Invitation to Bryanston Square
The results of the examination were published about a month later. I had done just well enough to be given a scholarship; Charles was lower in the list but still in the first class, which, in view of the amount of work he had done, was a more distinguished achievement than mine.
In September we began our year as pupils and at once saw a good deal of each other. Charles met me the first day I came to London, and our friendship seemed to have been established a long time. He continued to ask about my affairs from where we left off on the night of the examination.
‘You’re settled for this year, anyway? You’ve got £150? You can just live on that, can’t you?’
He got me to tell him stories of my family; he soon formed a picture of my mother and chuckled over her. ‘She must have been an admirable character,’ said Charles. But he volunteered nothing about his own family or childhood. When I asked one night, his manner became stiff. ‘There’s nothing that you’d find particularly interesting,’ he said.
He kept entertaining me at restaurants and clubs. One evening he had to give me his telephone number; only then did he admit that he had been living since the summer in his father’s house in Bryanston Square. It was strange to feel so intimate with a friend of one’s own age, and yet be shut out.
We entered different chambers: I went to Herbert Getliffe and he to someone called Hart, whom I knew by reputation as one of the ablest men at the Common Law Bar. The first weeks in chambers, for me at least, were lonely and pointless; there was nothing to do, and I was grateful when Getliffe appeared and with great gusto recommended some irrelevant book, saying, ‘You never know when it will come in handy.’ I was under-worked and over-anxious. I had taken two small rooms at the top of a lodging-house in Conway Street, near the Tottenham Court Road. Charles, guessing my state, drove round and fetched me out several nights a week. I wanted to discover why he, too, was harassed.
We each knew that the other was troubled when alone: we each knew that his secretiveness hurt me: yet those first nights in London and in Charles’ company were in some ways the most exhilarating I had spent. For a young provincial, the life in London took on, of course, a glamour of its own. Restaurants and theatres and clubs were invested with a warm, romantic haze. And we saw them in a style different from anything I had experienced. The prickliness of the examination evening did not last; it was not much like me, anyway. If we were to go out at all, Charles had to pay.
I noticed that, after he had stopped protecting my feelings, he was not extravagant nor anything approaching it. At bottom, I thought, his tastes were simpler than mine. We ate and went out at night in a decent but not excessive comfort: Soho restaurants, the Carlton Grill, a couple of clubs, the circle and the back row of the stalls. It was decent and not luxurious; it was a scale of living that I had not yet seen.
All that helped. I liked pleasure and good things: and it meant more to me than just the good things themselves; it meant one side, a subsidiary but not negligible side, of the life I wanted to win. Like most young men on the rise, I was a bit of a snob at heart.