Yes, and love was mine. In the music, I remembered the serene hours with Sheila, her beautiful face, her sarcastic humour, the times when her spirit made mine lighter than a mortal’s, the circle of her arms round me and her skin close to.
I had not to struggle for her love. It was mine. I had the certainty of never-ending bliss. As I listened to the music, her love was mine.
When I returned to the town I had four weeks to wait for the result. And I hid from everyone I knew. I paid my duty call on George, to show him the papers and be cross-questioned about my answers: he, less perceptive than Charles March, shouted in all his insatiable optimism that I must have done superbly well. Then I hid, to get out of sight, out of reach of any question.
I was half-tempted to visit Marion. But our understanding was clear — and also, and this kept me away for certain, I was not fit to be watched by affectionate, shrewd eyes. I did not want to be seen by anyone who knew me at all, much less one who, like my mother, would claim the right of affection to know me well. Just as I had never shared my troubles with my mother, so I could not share this suspense now.
Could I have shared it with Sheila, I thought once? I could have talked to her; yet such troubles were so foreign to her, so earth-bound beside her own, that she would not touch them.
Since the night at the theatre, she had been constantly present in my mind. Not in the forefront, not like the shadow of the result. I was not harassed about her. Even with my days quite empty, I never once walked the streets where I might meet her, and in my prowls at night I was not looking for her face. Underneath, maybe, I knew what was to come, what my next act must be.
Yet, one evening in June, my first thought was of her when my landlady bawled up the stairs that a telegram had arrived. I had only received one telegram in my life, and that from Sheila. The examination result, I assumed, would come by the morning post. I ran down, ripped the telegram open just inside the front door. It was not from Sheila, but the blood rushed to my face. I read: CONGRATULATIONS AND HOMAGE STUDENTSHIP PRIZE ACCORDING TO PLAN SEE YOU SOON MARCH.
I threw it in the air and hugged my landlady.
‘Here it is,’ I cried.
I only half realized that the waiting was over — just as I had only half realized it when my mother proclaimed the news of my first examination, that solitary piece of good news in her hopeful life. I was practising the gestures of triumph before I felt it. On my way to George’s, telegram in hand, I was still stupefied. Not so George. ‘Naturally,’ he called out in a tremendous voice. ‘Naturally you’ve defeated the sunkets. This calls for a celebration.’
It got it. George and I called on our friends and we packed into the lounge of the Victoria. George was soon fierce with drink. ‘Drink up! Drink up!’ he cried, like an angry lion, to astonished salesmen who were sitting quietly over their evening pint. ‘Can you comprehend that this is the climacteric of our society?’ That extraordinary phrase kept recurring through the mists of drink, the faces, the speeches and the songs. Drunkenly, happily, I impressed upon a commercial traveller and his woman friend how essential it was to do not only well, but competitively and superlatively well, in certain professional examinations. I had known, I said in an ominous tone, many good men ruined through the lack of this precaution. I was so grave that they listened to me, and the traveller added his contribution upon the general increase in educational standards.
‘Toasts,’ cried George, in furious cheerfulness, and at the end of each threw his glass into the fireplace. The barmaids clacked and threatened, but we had been customers for years, we were the youngest of their regulars, they had a soft spot for us, and finally George, with formidable logic, demonstrated to them that this was, and nothing else could possibly be, the climacteric of our society.
It went on late. At midnight there was a crowd of us shouting in the empty streets. It was the last of my student nights in the town. George and I walked between the tramlines up to the park, with an occasional lorry hooting at us as it passed. There, in the middle of the road, I expressed my eternal debt to George. ‘I take some credit,’ said George magnificently. ‘Yes, I take some credit.’
I watched him walk away between the tramlines, massive under the arc lights, setting down his feet heavily, carefully, and yet still with a precarious steadiness, whistling and swinging his stick.
All the congratulations poured in except the one I wanted. There was no letter from Sheila. Yet, though that made me sad, I knew with perfect certainty what I was going to do.
I went to London to arrange my new existence. I arranged my interview with Herbert Getliffe, whose Chambers I was entering, on Eden’s advice; I found a couple of rooms in Conway Street, near the Tottenham Court Road. The rooms were only a little less bleak than my attic, for I was still cripplingly short of money, and might be so for years.
In something of the same spirit in which I had abandoned Aunt Milly’s and spent money living on my own, I treated myself to a week in a South Kensington hotel. Then, since it was the long vacation, I should return to the attic for my last weeks in the town — and in October I was ready for another test of frugality in Conway Street. But in this visit, when I was arranging the new life, I deserted Mrs Reed’s and indulged myself in comfort — just to prove that I was not frightened, that I was not always touching wood.
It was from that hotel that I wrote to Sheila, asking her to meet me.
I wrote to Sheila. Since the examination I had known that if she did not break the silence, I should. Despite the rebellion of my pride. Despite Jack Cotery’s cautionary voice, saying: ‘Why must you fall in love with someone who can only make you miserable? She’ll do you harm. She can only do you harm.’ Despite my sense of self-preservation. Despite any part of me that was sensible and controlled. Prom within myself and without, I was told the consequences. Yet, as I took a sheet of the hotel notepaper and began to write, I felt as though I were coming home.
It was surrender to her, unconditional surrender. I had sent her away, and now I was crawling back. She would be certain in the future that I could not live without her. She would have nothing to restrain her. She would have me on her own terms. That I knew with absolute lucidity.
Was it also another surrender, a surrender within myself? I was writing that letter as a man in love. That was the imperative I should have found, however thoroughly I searched my heart. I should have declared myself ready to take the chances of unrequited love. And all that was passionately true. Yet was it a surrender within myself?
I did not hear that question. If I had heard it, writing to Sheila when I was not yet twenty-two, I should have laughed it away. I had tasted the promise of success. I was carving my destiny for myself. Compared with the ordinary run of men, I felt so free. I was ardent and sanguine and certain of happiness. It would have seemed incredible to hear that, in the deepest recess of my nature, I was my own prisoner.
I wrote the letter. I addressed it to the vicarage. There was a moment, looking down at it upon the writing table, when I revolted. I was on the point of tearing it up. Then I was swept on another surge, rushed outside the hotel, found a pillar box, heard the flop of the letter as it dropped.
I had written the first night of that week in London, asking Sheila to meet me in five days’ time at Stewart’s in Piccadilly. I was not anxious whether she would come. Of that, as though with a telepathic certainty, I had no doubt. I arrived at the café before four, and captured window seats which gave on to Piccadilly. I had scarcely looked out before I saw her striding with her poised, arrogant step, on the other side of the road. She too had time to spare; she glanced at the windows of Hatchard’s before she crossed. Waiting for her, I was alight with hope.