Without either remorse or regret, though fourteen hours had passed. I was still borne up by my excitement, I was waiting to hear from Hugh, but I had no doubt of the answer. Just then, I had one anxiety about my action, and only one: would Sheila learn of it? If so, should I have lost her for good? How could I get her back?
Hugh called on me early the following Sunday, while I was at my breakfast.
‘I said that I’d tell you, didn’t I?’ he said, in a tone weary and unforgiving. He would not sit down. ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘I’ve written to tell her that I’m walking out.’
‘What have you said?’
‘Oh, the usual things. We shouldn’t get on for long, and it would be mostly my fault. What else could I say?’
‘Have you seen her’, I asked, ‘since we talked?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did she guess what was coming?’
‘I didn’t tell her.’ Then he said, with a flash of shrewdness: ‘You needn’t worry. I haven’t mentioned you. But you’ve given me some advice, and I’m going to do the same to you. You’d better leave her alone for a few months. If you don’t, you’re asking for trouble.’
Within two days, I was telephoning her. At first, when I got no answer but the ringing tone, I thought nothing of it. She must be out for the evening. But when I had put through call after call, late into the night, I became alarmed. I had to imagine the bell ringing on and on in her empty room. I tried again the next morning as soon as I woke, and went straight round to Worcester Street. Sheila’s landlady opened the door to me in the misty morning twilight. Miss Knight had gone away the day before. She hadn’t said where she was going, or left an address. She might come back or she might not, but she had paid three months’ rent in advance (my heart leapt and steadied with relief).
I asked if I might glance at Sheila’s room. There was a book I had lent her, I went on persuading. The landlady knew me, and had a soft spot for Sheila, like everyone who waited on her; so I was allowed to walk round the room, while the landlady stood at the door, and the smell of frying bacon came blowing up the stairs. The room looked high in the cold light. The coins had gone, the records, her favourite books.
I wrote to her, and sent the letter to the vicarage address. I heard nothing, and within a week wrote again. Then I made inquiries through friends in the town — not George Passant and the group, but others who might have contact with the Knights. Soon one of them, a girl called Rosalind, sent me some news. Sheila was actually living at home. She was never seen outside the house. No one had spoken to her. She would not answer the telephone. No one knew how she was.
I could see no way to reach her. That weighed upon me, it was to that thought that I woke in the night, not to the reproach that this had happened through my action.
Yet I sometimes faced what I had done. Perhaps sometimes I exaggerated it. Many years later I could at last ask fairly: would he really have transformed her life? How much difference had my action made? Perhaps I wanted to believe that I had done the maximum of harm. It took away some of the reproach of staying supine for so long.
Often I remembered that evening with remorse. Perhaps, as I say, I cherished it. But at other times I remembered it with an utterly different, and very curious, feeling. With a feeling of innocence, puzzled and incredulous.
I had noticed this in others who performed an action which brought evil consequences on others and themselves. But I had to undergo it myself before I understood. The memory came back with the innocence of fact…an act of the flesh, bare limbs on a bed…a few words on a sheet of paper…was it possible that such things could shake a life? So it was with me. Sometimes I remembered that evening, not with remorse, but just as words across the fireplace, steam rising from the other man’s trousers, some words spoken as I might have spoken them on any evening. All past and gone. How could such facts hag-ride me now, or hold out threats for the years to come?
The summer began, and quite irrelevantly, I had another stroke of practical luck. Getliffe at last took silk. Inevitably, much of his practice must come to me.
For years he had bombarded us with the arguments for and against. He had threatened us with his own uncertainties; he had taken advice from his most junior pupil as well as his eminent friends at the Bar. He had delayed, raised false hopes, changed his mind, retracted. I had come to think that he would never do it — certainly not that summer, 1931, with a financial crisis upon us and the wise men prophesying that legal work would shrink by half.
He told me on an evening in June. I was alone in Chambers, working late; he had spent all the day since lunchtime going from one acquaintance to another. He called me into his room.
It was a thundery overcast evening, the sky black beyond the river, with one long swathe of orange where the clouds had parted. Getliffe sat magisterially at his desk. In the dark room his papers shone white under the lamp. He was wearing a raincoat, the collar half-turned up. His face was serious and also a little rebellious.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve torn it now. I’m taking the plunge. If — is going to be one of His Majesty’s counsel, I might as well follow suit. One has to think of one’s duty.’
‘Is it definite?’ I said.
‘I never bore my friends with my intentions’, Getliffe reproved me, ‘until they’re cut and dried.’
Getliffe gave me his fixed man-to-man stare.
‘Well, there’s the end of a promising junior,’ he said. ‘Now I start again. It will ruin me, of course. I hope you’ll remember that I expect to be ruined.’
‘In three years’, I said, ‘you’ll be making twice what you do now.’
He smiled.
‘You know, L S, you’re rather a good sort.’ Then his tone grew threatening again. ‘It’s a big risk I’m taking. It’s the biggest risk I’ve ever had to take.’
He enjoyed his ominous air; he indulged himself in his pictures of sacrifice and his probable disaster. Yet he was not much exaggerating the risk. At that moment, it was a brave step. I was astonished that he should do it. I admired him, half-annoyed with myself for feeling so. In that last year as a junior his income was not less than five thousand pounds. Even if the times were prosperous, his first years as a silk were bound to mean a drop. In 1931, with the depression spreading, he would be fortunate if he made two thousand pounds: he might not climb to his old level for years, perhaps not ever.
It could have deterred many men not overfond of money. Whereas Getliffe was so mean that, having screwed himself to the point of taking one to lunch, he would arrive late so that he need not buy a drink beforehand. It must have been an agony for him to face the loss. He can only have endured it because of a force that I was loath to give him credit for — his delight in his profession, his love of the legal honours not only for their cash value but for themselves. If ever the chance came, I ought to have realized, he would renounce the most lucrative of practices in order to become Getliffe J, to revel in the glory of being a judge.
Whatever the results for Getliffe, his move was certain to do me good, now and henceforward. His work still flowed into our Chambers: much of it, as a silk, he could not touch. His habits were too strong to break; he was no more reconciled to youth knocking at the door, and he did his best, in his furtive ingenious fashion, to direct the briefs to those too dim to be rivals. But he could not do much obstruction, and Percy took care of me. In the year 1930–1, despite my illness, I had earned seven hundred and fifty pounds. The moment Getliffe took silk I could reckon on at least a thousand pounds for each year thereafter. It was a comfort, for these last months I had half felt some results of illness and my private grief. I had not thrown myself into my cases with the old absorption. I did not see it clearly then, but I was not improving on my splendid start. I should still have backed my chances for great success, but a shrewd observer would have doubted them. Still, I had gone some distance. I was now certain of a decent income. For the first time since I was a child, I was sure of my livelihood.