Time and Time Again

Time and Time Again

(1953) 

James Hilton

PARIS I

Towards midnight Charles Anderson finished some notes on a talk he had had with a newspaper editor at lunch--nothing very important, but he thought he ought to keep Bingay decently informed. The hour and the completion of the task seemed to call for a drink, so he went to the bathroom for some water and then to his suitcase for the silver flask that he always carried on these junkets and tried to keep replenished. He was not much of a whisky drinker (so he would say of himself when he ordered wine), but he liked a nightcap either in bed before turning out the light or during that last half- hour of dressing-gowned pottering when he would tidy up the affairs of the day both in his mind and on his desk. He was tidy by nature and years of experience had made him save, whenever possible, some small but relaxing job for a final one, even if it were only an entry in his diary or a jotting for the book he was one day going to write.

Tonight, however, there was no doubt as to what the job should be. He had been thinking of it, off and on and with increasing satisfaction, all day; it had been a sort of protective armour at moments when he had needed it. And now, with the drink at his elbow and the sounds of the city pleasantly audible from beyond the closed and curtained windows, he took a sheet of hotel notepaper and wrote:

My dear Gerald,

As you may have seen from the very small print in the English papers, if you bother with them at all while you're on holiday, I'm with Sir Malcolm Bingay at the Conference here--a rather exacting job, one way and another, and I'll feel relieved when it's over, especially if we get any kind of agreement out of all the talk. Meanwhile there's a more cheerful event next Thursday which I expect is on your mind as well as mine. Do you remember (no, I daresay you were too young) that time at Parson's Corner when I visited you there and the fun we all had making plans for your seventeenth birthday? Anyhow, I'm enclosing a small gift in case you're still in Switzerland on the great day. I believe, though, you talked of returning to England about then, so it occurs to me, why don't you break the journey in Paris? We might see a few sights and have a civilised dinner for once, so let me know the date and time of your train if you can possibly manage it.

Your affectionate father,

Charles.

That done, and the envelope addressed care of Thomas Cook's, Lucerne, Charles finished his drink in bed and went quickly to sleep. He was a good sleeper, not because he had nothing to worry about, but because as a rule he had worked hard enough to be tired and conscientiously enough to be untroubled by conscience; lately, though, he had begun to feel sometimes TOO tired. But there need not be much more of it, he consoled himself; he would soon be on pension, and with each recent year ambition had withdrawn less reluctantly from the probably unscalable cliffs and had begun to settle for the long comfortable valley just round the corner.

After a couple of days Charles received a wire from Interlaken:

MANY THANKS PARIS OKAY SHALL ARRIVE GARE DE L'EST SEVEN P.M THURSDAY IF YOU CAN MAKE IT DINNER WILL BE FINE THANKS ALSO FOR SPLENDID CHECK AFFECTIONATELY GERRY

When Charles had digested this he happily made a note in his engagement book and then muttered in the presence of Sir Malcolm Bingay's secretary: 'I don't mind okay, but MAKE it . . . and c.h.e.c.k. cheque . . . really . . . hasn't he got over all that yet?'

Charles was a handsome man for his age, which was fifty-two. His hair had turned austerely iron-grey, but without thinning, and since he was something of a gourmet his trim figure offered a special tribute to character and temperament. Most people liked him, including those who would have been astonished if he had ever achieved any sensational success; he never had, so in a sort of way they could like him all the more. Had he been born half a century earlier he would probably not have been nicknamed 'Stuffy' by his colleagues; perhaps also in those halcyon days he could hardly have escaped becoming an Ambassador or Minister in one of the South American or smaller European capitals. 'After you're fifty there'll be something wrong with you if you don't get a Legation,' he had been told on taking up his first post, but his informant had himself been a Minister who had modestly added, in echo of Lord Melbourne: 'There's no damn merit about it that I can see.' But perhaps, if not merit, which Charles had possessed, there had been other things, including luck and a Zeitgeist, that had counted against him; at any rate, he had not been given a Legation, and for the last year or so had been sticking around at the Foreign Office. This Paris Conference was really the most considerable event that had come his way since the war period, though it was far from being world-shattering, and he surmised that Bingay had taken him along chiefly because the Balkan angle might crop up. So far it hadn't, and Charles wished it would, as a wrestler hopes for a chance to display a hold in which he has long specialized. Charles thought it possible that if the Balkan angle did crop up he might even, in a minor professional way and entirely without headlines, distinguish himself.

That he had been born during the last Victorian decade instead of the first was perhaps in some ways a pity, because he had just the right degree of correctness for the older-fashioned diplomat, apart from a very genuine integrity, knack with languages, suave manners, and a pretty if slightly erudite wit. He had also a taste for classical music, detective stories, and dry wines which aptly counterbalanced his distaste for jazz, modern non-detective fiction, and sweet wines. If you thought him a snob, as some people did, you had to admit that at Schönbrunn or Tsarskoye-Selo or in a first-class compartment on the old chocolate-and-white London and North-Western Scotch Express (en route for Balmoral) he would have looked the real thing in times when the standards of reality, or perhaps of things, were very different.