Time of Hope by C. P. Snow

casually to my father. ‘She would like to see Lewis before anyone else.’
    My father nodded, submissively.
    ‘I should give her a few minutes, if I were you,’ said Dr Francis to me. ‘I expect she’ll want to get ready for you. She doesn’t like being seen when she’s upset, does she?’
    He was thinking of me too. I could not reply. He gazed at me sharply, and clicked his tongue against his teeth in baffled sympathy. He pulled on the other glove and said that, though it was late, he would run along to church. He would get in before the first lesson. He said good morning to Aunt Milly, good morning to my father, put his hand on my arm. We saw him pass the window in short, quick, precise steps, his top hat gleaming, his plump cushioned body braced and erect.
    ‘Well,’ said Aunt Milly, ‘when the time comes, you will have to leave this house.’
    ‘I suppose we shall, Milly,’ my father said.
    ‘You’ll have to come to me. I can manage the three of you.’
    ‘It’s very good of you, Milly, I’m sure.’
    ‘You two might have to share a room. I’ll set about moving things,’ said my aunt, satisfied that there was a practical step to take.
    Then the clock struck the half-hour. My father did not repeat his ritual phrase. Instead he said: ‘Lena didn’t use to like the clock, did she? She used to say “Confound the clock. Confound the clock, Bertie.” That’s what she used to say. “Confound the clock.” I’ve always liked it myself, but she never did.’

 
     
9:   At a Bedside
     
    My mother’s head and shoulders had been propped up by pillows, in order to make her breathing easier – so that, asleep or awake, she was half-sitting, and when I drew up a chair that Sunday morning, her eyes looked down into mine.
    They were very bright, her eyes, and the whites clear. The skin of her face was a waxy ochreous cream, and the small veins were visible upon her cheeks, as they sometimes are on the tough and weather-beaten. She gave me the haughty humorous smile which she used so often to pass off a remark which had upset her.
    Outside, it was a windy April day, changing often from sunlight to shade. When I went in the room was dark; but, before my mother spoke, the houses opposite the window, the patch of ground between them, stood brilliant in the spring sunshine, and the light was reflected on to my mother’s face.
    ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ said my mother. She was speaking with difficulty, as though she had to think hard about each word, and then could not trust her lips and tongue to frame it. I knew – with the tight, constrained, dreadful feeling that overcame me when she called out for my love, for in her presence I could not let the tears start, unbidden, spontaneously, as they did when Dr Francis spoke of her courage – that she had rehearsed the remark to greet me with.
    ‘When it’s your time, it’s your time,’ she repeated. But she could not maintain her resignation. Her real feeling was anger, grievance, and astonishment. ‘It’s all happened through a completely unexpected symptom,’ said my mother. ‘Completely unexpected. No one could have expected it. Dr Francis says he didn’t. It’s a completely unexpected symptom,’ she kept saying with amazement and anger. Then she said, heavily: ‘I don’t want to stay like this. Just like an old sack. It wouldn’t do for me, would it?’
    For once, I found my tongue. I told her that she was looking handsome.
    She was delighted. She preened herself like a girl, and said: ‘I’m glad of that, dear.’
    She glanced round the bedroom, which was covered with photographs on all the walls – photographs of all the family, Martin, me, but most of all herself. She had always had a passion for photographic records: she had always been majestically vain.
    ‘But I shouldn’t like you to think of me like this,’ she said. ‘Think of me as I am in the garden photograph, will you, dear?’
    ‘If you want,