Time of Hope by C. P. Snow Page A

Mother,’ I said. The ‘garden’ photograph was her favourite, taken when she was thirty, in the more prosperous days just after I was born. She was in one of the long dresses that I remembered from my earliest childhood. She had made the photographer pose her under the apple tree, and she was dressed for an Edwardian afternoon.
    She saw herself as she had been that day. She rejected pity, she would have rejected it even if she had found what she had sought in me, one to whose heart her heart could speak. She would have thrown pity back even now, even if I could have given it with spontaneous love. But she saw herself as she had been in her pride; and she wished me eternally to see her so.
    We were silent; the room was dark, then sunny, then dark again.
    ‘I’ve been wondering what you’ll do with Za’s money,’ said my mother.
    ‘I’m not sure yet,’ I said.
    ‘If it had come to me as it ought to have done,’ she said, ‘you should have had it before this. Then I should have seen you started, anyway.’
    ‘Never mind,’ I replied. ‘I’ll do something with it.’
    ‘I know you will. You’ll do the things I hoped for you.’ She raised her voice. ‘ I shan’t be there to see .’
    I gasped, said something without meaning.
    ‘I didn’t want just the pleasure of it,’ said my mother fiercely. ‘I didn’t want you to buy me presents. You know I didn’t want that.’
    ‘I know,’ I said, but she did not hear me.
    ‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she cried, ‘I wanted to be part of you. That’s all I wanted.’
    I tried to console her. I told her that, whatever I did, I should carry my childhood with me: always I should hear her speaking, I should remember the evenings by the front-room fire, when she urged me on as a little boy. Yet afterwards I never believed that I brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women, and she was vain, but in the end she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I, that if one’s heart is invaded by another, one will either assist the invasion or repel it – and if one repels it, even though one may long, as I did with my mother, that one might do otherwise, even though one admires and cherishes and assumes the attitude of love, yet still, if one repels it, no words or acting can for long disguise the lie. The states of love are very many – some of them steal upon one unawares; but one thing one always knows, whether one welcomes an intrusion into one’s heart or whether, against all other wishes and feelings, one has to evade it, turn it aside.
    My mother was exhausted by her outburst. She found it harder to keep her speech clear; and once or twice her attention did not stay steady, she began talking of something else. She was acutely ashamed to be ‘muddle-headed’, as she called it; she screwed up all her will.
    ‘Don’t forget’, she said, sounding stern with her effort of will, ‘that Za’s money ought to have been mine. I should like to have given it to you. It was Wigmore money to start with. Don’t forget that.’
    Her lips took on the grand smile which I used to see when she told me of her girlhood. She lay there, the room in a bright phase of light, with her grand haughty smile.
    I noticed that a Sunday paper rested on the bed, unopened. It was strange to see, for she had always had the greatest zest for printed news. After a time, I said: ‘Are you going to read it later on today?’
    ‘I don’t think so, dear,’ she said, and the anger and astonishment had returned to her voice. ‘What’s the use of me reading the paper? I shall give it up now. What’s the use? I shall never know what happens.’
    For her, more than for most people, everything in the future had been interesting. Now it could interest her no longer. She would never know the answers.
    ‘Perhaps I shall learn about what’s going on here,’ she said, but in a formal, hesitating tone, ‘in another place.’
    That morning, such was the only flicker of comfort from