“I bought two of these here recently. Have you a room where I can put this shirt on?”

    Mark and Charles were conducted to a small room and Mark changed into the shirt he had brought in the parcel. Not only his hand but all his bony wrist and a piece of his hairy forearm protruded from the cuff. “When first I wore this,” he told the assistant manager, “it was rather embarrassingly long in the sleeve, the cuffs almost reached my knuckles. This has only been washed once. You can see for yourself what has happened to the cuffs. They receded at least four inches, leaving my wrists high and dry.”

    The A.M. produced a tape measure and adjusted it to the area in dispute. “Yes, sir,” he agreed. “Two and a half inches.”

    “I call it four inches,” Mark corrected him.

    “We, of course, will give you another shirt.” There was to be no unseemly dispute, the A.M. made it clear.

    “It was this shirt I bought, though. I do not want just a shirt. I was not short of a shirt.”

    “Of course not, sir, I quite appreciate that. No shirt today as I dare say you know, sir, is 100 per cent safe, most unfortunately. The trouble is in the factory. In the weaving of the fabric if they do not weave it close… well, there is a space between the threads. Naturally, sir, when you wash this cloth the space between the threads tends to close up. The cloth shrinks in other words. It is the work people. They will not work as they used to. Since the war it is terrible. Not that we don’t insist, sir, that goods we buy are tested. Oh, yes. As an instance, in the Swiss factory where these shirts come from everything is thoroughly washed before it is made up.”

    “These cuffs must have extended well over the fingertips mustn’t they before that wash!”

    The A.M. tittered politely. “That’s right, sir. That’s what puzzles me.”

    “Are people, customers, still too timid to complain?” Charles asked him. “If they take home an article of this sort have they not the spirit to bring it back and raise hell? Do they think anything is good enough for them? Because they are merely English?”

    “A year ago they were, well, a little like what you say, but they do complain now. There are people bringing back things all the time. But I wish they would complain more!” protested the assistant manager. “You would be surprised the kind of goods we get sometimes. A consignment of thin vests arrived this summer. We opened up one vest and there was a blooming great hole the size of a half-crown right in the middle of the back. We opened up a few more and I’m blessed if there wasn’t a hole in every blooming one! All had to be condemned of course, but I’m bothered if I can explain this Swiss shirt.”

    He affected to muse for a moment. “It is just possible, of course that these shirts come from here.”

    “What!” Mark was indignantly alert. “From England?”

    Charles lay back in his chair and laughed. “Never from this land of competence and integrity! What are you saying!”

    “I don’t say it is so,” the A.M. corrected. “It is possible, that is all.”

    “Do you mean that material was sold by us to some Swiss factory,” Mark demanded, “which that factory proceeded to make up into shirts: and that when the first of these shirts began to be sold to the Swiss they duly shrivelled up (like this one) in the wash? As you see I cannot even button this collar. And did the Swiss—is that your theory—then send the whole consignment over here?”

    “To sell them to the poor boobs of English—that sort of thing?” Charles added.

    “Well it’s you that put it like that you know, sir! I know nothing about it at all, I only think that perhaps the shirts themselves were made here for export to Switzerland. The Swiss are fond of checks you see—the way we like stripes. But” (catching sight of the displeasure which Mark did not seek to hide) “remember I know no more than you do. I am only trying to put two and two together.” The cloud on Mark’s face made the man nervous. Could he, he wondered, be a shirt-manufacturer?

    “Your explanation seems to me an exceedingly plausible one,” Charles told him. “You are to be congratulated on your brutal frankness.”

    Mark was silent. Thoughtfully he took off the shirt. “Will you please let me see what you propose I should take in exchange.”

    Back at the counter the assistant manager muttered obviously confidential instructions to the young man serving at that counter. At last two shirts were produced from some secret recess and laid side by side for Mark to make his choice. One was of exceptionally cheap and garish blue, coarsely striped, the other white.

    Charles said in Mark’s ear, “They keep these for such occasions. You would look well in that blue one!” Mark shortly left, his shirt beneath his arm, informing the assistant manager that he would write to the management. “It is disgraceful!” he added, in a rather official voice. As they marched away Charles affected to be concealing a smile which Mark affected to ignore. When they reached the street Mark said his head was aching badly, which indeed was the case, and that he thought he would go back to the flat if his friend didn’t mind. In an offensively “understanding” voice Charles advised him to rest up for a while.

    They arranged to meet at a downtown restaurant for dinner and Charles took a cab to keep an appointment with an eye-doctor. This had been the main purpose of his visit to London.

    The eye-specialist, who was one of the leading consultants in this specialty, possessed a large, brilliantly-lighted residence, eloquent of wealth, health, and a beacon-like eyesight. Within, it was sumptuous. The young woman who answered the door (one of the doors of Death, after all) breathed an expensive friendliness. The strains of “Cosi Fan Tutte” came down from halcyon regions above, also brilliantly lighted, at the summit of a vast staircase. “How fortunate it is,” thought Charles—as he passed into the costly and cosy waiting-room (which was actually warm) and took up a copy of Life—“how fortunate it is that I only suffer from astigmatism.”

    This was one of the many eminent specialists who had refused to take service under the State. “Cosi Fan Tutte,” Charles approvingly reflected, “does not belong to the same dimension as the Welfare State!” But when he found himself in the presence of the large preoccupied man, with a shock of white hair, he received no response to the first of his disparaging remarks about socialized medicine. The man he had come to consult went down in Charles’s estimation. “Whatever did Williams want to send me to this old fool for?” he grumbled internally.

    His was a routine eye-test, “no thrills”, as they say in Harley Street when no pain is to be inflicted. The massive and clumsy frame used for tests was stuck upon his nose. The big anguished-looking red-faced man then delicately placed lenses out of a box in the empty sockets of the frame. He dropped one of these, which later was discovered in the cuff of Charles’s trousers. The lenses of course were revolved and Charles was asked what he could see. There was sometimes an embarrassing absence of rapport between what Charles saw and what the doctor thought he ought to see.

    The doctor, twisting the lense slowly towards him would comment, “Now that is better like that, isn’t it?” Charles would answer, “I’m afraid not.” “Not?” the doctor would ask with surprise. He then would place another lense in one of the sockets and say confidently, “Now that is clearer, isn’t it?” When Charles would answer “No, that is worse” the doctor would observe gruffly, “No, it can’t be worse. Let us try again. Now I will put back the one that was there before. Remember what it looks like through this. Now”—and snatching one out and placing the disputed one once more in position (and it was during one of these lightning exchanges that a lense flew out of the doctor’s hand and nestled in the trouser cuff)—“now is that not better? You can see better with that can’t you?” “No, sir, I am afraid not. I cannot see so well.” This happened more than once. Charles naturally concluded that the great specialist was no magician. The doctor, on his side, decided that Charles was one of those insufferable patients who always try and put the doctor in the wrong. At the end of the test he was even less talkative than before.

    When Charles said, “I suppose I shall have to wait months for these bifocals,” the doctor said: “Probably. That, however, is not my affair.” “You could not,” Charles asked, “use on my behalf, sir, one of the priorities they give you?” But the only answer he got to that was: “It is dispensing opticians who are the people to talk to about that, not doctors.” Meanwhile the specialist was making out the prescription for the spectacles. “Do you mind where you go?” he asked Charles. “You don’t mind where it is?” A curious question. However, Charles declared himself indifferent, and the specialist said, “Then go to Davis and Merks. You have on this envelope their address.” And Charles saw that the name “Davis and Merks” was printed on the envelope. (The old devil gets a rake-off, mused Charles.) “I will telephone them and see what I can do.”

    Charles would of course have preferred one of the spacious and dignified Wigmore Street Opticians’ saloons, where a staff of impeccably mannered male mannequins still fit spectacles upon one’s nose as though it were a historic nose and as if Debrett were their bible. But he sat in Davis and Merks modest premises in an insignificant side street for a long time before he realized the sort of place he had been sent to—before it dawned upon him that the treacherous old eye-doctor (obviously playing a dirty game, with one foot in both camps, but his left foot having precedence over his right foot) had sent him to a National Health Service shop.

    When he first went in he sat beside a woman in a fur coat with a well-dressed youngster. They seemed to him quite nice people until the fur coat spoke. He was deeply shocked to hear the accents of the Harrow Road. There were a couple of bald men who looked like clerks in his father’s office. Although deploring the presence of what Mr. Orwell called “Proles”, and wishing that the eye-doctor had better taste in opticians, he was still a long way from understanding the dirty trick that had been played on him. The eight tables, at which client and shopman sat face to face gazing into one another’s eyes, were huddled together, and at each were two figures, their intent faces a foot or two apart. Charles became increasingly fascinated in the problems of a young charlady having her spectacles adjusted at the nearby table. Charles watched the expressions in the assistant’s face and studied the extraordinarily expressive fat little back of the youthful charlady.

    A mirror stood upon the table, placed there that she might gaze into it. As she studied the revolution her personality must endure, the addition of a pair of ultra-gay spectacles doing strange things to her face, alarm and doubt were expressed by her back muscles. As the quizzical eye of Mr. Charles Dyat was trained upon this bauble, this festively-coloured nose-toy, he reflected, “That’s what gets their silly votes! God, why did those dratted fools of Tories never think of spectacles—coloured like sugar-sticks? Thirty million pairs of cheap specs would have won for them a hundred seats!” But now came the buxom young char’s leisurely (everything luxuriously leisurely) terminating of the proceedings. Time was made for slaves and slaveys—and Britons were no longer slaves. She poked several short black neck-curls back under her bulbous tammyish cap. And oh with what delicate restraint the assistant advised her: “Always clean them with water—with—well, tap-water.”

    The little shy respectful hesitation before actually referring to anything so plebeian as a tap—and then the little laugh of comradely complicity. “Why not, after all?” he might almost have said. “A little lady like yourself is broad-minded enough not to mind my mentioning the tap over the sink!”

    At the street-door there was another leisurely palaver, shopman all smiling charm, as he deferentially yet a little flirtatiously held the door open. Charles heard him reassuring her. They would, she would find, quieten down with use. Yes, the canary-yellow would no longer, er, be quite so painfully canary (no longer scream at you, my dear, “I’m cheap!”—Charles supplemented these adieux under his breath).

    The shop was emptying and refilling all the time and Charles missed his turn twice because of his absorption in the tap-water episode. It was now that he began to say to himself that there was something wrong about this place—something terribly wrong! After all, there were too many people in it, to start with.

    A dark baldish individual, Charles noticed, was sitting alone at a table. He walked over and sat down in front of him. Charles did not like the face of this man, nor did Charles’s face appeal to the assistant—who made no pretence that he was a “younger son” who had gone into trade, who obviously would say tap-water without a modest pause beforehand. But he was not uncivil. It was a skimpy table, it was close quarters; Charles silently handed him the “Davis and Merks” envelope.

    “Bifocals,” said the assistant, staring at the prescription.

    “Yes. Bifocals,” Charles repeated.

    “You know, don’t you, sir, that the earliest you can expect these, or any bifocals with as large a reading segment as this, is three months?”

    “Three months!” Charles scowled.

    “That is the earliest.”

    “Oh, dear.” Charles looked disagreeable. “What is the smaller reading segment you spoke of?”

    He was shown a bifocal with a round spy-hole for reading at the bottom, of about the diameter of a lead pencil.

    “Why does it take so long to get these glasses?” he asked angrily. “Is it a result of the National Health Act chaos?”

    A tough look came into the spectacled eyes opposite his own. “It is nothing whatever to do with the National Health Service.”

    “Oh, you deny that!” Charles said disagreeably.

    “I don’t deny anything. I tell you what the situation is regarding bifocals. It always has taken a long time.”

    Charles reached over and took the prescription from the assistant’s hand—not without a certain difficulty.

    “This is mine—excuse me!” He pulled.

    “You cannot get them made quicker anywhere else.”

    Charles and the assistant darted a nasty look at one another, and Charles left the shop. He made his way as quickly as possible to Wigmore Street, and entered the first luxurious opticians he encountered, Craxton and Dawson, Opticians to H.M. the King of the Hellenes. It was five times the size of Davis and Merks, discreetly lighted—and completely empty.

    “No blasted National Health Service here!” Charles told himself with satisfaction.

    A tall distinguished grey-haired gentleman (he turned out to be the manager in person) approached. They took to one another at once. Both suggested by their demeanour that they had been born in a Palladian palace in a vast park, in which deer drifted from tree to tree: and naturally Marlborough and Magdalen in the clothes of Savile Row defeated with great ease the Secondary School and an Austin Reed suiting.

    There was complete harmony—but alas the reality of popular government in its ultimate totalitarian phase imposed its ugly presence, inasmuch as the manager was sorrowfully obliged to confess that he had no influence whatever with the factory that makes bifocals. That factory is the only one doing bifocals: it has literally tens of thousands of orders to be executed before it can deal with any new order. Nothing any shop says makes the slightest impression. Such was the gist of the manager’s information. Asked whether the National Health Service was responsible for these conditions, the manager answered, a little surprised, that of course that and nothing else was the cause.

    “Why does not the Government set up a second factory?” Charles enquired idly.

    “Why does it not do a great many things!” the manager countered. These two supporters of the old order parted on the best of terms. “Not a gentleman, but a damned sound feller!” was Charles’s mental comment. The manager without realizing what he was doing, wrote “Major Charles Dyat, Tadicombe Priory” against the order though Charles had laid no claim to military rank.

    Since their return from the cinema in an attempted snowstorm—a fiasco resulting in very dirty soft hail—the two friends had sat in front of the gas fire. A French existentialist film they had gone to see after dinner—“Time the Tiger” was the English title—had predisposed Mark, in the brief halt before re-entering his unmade bed, to a deeper discouragement than he had known for some time. The past fifteen hours pressed on him in this relaxed moment, in the way a crowd pressed on you as soon as you stand still. Mark’s mind was now accessible to the day’s frictions, against which it had been shut firmly all day in spite of Charles’s propaganda. The ’flu, he told himself, still lurked in his bloodstream and perhaps some further toxins as the doctor suspected. He grilled his feet before the red-hot elements superstitiously.

    Charles sat at his side gazing at the steam rising from the water placed in front of the fire. He thought of what “the actor-feller” had said: “Time is not passive—it is like a tiger devouring its prey.” Its prey is us. But its prey is temporal, like Time itself, for we are merely time-stuff, existential ephemera. It is not something timeless it devours (how could Time do that?) nor is it something timeless devouring something temporal. It is Time devouring itself, time eating up time indeed. But is there in reality any devouring? Is not everything we see just something fizzling away like a firework, which we call time? This verbalism has misled us, we create an abstract entity.

    Arguments of this sort had been going on in the film and were now prolonged lazily in his mind. He excogitated dimly an objection to Time seen as a Tiger. Our existence is more like the water, he thought, in that bowl—a small and limited quantity. The active principle is like that fire, which slowly disperses the little body of liquid placed in front of it, until there is nothing left.

    Mark at all times was liable to be visited by the discontents which—both because of inherited stoicism, and of a repressive ideology lately acquired—he daily smothered. This was a very severe attack, not unique. But day’s discontents came not singly, as disagreeable memories—for he would not have admitted them into his memory any more than he had done at the time: they came as an anonymous cafard, an exquisite depression. On the other hand Charles was subject to no attacks of this sort: he was more analytical to start with and a truculent perfectionist. For Charles, life was a silly wrangle over a shrunken shirt: life as he saw it was waiting months for spectacles—so life becomes a struggle to see (which ought not to be the case in the twentieth century): was a struggle to eat—as if we were paleolithic: he thought of life as charged with toxins no blood-test could isolate—he saw life as a struggle not to be poisoned by all the ideas that were injected as anti-toxins into it by malignant quacks: he saw life as a hysterical chemist obsessed by problems of antisepsis. But he never had the rough philosophy or the detachment to say “what is one man’s meat, etc.” The man who was being poisoned was himself, that was sufficient. But at least he knew he was being poisoned, he knew what was poison for him.

    At Oxford they had sometimes sat like this, Mark and Charles, at the end of the day: and as their discussions used to start then, so now one started rather suddenly, with Charles looking up and saying:

    “Do you think Time is a tiger, a ferocious beast of prey?”

    It was an undergraduate opening, how people talk when they are young.

    Mark shook his head.

    “No,” he said magisterially, “nothing forcible and palpable like that. More like the bacteria of a disease.”

    “It is rather a fierce malady!”

    Mark shook his head again. “I don’t think so. I know you do.”

    “At least,” Charles said, “it moves at an accelerated tempo at present. Perhaps Time has contracted a fever.”

    Mark looked up, his handsome eyes of a mildly-stern big-dog losing their lethargic droop.

    “A fever. Perhaps.” Mark passed his fingers through coarse dark hair. “Time has certainly shown itself in the tiger class during this century. The immense explosion of technical creativeness has torn the world of two millennia apart.”

    “You call that tiger Time. You are sure the tiger is not Man?” Charles asked.

    “There were men there in the eighteenth, the seventeenth, the sixteenth century and so on. No, I prefer to say Time. In 1900 the bee was in the clover. God was in His Heaven, all was well with the world. Fifty years ago the scene was amazingly different. The radio, the automobile, the airship and airplane, the telephone, television, the cinema—these revolutionary techniques did not come one at a time with decent intervals in between. Four decades absorbed this stupendous cataract.”

    “The advent of energies out of scale with man, as if a race of giants had been born the size of skyscrapers.” Charles shook his head; “1900: a blessed time.”

    “In some ways, yes,” Mark agreed. “Though neither of us was born yet. We are like the cinema and the telephone in that respect.”

    “I am neither like a telephone nor like the flicks.” And they both laughed. “Tonight,” Charles proceeded, “we have been to a movie play. Forty years ago it would have been living, sweating, actors. Much better!”

    “I too prefer the mime in the flesh: as I prefer a concert hall to a radio,” Mark again agreed. “However, the cinema has its uses and beauties. You would not deny that? At present it is misused in the most disgusting way by Hollywood.”

    “And don’t forget what is done over here.”

    “All right. But once the profit-motive is banished—as it will be in a socialist society, then there will be nothing but an intelligent standard of movie. If nothing else, its educative power will be enormous. Today it miseducates and corrupts. Then it will…”

    “No it won’t,” shouted Charles, “not if you have that pack of vulgar nobodies still there! By education, which you stress, they would mean propaganda. And as for art! In the company of some film magnate they lap up the vulgarest rubbish the cinema can produce. No Hollywood horror would be too stupid for them. One would say that they identify socialism with philistinism.”

    Mark laughed nervously. “You have got that all wrong too, Charlie. That is not bad taste, the minister involved is a man of sensitive culture. Alfred Munnings and he, for instance…”

    “Yes, yes, and Augustus John!” Charles laughed boisterously.

    “Augustus John?” A rather grave look came into Mark’s face. “I don’t know about Augustus John,” he said slowly, “but the responsible officials are not philistines whatever else they may be. No. It is DOLLARS.”

    “Nothing but dollars,” echoed Charles. “You believe that on the sly these great ministers of state slip out to see films of the type we have been to this evening? Who knows, that fat man at my side may have been Bevan.”

    “Highly probable,” snapped Mark. “I know Bevan likes good films.”

    “Don’t speak to me of vermin! There are vermin in all movie houses.”

    “Poor Nye.”

    “You will really have to get a new type of politician, Mark, for your brave new world. Do be serious about it if you must go in for it!… But I have been thinking about what you said—the last forty or fifty years you know and Time going berserk.”

    “Well?”

    “Well,” said Charles, “I of course agree that Time has packed a millennium into a half-century. But what should interest us most, purely as citizens, is not the terrific stepping up of man’s power over nature but the fantastic power conferred upon the politicos in this new era of radio, automatic weapons, atomic bombs, and so on: of man’s power over man. The power of a Sultan or a Mogul was absurdly limited in comparison with that of present-day Iron Curtain rulers. And the fact that they rule for the rulees’ good (so they say) does not make it a more attractive proposition. Upon what they might think was for my good we should violently disagree, were I a Pole or Roumanian.”

    Mark groaned and placed his hand affectionately on that of his friend. “Charles—chum…”

    “Please!” Charles looked up with alarm.

    “All right!” Mark laughed, “I thought you’d rise to that. But we are very old and very great friends.”

    “Yes, indeed,” Charles responded gravely.

    “I was not born a socialist—quite the contrary.”

    “Anything but!”

    “Well, Charles, what I suggest you remember is that I have made myself a socialist—just as you might do.”

    “No thank you!” Charles told him. “When you see me in a ‘Liberty Cap’ you will know I am on my way to Colney Hatch.”

    “I understand perfectly. It was not at all easy at first in my own case. I felt just like you. Inside I still feel in many ways as you do. Habits acquired in one’s young days… oh, of eating, dressing, and of thinking: don’t I know their power! They form an unbreakable framework—I can never be a socialist like Bevan…”

    “I hope not.”

    “But cannot you see, old Charles, that all the moulds are being broken for one? Do you feel intact yourself? I feel sometimes like an oyster without a shell” (hastily.) “I know you will say you do. There is nothing left of the world we both grew up in. We have been forcibly, violently, re-born. I am not a convert to socialism: I have been re-born a socialist.”

    Charles blew, to denote disgust. “Well, I haven’t,” he said, and put a match to a new cigarette.

    “You’re a pig-headed blighter, Charles. But force your mind open a fraction. Consider! The right word for what you hate is not ‘socialism’, in fact. It is not a theory of the state I have been re-born to. It is a set of quite novel conditions. But, for those conditions, like it or not, socialism is the necessary political philosophy. The society that was here in 1900 is as utterly of the past as the England of the Wars of the Roses. You have omitted to be re-born or have escaped rebirth, that is all.”

    “Thank God.”

    “All right, Charles, but you move about in this world like a ghost. You are, my dear Charles, a ghost from my past life. You are not a creature of flesh and blood!”

    Mark laughed heartily, gazing affectionately at his friend.

    “No?” said Charles. “I am not of flesh and blood?” At the same time he administered a pinch of considerable force. Mark started and caught Charles’s wrist. “Such demonstrations,” he observed, “prove nothing. A poltergeist is still a ghost.”

    “What you say proves nothing either, for it has no logical support.”

    “You think not.”

    “No. First of all, the word ‘socialism’ needs to be defined of course. What you mean is Marxism. Its prophet flourished a century ago. Marx’s ‘class-war’ is the sociological complement of Darwin’s lethal biological vision.”

    “Is life not a nightmare battle of organisms to survive? But go on.”

    “Marxist socialism comes to us from the past as a sacred text. It has been imposed upon this age by means of a ceaseless propaganda. As to Marxism being the only doctrine that is compatible with the air age and the ether age, that is rubbish. It is arbitrary and irrelevant. It is just as archaic as those other things which continue to be foisted on us such as the credit system, the Texas hoard of gold, Cabinet rule masquerading as parliamentary democracy—there is a long list of these obsolete institutions and techniques deliberately preserved. It is a very eccentric theory that television, rocket-bombs, radio and X-ray oblige us to accept Marxism.”

    Mark lay back and yawned nervously. “If,” he said, “you find yourself unable to accept my solution of your difficulties…”

    “What difficulties?” Charles interrupted.

    “Wait a year or two Charles and you will find out. But here is something else. Socialism is so solidly entrenched that no Blimp crusade is likely to dislodge it.”

    “So you think.”

    “So I know. Its leaders are de facto rulers of England.”

    “What if the Tories come out on top at the general election?” Charles asked.

    “If they were the strongest party? They could hardly secure a working majority. But if they did—if they do—they could not rule. There would be a General Strike, a violent one. Should the Tory Government succeed, for argument’s sake, in breaking the General Strike, that would not be the end. In suppressing it there would be bloodshed. A nascent class-war would be on. There would be great bitterness, nation-wide plotting and agitating, half the country permanently strike-bound. Do not delude yourself: the old party-system see-saw is at an end in this country. Not to adjust yourself, Charles, to this new situation is hopelessly romantic. Are you impressed with Lord Woolton by any chance? Are you an admirer of Mr. Anthony Eden? Or are you go-ahead, and a hot Butlerite?”

    Charles laughed as he got up and stretched himself. “Now you are on sounder ground,” he said. “The winning-side argument—the best I know of in dealing with the intelligent.”

    “That’s good.”

    “No, it isn’t. Because I am not ambitious.”

    “Nor am I,” Mark pointed out. “Ambition has nothing to do with it. It is just in order to live on the side of the law.”

    “You mean,” Charles told him, as he went back and sat down, “you mean to starve safely. To go on saying Yes ever after—unmolested, in a shabby corner. For without ambition that is all that you can mean. Well, Mark, that may be a prospect to tempt some people with. You might find that they would come and join you with alacrity. But to employ such arguments with me…! I am off to bed and to dream of my own little millennium.”

    “Pleasant dreams then—full of free enterprise, free speech for the upper classes, and a little freebooting thrown in. Good night, mad rebel!”

    Mark’s dreams that night were coloured by anticipation of the next day’s lunch with Ida. Memory led off with an album of dream-pictures of Ida as the most lovely schoolgirl that ever shook a golden curl—seventeen, a year younger that he was then. She poked fun at him, in the dream, and finally gave him a huge pinch, hooting with schoolgirlish mischief. The pain of the pinch woke Mark up. When in a few seconds he was again asleep, it appeared that he was on his way to visit his wealthy aunt who lived at York. Soon he had reached his destination, and as he had been fancying she might be dead he pressed the bell, making ready to say how sad it was and he did hope she had not suffered at the last. However, she was not dead: he saw her crossing the cavernous drawing-room quite skittishly as he entered. “How down-in-the-mouth you look, Mark? Has anything happened!” she was exclaiming, her white teeth flashing in the gloom, holding out briskly a shrivelled hand. And then he perceived it was Ida smiling at him ironically: only an Ida of what would probably be called “a young seventy”. The face changed sometimes into that of his aunt Susan (Robins), and then his aunt began to masquerade as Ida, in a really horrible fashion. They were looking into a very large glass bowl containing goldfish when his aunt made a sickly little soft gasping sound. He found himself supporting her in his arms. She was quite heavy, he placed her with difficulty on a sofa, on the way tripping over a rug and almost falling to the floor with her. It was obvious to him that she was dead, and he looked at her face most unwillingly. It was that of Ida, a waxen white deeply lined, the scalp disagreeably grizzled. Turning away violently he cannoned into a parlourmaid who had arrived there behind him without noise. “She passed away quite peacefully,” he told her and she smiled. He smiled too. Then he laughed.

    When next day at her club Mark found himself in the presence of the real Ida, for a moment he was incredulous. He smiled at her emptily with his teeth, as if to show he was not taken in. But he soon warmed up, for she was no apparition.

    Ida looked—oh, around twenty-five. The lazy laughing lips of Rossetti’s Jenny (“fond of a kiss and fond of a guinea”) were as roseate and indolent as ever: her eyes were steady, an almost imperceptible dance, as well, giving them a remote glitter of gaiety.

    As if it were a top, humming and spinning on without changing position, perhaps she would go on being like this until suddenly time asserted itself and she stopped dead. Such images of precarious fixity were frankly admitted to his consciousness by the otherwise infatuated Mark: but he was not altogether innocent of cosmetics. He was aware that the illusionist’s name might be Rubinstein, but what did that matter? It could not be all Rubinstein. A divine mental sloth, it occurred to him, played a major part. She would have agreed actually: she knew more about herself than the fish does regarding its marvellous iridescence, or the humming-bird its aerial spinning. Any marvels she could account for.

    The quality was still dream-like and introspective, certainly, only Mark felt confident that this time she was not going to turn into a wealthy aunt.

    “Your labours at the Ministry have greyed you Mark a little,” Ida said at once (no doubt reading his thoughts and diverting attention from her face to his). “Otherwise much the same.”

    “Yes, I have altered, but you my dear Ida are just the same—and if there is art, its causes are not found.”

    She shook her ’twenties curls with a nervous and defensive mirth. “A little vanishing cream, combined with an empty mind, is quite enough,” she laughed. So he and the woman he had always been in love with—and had not married any other because she was always there in his imagination—eyed one another benignly. He exposed his haunted vacuum, and she automatically entered and warmed it to the temperature of paradise.

    They were a party heated by the suns of the past: they were three people in the nineteen-twenties who entered the Ivy Restaurant. The restaurant personnel, stolidly Italian, were cold and hard in nineteen-forty-nine. Mark, Ida, and Charles talked of old ’twenties books and dishes and jokes, their politics were only those that may be found in a Gilbert and Sullivan Opera where everyone present is a little liberal or a little conservative—except for a moment in the small entrance lobby. An authentically proletarian youth, attempting to look dramatic and sinister, was heard to ask the doorman-vestiaire, “Is Mr. Zilliacus here yet?” Charles said “I hope not” to the ceiling, but the comment was intercepted by the doorman-vestiaire, who looked curiously at Charles and Charles returned his gaze.

    Ideology, otherwise, was wiped off this trio who had that clean sensation the non-political have. Mark had actually put the question to himself. Why had he not married Charles’s sister? He supposed it was Charles. It would have been too like homosexuality, which was an absurd sensation. She had not married, herself, until nearly thirty, and in a couple of years that marriage was terminated by the death of her husband in the hunting-field. He had been no horseman, poor chap. She insisted on his learning to ride in a Bayswater riding-school, however, and she whisked him off to week-end hunts with a stockbroker outfit in East Anglia. Since his death she had divided her time between Tadicombe Priory and Withers Norton, the other parklet which had materialized on her wedding-day and which she had so far been able to retain.

    Three theatre queues outside had an Italian minstrel in attendance; with a most piercing pathos locked up in his sinuses the high notes of heart-throb of a gutter-Pagliacci penetrated the lunch-time roar of the ever-full Ivy, and provided a musical sugarstick background as the three old friends rolled again in memory in the Swiss snows at Wengen—or drifted talking very youngly along “The High” on their way to Blackwell’s to buy Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers. And Mark reflected as they talked that one never knew, one might some day (if one did not come to the point with Ida) get married at this late date and to the wrong woman. Horrifying thought! He had a premonition of the form the wrongness would take.

    But the cocktails and the Sylvaner were taking effect. What happened arrived with great suddenness. At one moment they were blissfully gay as they revisited the landscapes of their youth—as if by common consent refusing to admit anything to their consciousness later than 1929 (that as a rather dangerous limit). Next moment almost, it seemed, they were all three glaring at one another. Ida—an Ida at least twenty years older—was denouncing the Socialist Government: she had asked why he, Mark, had not immediately handed in his resignation after the “vermin” speech of “that filthy little man Bevan, who ought to be horse-whipped!” “Ida!” Mark had protested, half-rising. But “why not!” had shouted Charles, half-rising, too, “is he not the lowest and dirtiest…” “I am not going to listen to this nonsense!” Mark protested still more strongly. “If Ida is drunk, that is one thing. You, Charles, should have a stronger head! I see you should take water even with your wine!”

    The change of climate, however, had been so abrupt and so absolute, and Mark prior to that had been so completely transported into the neutral fairyland of the past, that—though he attempted to silence public abuse of a powerful Minister, and of one personally admired by him as well—he was for a short time dull and bewildered, groping his way about between two worlds.

    But the Navy League side of Ida, aroused with so alarming a suddenness, tore on into battle, her face distorted with partisan rage. “They have cut down the reserve of officers!” spat those lips so recently models of a charmed aloofness. “The last R.N.V.R. cadets are now in training. There are to be no more. Who are to replace officer casualties? The lower deck I suppose! Only half the Fleet is in commission. Fine fighting units are rotting in port—soon we shall have the navy of a South American republic. We could be defeated in battle by Brazil!”

    Her eyes flashed as, in indignant fancy, she saw the flagship of the Home Fleet cock up its stern, explode, and sink, the victim of a Brazilian torpedo.

    “Ida, do stop talking such dreadful nonsense,” Mark expostulated.

    “She is not talking nonsense but very good sense,” Charles objected. “Ida has her facts from a pretty reliable source. Admiral Darrell is a neighbour of hers at Withers Norton.”

    “Wars are decided in the air—surface craft are militarily obsolete,” Mark said with cross indifference. “Darrell is gaga anyway.”

    “Say what you like,” Ida broke in again. “England is defenceless. The gang of ex-dock labourers, asiatics, and corporation lawyers who push us around from Whitehall are traitors. They should be hanged from the yard-arm!” She pointed fiercely out of the window at a convenient lamp-post.

    At a neighbouring table a man who had been reading put down his paper and signalled angrily the maître d’hôtel. He was recognized by Mark as a socialist member of parliament. He was complaining about them to the maître d’hôtel, who studied Mark with attention but apparent lack of interest.

    Ida by no means desisted—she became personal.

    “You, who are of our class, deliberately helping that rabble to enslave England! It does not make sense. Can’t you make an equally good living in some more honest way?”

    “By engaging in a bit of black-marketing?” he enquired dryly.

    “Yes, Mark, yes! That would be a damn sight straighter than what you are doing.”

    “I’m sorry, Ida, but you see I am a socialist.”

    “So you say!” Charles smiled with good-natured scepticism.

    Mark closed his eyes to shut out Charles’s smile. He felt very foolish and his choler was unabated. To the spring-time regions where the great sex issues are normally decided he had returned—the greatly retarded mating was in process of consummation when his love transformed herself with nightmare suddenness into a Tory soap-boxer. He had consented to play Romeo, and Juliet, at the critical moment, had acquired the mask of Col. Blimp, haranguing him from the moonlit balcony. An irrational resentment towards the brother and sister he was sitting with possessed him. He was in no mood to see in it an illustration of Time’s tigerish leaping. He had been tricked, was what he really felt, by Charles and Ida; they had made a regular fool of him. This was a matter of feelings only, though, for he did not suspect a plot.

    Mark looked across the table coldly at the vindictive female mask. A woman he had a few minutes before theoretically united himself with! He understood that it would be impossible for her to behave otherwise: that even from 1939 to now was a great time-leap for her—from a life of petty pomp to one of straightened anxiety—dismissal of gardener, disposal of a horse or horses, acuteness of the dress problem, and a prospect, as she saw it, should this election go the wrong way, tantamount to murder. Murder just as truly by Cripps as would have been murder by Crippen. What was the difference between a man who killed you with taxes or one who killed you with a revolver bullet or a dose of arsenic? None: except that the taxer takes longer over it—and is not tried for homicide!

    A long silence was broken by Charles’s laugh.

    “Three old friends,” he croaked, “who stopped to look forward at the Sodom and Gomorrah of the Future—and they all three are turned to salt!”

    Charles was unable, however, to turn them back into flesh and blood; and when not long afterwards these three old friends left the restaurant all three knew that they would never lunch together again, that they were friends no longer. Charles, singly, would have been able to postpone, for some time at least, this break. But Ida had been decisive. The Brazilian Navy had sent to the bottom the good ship Friendship, built in the palmy days of pre-World War I.

    Charles had taken his bag away about five—both were a little stiff at the last. That evening a loneliness attacked Mark in quite new places, even interfering, he found, with housework. He had had no time to make any arrangements for the evening, so there he was cleaning up after Charles, and afraid to sit down—for he had already tried to read and found he could not. The expulsion of Ida from her place in his imagination was responsible. These were the final pangs of Mark’s rebirth into a novel age, as well as the death-throes of Ida’s image. But he did not identify his pangs: he did not analyse. He went to his desk, took out a piece of notepaper and wrote “My dear Wendy”. Wendy Richardson was a good party-woman, with a pretty face. He asked her if she thought Time was a tiger or a pussy-cat. He had been thinking a lot about Time lately, he told her. He thought himself it was a pussy-cat that had grown overnight into a tiger. Anyway, would she go with him to see the French film “Time the Tiger”. “It is,” he concluded, “a film with a kick in it. Excuse the Americanism.”

    3 March, 1950.

    MY DEAR MARK,

    Your “Pick the winning side” argument is only effective if the side you support is at the moment winning. With a majority of merely seven in the House of Commons you have to find a new argument, don’t you? What is it?

     CHARLES.

    DEAR CHARLES,

     Like most Tories you seem to forget that the Election was won by the Socialist Party. You will yet be disagreeably surprised by what can be done with a majority of seven. But you seem to mistake me for a recruiting-sergeant. If I were one, however, I should not be interested in you as a recruit. I should tell you to go and join some other army. Meanwhile I suggest you find some other correspondent.

    MARK.