Time And Time Again by James Hilton

Author:James Hilton [Hilton, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Romance, Novel
Publisher: Roy Glashan's Library
Published: 2013-04-05T22:00:00+00:00

* * * * *

During his leaves Charles sometimes spent short holidays with Brunon and for the rest of the time rented a service flat in London. He rarely visited Beeching for longer than a week at a stretch because, he told himself, the country bored him—which was easier if less truthful than to admit that he found his father’s company a strain. It was not that they quarrelled or failed to get along; indeed their relationship seemed more cordial than it had formerly been. Yet there was still an unease about it… a feeling that made Charles, if ever he heard his father going downstairs after they had gone to bed for the night, tiptoe to the landing with a curiosity he could hardly define—because he would never have acted thus with Snowden or Brunon, though in the morning he would probably have asked them what they had been roaming about the house for. But with his father he never put such a question.

Havelock, now approaching his seventies, had retained much of his fine physique and all his capacity for charming those he wanted to charm. Nor could it be said that he had become more eccentric, since he had already reached a limit beyond which the word would seem inadequate. What had happened was a sort of levelling off along a high plateau of singular behaviour, in which the singularities were often so trifling that the mean average distance from normal could easily be overlooked. Much of his life was outwardly like those of his neighbours, and his pastimes, though odd, were no more so than those of many another man of his age and income. The porter at his club could doubtless have capped any queer story about him with other queer stories about other club members. Letters to The Times continued without further complications, for there were still old tombstones to be discovered and written about. All this was acceptable. So were parties at Beeching at which he could be a delightful host. It was just that sometimes in his company one could feel, by a heightened awareness, that one was in the presence… of a presence. Once Charles came upon him in the library pasting a typed poem inside a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Here again, a normal curiosity would have made Charles approach and look over his father’s shoulder, but he felt unable to do this; later, however, he found the book and inspected it. To his astonishment there were many of these pasted inserts, and most were obscene parodies of well-known poems. A few were rather clever. Charles was no prude, and quite unshockable by words, but what he did find depressing was the thought of so many busy hours devoted to some of the loveliest things in literature with only such a purpose in mind. He never mentioned the matter.

More discussable were Havelock’s political views, which had become increasingly bitter and at odds with almost every charted orbit.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.