by Evelyn Waugh
‘But you got the name?’
Kerstie took the slip of paper from her bag and handed it to her.
‘Brook Street?’ said Virginia. ‘I thought it would be someone in Paddington or Soho. No telephone number. Let’s look him up.’
They found the name and respectable address but when they tried to ring him up they were told the number was ‘unobtainable’.
‘I’m going round there now,’ said Virginia. ‘The hundred pounds will have to wait. I must have a look at him. You wouldn’t like to come too?’
‘No.’
‘I wish you would, Kerstie.’
‘No. The whole thing’s given me the creeps.’
So Virginia went alone. There was no taxi in Sloane Square, She took the tube to Bond Street and picked her way through the American soldiers to the once quiet and fashionable street. When she reached the place where the house should have stood, she found a bomb crater flanked on either side with rugged cliffs of brick and plaster. Usually at such places there was a notice stating the new address of the former occupants. Virginia searched with her electric torch and learned that a neighbouring photographer and a hat shop had removed elsewhere. There was no spoor of the abortionist’s passage. Perhaps he lay with his instruments somewhere under the rubble.
She was near Claridge’s Hotel and from old habits sought refuge there in her despair. Lieutenant Padfield was standing by the fireplace straight before her. She turned away, seeming not to see him, and wearily walked down the corridor to Davies Street; then thought: ‘What the hell? I can’t start cutting people,’ turned again and smiled.
‘Loot, I didn’t recognize you. One’s like a pit-pony coming in from the blackout. Will you buy a girl a drink?’
‘Just what I was about to suggest. I have to go out in a minute – to Ruby at the Dorchester.’
‘Is that where she lives now? I used to go to her parties in Belgrave Square.’
‘You should go see her. People don’t go to see her as much as they used. She’s a very significant and lovely person. Her memory is fantastic. Yesterday she was telling me all about Lord Curzon and Elinor Glyn.’
‘I won’t keep you, but I feel I need a drink.’
‘It seems they were both interested in the occult.’
‘Yes, Loot, yes. Just give me a drink.’
‘It’s not a thing that has ever greatly interested me, the occult. I’m interested in live people mostly. I mean, I’m interested in Ruby remembering, more than in what she remembers. Now some days back I was at a Catholic Requiem in Somerset county. It was the live people there I found significant. There were a lot of them. It was Mr Gervase Crouchback’s funeral at Broome.’
‘I saw he had died,’ said Virginia. ‘It’s years since we met. I was fond of him once.’
‘A lovely person,’ said the Lieutenant.
‘Surely you never knew him, Loot?’
‘Not personally, only by repute. He was reputed as very fine indeed. I was glad to learn that he was so well off.’
‘Not Mr Crouchback, Loot; you’ve got that wrong. He was ruined long ago.’
‘There were people like that in the States twelve years ago. Wiped out in the crash. But they got it all back again.’
‘Mr Crouchback wasn’t like that, I assure you.’
‘From what I hear he wasn’t ever “ruined”. It was just that the way things were over here after the first war, real estate didn’t produce any income. Not only it didn’t pay – it was a regular loss. When Mr Crouchback sold up, he not only got a price for the land; he saved himself all he had been paying out every year to keep things going. He wouldn’t let the place run down. Sooner than that he’d clear out altogether. That was how he reckoned it. There were some valuable things, too, he sold out of the house. So he ended up a very substantial person.’
‘What a lot you know about everyone, Loot.’
‘Well, yes. I’ve been told before now I’m funny that way.’
Virginia was not a woman who left things unsaid.
‘I know all about you and my divorce.’
‘Mr Troy is an old and valued client of my firm,’ said the Lieutenant. ‘There was nothing personal about it. Business before friendship.’
‘You still look on me as a friend?’
‘Surely.’
‘Then go and find a taxi.’
That aptitude never failed the Lieutenant. As Virginia drove back to Eaton Terrace, men and women emerged into the dim headlights signalling vigorously to the cab, waving bank-notes. She had a brief sense of triumph that she was sitting secure in the darkness; then the full weight of her failure bowed her, literally, so that she was crouched with her head near her knees when they drew up at the house where she lodged. Kerstie was on the door-step.
‘What luck. Keep the taxi,’ and then: ‘Everything all right?’
‘No, nothing. I saw the Loot.’
‘At the doctor’s? I should have thought that’s one place he wouldn’t be.’
‘At Claridge’s. He came clean.’
‘But how about the doctor?’
‘Oh, he was no good. Blitzed.’
‘Oh dear. I tell you what; I’ll ask Mrs Bristow in the morning. She knows everything.’ (Mrs Bristow was the charwoman.) ‘Must go now. I’m going to poor old Ruby.’
‘You’ll find the Loot.’
‘I’ll give him socks.’
‘He says we’re friends. I expect I’ll be in bed when you get back.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night.’
Virginia went alone into the empty house. Ian Kilbannock was away for some nights conducting a party of journalists round an assault course in Scotland. The dining-room table was not laid. Virginia went down into the larder, found half a loaf of greyish bread, some margarine, a segment of imitation cheese and ate them at the kitchen table.
She was not a woman to repine. She accepted change, though she did not so express it to herself, as the evidence of life. A mile of darkness away, in her hotel sitting-room, Ruby repined. Her brow and the skin round her old eyes were taut with ‘lifting’. She looked at the four unimportant people who sat round her little dinner-table and thought of the glittering guests in Belgrave Square; thirty years of them, night after night, the powerful, the famous, the promising, the beautiful: thirty years’ work to establish and impose herself ending now with – what where their names? what did they do? – these people sitting with electric fires behind their chairs talking of what? ‘Ruby, tell us about Boni de Castellane.’ ‘Tell us about the Marchesa Casati.’ ‘Tell us about Pavlova.’ Virginia had never sought to impose herself. She had given parties, too; highly successful ones, all over Europe and in certain select parts of America. She could not remember the names of her guests; many she had not known at the time. As she ate her greasy bread in the kitchen she did not contrast her present lot with her past. Now, as it had been for the past month, she was aghast at the future.
Next morning Kerstie came early to Virginia’s room.
‘Mrs Bristow’s here,’ she said. ‘I can hear her banging about. I’ll go down and tackle her. You keep out of it.’
Virginia did not take long preparing herself for these days. There was no longer the wide choice in her wardrobe or the expensive confusion on her dressing-table. She was ready dressed, sitting on her bed waiting, fiddling with her file at a broken fingernail, when Kerstie at length came back to her.
‘Well, that was all right.’
‘Mrs Bristow can save me?’
‘I didn’t let on it was you. I rather think she suspects Brenda and she’s always had a soft spot for her. She was most sympathetic. Not at all like Dr Puttock. She knows just the man. Several of her circle have been to him and say he’s entirely reliable. What’s more he only charges twenty-five pounds. I’m afraid he’s a foreigner.’
‘A refugee?’
‘Well, rather more foreign than that. In fact he’s black.’
‘Why should I mind?’ ask
ed Virginia.
‘Some people might. Anyway, here’s the name and address. Dr Akonanga, 14 Blight Street, W2. That’s off the Edgware Road.’
‘Different from Brook Street.’
‘Yes and quarter the price. Mrs Bristow doesn’t think he has a telephone. The thing to do is go to his surgery early. He’s very popular in his district, Mrs Bristow says.’
An hour later Virginia was on the doorstep of number fourteen. No bombs had fallen in Blight Street. It was a place of lodging houses and mean tobacconists, that should have been alive with children. Now the Pied Piper of the state schools had led them all away to billets and ‘homes’ in the country, and only the elderly and the slatternly remained of its inhabitants. The word ‘Surgery’ was lettered on what had once been a shop window. A trousered woman, with her hair in a turban, was smoking at the door.
‘Do you know if Dr Akonanga is at home?’
‘He’s gone.’
‘Oh dear.’ Virginia suffered again all the despair of the previous evening. Her hopes had never been firm or high. It was Fate. For weeks now she had been haunted by the belief that in a world devoted to destruction and slaughter this one odious life was destined to survive.
‘Been gone nearly a year. The government took him.’
‘You mean he’s in prison?’
‘Not him. Work of national importance. He’s a clever one, black as he may be. What it is, there’s things them blacks know what them don’t that’s civilized. That’s where they put him.’ She pointed to a card on the jamb of the door which read: DR AKONANGA, nature-therapeutist and deep psychologist, has temporarily discontinued his practice. Parcels and messages to and there followed an address two doors from the bombed house where she had peered into the darkness the evening before. ‘Brook Street? How odd.’
‘Gone up in the world,’ said the woman. ‘What I say, it takes a war for the clever ones to be appreciated.’
Virginia found a cab in the Edgware Road and drove to the new address, once a large private house, now in military occupation. A sergeant sat in the hall. ‘Can I see your pass, please?’
‘I’m looking for Dr Akonanga.’
‘Your pass, please.’
Virginia showed an identity card issued by HOO HQ. ‘That’s OK,’ said the sergeant. ‘You can’t miss him. We always know when the doctor’s at work. Hark.’
From high overhead at the top of the wide staircase came sounds which could only be the beat of a tom-tom. Virginia climbed towards it thinking of Trimmer who had endlessly, unendurably crooned ‘Night and Day’ to her. The beat of the drum seemed to be saying: ‘You, you, you.’ She reached the door behind which issued the jungle rhythm. It seemed otiose to add the feeble tap of her knuckles. She tried the handle and found herself locked out. There was a bell with the doctor’s name above it. She pressed. The drumming stopped. A key turned. Virginia was greeted by a small, smiling, nattily dressed Negro, not in his first youth; there was grey in his sparse little tangle of beard; he was wrinkled and simian and what should have been the whites of his eyes were the colour of Trimmer’s cigarette-stained fingers; from behind him there came a faint air blended of spices and putrefaction. His smile revealed many gold capped teeth.
‘Good morning. Come in. How are you? You have the scorpions?’
‘No,’ said Virginia, ‘no scorpions this morning.’
‘Pray come in.’
She stepped into a room whose conventional furniture was augmented with a number of hand-drums, a bright statue of the Sacred Heart, a cock, decapitated but unplucked, secured with nails to the table top, its wings spread open like a butterfly’s, a variety of human bones including a skull, a brass cobra of Benares ware, bowls of ashes, flasks from a chemical laboratory stoppered and holding murky liquids. A magnified photograph of Mr Winston Churchill glowered down upon the profusion of Dr Akonanga’s war-stores, but Virginia did not observe them in detail. It was the fowl that caught her attention.
‘You are not from HOO HQ?’ asked Dr Akonanga.
‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. How did you guess?’
‘I have been expecting scorpions for three days. Major Allbright assured me they were being flown from Egypt. I explained they are an essential ingredient for one of my most valuable preparations.’
‘There’s always a delay nowadays in getting what one wants, isn’t there? I don’t know Major Allbright I’m afraid. Mrs Bristow sent me to you.’
‘Mrs Bristow? I am not sure I have the honour—’
‘I’ve come as a private patient,’ said Virginia. ‘You’ve treated lots of her friends. Women like myself,’ she explained with her high incorrigible candour, ‘who want to get rid of babies.’
‘Yes, yes. Perhaps a long time ago in what you would call the “piping days” of peace. All that is changed. I am now in the government service. General Whale would not like it if I resumed my private practice. Democracy is at stake.’
Virginia shifted her gaze from the headless fowl to the unfamiliar assembly of equipment. She noticed a copy of No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
‘Dr Akonanga,’ she asked, ‘what can you think you are doing that is more important than me?’
‘I am giving Herr von Ribbentrop the most terrible dreams,’ said Dr Akonanga with pride and gravity.
What dreams troubled Ribbentrop that night, Virginia could not know. She dreamed she was extended on a table, pinioned, headless and covered with blood-streaked feathers, while a voice within her, from the womb itself, kept repeating: ‘You, you, you.’
5
LUDOVIC’S command was stationed in a large, requisitioned villa in a still desolate area of Essex. The owners had been ready to move out when they saw and heard, a few flat fields away, the bulldozers move in to prepare the new aerodrome; a modest enough construction, a single cross of runway, a dozen huts, but enough to annihilate the silence they had sought there. They left behind them most of their furniture, and Ludovic’s quarters in what had been designed as the nurseries were equipped with all he required. He had never shared the taste of Sir Ralph and his friends for bric-à-brac. There was a certain likeness between his office and Mr Crouchback’s sitting-room at Matchet, without the characteristic smell of pipe and retriever. Ludovic did not smoke and he had never owned a dog.
When he was appointed, he was told: ‘It’s no business of yours who your “clients” are or where they are going. You simply have to see they’re comfortable during the ten days they spend with you. Incidentally, you will be able to make yourself pretty comfortable too. I don’t imagine the change will be unwelcome’ – looking at his file – ‘after your experiences in the Middle East.’
For all his tutelage under Sir Ralph Brompton in the arts of peace Ludovic lacked Jumbo Trotter’s zest for comfort and his ingenuity in pursuing it. He shared a batman with his staff-captain, Fremantle; his belt and boots always shone. He cherished an old trooper’s fetish for leather. His establishment drew a special scale of rations, for it catered for ‘clients’ who were taking vigorous physical exercise and suffering, most of them, from nervous anxiety. Ludovic ate heavily but without discrimination. His life was the life of the mind and there was little to occupy it in his official duties. The staff-captain had charge of administration; three athletic officers performed the training and these brave young men went in fear of Ludovic. They had less information even than he about the identity of their pupils. They did not know even the initial letters of the departments they served, and they believed, rightly, that when they visited the market town, security police in plain clothes offered them drinks and tried to draw them into indiscretion on the subject of their employment. They reported at the end of each course on the prowess of their ‘clients’. Ludovic transcribed and where necessary paraphrased their verdicts and forwarded them in a nest of envelopes to the sponsors.
One morning at the end of November he settled to this, which was almost his only task. Training reports lay on his desk. PT OK, he read, but a nervous type. Got
worse. Had to be pushed out for last jump. NBG. – His excellent physique is not matched by psychological stamina, he wrote. Then he consulted Roget and under the heading of Prospective Affections found: ‘Cowardice, pusillanimity, poltroonery, dastardness, abject fear, funk, dunghill-cock, coistril, nidget, Bob Acres, Jerry Sneak.’
‘Nidget’ was a new word. He moved to the dictionary and found: ‘Nidget; an idiot. A triangular horseshoe used in Kent and Sussex.’ Not applicable. ‘Dunghill-cock’ was good, but perhaps too strong. Major Hound had been a dunghill-cock. He tried ‘coistril’ and found only: ‘Coistrel: a groom, knave, base fellow’ and the quotation: ‘the swarming rabble of our coistrell curates.’
His eyes followed the columns, like a prospector’s panning for gold. Everywhere in the dross of ‘coition … cojuror … colander’ nuggets gleamed. ‘Coke-upon-Littleton: cant name of a mixed drink …’ – He seldom frequented the bar in the anteroom. He could hardly call for Coke-upon-Littleton. Perhaps it could be used in rebuke. ‘Fremantle, it seemed to me you had had one too many Cokes-upon-Littleton last night.’ – ‘Coke’ he noted was pronounced ‘cook’. ‘Colaphize: to buffet and knock …’; and so browsed happily until recalled to his duties by the entrance of his staff-captain with an envelope marked ‘secret’. He hastily completed the report: Failed to eradicate faults in training. Not recommended for active operations, and signed at the foot of the sheet.
‘Thank you, Fremantle,’ he said. ‘You can take the confidential reports, seal them and give them to the despatch rider to take back. What did you think of our last batch?’
‘Not up to much.’
‘A rabble of coistrell curates?’
‘Sir?’
‘Never mind.’
Each batch of ‘clients’ left early in the morning to be succeeded by the next in the late afternoon two days later. The intervening period was one of ease for the staff when, if they were in funds, they could go to London. Only the chief instructor, who was a man of few pleasures, remained on duty that day. He did not like to be long parted from the gymnastic apparatus in which the station abounded, and was resting in the ante-room from a vigorous hour on the trapeze when the staff-captain found him. He refused a drink. The staff-captain mixed himself a pink gin at a bar, scrupulously entered it in the ledger, and said after a pause: