‘… votaries of the Furies who use branches of cedar, alder, hawthorn, saffron and juniper in their sacrifices of turtle doves and sheep, who pour upon the ground libations of wine and honey …’
Mrs Erdleigh almost hustled us through the door. There was something in her hand, a small instrument that caught the light.
‘I shall be with my old friend at the last tomorrow,’ she said, opening wide her huge, misty eyes.
The door closed. There was the sound of the key turning in the lock, then, as we moved off down the passage, of water poured into a basin.
‘You see what living at the Bellevue is like,’ said Duport.
‘I’m surprised you find it boring. Have you still got The Perfumed Garden?’
‘What’s that?’
‘The book I gave you – The Arab Art of Love.’
‘Hell,’ said Duport, ‘I left it in Trelawney’s room. Well, I can get it again tomorrow, if he hasn’t peddled it by then.’
‘Good night.’
‘Good night,’ said Duport. ‘I don’t envy you having to turn out for your uncle’s funeral in the morning.’
The Bellevue mattress was a hard one. Night was disturbed by dreams. Dr Trelawney – who had shaved his head and wore RAF uniform – preached from the baroquely carved pulpit of a vast cathedral on the text that none should heed Billson’s claim to be pregnant by him of a black messiah. These and other aberrant shapes made the coming of day welcome. I rose, beyond question impaired by the drinks consumed with Duport, all the same anxious to get through my duties. Outside, the weather was sunny, all that the seaside required. Nevertheless, I wanted only to return to London. While I dressed, I wondered whether the goings-on of the night before had disturbed other residents of the hotel. When I reached the dining-room, the air of disquiet there made me think we had made more noise than I had supposed. Certainly the murmur of conversation was uneasy at the tables of the old ladies. An atmosphere of tension made itself felt at once. Duport, unexpectedly in his place, was eating a kipper, a pile of disordered newspapers lying on the floor beside him. I made some reference to the unwisdom of terminating an evening of that sort with Dr Trelawney’s brandy. Duport made a face. He ignored my comment.
‘Nice news,’ he said, ‘isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘Germany and Russia.’
‘What have they done? I haven’t seen a paper.’
‘Signed a Non-Aggression Pact with each other.’
He handed me one of the newspapers. I glanced at the headlines.
‘Cheerful situation, you will agree,’ said Duport.
‘Makes a good start to the day.’
I felt a sinking inside me as I read.
‘Molotov and Ribbentrop,’ said Duport. ‘Sound like the names of a pair of performing monkeys. Just the final touch to balls up my affairs.’
‘It will be war all right now.’
‘And Hitler will be able to buy all the chromite he wants from the Soviet.’
‘So what?’
‘It’s good-bye to my return to Turkey, whatever happens.’
‘But if there’s war, shan’t we want the stuff more than ever?’
‘Of course we shall. Even a bloody book-reviewer, or whatever you are, can see that. It doesn’t prevent Widmerpool from failing to grasp the point. The probability of war made the pre-empting of the Turkish market essential to this country.’
‘Then why not still?’
‘Buying chromite to prevent Germany from getting it, and buying it just for our own use, are not the same thing. All the chromite Germany wants will now be available from Russian sources – and a bloody long list of other important items too.’
‘I see.’
‘Donners will handle matters differently now. I shall drop out automatically. I might get another job out of him, not that one. But can you imagine Widmerpool being such a fool as to suppose the prospect of war would diminish Donners-Brebner requirements. “Cut down our commitments”, indeed.’
Duport spat out some kipper-bones on to his plate. He took several deep gulps of coffee.
‘Of course in a way Widmerpool turned out to be right,’ he said. ‘As usual, his crassness brought him luck. As a matter of fact, I wouldn’t wonder if he didn’t cut off my credits as much from spite as obtuseness.’
‘Why should Widmerpool want to spite you?’
‘Just to show who’s master. I sent him one or two pretty curt telegrams. He didn’t like that. Probably decided to get his own back. Anyway, I’m up a gum tree now.’
I saw he had cause to grumble. At that moment, I could not spare much sympathy. In any case, I did not care for Duport, although I had to admit he had his points. He was, in his way, a man of action. Ahead, I thought, lay plenty of opportunity for action of one kind or another. Even now, a thousand things had to be done. Then and there, the only course to follow was to oversee Uncle Giles’s cremation, return home, try to make plans in the light of the new international situation.
‘ ’Spect they’ll requisition the place now all right,’ said Albert, when I saw him. ‘That’s if there’s anything to requisition in a day or two. Hitler’s not one to tell us when he’s coming. Just loose a lot of bombs, I reckon. The wife’s still poorly and taking on a treat about the blackout in the bedrooms.’
For a man who thoroughly disliked danger, Albert faced the prospect of total war pretty well. At best its circumstances would shatter the props of his daily life at a time when he was no longer young. All the same, the Germans, the Russians, the suffragettes were all one when it came to putting up the shutters. He might be afraid when a policeman walked up the Stonehurst drive; that trepidation was scarcely at all increased by the prospect of bombardment from the air. Indeed, his fear was really a sort of courage, fear and courage being close to each other, like love and hate.
‘Mr Duport and I sat up with Dr Trelawney for a while after he went to bed last night,’ I said.
Albert shook his head.
‘Don’t know how we’re going to get rid of him now,’ he said. ‘Flesh and blood won’t stand it much longer. If there’s requisitioning, he’ll be requisitioned like the rest of us, I suppose. It won’t do no good talking. Well, it’s been nice seeing you again, Mr Nick.’
I felt no more wish to adjudicate between Albert and Dr Trelawney than between Duport and Widmerpool. They must settle their own problems. I went on my way. The crematorium was a blaze of sunshine. I had a word with the clergyman. It looked as if I was going to be the only mourner. Then, just as the service was about to begin, Mrs Erdleigh turned up. She was shrouded in black veils that seemed almost widow’s weeds. She leant towards me and whispered some greeting, then retired to a seat at the back of the little chapel. The clergyman’s voice sounded as if he, too, had sat up drinking the night before, though his appearance put such a surmise out of court.
‘… For man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain; he heapeth up riches and cannot tell who shall gather them …’
Uncle Giles’s spirit hovered in the air. I could well imagine one of his dissertations on such a theme. The coffin slid through the trap-door with perfect precision: Uncle Giles’s remains committed to a nomad’s pyre. I turned to meet Mrs Erdleigh. She had already slipped away. Her evasiveness was perhaps due to delicacy, because, when Uncle Giles’s will (proved at the unexpectedly large figure of seven thousand, three hundred pounds) came to light, Mrs Erdleigh turned out to be the sole legatee. Uncle Giles could not be said to have heaped up riches, but he had seen to it that his relations did not gather them. It was one of those testamentary surprises, like St John Clarke’s leaving his money to Erridge. The bequest gave some offence within the family.
‘Giles was always an unreliable fellow,’ said my father, ‘but we mustn’t speak ill of him now.’
4
WHEN THE SWORD OF MITHRAS – to borrow Dr Trelawney’s phrase – flashed at last from its scabbard, people supposed London would immediately b
ecome the target of bombs. However, the slayer of Osiris did not at first demand his grievous tribute of blood, and a tense, infinitely uneasy over-all stagnation imposed itself upon an equally uncomfortable, equally febrile, over-all activity. Everyone was on the move. The last place to find a friend or relation was the spot where he or she had lived or worked in peacetime. Only a few, here and there, discovered themselves already suitably situated for war conditions. Frederica Budd, for example, Isobel’s eldest sister, as a widow with children to bring up, had not long before gone to live in the country within range of their schools. Her small house stood in a village within twenty or thirty miles of Thrubworth, upon which Frederica always liked to keep an eye. Here it was arranged that Isobel should stay, if possible, until she gave birth. Without much in common except their relationship as sisters, the temperaments of Isobel and Frederica – unlike those of Frederica and Norah – were at the same time not in active conflict. Isobel’s help in running the house was as convenient to Frederica as this arrangement was acceptable to ourselves.
Thrubworth had been requisitioned as a military headquarters. In principle detesting war in all its manifestations, Erridge was reported, in practice, to enjoy the taking over of his house by the government. This unexpected attitude on his part was not, as might be thought, because of any theoretical approval of state intervention where private property was concerned, so much as on account of the legitimate grievance – indeed, series of legitimate grievances – with which the army’s investment of his mansion provided him. Erridge, a rebel whose life had been exasperatingly lacking in persecution, had enjoyed independence of parental control, plenty of money, assured social position, early in life. Since leaving school he had been deprived of all the typical grudges within the grasp of most young men. Some of these grudges, it was true, he had later developed with fair success by artificial means, grudges being, in a measure, part and parcel of his political approach. At first the outbreak of war had threatened more than one of his closest interests by making them commonplace, compulsory, even vulgarly ‘patriotic’. The army at Thrubworth, with the boundless inconvenience troops bring in their train, restored Erridge’s inner well-being. There was no major upheaval in his own daily existence. He and Blanche, in any case, inhabited only a small corner of the house, so that domestically speaking things remained largely unchanged for him on his own ground. At the same time he was no longer tempted to abandon all his high-minded activities. Provided with a sitting target, he was able to devote himself to an unremitting campaign against militarism as represented in person by the commanding officer and staff of the formation quartered on his property. A succession of skirmishes raged round the use of the billiard-table, the grand piano, the hard tennis-court, against a background of protest, often justifiable enough, about unsightly tracks made by short cuts across lawns, objects in the house broken or defaced by carelessness and vandalism. However, these hostilities could at the same time be unremitting only so far as Erridge’s own health allowed, the outbreak of war having quite genuinely transformed him from a congenital sufferer from many vague ailments into a man whose physical state bordered on that of a chronic invalid.
‘Erry helped to lose the Spanish war for his own side,’ said Norah. ‘Thank goodness he is not going to be fit enough to lose this one for the rest of us.’
Norah herself, together with her friend, Eleanor Walpole-Wilson, had already enrolled themselves as drivers in some women’s service. They could talk of nothing but the charm of their superior officer, a certain Gwen McReith. Eleanor’s father, Sir Gavin Walpole-Wilson, after many years of retirement, had made a public reappearance by writing a ‘turnover’ article for The Times on German influence in the smaller South American countries. This piece had ended with the words: ‘The dogs bark: the caravan moves on.’ In fact everyone, one way and another, was becoming absorbed into the leviathan of war. Its inexorable pressures were in some ways more irksome for those outside the machine than those within. I myself, for example, felt lonely and depressed. Isobel was miles away in the country; most of the people I knew had disappeared from London, or were soon to do so. They were in uniform, or some new, unusual civil occupation. In this atmosphere writing was more than ever out of the question; even reading could be attempted only at short stretches. I refused one or two jobs offered, saying I was ‘on the Reserve’, should soon be ‘called up’. However, no calling-up took place; nor, so far as I could discover, was any likely to be enunciated in the near future. There was just the surrounding pressure of uneasy stagnation, uneasy activity.
I was not alone, of course, in this predicament. Indeed, my father, who might have been expected to be of some assistance, was, as it turned out, in worse case even than myself. He was by this time totally immersed in the problem of how to bring about his own re-employment, a preoccupation which, in spite of her very mixed feelings on the subject, equally engrossed my mother, who partly feared he might succeed, partly dreaded his despair if left on the shelf. It was hard, even impossible, for my father to concentrate for even a short time on any other subject. He would talk for hours at a time about possible jobs that he might be offered. His prospects were meagre in the extreme, for his health had certainly not improved since retirement. Now, his days were spent writing letters to contemporaries who had achieved senior rank, hanging about his club trying to buttonhole them in person.
‘I managed to have a word with Fat Boy Gort at the Rag yesterday,’ he would say, speaking as if in a dream. ‘Of course I knew he could do nothing for me himself in his exalted position, but he wasn’t at all discouraging. Gave me the name of a fellow in the Adjutant-General’s own secretariat who is entering my name on a special file with a few others of much the same category as myself. Something may come of it. Brownrigg’s doing his best too. As a member of the Army Council, he ought to bring something off.’
Then it struck me that General Conyers might be worth approaching in my own interests. By that time my parents had almost lost touch with the General, having themselves drifted into a form of life in which they hardly ever ‘saw’ anybody, certainly a way of life far removed from the General’s own restless curiosity about things, an energy that age was said to have done little to abate. At least that was the picture of him to be inferred from their occasional mention of his name. To tell the truth, they rather disapproved of rumours that percolated through to them that General Conyers would sometimes attend meetings of the Society for Psychical Research, or had given a lecture at one of the universities on the subject of Oriental secret societies. My parents preferred to think of General Conyers as living a life of complete retirement and inactivity since the death of his wife four or five years before. At that date he had sold their house in the country, at the same time disposing of such sporting poodles as remained in the kennels there. Now he lived all the year round in the small flat near Sloane Square, where he was still said to play Gounod on his ’cello in the afternoons.
‘Poor old Aylmer,’ my father would say, since he liked to think of other people existing in an unspectacular, even colourless manner. ‘You know he was rather a gay spark in his youth. Never looked at another woman after he married Bertha. It must be a lonely life.’
At first I hesitated to call on General Conyers, not only on account of this forlorn picture of him, but also because great age is, in itself, a little intimidating. I had not set eyes on him since my own wedding. Finally, I decided to telephone. The General sounded immensely vigorous on the line. Like so many of his generation, he always shouted into the mouthpiece with the full force of his lungs, as if no other method would make the instrument work.
‘Delighted to hear your voice, Nick. Come along. Of course, of course, of course.’
He was specific about the time I was to call on the following day. I found myself once more under his photograph in the uniform of the Body Guard I had so much admired as a child, when my mother had taken me to see Mrs Conyers not long after we had left Stonehurst. I think the General ad
mired this picture too, because, while we were talking of people we knew in common, he suddenly pointed to this apotheosis of himself in plumed helmet bearing a halberd.
‘They made me give all that up,’ he said. ‘Reached the age limit. Persuaded them to keep me on for quite a while longer than allowed by regulations, as a matter of fact, but they kicked me out in the end. Lot of nonsense. It’s not the fellows of my age who feel the strain. We know how to hold ourselves easily on parade. It’s the fellow in his fifties who has to go to bed for a week after duty at a court or levee. Tries to stand to attention all the time and be too damned regimental. Won’t do at that age. Anyway, I’ve got plenty to occupy me. Too much, I don’t mind telling you. In any case, gallivanting round in scarlet and gold doesn’t arise these days.’
He shook his head emphatically, as if I might try to deny that. His face had become more than ever aquiline and ivory, the underlying structure of bone and muscle, accentuated by age, giving him an other-worldliness of expression, a look withdrawn and remote (not unlike that of Lady Warminster’s features in the months before she died), as if he now lived in a dream of half-forgotten campaigns, love affairs, heterodox experiences and opinions. At the same time there was a restless strength, a rhythm, about his movements that made one think of the Michelangelo figures in the Sistine Chapel. The Cumæan Sybil with a neat moustache added? All at once he leant forward, turning with one arm over the back of his chair, his head slightly bent, pointing to another picture hanging on the wall. I saw he was an unbearded Jehovah inspiring life into Adam through an extended finger.
‘Sold most of the stuff when Bertha died,’ he said. ‘No good to Charlotte, married to a sailor, never has a home. Thought I’d keep the Troost, though. Troost? Van Troost? Can’t remember which he is. Not sure that I was wise to have had it cleaned on the advice of that fellow Smethyck.’
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