by David Boyle
From the start, the Savoy evening refused to go right.
Jack was about a quarter hour late as the guests streamed inside, dressed in their pre-war frocks and finery, past the chandeliers and the functionaries who seemed to reach back to a kind of pre-war deference. They barely glanced at Xanthe in the black dress she had borrowed from Moira, who was rather taller. A voice in her head kept struggling to quote the line from the novelist Morgan Forster, who she had met in King’s, about how charm was “just decoration”, and wondering what it meant. She was going to just drift away from the Savoy in shame when a flustered looking Jack appeared looking a little the worse for wear for drink.
“I’m so sorry, my dear. Just getting up a little Dutch courage. Don’t often take girls out, you see.”
“Honestly, Jack, it isn’t your wedding night or anything. And please don’t call me ‘my dear’. I’m nearly as old as you are.”
Not for the first time, she wondered about these poor English men – so tentative, so callow, yet she knew many of them who were already in uniform.
“Sorry, Xanthe.” He tittered alcoholically. “Some of them thought I needed a bit of strengthening medicine.” He reddened around the gills. “Shall we go up; I expect the fellows will be there by now.”
*
The rest of the evening was little better. Jack’s strengthening regime continued and his friends either didn’t like Xanthe or they were as frightened of her as he was. It was not the first time that she had been confronted by the strange reputation of American girls among English men. In Cambridge, they had just assumed she was stupid; in London, they also assumed she was some kind of vamp.
She came to the conclusion that it must have been a little of both because Jack and his friends largely ignored her. She kept catching sight of them behind the pillars, usually with a bottle of champagne to the lips. She found herself wandering around the room with a feigned air of purpose. It worked for half an hour or so before she began to feel too conspicuously inconspicuous for comfort. The string quartet was grinding out Handel and there was that upper-class English smell of champagne mixed with sweat that reminded her of Cambridge.
It was then that she met him. To be completely accurate, he met her.
“You look like someone I could get to know,” said a voice behind her. She swung round. For a moment, there seemed to be nobody there at all.
“Come over here. You can’t hear yourself think out there. I’m hiding away. Come and join me.”
It took her a moment to see where the voice was coming from, and to make sure it was directed at her. Then she saw him, looking languid in a little alcove, with a glass of what must have been whisky. She was impressed with him, partly because he was not drinking champagne, and partly because he was clearly not properly dressed for the occasion. Jack and his friends wore wing collars and evening suits, the kind of outfit of tuxedo and black tie they very rarely wore in Cincinnati. This man, whoever he was, wore nothing of the kind. In fact, he had a collar and tie and a black charcoal business suit, graced by a necktie that looked vaguely regimental.
“Sorry, I don’t generally speak to strange men…” she was irritated with herself that this would sound as if she was flirting. But, then again, perhaps she was.
The man smiled to hear her accent. “Aha, you’re one of our American cousins. Tell me, what brings you to this corner of the doomed world? This sceptred isle, this demi-paradise, this seat of Mars, blah blah blah. I was just wondering what on earth had brought me to this party.”
Xanthe laughed. He had an infectious smile – it was the first element about Ralph that she really liked. She caught Jack and his friends out of the corner of her eye a few times and he seemed pretty oblivious, so she carried on talking. The stranger was a good listener and seemed to know everything, but carried the knowledge lightly.
“So, let’s sum up, shall we? Your name is Xanthe and you come from Cincinnati, and you are studying in Cambridge until the end of this summer? Am I right? After which you are not sure what to do – but you want to be a journalist of some kind…”
“Bravo!” she pretended to clap.
“I can understand that going home right now is not an obvious choice what with all those U-boats.”
“Sure. Quite right. But what about you? You haven’t told me anything about yourself?”
“Well, you haven’t asked – but perhaps I should say that I am betrothed to my constituents, the good and very sensible people of Chanctonbury in the county of Sussex.”
“Your constituents? You’re a senator of some kind?”
“A member of Parliament? I am, and I have been for what seems like decades, but it has actually only been for five years.” He sat back with a mild air of self-satisfaction that Xanthe found unexpectedly attractive. He was the first grown-up man in England who had really looked at her in quite that way, confident and unabashed. She loved it.
“Look, Xanthe, if I might call you that so early in our acquaintance. I had been hoping to talk to you…”
She giggled a little, heard herself and then stopped. “What nonsense: you didn’t even know me.”
“Yes, but that was exactly why. You were the only person here I couldn’t place. I’ve got a pretty good idea who the others are, but I had no idea who you were, at least the only one I wanted to talk to. I don’t get out much these days, what with the war and everything. So I wondered if you might have dinner with me next week. Do you have a telephone number where I can reach you? Perhaps you could write it there?”
He produced a small pocket diary filled with spidery hieroglyphics, and a little pencil. As she was writing down the number of Simonetta College office again – she had no access to a telephone line in the dormitory where she was staying – she was suddenly aware of a flurry of activity behind her.
“Mr Lancing-Price? You’re wanted urgently on the telephone.”
“Really? Who is it? My mother?”
“No sir, it’s the Admiralty. They asked if I could send you straight round if I found you.”
“Ah yes,” he said with an air of exhaustion. “The fleet calls.”
“Yes but, what…?”
“I fear I omitted to tell you about my day job. I am among a couple of parliamentary undersecretaries to the First Lord of the Admiralty. There are only two of us but Winston requires the services of whole charabancs of undersecretaries to satisfy his restless soul. We are kept busy.”
*
She flushed as he left, and was furious with herself for doing so and, later, looked back on that flush as a sign of innocence which she would never quite manage to rediscover. But the truth was that she had liked him, had basked briefly in his attention, and assumed she would never hear from him again. It was sad, but there it was.
But she did hear from him. The irritated face of the college receptionist sought her out in the philosophy class – actually a glorified exercise in sex education and morality – and knocked on the door.
“I’m sorry for disturbing, Miss Bright. But there is yet another telephone call for Xanthe Schneider.” Then, with great disapproval, she said: “They say it’s the Admiralty.” A titter went round the room.
That evening, Xanthe found herself in the lobby of the House of Commons, staring up at the garish mosaic of St George and wondering what to do next. She had come down in a train full of troops and it had exhausted her. Three of them had offered her a seat but the journey had been squashed and stultifying. She felt nervous, once again in a place where establishment figures dashed busily to and fro which made her fear she looked conspicuous. Conspicuous again by her own attempts to stay inconspicuous.
“And who are you waiting for, miss?” said a man in a black-tailed coat.
For a horrible moment, she realised she had forgotten his name. “Um, Ralph…” her mind went blank. “Lancing-Price!”
The man consulted his desk. “I’m afraid, miss, that…” Then suddenly, there he was. She was afraid for a moment that he would see her
intense relief. He stared at her for a moment, then he took her arm and marched her off to one of the innumerable restaurants around the Palace of Westminster.
It was the start of a peculiar friendship. The two of them would meet at weekends. She spent more and more time at Moira’s flat in Maida Vale. She was aware that Ralph had a lady friend, a raven-haired society beauty, and had seen her photo in the magazines. Maybe even a fiancé. But he never seemed to talk about her, let alone see her. Xanthe feared it was her own sheer innocence that attracted him. And the parks were full of couples walking in the spring sunshine, as they wandered through Kensington Gardens. They saw Gone with the Wind at the Empire Leicester Square. They saw Me and My Girl at the Victoria Palace.
Occasionally, he would have to leave earlier than expected and, naïve as she was, three things began to worry her after they had met a few times. First, he had some peculiar opinions – he had a visceral hatred of bankers, which Xanthe thought strange for a Conservative. It also worried her that he never asked her about herself. And third, of course, although he did kiss her somewhat half-heartedly and not very often, he seemed less than fascinated by the idea of getting her into bed.
It was not that she actually intended to or wanted to sleep with him, but there was a recalcitrant part of her that wished he wanted to and was a little affronted that he so clearly did not.
“I know I have nothing of interest for you,” she said, petulantly, as they had tea before an early goodbye at Baker Street Station. She had been a little jaded all evening and was irritated that, even on a Sunday, the Admiralty called. “I can’t imagine why you want to be with me.”
“Ah, Xanthe. You see, you are a human code, and I love codes. It is one of my responsibilities, in fact.”
“I don’t think I’m really that complicated.”
“Well, there you would be wrong. It is quite true that I can’t quite read you, but I nearly can. Do you know why? Because I’m a member of the Anglo-Saxon race and we are pre-eminent in the world when it comes to cracking codes. So I’m close to cracking yours.”
“Really?” said Xanthe hopefully. There were, after all, many things she would have liked to know about herself, feeling she was some way still from cracking her own codes. But Ralph did not expand. Instead, he began to give her a lecture about naval codes and how the British Admiralty had succeeded in cracking the German naval codes in 1914 and had to crack them all over again every night.
“And now? Can they still?”
“Well that, my dear Xanthe, is classified information and I have already told you too much. But I will make a small wager with you. Within a few weeks, I will myself have made a small contribution to the art of code cracking. My lips are sealed until then.”
He reached inside his jacket, pulled out a silver flask and poured himself a generous helping of whisky. Xanthe had never seen him drink so early before.
“Other races can’t do it. I don’t know why it should be but, if you’re British, the whole code world comes easier to you. If you’re American or Jewish or Russian, well good luck to you.”
Had he been drinking all day, she wondered? This seemed to be a whole new arrogance that she had not noticed before.
“All the Jews I’ve met have seemed pretty clever to me.”
His face darkened. “Don’t you believe it. It’s a cleverness that’s entirely concerned with making money, like your own countrypeople – not the Russians, of course. They don’t seem to have the first idea how to make money. Otherwise, it’s a cleverness that drives the great, tyrannical plutocratic machine, this great alien force that moves the markets and puts all the poor people out of work…”
“Heaven’s Ralph,” she said innocently. “You’re beginning to sound like Herr Hitler.”
“Well, I know we are at war and all that, but Herr Hitler, as you put it – I haven’t heard him described like that now for some months – is still right about some things. Part of the tragedy of this war is that we’re in some ways fighting the wrong side. It’s hard to tell isn’t it. The Soviets, the Americans, are also threats to the way the world is.”
“You don’t mean that, do you?”
“No,” he said, as if suddenly coming to. “I don’t mean anything. I’m being a little silly, which is what comes of being tired, and especially tired of my boss.”
*
She was upset when she heard nothing from him for a week. She realised she didn’t even have a telephone number for him. She had an address of course, and – after agonising about the decision for a couple of days – she used it. She wrote to him. She composed a short note apologising for being too forward – she had also agonised about exactly what she should apologise for – and sent it to the House of Commons. There was no reply.
Six weeks later, she saw the letter again, by which time she had come to regret sending it and the memory of Ralph had begun to recede a little from everyday consciousness. Most people don’t expect to be confronted by their little missives begging for some man or other to go back to paying them some attention, especially when there was a war on and their friend is busy organising it. But Xanthe was.
She had been hauled out of an end-of-term exam – where she had been writing about Shakespeare’s morality in Othello – by the long-suffering school secretary, Miss Beale. When she got to her office, there was a man waiting for her in a dirty mackintosh. He looked a little like a child molester who had seen better days.
“Miss Schneider. I am sorry to disturb you from your studies.”
“Oh, no trouble.” She could hear Miss Beale sniff disapprovingly.
“I have a message from you, which I would like to discuss with you on the way.”
“On the way where?”
“To Scotland Yard,” he said, as if the answer was obvious. “I have a car outside.”
Xanthe blanched. “What? Are you saying I’ve done something wrong?”
“I don’t believe so, no, miss, but I’m not at liberty to tell you now. Except to say that I believe the purpose of the meeting is to enlist your help.”
*
She was aware – how could she not be? – of just how scarce petrol was at the time. It unnerved her that they were prepared to spend so much of it just driving her to London, but apparently they were. There was little traffic on the main road through Hertfordshire and, an hour or so later, they were speeding along the Victoria Embankment towards Big Ben.
They turned right just in front of it and a London policeman in a helmet saluted them as they went by. Moments later, Xanthe was being taken upstairs to a cosy office with ancient leather armchairs, a pot of tea and all the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club. It also seemed to be full of people.
Closer inspection revealed that there were only four of them, and none of them seemed very friendly apart from the old gent behind the desk.
“Miss Schneider.” She was announced.
“Come in, come in, Miss Schneider. Please make yourself at home. Would you like some tea? Now these gentlemen have asked if they can, how shall I say, borrow my office for the purposes of meeting you, so I am going to hand you over to them, and I believe Commander Fleming here has some questions for you – that’s right, isn’t it, Fleming?”
“Thank you,” said a tall, aloof-looking man with wavy stripes on the sleeve of his naval uniform. “As my colleague said, my name is Fleming, Commander Fleming, and we are all extremely grateful to you for giving up your time to help us. You’re not a British citizen I understand?”
“I’m American. Could I ask what this is all about? I don’t think I have done anything wrong.”
The old gent gave Xanthe a reassuring nod and it was then that Commander Fleming opened the file in front of him and, with a disdainful air, picked up her letter to Ralph Lancing-Price.
“May I ask, did you write this?”
She got up for a closer look. Her heart sank as she recognised the childish handwriting. She began to shake involuntarily.
“Yes, was it very
wrong of me? Don’t tell me, he’s married or something. I promise not to write again, if that’s the problem.”
“Please don’t upset yourself, my dear,” said the elderly police superintendent whose office they were in. “My colleagues here would like to talk to you about it, that’s all. Mr Liddell here and his colleague have some responsibilities for counter-espionage and I work for a department we know as Special Branch. These are serious matters, but you are not under investigation, I absolutely promise you.”
“We simply want to know how well you knew Mr Lancing-Price,” said Liddell.
She began to tell the story of their somewhat one-way relationship, the first meeting and their conversations since. She told them about their small tiff and how Ralph had failed to contact her again. When she had finished, she was asked to leave the room and, about ten minutes passed as she stood in the corridor, then she was invited back in. Why had they used the past tense about the relationship, she wondered – why did they say “knew” not “know”? Was there something they knew about Ralph that she did not?
“Now, Miss Schneider,” said the old gent. “We have a few questions for you and I would like to ask you to be as honest as you can.”
She nodded uncertainly.
“Did you tell him much about yourself and your plans?” Fleming hardly looked up from his notes.
“Not really. He didn’t seem very interested. He knew I wanted to get into journalism someday. We did talk a little about how I would like to go home – to Cincinnati, I mean.”
“Fine,” said Fleming. “Now, I can’t ask this one delicately. Can you tell me what kind of relations you had with him? I mean sexually.”
Xanthe reddened. The men looked pointedly downwards. “We kissed I think three times. No more.”
“Are you sure?”
“It isn’t the kind of thing a girl forgets.”
Fleming grinned at her for the first time.