A View of the Empire at Sunset

by Caryl Phillips

  The bus deposited her a short walk from her rooming house on Torrington Square, but not having an umbrella, she bent her head and leaned forward into the spiteful London wind so that she could see only her feet and a few yards of pavement ahead of her. She cradled the small ribboned box under her arm, tucking it away as best she could to protect it from the now lashing downpour, and she could feel the bitter cold beginning to sting her face. Whenever she heard a pair of footsteps, she looked up to make sure that she was avoiding a collision, but inevitably the person had already seen her and was moving out of her path. Once she reached the house, she scampered upstairs as quickly as possible so that she might shun having to engage with any of the residents who, during this time of war, appeared to be a strange assemblage of Continental transients and strays hiding out in London—but from what or whom she could never be sure. And truthfully, was she that dissimilar to them? During the week she worked at a canteen near Euston Station serving soldiers and other lost souls, and in the evenings she would unhappily slouch back to her room and wait. But for what? For the war to end, of course, but would it ever end? And the longer it went on, the more she felt trapped in England.

  She closed the door to her room and put the box of cake down on the sideboard. She was too tired to lay a fire, and so she would have to move briskly. She slipped out of her damp shoes and then hung her sodden coat on the back of the door. Then she stepped clear of her best skirt and unbuttoned her blouse before sitting and peeling off her stockings. Her old dressing gown lay corpse-like across the bed where she had left it this morning, so she picked it up and belted it around herself and then emptied the contents of the ceramic jug into the tin basin and cupped the icy water to her face. She was safe now, back in her room, and unless one of the eccentrics knocked at her door and tried to persuade her to come downstairs for dinner, she was comfortably beyond human intercourse for the remainder of the evening.

  She stared out of the window as the rain intensified, and she thought of all that had happened on this strangest of Saturdays. She had deliberately woken late, as though keen to bypass the day that lay ahead of her, and then she dressed slowly and attempted to time her exit from Torrington Square so that she might dodge any prying eyes, for the bonnet she was wearing was bound to leave her susceptible to unwanted questions. She found the church easily enough and took up a seat in the rearmost pew on the side that looked as though it belonged to Mabel’s family and guests. Then she fidgeted as she waited. She could see the back of two dozen heads and guessed that some of them were stage girls, but she had long ago left that world behind and so she knew that it was unlikely that any of the girls would be familiar to her. After migrating to Australia, Ethel had written her a peach of a letter telling her all about her new husband, who owned a travelling circus, and so there was only Mabel left to remind her of what she once was. And then the music dropped full-on, deep disturbing organ chords which announced something ominous was about to transpire. All about her, people rustled to their feet, and so she did, too. The matronly woman next to her was wearing an extravagant hat set off with a peacock feather, and she watched her neighbour lean forward and pick up a hymn book and raise her voice together with the rest of the congregation. But why were they singing a hymn? Surely the bride was supposed to walk up the aisle to just music, but because she’d never before been invited to a wedding, she couldn’t be sure. Then Mabel passed her by dressed in a white satin gown with a lace veil, and she could see that her friend was leaning on the arm of an older man who she assumed was Mabel’s father. Mabel looked uncertain, but her father seemed proud, and the people continued to sing their hymn, and then Mabel reached the altar, where a man named Billy was waiting for her, a man to whom her friend had never introduced her, for, according to the note that Mabel had scribbled on the back of the invitation, everything had happened really fast.

  * * *

  The fellow was attempting to eat a piece of cake with a fork. “Have you ever ridden in a motorcar? Another year or two and I’ll have one for myself.”

  She stared at the ruddy-faced clown who had followed her down the nave and then out into the cold and around the back of the church to the hall in which the wedding reception was to be held. How clever this chap must think he is, talking to Mabel’s peculiar friend and attempting to work out if he is in with a chance. She ignored him and peeked over at Mabel, who was trying to mingle with her guests and appear happy in the large draughty hall. But Mabel didn’t seem happy, and she wondered if perhaps an unwelcome baby was on the way. She observed her friend closely as she continued to whisk her way around the hall with a smile stitched to her face, and then she came to rest by Billy’s side and touched her husband’s arm as though keen to indicate that this man meant everything to her.

  “Hey, you’re not listening to me, are you?”

  She blinked at the fellow, unsure of what exactly he expected her to say.

  “I asked you if I could call on you, but if it’s not convenient, then just say so. It’s not nice to keep a chap hanging on like this.”

  She looked closely at the man, and then across at a beaming Mabel, then back at her admirer.

  “Listen, wee lassie, you should go home. I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you don’t seem well. But don’t forget to pick up your little box of cake. Nice touch, don’t you think. Typical of our Billy to think of every last detail.”

  * * *

  It had stopped raining now, but she continued to sit in her old dressing gown and stare out of the window and down into Torrington Square. Mabel had tried to persuade her to stay (“There’s plenty of interesting blokes here besides Billy’s big brother”), but she told her friend that she had a headache. (“Well, I expect to see you after the honeymoon. Billy’s taking me all the way to Scotland. It’s where his folks are from.”) It was some time now since Mabel had wistfully announced that she was putting aside her hopes of enticing a wealthy “sugar.” (“Let’s be honest, I’m turning blousy, and when the petals start to fall off the rose, the bees don’t come around anymore.”) Today her friend Mabel had snagged a modest type of fellow, and she was pleased for Mabel, while having no aspiration of her own to be similarly encumbered. Mabel now had a husband, and she in turn had a little box of cake, and earlier in the day she had given Mabel a hug and then dashed off to try and find a bus back to town, where she knew she would have to change at Piccadilly Circus.

  She pulled the dressing gown even closer and realized that she should withdraw from her seat by the window and climb into bed and try to keep warm before she caught a cold. She knows that Mabel isn’t coming back from Scotland. Why would she? Mabel has willingly costumed herself in a white dress and veil in exchange for the guarantee of an escape route. As she turned over in the icy envelope of the bedsheets, she tried to feel pleased for Mabel, but she worried that Mabel’s brother-in-law might well be representative of Mabel’s new family, and if this proved to be the case, then she feared for her friend’s future happiness.

  37

  The Great War

  After weeks of scouring the notices in newspapers, she eventually secured a job near Euston Station and started serving food and drink to men returning from the horrors on the Continent. These were truly broken men who lined up before her, and any temptation to wallow in self-pity over her post-chorus-girl years of drinking and ill-chosen men seemed inappropriate. For many of these gallant soldiers shuffling towards her counter, death on the field of battle might have been a benevolent gift. Having dragged themselves back home she guessed that a great number of the men had now discovered themselves adrift among family and friends who no longer recognized them, nor did they know what to do with these ghostly apparitions. The men smiled pluckily when the bashful lady handed them a bread roll and a cup of tea, but she wasn’t fooled by either their civility or the bulky confidence of their brown greatcoats, for she knew that beneath their buttoned shrouds of rough wool these men were skin and bone and the occasional charitable “meal” w
asn’t going to help. Just what actions had they witnessed that caused these young souls to wear such looks of abject bewilderment? Having eaten, some of them could barely manage to drag themselves to their feet and leave, while others finished their tea and bread and then grabbed another roll and scooted for the door as though ashamed to be seen taking handouts of any kind. Some few, of course, had never fought in the war and were simply down on their luck and drifting around fogbound London when they happened upon the canteen by good fortune, but uniformed or not, neither she nor the other women made any distinction once a weary man stepped through the door in search of food and drink and a temporary respite from the late-autumn chill.

  Her rooming house was crowded with refugees from every corner of Europe. On the evening that Monsieur Lenglet visited, she instantaneously noticed his stiff white collar and tie, and his handsome dark eyes, and the unkempt hair that swept down across his forehead betrayed the fact that it was unlikely he had ever seen the front. He sat near the head of the dining table and spoke softly in French, but every time she looked up, the confident stranger was staring in her direction, and long before he eventually turned to her she knew that he would find an excuse to address her. Would she perhaps be able to join him for lunch tomorrow at a Soho restaurant with which he was familiar? English people seemed to dislike her voice and so she had long accustomed herself to speaking in a whisper, but this meant that her words were often lost in the welter of noise generated by competing conversations. He asked her again, displaying quiet elegance in a language that was not his own, and this time she nodded as she answered “Yes,” but she was careful to make sure that their eyes did not meet.

  The following evening they sat together at the Caf é Royal and stared out of the window at the elegant sweep of a busy Regent Street. As they did so, the waiter removed the cold ornamental plates that boasted the restaurant’s name and replaced them with marginally larger warm plates that lacked decoration of any kind. Their silences were long but never ungraceful, and she liked the fact that this foreigner felt under no obligation to entertain her with sweetly dealt words. In fact, he behaved towards her as though women were to be admired as opposed to desired, and a man had never before appeared to simply delight in her company. Lunch had been easy. He had waited patiently for her in a shop doorway, and only when she came into view did he step forward and offer his arm and gently guide her into the dimly lit Soho restaurant, where he finally asked her, “Are you English?” She paused and lowered her eyes. “Well, I suppose I’ve tried to be, but no.” After lunch she strolled along Piccadilly on the well-favoured man’s arm, and he bought her cigarettes, scent, and powder, and then said he thought her wise to have renounced the stage, for it was beneath her. He then enquired if she might be available for dinner.

  The waiter placed the dessert tray on the table in front of them, and only after the attentive man withdrew did she begin to tell Monsieur Lenglet about Aunt Clarice. Over pre-dinner cocktails he had asked about her family, and unsure how to respond, she had changed the subject in the hope that the business of ordering food and wine might deflect his attention away from this topic. However, now that they had reached the culmination of their meal, she felt comfortable enough to speak a little of her Aunt Clarice, whom she summed up as “disapproving.” Having shared this information, she quickly moved on and told him that after arriving in England she had been relentlessly teased by the girls at her school. As she spoke she could see a cloud of hurt descending across her new friend’s face, as though it was he who had been the victim of the schoolgirl bullying. He reached across the table and took both of her hands in his own, and then he paused as though unable to comprehend that such cruelty might exist in the world. “I am so sorry, but now I understand why you appear to be so frightened. These girls, they really hurt you, didn’t they?” She had never thought of her eighteen months as a schoolgirl in Cambridge as possessing any real significance, partly because so much unhappiness had been visited upon her during her subsequent years in London. “Yes,” she said, her voice faltering slightly. “I think it was difficult, but once I left the Perse School and came to London and started at Mr. Tree’s Academy of Dramatic Art, I soon forgot all about the girls.”

  Monsieur Lenglet let go of her hands and sat back in his chair and looked at her as though he had never before met such a creature. Although she was unsure of what he was thinking, it was suddenly clear to her that this mysterious but nevertheless charming man seated across from her represented the possibility of an escape to some kind of a future. On each evening of the same week he escorted her to dinner, where by degrees she learned a little more about his past. He told her that he was fluent in at least four languages and that he had been sent by the French government into Germany. But to what purpose? she wondered. The Germans were the enemy. She listened and he talked, and even when the impossibly expensive dinners ceased and were replaced by long evenings at her rooming house with a bottle or two of red wine, she continued to listen diligently. One night they charged out into the first sprinkling of snow and stood together in the cobbled courtyard behind the house like guests who had turned up late for a party. When he asked if she might consider crossing the Channel and joining him on the Continent once this damn strife finally came to an end, she felt able to whisper, “Yes.” However, later that night it occurred to her, join who exactly? All she really knew was that this man’s past seemed to lead to the muddy crossroads of Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, and France, and he spoke cautiously to her out of the hodgepodge of his many languages. Obviously he had a history, but nobody at the Torrington Square house seemed able, or willing, to assist her in understanding what it might be, although she had gleaned that he bought and sold things that she suspected were not always his to sell. But did it really matter? Her life in England had now been reduced to a job in a canteen near Euston Station spooning out rations to the unfortunate and the afflicted. She turned over in bed and looked out through the uncurtained window at the black starless sky, and once again she asked herself, did it really matter that she knew practically nothing about this strange Monsieur Lenglet, who had offered her no blandishments and, unlike the others, did not appear to be in a hurry to try and make his tongue gambol in her mouth.

  38

  A Modern Marriage

  The train ceases its rattling march and slows down as they near the Gare du Nord. As it does so, she presses her face up against the window. Where is the world of wide, inviting boulevards populated by fashionable Parisians? Where are the garrulous French bohemians who choose to sit at splendid sidewalk caf és drinking coffee and liqueurs, as opposed to hiding themselves away in pubs? Nearly a year after the armistice, the fa çades of some buildings remain boarded up; brickwork appears to be pockmarked and she can see many broken windows. As the train eases its way into the station accompanied by an ominous metal grating, she stares at the flurry of itinerant soldiers and scurrying vendors and keen-eyed porters. After five months in Holland she understands that, for better or worse, this is now her world. Her slumbering husband continues to breathe with a hoarse regularity that she worries might thicken into a snore, and so she leans forward and gently pushes him awake. Monsieur Lenglet rubs a hand across his face and seems distracted, as though momentarily trying to remember her. Is it possible, she wonders, that she might well be participating in a modern marriage: attachment and detachment at one and the same time?

  She steps down onto the platform, clutching her brown valise, and scans the disembarking passengers to her left and right. A barrel-shaped man in a purple gown, with slippers to match, gestures with his little finger towards a pile of luggage that he expects a bemused porter to convey for him. The flamboyant man smokes a cigarette with a filter, and she can see that the thin sheen of perspiration on his brow will eventually cause his makeup to run. She gazes at her tired husband, who seems to be affecting boredom with this chaotic foreign terminus. No doubt her Aunt Clarice would have pursed her lips and without any words made i
t clear that this alien was exactly the type of untrustworthy dawdler she anticipated her twenty-nine-year-old niece would end up with. Lenglet throws down his cigarette and smiles at her and tries to simulate an ease with the scene, although she suspects that her husband’s immediate impulse is to get back on the train and escape this furor.

  “You need to rest.” He gently touches her pregnant stomach, then he steps back and takes her in from head to toe. “And we will have to get you some Parisian clothes.”

  But the city would have to accept her as she is, for experience has already taught her that making any kind of effort never seems to result in anything but disappointment.

  “Won’t you look at me?” He lifts her chin with his index finger. “You’re supposed to be happy now.” She gives him her eyes and then bursts into laughter, a habit which creates pockets of awkwardness which she knows Lenglet finds difficult to abide. And then she attempts to hide behind her nonexistent mane of hair. Her husband has already accused her of looking at him as though she has gone back to her childhood, but why not go back to a time when she was relatively content?