He had further narrowed his mind by a considerable amount of travel abroad, where he had again always made his way to the small hotels. He was noticeably clean in his person, and wore high white collars and old-fashioned ties with a tiepin. He wore suits of durable material, coats with high lapels, trousers which did not turn up at the bottom, and elastic-sided boots.
He could make himself agreeable when he wished, and had frequently been known to charm old ladies in the early stages of his acquaintanceship with them, going out of his way to do small services for them. Behind their backs, however, he would speak of them, to fellow-guests or servants, as ‘old frumps’, ‘desiccated spinsters’, and so forth.
Having said ‘Good evening’ and looked at Miss Roach, Mr. Thwaites had nothing more to say at the moment, and no one else in the room spoke as Sheila, the Irish maid-of-all-work, now working as a waitress and dressed as such, hurried about putting plates of soup on the table.
This soup, like the rest of the food, came up on a small service lift hidden behind a screen in a corner of the room. The lift-shaft communicated directly with the kitchen underneath, and conversations frequently took place through this medium between whoever was serving the guests above and whoever was serving the lift below – enquiries, comments, and sometimes remarks of a censorious nature being hurled down from above in the hearing of the guests, and appropriate rejoinders from below feebly making their way to the surface amidst the rumbling of the lift. In the long pauses, when no one was talking, the guests listened, in a hypnotised way, to these back-stage noises and manœuvres.
Soon after Mr. Thwaites had started upon his soup – which he always sprinkled, first of all with lumps of bread, and then with pepper, with a vigour and single-mindedness which displeased Miss Roach – he opened the conversation.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘Your friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves as usual,’ and oh God, thought Miss Roach, not that again, not that again.
5
Miss Roach’s ‘friends’ – according to Mr. Thwaites – were the Russian people, and Mr. Thwaites did not like or approve of these people at all. Indeed, it would not be exaggerating to say that the resistance and victories of the Russian people in the last year had practically ruined this man’s peace of mind – a state of affairs which was aggravated bitterly by the fact that he was unable fully to vent his mind upon the matter in public.
Mr. Thwaites had since 1939 slowly learned to swallow the disgrace of Hitler, of whom he had been from the beginning, and still secretly remained, a hot disciple. He could now even force himself to speak disparagingly of Hitler: but to speak well of the Russians was too much for him. He could not mention them save gloweringly, defensively, almost savagely. He had also undergone the misfortune of capturing Moscow and Leningrad within three weeks of the outbreak of the war, and so his boarding-house sagacity had been struck at along with his personal feelings.
Actually the Russians were not in any very particular sense Miss Roach’s ‘friends’. Miss Roach was too completely bewildered, stunned, and unhappy in regard to all that was happening in the world around her for this to be so. But Miss Roach sometimes brought back literary political weeklies from London, and had been foolish enough to leave them about in the Lounge, and this, in the eyes of Mr. Thwaites, was in itself a diseased and obscurely Russian thing to do. He had therefore come practically to identify Russia with Miss Roach; and in the same way as Russia gnawed at him, he gnawed at Miss Roach.
Miss Roach now tried to dodge his fury, to apologise, in so far as it was possible, for the present state of affairs on the Eastern Front, by smiling, making a vaguely assenting and agreeable noise in her throat, and looking hard and giddily at her soup. But Mr. Thwaites was not the sort of man who would permit you to look at your soup when he was anxious to talk about the Russians.
‘I said,’ he said, looking at her, ‘your friends seem to be mightily distinguishing themselves, as usual.’
‘Who’re my friends?’ murmured Miss Roach, and she was, of course, aware that the rest of the room was listening intently. Sitting at the same table with Mr. Thwaites, and having him talk at you directly, was very much like being called out in front of class at school.
‘Your Russian friends,’ said Mr. Thwaites, who was never afraid of coming to the point. There was a pause.
‘They’re not my friends . . .’ said Miss Roach, wrig-glingly, intending to convey that although she was friendly enough to the Russians, she was not more friendly than anybody else, and could not therefore be expected to take all the blame in the Rosamund Tea Rooms for their recent victories. But this was too subtle for Mr. Thwaites.
‘What do you mean,’ he said, ‘they’re not your friends?’
‘Well,’ said Miss Roach, ‘they’re not my friends any more than anybody else.’ And here Mrs. Barratt came to her rescue, as she often did.
‘Well,’ said Mrs. Barratt. ‘You must admit they’re putting up a wonderful fight, Mr. Thwaites.’
Mrs. Barratt was a grey-haired, stoutish, pince-nezed, slow-moving woman of about sixty-five, with an unhappy and pallid appearance which probably derived from the preoccupation which secretly dominated her life – a pre-occupation in pills, medicines and remedies for minor internal complaints – for indigestion, constipation, acidity, liver, rheumatism – as advertised in the daily newspapers and elsewhere. An elderly believer in magic, with passion yet patience she sought and sought for ideal remedies, without ever finding what she sought, but without ever a thought of abandoning her quest. Mrs. Barratt’s eyes, behind her enlarging pince-nez, bore, if one could but see it, the wan, indefatigable, midnight-oil look of one who yet had faith in the Philosopher’s Stone of the sedentary sufferer inside. She gave her mind over to research, and her body over to endless experiment upon herself. No new advertisement in the paper, with a fresh angle, approach, or appeal, ever escaped her close inspection, nor did any article ‘By a Doctor’ or ‘By a Harley Street Specialist’. She grew iller and iller – an ageing, eerie product of the marriage between modern commercial methods and modern medicine. Her outward behaviour was, however, entirely normal, and the Rosamund Tea Rooms had no knowledge of the influences which in fact dominated her life, though it noticed the many different pills and patent foods which appeared from time to time upon her table. She had a kind heart and now came to the rescue of Miss Roach.
‘Oh yes,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘They’re putting up a fight all right.’
And the savage and sombre way in which he said this suggested that they were not putting up a fight as other and decent people would, or that they were only doing so because they jolly well had to, or that their motives were of a kind which he did not care to make public.
‘You know,’ said Mrs. Barratt, ‘I don’t think you really like the Russians, Mr. Thwaites. I don’t think you realise what they’re doing for us.’
‘No,’ said Miss Roach, taking heart, ‘I don’t believe he does.’
Mr. Thwaites was momentarily taken aback by this unexpected resistance, and there was a pause in which his eyes went glassy.
‘Ah,’ he said at last. ‘Don’t I? . . . Don’t I? . . . Well, perhaps I don’t . . . Maybe I thinks more than I says. Maybe I has my private views . . .’
Oh God, thought Miss Roach, now he was beginning his ghastly I-with-the-third-person business. As if bracing herself for a blow (as she looked at the tablecloth), she waited for more, and more came.
‘I Keeps my Counsel,’ said Mr. Thwaites, in his slow treacly voice. ‘Like the Wise Old Owl, I Sits and Keeps my Counsel.’
Miss Roach, shuddering under this agonisingly Thwaitesian remark – Thwaitesian in the highest and richest tradition – knew well enough that there was more to follow. For it was a further defect of Mr. Thwaites that when he had made a remark which he thought good, which he himself subtly realised as being Thwaitesian, he was unable to resist repeating it, either in an inverted or a slightly altered form. He did not fail to do so on this
occasion.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I Keeps my Counsel, like the Wise Old Bird . . . I Happens to keep my Counsel . . . I Happens to be like the Wise Old Bird . . .’
And in the silence that followed, broken only by the scraping of soup-spoons on plates, the whole room, with all its occupants, seemed to have to tremble in hushed reverence before the totally unforeseen and awful Bird which had materialised in its midst – its wisdom and unearthly reticence . . . Miss Roach guessed that honour was now satisfied, and that this would be enough. It was not, however, enough. With Mr. Thwaites nothing was ever enough.
‘I Hay ma Doots, that’s all . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘I Hay ma Doots . . .’
(He is not, thought Miss Roach, going to add ‘as the Scotchman said,’ is he? Surely he is not going to add ‘as the Scotchman said’?)
‘As the Scotchman said,’ said Mr. Thwaites. ‘Yes . . . I Hay ma Doots, as the Scotchman said – of Yore . . .’
(Only Mr. Thwaites, Miss Roach realised, could, as it were, have out-Thwaited Thwaites and brought ‘of Yore’ from the bag like that.)
The room, which had by this time finished its soup, maintained its stupefied silence – a silence permeated and oppressed, of course, by the knowledge that Mr. Thwaites, in regard to the Russians, kept his counsel like the wise old bird, and hayed his doots as the Scotchman said of yore. If he had nothing else, Mr. Thwaites had personality in a dining-room. The maid went round quietly removing the soup-plates . . .
‘Ah, Wheel . . .’ said Mr. Thwaites, philosophically, and by some curious process of association identifying himself with the Scotchman of yore whom he had quoted. ‘Ah, Wheel . . .’
And again, as the maid replaced the soup-plates with the plates of warm spam and mashed potatoes, the room seemed to have to echo reverently Mr. Thwaites’ ‘Ah, Wheel’, and to be bathing in the infinite Scottish acumen with which it had been uttered.
‘Oh, well,’ said Mr. Thwaites a little later, briskly returning to his own race and language, and with a note of challenge, ‘we’ll all be equal soon, no doubt.’
This, clearly, was another stab at the Russians. The Russians, in Mr. Thwaites’ embittered vision, were undoubtedly perceived as being ‘all equal’, and so if the Germans went on retreating westward (and if Miss Roach went on approving of it and doing nothing about it) before long we should, all of us, be ‘all equal’.
‘My Lady’s Maid,’ continued Mr. Thwaites, ‘will soon be giving orders to My Lady. And Milord will be Polishing the Pot-boy’s boots.’
Failing to see that he had already over-reached himself in anticipating very far from equal conditions, Mr. Thwaites went on.
‘The Cabby,’ he said, resignedly, ‘will take it unto himself to give the orders, I suppose – and the pantry-boy tell us how to proceed on our ways.’
Still no one had anything to say, and Mr. Thwaites, now carried away both by his own vision and his own style, went on to portray a state of society such as might have recommended itself to the art of the surrealist, or appeared in the dreams of an opium-smoker.
‘The Coalman, no doubt, will see fit to give commands to the King,’ he said, ‘and the Navvy lord it gaily o’er the man of wealth. The Banker will bow the knee to the Crossing-Sweeper, I expect, and the millionaire take his wages from the passing Tramp.’
And there was yet another silence as Mr. Thwaites gazed into the distance seeking further luxuriant images. He had, however, now exhausted himself on this head, and for half a minute one could hear only the clatter of knives and forks upon plates. . .
‘The Lord Forefend,’ said Mr. Thwaites, at last. ‘The Lord, in His grace, Forefend . . .’
And Miss Roach had a fleeting hope in her heart that, with this little prayer, the discussion, or rather monologue, might be terminated. But Mr. Thwaites, suddenly aware of the quietness which had for so long surrounded him, and sensing, perhaps, that it was a little too heavy to be wholly applauding, looked around him and did not hesitate to throw down the gauntlet.
‘At least,’ he said, looking straight at Miss Roach, ‘that’s what you want, isn’t it?’
Miss Roach, putting food into her mouth, now gave as clever an imitation as she was able of one who was not being looked at at all, but knew how futile such an endeavour was.
‘I gather that’s what you want,’ said Mr. Thwaites, ‘isn’t it?’
This was the whole trouble. It was always she who had to bear the brunt, she who had to be made the whipping-boy in public for his private furies and chagrins.
‘No,’ she said, her voice insecure with humiliation and anger, ‘it’s not what I want, Mr. Thwaites.’
‘Oh,’ said Mr. Thwaites, ‘isn’t it? That’s funny. I thought it was.’
Here Miss Steele, who sat at a table by herself, behind Miss Roach but in view of Mr. Thwaites, took a turn at helping her out.
Miss Steele was a thin, quiet woman of about sixty, who used rouge and powder somewhat heavily, whose white, frizzy, well-kept hair had the appearance of being, without being, a wig, and whose whole manner gave the impression of her having had, without her having had, a past. Miss Steele affected infinite shrewd worldly wisdom acquired in this imaginary past, reticence in conversation (she prided herself that she ‘never opened her mouth unless she had something to say’), and the spirit of modernity generally. She was careful to avow at all times her predilection for ‘fun’, for ‘cocktails’, for ‘broadmindedness’, for those who in common with her were ‘cursed’ with a sense of humour, and for the company of young people as opposed to ‘old fogies’ like herself. But she had, in fact, little fun, no cocktails, and no company younger than that furnished by the Rosamund Tea Rooms. She was also advanced in the matter of culture, for she had ‘no time for modern novels’. Instead she read endless Boots’ biographies of historical characters, and was, in fact, a historian. This came in handy, for if you ‘happened to know a little something about History’, you were able to compare present events with those in the past, and roughly see how things would be going in the future. All this, of course, made Mr. Thwaites furious, and he would have used her as the Rosamund Tea Rooms whipping-boy had he not been a little afraid of her and had he not already fixed upon Miss Roach. Behind her not unpitiful and not uncourageous little shams, Miss Steele had, like Mrs. Barratt, a kind and sensible heart.
‘Well,’ said Miss Steele, ‘there’s a lot to be said on both sides, really, isn’t there, Mr. Thwaites?’
‘What?’ said Mr. Thwaites, and was so surprised by this second attack from outside that for the moment he could say nothing. Then he added: ‘Oh yes, there is. On all sides.’
‘After all,’ said Miss Steele, ‘it’s the younger generation that’s got to decide, isn’t it? It always was that way, and it always will be, won’t it?’
Thus, with a clever mixture of the spirit of modernity and the wisdom of history, Miss Steele brought down two birds with one stone, and Mr. Thwaites was practically knocked out.
‘Ah well, we shall see,’ was all he could manage.
But Miss Roach again guessed that he had not done yet, and she was again right.
All at once she saw his eyes shoot over to the other side of the room in the direction of the two American Lieutenants, who had so far been too shy to speak a word, even to each other.
‘I wonder,’ he said, ‘what our Friends across the Water think about it all. What?’
And he fixed them with a horrible sort of ogling and encouraging eye.
This was too hideous – Miss Roach felt she would rather be attacked herself. Not content with disgracing the Rosamund Tea Rooms, he was now going to disgrace his country as well.
‘I wonder,’ said Mr. Thwaites, having had no answer, ‘what our Democratic friends from across the Atlantic think about it all – our redoubtable friends from across the Pond – the Lil Ole Pond – eh?’
There was yet another ghastly pause – the ghastliest yet. Always, with Mr. Thwaites, the pauses got ghastlier and ghastlier. Th
en one of the Americans, the bigger of the two, could just be heard murmuring that he reckoned he agreed with the lady, there was a whole lot to be said both ways . . .
‘What?’ said Mr. Thwaites, who had not heard what was said. But the big American would not repeat himself.
‘The Whale of a Problem,’ said Mr. Thwaites, considerately assuming what he assumed to be the idiom of those to whom he was addressing himself. ‘What?’
But the American still would not speak, and at this point things were made easier by Sheila beginning to remove the empty plates of spam and mashed potatoes, and replacing them with plates of steamed pudding and custard.
He will certainly, in a moment, say ‘Say, Bo’ or ‘Waal, Bo’, thought Miss Roach, for he hardly ever failed to do this when imitating American speech, or talking about Americans. But this time he did not do exactly what she feared. Instead, he paused a long while, and then came out with something which even she could not have foreseen.
‘The Almighty Dollar,’ said Mr. Thwaites, weightily, out of the blue, and in a measured tone . . . That, and nothing else.
It was not easy to see exactly what Mr. Thwaites intended to establish by this – not easy, that is to say, for one who was not acquainted with the workings of his wild and circuitous mentality. To one so acquainted, however, his meaning was fairly clear. He meant Americans in general. He had been put into the presence of Americans: it therefore seemed to him his business, as master and spokesman of the boarding-house, to sum up and characterise America, and in this way he summed it up and characterised it.
And here it seemed that he was conscious of having found perfect expression for the perfect thought, for he said no more.
And because Mr. Thwaites said no more, the atmosphere in which pins could be heard dropping returned to the room, and no one else dared to say any more. Ruminatively, dully, around the heavy thoughts set in motion by Mr. Thwaites, the heavy steamed pudding was eaten.
Miss Steele was the first to rise and leave, stealing from the room with her Life of Katherine Parr under her arm.
The Slaves of Solitude Page 4