Twice a week Linda worked in a Red bookshop. It was run by a huge, perfectly silent comrade, called Boris. Boris liked to get drunk from Thursday afternoon, which was closing day in that district, to Monday morning, so Linda said she would take it over on Friday and Saturday. An extraordinary transformation would then occur. The books and tracts which mouldered there month after month, getting damper and dustier until at last they had to be thrown away, were hurried into the background, and their place taken by Linda’s own few but well-loved favourites. Thus for Whither British Airways? was substituted Around the World in Forty Days, Karl Marx, the Formative Years was replaced by The Making of a Marchioness, and The Giant of the Kremlin by Diary of a Nobody, while A Challenge to Coal-Owners made way for King Solomon’s Mines.
Hardly would Linda have arrived in the morning on her days there, and taken down the shutters, than the slummy little street would fill with motor cars, headed by Lord Merlin’s electric brougham. Lord Merlin did great propaganda for the shop, saying that Linda was the only person who had ever succeeded in finding him Froggie’s Little Brother and Le Père Goriot. The chatters came back in force, delighted to find Linda so easily accessible again, and without Christian, but sometimes there were embarrassing moments when they came face to face with comrades. Then they would buy a book and beat a hasty retreat, all except Lord Merlin, who had never felt disconcerted in his life. He took a perfectly firm line with the comrades.
‘How are you today?’ he would say with great emphasis, and then glower furiously at them until they left the shop.
All this had an excellent effect upon the financial side of the business. Instead of showing, week by week, an enormous loss, to be refunded from one could guess where, it now became the only Red bookshop in England to make a profit. Boris was greatly praised by his employers, the shop received a medal, which was stuck upon the sign, and the comrades all said that Linda was a good girl and a credit to the Party.
The rest of her time was spent in keeping house for Christian and the comrades, an occupation which entailed trying to induce a series of maids to stay with them, and making sincere, but sadly futile, efforts to take their place when they had left, which they usually did at the end of the first week. The comrades were not very nice or very thoughtful to maids.
‘You know, being a Conservative is much more restful,’ Linda said to me once in a moment of confidence, when she was being unusually frank about her life, ‘though one must remember that it is bad, not good. But it does take place within certain hours, and then finish, whereas Communism seems to eat up all one’s life and energy. And the comrades are such Hons, but sometimes they make me awfully cross, just as Tony used to make one furious when he talked about the workers. I often feel rather the same when they talk about us – you see, just like Tony, they’ve got it all wrong. I’m all for them stringing up Sir Leicester, but if they started on Aunt Emily and Davey, or even on Fa, I don’t think I could stand by and watch. I suppose one is neither fish, nor good red herring, that’s the worst of it.’
‘But there is a difference,’ I said, ‘between Sir Leicester and Uncle Matthew.’
‘Well, that’s what I’m always trying to explain. Sir Leicester grubs up his money in London, goodness knows how, but Fa gets it from his land, and he puts a great deal back into the land, not only money, but work. Look at all the things he does for no pay – all those boring meetings. County Council, J.P., and so on. And he’s a good landlord, he takes trouble. You see, the comrades don’t know the country – they didn’t know you could get a lovely cottage with a huge garden for 2s. 6d. a week until I told them, and then they hardly believed it. Christian knows, but he says the system is wrong, and I expect it is.’
‘What exactly does Christian do?’ I said.
‘Oh, everything you can think of. Just at the moment he’s writing a book on famine – goodness! it’s sad – and there’s a dear little Chinese comrade who comes and tells him what famine is like, you never saw such a fat man in your life.’
I laughed.
Linda said, hurriedly and guiltily:
‘Well, I may seem to laugh at the comrades, but at least one does know they are doing good not harm, and not living on other people’s slavery like Sir Leicester, and really you know I do simply love them, though I sometimes wish they were a little more fond of chatting, and not quite so sad and earnest and down on everybody.’
15
Early in 1939, the population of Catalonia streamed over the Pyrenees into the Roussillon, a poor and little-known province of France, which now, in a few days, found itself inhabited by more Spaniards than Frenchmen. Just as the lemmings suddenly pour themselves in a mass suicide off the coast of Norway, knowing neither whence they come nor whither bound, so great is the compulsion that hurls them into the Atlantic, thus half a million men, women, and children suddenly took flight into the bitter mountain weather, without pausing for thought. It was the greatest movement of population, in the time it took, that had ever hitherto been seen. Over the mountains they found no promised land; the French government, vacillating in its policy, neither turned them back with machine-guns at the frontier, nor welcomed them as brothers-in-arms against Fascism. It drove them like a herd of beasts down to the cruel salty marshes of that coast, enclosed them, like a herd of beasts, behind barbed-wire fences, and forgot all about them.
Christian, who had always, I think, had a half-guilty feeling about not having fought in Spain, immediately rushed off to Perpignan to see what was happening, and what, if anything, could be done. He wrote an endless series of reports, memoranda, articles, and private letters about the conditions he had found in the camps, and then settled down to work in an office financed by various English humanitarians with the object of improving the camps, putting refugee families in touch again, and getting as many as possible out of France. This office was run by a young man who had lived many years in Spain called Robert Parker. As soon as it became clear that there would not be, as at first was expected, an outbreak of typhus, Christian sent for Linda to join him in Perpignan.
It so happened that Linda had never before been abroad in her life. Tony had found all his pleasures, hunting, shooting, and golf, in England, and had grudged the extra days out of his holiday which would have been spent in travelling; while it would never have occurred to the Alconleighs to visit the Continent for any other purpose than that of fighting. Uncle Matthew’s four years in France and Italy between 1914 and 1918 had given him no great opinion of foreigners.
‘Frogs,’ he would say, ‘are slightly better than Huns or Wops, but abroad is unutterably bloody and foreigners are fiends.’
The bloodiness of abroad, the fiendishness of foreigners had, in fact, become such a tenet of the Radlett family creed that Linda set forth on her journey with no little trepidation. I went to see her off at Victoria, she was looking intensely English in her long blond mink coat, the Tatler under her arm, and Lord Merlin’s morocco dressing-case, with a canvas cover, in her hand.
‘I hope you have sent your jewels to the bank,’ I said.
‘Oh, darling, don’t tease, you know how I haven’t got any now. But my money,’ she said with a self-conscious giggle, ‘is sewn into my stays. Fa rang up and begged me to, and I must say it did seem quite an idea. Oh, why aren’t you coming? I do feel so terrified – think of sleeping in the train, all alone.’
‘Perhaps you won’t be alone,’ I said. ‘Foreigners are greatly given, I believe, to rape.’
‘Yes, that would be nice, so long as they didn’t find my stays. Oh, we are off – good-bye, darling, do think of me,’ she said, and, clenching her suède-covered fist, she shook it out of the window in a Communist salute.
I must explain that I know everything that now happened to Linda, although I did not see her for another year, because afterwards, as will be shown, we spent a long quiet time together, during which she told it all to me, over and over again. It was her way of re
-living happiness.
Of course the journey was an enchantment to her. The porters in their blue overalls, the loud, high conversations, of which, although she thought she knew French quite well, she did not understand a single word, the steamy, garlic-smelling heat of the French train, the delicious food, to which she was summoned by a little hurried bell, it was all from another world, like a dream.
She looked out of the window and saw chateaux, lime avenues, ponds, and villages exactly like those in the Bibliothèque Rose – she thought she must, at any moment, see Sophie in her white dress and unnaturally small black pumps cutting up goldfish, gorging herself on new bread and cream, or scratching the face of good, uncomplaining Paul. Her very stilted, very English French, got her across Paris and into the train for Perpignan without a hitch. Paris. She looked out of the window at the lighted dusky streets, and thought that never could any town have been so hauntingly beautiful.
A strange stray thought came into her head that, one day, she would come back here and be very happy, but she knew that it was not likely, Christian would never want to live in Paris. Happiness and Christian were still linked together in her mind at this time.
At Perpignan she found him in a whirl of business. Funds had been raised, a ship had been chartered, and plans were on foot for sending six thousand Spaniards out of the camps to Mexico. This entailed an enormous amount of staff work, as families (no Spaniard would think of moving without his entire family) had to be reunited from camps all over the place, assembled in a camp in Perpignan, and taken by train to the port of Cette, whence they finally embarked. The work was greatly complicated by the fact that Spanish husbands and wives do not share a surname. Christian explained all this to Linda almost before she was out of the train; he gave her an absent-minded peck on the forehead and rushed her to his office, hardly giving her time to deposit her luggage at an hotel on the way and scouting the idea that she might like a bath. He did not ask how she was or whether she had had a good journey – Christian always assumed that people were all right unless they told him to the contrary, when, except in the case of destitute, coloured, oppressed, leprous, or otherwise unattractive strangers, he would take absolutely no notice. He was really only interested in mass wretchedness, and never much cared for individual cases, however genuine their misery, while the idea that it is possible to have three square meals a day and a roof and yet be unhappy or unwell, seemed to him intolerable nonsense.
The office was a large shed with a yard round it. This yard was permanently full of refugees with mountains of luggage and quantities of children, dogs, donkeys, goats, and other appurtenances, who had just struggled over the mountains in their flight from Fascism, and were hoping that the English would be able to prevent them being put into camps. In certain cases they could be lent money, or given railway tickets enabling them to join relations in France and French Morocco, but the vast majority waited hours for an interview, only to be told that there was no hope for them. They would then, with great and heart-breaking politeness, apologize for having been a nuisance and withdraw. Spaniards have a highly developed sense of human dignity.
Linda was now introduced to Robert Parker and to Randolph Pine, a young writer who, having led a more or less playboy existence in the South of France, had gone to fight in Spain, and was now working in Perpignan from a certain feeling of responsibility towards those who had once been fellow soldiers. They seemed pleased that Linda had arrived, and were most friendly and welcoming, saying that it was nice to see a new face.
‘You must give me some work to do,’ said Linda.
‘Yes, now what can we think of for you?’ said Robert. ‘There’s masses of work, never fear, it’s just a question of finding the right kind. Can you speak Spanish?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, well, you’ll soon pick it up.’
‘I’m quite sure I shan’t,’ said Linda doubtfully.
‘What do you know about welfare work?’
‘Oh, dear, how hopeless I seem to be. Nothing, I’m afraid.’
‘Lavender will find her a job,’ said Christian, who had settled down at his table and was flapping over a card index.
‘Lavender?’
‘A girl called Lavender Davis.’
‘No! I know her quite well, she used to live near us in the country. In fact she was one of my bridesmaids.’
‘That’s it,’ said Robert, ‘she said she knew you, I’d forgotten. She’s wonderful, she really works with the Quakers in the camps, but she helps us a great deal too. There’s absolutely nothing she doesn’t know about calories and babies’ nappies, and expectant mummies, and so on, and she’s the hardest worker I’ve ever come across.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Randolph Pine, ‘what you can do. There’s a job simply waiting for you, and that is to arrange the accommodation on this ship that’s going off next week.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ said Robert, ‘the very thing. She can have this table and start at once.’
‘Now look,’ said Randolph. ‘I’ll show you. (What delicious scent you have, Après l’Ondée? I thought so.) Now here is a map of the ship – see – best cabins, not such good cabins, lousy cabins, and battened down under the hatches. And here is a list of the families who are going. All you have to do is to allocate each family its cabin – when you have decided which they are to have, you put the number of the cabin against the family – here – you see? And the number of the family on the cabin here, like that. Quite easy, but it takes time, and must be done so that when they arrive on the boat they will know exactly where to go with their things.’
‘But how do I decide who gets the good ones and who is battened? Awfully tricky, isn’t it?’
‘Not really. The point is it’s a strictly democratic ship run on republican principles, class doesn’t enter into it. I should give decent cabins to families where there are small children or babies. Apart from that do it any way you like. Take a pin if you like. The only thing that matters is that it should be done, otherwise there’ll be a wild scramble for the best places when they get on board.’
Linda looked at the list of families. It took the form of a card index, the head of each family having a card on which was written the number and names of his dependants.
‘It doesn’t give their ages,’ said Linda. ‘How am I to know if there are young babies?’
‘That’s a point,’ said Robert. ‘How is she to?’
‘Quite easy,’ said Christian. ‘With Spaniards you can always tell. Before the war they were called either after saints or after episodes in the life of the Virgin – Anunciación, Asunción, Purificación, Concepción, Consuelo, etc. Since the Civil War they are called Carlos after Charlie Marx, Frederigo after Freddie Engels, or Estalina (very popular until the Russians let them down with a wallop), or else nice slogans like Solidaridad-Obrera, Libertad, and so on. Then you know the children are under three. Couldn’t be simpler, really.’
Lavender Davis now appeared. She was indeed the same Lavender, dowdy, healthy, and plain, wearing an English country tweed and brogues. Her short brown hair curled over her head, and she had no make-up. She greeted Linda with enthusiasm, indeed, it had always been a fiction in the Davis family that Lavender and Linda were each other’s greatest friends. Linda was delighted to see her, as one always is delighted to see a familiar face, abroad.
‘Come on,’ said Randolph, ‘now we’re all here let’s go and have a drink at the Palmarium.’
For the next weeks, until her private life began to occupy Linda’s attention, she lived in an atmosphere of alternate fascination and horror. She grew to love Perpignan, a strange little old town, so different from anything she had ever known, with its river and broad quays, its network of narrow streets, its huge wild-looking plane trees, and all around it the bleak vine-growing country of the Roussillon bursting into summery green under her very eyes. Spring came late and slowly, but when it came it was hand-
in-hand with summer, and almost at once everything was baking and warm, and in the villages the people danced every night on concrete dancing floors under the plane trees. At week-ends the English, unable to eradicate such a national habit, shut up the office and made for Collioure on the coast, where they bathed and sunbathed and went for Pyrenean picnics.
But all this had nothing to do with the reason for their presence in these charming surroundings – the camps. Linda went to the camps nearly every day, and they filled her soul with despair. As she could not help much in the office owing to her lack of Spanish, nor with the children, since she knew nothing about calories, she was employed as a driver, and was always on the road in a Ford van full of supplies, or of refugees, or just taking messages to and from the camps. Often she had to sit and wait for hours on end while a certain man was found and his case dealt with; she would quickly be surrounded by a perfect concourse of men talking to her in their heavy guttural French. By this time the camps were quite decently organized; there were rows of orderly though depressing huts, and the men were getting regular meals, which, if not very appetizing, did at least keep body and soul together. But the sight of these thousands of human beings, young and healthy, herded behind wire away from their womenfolk, with nothing on earth to do day after dismal day, was a recurring torture to Linda. She began to think that Uncle Matthew had been right – that abroad, where such things could happen, was indeed unutterably bloody, and that foreigners, who could inflict them upon each other, must be fiends.
One day as she sat in her van, the centre, as usual, of a crowd of Spaniards, a voice said:
‘Linda, what on earth are you doing here?’
And it was Matt.
He looked ten years older than when she had last seen him, grown up, in fact, and extremely handsome, his Radlett eyes infinitely blue in a dark-brown face.
‘I’ve seen you several times,’ he said, ‘and I thought you had been sent to fetch me away so I made off, but then I found out you are married to that Christian fellow. Was he the one you ran away from Tony with?’
The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford Page 82