A Coat of Varnish
Page 5
In fact, on his forehead and cheeks the fine nordic skin was burning. He was wearing only a shirt and linen trousers, and some girl – would it be Susan? – would have to treat him with ointment that night.
‘Soon. We’ll go in soon, dear boy.’ Lady Ashbrook wouldn’t give him his own way. She was behaving like a spoiled and wilful beauty. Between the two of them, the old lady used to being wooed and the indulged young man, there was the air, Humphrey was noticing, of something remarkably like a flirtation. Loseby was better at handling her than anyone whom Humphrey had seen. It emerged in the conversation that he had brought her flowers and a case of champagne. Tomorrow he would arrange a bridge party for the early evening. Humphrey was invited. The champagne would come in useful. Meanwhile she was to drink half a bottle without fail before she went to bed tonight.
Loseby gave out affection as naturally as a sunny child. It was genuine affection, Humphrey didn’t doubt. With his grandmother, was it also love? There could be an element of cupboard love, of course. He was the only relative she cared for. Where else should her money go? It could be that he was making sure. Easy-natured men were often better than the calculating at looking after themselves. And yet it was very difficult to act love as well as he did.
One thing he wouldn’t do. She wanted him to sit with her that night until she went to bed.
‘I’ll stay with you till seven. Then I really am obliged to go.’
‘Too early.’
‘I’m so sorry, Grandmama dear. I’d get out of it if I could.’
‘Do so. You have some talent for excuses, you always have had.’
Loseby gave his radiant shameless smile. ‘Not this time, I’m afraid. It’s a date. Fixed up weeks ago.’
‘I suppose it’s an assignation,’ she said.
‘You can suppose most things, can’t you?’ he replied. ‘By the by, did you really talk about assignations in your wicked days?’
‘We didn’t talk as much as your friends do,’ said Lady Ashbrook. ‘We should have thought it took the edge off things.’
‘Oh, we talk about going to bed. Loudly. No secrets. But if anyone thinks of getting married it has to be whispered. That really is rather shameful. So it’s a dead secret.’
‘Are you thinking of it?’ She sounded accusing, apprehensive, maybe jealous.
‘Dear Grandmama, I’ll tell you if I ever do.’
The exchanges went on. Under all his willingness to please, he was as stubborn as she was, and she couldn’t tease, persuade, force, cajole him into staying with her throughout the evening. There was one device she didn’t use, which Humphrey guessed might have worked. That was the blackmail of pity. She didn’t for an instant deploy that. She didn’t so much as hint that, in her state, she wanted someone loving near her.
Later in the afternoon, Humphrey made his way to the habitual Saturday rendezvous with Alec Luria. Their meeting-place was a public house which the inhabitants of this part of Belgravia referred to as their local. There was nothing special about the pub, which was situated in the street running from the end of Eaton Square towards Buckingham Palace Road. Luria liked it and was fond of explaining how good the English were at making themselves comfortable: there was no equivalent to such a pub in any other country he had lived in. There was a large sedate saloon with three cosy alcoves, leather-covered chairs and benches, unexacting and quiet. That evening, at six o’clock, there were about twenty people scattered about the saloon, perhaps more, most of them residents from close by who had called in for a drink before dinner.
It was a peaceful time. Humphrey and Luria settled themselves, as usual on a Saturday evening, in the far corner, legs stretched under the table in front of them, on the table pints of beer. Luria, though he had his taste for English pubs, had no such taste for English beer; but this was part of the ritual and he endured it.
They were having a conversation with voices subdued but actually animated. Humphrey wanted to get some hard information about Tom Thirkill. This was part of Kate’s concern for the Thirkill daughter which had become a link between Kate and Humphrey – the kind of link they could enjoy while staying mute about themselves. So Humphrey had involved Luria, who had more acquaintances in London than most Englishmen, and who also wasn’t an innocent in financial dealings, as Humphrey was. Luria had dutifully made enquiries, which he didn’t pretend not to revel in. He was explaining, and he was one of the best of expositors. His view was that all such buying and selling of companies and playing the exchanges market had their obscure side. Granted that Thirkill had certainly done nothing criminal, and probably nothing improper. He might have been a shade indiscreet, particularly as the English had become prudish about anyone making money. Except themselves through sweeps or strikes, said Luria, with melancholy sardonic eyes. Thirkill had clearly attracted much political enmity, both from the Tories – natural enough – and from his own left wing – natural enough again. Further, he seemed to have attracted an unusual amount of personal enmity. ‘Well, you know him, don’t you?’
‘Only slightly,’ said Humphrey.
‘You ought to have some insights there, though.’ Luria appeared to regard the problem with a kind of resigned satisfaction.
People of good judgment did tend to suspect the man, Humphrey remarked. He didn’t mention the name of Kate. Luria was a friend, and to be trusted; but Humphrey would speak to no one until the chances were better than they appeared now. He was a superstitious man.
Thirkill was a good, safe, friendly topic. They were both relaxed. Luria courteously refused another drink, but Humphrey bought himself a second pint of bitter. Then they were disturbed.
There was a commotion, a hubbub mixed with chanting from outside the street door, diametrically opposite to their own corner. A crowd surged into the room. More yells, more chanting, so much that Humphrey was confused. The room pullulated with the crowd and the noise. It was hard to see individual faces. Perhaps there were thirty or forty in the crowd, some still jamming the far door. All young, so far as he could make out, as he tried to clear his eyes. One or two looked in their twenties. Others very young, sixteen, seventeen? Beards, profuse hair, a few girls hanging on to shoulders. Chant reiterated, unlike human speech. Humphrey couldn’t make it out.
Then he had it. It was like the mindless chanting of a football crowd. This was mid-summer. They presumably had come from Victoria tube station half a mile away. Some were wearing sweaters with the legend ‘We Are the Champs’. This was a mob from one of the limited-over cricket matches, started and finished in one day. A lot of them were angry drunk. Glasses were swept from the bar. A couple rushed behind, screamed at the barman, punched him in the face, grabbed bottles of whisky, and knocked off the necks. Others snatched glasses from the tables, swore at anyone around, and sank the drinks. One elderly man was resisting. Raucous cries – ‘Get lost’, ‘Stuff it’, ‘Do him’. His hat was on the bench beside him. One of the slightly older men seized that, put it on, and pranced round. The elderly man was standing now. He was knocked back into his seat, and had beer poured over his head and shoulders.
Other customers were sitting stupefied, quiescent, immobilised. It was as if they didn’t notice what was going on.
At last Humphrey collected himself enough to call to the barman: ‘Gerald Road quick.’ Gerald Road was the local police station. The mob wouldn’t know that, but they were inflamed by any signs of interference, even of life. The barman, face bleeding, slipped away. Raging, half a dozen youths were milling round Humphrey’s table. Both he and Alec Luria were able-bodied men, but it was no use trying to fight at those odds. Humphrey had handled troops in his time, but nothing like this. He tried to recapture his army tone. ‘Get away. You’re all in trouble. Sit down.’
Shouts of hate– ‘Do him!’, ‘We’ll do you.’
Luria, like Humphrey, was by this time standing up.
‘You’re doing yourselves no good,’ he said in a strong bass voice. ‘I advise you to quieten down.’
Humphrey was shouting to the room for help, but none came. Then there was a susurration near the door. ‘Fucking pigs.’ Two policemen, in shirt-sleeves, came in. That wasn’t a result of the barman’s call. It was later known that a passer-by had seen the mob screeching and surging down the street and had warned a police car.
Some youths were escaping, but hate was still active. The policemen were attacked. A big lad was threatening one of them with a broken bottle. More police cars were arriving. Now the crowd was melting. Kicking over tables, smashing glasses, putting feet through glass panels, they pelted out into the decorous streets. Police cars followed them. It wasn’t often, Humphrey remarked as they returned to quietness at their table, that police cars conducted a chase round Eaton Square.
‘I was shaken,’ said Alec Luria.
‘Not to be expected in this part of London.’ Humphrey was beckoning the barman to clean up the table. His glass had been broken, and he was asking for another drink.
‘I think we might go.’
‘No, not yet,’ Humphrey said, as though this were an occasion for maximum phlegm. ‘Not to be expected after a game of cricket. I’m inclined to doubt whether anything like that has happened round here before.’
‘I found it very frightening.’ As wasn’t common in talks between those two, Luria was being more direct than his friend.
‘So did I.’ He had seen that Luria wasn’t a coward: it was better to talk in the same tone.
‘We mustn’t fool ourselves.’ Luria was brooding.
Humphrey said: ‘The curious thing was, it was so paralysing. At least for me. More so than going into action (he meant military action). Then you had an idea what you were supposed to do.’
‘One of the frightening things,’ Luria went on brooding, ‘was that no one stirred – all these men sitting round the room. That is frightening. There was a gang at home, up in Riverside Drive, decent locality, carving a girl up on the sidewalk – and solid citizens looking on from windows. Not doing a thing. Too much like what went on here. I keep telling you, people have damn well ceased to feel.’
‘They don’t want to get mixed up, they’re afraid,’ said Humphrey.
‘When people are afraid, they cease to feel, don’t they? Isn’t that true in war?’
Luria, in spite of his venerable appearance, was too young to have been a soldier in the Hitler war. He thought that that was a grave deficiency for a psychologist; but, then, he tended to think the same of any human activity he hadn’t performed. Humphrey was accustomed to tell him that almost any human activity when you were actually at work inside it inspired less emotion than an outsider could imagine.
‘It wasn’t elegant tonight.’ Luria was in earnest. At times, he could sound pontifical, but now he didn’t. ‘You must have thought about it often – to be sure you have – I have – there isn’t much between us and this sort of mess.’ He was gazing round, as though the mob were still there. ‘We go on fooling ourselves, that’s what I meant a few minutes ago. Especially if we live in a nice pretty cushioned world. Civilisation is hideously fragile, you know that. There’s not much between us and the horrors underneath. Just about a coat of varnish, wouldn’t you say?’
Humphrey merely nodded.
‘And the same applies to you and me. And the rest of us. There’s not much between us and our beastly selves. Human beings aren’t nice, are they?’
Humphrey nodded again. It had been, by the standards of the time, just a trivial incident they had been caught in, but Luria’s phrase somehow passed round among their circle and became part catch-phrase, part a kind of jargon joke, the kind of joke they used when they wanted to deny that they were being serious.
They had now stayed in the pub long enough for the sake of normality. They walked along to Eaton Square, on the way to Luria’s apartment. Also for the sake of normality, Luria gave Humphrey more instructions about the financial structure of Tom Thirkill’s operations.
5
Loseby had amiable intentions and social skill, but it had been a mistake to provide company for his grandmother on that Sunday afternoon. They were meeting in the garden down below her house. A table was prepared for bridge, and round it sat Paul Mason, Humphrey, Loseby and Lady Ashbrook herself. Bottles of champagne stood on another table close by. Humphrey heard Paul call Loseby Lancelot, which seemed another piece of incongruous nomenclature – though they had been at school together, and this actually was one of Loseby’s Christian names.
The men were doing their best to talk as though this were an agreeable summer occasion no different from others, but Lady Ashbrook, despite her self-discipline, was on the edge of losing even her formal manners. As for any attempt at displaying pleasure, she did not seem to have the desire or even the energy to try. She had attended church that morning, just as she had all her life. Humphrey had often wondered, and in her garden was doing so again, whether she really had religious faith. It might have been convenient in a life as talked about as hers to show herself punctilious in at least one kind of piety. He had never heard her make a speculative remark. He would have liked to know whether she had prayed that morning, praying for good news in the coming week, for release from danger, as children pray when they are waiting for examination results. But unbelievers sometimes prayed like that. Humphrey recalled, with a blink of shame, that he had done so himself.
There were intermittences of anxiety as there were of hope. Perhaps that afternoon she had no relief from the thought of the coming week. Or perhaps she had some easement from letting herself get out of temper about the bridge. Herself, she was a very good player. She was partnered by her grandson, who was a very bad one. Paul was passable, but not what she would have expected from anyone of his talents. Humphrey was bad. Not so long before, when she wasn’t under strain, she had been heard to remark – the difference between Loseby and Humphrey was that Loseby thought for hours before playing the wrong card, while Humphrey did so quickly.
Loseby was playing the wrong card often that long, hot afternoon.
‘Really, my dear boy,’ she began to utter, more than once. She was losing money. Not much, for the stakes were low, but she was losing money. After the end of the second rubber she said again: ‘Really, my dear boy.’ That was all she said. It was the signal for the guests to leave.
Loseby was the best of social lubricants, but he couldn’t reduce the level of Angst in that garden. He tried producing a mildly scabrous discovery which he had just made. As Paul was saying goodbye, Loseby was reminding them what they all knew, that in this garden and the one next door there was a small back door which led into the adjacent mews. From there it was only a few yards to Eccleston Street.
‘Convenient for sinful purposes. For which there were rather good examples round here.’
Face shining with shameless delight in others’ frailties, and his own, he asked whether any of them had heard of 55 Eaton Terrace, less than half a mile away. That had a garden and a private door into a mews, precisely like this. One could get out through the mews into Chester Row and so unobtrusively home. In the eighteen nineties and later, number fifty-five had been the most elevated brothel in London, organised by the Prince of Wales’ confidants and financed from the royal purse. Presumably eminent gentlemen walked home, or had their carriages waiting at a discreet distance.
‘Had you heard about that, Grandmama?’
For a moment, Lady Ashbrook melted into an astringent smile.
‘Rather before my time, you know. Do you really think I’m a hundred?’
After the bridge party, Humphrey had nothing to fill the day until eight o’clock. He had arranged, as part of Kate’s secret services to her protégée Susan, to take Tom Thirkill out to dinner. Though the two of them had met several times, with Thirkill making demonstrations of cordiality, it had been the professional cordiality of a politic
ian. When Humphrey had sent a note round to Eaton Square he hadn’t received an acceptance for three days. Humphrey understood well enough. Persons living in the public scene might be cordial to anonymous neighbours, but didn’t encourage them. For a man like Thirkill, engagements were for a purpose. Humphrey had no doubt that Thirkill had been making enquiries about him, easy if one had access to Ministers, and was deciding whether the man was any use to him, or alternatively might be a nuisance if he were turned down.
It had been something of an effort to find a place in London to have dinner on a Sunday night. By himself Humphrey lived simply, apart from a taste in wine. His old housekeeper gave him the meals he had been content with as a young bachelor, and alone that night it would have been a cutlet and cheese. If he were going to get anything like confidence from Tom Thirkill, that didn’t seem adequate, and Humphrey booked a table at the Berkeley. The random thought occurred to him, entertaining rich men was always expensive, the more so the richer they became: one somehow performed as though they were entertaining you.
Prompt on the stroke of eight, Thirkill’s car drew up outside the house. Thirkill stepped out, limber and vigorous, giving an impression that he could dismiss trouble because he was happy in his own health. He was personable in an actor’s fashion, not uncommon in politicians, strong facial lines, jaw a shade underhanging. ‘Good evening to you.’ His voice resounded. ‘Where are we going?’
Humphrey told him, was instructed not to trouble about his own car, Thirkill would do the transport.
‘This is very civil of you, I must say,’ Thirkill remarked, as he drove through the quiet and empty streets.
‘I’ve always wanted to have the chance to talk with you,’ Humphrey replied.
‘So have I, so have I.’ It wasn’t the first time that either of them had had that particular exchange, though with different partners.
The Berkeley dining-room was cool after the air outside, not crowded, conversation subdued. As they sat at their table, Thirkill having refused any drink but tomato juice, Humphrey said: ‘Rather different from last night.’