by Angus Wilson
They made a handsome couple as they stood on the battlements of Kronborg and watched the ice breaking up in the Sound, the great snow-covered blocks floating out into the Kattegat and on to the North Sea. Handsome couples should always be tall, though perhaps they carried this a little to excess. Inge, at any rate, looked like the queen of some Northern Ruritania at the novel's happy ending. Her eyes were bright with pleasure, her pink cheeks glowed with the salt spray, her hair blew in gleaner's wisps against her sable toque. She had the rare gift of a figure at once stately and graceful. As she stood there in her long sable coat, with the tails of her muff lapping over the side of the wall, it seemed to Gerald that all the soldiers in this palace turned barracks must salute their queen, for she had that graciousness one expects of royalty, and perhaps a little of the nullity.
'I am glad,' she said, 'that Father got permission for us to enter the castle. Even so, I do not think you would have been allowed in if the War was not over. So even here in Denmark, you see, we notice a new world.' She turned to him and smiled. 'So you really and truly are not disappointed with our old Elsinore. Even after Shakespeare,' she said. 'That makes me very happy.' She spoke to him partly in Danish, partly in a little hardly acquired English.
'I'm in love with it all,' he said. 'I didn't think for a moment I should be. I did everything I could to get out of it when the War Office seconded me to the Embassy here. But I am.'
It was true: he had pulled every string he knew to avoid it. It was absurd and monstrous that he should be going to a neutral country, he had told them, simply because of dysentery that was over and done with, when hundreds of men with holes in their chests or one arm were being sent back to the Front. France wasn't the Dardanelles, he reminded them, or even the Italian front, to consider dysentery. And when all this proved useless, he had pleaded at least for a Whitehall job; after all, his Scandinavian languages would be just as useful in Intelligence at home. Anywhere but to the unreality of a neutral country. But, in the last resort, there was nothing for it; there were Scandinavian linguists, yes, but few who spoke as fluently as he did. He had cursed his pre-war visits to Denmark then, and cursed Stokesay who had argued him into Viking research.
Finally, however, it had been Stokesay and Dollie between them who had reconciled him to the inescapable, but even so he had come there with an ill grace. Stokesay had so evidently counted on him as his heir, not only academically but almost personally since Gilbert had been killed.
'I'm not suggesting for a minute, Gerald,' he had said, 'that any life should count in the titanic struggle that we're waging. A year ago, when things looked so black, I might even have spoken differently, but I really feel that 1918 has turned the corner for us. There will be setbacks and so on, but I feel at last that it isn't entirely wrong to think of the future. I sometimes even imagine myself a don again. No more propaganda. It's not going to be easy for me, you know, with Gilbert gone; but there will be an even greater task before us. I'm quite convinced, my dear fellow, that a proper study of history is going to contribute as much and more than all your sciences to the making of a better world, and in that study, the knowledge of our beginnings is going to play its part. Nationalism has got to go. And although I should be the last to subscribe to some of the ideas of our Roman Catholic colleagues, it can't be denied that the medieval world can teach us a great deal about internationalism. And you, Gerald, are the best young medievalist in the country. That's all I'm going to say to you. The decision, like every other important thing in a man's life, is ultimately in his own hands.' It had not been, of course, it had been in the hands of the War Office, but Stokesay was tending more and more to talk in this way.
It was Dollie, however, who had finally made the trip to Denmark both easier and more bitter. She had so evidently wanted him out of England.
'And now you are going to leave us,' said Inge. 'We shall miss you very much.' It was the sort of remark that he had trained himself to mistrust on the lips of English girls. He had heard it so often at country house weekends. 'And now you are going to leave us, Mr Middleton. We shall miss you very much.' It was usually said by the mothers who had their eye on rich young bachelors; but on occasion, more coyly, by the daughters. Inge never spoke coyly; there were times when he had thought her remarks a little childish, oddly playful, in a girl at once so easy in her manner and dignified, but then difference of language made such nuances so difficult to tell, particularly nuances of humour. And then she was the only daughter of a doting widower who kept her younger than she should be.
'Well,' she said, 'you never brought little Denmark into the war,' and when he protested, she laughed. 'No, I know that was not your intention. I was trying to make an English joke, but I am not yet practised at this. You have done much to make Danes love England more. You should be a proud man.'
'If I have done so at all, I am,' said Gerald. 'You have certainly helped to make me fall in love with Denmark.'
They moved slowly along the ramparts. The March sun shone quite lustily upon them, and Gerald opened his astrakhan collar to give himself more air. Beneath their feet the snow crunched crisply. 'I like it all better than I can say,' he told her, 'and especially perhaps now that the Armistice has come.'
'Ah,' she cried, 'because you will be leaving us. It is always easy to love people when you leave them.'
'Perhaps it is a little that, but it's far more than that. While the fighting was on I always felt a little guilty to be enjoying it all so much. Now, I should like to stay for ever.'
She stopped and looked at him. 'I believe that is true,' she said, 'but you will be leaving us soon.'
'Not if I know the War Office,' he said; 'they've probably forgotten my existence.'
'I hope so,' Inge declared, 'but no! I must not say that. You will do such splendid work. You have no idea of the nice things Professor Gulbrandsen was saying about you last night. He said that you know already far more of our history than we do.'
'That wouldn't be difficult in some cases,' Gerald laughed.
Inge sighed. 'I'm afraid that is true. But there is so much to be done in the present here. Look at my poor father, always sitting on committees and getting houses built. He has no time for the past. And yet I know he is proud of our history. He has spent much time working for good history teaching in the schools.'
Gerald said uncomfortably, 'I'm afraid my remark was meant as a joke. I'm sure you all know far more than English people do about their country's history.'
Inge said simply, 'Oh!' and Gerald felt that, as too often, he had snubbed her. They stood for a moment in silence, then Gerald pointed with his walking-stick to an eider duck seated on an ice-block that was floating out to sea. 'I wonder what happens to those birds that get carried too far out to sea,' he said.
'Oh! I believe that they have a special home,' she cried, 'where are only happy birds and ... unhappy fish.' She made a comic grimace.
Gerald was irritated at the whimsy he so disliked. 'I imagine they die a rather icy death,' he said.
Inge simply did not comprehend his feelings. Her face, when she turned to him, was blank and very beautiful. It was this feature that so overwhelmed him. With others, with Dollie, for instance, beauty came to them with expression, with movement, but Inge simply was beautiful, the more beautiful when, as now, there was nothing there except the shape and colour of her face. Sometimes he wondered if it was coldness of temperament, and yet she was warm in character, enjoying life as it came to her. He had come probably to associate passion with tension. Dollie, for all her straightforward, almost boyish manner, was always tensed; it was part of the general tension of Engish life that he dreaded meeting again. Inge, by comparison, was only half grown.
She put her hand on his arm. 'You think I am very childish, Gerald,' she said, 'but it is difficult for me. Our society is a small one and so many of them are Father's friends - the trade union leaders and the Deputies - they treat me as Father wishes me to be, like a small girl. That is rather foolish whe
n someone is so big as I am,' she laughed. 'I am grateful that you treat me with respect to my size.'
On their return journey, the carriage stopped at Fredensborg, and in the formal garden of this eighteenth-century palace, its avenue of trees, its statues and urns all snow-covered, he proposed to Inge and was accepted. Perhaps it was the garden's declared restraint, or perhaps it was just the snow, but she showed no trace of that playfulness or whimsy, that false warmth which sometimes disturbed him. Even though he had to return to England, to all he dreaded, in her passive beauty he felt that he would be taking back with him some of the peace he had found here. He would need to commit all his energies to work, to research, to a career, if he was to fill the emptiness that awaited him at home. He could only do so if he could rely on a source of protective calm. Inge, he knew, would be that source. ...
And that, thought Gerald, was the decision of a man already turned twenty-seven. He shrank into the armchair with disgust. He refused the excuse of the war for his immaturity as cant. Nevertheless, one had to be fair to people - even to oneself at an earlier age - and there was no doubt that his last interview with Dollie had broken him. As the scene returned to him, he felt a desperate desire to shut it off, to return to the family's 'scratchy' banal talk, but he couldn't for the life of him see how he could avoid going through with it all now, back to wherever it might lead. If many might have agreed that Inge was the second best, even as she was in those days, there were few perhaps who would have seen their first choice in Dollie. And yet the years had proved him right in his belief that she was his; or was it simply that an image had replaced the woman he could not have? Later, when he had lived with her, she had only been for moments what he had hoped for, but then Inge had come in between. However that might be, Dollie had made it perfectly clear in those early days that she would not marry him, just as she had made it perfectly clear years later that she wanted to be his mistress.
The heat was overpowering that May, and the sun's rays refracted in an intense glare from the chalk-white cliffs and the long line of white hotels along the front; even Dollie's white linen skirt and coat and the white shoes and stockings peeping from below swam before Gerald's eyes in the haze. Beneath her white sailor hat her little, smooth-cheeked face offered calm and coolness.
'Think of me,' he said, 'in a week's time in the disgusting fatness of a neutral climate.' His officer's uniform gave slimness to his already heavy frame.
'Think of me,' she replied, 'at Hastings. It's the semi-finals in a week.'
'Winning all the cups,' he laughed.
'Yes,' she said; 'isn't it disgusting? It really must be my last tournament. I'm turning into a pot-hunter. But there's such a lot of rabbits about. I miss the Canadians,' she added. 'Now I suppose we'll have Yanks. It'll all be over over here, "I don't think," as Harry Tate says. All the same, I'm glad they've come in. The more the merrier, I say.'
Gerald winced. 'Sorry, old thing,' Dollie said. 'I know you don't like me to say things like that. But you make too much of words, Gerrie. Nobody, not even fools like me, really think it merry. Only we've got to see it through, haven't we?'
Gerald didn't answer her question. 'I think a lot of people at home find it quite merry,' he said bitterly.
'Meaning me,' she said. 'Oh, yes, Gerrie, you did. Or if you didn't you should have done.'
'You're unfair on yourself. You've done a wonderful job nursing.'
'Please, Gerrie,' she said, and she lit a cigarette. 'A wonderful job. And a wonderful job playing mixed doubles with the Canadians. And a wonderful job giving good times to the boys on leave. Dancing and shows and sleeping with the brigadier.'
Gerald looked shocked. 'Sorry, old thing,' she said, 'but you knew it wasn't only you. Or is it just my language that upsets you? You forget that I'm fast. Haven't you heard the old hens cackle?'
'I don't listen to gossip',' Gerald said. 'Besides, you've been through a lot, Dollie.'
'Oh, yes,' she said. 'I'm a young war widow. Haven't you heard the pater talking about it? It's quite moving. Only he forgets that there are two million others. Most of them at least kept the home fires burning. I couldn't even have the decency to do that for his darling Gilbert.'
'Your marriage was washed up long before Gilbert went out,' said Gerald. 'You should never have married him. And what's more, he treated you like a brute. I say that even though he was my friend. Yes, even though he was killed and it was a shameful waste.'
'Yes,' said Dollie, 'you said it to me before. Even though he was your friend and even though he hadn't been killed then. You said it to me in bed, to be exact.'
Gerald seized her wrist and twisted it in his anger. 'Shut up,' he said. 'You're being a little fool. You can't go on torturing yourself about that for ever.'
'Can't I?' Dollie asked. 'Don't you be so sure.'
Gerald struck the side of his leg with his cane. Then, calmed, he put it to her. 'Look, Dollie,' he said, 'try to remember what happened. You were lonely,and unhappy and so was I. You knew that Gilbert wasn't faithful to you, even on that last leave. Why should you blame yourself? We were in love, Dollie. And we are,' he added vehemently.
'Oh, yes,' said Dollie, ignoring his words, 'we had a high old time all right. I enjoyed myself. But then I would. Haven't you heard about little Mrs Stokesay? No? But then I forgot you don't listen to gossip. You, should, you know. You ask at the club. Anyone'll tell you. Little Mrs Stokesay's hot stuff.'
Gerald leaned back in his deck-chair and sighed. He stared out where the blue was flecked with white edgings below Beachy Head.
'Don't say you can hear them,' Dollie cried. 'Oh, they say you can on a still day, you know. Even respectable Eastbourne can't quite forget what's going on over there,' she added bitterly.
'I'm not going on this damned mission,' Gerald said abruptly. He got up and stood over her. 'I don't care if it means a court martial. I'm not going to leave you in this unhappy, bitter state.'
'Thank you kindly,' she said. 'But napoo! I can look after myself. I didn't leave home yesterday and I'm not going back to the shack. I'm having a good time, Gerrie, like all the women now. You told me so.'
'Oh, for God's sake!' he cried, and then, surprising the strollers on the promenade, surprising even himself, he went down on his knees beside her and took both her hands in his. 'Marry me, Dollie!' he cried. 'I can, I will make you happy.'
Dollie's face puckered for a second and then set in hard lines. She pushed his hands away. 'No, Gerrie. For God's sake, get up!' she said. 'I made one man unhappy. Not another. You're brainy like Gilbert. I'm not. I couldn't help you in your career. I should only get in the way.' When he seemed about to speak again, she turned away and said violently, 'Oh! for heaven's sake! can't you see what I'm trying to tell you? I don't want to marry you, Gerrie. I should be bored to tears in a week.'
She got up from her deck-chair and, as he rose from his knees and stood beside her, she said, 'As a matter of fact, I'm bored to tears already. Do you know what I fancy? I fancy a cocktail. Let's make for the American bar. So you're to wear mufti,' she said, 'because the dear little Danes might not care to be reminded of the war.
Robin and John had won the day. Despite all attempts to deter them, they had brought the conversation back to Pelican again.
John, munching marrons glacés, looked like the spoilt, sweet-stuffed boy of their childhood arguments. As then, he answered Robin's assumptions of senior experience by the condescension of brilliant youth to dull-witted age.
'My dear Robin,' he said, 'I'm not entirely inexperienced in these things. I have hundreds of hard-luck stories every week. Many of them turn out to be bogus, the results of folly or knavery. I investigate them all very thoroughly. You tend to assume that you're the only one who knows how to do his job. I'm afraid that isn't so. I happen to know mine. I don't say much about it because I take that part of an intelligent man's life for granted. I investigated Cressett's claim thoroughly. It's genuine.'
'Yes, yes,' said Robin impati
ently, 'I'm sure it is.' He had hoped that it might not be; but looking at John, he reflected that his younger brother was a successful careerist idealist, not a bungling, overweening small boy. He was unlikely to support a bogus claim. Robin shifted his ground. 'No one doubts that Pelican or one of his staff has slipped up. I'm simply appealing to the adult in you to put side by side the small effects of his mistake and the serious consequences of your publicity - the possible ruin of the career of a man who is doing a useful job. Of course, you have to take my word for that.'
'Oh, no,' said John, 'I know the men I'm dealing with. I've made it my business to find out about Pelican. He's a good civil servant. That's why it's all the more important to make an example of him. It underlines the fact that the executive, even the most able and conscientious of them, is responsible before the bar of public opinion.'
'But Johnnie dear,' said Kay, 'you speak as though the man knew that he'd made a mistake. Surely that's very unlikely. A head of a department or whatever he is probably never sees any of these individual cases. It was almost certainly some clerk who slipped up.'
'Then,' said John and he pulled at his pipe, 'Pelican or his successor will insist on better clerks or more clerks or whatever's at fault. Good heavens! I'm not against the civil service. I just want a good one. Besides,' he added, 'I don't believe that there wasn't some moment when the papers passed through Pelican's hands and, for some reason or other, because he was too busy or going on leave or what-have-you, he let a thing go by that he knew was incorrect. It may be only for a fraction of a second, you know, when it's revealed to us, but I believe that there's always a moment of truth....'