1. Arising from the Minutes.
2. Pamphlet in Welsh on German labour conditions.
3. Facilities for Wilkinson to visit the A.T.S.
4. Objections to proposed Bone pamphlet.
5. Suggestion for a leaflet from Meat Marketing Board.
6. The Problem of India.
The list, Skate thought, looked quite impressive.
"Of course," King went on, "the details need working out. We've got to get the right author. Priestley or somebody. I feel there won't be any difficulty about money if we can present a really clear case. Would you look into it, Skate, and report back?"
Skate agreed. He didn't know what it was all about, but that didn't matter. A few minutes would be passed to and fro, and King's blood would cool in the process. To send a minute to anybody else in the great building and to receive a reply took at least twenty-four hours: on an urgent matter an exchange of three minutes might be got through in a week. Time outside the Ministry went at quite a different pace. Skate remembered how the minutes on who should write a "suggested" pamphlet about the French war effort were still circulating indecisively while Germany broke the line, passed the Somme, occupied Paris and received the delegates at Compiègne.
The committee as usual lasted about an hour—it was always, to Skate, an agreeable meeting with men from other divisions, the Religions Division, the Empire Division and so on. Sometimes they co-opted another man they thought was nice. It gave an opportunity for all sorts of interesting discussions—on books and authors and artists and plays and films. The agenda didn't really matter: it was quite easy to invent one at the last moment.
Today everybody was in a good temper: there hadn't been any bad news for a week, and as the policy of the latest Permanent Secretary was that the Ministry should not do anything to attract attention, there was no reason to fear a purge in the immediate future. The decision, too, eased everybody's work. And there was quite a breath of the larger life in the matter of Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a very popular novelist who wanted to sound a clarion note to women, and he had asked permission to make a special study of the A. T. S. Now the military authorities refused permission—nobody knew why. Speculation continued for ten minutes. Skate said he thought Wilkinson was a bad writer and King disagreed—that led to a general literary discussion: Lewis from the Empire Division, who had fought at Gallipoli during the last war, dozed uneasily.
He woke up when they got on to the Bone pamphlet. Bone had been asked to write a pamphlet about the British Empire: it was to be distributed, fifty thousand copies of it, free at public meetings. But now that it was in type, all sorts of tactless phrases were discovered by the experts. India objected to a reference to Canadian dairy herds, and Australia objected to a phrase about Botany Bay. The Canadian authority was certain that mention of Wolfe would antagonize the French-Canadians, and the New Zealand authority felt that undue emphasis had been laid on the Australian fruit-farms. Meanwhile the public meetings had all been held, so that there was no means of distributing the pamphlet. Somebody suggested that it might be sent to America for the New York World Fair, but the American Division then demanded certain cuts in the references to the War of Independence, and by the time those had been made the World Fair had closed. Now Bone had written objecting to his own pamphlet, which he said was unrecognizable.
"We could get somebody else to sign it," Skate suggested—but that meant paying another fee, and the Treasury, Hill said, would never sanction that.
"Look here, Skate," King said, "you're a literary man. You write to Bone and sort of smooth things over."
Lowndes came in hurriedly, smelling a little of wine.
He said, "Sorry to be late. Had to lunch a man on business. Seen the news?"
"No."
"Daylight raids again. Fifty Nazi planes shot down. They are turning on the heat. Fifteen of ours lost."
"We must really get Bone's pamphlet out," Hill said.
Skate suddenly, to his own surprise, said savagely, "That'll show them," and then sat down in humble collapse as though he had been caught out in treachery.
"Well," Hill said, "we mustn't get rattled, Skate. Remember what the Minister said: It's our duty just to carry on our work whatever happens."
"Yes, I didn't mean anything."
Without reaching a decision on the Bone pamphlet they passed on to the Meat Marketing Leaflet. Nobody was interested in this, so the matter was left in Skate's hands to report back. "You talk to 'em, Skate," King said. "Good idea. You know about these things. Might ask Priestley," he vaguely added, and then frowned thoughtfully at that old-timer on the minutes, "The Problem of India."
"Need we really discuss it this week?" he said. "There's nobody here who knows about India. Let's get in Lawrence next week."
"Good chap, Lawrence," Lowndes said. "Wrote a naughty novel once called Parson's Pleasure."
"We'll co-opt him," King said.
The Book Committee was over for another week, and since the room would be empty now until morning, Skate opened the big windows against the night's blast. Far up in the pale enormous sky little white lines, like the phosphorescent spore of snails, showed where men were going home after work.
Alas, Poor Maling
Poor inoffensive ineffectual Maling! I don't want you to smile at Maling and his Borborygmi as the doctors always smiled when he consulted them, as they must have smiled even after the sad climax of September 3rd, 1940, when his Borborygmi held up for twenty-four fatal hours the amalgamation of the Simcox and Hythe Newsprint Companies. Simcox's interests had always been dearer to Maling than life: hard-driven, conscientious, happy in his work, he wanted no position higher than their secretary, and those twenty-four hours happened—for reasons it is unwise to go into here, for they involve intricacies in British Income Tax Law—to be fatal to the company's existence. After that day he dropped altogether out of sight, and I shall always believe he crept away to die of a broken heart in some provincial printing works. Alas, poor Maling!
It was the doctors who called his complaint Borborygmi: in England we usually call it just "tummy rumbles." I believe it's quite a harmless kind of indigestion, but in Maling's case it took a rather odd form. His stomach, he used to complain, blinking sadly downwards through his semicircular reading glasses, had "an ear." It used to pick up notes in an extraordinary way and give them out again after meals. I shall never forget one embarrassing tea at the Piccadilly Hotel held in honour of a party of provincial printers: it was the year before the war, and Maling had been attending the Symphony Con. certs at Queen's Hall (he never went again). In the distance a dance orchestra had been playing "The Lambeth Walk" (how tired one got of that tune in 1938 with its waggery and false bonhomie and its "ois"): suddenly in the happy silence between dances, as the printers sat back from a ruin of toasted tea-cake, there emerged—faint as though from a distant part of the hotel, sad and plangent—the opening bars of a Brahms concerto. A Scottish printer, who had an ear for good music, exclaimed with dour relish, "Ma goodness, how that mon can play." Then the music stopped abruptly and an odd suspicion made me look at Maling. He was red as beetroot. Nobody noticed because the dance orchestra began again to the Scotsman's disgust with "Boomps-a-Daisy," and I think I was the only one who detected a curious faint undertone of "The Lambeth Walk" apparently coming from the chair where Maling sat.
It was after ten, when the printers had piled into taxis and driven away to Euston, that Maling told me about his stomach. "It's quite unaccountable," he said, "like a parrot. It seems to pick up things at random." He added with tears in his voice, "I can't enjoy food any more. I never know what's going to happen afterwards. This afternoon wasn't the worst. Sometimes it's quite loud."
He brooded forlornly. "When I was a boy I liked listening to German bands..."
"Haven't you seen a doctor?"
"They don't understand. They say it's just indigestion and nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about! But then when I've been seeing a doctor it's
always lain quiet." I noticed that he spoke of his stomach as if it were a detested animal. He gazed bleakly at his knuckles and said, "Now I'm afraid of any new noise. I never know. It doesn't take any notice of some, but others seem—well, to fascinate it. At a first hearing. Last year when they took up Piccadilly it was the road drills. I used to get them all over again after dinner."
I said rather stupidly, "I suppose you've tried the usual salts," and I remember—it was my last sight of him—his expression of despair as though he had ceased to expect comprehension from any living soul.
It was my last sight of him because the war pitched me out of the printing trade into all sorts of odd occupations, and it was only at second-hand that I heard the account of the strange board meeting which broke poor Maling's heart.
What the papers called the "blitz-and-pieces krieg" against Britain had been going on for about a week: in London we were just settling down to air-raid alarms at the rate of five or six a day, but the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the war, had so far been relatively peaceful. There was a general feeling, however, that Hitler might celebrate the anniversary with a big attack. It was therefore in an atmosphere of some tension that Simcox and Hythe had their joint meeting.
It took place in the traditional grubby little room above the Simcox offices in Fetter Lane: the round table dating from the original Joshua Simcox, the steel engraving of a printing works dated 1875, and an irrelevant copy of a Bible which had always been the only book in the big glass bookcase except for a volume of type faces. Old Sir Joshua Simcox was in the chair: you can picture his snow-white hair and the pale pork-like Nonconformist features. Westby Hythe was there, and half a dozen other directors with narrow canny faces and neat black coats: they all looked a little strained. If the new Income Tax regulations were to be evaded, they had to work quickly. As for Maling, he crouched over his pad, nervously ready to advise anybody on anything.
There was one interruption during the reading of the minutes. Westby Hythe, who was an invalid, complained that a typewriter in the next room was getting on his nerves. Maling blushed and went out: I think he must have swallowed a tablet because the typewriter stopped. Hythe was impatient. "Hurry up," he said, "hurry up. We haven't all night." But that was just exactly what they had.
After the minutes had been read Sir Joshua began explaining elaborately in a Yorkshire accent that their motives were entirely patriotic: they hadn't any intention of evading tax: they just wanted to contribute to the wareffort drive, economy.... He said, "The proof of the pudden'..." and at that moment the air-raid sirens started. As I have said a mass attack was expected: it wasn't the time for delay: a dead man couldn't evade income tax. The directors gathered up their papers and bolted for the basement.
All except Maling. You see he knew the truth. I think it had been the reference to pudding which had roused the sleeping animal. Of course he should have confessed, but think for a moment: would you have had the courage after watching those elderly men with white slips to their waistcoats pelt with a horrifying lack of dignity to safety? I know I should have done exactly what Maling did, have followed Sir Joshua down to the basement in the desperate hope that for once the stomach would do the right thing and make amends. But it didn't. The joint boards of Simcox and Hythe stayed in the basement for twelve hours, and Maling stayed with them, saying nothing. You see, for some unaccountable reason of taste, poor Maling's stomach had picked up the note of the Warning only too effectively, but it had somehow never taken to the All Clear.
The Blue Film
"Other people enjoy themselves," Mrs. Carter said.
"Well," her husband replied, "we've seen—"
"The reclining Buddha, the emerald Buddha, the floating markets," Mrs. Carter said. "We have dinner and go home to bed."
"Last night we went to Chez Eve...."
"If you weren't with me," Mrs. Carter said, "you'd find... you know what I mean—Spots."
It was true, Carter thought, eyeing his wife over the coffee cups: her slave bangles chinked in time with her coffee spoon: she had reached an age when the satisfied woman is at her most beautiful, but the lines of discontent had formed. When he looked at her neck he was reminded of how difficult it was to unstring a turkey. Is it my fault, he wondered, or hers—or was it the fault of her birth, some glandular deficiency, some inherited characteristic? It was sad how when one was young, one so often mistook the signs of frigidity for a kind of distinction.
"You promised we'd smoke opium," Mrs. Carter said. "Not here, darling. In Saigon. Here it's 'not done' to smoke."
"How conventional you are."
"There'd be only the dirtiest of coolie places. You'd be conspicuous. They'd stare at you." He played his winning card. "There'd be cockroaches."
"I should be taken to plenty of Spots if I wasn't with a husband."
He tried hopefully, "The Japanese strip teasers..." but she had heard all about them. "Ugly women in brassiéres," she said. His irritation rose. He thought of the money he had spent to take his wife with him and to ease his conscience—he had been away too often without her—but there is no company more cheerless than that of a woman who is not desired. He tried to drink his coffee calmly: he wanted to bite the edge of the cup.
"You've spilt your coffee," Mrs. Carter said.
"I'm sorry." He got up abruptly and said, "All right. I'll fix something. Stay here." He leant across the table. "You'd better not be shocked," he said. "You've asked for it."
"I don't think I'm usually the one who is shocked," Mrs. Carter said with a thin smile.
Carter left the hotel and walked up towards the New Road. A boy hung at his side and said, "Young girl?"
"I've got a woman of my own," Carter said gloomily.
"Boy?"
"No, thanks."
"French films?"
Carter paused. "How much?"
They stood and haggled awhile at the corner of the drab street. What with the taxi, the guide, the films, it was going to cost the best part of eight pounds, but it was worth it, Carter thought, if it closed her mouth forever from demanding "Spots." He went back to fetch Mrs. Carter.
They drove a long way and came to a halt by a bridge over a canal, a dingy lane overcast with indeterminate smells. The guide said, "Follow me."
Mrs. Carter put a hand on Carter's arm. "Is it safe?" she asked.
"How would I know?" he said, stiffening under her hand.
They walked about fifty unlighted yards and halted by a bamboo fence. The guide knocked several times. When they were admitted it was to a tiny earth-floored yard and a wooden hut. Something—presumably human—was humped in the dark under a mosquito-net. The owner showed them into a tiny stuffy room with two hard chairs and a portrait of the King. The screen was about the size of a folio volume.
The first film was peculiarly unattractive and showed the rejuvenation of an elderly man at the hands of two blonde masseuses. From the women's hairdressing the film must have been made in the late twenties. Carter and his wife sat in mutual embarrassment as the film whirled and clicked to a stop.
"Not a very good one," Carter said, as though he were a connoisseur.
"So that's what they call a blue film," Mrs. Carter said. "Ugly and not exciting."
A second film started.
There was very little story in this. A young man -one couldn't see his face because of the period soft hat -picked up a girl in the street (her cloche hat extinguished her like a meat-cover) and accompanied her to her room. The actors were young: there was some charm and excitement in the picture. Carter thought, when the girl took off her hat, I know that face, and a memory that had been buried for more than a quarter of a century moved. A doll over a telephone, a pin-up girl of the period over the double bed. The girl undressed, folding her clothes very neatly: she leant over to adjust the bed, exposing herself to the camera's eye and to the young man: he kept his head turned from the camera. Afterwards, she helped him in turn to take off his clothes. It was only then he re
membered—that particular playfulness confirmed by the birthmark on the man's shoulder.
Mrs. Carter shifted on her chair. "I wonder how they find the actors," she said hoarsely.
"A prostitute," he said. "It's a bit raw, isn't it? Wouldn't you like to leave?" he urged her, waiting for the man to turn his head. The girl knelt on the bed and held the youth around the waist—she couldn't have been more than twenty. No; he made a calculation: twenty-one.
"We'll stay," Mrs. Carter said. "We've paid." She laid a dry hot hand on his knee.
"I'm sure we could find a better place than this."
"No."
The young man lay on his back and the girl for a moment left him. Briefly, as though by accident, he looked at the camera. Mrs. Carter's hand shook on his knee. "Good God," she said, "it's you."
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