by Alec Waugh
“I thought you all worked hand-in-glove.”
“On the very top level yes, but on my level the right hand does not know what the left hand’s doing.”
“Then you can’t do anything about it?”
“Not a thing.”
“I’d hoped . . .” she checked. “Have you any idea what’ll happen to him?”
Actually he had none. But he did his best to put her mind at rest. “He’s not a criminal. This isn’t Germany. There’s no law under which he can be tried. He’s not a traitor. He’ll be treated like an officer prisoner of war, in honourable confinement. He probably won’t be in prison very long. This is a moment of crisis; of near-panic. They’re roping in everyone about whom they feel the least suspicion. They’ll review the cases later. They’ll release three-quarters of them. You’ll probably have him back by Christmas.”
“Do you think I shall? That’s wonderful. You’re very consoling.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help——”
“There is one thing. You could tell the boys.”
“I could do that easily.”
“I’d be so grateful if you would. It would come better from you. The masculine point of view. I’m so afraid they may get a sense of inferiority about it. The other boys sneering at them. They mustn’t be ashamed of Rex. They must be able to stay proud of their father.”
“I think I can put it right for them.”
“I’ll be so grateful.” She rose to her feet. She had not been in the flat fifteen minutes.
“Don’t go,” he said. “Let’s have a drink and gossip.”
“Thank you, I’d rather not. I’d be bad company. I’m worried and it’s late.”
“All right, I’ll drive you back.”
“No, really no. I know how valuable your petrol is.”
“One of the advantages of my racket is getting all the petrol that I need.”
“In that case then, well, I think I would like a whisky.”
She stayed on for half an hour, but she had been right in thinking she would be bad company. There were awkward pauses in the conversation. How completely they had grown apart.
Guy took his day off on the following Tuesday. It would be a half-holiday at Fernhurst. It was a warm, bright day, the spell of unclouded sunshine still unbroken. The familiar landscape looked very calm and static; the cattle dozing in the shade; vans lumbering between hedges along winding roads, villages clustering round their spires, large red-brick houses on the hills, with their stables and outhouses and high garden walls, their parks and trees. It was hard to realize that across twenty miles of water an arrogant victorious enemy was planning the destruction of this fertile peace.
He had not been down to Fernhurst for fifteen years, not since he had come to see Franklin about his ‘embroidered bag’. You lost touch with your old school when you gave up games and had no son or brother there. He arrived soon after twelve. Everyone was in school and the courts were empty. He stood in the corner of the cloisters, by the studies, waiting for the half-hour to strike, and the classrooms to spill out their horde of shouting, hurrying boys. He had wondered that last time he had stood here, whether he would stand here next at Renée’s side, waiting for their son, fifteen years from then, in the autumn of 1940.
On the way down he had thought out what he would tell his nephews; how he would explain that this war was not like the last; it was a fight not between nations but ideologies. There was nothing disgraceful, nothing even discreditable in a man’s having believed in 1937 that a different ideology held the solution for the world’s and his country’s problems. On the contrary it was very much to their father’s credit that he had concerned himself so intensely with his country’s problems, when so many others, like himself, had selfishly led their private lives, busied with race meetings and football pools. He phrased and rephrased the sentences in which he would try to show that their father was guilty of nothing worse than backing the wrong horse.
He need not have put himself to so much trouble.
“Will it be in the papers?” That was the first thing Digby asked.
“I’m afraid it will, but only a small paragraph.”
“Gibson’s father got more than that when he drew the second favourite in the Irish Sweep. There was a photograph and an interview.”
“It’s much grander though,” George countered, “to have a father who’s so important that they have to put him into prison before he’s done a thing, only because they’re afraid he might.”
“Poor Daddy. How he’ll hate it.”
“I don’t expect that he’ll be there very long,” Guy said. “I expect you’ll have him home for Christmas.”
“Do you think he’ll be back these ‘hols’?” Digby asked.
“I’m afraid not as soon as that.”
“Then I’ll ride the chestnut.”
Margery dined with him that night. He had anticipated the need after an exacting day of family support. He did not, but he was grateful for her company.
“Young people take a very immediate view of things,” she said. “They can’t see further than next holidays and then in terms of their own interests.”
“That sounds like an M. of I. ‘report’.”
“Well, and why not? Everybody makes fun of us. We’re fair game. Better journalists are outside than in, and they resent our official status. But we are, you know, quite efficient.”
“I’ve never known quite what you do?”
“Questions are asked in the House on that very point.”
“I don’t mean the Ministry. I mean you yourself.”
“Me, oh, I’m rather grand. I organize people’s work. I decide on policy. If we were an army unit, I’d be a major. I’ll be a half-colonel soon.”
Margery a Lieutenant-Colonel. Well, she was thirty-five. She had a mature air of authority. Her hair was beginning to turn grey. He had a swift prophetic snap of her at fifty: silver-haired, taut and lean, with lines between mouth and nostrils, composed, executive, high-up in some Government Department. She was one of those who get and take their chance in wartime—a stern disciplinarian, her staff in awe of her, yet with an unquenched gamine quality that would make some girl who’d been reprimanded admit afterwards “she made me feel pretty small, but all the same she’s not inhuman. She might even have been fun when she was young. Wonder what happened. I suppose someone jilted her.”
“You like it, don’t you, in your Ministry?” he said.
She nodded.
“There’s a lot that’s maddening; so much red tape: approaches having to be made through the right channel; but it is exciting; you’re behind the scenes; and there’s camaraderie. I wouldn’t change my job. I often thank heaven that I’m not married. Poor Lucy, marooned there in that vast house, and Barbara in a strange country with those four children. I don’t deny that I haven’t felt sometimes sorry for myself this last five years. I’ve sometimes sworn I’d marry the first reasonable man that asked me. Thank God, I didn’t. I wouldn’t change places now with the woman I would have been if I had. Marriage for love’s sake, yes, but marriage for the sake of marriage, no, no thank you.”
She paused. “They say that no girl’s unmarried who’s had a chance of marrying. What rubbish that is. Do you remember Father’s remark all those years ago about it not being true any longer that a girl’s better off married unhappily than not married? There’s not all that difference nowadays between a man and a woman. By and large, you and I, we, the unmarried ones, have come off best.”
That was in mid-July. For Guy it was a calm period that followed. Never, he felt, had the contrast been more acute between the tempo of his private life and of the nation’s. The Home Guard was mustering, coast defences being built, new age groups called-up, the factories working overtime. He read of the Dunkirk spirit, the tremendous drive of energy inspired by Churchill’s speeches and Herbert Morrison’s ‘Go to it’. But for himself the collapse of France and the threat of imminent invasion
brought no change in the smooth rhythm of his routine.
Crocodile was presenting at the moment a very pretty problem. The contact at Kamechle had compromised with necessity and the Germans had learnt that he was in British pay. The Germans were now using Crocodile as a means of finding out what the British wanted them to know. That was of use to them. They did not know, however, that the British knew they knew. As they would now discount any information that was sent up, it behoved the British to tell them the truth, knowing that they would not believe it. Aunt Mildred in Baghdad would decide on the actual information that would be supplied, but Aliens’ Registration with their all-in picture would decide the policy.
Guy, watching each move, from the centre of his web, was reminded of a poem read once in an anthology about a courtier who pretended to be asleep in a garden under his love’s scrutiny which ended with the line, ‘She thought I thought she thought I slept.’ That problem was simpler than his own. Sooner or later the Germans would discover that the British knew they knew. Then Aunt Mildred would have to change her tactics, and start telling lies again. Later there might be another switch, when the Germans realized that the British knew this too. Where would it all end, Guy asked himself; in hopeless confusion surely.
Ten years later he was to learn the extent of the confusion, from the published story of one of Crocodile’s-contacts who as valet to an allied Minister obtained in 1944 precise information on the D-day landings, information that, had the Germans exploited it with skill, might well have delayed the ending of the war by eighteen months. Ribbentrop refused, however, to believe that the documents were not supplied by the British deception services.
Each day brought to Guy’s desk a new instalment of one or other of the cases, similar to Crocodile’s, that he was handling. If he found it at times hard to reassure himself that he was not fiddling with Rome in flames, to remind himself that the Middle East had always been a sphere of German intrigue, with a Berlin-Baghdad Axis one of the Kaiser’s fondest dreams, he found it even harder to believe that Britain was threatened by real danger. He knew she was, but it seemed impossible. Everything looked so very much the same in London: the same brisk bustle along the streets, the coffee-room at the Wanderers’ at lunch three-quarters full, scarcely a free table at dinner in the Café Royal. The sun shone and the sky was blue. Renée’s Eric came back for his holidays: his final holidays but one. His age group would be called up at Christmas. Some good one-day matches were being played at Lord’s, and Guy took him there. Once the three of them drove out to Epping Forest for a picnic. The Battle of Britain had begun. Each day brought in its cricket score of German losses, but the blue sky was clear and cloudless. The war seemed very far away.
Then, on the first Saturday in September, the brazen fury broke loose upon London.
In the third week of the bombardment, a few days after Eric had gone back to Eton, Guy was rung up by Renée at his office.
“I’m in trouble,” she said. “I’ve been bombed out. No one’s been hurt, but there’s not much left.”
Her voice was as calm as ever. It was as though she had said, “It’s raining. I’ve no umbrella. Could you send round a car to pick me up?”
In silence they stood together on the pavement; a direct hit had torn away the whole frontage of the house. It looked like a stage set, with the exposed frescoes, splintered lacquer, the velvet curtains hanging loose, and high on the top floor, the nursery wallpaper with its serial fairy story showing through the laths and plaster beneath the conventionally-patterned paper that had been superimposed when Eric had become a schoolboy.
“I’m glad that Roger isn’t here,” she said. “It would have broken his heart. He loved that house. By the time he gets back from Washington, they’ll have the whole thing demolished.”
“What are you going to do yourself?”
“Find a flat or go to a hotel.”
“There’s room in my place. Everyone’s left except the caretaker. You could move in on the ground floor.”
“Could I, yes, I suppose I could.” She looked at him pensively. He could tell what she was thinking. In the past she had always been careful to maintain appearances, but now . . . with the house that was the symbol of her marriage in ruins before her eyes, with Roger away in Washington, with her son about to join the army, with an air-raid Alert in progress, with a ‘dog fight’ being waged above their heads, with the blue of the sky criss-crossed with the white trails of the exhausts . . .
“Do those things matter now?” he asked.
Both knew what he meant by ‘those things’—convention, appearance, the maintenance of a social code, the things by which up to now they had run their lives. She shrugged.
“No,” she said. “There’s nothing matters now, nothing that’s personal, that’s to say, nothing except that,” and she pointed upwards towards the Spitfires’ spirals.
She had said that nothing personal mattered any more, yet it was a curiously personal, curiously intimate life that started for them in that October of 1940 in Rutland Street. Only three remained out of the sixteen tenants for whose benefit the service of the four houses had been organized. The management had left when the blitz began; a single char ‘did’ for them. Renéeand Guy had an entire building to themselves.
There was nothing they did not share. Returning at night to a house empty except for themselves, they were as isolated during the hours of black-out as any two refugees from a torpedoed ship on a deserted island. At one moment they would be heating themselves some cocoa; at the next throwing sand over an incendiary bomb that had pitched in the backyard. Windows would be smashed by blast. They would return from dinner to find a lump of shell casing in the hall. There would be the whine over their heads of a screaming shell and before the noise of the explosion reached them, the house under the impact of its explosion would be quivering in its foundations. On their way back from dinner, as they turned a corner there would be a quick succession of explosions and the street in front of them would be a cloud of rubble.
They were completely dependent on each other. There was a last-time sense about everything they shared, with danger rendering every sensation more acute. It was in varying moods that they faced the bombing. There were times when simultaneously they would want to dive under tables; there were times as they sat over a glass of sherry before going out to dinner that the roar of aeroplanes would so get upon their nerves, that they would gulp down their wine and almost run to the shelter of a basement restaurant. There were other times when the roar of the aeroplanes overhead was like a sedative.
It was a picnic life they shared, doing the greater part of their own housework, fixing their own breakfasts, often cooking themselves kitchen suppers, ringing themselves up during the day to decide the shopping; never during the black-out going outside a five minutes radius, never seeing anyone except themselves, with no one for those fourteen hours between half-past-six and half-past-eight existing for them outside themselves; with everything that happened during the working day made harmonious, significant by the memory, by the prospect of those fourteen hours.
Once he was sent out of London on a tour of duty. “It’ll give you a chance of a night’s sleep,” the Colonel said.
But he could not sleep. He felt restless, away from London. He tried to ring up Renée but the line was blocked. He cut his tour short and was back by the following afternoon.
“I’ve never realized,” he said, “till now what marriage was. I’ve always thought of it in terms of obligations. I’ve never thought of it as a coming home to someone.”
It was on a Saturday in November that he said that; one of those warm November days when summer seems to have returned. They had each had a half-day off; they had strolled through the park as the day was dying. The moon was three-quarters full; the sky was cloudless. London looked very lovely in the silvered dusk, the eye undistracted by the glare of street lamps. The night was warm, so warm that back in the flat they did not bother to light the fire. They sa
t sipping at their sherry, with the black-out curtains undrawn even though an Alert had gone. A waxing moon was high over the roof-tops filling the room with twilight. It was easy in that atmosphere to say tender things, as easy with the width of half a room between them, with the aeroplanes droning above their heads, with searchlights sweeping the sky, with the clatter of anti-aircraft fire splitting every sentence, as ever it had been in the dusk of their close-locked moments. Never had he felt more at one with her.
“Half the novels I’ve read,” he said, “have talked about love changing, becoming a different kind of love, about ‘being in love’ giving way to ‘loving’. It’s fifteen and a half years since Miirren yet I feel no differently.”
“That’s how I meant it to be,” she said.
“Meant?”
“I meant you to stay in love with me.”
Her head was against the light, in profile and silhouette; which was a symbol he supposed of what she had always been to him. He’d never known what she was thinking.
“I’ve never known what you saw in me,” he said.
Though she was still in silhouette, he could tell from her profile that she was smiling.
“That’s the third time that you’ve said that,” she said.
“It’s not the third time that I’ve wondered it.”
“You’ve never guessed the answer? Haven’t you read in any of those novels about ‘love coming afterwards’?”
“Where would that apply?”
“That I might have been lonely, that I might have needed someone; just as a girl who’s been let down in love might say, ‘I’ll marry the next decent man who asks me and I’ll make a go of it.’ Mightn’t I have thought, in my special and particular position, ‘The next man I meet who’s wholesome in mind and body and who’s attracted by me, I’m going to make fall in love with me and stay in love with me.’ Did it never occur to you that I might have felt just that?”
“Is that what you did feel then?”
“I didn’t say I did. I asked if you hadn’t ever wondered whether I mightn’t have.”