Mr Squales paused. Obviously this was a big moment. Quite a lot would depend on how he answered. And he was determined not to be found unequal to it. Summoning up his courage he played as big as the moment.
‘Something tells me that there won’t be any war,’ he said. ‘Something tells me that this is just a time sent to test us.’
But Mrs Jan Byl was in no mood for the psychic this afternoon. She was collecting up the little Sèvres ornaments that stood on a side‐table by her desk.
‘I should never forgive myself,’ she said, ‘if these got bombed. All the insurance in the world couldn’t replace them.’
On the way home in the bus, Mr Squales thought dark and revolutionary thoughts.
‘They’re all the same – rich women,’ he told himself. ‘There’s no humanity in them. They’re just Crœsuses’ – he liked a classical reference or two in his thoughts. ‘They smile on you one day and spurn you away with their toe the next. All I ask is one large bomb. Just one. One large bomb on Withydean.’
That was why there was such a happy home‐coming when Mr Squales returned to Dulcimer Street. His previous coldness and taciturnity – or had Mrs Vizzard only imagined it? – had vanished. He was affectionate and even playful.
When Mrs Vizzard suggested that they should get married in October, Mr Squales called her his kitten again.
Chapter XLV
1
Mr Veesey Blaize’s chambers in the Temple were small, dark and inconvenient. They were in Pump Court and the rooms had a north aspect – if you can call the other and identical side of the court, less than twenty yards away, an aspect. Had chambers so manifestly shabby and badly‐situated been offered to Mr Veesey Blaize in any other part of London he would, of course, have refused them. But the Temple was different. It had its own standards, and it hadn’t departed from them. There was a kind of you‐must‐take‐me‐as‐you‐find‐me attitude about the place. New‐fangled inventions like lifts and central‐heating might have conquered the rest of London, but the Temple hadn’t been conquered. There was still the sound of foot‐leather on stone staircases and coal being stoked on to the fire by the shovelful. In the Temple even the telephone seemed a modern distraction. And it was rather strange when you came to think of it, talking on the telephone about thousand pound retainers, and having to share a lavatory with four other men on the same floor.
But that was the Temple all over. And it was simply a part of the overcrowding that went on there. You couldn’t have squeezed in even another junior with a shoehorn. There they were packed solid – K.C.s, clerks, devils, bright juniors, and all the rest of them; and some people actually chose to live there despite the overcrowding. You had only got to look at the names – rather imposing names, too, some of them – written up on any one of the staircases to see what a pass things had come to. Rows and rows of them. Mr Valentine Probjay, Sir Aneurin Lewis, Mr A. Clifton Speldman, Mr Veesey Blaize, Mr E. Predderburn‐Goldschmidt and Mr J. E. A. Ropps – that was the actual list beside Mr Blaize’s own front door.
It was just as bad, in fact, as Harley Street where the doctors lived. And there was nothing except tradition to explain it. Proximity to the Law Courts had very little to do with it because only a little further up the Strand there was a big up‐to‐date office building like Bush House which would have suited everybody perfectly. No, it was as if the Law, like a lot of lemmings, had suddenly all banded together and then been held up by the railings of Temple Gardens on the way to take their communal header from the Embankment.
Not that there weren’t compensations for being there. You had only got to step out of Fleet Street, with its pubs and tobacconists and newspaper palaces, into the Temple to be right out of space and time altogether. It was going back two, three, four hundred years in a hundred yards. Christopher Wren had designed some of the newer parts. And quite a few of the inmates looked as though Sir Christopher had designed them, too. Standing still in one of the courts you could hardly believe that you were in a City at all. The sound of London, the deep pulsating roar of the place, couldn’t find a way through the crooked alleyways and up the little flights of steps. The only noise that ever got in was the hooting of tugs on the river. And that is something that you couldn’t keep out. It was like the river itself. It was why London was there.
Mr Veesey Blaize had been in his present chambers for nearly eleven years. He’d been there for so long in fact that he’d forgotten that there was anything wrong with them. And that was strange because the rest of his life was planned to make him comfortable. He’d got a flat in Knightsbridge beside the Park, and a cottage in Sussex where every week‐end – except when there was a rush on – he stopped being a learned counsel and became a two‐acre country squire.
Considering the life he led – the public dinners; his late hours and his rages in Court, Mr Blaize looked a healthy enough sort of man. His eyes were a bit bloodshot towards the end of Term, and his hands sometimes trembled a little. But that was probably only because he didn’t get enough sleep. It was really his magnificent physique that had kept him going. He was like a bull; a bull with high blood‐pressure. Seen from the back he was a great bulging mass of a man. And so he was from the front and sides. But then you noticed what small hands and feet he had. His face was round and spreading, too. The heavy pink dewlaps fell down over the wide points of the collar. But there was one other thing about him that wasn’t round and spreading. Something that was fine and different like his hands. And that was his nose. It was like the beak of a bird. Not large and aquiline like an eagle’s. Small and sharp like a razorbill’s.
At that moment he was reading a brief which concerned a big firm which, acting on advice, was resisting a claim for compensation from a workman’s widow whose husband while under the influence of drink had been caught up in a piece of the big firm’s machinery. It was an involved, tricky sort of case, with the Lords written all over it, and Mr Veesey Blaize was enjoying it. Really enjoying it immensely. It brought out all that was best in the man. At the thought of what his client, the widow, had suffered, one of his really big Court rages was already boiling up inside him.
But it was not exclusively of the poor widow v. Trapleigh Mills, Ltd., that he was thinking. It was of his daughter. She had a most remarkable talent for coming between him and his briefs. And she seemed to have been cultivating that talent lately. There had, in fact, been hardly a day for the last three years – ever since she had come down from Oxford, and that prematurely – when he had been quite sure what was happening to her. For one so young, she was extraordinarily unfortunate. At twenty‐two she had been in five night clubs that had been raided, and had very nearly – and most expensively for her father – been the woman named in a small and no‐account divorce case. On the following morning, while her father was pleading for the workman’s widow, Celia Blaize was coming up in a different Court on a charge of drunkenness and disorderly conduct in Piccadilly. All the afternoon he had been writing personal letters to the editors he knew, asking them not to report the case. He had never realised before quite how many editors he knew.
Mr Blaize relit his cigar that had a good four inches to go, and settled himself down to the brief again.
His clerk came in and stood in front of him.
‘Mr Barks to see you, sir,’ he said. ‘Case of Percy Aloysius Boon.’ ‘Barks,’ Mr Veesey Blaize said angrily, ‘never heard of him.’
2
The South London Parliament was in session. There were 32 members present – 4 more than there were at the moment across the water at Westminster. But there was a reason for it. Down in South London they were having a full‐dress debate on foreign policy.
The headmaster of the Church School at Camberwell had nearly finished. He was a small intense man like a kettle that has just come to the boil. His upturned spoutlike nose was raised angrily, and little hot steamlike bursts were coming from him.
‘…and there are some who spend their time trying to make things diff
icult for this great and good man who has done more to stave off war than any one else alive to‐day. To them I say one thing and one thing only. Where would Britain be to‐day if our Prime Minister had not flown to Munich? We should be at war, gentlemen. At war.’
He sat down abruptly, his shoulders still rising and falling. But it was obvious that the steam‐pressure inside him had subsided: he had boiled himself dry in fact. Mr Josser felt rather relieved that he had finished. It was good sense that he had been talking. Good sense, but too much of it. There had been an awful lot of foreign‐policy let loose since the house had met at 7.30. Mr Josser hoped that Mr Runcorn, the Speaker, would feel like rising. But even if he did feel like it, Mr Runcorn was a thorough and conscientious man and, as there was still ten minutes to go, he supposed that there was nothing for it but to give Uncle Henry his chance. He’d deliberately avoided catching his eye earlier, because he hated Uncle Henry.
‘The honourable member for Limehouse,’ he said, without enthusiasm.
Mr Josser’s heart fell. He knew just what it would be like. Uncle Henry had been getting worse lately. He had taken to muttering. All through the last speech Mr Josser had heard coming from him little snatches that sounded like ‘soft soap,’ ‘crypto‐fascist,’ ‘…lamp‐posts in Whitehall.’ Even so, Mr Josser wasn’t prepared for what was coming.
Uncle Henry began quite mildly. Suspiciously mildly, for him.
‘I’ve been a member of this house for seven years,’ he said. ‘I’ve watched Governments come and I’ve watched Governments go. I’ve seen new faces and I’ve lost old friends. I’ve heard some good speeches and I’ve made one or two myself.’
Here Uncle Henry paused.
‘And what does it all add up to?’ he asked. ‘What does it all add up to?’
He paused again. A longer pause than last time. Mr Josser noticed that he had stuck his two thumbs under the back strap of his braces. That was always a bad sign with Uncle Henry: it meant that he was getting ready to kick out at someone. And sure enough he was.
‘It means we’ve all been a bloody lot of fools,’ he said. (Cries of ‘Shame! Shame!’ from the Church School headmaster). ‘If we hadn’t been bloody fools we shouldn’t have come here,’ Uncle Henry continued. ‘Playing Parliament, indeed. Playing ostriches more likely. Wait till the bombs come raining down. Wait till the streets are full of dead and dying. Wait till your wives and children have had their limbs blown off. Wait till Mr Speaker has got a shell‐splinter in his gizzard…’
The cries of ‘Shame’ were so numerous this time, even from Uncle Henry’s own supporters, that the Speaker felt bound to intervene. There was only a few minutes to go and he’d hoped that the evening would close quietly.
‘I moss arsk the honourable member for Limehouse to restrain himself,’ he said in a thick, professional voice. ‘We want politics, not unpleasantness.’
But Uncle Henry was off again. His eyes were glazed and staring, and over his forehead his quiff of grizzled hair was standing out like a horn.
‘The war‐clouds,’ he went on, speaking louder than ever, ‘are gathering overhead to drench us in a gory deluge. The sea will render up its dead with depth‐charge and torpedo. And, on the land, vast armies are about to clash until the rivers of Europe will run crimson to the ocean and the widow and the childless will rend heaven with their cries. And what do we do? What?’ Here Uncle Henry raised his voice so much that passers‐by in the Kennington Park Road were able to hear him quite distinctly. ‘We sit down here, a lot of middle‐aged men who ought to know better, and pretend we’re M.P.s. And a silly old geyser in an armchair tries to kid himself that he’s Mr Speaker. I tell you…’
But Uncle Henry had gone too far. Definitely too far. There were cries of ‘Withdraw,’ ‘Chuck him out!’ and ‘Apologise.’ And it was the latter word, in particular, that annoyed Uncle Henry.
‘Apologise for speaking the truth?’ he roared. ‘Never!’
So there was nothing for it but for Mr Runcorn to assert his supreme authority. He wasn’t sorry to do so. He’d been called a silly old geyser with a shell‐splinter in his gizzard. And he was angry. Very angry. He rose, trembling.
‘I der‐clare the honourable member for Limehouse suspended,’ he said.
‘You can’t,’ Uncle Henry shouted back at him. ‘I’ve resigned.’
Uncle Henry came across to Mr Josser afterwards. Usually he had sobered up by the time the House had risen. But not to‐night. In his eye there was still that wild look that Mr Josser distrusted. And he was breathing hard. There seemed nothing for it but to humour him. This time Uncle Henry’s suspension seemed final.
‘Coming across for the usual?’ Mr Josser inquired pleasantly.
It was an agreeable institution that weekly migration to the Wrexford Arms. Indeed, without it, the South London Parliament could hardly have continued. There was a dangerous tension, an electric something‐in‐the‐air about these sessions that could not have been sustained week after week without relaxation. The bitter animosities, the feuds that started up on the floor of the House were magically washed away by half‐a‐pint of old‐and‐mild, or a bitter, afterwards.
But to‐night Uncle Henry’s response just showed how impossible it was to do anything with the man. He simply glowered back at Mr Josser.
‘These are not drinking days,’ he said sternly. ‘They’re days for action.’
‘Just so,’ Mr Josser replied amiably. ‘That’s what we could do with – action.’
Uncle Henry thrust out his hand and gripped Mr Josser by the elbow.
‘Then I can count on you?’ he demanded.
Mr Josser hesitated.
‘What for?’ he asked.
‘To rouse the country,’ Uncle Henry told him. ‘To sound the tocsin and awake Whitehall.’
He paused long enough to gather up a bundle of papers and, still holding Mr Josser firmly by the elbow, led him into the street.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you.’
Chapter XLVI
1
They’d decided at the infirmary that Mrs Boon was well enough to be sent away to their convalescent centre. And they’d even fixed up for her to go down by ambulance. All the way to Bournemouth by private ambulance. But she didn’t want to go. It was too far from Percy, she said.
And in the end they had to give up. It turned out that it wasn’t only the trial that was worrying her. It was Dulcimer Street as well. She was concerned about the rooms. She was afraid that if she went to Bourne‐mouth Mrs Vizzard would re‐let them and that she would have nowhere that she and Percy could call a home when he came out again. If only she could see Mrs Vizzard face to face for a few minutes, she insisted, she could explain everything. That however was impossible. She had to write. And it is difficult to say exactly what is in your heart when you are dictating to another person. The Sister who took it down was very nice about it but it wasn’t the same thing.
Mrs Vizzard, however, was far from pleased to receive Mrs Boon’s message about the rooms. She had set her heart on them for herself. She was greedily and extravagantly planning to re‐absorb them. They were, in fact, a part of her marriage plans. She would, of course, have preferred to have the Jossers’. Taken along with the basement they would have provided a complete bridal suite. But the Jossers were permanent. And friends. And payers. Anything in the way of dispossessing them was unthinkable.
Then she pulled herself up sharply. How could she think, even for a moment, of occupying more rooms just when every penny, every halfpenny, mattered? She must have taken leave of her senses to contemplate it.
‘But surely,’ she told herself, ‘it won’t always be like this. Rico won’t always be… be dependent on me. He must as time goes on… find something. There must be an opening for him somewhere.’
Again she checked herself. These doubting thoughts about Mr Squales seemed positively disloyal, somehow. It was almost as though deep inside her she questioned his ability to earn his livi
ng like other men. But this was absurd, she realised. He was so gifted, so talented. That wonderful presence of his. And the deep rich voice that melted you to jelly when it was turned full on you. Of course he would succeed. Would succeed dazzlingly. And she would have been the one, the woman in the background, who had stood by him while he was still unknown…
It wouldn’t be long now. By Christmas they’d be married. And Mr Squales would have settled down to… oh dear, what was it that he was going to settle down to? Somehow, mediumship – especially when you thought about it before lunch – seemed such a vague, precarious way of earning a living for two. But even so, there was nothing vague and precarious about Mr Squales. When she had hinted, had declared openly in fact, that with a house waiting for them both they could get married straight away, Mr Squales had chided her. He had refused. Refused, gently but firmly. He had said that things were too unsettled internationally to be precipitate about a thing like marriage. By January or February, or March at the very latest, they could see how things were in Europe. And then they could wed and set up house with a light heart. In the meantime, as he had reminded her, they were together. They were near, weren’t they? he had asked.
But not to‐night. To‐night they weren’t near. Mr Squales had gone off on a professional engagement. Right over to Finsbury Park where the rival body, the North London Spiritualist Club, held their meetings. He had gone without Mrs Vizzard. Without even suggesting that she should go with him. And Mrs Vizzard, stifling her feelings, had let him go. She had felt tears come in her eyes and a large choking lump in her throat, when he had informed her. But she still had some reserve and self‐control. She revealed nothing. She even helped him to get ready, ironing him a handkerchief so that he should be complete in every detail. After all it was his career, not hers, that he was pursuing. She couldn’t expect to accompany him everywhere when the engagements eventually came crowding in. And, as things were, it was for her as much as for him that he was building up his connections.
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