A Kiss for the Enemy

by David Fraser

  Flintdown was now silent. The whole of England was silent. At this hour, on this day, ‘Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,’ people withdrew absolutely for two minutes from the pressure of daily living, of getting and spending and chatter. Work stopped. Machines were still. Travel was checked. All stood bareheaded – in church, in the street, at their place of work, in their homes. The old remembered sons. The middle-aged – John Marvell was forty-seven, his wife forty-three – remembered brothers, lovers, husbands: above all, comrades. The young – those under the age of thirty – recalled parents. And the children, who recollected nothing directly, had grown up beneath the shadows of a great melancholy, a corporate sadness.

  The notes of the church clock continued to reverberate through Flintdown, echoing, measured, relentless. It took thirty-five seconds for the hour to strike. After the last note, two minutes would elapse – nobody needed a signal to mark the end of this extraordinary, united act of homage. So it had been decreed from the first year of victory. England could have accepted no less dignified an annual gesture. After two minutes folk would begin to walk quietly on, talking little. The first car door would close without fuss, the first engine apologetically start. Traffic would move again, commerce be resumed. Few people would refer directly to the experience just shared. There would be an occasional comment, understated, a relief of feelings:

  ‘My husband just has to stay at home, he has to listen to it on the wireless, from the Cenotaph –’

  ‘My sister lives near Croydon, they have the aeroplanes there, last year one came over during it – during the silence! It was all wrong, it could have waited, couldn’t it! After all …’

  ‘I liked it when we had the special service, the bugles and that, no matter the day of the week, there’s fewer go to that now, save the Legion.’

  But on the whole, Flintdown resumed its business without introspection. For two minutes there had been peace, broken by no human voice, interrupted by no sound contrived of man. For two minutes, although they certainly did not think of the matter thus, Flintdown had been at prayer, quiet, vulnerable and receptive.

  John Marvell, a very private man, always felt awkward at the ritual gatherings, the bemedalled parades at which, as a wartime ex-officer, he was invited to appear. Latterly, he had excused himself –

  ‘Mrs Marvell, you know – really we like to be quiet…’

  His absence was regretted and by no means comprehended, but he was a respected figure in the county of Sussex, a well-liked, dutiful man and this apparent and atypical lapse in proper sentiment came to be accepted. It was now an acknowledged thing that ‘Mr Marvell doesn’t come’. His presence in Flintdown High Street anyway caused no remark, for his own parish church with its war memorial was several miles away.

  Marvell generally tried to be at home on the morning of Armistice Day. It was inevitable that his wife Hilda, without morbidity, thought particularly at that time of her elder and beloved brother, killed on the last day of March, 1918 during the final great German offensive which had seemed destined to crack the British front in Picardy. John Marvell liked being with Hilda on the morning of 11th November. She was a practical, unsentimental woman; they gave each other tranquil, undemonstrative support. And John, too, had lost an elder brother. He moved his mind away. That was a corridor off which were too many locked doors and he never walked down it far.

  On this occasion, however, he had needed to go to Flint-down. A meeting with a local solicitor, a matter of some urgency concerning one of the farms, had been postponed from the previous week by the solicitor’s, Christie’s, attack of influenza, just over. And Christie’s business had taken twice as long as forecast. Hilda was not alone – not, he thought, that it would have bothered her whether she were or not. He simply liked to be there, liked her to feel his presence, unobtrusive, comprehending, not only husband but contemporary. Their generation had shared an experience at which their youngers could only guess, and sometimes, John knew, impatiently resented with a sense of exclusion. But Hilda was not alone at Bargate. Anthony was at home, down from Oxford for three weeks’ convalescence after a disagreeable bout of jaundice.

  John drove homeward through the lanes to Bargate, seven miles from Flintdown. As he turned in at the white painted gates, up the long drive of Bargate Manor, his heart returned to the scenes evoked by the silence in Flintdown High Street – to that morning nineteen years before, when an orderly had brought to Company Headquarters a pencilled message from the Adjutant, confirming what had been rumoured for forty-eight hours. German emissaries had accepted unconditionally the terms dictated to them by Marshal Foch. All fighting was to cease at eleven o’clock. Thereafter, no guns would fire.

  It had made little immediate difference to John’s battalion, ‘resting’ as they were behind the lines. But it meant that no more friends – there weren’t many left – would be killed. There would be no more letters to write to mothers and wives.

  ‘Your son was an excellent soldier, a gallant man who will be sadly missed by all his comrades in this Company. No words of mine etc. etc.’

  No more of that. Was it really nineteen years ago, that extraordinary sense of light, of quiet, of anti-climax, no appropriate words to speak nor thoughts to think? ‘It seems yesterday,’ John said to himself. ‘It has dominated these years so heavily.’ Soon, he supposed, it would be a distant memory, a gradual emergence from a fear and a pain which later generations would be unable to imagine and would blame their elders for permitting, however young they were. He left the car by the front door and went into the house in search of Hilda.

  Every house has a centre, a point where the most significant developments occur, where opinions and affections are most often formed, where the heart most memorably beats. At Bargate Manor, this centre was the inner hall. The front door opened to a flagged space, with chests, umbrella stands, shooting sticks and croquet mallets piled haphazardly, foxes’ masks mounted and scrupulously marked with the date and place at which young Marvells had been honoured by successive Masters of Foxhounds. From this outer hall – echoing, functional, draughty – glass doors gave on to the inner hall. The inner hall was the heart of the house.

  It was a large, low-ceilinged oak-panelled room which ran the depth of the building, so that at the far end from the outer hall, windows opened on the garden – the rose garden, with brick paths intersecting beds of musk and floribunda roses. In a huge, stone-surmounted fireplace logs burned without ceasing from early November until at least the end of March, so that although the fire seldom smoked uncomfortably there was always awareness of its scent and crackle. Tables, piled high with books and magazines, separated a large number of comfortable sofas and armchairs. There were, on one wall, a set of eighteenth-century prints of Sussex; although a few ‘good’ pictures hung in the drawing and dining rooms – and some undistinguished Marvell portraits in the library – the panelling of the inner hall was beautiful in its own right and needed little embellishment. It was a dark room, yet never depressing. Colour was provided by the gentle shading of the sofa covers, by crimson curtains after dark, and, in almost all seasons, by a huge bowl of flowers which were Hilda Marvell’s skill and delight. The inner hall never seemed empty. It was irredeemably untidy, and conveyed always a sense of companionship, of voices.

  Bargate was of no great architectural distinction. The oldest section – of which the inner hall formed the main part – was built in 1625. An elegant, though not altogether congruous, wing was erected at a right angle to the Jacobean house in 1768. In this wing, reached by a passage from the inner hall, was a long drawing room with French windows opening on to a lawn, next to a small, square study invariably knee-deep in John Marvell’s papers. This eighteenth-century wing also contained a very delicate, curving staircase.

  Less happily, John’s grandfather had, in 1860, felt an injudicious urge for grandeur on a larger scale. He had, in consequence, tacked on to the other end of the original building a library (the bigg
est room in the house), a billiard room, and a number of closets and washplaces which earlier generations had found unnecessary and which, although adding to comfort, were unsightly. The windows of these Victorian rooms were large, plain and disproportionate to the original (whose front they extended). Behind the library was a new dining room and extensive kitchens, also added in the Victorian era. Nevertheless, Grandfather Marvell had kept the colour tones of the house’s exterior harmonious. He had used the same grey facing-stone, and the general effect was, by 1937, by no means disagreeable. Climbing creeper helped blend the work of one century with another. Like many English houses, Bargate was a hotchpotch, but a hotchpotch with some dignity and a good deal of charm.

  John went into the inner hall. A man with hair now greying, clean-shaven, face weather-beaten, lined and kindly, he walked with a slight limp. It was impossible to imagine his quiet, courteous voice saying a hurtful or malicious word. Hilda Marvell smiled up at him from a chair where she was making entries in a notebook on her knee. She had, he knew, been listening to the broadcast ceremony from the Cenotaph in London.

  ‘Did it come through all right, my love?’

  ‘Oh yes! It was such a relief to think it was George there – everything bound to be done right. Before, one never knew.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s a little unfair, darling,’ said John mildly. ‘His predecessor always struck me as perhaps never happier than when among old soldiers. And I remember seeing him once, in 1917.1 suspect the War was one of his best times.’

  Hilda shrugged her shoulders. She had felt little sympathy with the character and the predicament of King Edward VIII. She said,

  ‘Anthony doesn’t agree with me, of course. I was unwise enough to say something of the sort to him and he snapped at me. He thinks our generation turned against someone who could have led us all towards a better future. He thinks –’

  At this point, however, Anthony himself came into the inner hall.

  ‘I hope it’s not the wrong day to ask, Mummy,’ he said rapidly, ‘but I’ve just been on the telephone to a friend of mine. He rang up from London and asked if he could come down for the night tomorrow, Saturday. I told him it would be splendid.’

  ‘Of course it’s all right,’ said Hilda. ‘Why shouldn’t it be, darling? I know we can manage one more.’

  ‘The thing is,’ said Anthony, ‘he’s a German. His name is F-F-Frido von Arzfeld. He was at Oxford for a month last term, on a reciprocal visit of some sort. Now he’s come over to fence for his university. I told him in the summer to get in touch with us at any time. He’s taken it up. He’s charming.’ He looked defiant. He had never mentioned Frido before.

  There was a perceptible silence, momentary but definite. Hilda said,

  ‘That will be delightful. What university is he at in Germany?’

  ‘I think he’s about to leave. Marburg.’

  ‘Your sort of age?’ asked John.

  ‘A bit younger. He’s done everything, university and all that, very young. Now he’s going to start his military service, after Christmas. Of course, they’ve introduced universal conscription again. Everybody has to do it.’

  ‘I know that,’ said John, a little drily.

  ‘Well, we shall look forward to seeing him tomorrow,’ said Hilda. ‘Marcia will be down this evening. Otherwise we’re on our own. Or at least, not quite – Stephen’s coming over for dinner and staying tomorrow night as well. He’s on his way back from somewhere on the coast, some speaking engagement.’

  Stephen Paterson, a Member of Parliament, was Hilda’s younger brother by eight years. She murmured something and left the room. Adjustments would need to be made.

  ‘Do you mind, Dad?’

  Anthony looked dissatisfied with the tranquillity in which his initiative appeared to have drowned. He sat down on the same sofa into which his father had subsided with The Times and turned to him with a suspicious half-smile. John felt the challenge and went through the motions of turning the paper’s pages while replying with what he hoped could be taken as nonchalant detachment.

  ‘Mind what, old boy?’

  ‘My asking Frido here. My entertaining a Hun, a Boche. Your words.’

  ‘Of course not. All that was years ago.’

  ‘But you still feel it, don’t you? You still feel hostility. Mistrust.’

  John tried to appear judicious. He knew, and he knew that Anthony knew, that this was indeed so. And recent events –

  ‘I don’t – at least I hope I don’t – feel prejudice now. All bad on the other side, all honour with our own. I don’t think I ever argued that. But at times – still, one must be patient, humble. Nobody had or has a monopoly of right. And if we can’t see each other’s virtues as well as vices after twenty years, it’s a bad lookout for Europe.’

  ‘You’re a fair man, Dad. But what do you feel in your heart?’

  ‘I think the thing I feel strongest of all – by far – is that I never want to see a war again. And certainly not against Germany. Nor against anyone else for that matter.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have that in common with Frido, anyway. His great obsession is that we’ve got to be friends. He sees England couleur de rose.’

  John considered his son carefully. He was very proud of him. Anthony could be intolerant, hasty and short of patience. What young man of spirit could not? He would, with luck, always have the courage to challenge conventional wisdom while retaining the wit to conclude – and, perhaps, the humility to admit in due course – where he was wrong. Anthony was a fine-looking young man, John thought complacently, a strong body and an interesting, handsome face. ‘Hilda’s son,’ his father often said to himself with love, but he felt personal satisfaction too. And what was youth but a time to flex all muscles, particularly those of the intellect, and try all adventures, not excluding those of the mind? John rejoiced in Anthony’s natural elegance, in the grace of his movements, in his agility of mind and body. Now Anthony leapt to his feet, mood changed, clouds dissolved, stutter not in evidence.

  ‘You understand things very, very clearly, Father!’ John thought it untrue, but he felt warmed and grateful. He felt blessed. ‘He’s a kind-hearted boy,’ he said to himself, inadequately.

  ‘Yes,’ said Anthony, ‘Frido thinks we’re marvellous. Gets us all wrong of course.’ He was smiling now.

  ‘And what,’ asked John, ‘does he think of his Chancellor?’ The Nazis had been in power for four years.

  ‘Of Hitler? Harder to be really sure. His family, I gather, are dead against. They’re very ancien régime, I suspect, and for them Hitler’s a nasty little upstart with a raucous voice and some undesirable friends, that sort of thing. Frido feels a good deal of that, I think. And he’s a decent as well as very charming chap. You’ll agree, I know. But of course he’d certainly say that they – the Nazis – have done a lot for Germany. And I think they feel that the SA – the Brownshirts – were sorted out in 1934 and the early excesses (as he’d put it) were got under control.’ Anthony smiled again. He was recalling Frido.

  ‘And what are they going to do for the rest of us, does he suppose?’ said his father. He did not particularly invite an answer. The question was more comment than interrogation. Muttering how far behind he was with correspondence he moved towards his study. Anthony remained standing, gazing at a large, smouldering log that looked poised to roll forward undesirably. His mind was elsewhere. The dark room enclosed him, rustling, creaking and whispering.

  Frido von Arzfeld found it almost impossible to think, during dinner, of anything except the exquisite girl sitting on his left. On his right was his hostess. Opposite, at the oval table, sat his hostess’s brother, Stephen Paterson. At the other end, John Marvell was between his two children, with Marcia on his right, next to Frido, and Anthony between his father and uncle. The table was set in a large bay window in the dining room, itself a part of Grandfather Marvell’s improvements, panelled in not unsuccessful imitation of the inner hall.

  Marcia had t
he same smooth, pale skin as her brother, but her hair was brown rather than black and her dark eyes shone where Anthony’s more frequently smouldered. Everything about her seemed to glow. It was impossible to imagine her except smiling. She seemed never still, a creature full of dancing movement. Tall – taller than her mother – she was slender, with delicate wrists and ankles. Her voice was gentle like her father’s, and rather deep.

  Frido’s manners were perfect. Familiar by now with English ways, he reckoned he knew which gestures were out of order. He did not raise his glass of claret to Mrs Marvell and he had got over his earlier surprise that his companions were apt to start drinking wine as soon as their glasses were filled. He had replied with easy correctness to his hostess’s enquiries about the University in Marburg and felt little surprise that she clearly had never previously heard of it. He had been told that the English, unlike the French, cooked without skill and ate without discrimination. This might, he supposed, often be true, but at Oxford, more often than not, he had lunched and dined in sumptuous style. And here, certainly, the dinner was delicious.

  As if reading his thoughts, the voice on his left said,

  ‘How do you like English cooking, Frido?’

  He found himself blushing. Despite practice he had not yet got used to the fact that even unmarried women of good family used first names to strangers within minutes of meeting. Or so it appeared. He had also been told that it was a mark of poor breeding to discuss food or praise it in a private house. Yet here was this divine girl tempting him to do exactly that. This, late during the meal, was the first conversational opening to his left. It unfortunately coincided with a lull in other conversation and a gentle smile towards him by his hostess who had heard the question. His answer would be listened to by all. It was of absolutely no importance but it would be listened to by all.