‘As the Irishman said, “Is this a private fight or can anyone join in?”’ Sally asked. ‘I suggest that, as we have the best part of three months until the next meter reading, we use that time to investigate the actual wiring circuits and see if they are sufficiently separate to allow us to install individual private meters to help us divide the next bill with less . . . what can I call it?’
‘Democracy?’ Faith offered. ‘Communism?’
‘This argument is not about electricity, anyway,’ Marianne muttered.
‘What then?’ Nicole challenged.
‘We all know what it’s really about.’
‘Sit up straight, precious,’ Isabella snapped at Eric. ‘No wonder your back hurts – the way you sit.’
‘Ah!’ he replied wistfully. ‘I see you have not grasped my purpose, my dear. I was seeking to make myself as small and inconspicuous as possible – just while these torrents of unbridled abuse and contumely pass overhead. You and I are so utterly unused to this bickering sort of atmosphere.’
When the laughter died, neither Marianne nor Nicole could find the way back to the battleground.
‘Item two!’ Willard barked at Tony.
Most of the remaining agenda went through smoothly.
A Communal Fund would be levied at the rate of one pound per family per month.
The rewiring done in the days of the evacuated school would probably last another ten years; meanwhile a certain amount of extending and patching was all they need do. And private meters could intercept most if not all of the electricity they used.
Willard would look into restoring the old central-heating system at least to the flats in the main house.
Everyone should look out for a good second-hand Rotavator – to take the pain out of digging the vegetable garden. Also a flame gun to keep down the weeds. And individual families would be responsible for their own barrows, forks, spades, etc.
The Johnsons volunteered to make and fit a broad shelf in the passage, just inside the old Tudor back door, with seven divisions – six for the families and one for A.N. Other – where deliveries of milk, letters, newspapers, etc. should be left.
‘Item seven,’ Tony snapped.
‘Eight!’ the three women said in unison.
He looked hurt at each in turn; then at Willard, who held up both hands à la Pontius Pilate.
‘The communal meals work very well when Nicole is the chef,’ Marianne said. ‘Too badly when I am chef.’ [murmurs of dissent] ‘And so-so in-between. So now – until the babies are coming – Nicole is chef, Sally and Faith are shopping ladies. I am washer-upper. And everybody is host and hostess in turn.’
‘Can’t we contribute more?’ May Prentice asked.
‘Somewhere else?’ Sally suggested. ‘Sweeping the communal area? Weeding? Pruning? When the babies are coming – as Marianne says – everything will change, anyway.’
Tony conceded with a sigh. ‘Item eight.’
They decided that the vegetable garden was so large that, if they got a good rotary tiller, they could devote half an acre to some communal project – potatoes for sale, say – and in the remaining enclosure people could take as much as they liked for individual vegetable and flower gardens.
Tony reported he had completed only half the structural survey and had found one possible piece of dry rot which the landlord would tackle. Adam had mortared glass telltales into the brickwork over several small cracks, which were probably ancient and harmless.
Nicole said she and Tony were planning a midsummer party – actually on the 21st of June when there was a full moon – to be held on their lawn for ‘some people from the village’. Everyone in the house was welcome, of course. They were so vague as to who these ‘people’ might be that Willard’s suspicions were alerted at once. The community had no leader, it was true; but he felt that if anyone was to represent it to the wider world, the mantle should fall on him.
When Nicole said she hoped everyone would make a special effort to keep the communal areas clean and tidy for the occasion, Marianne almost had a fit. She wasn’t the only one. The stunned silence seemed a good note on which to finish. Tony said, ‘Any Other Business?’ in a tone that clearly expected none.
Willard raised a finger. ‘They’re talking about us in Barwick Green and Dormer Green.’
‘Only natural—’ Adam began.
‘They’re saying that we’re running some sort of temple of free love here. Or worse.’
‘A brothel?’ Eric asked. ‘That would certainly count as “any other business”.’
‘It’s no laughing matter, Eric. That’s where our kids will be going to school.’
‘Oh, they’ll surely know the truth by then,’ Sally said.
Willard shook his head. ‘Can’t wait for that, honey. We have to kill it stone dead – PDQ.’
‘We?’ Adam said.
‘Sure. If Nicole and Tony don’t mind, I’d like to suggest that we – the Dower House community – invite the people from the village – in fact, all the people we know from round here – to a big midsummer party on the big lawn. Really go to town.’
‘To Hertford?’ Nicole asked.
‘No – it’s a saying. Like . . . really . . . you know . . .’
‘Really “make a meal of it”,’ Eric suggested. ‘“Tear the place up . . . go overboard . . . have a gilhooley . . . give it socks”.’
‘Enough!’ Sally said, turning to Nicole. ‘Do you mind if we make it a communal invitation?’
Nicole shrugged.
‘Wizard idea,’ Tony said.
‘People we know in London, too,’ Felix suggested. ‘Fogel is longing to see this place – a capitalist kibbutz, he calls it.’
‘Now that I like!’ Willard crowed. ‘Capitalist kibbutz! We should hang that as our shingle on the gate.’
On their way home across the back yard Faith said, ‘We must ask Angela as well.’
‘We? You mean whichever one of us gets to her first.’
‘No – you ask her. She might not come if I do the inviting.’
Saturday, 21 June 1947
Each family arranged for one or two rooms to be available for people who wanted to stay at least until dawn – which, they thought, would be most of the London and more distant guests. Willard fixed palliasses and sleeping bags through friends at the US depot near Wheathamstead. He and Tony flushed out the old cast-iron central-heating system and refilled it with water and some kind of rust inhibitor, also courtesy of Uncle Sam. The communal fund paid for a ton of coke to fire the boiler. Nicole went around the butchers in Hertford and got all the bones and off-ration offal they could spare, from which she made a stock, using herbs she gathered in the countryside around and saddle-fungus from a big beech near the pheasant runs – the only edible fungus she could find in June. Its bouquet filled and tantalized the house all week.
‘I’m not going to let her flaunt herself around as the solo caterer,’ Marianne told Felix.
He told her about Fortnum and Mason’s.
Every woman sewed the old blackout curtains into loose covers to protect the furniture they were lending for the communal party.
To floodlight the main lawn, Willard acquired a perimeter light from the Yanks and almost started a fire when he plugged it in. When they went to take out the fuse, they found it had been replaced by a two-inch coach-bolt – another Jersey legacy; and when they lifted the floorboards in the Prentices’ flat to inspect for damage to the wiring, they saw that the conduits there were the original bare copper rods, set into the floor joists – a legacy from Edwardian times. So a complete survey of the wiring of the entire house was no longer item 3 on the community agenda, and there was no maybe about the rewiring. Arthur Prentice liberated some new sheathed cable and they ran it directly from the fuseboard to the lamp.
Felix invited Corvo and his current friend, Julian Buller; also Fogel and Peter Murdoch who was the new editor-in-chief of the Modern Art series at Manutius; he had been seconded from
Macdonald’s, who were to publish the English edition and wanted their own man on the inside.
The Wilsons and the Palmers invited several colleagues from the Greater London Plan, including the great Sir Patrick Abercrombie, himself; also friends from architectural college and their schooldays.
Willard’s list included the local doctor, neighbouring farmers, handyman Bob Ambrose, and Mrs Tawney of the local War Agricultural Executive Committee, the Herts County Council, the Watch Committee, the Workers Educational Association Committee, a justice of the peace, a parish councillor, and Brown Owl of the Dormer Green Brownie troupe.
‘His instinct has not deserted him,’ Adam commented.
Arthur and May Prentice asked several colleagues from Alexandra Palace. Todd and Betty Ferguson asked his mates at the Welwyn Garden goods depot and hers in the hair stylists at Welwyn Department Store. The Brandons, whose Bentley-designed Lagonda stood dead centre in front of the main portico for the day, brought along important buyers from Aquascutum and Selincourt.
The community as a whole invited John Gordon, the land agent for the Hatfield Sand and Gravel Company, their landlords. He, in turn, said that Sir Waldron Bligh, the chairman, would not turn down an invitation – especially when he learned that Sir Patrick would be briefly present.
‘Surely this is what we meant by community?’ Adam said to Willard as they surveyed the gathering crowd upon the big lawn – a mix of the Royal Enclosure at Ascot and the Chelsea Arts Ball. ‘None of us, if we were sole occupiers of the house, could have done all this. And just think what it’ll be like when we all have our own families – a dozen of our own children here all the time!’
‘Adam!’ Willard patted his arm. ‘You should have married that woman called Eve. That was the first and last time every living human was a true communist.’
Adam checked his watch and laughed. ‘Funny you should say that, old chap. As a matter of fact I’ve invited a girl called Eve. She was my first ever girlfriend at school.’
‘What does Sally say to that?’
Adam winked.
The guests had arrived in ones and twos – by train and bus, by bicycle and motorbike, by taxi, and even a few by car. Sally ran a shuttle with her horse Copenhagen and her gig between the house and the bus stop at Barwick Green. It was a fine evening with only the mildest breeze under an almost cloudless sky. The early arrivals lent a hand with the tables and chairs. Nicole took two tables to one side of the lawn and set out her contributions to the fare – the mouthwatering broth, the profiteroles, and the tartes tatines. Marianne’s table, on the opposite side, was laden with smörgåsar of egg and anchovies, prawns in mayonnaise, and soft cheese dotted with lumpfish roe.
It was the sort of feast that, since 1938, most English people had seen only in Hollywood costume epics. Many of those who had come out of curiosity, feeling more than sceptical about this experiment in communal living, were given food for thought as well. As Sally said later, ‘They came to scoff and they scoffed the lot.’
And the chatter was unending. If words had been visible, there would have been a haze drifting over the whole of south Hertfordshire.
Faith went up to town early and came back by taxi with Wolf Fogel and – Felix was surprised to see – Angela Worth. He ran toward them but Fogel leaped out and, grasping him by the arm, asked, ‘Which is your bit of this kibbutz?’
‘But . . .’ Felix glanced toward the two women.
‘Ignore it,’ Fogel said. ‘That’s business.’
‘What business?’
‘Faith thinks television and publishing can get in bed together. Ritchie Calder calls it synergy. She wants Miss Worth to introduce her to a Mister Hugh Wellington, from television, who should be somewhere in these crowds.’
Reluctantly, Felix took him to the cottage – where Fogel only had eyes for ‘his’ sculpture. When showing the man upstairs (these of pine, numbering twelve), Felix was surprised to discover that Faith had written out two cards, one saying Faith, the other Felix, and had pinned them to separate bedroom doors. ‘It would be embarrassing if your lovers – or hers – made a mistake, eh?’ Fogel suggested. ‘Life in any kibbutz must be complicated, no?’
‘My life is simple enough, Wolf. I suspect this is for Miss Worth’s benefit – not yours.’
At that moment Faith was saying to Hugh Wellington, ‘Yes, but just suppose Richard Dimbleby or Wynford Vaughan Thomas had been able to shoot thirty minutes of a report – not just three . . . I mean, the war we saw in the newsreels was like salvaging five pieces out of a two-hundred-piece jigsaw puzzle. What if they’d been able to show us the whole damn thing?’
‘My dear young lady,’ he responded. ‘The top brass would have had a fit!’
‘And would they have deserved it?’
‘Well . . .’ He gazed over her shoulder, seeking someone less demanding to chat with. ‘A lot of water must flow under the bridge before we get there.’
‘Oh!’ she responded briskly. ‘Somehow I imagined we were talking about the very reservoir from which all that water must one day flow.’
She introduced Felix and Fogel, who had just joined them. Fogel took Wellington by the arm, saying, ‘I have champagne in the taxi.’ As they strolled away, he was saying, ‘You know vot ze scientists call synergy, yes?’
‘Where’s Angela?’ Felix asked. ‘I thought I would be meeting her at Harmer Green.’
‘It seemed only a kindness to offer her a lift. And Robert Street was only a couple of miles out of our way. So many people!’ Faith stared toward the back lawn, where Nicole and Marianne had set out their tables. ‘She said she saw someone she thought she knew. She went off that way.’
They didn’t find her – she found them at the head of the big lawn, by the ballroom steps, and in some agitation. ‘You know Marianne Johnson?’ she said to Felix, gripping his arm almost painfully. ‘I’m sure she’s the one I told you about – Maria – in Berlin.’
‘You . . . what . . . ?’ He understood the words but . . .
‘My contact with the communists! And she recognized me, too. The moment she saw me . . . pfft! Up the steps and into the house. Can we go in there?’
‘Er . . .’ Felix’s mind was racing.
‘Is that her husband – Willard?’
‘Did you speak to him . . . tell him anything about—?’
‘No! Of course not. She’s the Swedish girl you told me about?’
‘Yes. The thing about him and Marianne . . . I meant to explain all this when . . . I mean, if I’d collected you off the bus. The thing is . . . Willard is . . . well, he’s a wonderful fellow in many ways . . . done wonderful things for this community . . . but he has an absolutely fanatical hatred of communism. That’s why Marianne took fright and bolted. Nothing to do with you.’ He chewed his lip. ‘What do we do now?’
‘Can you take me up to see her?’
Faith put her oar in: ‘If Marianne really is Angela’s communist contact, then it’s not fair to leave Nicole in ignorance. My God! And Marianne has accepted Nicole’s taunts all this time rather than risk Willard’s finding out she was a heroine all along! A heroine who happened to be a communist!’
‘Gott in Himmel!’ Angela exclaimed. ‘I’m going to give that Willard a bit of my mind!’
‘No!’ Felix spoke loud enough to turn several heads. More quietly he added, ‘Do that and you’ll smash a good marriage.’
‘How can it be good with such a man?’
‘That’s not for you to judge, Angela. Take it from me – it’s a good marriage—’
‘Not for me to judge? Not for you, either, I think.’
‘I know more about this than—’
‘We have lived in Hell for years. Never again can we make judgements on –’ she waved a hand at the entire garden party – ‘the normal.’
‘All the more reason not to interfere,’ he said calmly.
‘Except,’ Faith put in, ‘how much did Willard see? I’ll bet those little brain-cogs are already goi
ng clicketty-click!’
Felix nodded glumly.
Faith had not finished. ‘And we can’t let Nicole go on digging herself deeper and deeper in a hole. These things always come out in the end . . . and if she discovers that we knew the truth all along . . .’
‘Also,’ Angela said, ‘Maria, or Marianne, has – or had – the only remaining copy of the protocol I made of that conference at Interpol HQ IN.’ FORTY-TWO . . .’
‘Should I have heard about this?’ Faith asked.
Felix told her. ‘It was a conference where the SS told the rest of the Nazi bureaucracy they were going to murder all the Jews, gypsies, and queers they could find.’
‘And,’ Angela added, ‘I gave a copy to British Intelligence when I was debriefed. And now they say they can’t find it. I hoped they’d use it in the war-crimes trials because everything is there. It’s like fifteen signed confessions – the things they said. But they’ve lost it!’
‘Here’s what we’ll do,’ Felix said.
‘Well, we had a John Logie Baird set before the war,’ Isabella was telling Arthur Prentice. ‘And if that’s what your television is going to look like when it returns for all the nation, you can jolly well keep it.’
Arthur assured her that the BBC had ended the Baird experiment in 1937 and the apes would quit Gibraltar before the BBC would agree to let Baird and his wretched excuse for a television system come within ten miles of any TV studio. It would be exclusively Schoenberg’s electronic system from EMI.
‘And who is that extraordinary man talking to the Continental-looking person who came in a taxi with Faith Bullen-ffitch. Where on earth did he learn to speak like that?’
‘Schtumm!’ he warned. ‘That’s Hugh Wellington – my boss.’
‘Oh! Poor you!’
‘Dylan Thomas says the man speaks as if he had the Elgin Marbles in his mouth. He says it’s the standard BBC accent.’
‘You know Dylan Thomas?’ Isabella said, taking a step back and looking him up and down.
‘I run across him now and then at Mother Redcaps in Camden Town. He does poetry, they say.’
‘Very good poetry, too.’
The Dower House Page 15