‘Have a drink,’ said Rudolph, pouring them out. Florence gave him a tortured, jolly smile, and said that drinking gave her extraordinarily little pleasure nowadays. Luke, who hated being offered drinks in his own house, refused more shortly. ‘Lunch is ready,’ he said.
They went downstairs.
‘Has the war begun?’ asked Sophia, wondering who could have ordered soup for luncheon, and seeing in this the God-guided hand of Florence. She guessed that Florence was staying in the house.
‘No,’ said Rudolph. ‘I don’t know what we’re waiting for.’
‘My information is,’ said Luke, at which Rudolph gave a great wink, because Luke so often used those words and his information was so often not quite correct, ‘my information is that Our Premier (his voice here took on a reverent note) is going to be able to save the peace again. At a cost, naturally. We shall have to sacrifice Poland, of course, but I hear that the Poles are in a very bad way, rotten with Communism, you know, and they will be lucky to have Herr Hitler to put things right there. Then we may have to give him some colony or other, and of course a big loan.’
‘What about the Russian pact?’ said Rudolph.
‘Means nothing – absolutely nothing. Herr Hitler will never allow the Bolsheviks into Europe. No, I don’t feel any alarm. We have no quarrel with Germany that Our Premier and Herr Hitler together cannot settle peacefully.’
Sophia said shortly, ‘Well, if they do, and there isn’t a revolution here as the result, I shall leave this country for ever and live somewhere else, that’s all. But I won’t believe it.’
Then, remembering from past experience that such conversations were not only useless but also led to ill-feeling, she changed the subject. She had never been so near parting from Luke as at the time of Munich, when, in his eyes, Our Premier had moved upon the same exalted sphere as Brother Bones, founder of the Boston Brotherhood, and almost you might say, God. His information then had been that the Czechs were in a very bad way, rotten with Communism, and would be lucky to have Herr Hitler to put things right. It also led him to believe that universal disarmament would follow the Munich agreement, and that the Sudetenland was positively Hitler’s last territorial demand in Europe. Carlyle has said that identity of sentiment but difference of opinion are the known elements of pleasant dialogue. The dialogue in many English homes at that time was very far from pleasant.
‘Then a silly old welfare-worker came up to a woman with eight coal-black children and said, “You haven’t got a yellow label, so you can’t be pregnant,” and the woman said, “Can’t I? Won’t the dad be pleased to hear that now?” And when we got to the village green the parson was waiting to meet us, and he looked at the pregnant ladies and said, very sadly, “To think that one man is responsible for all this.” It’s absolutely true.’
Rudolph watched her with admiration. He enjoyed Sophia’s talent for embroidering on her own experiences, and the way she rushed from hyperbole to hyperbole, ending upon a wild climax of improbability with the words ‘It’s absolutely true.’ According to Sophia, she could hardly move outside her house without encountering the sort of adventure that only befalls the ordinary person once in a lifetime. Her narrative always had a basis of truth, and this was an added fascination for Rudolph who amused himself by trying to separate fact from fiction.
‘Darling Sophia,’ he said, as she came to the end of a real tour de force about her father, whom she had left, she said, blackening the pebbles of his drive which he considered would be particularly visible from the air, ‘I know what your job will be in the war – taking German spies out to luncheon and telling them what you believe to be the truth. When you look them in the eye and say “I promise it’s absolutely true”, they’ll think it’s gospel because it’ll be so obvious that you do yourself. The authorities will simply tell you the real truth, and you’ll do the rest for them.”
‘Oh, Rudolph, what a glamorous idea!’
She took Florence upstairs. Florence wriggled a good deal which she always did if she felt embarrassed, and in spite of her conscious superiority in the moral sphere she often felt embarrassed with Sophia. Presently she said in a loud, frank voice, ‘I hope it’s all right, Sophia. I’m staying here.’
‘Oh, good. I hope you’re comfortable. If you want any ironing done, just tell Greta.’
Florence said she required extraordinarily little maiding, but this did not for a moment deceive Sophia, who had been told by Greta, in a burst of confidence, that Fraulein Turnbull gave more trouble than three of the Frau Gräfin.
Florence now drew a deep breath, always with her the prelude to an outburst of Christianity, and said that the times were very grave and that it made her feel sad to see people pay so little attention to their souls as Sophia and Rudolph.
‘We don’t think our rotten little souls so important as all that.’
‘Ah but you see it isn’t only your souls. Each person has a quantity of other souls converging upon his – that’s what makes this life such a frightfully jolly adventure. In your case, Sophia, with your looks and position, you could influence directly and indirectly hundreds – yes, hundreds of people. Think how exciting that would be.’
Sophia saw that she was in for a sermon, and resigned herself. She knew from sad experience that to answer back merely encouraged the Brotherhood to fresh efforts.
‘You know, dear, Luke feels it very much. It hurts him when you talk as you did at lunch, flippantly and with exaggeration. I wish you could realise how much happier it makes one to be perfectly truthful, even in little ways. Truth is a thing that adds so greatly to the value of human relationships.’
‘Some,’ said Sophia carelessly. ‘Now it adds to the value of my relationship with Rudolph to tell more and funnier lies. He likes it.’
‘I wonder if that sort of relationship is of much value. Personally the only people I care to be very intimate with are the ones you feel would make a good third if God asked you out to dinner.’
Sophia wished that Florence would not talk about the Almighty as if his real name was Godfrey, and God was just Florence’s nickname for him.
‘Oh, God would get on with Rudolph,’ she said.
Florence smiled her bright, crucified smile, and said that she was sure there was good material in Rudolph if one knew where to look for it. Then she wriggled about and said, very loudly, ‘Oh, Sophia, how much happier it would be for you, and for those about you, if you would give your sins to God. I feel there would be, oh! such a gay atmosphere in this house if you could learn to do just that.’
‘Only one sin, Florence, such a harmless one. I don’t steal, I honour my father, I don’t covet, and I don’t commit murder.’
‘Perhaps flippancy is the worst sin of all.’
‘I’m not flippant but I’m not religious and I never will be, not if I live to be a hundred. It’s a matter of temperament, you know.’
This was a false step. Florence now embarked on a rigmarole of bogus philosophy which no power short of an explosion could have stopped. Poor Sophia lay back and let it flow, which it did until the men came into the drawing-room, when Florence gave Luke a flash of her white and even teeth which all too clearly said ‘I have failed again.’
‘I’m just going up for a little quiet time,’ she said. ‘I’ll be ready in half an hour.’ She and Luke played golf on Saturday afternoons.
‘I’m just going down for a little quiet time and I’ll be ready in about half an hour,’ said Rudolph, picking up the Tatler. When he got back, he said, ‘Come along, Sophia, I’m taking you to the local A.R.P. office to get a job.’
‘There won’t be any war,’ said Luke comfortably, as he settled down to his Times.
Sophia and Rudolph strolled out into the sunshine.
‘Let’s go to Kew,’ said Sophia.
‘Yes, we will when you have got your job.’
‘Oh darling, oh dear, do I have to have a job?’
‘Yes, you do, or I shall be through with you. You kn
ow that I think it’s perfectly shameful the way you haven’t done any training the last few months. Now you must get on with it quickly. There is only one justification for people like you in a community, and that is that they should pull their weight in a war. The men must fight and the women must be nurses.’
‘Darling, I couldn’t be a nurse. Florence has a first aid book and I looked inside and saw a picture of a knee. I nearly fainted. I can’t bear knees, I’ve got a thing about them. I don’t like ill people, either, and then I’m not so very strong, I should cockle. Tell you what – could I be a précis writer at the Foreign Office?’
‘There haven’t been précis writers at the Foreign Office since Lord Palmerston. Anyway, you couldn’t work in a Government Department, you’re far too moony. If you can’t bear knees and don’t like ill people, you can scrub floors and wash up for those that can and do. Now here we are, go along and fix yourself up.’
Sophia found herself in a large empty house, empty, that is, of furniture, but full of would-be workers. She had to wait in a queue before being interviewed by a lady at a desk. The young man in front of her announced that he was a Czech, and not afraid of bombs. The lady said nor are British women afraid of bombs, which Sophia thought was going too far. She gave the young man an address to go to, and turned briskly to Sophia.
‘Yes?’ she said.
Sophia felt the shades of the prison-house closing in on her. She explained that she would do full-time voluntary work, but that she had no qualifications. For one wild moment of optimism she thought that the lady was going to turn her down. After looking through some papers, she said, however, ‘Could you do office work in a First Aid Post?’
‘I could try,’ said Sophia doubtfully.
‘Then take this note to Sister Wordsworth at St. Anne’s Hospital First Aid Post. Thank you. Good day.’
Rudolph was in earnest conversation with a German Jew when she came out. On hearing that she was fixed up he said that she might have a holiday before beginning her job. ‘You can go to St. Anne’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you down to Kew now.’
They sat on a bench at the end of the ilex avenue and stared at Sion House across the river. Sophia asked Rudolph what he planned to do, now that the war had begun.
‘I hope for a commission, of course,’ he said; ‘failing that I shall enlist.’
‘Somebody who knows all those languages could get a job at home – I mean not a fighting job. Perhaps it is your duty to do that,’ she said hopefully.
‘Can’t help my duty: I’m going to fight Germans in this war – not Nazis, mind you, Germans. I mean huns.’
Sophia agreed with him really. The huns must be fought.
‘How strange everything seems now that the war is here,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is unreal because we have been expecting it for so long now, and have known that it must be got over before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can be happy and sleep again. We are starting down it. Oh darling, I wish it was over and we were back in bed. What shall I do when you’ve gone?’
‘Don’t you anticipate,’ said Rudolph severely; ‘you never have, so don’t begin now. You are the only person I know who lives entirely in the present, it is one of the attractive things about you.’
‘If you are killed,’ said Sophia, paying no attention.
‘You are one of those lucky women with two strings to their bow. If I am killed, there is always old Luke.’
‘Yes, but the point is I shall have such an awful grudge against Luke, don’t you see? I do so fearfully think the war is the result of people like him, always rushing off abroad and pretending to those wretched foreigners that England will stand for anything. Cracking them up over here, too; Herr Hitler this, and Herr von Ribbentrop that, and bulwarks against Bolshevism and so on. Of course, the old fellow thought he was making good feeling, and probably he never even realised that the chief reason he loved the Germans was because they buttered him up so much. All those free rides in motors and aeroplanes.’
‘You can’t blame him,’ said Rudolph, ‘he never cut any ice over here, but as soon as he set foot in Germany he was treated as a minor royalty or something. Of course it was lovely for him. Why, Berlin has been full of people like that for years. The Germans were told to make a fuss of English people, so of course masses of English people stampeded over there to be made a fuss of. But it never occurred to them that they were doing definite harm to their own country; they just got a kick out of saying “mein Führer” and being taken round in Mercedes-Benzes. All the same they weren’t directly responsible for the war. Old Luke is all right, he’s a decent old fellow at heart. I feel quite happy leaving you in his hands. I believe he’s getting over the Brotherhood, too, you’ll see.’
As they strolled across Kew Green to get a taxi, an unearthly yelp announced to them that they had been observed by Sophia’s godfather, Sir Ivor King, and sure enough, there he was, the old fellow, waving a curly, butter-coloured wig at them out of his bedroom window. He invited them to come in for a cup of tea.
This faintly farcical old figure was the idol of the British race, and reigned supreme in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen, indeed of music lovers all over the world, as the King of Song. In his heyday, he had been most famous as a singer of those sexy ballads which were adored by our grandparents, and for which most of us have a secret partiality. He was unrivalled, too, in opera. The unique quality of his voice was the fact that it could reach higher and also lower notes than have ever been reached before by any human being, some of which were so high that only bats, others so low that only horses, could hear them. When he was a very young man studying in Germany, his music teacher said to him, ‘Herr King, you shall make, with that voice of yours, musical history. I hope I may live to hear you at your zenith.’
The prophecy came true. Ivor King was knighted at an early age, he made a large fortune, gained an unassailable position and the nickname by which he was always known, ‘The King of Song’, largely on the strength of this enormous range of voice. Largely, but not solely. A lovable and very strong personality, a genial quality of good fellowship, and latterly his enormous age, had played their part, and combined with his magnificent notes to make him not only one of the best known but also one of the best loved men of several successive generations. Among particular achievements he was the only man ever to sing the name part in the opera Norma, the script of which had been re-written especially for him, and re-named Norman.
The King of Song had toured the world, and particularly the Empire, dozens of times and these tours were indeed like royal progress. In very remote parts of Africa the natives often mistook him for Queen Victoria’s husband, and it was universally admitted that he had done more towards welding the Empire in the cultural sphere than any other individual. Quite bald, although with a marvellous selection of wigs, and finally quite toothless, he still maintained a gallant fight against old age, although some two years previously he had succumbed to the extent of giving a final farewell concert at the Albert Hall. He had then retired to a charming house on Kew Green, which he named Vocal Lodge, and devoted himself to botany; in the pursuit of this science, however, he was more keen than lucky.
‘She wore a wreath of roses the day that first we met,’ he chanted, cutting a seed cake. It was what the most vulgar of the many generations which had passed over his head would call his signature tune, and he sang it in a piercing soprano.
Sophia poured out tea, and asked after his Lesbian irises.
‘They were not what they seemed,’ he said, ‘wretched things. I brought the roots all the way from Lesbos, as you know, and when they came up, what were they? Mere pansies. Too mortifying. And now I’m the air-raid warden for Kew Gardens, in a tin hat – and it will be years before I visit Greece again. It may be for years, and it may be for ever. As you will note, the war has f
ound me in excellent voice. I am singing at the Chiswick Town Hall tonight to our local decontamination squads. Such dear boys and girls. And let me darkly hint at a more exalted engagement in the not-too-too-far-off future. I was trying to decide, when I saw you on the Green, whether I should go to my interview with some Important Personages as a blond or a brunette. I think I favour the butter-coloured curls,’ he said, taking off his wig and revealing beneath a head of egg-like baldness.
Sophia and Rudolph were quite used to this, for the King’s wigs were as much off as on, and there was never any kind of pretence about them being his own luxuriant hair.
‘Yes, I have always liked that one,’ said Sophia, ‘it softens your features. What important personages?’
‘Ah,’ said the old singer, ‘I can keep a secret. What are you up to, Rudolph? I haven’t seen you since the Munich crisis. I may tell you that, having heard that you were doing the Italian broadcast from the B.B.C., I switched on the wireless to listen. Well, I said to Magdalen Beech, poor Rudolph sounds very ill – then we discovered that it was the dear late Pope, and not Rudolph at all.’
Sir Ivor was a fervent Roman Catholic. For a short time, many years ago, he had been married to a woman so pious and so lavish with Sir Ivor’s money that she had posthumously been made a Papal Duchess and was accorded the unique honour of being buried in the Vatican gardens. Lady Beech was her sister.
‘Now you can tell me something,’ said Sophia, glancing at the Sargent portrait, in brown velvet and lace, of Duchess King which hung over the chimneypiece. ‘I had a letter from Lady Beech saying what a pity, as we must all so soon be dead, that we shouldn’t all be going on to the same place afterwards. What really happens to us heretics, darling old gentleman?’
‘Darling pretty young lady, you pop straight on to a gridiron and there you baste to eternity.’
Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie Page 22