by D. J. Taylor
‘I say,’ he said, half-admiringly, as they got back into the car, ‘you are in a stew.’
The daylight was fading away. A little further on from where the car was parked, enormous palm trees hung over the road, thirty or forty feet high. The effect was surprisingly unsettling.
‘Do we go right or left here?’ Henry wondered, when the trail seemed about to divide. ‘I can’t remember.’ He seemed flustered by the twilight, not quite at ease.
Cynthia twitched her shoulder slightly to one side, not interested in these difficulties. Henry had insisted on bringing her out here. He could take her back again. Her right knee ached and she wished she had brought a jumper. The glimmer of the car’s headlights illumined odd items in the roadway: half a packing case, a length of coconut matting.
‘You shouldn’t go at such a pace,’ she said, not really concerned. She was still thinking of what Henry said about Mr Bannister being in the faction. What made her so cross, she divined, was its implication of ulterior knowledge. It occurred to her that Henry, leg-stretching, Greats-reading Henry, had confused her with another girl who presumably had this faction business, whatever it was, at her fingertips.
Not long after this Henry, who had one arm flung protectively around her shoulder, even though it was tilted away from him, and the other rather too negligently on the wheel, ran the car off the road and into a tree.
The Kirkpatricks were supposed to be good in a crisis: this was what Mrs Kirkpatrick always said. Having hit the tree, the car veered off for a dozen yards or so into the undergrowth and finally came to a halt against a second, tougher obstruction. Lying against the passenger door, where the impact had flung her, she was conscious of a dreadful pain in her side.
‘Henry, I’m hurt,’ she said, and then, getting no answer, only a far-off cry in the undergrowth that must have come from some animal taking flight, ‘I’m hurt, Henry.’
But she saw that the driver’s seat was empty. She tried to stand up, but the pain in her shoulder made her fall backwards into the car.
‘Henry,’ she said again, more urgently. There was some blood in her mouth, but this did not alarm her, for Mrs Kirkpatrick, who, as she sometimes said, had fallen off more horses than you would have thought possible, always maintained that, provided one was still breathing, a little blood meant nothing.
Eventually, after a longish struggle, she managed to drag herself upright. There was a dismaying stretch of time—two or three minutes at least—when his location escaped her—the blood was running all over her front now, which was another dress ruined—but then she saw what at first looked uncannily like an old sack spilling its contents over the forest path, and realised that this was Henry, leg-stretching, Greats-reading, French letter-fumbling Henry, and that was that.
As for what happened afterwards, even Mr Kirkpatrick, who never swore, allowed that it was a bloody disaster. They buried Henry in the English cemetery up on Pattayara Heights, next to a giant catafalque in green marble, put up to honour some bygone colonial vizier, that had already begun to list alarmingly to the right. A vulture sat watching from a nearby eucalyptus tree, and people tried very hard not to notice the rat-holes that ran down beneath the newly turned grass.
Oh, those funerals in the East, with the sun burning off the chaplain’s bald forehead, incongruous silk hats, a smell of cinnamon, and the alien sky looming purple in the background! Cynthia had read about them in Blackwood’s. Now she was alarmed to find them every bit as fearful as Maugham had hinted. They had let her out of hospital to attend, with her arm in a sling and the three cracked ribs bound up with surgical tape, and she fainted twice in the car. After that she felt a bit better and was able to take a tearful interest in her surroundings.
No one seemed to know whether she should be treated as the grieving widow or the silly girl who had been indirectly responsible for this horror, and one or two of the things said to her were inexpressibly painful: not because they were insincere, but because her own sincerity was so very much in question. In the end she could not bear to watch Henry’s coffin—surprisingly cheaply made, she noticed, and unvarnished—being lowered into the ground, and concentrated instead on the next memorial along, which was to someone called Laurence Horatio Mainwaring, who had died at sea off Galle in 1922, and which insisted that blessed were the pure in heart. By the time she had digested this sentiment—all the gravestones had a greenish tinge, like rotting teeth, and the gilt inscriptions had begun to flake off—they were back in Government House where an Honorary Attaché with a defective palate (the Governor was up-country in Jaffna) said what a fine young man Henry was, and how his memory would live on in their hearts. The rain came on halfway through and they listened to it drumming on the roofs of the cars drawn up in the square outside.
Later on, back at the villa, she fainted again—on purpose—and had to be put to bed.
There was an etiquette, she assumed, to the predicament in which they found themselves, but nobody seemed to know what it was. They ate their meals in silence, as the rain teemed over the ragged grass, alert to the sound of footsteps or churned-up gravel in the drive. Mrs Kirkpatrick’s personal myth was much in evidence: the part that dealt in stoicism, steely resolve, the cavalry charge still accomplished even if one’s horse had been shot from underneath one. ‘I suppose it would have been a very exhausting life,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said once, which might have been an apology.
But there were worse things than Mrs Kirkpatrick’s determination to make amends. In particular, there was an excruciating interview with Mr Bannister one morning in the villa drawing room, which everyone seemed to think it was necessary to go through. This, too, was like one of the stories in Blackwood’s. He was standing in the very centre of the room, rather impressively, with his hat in his hand and a cane wedged under his arm like a swagger-stick, and when he saw her he came forward decisively and put his hand in hers as if there were now some immortal compact between them that could never be put asunder, and she would have been prepared to concede this—the impressiveness, the hat, and the hand—had he said anything that was in the slightest degree original.
As it was he relaxed his grip, stared at her keenly—he was on the tall side, and the effect was faintly intimidating—and said, ‘Cynthia, this is a terrible thing to have happened.’
‘Yes, it is,’ she said, wishing she could be anywhere else but here in this room, with the dreadful little pagoda-clock ticking away on the mantelpiece next to the Nuwara Eliya cricket club fixtures card. ‘A terrible thing.’
‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ Mr Bannister said, with the brazen look of someone who is absolutely determined to say it, ‘but of all my children he was the one I loved the most, you know.’
‘I’m sure he was,’ she said. Henry had always complained about the favours lavished on the Leicestershire hunt-secretary.
‘And I need hardly say’—this, in retrospect, was the worst bit of all—‘that he thought the world of you.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she said.
‘I won’t have us lose touch, you hear?’ There was something incorrigible about Mr Bannister as he said this. ‘Just because of this dreadful thing. Old friends we are and old friends we shall stay. You must come and see us often.’
‘I should like that,’ she said, thinking that whatever her mother might say, she never wanted to see Mr Bannister ever again.
There was quite a lot more of this, and she was surprised at how cross it made her. Part of her was prepared to sympathise almost indefinitely with Mr Bannister, but another part thought that he was a wicked old man saying things he did not believe in.
She was startled to find that when she thought of Henry she could remember only the unimportant things: the kink in the bridge of his nose that made him look slightly Jewish; the golfing brogues he tramped around in at home in Sussex; the way he said ‘lava-tory’; his teaching her to shoot on a moor somewhere n
ear the Tweed and telling her that it was a valuable skill that was bound to come in useful some day. Already, a week after his death, it was as if he had barely existed, drifted away into some backwater of memory from which the most determined efforts could not drag him clear.
There was a photograph of him in an old album that had come out with them from England, a younger Henry holding a tennis racket slantwise across his chest and wearing a striped blazer, rather as if he were about to take the part of the male lead in a musical comedy, and she stared hopefully at it for quite a long while, wondering if it would disclose a second, more intelligible Henry whom she had never really known, but in the end she gave it up as a bad job. Meanwhile, the rain continued to fall, Mrs Kirkpatrick was more than usually trying, the garden mouldered under its blanket of fog, and there were times when she wished that the earth of the Government House shrubberies in which she wandered would rend itself in two and swallow her up.
Not long after this the Kirkpatricks decided to go back to England. There were three reasons given for this. The first was that Cynthia’s health might benefit from the voyage. The second was that Mr Kirkpatrick had business in London. The third, it went without saying, was the international situation.
The voyage home had no charms for her. She had been here before. The flying fish in the bay at Colombo might have been sprats leaping up from their nets in Southwold Harbour for all their novelty, and the Red Sea the Round Pond at Kensington. Bereft of occupation, and without her servants to bully, Mrs Kirkpatrick went into a decline, was haughty with the stewards and stalked around the ship like a tragedy queen. Mr Kirkpatrick sat in a deck-chair making notes on the sheets of yellow legal paper that he carried round with him, went for walks around the upper deck, played quoits, and then returned to his note-making, and it was all very dull.
To revenge herself on them, Cynthia embarked on a flirtation with the ship’s purser, a bald young man who said he had been to school at Tonbridge. It was not much of a romance. The bushy-haired girl in the photo frame in his cabin turned out to be his fiancée rather than his sister, and the captain disapproved so much that he forbade the purser to sit next to her at dinner. When that was all over she lay on the bed in her cabin reading the novels of E. Phillips Oppenheim, of which the ship’s library possessed an inexhaustible supply, so that ever after Mediterranean scenery was associated in her mind with ticking bomb-primers and men in fedora hats skulking through the corridors of continental hotels.
At intervals along the way there came news of the wider world, and the people in the deck-chairs and rail-idlers watching the quoits games talked about Chamberlain and Halifax and Herr von Ribbentrop. The other passengers were a mixed lot—Burma policemen, with faces burned mahogany by the sun, home on furlough; chatty Eurasians with high-pitched voices travelling steerage; a university debating team coming back from a world tour—and of no interest to her. The spy novels were like a drug, softly anaesthetising the unpleasantness of the past few weeks and replacing it with expectation. England would save her, she thought, England would make her whole. When the ship reached the Channel, she stood on deck staring at the blue-grey horizon, as if it contained some vast, ineluctable secret that only she could see.
They were docking at Liverpool, which, like everything else connected with the voyage, Mrs Kirkpatrick thought inconvenient. She had already complained about the food, the familiarity of the people in the second-class berths, and the ship’s doctor, who had declined to renew her stock of M & B tablets. But to Cynthia, who knew less geography, Liverpool had the edge over Tilbury or Southampton. It was all caught up in her mind—God knew how—with the Northern Lights, Lakeland rills, Romantic poetry, clipper ships racing home to port.
And so the Mersey, when they came to it on a bright forenoon in July, was a bitter disappointment. The fields on either side looked like badly painted theatrical scenery that men in white aprons might very soon come and begin to dismantle, and the smoke from the factory chimneys left smuts on the clean clothes that everyone had put on for the occasion. It was the same on the train-ride south, and possibly worse at Euston, where the sun had come out after a cloud-burst to produce fantastic Turneresque tints that were in painful contrast to the faces of the people moving below, and she thought that England had not made her whole but split her into two parts, one of them made up of cramped Midlands towns and crooked church-spires, the other composed of Chatham Street, the Grand Oriental Hotel, and the scent of jasmine.
The Kirkpatricks’ London house was in Bayswater, but it had not been lived in for two years and there was a strong smell of damp. Worse, the telegram that Mr Kirkpatrick had sent to the domestic agency from Marseilles had gone astray, which meant that the beds had not been aired and there was nothing to eat. In normal circumstances this would have been the moment for a dramatic flowering of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s personal myth. A year ago she would have cheerfully rustled up plates of bacon and eggs and nodded at the black beetles in the scullery cupboards without turning a hair. Now it was as if some essential part of her spirit had been quashed, and they dined off sardines and bread-and-butter bought from a grocer’s shop in the debased thoroughfare around the corner.
It was the same in the days that followed. Somehow the Kirkpatricks had been subtly diminished by the month-long trip across the ocean, and though they applied themselves to their new routines their hearts were not really in it. Everything was—a word that clanged through their breakfast-table conversation like a muezzin bell—‘difficult,’ and the difficulty extended even to Cynthia and what ought to be done with her.
First there was a plan for her to stay with some distant relatives of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s in Yorkshire, only for a letter to come explaining that the estate was being shut up and the family retiring to the dower house. Then there had been an idea that she might go shooting in Scotland—or at least stand and inspect the shooting while it took place—but nobody wanted to go north with the situation being what it was and in the end most of the parties had been cancelled. Every other day, it seemed, some bright, tree-flanked prospect would open up in front of her only for the gate that lay before it to slam resolutely shut, and the polite intimations of regret that arrived each morning in the post were her scourge.
And then there was London, which, like Ceylon, was not all it had been. It was high summer now, and most of the houses in the square had their windows open, which meant that the sound of the radio news bulletins could be heard at all hours, often in dismaying counterpoint. The Kirkpatricks greeted the news of the Hitler–Stalin pact with stony disbelief, as something so outrageous that comment was impossible. A week later they sat in the dining-room listening to Mr Chamberlain’s declaration of war.
‘I never thought,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said, timorously for her, ‘that it would come to this.’
‘Perhaps it won’t last very long,’ Mr Kirkpatrick volunteered. A month in England had knocked the stuffing out of him.
‘I expect it will go on forever,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said, her old stiffness instantly renewed.
The sun, flooding in unexpectedly through the high windows, drenched them in yellow-green light and sent grotesque shadows darting across the far wall. And Cynthia, staring at them as they sat in their sun-haloes, white-faced, frightened, and resentful, realised that she had no idea of the kind of people they were, or what they thought about anything, that there was a separateness about them that appalled her and in which, inevitably, she was complicit. I am a ghost, she thought, until the solidity of the room, the hardness of the chair in which she sat, and—a bit later—the distant whining of a siren broke the spell and drew her home.
Chapter 2
Duration
Duration: A monthly review of art and letters. First issue in preparation. Annual subscription £2/10s. For a prospectus and all other enquiries, please contact the editor, Desmond Rafferty (author of A Georgian Boyhood &c.), 6 Gordon Square, London WC1.
Smith’s
Trade News, September 1939
There was fog hanging over the square, which meant that the houses at the northernmost end had almost disappeared. The handful that remained to view—those in whose rectangular windows lights burned, or where the wisps of vapour clung less densely to the stucco frontages—produced an oddly variegated effect, like the last remaining stumps in a mouth otherwise picked clean of teeth. Here and there, their noise hardly audible, such was the height at which she sat, a few cars crawled in and out of the murk.
The square lay in Bloomsbury’s furthest quadrant, its ultima Thule, Desmond used to say, and was in the process of having its gardens dug up for the war effort, so that at any time of the day three or four labourers in moleskin trousers and open-necked shirts might be seen hacking away at the bushes with antique bill-hooks or making bonfires out of the swept-up branches. There was a self-conscious deliberation about the men as they went about these tasks. Like artists’ models they were bent on exaggerating their picturesqueness, and the trips they made across the kerbside, pushing loaded wheelbarrows, were mostly intended to disrupt the traffic. Occasionally lorries came and took the less flammable debris away.
To the north, where the mists had begun to disperse, a barrage-balloon hung tethered over Euston Station, like one of those fat cigars you saw men smoking at taxi-ranks while they read the evening paper, only these days there seemed to be fewer cigars and fewer men to smoke them. None of this, she thought—fog, desecrated gardens, or barrage-balloons—boded well.
The magazine’s offices were on the third floor of a house otherwise occupied by a doctor, a dentist, and a red-lead company: high-ceilinged and tall-windowed, but somehow never catching the light, so that even on the days when there was no fog they had a curiously sub-marine quality, as if everything in them were washing around underwater and the desks might float up to join the light-fittings unless they were weighted down. They had only been there a week, and the headed notepaper had still to arrive from the printer, which meant that letters had to be sent out with Duration typed at the top of the page using the red ribbon.