by D. J. Taylor
The magazine was bound to be a success, people said, because the cinemas were closed and there was nothing else for pleasure-seekers to do in the evenings except read. Another advantage was that all Desmond’s friends would be writing for it. Cynthia had one of these sheets of paper in her typewriter now, but had stopped looking at it in favour of the barrage-balloon, which seemed to her an extraordinarily sinister thing, frightful to behold but dangerous to ignore, leaving you in an endless, disagreeable limbo, frightened by the implications of what you looked at, but always conscious of its absence if you looked away. Somewhere above her head there was a stifled cry, but she was used to the noise of the dentist performing extractions and merely shook her head.
From the desk in the room’s furthest corner, squeezed between a bookcase crammed with review copies and a table full of tea-making equipment, Lucy looked up from the story she was translating from the French and said, ‘I say, do you know what esculiers are?’
‘I don’t think I do. Is there a hint?’
‘Well, it sounds rather rude. Avec grande excitation, il commence à caresser ses esculiers.’
‘Does it say what had happened before?’
‘As far as I can make out, Jules and Ernestine are in the garden listening to the nightingales.’
There was a sound of sharp, obtrusive movement, like an animal blundering around in the dark, and the door of the second of the two inner offices that faced out into the big workroom flew open and then swung rapidly back and forth—rather, Cynthia thought, in the way that saloon doors flapped in cowboy films. Desmond loomed in the doorway. There was a coffee cup sunk into the red flesh of his fist, and he was smoking a cheroot.
‘It means buttocks,’ he said. ‘With great excitement, he begins to stroke her buttocks. Put “bottom” if you’re feeling squeamish.’
‘Thanks, Des,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m not in the least squeamish. Of all people alive, you ought to know that. Buttocks it is.’
Everyone had agreed at the outset that they would not turn a hair at anything Desmond said. This was a source of some annoyance to him, as he got most of his pleasure from the effect he had on other people. When no one rose to the bait, he grew petulant and went back into his office to sulk. He was a short, stoutish man in his late thirties, with a large, half-bald head, who had written an autobiography about how unhappy he had been at school and at university, how his first wife had never loved him, and how difficult it was to find the time to write anything. Inexplicably, this had made his reputation and now quite famous people rang up to ask him to dinner.
In his fawn-coloured jacket and his red check shirt there was also something Irish about him. He looked, Cynthia thought, as if he ought to be standing in the market square in Ennis on a Sunday morning after Mass waiting for the pubs to open. She was deeply in awe of him, as she was of Lucy, the typewriter on the desk before her, and indeed anything to do with Duration, but she thought that so far she had managed to hide this anxiety pretty well.
‘Do you know,’ Desmond said, still lingering in the doorway and dousing his cheroot in the coffee cup, ‘that they painted over all the glass panes of the roof of the Wembley dog-track the other day? Apparently it cost them £300.’ He was always desperate for conversation, but had never sunk quite so low as this.
‘Why would they want to do that?’ Lucy wondered.
‘They wanted to see if they could get it to conform to the blackout regulations. But then they discovered that there wasn’t to be any greyhound racing, blackout or no blackout. £300! I ask you!’ Most of Desmond’s utterances reverted, in the end, to money. ‘What I couldn’t do with that. Do you know, it’s going to cost nearly twice that amount to produce every 5,000 copies of the magazine?’
‘We’re getting an awful lot of subscription enquiries,’ Lucy said encouragingly. ‘There were at least another fifty this morning.’
‘Don’t tell me about the kind of people who subscribe to literary magazines,’ Desmond said. He had looked peevish when he dashed out of his office. Now he seemed still more ground-down, practically tragic. ‘After all, I used to be one of them myself.’ He waited to see if anyone would laugh, but had no luck. ‘I say, though, has anyone seen Anthea? Only I need her to help me break open the petty cash tin.’
They were rather lax about time-keeping at Duration. Lucy and Cynthia tried to get there by ten. Desmond was sometimes delayed until as late as half-past. Mr Samways, the business and advertising manager, usually ‘looked in’ in the middle of the afternoon. It was now about ten past eleven.
‘Isn’t that her coming upstairs now?’ Lucy suggested. ‘Or perhaps it’s Mr Wildgoose.’
It was a mark of their respective status that Desmond was known to his staff as ‘Des’ and the magazine’s proprietor as ‘Mr Wildgoose.’
While they watched to see who was coming up the staircase, Cynthia reached for her bag and pulled out the letter between the index finger and thumb of her right hand. It was the fourth time she had looked at it, without being in the least able to grasp its implications. Dear Cynthia, Mrs Bannister—the Honourable Mrs Bannister, as she now remembered—had written, in her slanting, italic hand, Although everything is very difficult at the moment, we are determined that some of the old social usages should be maintained. And so we wondered if you would like to join us on the weekend after next. No doubt Gavin will be closeted with his cronies, but there will be several young people to talk to and Hermione will be delighted to see you again.
A shaft of sunlight burst unexpectedly through the fog and lit up the carpet in front of the desk in a way that was rather too dramatic for comfort, and the office cat—a tremendous creature that looked as if it had escaped from a Beatrix Potter book and really ought to be wearing a suit of clothes—came out from its lair behind the bookcase to bask in the glow. From the vestibule they could hear the sound of Anthea taking off her mackintosh and folding up her umbrella—something she did with extraordinary force, rather, Desmond had once said, as if she was trying to stick a pig.
Cynthia rolled the letter into a cylinder and returned it to the mouth of her bag, while the phrases it contained—the closeted cronies, the social usages that had to be maintained, Henry’s younger sister Hermione being delighted—continued to roam through her head. She had no idea why the Bannisters wanted to see her. Another few seconds passed, in which the sun-burst got caught up in her mind with the words in Mrs Bannister’s letter, so that they hung there, gleaming and burnished like the inscriptions on a medieval scroll, and Anthea came into the room.
It was always worth being in the office when Anthea arrived. She was a tall, painfully thin girl of about twenty-four, with a chalk-white face, very pale fair hair, and an expression of absolutely unappeasable sulkiness. Usually she wore outfits that relied for their effect on maximal incongruity and the wilful jumbling of styles—chic little jackets, say, on top of dirndl skirts. On this particular occasion she was got up in a man’s collarless shirt, a pair of canvas trousers, and gym shoes, while the expensive handbag she usually carried had been usurped by a kind of holdall, out of which stuck her gas mask and a copy of that morning’s Daily Worker. On the other hand, Cynthia reflected, her earrings could not have cost less than twenty guineas.
‘One of those bohemian girls, I daresay,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick had offered, when news of Anthea had been brought to her.
‘Hello, Anth,’ Desmond said, looking at the copy of the Daily Worker with a kind of reluctant admiration. ‘It was good of you to come and see us.’ This was about as far as Desmond dared go with Anthea, who had been known to turn nasty.
‘You know, Des,’ Anthea said, throwing her holdall onto the spare desk and releasing a powerful scent of fish, ‘that jacket doesn’t suit you.’
‘Doesn’t it?’ The cat had climbed onto the desk, the better to investigate the smell.
‘No. It makes you look like a bookie at Wincanton races. Fatt
er, too. You ought to take it back to Aquascutum and have them change it.’
‘How’s Archie?’ Desmond wondered. There was a faint jauntiness in his tone, but he was clearly not up to Anthea’s fighting weight. ‘Has he finished that story he promised me? The one about the dictator who lives in a palace made of glass waited on by midgets.’
‘No. He says he won’t until you pay him three guineas a page. In any case, he says Connolly’s asked him to do the film reviews for Horizon.’
‘Anthea’s behaving very mysteriously these days,’ Desmond announced to the room at large. ‘Spends her evenings in dreadful little pubs in Soho. I can’t think what she does there.’
‘Well, a friend of mine said she saw you at the Dorchester the other day having lunch with Esmé Gurvitz,’ Anthea said, with infinite disdain.
There was no answer to this. A silence fell over the room. The sunlight had dispersed. Its absence renewed the creeping sensation that everything—carpet, desks, the people behind them—was somehow submerged. Cynthia thought desperately about the Bannisters’ house in Sussex, with its twenty-three rooms, its condescending butler and retinue of manservants, and what she might be expected to do when she got there.
They were all frozen in their attitudes, she thought—Lucy looking up from her desk, Anthea standing with her arms akimbo and her right foot wound snakily around the calf of her left leg, Desmond still loitering uncertainly in his doorway. Again the effect was somehow medieval, like the figures in a frieze. Finally the telephone rang and Anthea, answering it, began a long conversation with the caller, evidently a personal friend, in which the words ‘id’ and ‘superego’ recurred. Abruptly, the frieze disintegrated.
‘If Pritchett calls about that review of the Walpole,’ Desmond said with a rather despairing glance at Anthea, ‘you’d better let me know.’
They said they would let him know, and he went back into his study but left the door half-open so they could see him sitting at his desk with his head in his hands.
‘I don’t think esculiers can mean “buttocks,”’ Lucy said, ‘because there’s a sentence here about them being malheureuses et énormes.’
Gradually the rest of the morning passed. At intervals the telephone rang, but the callers were mostly people owed money by the previous tenants. Anthea’s holdall had to be put in a cupboard to deter the cat. Lucy worked at her translation and Cynthia retyped a letter to a print-broker whose original had contained so many mistakes that even Desmond would not let it through. The twelve o’clock post brought another twenty subscription requests, a short story written in green ink and addressed to Mr Desmond Rafferty Esq., and a bill for dinner for one at the Café Royal which Desmond claimed not to have eaten.
The fog had lifted now and the wind was getting up, so that the plane trees at the sides of the square moved backwards and forwards in a menacing way. The Bannisters’ house was called Ashburton Grange, and she had been there now and again. She had a dim memory of hounds assembling on the lawn, iced stirrup-cup drunk out of green-patterned tumblers, and Mr Bannister looking rather ridiculous in a pink coat. Where had Henry been? But there was no place for Henry in these imaginings. Like so many things in her life, he had moved on into a place from which memory had no power to bring him back.
At a quarter to one Anthea finished the letter she had been typing with a last murderous ping of her typewriter bell. ‘Hell’s teeth,’ she said. She had taken off her gym shoes and had been walking around the office in her bare feet. ‘I’m supposed to be meeting Norman for a drink at the Ritz Bar, but I simply can’t face it on my own. You’d better come with me, Cynthia. That’s if you’re not doing anything else.’
‘Oh no,’ Cynthia said, flattered to be asked. ‘I’m not doing anything else.’
‘You don’t mind holding down the fort, do you, Lu? It would be simply angelic of you.’
There was something altogether brazen about Anthea’s insincerity. It was so obviously not in the least disguised, and only an inch or so away from outright mockery. But Lucy, whose upbringing had been rather strict, always took these things very well.
When they had got their hats and coats, picked up their gas masks and, through grey, untidy streets, walked half the way to the bus stop on the Tottenham Court Road, Anthea said, rather urgently, as if it were the answer to a question she had been asked some time before: ‘The thing about Desmond, you see, is that he’s terribly insecure.’
‘Insecurity’ was not a word that had featured much in Cynthia’s vocabulary before she had come to the Bloomsbury square, but she was getting used to it.
‘Why is he insecure?’
Anthea’s voice was, against stiff competition, perhaps the most attractive thing about her. It was unexpectedly high, lost-little-girlish and, when not being ironic, faintly earnest. ‘Anthea’s way of getting rich old men to propose to her,’ Desmond had explained. ‘She sits on their knees in the private rooms at Claridge’s and coos at them.’
‘Well, you see he was at school with all sorts of people who’ve gone on to be terribly well-known. And then he married Marietta, and thought he’d have plenty of money and be able to live in the South of France and not work for the Listener so much, only she turned out to be a lesbian and not to have nearly as much money as everybody thought.’
On the corner where University Street ran into the Tottenham Court Road there was a man selling newspapers whose headline ran chamberlain to reject peace talks, and Cynthia bought one and put it in her bag. Anthea stalked on ahead, hands plunged into the pockets of her mackintosh. Overhead the sky was turning grey. Somewhere a plane droned quietly. The bus, when it came, was rather full of people, but by staring crossly at a pair of middle-aged men on the upper deck, Anthea managed to procure them seats. The advertising hoardings were so close that Cynthia thought she might reach out and touch them.
‘How did you come across Lucy?’ Anthea asked in a bored voice.
‘Actually,’ Cynthia said, ‘we were at school together.’
Nearer at hand now, looming at them over the tops of the houses, the barrage-balloon looked even more sinister than before.
‘I’m sure that must have been fun,’ Anthea said.
A little bomb of resentment that had been ticking away in Cynthia’s head for several days suddenly exploded.
‘Actually,’ she said, ‘it was, rather.’
After that they got on better.
The bus dropped them halfway along Piccadilly, next to Hatchard’s book-shop, which had a wall of sandbags rising up its window. One or two men in steel helmets were wandering about. Like the gardeners in the square, they moved with an extreme self-consciousness, as if the Piccadilly shop-fronts had been expressly designed to provide a backdrop for their adventures and London was simply an expensive film-set. Cynthia tried to imagine what Hatchard’s had looked like last time she had seen it, but found she could not remember. Like Ceylon, and like Henry, it was fading fast, borne on a heavy tide, drifting away into oblivion.
An impermeable membrane seemed to have slipped between the war and the great stretches of time that had preceded it. Already people talked about what they had done in the summer as if it had taken place in some far-off, mythical terrain, as if the beaches they had sat on had been ridden over by centaurs. On the lip of St James’s Street there was a man in a dingy overcoat with a pedlar’s pack open at his feet and a selection of domestic items spread out over the pavement. Anthea stopped and bought a pair of dusters.
‘I always think,’ she said, ‘that when you’re living with a man you should make some contribution to your upkeep.’
Grey streets; exiguous traffic; men in battle-dress; sandbagged doorways. She was already used to these landscapes, and they no longer haunted her imagination. They went into the Ritz through the Arlington Street entrance. Here things were livelier. A couple of officers, one of them a colonel in scarlet tabs, were slapping t
he shoulder of a third man who looked rather sheepish about the attention he was getting. As Anthea was taking off her mackintosh, a waiter came and said something in an undertone. Anthea muttered something back, and he slunk away.
‘What was that about?’ Cynthia wondered.
‘Oh, he said he didn’t think he could let in people wearing canvas trousers, and I said that I was the Countess of Antrim and that I was waiting for my husband who was in a shareholders’ meeting upstairs and he’d be frightfully cross if I wasn’t admitted. Now, where’s Norman, I wonder?’
They went and sat at one of the marble-topped tables, not far from the bronzed nymph perched in her grotto of artificial rocks and ferns. It took only a moment for the pink-and-green furniture and the cream-and-gold surround to work their effect, and then she was glad she had come. The place was fairly crowded: more uniformed men; people in morning coats and striped trousers; one or two girls who looked like promising imitations of Anthea without, in dress terms, having degenerated quite so far. There was no sign of Norman, whoever he was.
‘I expect we shall see Des here before too long,’ Anthea said. ‘He’s a famous frequenter of the Ritz Bar. They used to say that one of the viscounts he’d known at Oxford told him it was the only place a gentleman could be seen at, except his club, and so once he arrived in London he never went anywhere else.’ There was a way in which, despite her triumph over the waiter, she seemed a little less at ease here in the cream-and-gold amphitheatre than in the street outside it, and that the joke about Desmond was intended to disguise this uncertainty.