by D. J. Taylor
Glancing at her face, still extraordinarily sulky beneath its halo of white-gold hair, Cynthia divined that she was looking at a superior version of herself. Somehow this thought depressed her. She would never be able to buy dusters for the men she was living with, she thought, make jokes about the viscounts Desmond had known at Oxford, or pass herself off as the Countess of Antrim. Expertise of this kind was simply beyond her: she could not imagine how you came by it, still less how you made it work to your advantage.
It was about a quarter-past one. In the house at Bayswater, Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick would be eating warmed-up shepherd’s pie and tinned peaches and listening to the lunch-time news on the radio. Somehow all this depressed her even more. Meanwhile, there was the next half-hour, or hour, or two hours—she had no idea how long Anthea would want to stay at the Ritz Bar—to be got through. There was still no sign of Norman. A man sitting at the next table, small and sharp-eyed, like a creature of the field, stared suddenly in her direction and she looked away.
Anthea stared furiously at the bronze nymph, as if she would have been happy to change places with her, given any kind of encouragement, and said, ‘Well, if you’re not going to tell me what you’ve been glooming about all morning, there really wasn’t much point in bringing you here, was there?’
And so, to her surprise, Cynthia found herself telling her about what had happened on the back-road out of Colombo, the voyage home, and now the letter that had come from the Bannisters. Outside, a siren went off in the street, and three or four people at the next table said ‘false alarm’ at exactly the same time. Anthea listened with professional interest.
‘I’m not sure I didn’t come across your Henry Bannister years ago,’ she said. ‘Now where might it have been? Windsor Great Park? One of those boring cricket matches in aid of the Georgian Association? Rather keen on the girls, I seem to remember. So now he’s dead and the parents want you to go and stay with them. Why should they feel you had to do that?’
‘They’re very old friends of my mother and father,’ Cynthia said. ‘Terribly old. In fact I think Mummy and Mrs Bannister might have come out together.’
‘If I remember Mrs B rightly,’ Anthea said, ‘there’d have been no question of her coming out. In fact, people would have subscribed a handsome amount to keep her in. Perhaps I’m misjudging her. But as to the weekend in Sussex—and it sounds pretty grim, I’ll allow—do you want to go?’
‘It seems a bit of a duty, if you know what I mean.’
‘Duty,’ Anthea said. She was smoking a cigarette, and the smoke, partly obscuring her face, made her look like an ancient sibyl grimly pronouncing judgement in the vapour of an Attic dawn. ‘That word again. Even Des has taken to using it, so you can see what an effect it’s having on people. I’m not sure what I think about duty. In any case, here’s Norman come at last.’
There was a tallish figure moving rather diffidently towards their table, not obviously aware of where they were, and she flung up her hand and began making wild semaphore signals.
Since the first mention of his name a good three-quarters of an hour ago, Cynthia had been wondering who Norman was. She had expected him to be young and quite probably dressed in a service uniform. In fact, inspecting him as he continued to drift—a bit more purposefully now—between the tables, she saw that he was nearer forty than thirty, and wearing only a nondescript-looking raincoat. Anthea instantly took charge of the situation.
‘Norman! How nice to see you. Cynthia, this is Norman Burdett.’
Closer up, he looked even older than she had first imagined: straw-haired and not especially well shaved. As well as the raincoat, he was wearing what she recognised as a Toc H tie. One of the veins in his cheek had burst into a little spiral of pink threads. He reminded her of the kind of man she had come across once or twice in the East: vague, non-committal, humorous about odd things, guardians of some immensely private joke that they might allow you in on when they knew you better. Mr Kirkpatrick had occasionally produced people of this sort at dinner. It was not unusual for their whimsicality to disguise some bitter, private grief.
Anthea seemed not quite able to decide whether to regard Norman as a source of comic relief or as a kind of oracle who should be respectfully attended to.
‘How are things in Jermyn Street, Norman?’
‘Oh, they’re fine. Not nearly so many pretty girls as there used to be, though.’
‘Still chasing after the King’s Party?’
‘That’s right. Still chasing after them.’
The beady-eyed man at the next table looked up at this, but Cynthia could not work out if he was staring at herself or Norman.
‘And Captain Ramsay?’
Norman accepted a drink from a passing waiter. ‘I will allow that Captain Ramsay has been in my thoughts.’
‘Oh, he’s terrible, isn’t he?’ Anthea said, as if they were discussing some notorious ladies’ man who had given friends of hers cause for concern. ‘Did you hear what he said about Mosley the other day?’
There was something faintly unreal about all this, Cynthia thought, which the ornaments of the Ritz—its long, high-backed sofas, the bronze nymph solitary in her grotto—made worse. She had been to the Ritz before, of course, in the aftermath of dances and Boat Races, but with young men who ordered champagne and looked out to see who else was there, and never with anyone remotely like Anthea or Norman Burdett.
Norman was grinning now, and looking more than ever like a variety-hall comedian about to crack a joke about his mother-in-law. ‘Ladies, ladies. You don’t want to hear about me. Tell me something about yourselves. How is young Mr Rafferty?’
‘He’s very depressed,’ Anthea said. ‘The first number’s due in a fortnight and he says he’s got nothing to put in it yet.’
‘And where’s he getting his paper from, I wonder?’
‘That man in Chatham, I think. At least he’s always talking about him. I believe that friend of Peter’s at the Ministry of Supply is helping.’
The expression on Norman’s face altered slightly. ‘A bit of a tricky customer, that one,’ he said. ‘He’d better keep his eyes open.’ There was some game being played with her, Cynthia thought, some odd cryptogram being solved in front of her eyes to which she had no key. Oddly, this suspicion did not upset her. She liked being in the high, cream-and-gold room, and she liked Anthea and Norman Burdett, whoever he was, and would have acceded to any reasonable request they made of her.
‘I hope Des keeps his eyes open. I should mind it most dreadfully if he didn’t. And who else are you interested in just at the moment?’
‘Oh, the usual suspects, you know.’ Norman’s face had gone back to its usual vague benignity. ‘Lymington. Domvile. That Bannister chap.’
Lymington, Domvile, and that Bannister chap. Cynthia shifted in her chair, curious to hear that the man who had just proffered her a weekend invitation was being suspected of something. It was past two o’clock now, and the confraternities of the Ritz Bar were breaking up. The people at the next table were clambering to their feet and shaking hands and saying they would see each other soon, and a woman with an impossibly expensive face and a Pekingese under her arm was explaining how wild horses wouldn’t stop her going to Cap Ferrat even if there was a war on. Rain, falling diagonally against the high windows, enhanced this air of private fantasy, of something set at one remove from the real life going on outside.
They left Norman sitting at the marble-topped table and went out into the lobby, where the waiter who had tried to stop Anthea coming in drew himself up and gave a stiff little bow.
‘Aren’t we going to be awfully late?’ Cynthia wondered, looking at her watch.
‘I daresay,’ Anthea said. One or two faint twists of colour had come back into her face, and she looked appreciably more human.
In Piccadilly there were a pair of army trucks pulled up at the kerbsi
de and a company of lady cyclists in WVS uniforms labouring by, and they crossed over and made for the bus stop. Cynthia could not repress her curiosity about Norman. ‘Is Mr Burdett in the paper trade?’
‘Norman? Gracious no. He’s in one of the cloak-and-dagger outfits.’
‘And what is the King’s Party?’
The skin of Anthea’s wrist was almost translucent, so that the veins looked like traceries of blue ink. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘You know all the people who go around saying that only the King can stop the war?’
There were two of these in the Kirkpatricks’ house at Bayswater. It sounded from what Norman Burdett had said that Mr Bannister made a third. ‘Of course I know about them.’
‘Let’s just say that the gap between wanting peace and thinking that the war becomes meaningless once you take away the aggression and the bad faith is a good deal wider than some of them imagine. And another thing,’ Anthea said, rather sharply, as if the two subjects were somehow connected. ‘If I were you I’d go down to Sussex for the weekend. Heaven knows, Mrs B might have learned some hostessing skills by now. And it can’t possibly do any harm.’
‘Do you know,’ Cynthia said, noticing that the pile of sandbags outside a dress shop had been sprayed lime-green to match the window frames and puzzled by the curious note of urgency in Anthea’s voice, ‘I really think I might.’
Back at the Duration office they found Desmond sprawled in an armchair reading Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, and there was a message asking Cynthia to telephone her father. Later a truck came and removed some more heaps of foliage from the ruined garden.
Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick had taken the war about as badly as they had ever taken anything. Becalmed in its considerable shadow, they did not feel, as they were fond of saying, themselves. Rather, their discontent had turned them into slightly faded versions of their original prototypes. None of this made them easier to live with, talk to, or even contemplate from a distance.
Mr Kirkpatrick had the proper patriot-defeatist attitude. He said: ‘Nobody supports the war more than I do. It’s perfectly right that we should take exception to another country that has acted belligerently. The Poles have my sympathy, just like the Czechoslovaks. But if you take away the cause of the belligerence, which in the end has very little to do with us, then what are you left with? A lot of unnecessary inconvenience. I think everyone’s best interests would be served by a negotiated peace.’
Mrs Kirkpatrick, meanwhile, had joined an organisation of politically minded gentlewomen who met on Thursday afternoons in an upstairs room of the Goring Hotel where they were addressed by an Irish peer who had once worked in the diplomatic service. A plan to go back to Ceylon had been quietly jettisoned. Occasional telegrams came from Colombo.
One symptom of the Kirkpatricks’ devitalised state was their attitude towards Cynthia. In the past they had tended to hover over her life, like a pair of game birds over a nest of fledglings. With demoralisation, on the other hand, came a new spirit of laissez-faire, sometimes shading into outright indifference. They were not much animated by her coming across Lucy again, and even less interested in the process of negotiation that took her to the Bloomsbury square.
In the past Mrs Kirkpatrick would have made little jokes about Duration, and the humour would, additionally, have canvassed a need for vigilance in the face of moral laxity. Now she merely said: ‘Why it counts as war-work I can’t imagine. And I suppose the people are rather highbrow.’ Mr Kirkpatrick, told that Desmond had commissioned an essay by Sickert, remarked that it wasn’t what he called painting and left it at that. But they cheered up no end over the invitation to Ashburton Grange. ‘I think it is very kind of Mrs Bannister,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick pronounced, ‘particularly in the current circumstances.’ The italics hung in the air like dust-motes. ‘You must certainly go.’
‘Of course she should go,’ Mr Kirkpatrick said, who had not actually been appealed to. ‘No earthly reason why not.’
The processes that had been at work on the Kirkpatricks could be observed elsewhere. London, for example, though full of people, seemed to be growing smaller and less familiar by the minute. The girls Cynthia had been to dances with three years ago had all disappeared. They were lodging with their husbands in married quarters at Canterbury and Catterick, or safely installed in dower houses beyond the Tweed. All over England everyone was battening hatches, hunkering down, storing up provisions against the gathering storm, in sharp retreat to private worlds of their own devising. There was no getting away from this. Equally there was no solace for anyone who wasn’t married to a subaltern or had no dower house waiting to receive her.
None of the old consolations seemed to apply. In the past Cynthia had always been able to revive her spirits by going through the photograph albums that lay in the bottom compartment of the drawing-room sideboard. Bought over the years at Harrods, and beginning to part company with their beige-brown bindings, they were a tribute to Mrs Kirkpatrick’s intent, methodical side. But there was also a kind of defiance to them, the thought of a compiler keen to tell the world that though she could, had she chosen, have been a military strategist or a translator from the Greek, she had preferred to stick pictures in Harrods albums, without the slightest lapse in commitment or intellectual attack.
Never had these photographs, in which Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick stood diffidently in the porch of St George’s, Hanover Square in their wedding finery, sauntered on the decks of ocean liners, or stared severely at the carcasses of slaughtered pheasants, failed her, and yet now there was something wrong about them. It was hard to say where the disappointment lay, but like the process of realignment that had picked up nearly everyone she knew and deposited them a little further away from her, it could not be gainsaid, and after a final, fruitless inspection of a picture showing Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick attending the durbar in Delhi in 1923 she put the albums away. Pictures could not help her: she needed humankind.
In the end she turned up a girl called Sophie Morris, who lived in one of the adjoining squares and with whom she had once been to classes in conversational French. Sophie was a nice, friendly girl with sandy hair and rather uneven teeth who in the past had been grateful for any smiles Cynthia had cared to bestow on her. But Sophie, Cynthia discovered, had been borne away on the same devitalising tide as Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick. She was engaged to a young man in the Ministry of Works, had expectations of an aunt, and recoiled from any discussion of the past as if it had been an unexploded limpet-mine.
‘Do you remember how cross Mademoiselle got,’ Cynthia asked once, in a spirit of companionable reminiscence—they were having tea at a Lyons in the Earl’s Court Road—‘when Daisy Fellowes came in smoking a cigarette, with her nails painted bright blue?’
‘I don’t think I can have been there that day,’ Sophie said. A letter had come that morning from her aunt. ‘I did hear Daisy Fellowes married someone quite high up at the War Office.’
‘And then there was that time she got soaking wet on the way to the Chelsea Arts Ball and said that it never rained but it Diored.’
‘Simon says that some of the War Office wives are still behaving very irresponsibly. You know, having dinner parties and wondering why their husbands can’t be back in time.’
‘Oh, Sophie,’ Cynthia said in despair. ‘I know there’s a war on, but you never used to be like this.’
‘I don’t believe you’ve changed at all,’ Sophie said triumphantly.
They kept it up for a week or two. They played table tennis in the basement of the Morrises’ house in Powis Square beneath the portrait of Sophie’s grandfather in his Masonic apron, they went shopping for a skirt that Sophie intended to wear at the Ministry of Works’ winter reception, and rejoiced in the sight of the King travelling along Piccadilly in a Daimler because it was known that he rarely went out. At the end of it Cynthia thought that she might probably have passed a competitive examination on the subject
of Simon: the combinations he wore under his suit in cold weather, and the bad case of erysipelas that had kept him out of the Charterhouse fifteen in his last term.
‘Sophie,’ she said on one of these occasions, in a voice that she knew was borrowed from Anthea, ‘I know it’s awful of me to say so, but you make him sound the most boring man on earth.’
There was no going back from that, of course. The next time Cynthia rang Powis Square, Mrs Morris said her daughter was out. Two days later there came a letter saying that Sophie had joined the Red Cross Port of London Authority River Emergency Service and was busy in the evenings. So there was another friend gone west.
Against this unpromising backdrop, the visit to Ashburton Grange took on a wholly unmerited significance: a pageant, a raree show, and a conversazione rolled into one, with Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick as its impresarios, its zealous sponsors, its loyal supporters denied a place at the table themselves but keen that their daughter should sample whatever sweetmeats were on offer. Mrs Kirkpatrick produced ten guineas for a new evening dress; Mr Kirkpatrick made over a little pile of half-crowns packed into a rouleau which he said would be useful for tipping the servants; and one of the old monogrammed suitcases that had belonged to Mrs Kirkpatrick’s father and had seen service in the days of the Paris Commune was put at her disposal. Meanwhile, there was no war news worth speaking of, and nobody Cynthia spoke to seemed to find this in the least bit surprising.
Chapter 3
Behind the Counter
The shop was in a distant part of Maida Vale, near the Regent’s Park canal. Sometimes a few cognoscenti struggled up from the Underground station. But mostly it was empty. Fifty yards away, in the square’s northwestern quadrant, there was a glimpse of railway lines, and every twenty or thirty minutes, in a brisk detonation of whirled pistons and black smoke, a locomotive would plunge into view. These performances, with their explosive choreography, gave the day routine: a momentary quickening of the senses; satisfaction; slow decline.