by D. J. Taylor
‘Not necessarily,’ she said, shaking her head in satisfaction. She looked like one of those big, flaxen-haired dolls that might say ‘mama’ or ‘papa’ if jabbed in the small of the back. ‘What do you know?’
He thought about what he knew. It was not very encouraging, and mostly on the practical side.
‘Listen,’ he said. ‘We can’t sit here all night.’ He knew there was no proscription at all on them sitting there all night, that lots of people—brewers, publicans—would be delighted for them to do it. ‘Why don’t we go back to my place? It’s not far.’
He was surprised at how readily she agreed. He had not yet quite established what she would and wouldn’t do. They went on quickly through the empty streets in the direction of Maida Vale. On the corner of Shelton Road she said, rather hopelessly, as if the complexities of her emotional life were beyond anyone to solve, ‘My young man’s in the ARP. Down at the centre in Lissom Grove.’
‘He’ll be freezing to death, then, on a night like this.’
‘They work them very hard in the ARP,’ she said vaguely. ‘There’s some nights he doesn’t get home till four.’
‘It’s just this way,’ he said. He didn’t at all believe in the young man.
The house might have been a medieval fortress abandoned to the plague. There was no one about. In his room she became unexpectedly practical, found the kettle, filled it with water from the basin on the landing and made tea on the gas-ring. Her heels clacked on the bare floorboards next to the door. She gave a little nod at the portrait of Hedy Lamarr, razored out of Film Fun, that hung on the door-back: a foot-soldier watching the general pass. All this faintly disconcerted him. He had wanted her to sit on the cane chair while he managed things. It occurred to him that the room, with its dust, its tea-stains, the burnt umber paper that was coming apart from the wall, needed justifying.
‘It’s not much of a place,’ he said.
‘It’s a room, isn’t it?’ she said, quite sharply. ‘I’ve to share with my sister. Think about it. You could walk about here with no clothes on and nobody to see.’
‘I could do that,’ he conceded.
The gas-fire had begun to pulse out heat. With it came the smell that, most of all, reminded him of London: sweet, stuffy, faintly poisonous. It was there when you clambered up to the tops of buses, or in the pleasure boats cruising the Thames: warm, enticing, but calculated to put your teeth on edge. He hung his coat up on the hook behind the door.
‘You got a nice landlady?’ she asked.
‘She’s all right,’ he said. ‘Not the sort to interfere.’
He got the coat and her blouse off without too much difficulty. She sat back in the cane chair and looked absently at the fire, long-limbed and co-operative. Somewhere in the distance a train went by and the windows rattled. A bit later she said: ‘You mustn’t bite me there. It’ll hurt.’ There was a chocolate-coloured stain on one of her breasts the size of a threepenny bit.
He felt rather than heard the taxi arriving in the street outside, as if the silence, instead of being broken, had somehow been displaced.
‘Christ!’
‘What is it?’ she asked, half-dreamily, as if wrenched from sleep.
‘Errand I got to do.’
‘It’s a bit late for an errand,’ she said. One of her shoulders twitched.
‘No helping it, is there?’
As with the tea, she was all practicality again, taking his coat from off the hook and putting back her brassiere all in the same movement. As he made his way downstairs, the stair-rods gleaming in the half-light, he could hear the clink of tea-things.
The American had one foot on the taxi’s running-board, one hand readjusting his hat. He saw Rodney’s half-buttoned shirt and said, ‘Guess I’ve interrupted you.’
‘Maybe I needed interrupting.’
The cab smelled of sweat and upholstery: the second London smell, found in pub snuggeries, cheap offices, and the Warren Street car showrooms. As it moved off, the American said, ‘I’ll get out at Oxford Circus, but he’ll take you on. There’s a little club at the far end of Jermyn Street. The Julep. He’ll be coming out of it about half-past the hour. That’ll give you the chance to introduce yourself.’ For the first time ever that Rodney had known him, his eye gave a little shiver of uncertainty, before being gathered up once again in the aura of his self-belief. ‘You’ll know what to do,’ he said, poised halfway between statement and question.
‘Sure thing,’ Rodney said. He had forgotten about the girl, her breath rising and falling, the chocolate birthmark, the stair-rods’ gleam. It was as if they had never existed. The road in front of the taxi was a conveyor belt with the face of the man in the photograph at its end. ‘I’ll know, all right.’
Chapter 4
Sussex by the Sea
The autumn was getting on now, and the beech leaves piled up at the track-side were a shiny copper-brown, like the warming pans you saw hanging up in the inglenooks of rural fireplaces. Thick as autumnal leaves that strow the brooks in Valhombrosa, Cynthia thought, wondering exactly where Valhombrosa was, how you got to it, and why, in the course of a notably patchy education, it had stuck in her head.
The train bored on through the Sussex Weald, past verdure so dense that it seemed faintly unreal, like scenery wheeled up from a dramatic production at some exceptionally well-funded theatre. A wood of giant oaks; a long stretch of overgrown meadow; a cutting choked with bramble bushes: all these passed in quick succession. In the distance, where the road kept disappearing from view, behind these packed embrasures, small cars skidded in and out of range.
Curiously, the sense of unreality persisted—as if, she thought, she was travelling through one of those classical paintings she liked so much, and the next clearing might bring a ruined temple and an ancient greybeard plucking a lyre to entertain a bevy of nymphs. The train, like every train these days, was rather full of people: men in bowler hats with briefcases wedged under their arms; schoolgirls in bright blue uniforms; wide-eyed women with babies on their laps. The station platforms through which they passed were always crowded: half a dozen trains, stopping simultaneously, could not have cleared the freight of humanity that lingered on them. It was a Friday afternoon, and she had got off work by pretending to go to the dentist.
At Arundel, about half the passengers disembarked, and she found herself in the vanguard of a great crowd of people scattering by degrees onto a stone forecourt where gulls tore fish-and-chip wrappers apart and the air was heavy with the smell of sea-salt. The Bannisters’ Daimler was drawn up in the car park, but she did not recognise the driver.
‘What happened to Eddie?’ she asked, as he hauled her luggage into the boot.
‘Gone off with his regiment, miss.’
The monogrammed suitcase had been a mistake, she thought. It hinted at a status to which she could never aspire.
‘Volunteered, you mean?’
‘That’s about the strength of it.’
She waited for the second ‘miss,’ but it never came. That the working classes were using the war as an excuse to get above themselves was one of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s most deeply felt beliefs. There would be no half-crown here.
The car bowled on through the outskirts of the town, where children on their way home from school lingered outside corner-shops and aged taxis had been dragged up onto the kerb-side, and on through side-roads fenced in by giant hedges of cow parsley, and she felt a surge of exhilaration, pure nature-worship, that even the thought of Mr and Mrs Bannister could not subdue. Unhappily, Ashburton Grange, which they came upon suddenly seven or eight miles later, seemed to have been expressly designed to quench illusions of this sort.
Looking out of the window, as the Daimler steamed up the hill, Cynthia decided that it was exactly the same: the cars drawn up on the gravel drive; the marbled Venus enthroned above a fountain whose jets had n
ow been turned off; sun glinting in at the mullioned windows. The problem about Ashburton Grange, if you went into it architecturally, was the flamboyant redesign that someone had embarked on at the end of the nineteenth century, which had added an extra storey, topped by a medieval battlement. This gave it a slightly bogus air, as if an American actor, dressed in a hauberk and chain mail, might suddenly appear there and start directing troop movements.
Despite her resolution, she gave the chauffeur one of the half-crowns from her store, and was rewarded with a finger flicked in the direction of his peaked cap. Mrs Bannister, waiting on the top of stone steps to receive her, looked more than ever like a mad terrier. Taken out of the Eastern sun, her complexion had lost its dried-up, curry tint and grown pinker.
‘My dear, it’s so very good of you to come and see us.’ And then, without further preamble: ‘When you’ve taken your things upstairs, I wonder if you’d just mind coming down and stepping into the garden with me, for there’s something I very much want to show you.’
What was it that Mrs Bannister wanted to show her? A nudist colony to which they had sub-let part of the grounds? A Bolton Paul Defiant in which Mr Bannister proposed to take to the skies and repel the Nazi invader? Mrs Bannister’s vague, milky eyes offered no clue. They went into the house, which was as spacious as ever and clearly doing its best to ignore all thought of war’s exigencies, while the chauffeur dealt with the suitcase.
‘I shall give you ten minutes,’ Mrs Bannister said radiantly as they stood at the foot of the main staircase, with a housemaid standing by to carry on the torch of hospitality, ‘and then wait for you by the back door. Rose will show you where everything is.’
All this was very mysterious, but not quite unexpected. Her parents practised similar secrecies and evasions, withholding holiday details until the morning of departure, keeping travel plans in abeyance. These attempts to ginger up appetites that might otherwise be stricken and wither nearly always had a depressing effect. It was the same now. Sitting in her room under the eaves, which looked out over the lawns but was a ten-yard corridor and a cramped staircase away from the bathroom, Cynthia realised that she knew exactly what her hostess had up her sleeve.
Sure enough, when she came downstairs, Mrs Bannister, with a horribly glazed expression on her face, led her blithely to a spot in the garden where, beneath an elm tree, a marble tablet had been sunk into the ground. On it had been chiselled the inscription:
in memoriam
henry martineau bannister
1 may 1915–23 june 1939
‘the meek shall inherit the earth’
‘I wanted you to see it,’ Mrs Bannister said with surprising harshness, as if Cynthia had tried her hardest to stay in the house and had to be dragged out by main force.
‘It looks very nice,’ Cynthia said. She wondered what she thought about Henry, now four months dead and rotting, and found that she thought nothing at all. She could appreciate the idea of him—Henry the Oxford scholar, a zealous, white-flannelled Henry roaming the dewy cricket-field—but the flesh and blood reality entirely escaped her.
‘Really, you know, all in all, I think he had a very happy life,’ Mrs Bannister said, again rather fiercely and accusingly, as if she expected Cynthia to deny it. After that they went back indoors and the serious business of the weekend began.
In a modest way, Cynthia was used to country-house parties. She could play peggoty and bezique, and generally put up some kind of show with the other guests. These were not inspiring. There were five weather-beaten middle-aged-to-elderly men who sat with Mr Bannister on the Government back benches, but had for some reason come without their wives, a youngish man with curiously shiny hair, rather as if someone had mixed several grains of lake into a pot of black ink, and two or three girls whose business it was to be ornamental.
The guests were decently friendly—two of the old gentlemen asked to be remembered to her father—but taken as a whole there was something odd about them, the oddity being that they seemed to be in possession of some secret to which she herself had not been made party. It was difficult to put this feeling, which grew stronger during the course of the evening, into words, but there it was: a kind of unobtrusive drawing-up of ranks; a word or two spoken in unintelligible private code: a sense of people waiting for their prompts before they began to speak.
The exception to this rule was the young man with the shiny hair, who came up to her on her first appearance in the drawing room, where two of the ornamental girls were doing a jigsaw, and said: ‘You must be Cynthia Kirkpatrick. They said you were coming. Isn’t your father Jackie Kirkpatrick?’
She had come across Americans in the East. They had not always been reliable.
‘You’re very well informed,’ she said. An Englishman would have taken this as a rebuke, but he gave a little smile, as if to say that knowing about the alien landscape you had fetched up in did not necessarily mean that you felt any affinity towards it.
‘I work at the US Embassy,’ he said. ‘I suppose it pays us to know things like that. My name’s Tyler Kent. Have you met Miss Chamberlain here, and Miss Mackay?’
‘I can’t say I have.’
She was still thinking about other Americans she had known in the East: desiccated Rotarians who sat in a collapsed state in the lobby of the Galle Face Hotel complaining about the lack of hot water; optimistic consuls (‘You see, Miss, er, Kirkpatrick, President Roosevelt is a very capable man’); crapulous engineers on furlough from construction jobs up-country.
‘Well, come and say hello then.’ Miss Chamberlain and Miss Mackay were still bent over their jigsaw puzzle. ‘You know,’ he said, a shade less loudly, ‘I knew Henry.’
‘Did you?’
‘Yes indeed. He was a hell of a fellow.’
Henry was everywhere at Ashburton Grange. His ghost came in with the pre-dinner drinks and went out last thing with the cat. There were at least seven photographs of him around the place: Henry, oar to chest, amongst a college rowing eight; in a sub-fusc suit and a scholar’s gown outside the Sheldonian; with Mr Bannister on the House of Commons terrace. He looked somehow eager and expectant, as if a great prize hung in the air just a little way off, waiting to be brought down, or, alternatively, a locked door to which, only a little later, he would be given the key.
All this she found she could put up with. There was no menace in photographs and their dead, white faces. It was slightly less easy to put up with Henry’s sister Hermione, who had clearly taken upon herself the task of making Cynthia feel at home at Ashburton Grange and in consequence stuck to her like a leech.
She was a plump, nervous girl with an oversized head and bobbed dark hair, of whom Cynthia had heard a certain amount in the past, with a toxic habit of blurting out semi-confidential information and then only half-seeming to regret it, who smoked cigarettes out of an amber holder and talked, rather fixatedly, about men whose relation to her was never wholly clear-cut. But still, Cynthia thought, there were worse people to be conducted around Ashburton Grange by than Hermione.
They ended up in Henry’s room, untouched since his death, but not yet quite a shrine, where dust clung to the stack of dumb-bells and hockey-sticks in the corner and there were still two or three unopened letters on the desk.
‘Of course,’ Hermione said—she was not really distraite, but gave a very good impression of being so—‘there wasn’t any real need for him to go out East with Father. It was just that he wanted to see Ceylon again.’
And Cynthia bowed her head at the rebuke.
On the other hand, it was useful to have Hermione alongside her in the drawing room before dinner, where the press of unfamiliar faces became slightly bewildering.
‘That’s Lord Lymington, who edits the Pioneer … The tall old gentleman with the white hair is Mr Galloway. Someone of Father’s, I don’t know what he does … You’ve seen Ursula Chamberlain, I think. Sh
e was supposed to be marrying a man in the Brigade, but then somebody said he had some terrible disease and it was all off … The man in the doorway talking to Mr Kent is Captain Ramsay.’
Just before they went in to dinner, Tyler Kent detached himself from one of the ornamental girls and came towards her nodding his head. ‘Having a good time?’
‘It’s not so bad,’ she said, not quite seeing why she should be expected to unburden herself. ‘How are you getting on with Miss Mackay?’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I suppose if you don’t know anything about breeding gun dogs you’re at a certain disadvantage. She’s swell, I reckon. Works at one of the Ministries. I may run into her there sometime. What are you doing with yourself right now?’
And so she explained about the Bloomsbury square, and Desmond, and the sound of the dentist performing extractions in the room above.
‘Duration,’ he said. ‘I think I’ve heard of that. Not quite the kind of thing we have in the States. Back home there’s nothing between the New Yorker and the college reviews.’
He would have been about twenty-eight, she thought, and had an irritating habit of looking sideways at other people while he was talking to you.
‘We ought to have a drink sometime,’ he said. ‘That is—if you’re free.’
She was not impressed. ‘It’s awfully kind of you, but I’m rather busy in the evenings.’
‘I’ll ring you up at the office,’ he said. ‘Nice chance to talk to Desmond, too.’
How did he know Desmond, she wondered? The intricacies of London life were still a mystery to her: invisible cords that bound the unlikeliest of collaborators. Hermione, who had a bandeau pulled low over her spacious forehead, was smoking another cigarette through her amber holder and seemed slightly drunk. She said: ‘Do you know, I was engaged to Cecil Beasant once? But we couldn’t get on, we really couldn’t. And they say it nearly broke his mother’s heart.’ After that, they went in to dinner.