by D. J. Taylor
No hint of war’s privations had come to the Ashburton kitchen. They ate Colchester oysters, capons, a saddle of mutton, devils on horseback. The light from the chandeliers burned off the silver epergne and the butler’s bald head. Outside, the garden was dim and blue in the moonlight, and she thought of the evening she had spent staring out of the window at the villa in Colombo. It seemed an eternity away. Meanwhile, there were several breezy conversations to attend to.
‘… I mean, once you take away the fact of their invading Poland, and the bad faith, the whole thing simply becomes meaningless.’
‘… Nobody grudges Germany Lebensraum, provided Lebensraum doesn’t become the grave of another nation.’
‘… That’s right. What we need is a just colonial settlement. Just, mind you.’
‘… If we’re going to have a negotiated settlement, which we certainly will have to fairly soon, why can’t we have it now, before any real damage has been done?’
‘… I must say, the King’s been absolutely first-rate. At least everyone knows where he stands.’
‘… The mistake was to let Hitler make that alliance with the Russians. It was all Halifax’s fault for going round saying the Nazis were really Bismarcks in disguise.’
There were owls outside in the garden and she could hear them swooping against the window. Tyler Kent, she saw, was looking keenly on, but with a slight smile on his face, as if he could take it or leave it.
‘… It would be a great deal easier if everyone admitted that this is a Jew’s war.’
‘… Why is it a Jew’s war, Jock old boy?’
‘… Did you know that of the fifty-nine members of the Central Council of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1935, fifty-six were Jews and the others were married to Jews? It’s all in Father Fahey’s book.’
‘… Of course, Hitler must have had his reasons for what he’s done.’
‘… I’ve met Hitler. He’s a reasonable man. Not at all a fanatic. Some of his speeches are strong stuff, I grant you.’
‘… It’s a shame they couldn’t be got to amend the Companies Act. After all, once you know who a newspaper’s shareholders are, then that’s half your problem solved.’
There was something faintly conspiratorial about all this, the sense of things being said that, in other company, would have remained unspoken. It was like Jacobites toasting the health of the King across the water while outside, amid lofted torches, Protestant mobs went stamping down the street. Afterwards they went back to the drawing-room where Mr Bannister, with a dazzling lack of self-consciousness, sang in a faux-cockney accent a song called ‘I’m a Man Who’s Been Done Wrong by my Parents.’ Outside, there were dense pockets of shadow on the lawn and the darkness welled up like ink.
Tyler Kent caught her eye and nodded.
Waking up just after dawn and standing by the window, where some unfathomable impulse had drawn her, she saw a man’s figure beneath a tree, smoking a cigarette, and it occurred to her that it might be Kent, but there were streaks of mist flying in from the sea, ghostly and striated in the pale light, and within a moment or two whoever it was—Tyler, Captain Ramsay making a votive offering to the destroyer-of-all-Jews, or some other person quite unknown to her—had disappeared.
In the morning things improved. The mist blew away to the east and the sun came out. It was a hot day and Mr Bannister, in a tweed suit and hobnailed golfing brogues that raised sparks off the concrete floor, conducted her on a tour of the stables and the outhouses where the dogs were kept. The dogs were of various kinds: an Irish wolfhound; a sickly spaniel; a pair of corgis. They were pleased to see Mr Bannister, and he them.
‘Of course, the best kind of dogs have an instinct, don’t you think?’ he said. ‘Why, I remember when my aunt was ill—bedridden, you know, but expected to recover—and then one morning we noticed that the corgi who’d been lying on her mattress had taken itself off to the fireplace. And would you credit it, within another half-hour she was dead?’
‘Yes,’ Cynthia heard herself saying. ‘Yes, yes.’ The sun burned against her forearms and the frock she had put on that morning seemed unaccountably heavy.
By lunch-time it was so hot that Mrs Bannister proposed an excursion. They could go down to the sea, she suggested, stay out until such time as the light lasted, and be back well before dinner. From her vantage point in the corner of the drawing room, next to a green baize table at which two of the ornamental girls sat conjuring a second jigsaw—they were indefatigable, these girls—Cynthia could not imagine that this idea would be taken seriously. But she had forgotten the exacting protocols of the country-house weekend.
Three quarters of the party said they would go. An ancient Rolls-Royce shooting brake was routed out of one of the garages, and presently a small convoy of miscellaneous vehicles set off along the pot-holed cinder track that led down, through gently descending meadows and hedges still patterned with loosestrife, towards the beach. Without in the least stage-managing the business, Cynthia found herself in the shooting brake with Tyler Kent, Captain Ramsay, and the ornamental girls—she could not remember which was Miss Chamberlain and which Miss Mackay—and a quiet man whom she had first mistaken for somebody’s valet.
Captain Ramsay, who was tall and supercilious-seeming, but at the same time not wholly correct, as if he might be about to fish a pack of cards out of his pocket and suggest a hand at nap, was still wearing his suit. On the other hand, Tyler Kent, with whom he was deep in conversation, wore a golfing jersey and a pair of highly inauthentic plus-fours with an orange check. The ornamental girls, who had clearly taken maternal advice, were swathed in jumpers and sensible shoes.
It was about three o’clock and bright for the season, so that the glow of the sunlight off the banks of fallen leaves seemed almost unhealthy, and the trunks of the elm trees had turned a sickly, disease-ridden green. Several fields away, but narrowly visible over the succession of low stone walls, a hunt was in progress, and she watched the individual chips of colour rising and falling over the impediments placed in their way so intensely that in the end they seemed to merge into a single, sinuous blur moving like a wave into the distance. This fascinated her so much that she forgot about Captain Ramsay, and Tyler Kent’s plus-fours, and the two girls who had begun to discuss somebody or other’s coming-out ball that had been cancelled on account of the war, and carried on staring into the space occupied by the hunt long after it had disappeared.
And so, by degrees, with the fields gradually giving way to a kind of ragged headland, strewn with marram grass, and the road barrelling down between high steps cut into the chalk, they came eventually to the sea.
The beach was so like every other beach that Cynthia had ever seen in the English southern counties that she lost interest in it from the outset. In Ceylon there would have been coconut palms, white sand, and the blue-brown froth of the Indian Ocean. Here there was twenty feet or so of gravel, some angry waves greenish at the peak and the colour of gravy below, and vast amounts of seaweed flung capriciously among the driftwood. All this was so familiar to her that she half-expected to see Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick emerge stealthily from behind a rock and start putting up deck-chairs.
Amoeba-like when it arrived at the beach, the party now divided into half a dozen distinct and self-sufficient cells. Mr Bannister and Captain Ramsay went and established themselves on an outcrop of rock that was relatively free from sand. Tyler Kent, the light glinting so dramatically off the checks in his plus-fours that he looked rather like an abstract painting, threw stones into a tin can for the amusement of the ornamental girls. The quiet man whom she had mistaken for somebody’s valet produced a copy of Pip: A Romance of Youth, sat down on a spar of driftwood, and began to read.
Not wanting to seem put out by her detachment from these groups, and determined to make it look as if what she was doing was her own special plan, designed to give her the maximum possib
le satisfaction, Cynthia stood examining the flotsam of the shore for a moment, in which, as usual, strings of onions predominated, and then went over to a spot a few yards away from Captain Ramsay and Mr Bannister, arranged her cardigan on the pebbles, and lay down on it, one hand shading her eyes from the sun.
Here at ground level it was more agreeable than she had expected. The noise of the sea was faintly soporific. The regular plink-plunk of Tyler Kent’s pebbles against the tin can—he was a surprisingly good shot—worked in rhythmic counterpoint. She thought that, really, she was enjoying herself, while remaining darkly suspicious that the source of this enjoyment would soon be taken away.
Everything was in flux: no pattern prevailed. First she had been in the East and then, wholly unexpectedly, all that had come to an end. Then there had been the boat-ride back from one world into another. Now there was England, England and the war. There had been scarcely any military news for a week or more—a ship sunk off Norway, desultory manoeuvrings behind the Maginot Line—and everyone said that the King was urging peace. But soon, she knew, another unstoppable tide would hurtle down and smash the world into fragments. She remembered the French letter falling slap onto the temple floor and thought that in some ways even Henry would have been preferable to all this.
Tyler Kent had stopped throwing pebbles against the tin can now. Instead he and the girls had gone off to explore a rock pool. Their shrieks of amusement sounded horribly thin. She could have done better than that. On the other hand, she thought, why put yourself out for a man from the American Embassy who wore orange-check plus-fours? For some reason the beach still seemed haunted by the ghosts of her parents. She could see her father sitting in one of the deck-chairs with his trousers rolled up to expose his spindly calves, and she could see Mrs Kirkpatrick brewing tea on the portable Bunsen burner that someone had given her as a wedding present. Picnic baskets, supernumerary newspapers, coffee flasks, and copies of tide tables lay at their feet. Oppressed by this vision, she turned over on her side and fell three-quarters asleep.
When she woke up, from another dream about the East in which cinnamon gardens alternated with flowers gleaming in the moonlight and Henry’s face reflected out of a car’s windscreen, great stretches of time seemed to have passed. But a glance at her watch told her that only a quarter of an hour had gone by. If anything it was even hotter than before.
Tyler Kent and the girls had given up the rock pool and were prospecting along the beach’s further end. Hermione, who had come in one of the other cars, now heaved into view thirty or forty yards away with a bulky object under her arm. This transformed into an easel and a collapsible chair, which she now erected on the sand. At a distance her head looked even more disproportionate to the rest of her body, like a pumpkin or a grotesquely enlarged horse chestnut. Nearer at hand, Mr Bannister and Captain Ramsay were still talking earnestly. For some reason the noise of the sea was quieter now and she found that she could hear what they were saying.
‘I had that fellow Burdett round to see me at the House,’ Captain Ramsay said.
‘Burdett!’ She could not tell whether Mr Bannister thought this the best joke ever coined, or the greatest piece of effrontery. ‘What on earth did he want?’
‘Oh, fishing, you know,’ Captain Ramsay said. ‘I need hardly tell you that a worse angler never existed.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I said that Halifax had the greatest confidence in what we were about.’
‘Not strictly true, I’m afraid.’
‘Well, perhaps not. But how is Burdett to know?’
For the first time in the conversation, Mr Bannister seemed faintly irritated. ‘There’ll be plenty of people in the Foreign Office to tell him.’
‘Perhaps there will. And there are friends of Mr Burdett’s to tell people things too. How was it that Joyce slipped off to Berlin in August?’
‘I never had anything to do with Joyce, you know.’
‘Neither did I. But someone who knew which way the wind was blowing told him to get out.’
‘And now he’s on Berlin radio three nights a week. Never mind what you said to Burdett. What did Halifax say when you saw him?’
‘Well, he was affable, I’ll give him that. As affable as Butler, almost. I mean, he practically said that an acceptable settlement needn’t involve restoring Czechoslovakia or giving Danzig and the Corridor back to Poland.’
‘Well, if that’s the case why are we still committed to war? All very well to talk about official channels. What we need are a few unofficial ones.’
‘Did you sound out that man in the embassy at Brussels?’
‘Well, it’s all very difficult. He says the Faction isn’t exactly in the best of odours over there. All those memories of gallant little Belgium a quarter of a century ago, you understand.’
Much of this was horribly cryptic, like a crossword puzzle which only die-hard readers of the newspaper could be expected to solve. But without requiring any particular mental effort on her part, two links in a tiny chain of causation snapped together. Norman Burdett and the Faction. The latter, she realised, was something to do with the King’s Party that people sometimes talked about.
At the same time, it was clearly something more than the King’s Party, for Norman Burdett and his cloak-and-dagger show were taking an interest in it. There had been an article in one of the papers recently about the ‘Tory defeatists.’ And now here she was spending her weekend in a nest of them. Did that make her a Tory defeatist? Or any kind of defeatist? Abruptly, she raised her head. The voices did not stop, but she was aware that Captain Ramsay instantly gave up the topic of the embassy at Brussels for a hot speech that his wife had given to the Arbroath Businessmen’s Club.
It was about four o’clock and the warmth was starting to go out of the day. There was no sign of Hermione, and as the easel lay tenantless on its stretch of sand, she decided to take a look at it. Halfway along the beach, with the green-grey water boiling about at her feet, she came across Tyler Kent walking the other way.
‘Where are your friends?’ she wondered.
‘They went back to the car. Said it was too cold.’ The sea-water had got into the bottoms of his plus-fours, she noticed, and he looked just a little less jolly. ‘I say,’ he went on, half-humorously, ‘you never told me Miss Chamberlain was a dook.’
He had to say the word twice before she understood.
‘What do you mean? A woman can’t be a duke.’
‘Well, an earl’s daughter, then. All this time I’ve been calling her Miss Chamberlain, and it turns out she’s the Lady Ursula Chamberlain.’
‘I expect she was too polite to say.’
‘Well, she wasn’t too polite to tell me in the end.’ She wondered exactly what he had said to Lady Ursula Chamberlain, and what kind of reception he had got in return. Having got this social solecism off his chest, he brightened up. ‘I suppose we ought to take a look at Hermione’s painting now that we’re here.’
Along the horizon there were cargo ships, moving in Indian file, at least a dozen of them, remote and insubstantial, as if made out of balsa wood. Mr Bannister and Captain Ramsay were getting to their feet. Together Cynthia and Tyler Kent inspected the sheet of cartridge paper, each corner secured with an outsize clothes-peg, that Hermione had left on the easel. As might have been expected, it offered a vista of choppy waves and lowering cloud, but superimposed was a kind of vortex of wind, debris, and flailing black birds.
‘Not so good, I guess,’ Tyler Kent said. He sounded slightly disappointed, as if he had hoped to write an article in a weekly magazine proclaiming the discovery of a limitless new talent, only to have the cup dashed from his lips.
‘No,’ Cynthia agreed. She had decisive opinions about art. ‘Not so good.’
‘Now, Lady Ursula,’ Tyler Kent said, clearly wanting to get back onto softer ground, ‘designs—I guess
you’d call them boutonnières, out of beech-nut clusters.’
This was so preposterous that Cynthia almost laughed. Instead she said: ‘What do you do at the American Embassy?’
‘What kind of question is that?’
She had a feeling that this was meant to be a rebuke, if not quite in the same class as the one clearly administered by Lady Ursula over her title. But she had never allowed herself to be intimidated by Americans.
‘Quite an ordinary one, I should think. I thought men liked to be asked about their jobs. Most people do.’
‘I guess that’s so,’ he said, a bit uncertainly, as if the idea had only just occurred to him. ‘Well, part of the time people come and ask me questions, and part of the time I go and ask them questions.’
They could see Hermione labouring up the beach towards them. She was wearing one of her furious, dishevelled looks, and her distress seemed to grow more acute as she drew level with the easel.
‘I suppose you’ve been looking at my awful picture,’ she said bitterly.
There was a difficulty in replying to this. If Hermione was so convinced that the picture was awful, would she want anyone disagreeing with her? On the other hand, confirming her judgement might make her more miserable still. Tyler Kent seemed to have lost interest both in the picture and its creator. He said,
‘It’s not so bad.’
‘I like the birds,’ Cynthia offered. ‘As if they were caught up in a tornado or something.’
Unexpectedly, this turned out to be the right thing to say. Hermione instantly brightened up. ‘Yes, they’re not bad, are they? Henry always used to say I could paint birds by the flock.’
So there was Henry again, bouncing up from the bracken where he had lain concealed. They wandered back to the cars, where the rest of the party had begun to assemble. It was definitely cooler now, and the light was breaking up into blood-red streaks. The rest of the sky was violet-coloured. No one had anything of any interest to report, except that one of the ornamental girls had overturned on the edge of a rock pool and grazed her knee. There was a faint smell of brine.