by D. J. Taylor
Desmond, on the other hand, she still found vaguely unreal. The self-consciousness, the gestures and declarations made for the benefit of anyone who happened to be looking on, she thought affected. The tweed suits and the bow ties, on the other hand, she found she could put up with. They were caste-marks, or rather badges of affiliation: like a tobacco jar in college colours or a prefect’s tie. The Kirkpatricks had a number of professional categories for people like Desmond. Their choice in this particular case was ‘highbrow’—not a category which was given much house room, but was at any rate acknowledged to exist.
While she was thinking this—a process made both more and less difficult by having the two of them a few feet away from her in the room—there came a faint scuffling noise from beyond the door and then a half-hearted rattle at the door-knob, as if the person trying to come in either lacked the strength to go any further or had serious doubts about what he or she might find on the other side.
Somehow the effect of this interruption was mesmerising. Peter put down his teacup, which Anthea returned to the shelf above the kettle. Desmond stared at the door in a kind of nervous panic, as if the physical manifestation of every nightmare he had ever had lay behind it, something that terror urged him to keep away but that duty obliged him to confront.
‘Do you suppose the handle’s broken?’ Lucy asked innocently. ‘Whoever it is seems to be taking an awfully long time.’
There was a final, decisive twist on the door-knob and a small man in a grey-brown mackintosh, apparently impelled by the force he had had to exert on the door, more or less fell into the room. To no one’s very great surprise, this turned out to be Sylvester Del Mar.
‘Why, Sylvester,’ Desmond said, a look of inexpressible relief on his face. ‘Do come in. We were just talking about you.’
‘Nice things, I hope,’ Sylvester said, but not as if he had any great expectation of this being the case. ‘Look, I brought you those other stories you wanted to see. I was clearing out a lot of stuff in my digs and found them, so I thought I’d bring them along. It’s only a step from Finsbury Park.’
There were several mysteries about Sylvester Del Mar. One was whether this was his real name, although Desmond claimed to have seen it on an official document—if not his birth certificate, then a bill of some kind. The second was how he made a living. He could not possibly have survived on the fragments of journalism that had preceded his new calling as a short-story writer. Desmond was supposed to have met him while rooting through one of the secondhand book-barrows in the Farringdon Road, and there was a suspicion that managing one of them was the real business of his life.
As well as being short and given to wearing mackintoshes, he had an oddly furtive air, as if he half-expected to be asked to turn out his pockets on the spot. ‘I imagine Sylvester really thinks of me as a plain-clothes policeman,’ Desmond had said once. ‘Perhaps he comes and steals review copies when there’s no one here. I must say, I don’t much care if he does.’
‘Actually, Sylvester,’ Desmond said now, ‘I’d be obliged if you’d just step into my office. There are one or two points about that story of yours we’re putting into the first number that we need to discuss. Routine things, you understand. Nothing to worry about.’
‘I’m not worried about them,’ Sylvester said. The girls always wondered at Desmond’s obsequiousness towards his authors. Sylvester, on the other hand, accepted it as his absolute and unquestionable due. ‘While we’re at it, you can look at this other stuff I’ve brought.’
Although a gleam had come into his eye at the prospect of unloading more of his work on Desmond, this came mingled with an expression of mild resentment. Being ushered into the editor’s office was all very well, but it deprived him of one of the other things he liked doing, which was hanging about in the outer room talking to anyone who would listen to him and making heartfelt but sometimes startlingly ill-informed pronouncements about the war, literature, or the inconveniences of the blackout.
‘Yes, why don’t you go and talk to Des,’ Peter said. He was watching Sylvester with a look of extraordinary fascination, as if he expected him to change shape, start reciting a poem in a foreign language, or announce that he was a German paratrooper who intended to take them all hostage.
‘All right, I’ll do that,’ Sylvester said. His accent, in fact his whole social background, was impossible to place. He could have been a country solicitor up in London for the day, a plumber’s mate who had come into money, anything. He was standing in front of Anthea’s desk, staring at her typewriter as if he had never seen one before. ‘And what’s this young lady up to? Getting on with her work, I hope.’
Cynthia had always assumed that Sylvester would appeal to Anthea’s anarchic, bohemian side. In fact she was wrong about this.
‘I’m afraid I really don’t have time for gossip, Mr Del Mar.’
‘You know what worries me?’ Sylvester said. He had given Anthea up as a bad job. ‘Here you are, starting a magazine called Duration. Now, what happens if the war stops? What happens if there’s a negotiated peace by Christmas? What do you do then, eh?’
There was a general feeling in the office that this was a good question. ‘I think …’ Desmond said, and then stopped; he always deferred to Peter in any discussion of the war. Sylvester had taken off his heavy, horn-rimmed spectacles and, extracting a brightly coloured handkerchief out of his pocket, begun to polish them with an intent, all-consuming seriousness.
‘But there won’t be a negotiated peace,’ Peter said, a bit crossly. ‘I keep hearing this all the time from Desmond’s right-wing friends.’ Desmond gave a tiny, guilty start. ‘Hitler can keep on offering as many phoney olive-branches as he likes, and all the defeatists will carry on lulling themselves into a false sense of security. There are 12 divisions within a half-mile of the Belgian border, and in a very short while they’re going to start heading west. But in answer to your initial question, Sylvester, I think Duration will be around for a pretty long time yet. Certainly long enough to print your story—a very good story, if I may say so—about that lesbian mistress in the girls’ school and what she gets up to with her hairbrush.’
Most people would have taken this as a rebuke. But Sylvester did not look in the least upset. He had asked a question, and got an answer: that was all there was to it. Half a dozen storm-troopers breaking into the room would not have alarmed him, provided they brought an assurance that the magazine’s paper supply would somehow be forthcoming. Still polishing his spectacles, as if they were a vital part of the war effort, he allowed himself to be led off into Desmond’s office.
‘You know something?’ Peter said. Sylvester’s single-mindedness about his career always amused him. ‘I’m sure I’ve come across that chap before. Can’t remember where. Ten shillings to anyone who can tell me.’
But Cynthia had lost interest in Sylvester, Desmond, and even Peter Wildgoose. She had other things to think about.
Before it had been turned into an office, the fireplace desultorily bricked up, and a row of gunmetal filing cabinets introduced into the furthermost corner, the space they sat in had once been a drawing room. Its high mantelpiece, white-painted and supported by thin, Doric columns, had been used to display invitations and sports-club fixtures. Now a line of picture postcards ran from one end to the other, offering views of the beach at Toulon, Manhattan skyscrapers, the gorge at Ronda. They were from Desmond’s friends, those expatriate bohemians even now not yet returned from the far-flung nooks and crannies in which the declaration of war had found them.
Of course, if the Hun decides to come south and there isn’t a boat we shall all be interned …
B. is here with the sweetest little German boy he picked up in Athens last summer and making the most tremendous fuss about naturalisation papers …
Wystan sends his love …
Staring at a picture of the cathedral at Lisbon, Cynthia was re
minded of her parents, forgotten for a moment, but indisputably one of the things she needed to think about. Since Mr Kirkpatrick’s stroke—a fortnight ago now—the two of them had begun to behave strangely. Or rather, Cynthia acknowledged, it was not that they had begun to behave strangely, but that, detached from the milieu in which she had been most used to observing them, their behaviour suddenly lacked context. Statements that might have made perfect sense in Colombo seemed unutterably bizarre in Bayswater. It was not that Mrs Kirkpatrick was unable to cope with the anxieties of warfare, the queues in shops, and wardens enforcing the blackout, merely that the whole thing seemed to outrage her sensibilities. She was like a philosopher set to labour on a factory production line: she could do the work, but the indignity burnt into her soul.
Mr Kirkpatrick’s predicament was, in some ways, even worse. Unlike his wife, he had no personal myth to fall back on. Another man would have dramatised his situation and given it a little romance, reinvented himself as a world-weary colonial back from a lost but forever-tantalising East, a man of action now forced to be a contemplative. But Mr Kirkpatrick was not really up to this. To make matters worse, his illness had badly frightened him. There was really only one escape route open—something his wife had managed decades ago—and that was to stylise his manner.
In the fortnight that this had been going on, Cynthia had lost count of the number of times he had looked at her benignly over the top of his spectacles, fixed her with the grin of a peppery colonel staring at the Sussex pines, and remarked that the autumn was really coming on, or begun, in a purposely quavering voice, a music-hall song about being Henery the Eighth. Each of these things annoyed her, not just because they were irritating in themselves, but because they seemed to suggest that he was in sharp retreat from the person he had been, and that it would take resources she did not possess to drag him back.
Cynthia had long ago resigned herself to having lost her mother to caricature, but her father’s desertion appalled her. She felt that she was losing an ally: worse, that the ally knew nothing of the process that was drawing him apart. Just now they were talking of going to Portugal, so that Mr Kirkpatrick could recuperate. All this struck Cynthia as impractical, dangerous, and possibly illegal, but Mrs Kirkpatrick had gone into the matter, and it appeared that Portugal—neutral, navigable, and also harbouring a remote cousin of Mr Kirkpatrick’s—would be prepared to have them.
The other thing that Cynthia wanted to think about was Lucy. In the past three months she had grown used to her friends—rather like the people one read about in novels—declaring themselves, sloughing off some time-honoured aspect of their character and replacing it with another, sometimes using materials that already lay to hand, sometimes making use of wholly unexpected additions. And so dowdy girls remembered from the schoolroom were found to have joined glamorous branches of the women’s services, while hitherto dashing young men angling for commissions in smart regiments were reincarnated as obscure civil servants.
All this was par for the course, but it was odd to find Lucy joining their ranks. They had started having lunch together—at first eating sandwiches brought from home side by side on a bench with a newspaper spread over their knees; then, when it got too cold, in Lyons or British Restaurants, which were ghastly but where the awfulness of the food at least gave you something to talk about.
‘Mother told me this morning that she and Dads were thinking of shutting up the house,’ Lucy had said on one of these occasions.
Lucy’s parents lived rather modestly in North Kensington.
‘Oh yes?’ Cynthia said, chewing away at her sandwich. ‘Where will they go?’
‘Mother said they might go and stay with Uncle Mark in Flintshire. After all,’ Lucy said, rather fiercely, as if replying to a question that had not been asked, ‘it’s not as if Dads can do anything, with his arthritis being so bad.’
The Lyons in which they were sitting was a curious place, with a clientele that consisted half of solicitors’ clerks discussing the wiles of their trade, and half of exotic young women who sat about on stools smoking cigarettes and not appearing to eat anything.
‘It’s amazing how many places are being shut up,’ Lucy said. ‘Somebody told me the other day that half the houses in Belgrave Square are for sale.’ She stopped talking for a moment and they looked at the steam rising from the urns over by the window, and the piles of rock buns lying unappetisingly on the alabaster counter. ‘Actually,’ she resumed, ‘Dads knows a man who’s letting out a flat there. We could go and look at it if you liked.’
And so, greatly daring and yet contriving to give the impression that it was the most matter-of-fact thing in the world for two people of their age, sex, and class to go apartment-hunting together, they left work early that afternoon and took a bus down to Belgrave Square.
The flat was on the top storey of a house in the north-western corner, not far from Halkin Street, and had pretty clearly been converted out of a series of attics. The four floors beneath it were occupied by a Catholic charity that exported second-hand clothing to Eastern Europe, a literary agency, the embassy of a Central American republic, and a deserted ballroom choked with dust. In the basement lurked a very old lady whose husband had fought at Inkerman. It would cost three guineas a week, which the agent, who stood politely in the doorway while they looked, said was cheap at the price.
‘It would be rather exciting, wouldn’t it?’ Lucy said.
‘Yes, it would.’
Cynthia had read a number of novels about women who shared flats together. They had titles like The Adventures of a Bachelor Girl and featured stockings hung up to dry in front of the gas-fire, Sunday afternoon tea parties, taxis hooting in the street outside, and liberty hall. They settled three months’ rent in advance and got Lucy’s father to pay a deposit against breakages.
A year ago, Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick would have raised serious objections to a flat in Belgrave Square. Now the general feeling was that everything could have been a great deal worse. In any case, Mrs Kirkpatrick had other things on her mind. It was all a question, Cynthia now thought, of context, of finding a backdrop which confirmed the suitability of the things you wanted to do or the person you wanted to be. The people she envied were the ones who seemed able to move seamlessly from one milieu to another. Her immediate circumstances—the room in which she sat, the conversation of the past quarter-hour—were proof of this.
Desmond, she knew, would not have done for Bayswater. The particular skills he canvassed—knowingness, effrontery, irony—would have found no echo there. Peter, on the other hand, would have gone down, to use that expression of Mr Kirkpatrick’s, like a dinner. As to what this ability to transcend your natural environment consisted of, what qualities in the end made Peter a sharper operator than Desmond, Cynthia confessed herself baffled.
Since Desmond had dragged Sylvester Del Mar away into his office, a silence had fallen on the room. Then, gradually, punctuated by the murmur of Desmond’s voice coming through the door, the routines of the late morning began to assert themselves. A man in striped trousers and spats came selling typewriter supplies and was smartly repulsed. Somebody rang up Anthea and started a conversation in which her part consisted of repeating the words ‘I think that’s really out of the question’ in ever more decisive tones. Peter finished what was left of someone else’s tea, even though it had gone cold, and went off to forage through the bookcase of review copies to see if there was anything he could bring himself to read. Outside it began to rain again.
All this went on for about twenty minutes. Eventually, when the air of repetition became almost too great to be borne, and Cynthia almost expected the man selling typewriter supplies to walk into the room for a second time, like a character in a play, Desmond appeared suddenly in the doorway of his office, shut the door behind him, and said to Peter, ‘I say, Sylvester’s in rather a bad way. I don’t suppose we could let him have fifteen pounds?’
‘What does he want it for?’
‘Well …’ Desmond’s manner was that of a headmaster whose prize pupil had unexpectedly failed to secure top marks in French. ‘Apparently he’s in danger of being thrown out of his digs. And I gather there’s trouble with his girl.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘He didn’t go into details. Those new stories he’s brought in are very good, you know. Couldn’t we advance him some money against publication?’
It really was raining very hard now. Peter said: ‘I don’t know. Perhaps we should rent him a furnished flat. Or get him a suite at Claridge’s. I gather the place is virtually empty at the moment. Or, wait a minute, why doesn’t he stay with you? Think of the service you would be doing literature. Never mind the companionship. I should have thought that having Sylvester complaining to you over the marmalade about how Twentieth Century Verse never published that poem of his, even though they said they were going to three times, would be just the thing to make breakfast go with a swing.’
This went on for some time. In the end Peter took three five-pound notes out of his wallet and handed them over. Desmond accepted this bounty with a meek little bob of his head, like a man taking the sacrament in a church. When he had gone, Peter selected a book from the shelf called Sicilian Mornings, picked up his umbrella, and went stiffly off through the door without saying goodbye. Lucy had disappeared somewhere, and Cynthia became aware that Anthea, her telephone conversation now over, was looking at her rather fixedly. She said, ‘Peter hates giving money to Desmond’s lame ducks.’
‘He didn’t seem to mind then. Not too much, anyway.’
‘Ah, but you see Peter’s such a gentleman that he has to be polite about it. But secretly he goes home and seethes. Of course he’d mind it less if Sylvester weren’t such an awful little man.’
‘I think he’s rather nice,’ Cynthia said, who could not quite quantify ‘awful little man’ in these circumstances.