by D. J. Taylor
‘It will all end in tears,’ Anthea said. ‘Desmond’s, I should think.’ Over the past few days she had been at her haughtiest, gone around the office for whole afternoons without wearing her shoes, and corrected Desmond’s pronunciation of selbsthass. There was a fountain pen in the ferrule at the end of her desk and she picked it up and stared at it as if it had mortally offended her in some way. ‘How was your weekend at Ashburton Grange?’
There were a number of ways of replying to this, Cynthia thought. The safest seemed to be to say that she had had rather a nice time.
‘Oh, I had rather a nice time.’
‘Did Mr Bannister insist on taking to the sea in an Edwardian bathing costume? He did it once when a friend of mine was staying there. And how was Captain Ramsay?’
‘How did you know Captain Ramsay was there?’
‘Oh, one sees people who go to these things and they tell one about the other people who go there.’
There was something rather marked in the way that Anthea said this, Cynthia thought, as if she sat in the middle of some vast intelligence-gathering network with runners coming in daily with fresh information—things that were long centuries away from the light conversation of which her spare time usually consisted. Cynthia said: ‘How’s Norman Burdett?’
Anthea’s face dropped. ‘Actually, Norman’s not very well. In fact, he’s in hospital.’
‘What’s the matter with him?’
‘If you really must know, somebody came up behind him in the blackout and hit him on the head with a half-brick.’
‘Goodness gracious,’ Cynthia said. She lived in a world altogether beyond physical violence.
‘Goodness gracious is about right,’ Anthea said. ‘So anything I could tell him about Captain Ramsay at Ashburton Grange would cheer him up no end.’
Just then Mrs Kirkpatrick telephoned to say that their visas to Portugal had come through and they intended to leave the following week.
When it came to it, the Kirkpatricks were a ceremonious family. Significant anniversaries were celebrated by cocktail parties in the Bayswater drawing room. On Mr Kirkpatrick’s fiftieth birthday they had dined at the Galle Face Hotel beneath the photographs of American film stars. Now, to mark the trip to Portugal, they decided to lunch that Sunday in a fish restaurant on Wilton Street.
It was not much of a lunch. By the time they got there the salmon was all gone, and the whitebait spoken for, and they had to make do with plates of mackerel in a rather nasty pink sauce. As if this wasn’t enough, the restaurant was unusually crowded for a Sunday and the tables seemed to have been jammed closer together than was usually the case.
However, like most people who live by the will, Mrs Kirkpatrick was capable of imposing her personality on the situation. The prospect of the Portuguese trip had enlivened her a little, and she seemed more like the person she had previously been. In this spirit she commandeered a ‘reserved’ table by the window before anyone could stop her, and spoke so briskly to the waiter who came to remonstrate that he went away.
About halfway through the meal, Cynthia saw that Peter Wildgoose was in the restaurant. He was wearing a quite paralysingly well-cut suit and smiling rather sardonically to himself. There was a younger man with him, who looked as if he might have been in his early twenties, with big, saucy eyes and a startled expression. When Peter saw her he smiled again, less sardonically, and gave a little wave. Then, when she was on her way back from the Ladies’, he sprang up from his chair and met her halfway across the room.
‘My parents are going to Portugal,’ she explained. ‘We’re having lunch to see them off.’
‘I believe I heard something about it,’ he said. Back at the table, the young man he had brought with him sat eating olives one by one off the end of a cocktail stick. ‘Well, make sure you enjoy yourself.’
‘You must make sure you enjoy yourself,’ she insisted, with rather more skittishness than she usually allowed herself.
‘Oh, I always do,’ he said.
Five minutes after she had got back to her seat, a waiter came across with three glasses of champagne on a tray and said that the gentleman in the corner had ordered them to be sent. Naturally, this took some time to explain to Mrs Kirkpatrick, but when she was able to make sense of it she professed herself charmed.
‘Well, I call that very civil,’ she said. ‘How kind of Mr Wildgoose.’
The Kirkpatricks had heard of Peter. ‘Didn’t his father make a packet from selling margarine in the last war?’ her father wondered.
‘His mother was a Trench,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said, which disposed of the margarine-selling forever.
After that things improved. There was something laboriously old-fashioned about the Kirkpatricks’ attitude to enjoyment, but you could not question their zeal. Mrs Kirkpatrick reminisced about a famous party she had been to in the 1920s where everybody dressed up as somebody else and she had had her photograph taken for the Bystander. They talked about Ceylon and how it had never been the same as it was when they had first gone there, and the impossibility of ever going back, and it was as if Henry Bannister, the car’s front wheel thumping into the tree-trunk, and the rat-holes leading down beneath the cemetery grass had never been. Over at the far table Peter and his friend were eating oysters, which was odd as there had not been any when the Kirkpatricks arrived.
Finally, when they were drinking coffee and watching the taxis surge down Wilton Street, Mrs Kirkpatrick’s face lost its reminiscent glaze and she began to impart some serious information. ‘Of course, if you find yourself really short you must go and see Mr Cheyney at the bank … I’m sure Aunt Dorothy would be pleased to help if you ran into any kind of difficulty. I believe they’re in Renfrewshire just at the moment … Perhaps your cousin Harriet would come and stay with you, if you were to ask her … Lucy Yeoward was always a very sensible girl, so I’ve no worries on that score … I’ve asked Mrs Haldane, who lives in Pont Street, if she’ll keep an eye on you …’
Cynthia saw that all this was intended to reassure, to imply that she existed at the centre of a vast network of friends and relations, all of whom could be pressed to offer succour at a moment’s notice. In fact, it had precisely the opposite effect. She had never felt so detached from the world of which she was supposed to be a part. Curiously, there was something exhilarating about this. The crowd in the restaurant was thinning out now: half the tables were empty. Standing in the doorway putting on his coat, Peter Wildgoose glanced in the Kirkpatricks’ direction, raised two fingers to the side of his head and gave a mock-salute. It was a measure of Cynthia’s exhilaration that she saluted back.
‘What a very nice young man,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said.
The Kirkpatricks were not great ones for leave-takings. They stood on a street corner in a disconsolate and uncertain huddle while Mr and Mrs Kirkpatrick looked for a taxi. For some reason the taxis, which had been clogging the kerbside an hour before, had all disappeared.
‘My dear,’ Mrs Kirkpatrick said once or twice.
Mr Kirkpatrick was less oblique. ‘I shall miss you, Pongo,’ he said—‘Pongo’ was an ancient nickname, dating from the nursery, not used for a dozen years—‘and I wish you were coming with us.’
And then they were gone, off down Wilton Street in the grey November afternoon, and she stood on the pavement, lost in the world that ‘Pongo’ had suddenly conjured up: drinking rose-hip syrup out of a powder-blue china mug; the Hundred Acre Wood; hot summer days at Burnham Beeches.
At Belgrave Square Lucy would be rearranging furniture and positioning waste-paper baskets, but she did not want to go back there just yet. Instead she set off through Pimlico to the river. It was nearly three o’clock and there was no one much about.
A few soldiers were lugging their kitbags in the direction of Victoria Station. In the Belgrave Road a gang of Boy Scouts were picking up pieces of litter. The exhilaratio
n was still there, fizzing about inside her, and oddly enough it had come to include Peter. She wondered what it would be like having lunch with him, and the kind of things he might talk about.
The Thames was at slack-tide and about the colour of gravy. Alone among the landmarks of her childhood, it seemed not to have been altered by the war. There was a flotilla of houseboats chained up on the Battersea side, all clanking together in the breeze, and she watched the movement of their prows against the green-grey surround. Then, without warning, a Port of London Authority barge came steaming into view from beneath Grosvenor Bridge, with a Union Jack on a pole by the foredeck and two or three dozen women with pink faces in WVS uniforms gazing excitedly over the side. A gust of wind blew down, and three or four hats went springing away into the swell. In the distance, towards the power station, there were odd little flashes of light rising above the water, like a battle being fought by unseen ships.
No, she thought, even the river had changed.
And, of course, living in Belgrave Square was not in the least like The Adventures of a Bachelor Girl. The flat consisted of four irregularly shaped rooms leading off a serpentine corridor, and the sitting-room windows were so large that they ran out of blackout curtains and had to make do with squares of brown paper held in place by sticking plaster.
Worse, people were always mistaking the location of the Catholic charity on the third floor and leaving parcels of old clothes on the landing which had to be taken downstairs again, and the front door-bell did not work properly, which meant that there was a difficulty about callers, several of whom had been left standing in the street.
The parts of the sitting-room windows that were not permanently blacked out looked over Grosvenor Place and beyond that the gardens of Buckingham Palace, in which, Lucy maintained, one bright afternoon, with the aid of a pair of binoculars, she had seen the King exercising his pugs. Cynthia had not believed the story about the King, which seemed to her somehow symptomatic of the relation in which she stood with Lucy, and had something to do with a suspicion that her good nature was being presumed upon.
Meekly submissive in the Bloomsbury square, the domestic Lucy turned out to be a more exacting proposition. There was one little rota pinned to the kitchen wall about the cooking, and another little rota left next to the telephone about who was responsible for the laundry. There was also a little jar for threepenny bits to defray the telephone bill. The Beardsley prints that Cynthia had thought suitable for the sitting-room vanished overnight, to be replaced by works by Sisley and Munnings, and there were little arguments about empty biscuit-tins and stolen milk. To balance this was the odd and not always comforting sense of being beholden to absolutely no one: of being able to walk around the flat stark naked if one wanted to and dine out of a sardine-tin at four o’clock in the morning.
Later, people would insist that the early days of the war imposed a routine, at the very least a pattern, on the lives being lived out in its shadow. But this was not true. Rather, it brought a rhythm, not always heard, occasionally almost forgotten, but at all times capable of making its presence felt in unexpected ways.
The people one knew—people working in government offices, in one or other of the services, even those in reserved occupations—mysteriously came and went: summoned to distant parts of the British Isles on a whim and then, equally mysteriously, brought back again. Desmond said he knew a man who worked in the press department at Fighter Command who had been sent to Oxford, Swansea, and Inverness in the space of a fortnight. When he came back, the office in which he worked had been relocated to Slough and nobody knew who he was. All over England the tribes were in flux, reassembling themselves in new communities that broke apart almost as they were created, like a clump of iron filings endlessly responding to an unseen magnet’s call.
The best times in the flat were Sunday mornings. By then one had thrown off a week’s accumulated tiredness, got through the weekend’s chores (with exceptions) and reached a point where one was looking out for pleasure. Sometimes this pleasure never arrived, but it was consoling to think that it might do, and it was possible to spend a very comfortable few hours with one’s hair in curl-papers, reading the Sunday Times and waiting for the telephone to ring, and not realise, until five o’clock struck and the darkness stole over the square, that the day had been wasted.
It was on one of these days, about two weeks after they had moved in, that Cynthia, alone in the sitting room, heard the sound of footsteps coming rapidly up the stairs. This was so unusual that she opened the door of the flat and stood on the landing. Intended to be welcoming, or at any rate inquisitive, the gesture had a curiously dampening effect on the two figures she could see through the gaps in the staircase twenty or thirty feet below. Their conversation—loud, exuberant conversation—stopped, so that all that remained was the slap of shoe-leather on linoleum. The visitors were a man and a woman, and the effect of the sunlight, which came slanting in over the stairwell to create enormous prisms, was so startling that it took a moment for her to establish who they were.
‘We just happened to be passing,’ Tyler Kent said, as he came up level with her. ‘Taking a little stroll through Belgravia, you know. So we thought we’d come and look you up.’
Somehow there was a terrific sense of purpose in the way he pronounced these very ordinary words, as if the idea of taking a Sunday morning walk, much less looking anyone up in the course of it, was a fantastically novel idea that deserved a round of applause from everybody present.
‘That’s very kind of you,’ Cynthia said. ‘How on earth did you know where I lived?’
‘Oh, we have our spies,’ the woman said, who turned out to be Hermione Bannister. She looked slightly less odd, although the new way in which she had had her hair done rather emphasised the size of her head, and she was badly out of breath. ‘Gracious, what a lot of stairs to have to climb.’
For a moment it looked as if they might simply talk about stairs, or how they had discovered Cynthia’s address. Happily Tyler Kent took control of the situation. Detached from the Bannisters’ drawing-room, he looked even more watchful, and said mock-humorously: ‘I believe you know Miss Bannister?’
‘Don’t be absurd. Of course I know Miss Bannister. You’d better come in. There’s never very much in the place on a Sunday, but I could probably run to a cup of tea.’
The prisms were quite dazzling now, and the light seemed to flow over Hermione as she stood, still panting for breath, at the top of the staircase, like a molten stream.
‘Actually,’ Tyler Kent said, ‘we thought you might like to come out some place with us. So dull to be sitting at home on a Sunday when you could be gadding about.’
Again, he managed to invest the words with an almost paralysing suggestiveness. There was no knowing, he implied, where he and Hermione might take her, or the delights that might be awaiting her when they got there. Like Mrs Kirkpatrick, in pre-war days, before disillusionment had set in, the force of his personality was quite overwhelming. Cynthia went to get her coat and hat.
Lucy had gone out an hour ago, leaving a note that said: unexpectedly called away: back later. ‘Unexpectedly called away’ stood high on the list of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s forbidden excuses, on the grounds that it could mean absolutely anything.
When Cynthia got back to the landing, Tyler Kent and Hermione had gone into a little huddle: Tyler’s face still sardonically amused; Hermione’s faintly resentful. The once-molten light had faded away almost to nothing.
‘If you haven’t the energy to walk down four flights of stairs and then get as far as the taxi-rank in Halkin Street, there wasn’t a whole lot of point in bringing you,’ he said.
There was some doubt as to how Hermione might take this. In the end she gave a meek little nod and they went downstairs in triangle formation, Tyler Kent leading the way, the girls following. Each landing that they passed turned out to have a range of obstacles to nego
tiate. Next to the Catholic charity’s vestibule, someone had left a perambulator filled with flannelette nightgowns. Outside the literary agent’s door, there were half a dozen parcels spilled over the mat. The entrance to the embassy was almost blocked by cane chairs piled to a height of six or seven feet.
‘Now, a fellow I know who lived in a rooming house in Baltimore once came downstairs and found a stiff in the hallway,’ Tyler Kent said. However long he had been in England, he was still entranced by its peculiarities. As they passed the ballroom on the ground floor he threw a longing glance towards the high, plate-glass doors. ‘I’d certainly like to take a look in there some day,’ he said.
There was a difficulty about taxis. Tyler strode jauntily off down Halkin Street to summon one and she found herself standing on the kerbside with Hermione. The illusion of normality brought by the staircase and the coruscating light had disappeared: she looked weirder than ever. At the same time it was hard to work out exactly what this weirdness consisted of.
Anthea’s oddity—and it was remarkable how Anthea had become the point of comparison for every other person she met—rested on her clothes, and the way she wore those clothes, and her sulky demeanour. Hermione’s oddity, on the other hand, lay in everything about her being faintly out of proportion. If her head seemed too large for her body, then her feet, conversely, looked too small for the legs they supported. She seemed ready to fall over at a moment’s notice.
Over the years Cynthia had developed a technique for dealing with the Hermiones of this world. It consisted of attending to their more outrageous pronouncements in a spirit of tolerant irony, not taking any nonsense, and jollying them along.
‘Actually, we came by your address because Mummy knows Mrs Yeoward and they happened to meet at a sale of work for the Serbian refugees,’ Hermione said, all in a rush, and Cynthia registered another absolutely vital odd-girl’s characteristic: a habit of blurting things out.