by D. J. Taylor
Seeing that Tyler Kent was still thirty yards away, although now negotiating with a taxi man, and there was no knowing what Hermione might come out with next, she said, ‘It must be rather nice to have Mr Kent taking you round London.’
‘Oh, we’re seeing a great deal of each other,’ Hermione said, almost roguishly. ‘And Mummy doesn’t mind a bit,’ she added. It was impossible to work out exactly what was meant by this: whether the seeing a great deal of each other was Hermione’s idea, or Tyler Kent’s, or why Mrs Bannister might have been expected to mind about it, but now didn’t. There were worse things, surely, than having your daughter paying Sunday morning calls in Belgrave Square in the company of a man who worked at the American Embassy.
The taxi was now moving down Halkin Street towards them, slowing as it approached. For some reason, Tyler Kent had preferred to walk. He was about twenty yards behind, brow furrowed, hands plunged in the pockets of his overcoat. She could not work out whether he was good-looking, or, if he was good-looking, in what kind of way. When he saw she was staring at him, he took one hand out of his pocket and made a little gesture at the cab.
Nobody had troubled to tell her where they were going, but Tyler Kent gave the man an address in Soho. The asphyxiating smell of mothballs that pervaded the cab turned out to come from Hermione. There was not much traffic about. Beyond the window, London sped by. Grosvenor Place. Hyde Park Corner. Piccadilly. Lumbering army vans. Dig for Victory signs. This reminded her of the Bloomsbury square, flattened into bare earth a month ago now. Some of the letters printed in The Times, Desmond’s copy of which she sometimes read in the afternoons, had got very cross about the Bloomsbury squares.
The taxi dropped them in Brewer Street and they walked down some steps into a kind of subterranean tea-room-cum-drinking-den whose walls were hung with marginally surrealist paintings. She had been to this kind of place once or twice before and was not much shocked by it. There was an epicene old man behind the bar whose high colour was accentuated by the spots of rouge on his cheeks, and some younger men in purple-and-green suits whom Mr Kirkpatrick would have described as ‘nancy-boys.’
They ordered gin-and-Italians but there turned out not to be any Italian, so they had to settle for orange juice. The old man with the rouge spots had a pet monkey in a tarboosh, sitting on the bar beside him, who sometimes leapt up onto his shoulder.
‘A fellow at the Embassy brought me here once,’ Tyler Kent explained as they sat down. He was grinning with delight. ‘Isn’t it the greatest place?’
He was definitely good-looking, Cynthia had decided, and in the right kind of way.
Hermione, meanwhile, was doing her best to appreciate this new milieu. ‘When my uncle was Commissioner of Police,’ she said, ‘this is exactly the sort of club the Home Secretary would have wanted him to close down.’
‘I guess he was the most respectable old guy in Christendom, wasn’t he, sweetie?’ Tyler Kent broke in, allowing himself to sound vastly more American than he had done on the staircase or in the taxi. ‘Now, why don’t you drink the nice drink I’ve just bought you and then we’ll be interested to hear what you’ve got to say.’
To her surprise, Cynthia discovered that the first unwritten law of female solidarity—that if one of your number was suffering even the mildest of hard times from a man, you instantly combined against him—no longer applied, and that she hadn’t the faintest desire to come to Hermione’s aid. They drank their gin-and-oranges in silence, while Tyler Kent cast an appreciative look or two around the bar.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘the monkey’s name is Joynson-Hicks? After some minister or other who made himself unpopular around here in the ’20s. How about that?’
Looking at him as he said this, Cynthia decided that the adjective which best described him was ‘natty.’ As used by Mrs Kirkpatrick, this was not quite a compliment. It meant observing routines of dress and deportment to the point where they became ostentatious. Among other things, Tyler Kent was wearing a double-breasted waistcoat and a pair of diamond links.
There was a minor commotion as Hermione got up to go to the Ladies’. When they had reset the stools and retrieved the ashtray that had clattered to the floor in her wake, Tyler Kent said: ‘She’s a nice girl, Hermione, but, what would you say, a little distraite?’
Until then it had not occurred to Cynthia that their relationship might be a case of Hermione taking Tyler Kent up rather than the other way around. Now, when she thought about it, this explained rather a lot. But Tyler Kent seemed not to want to talk about Hermione.
‘I hear great things about Duration. Isn’t that right? And this fellow Sylvester Del Mar that Desmond’s discovered. He sounds quite a find.’
‘How did you know about Desmond and Sylvester Del Mar?’
‘Oh, Des knows someone at the Embassy. You’d be surprised how these things get talked about.’
It was becoming unbearably hot and the old man with the rouge spots had rolled up his shirtsleeves to expose wasted white arms that were the texture of cold chicken. At his side the monkey ate peanuts studiously out of a bowl. One or two people were drinking Pernod at the bar and there was a strong smell of aniseed. Hermione came back from the Ladies’ and there was another rearrangement of furniture.
‘You’ll never believe it,’ she said, rather excitedly, ‘but just now, as I was going into the lavatories, there was a man coming out of them. At least, I think it was a man.’
‘Ah, Bohemia,’ Tyler Kent said, clasping his hands behind the back of his head. ‘There’s nothing like it.’ It was impossible to tell whether he was joking or not.
Outside, rain fell on the basement windows. There was something unreal about the situation in which she found herself, Cynthia thought: the red faces; the monkey’s burrowing paw; the old man’s thin white arms. She had a feeling that if she snapped her fingers the scene would instantly dissolve, prior to reconfiguring itself in a different shape.
The trip to the Ladies’ turned out to have had a lowering effect on Hermione’s spirits. While Tyler Kent told them, in quite merciless detail, about a visit he had paid to some people in Hampshire, her face grew steadily more woebegone. Finally, as he was explaining the idiosyncrasies of a pheasant shoot, she made a little gurgling noise in her throat and said: ‘This place is getting on my nerves. I never smelled so much aniseed. And that dreadful old man. Can’t we go somewhere else?’
Tyler Kent looked at her interestedly, not with any concern but in a spirit of scientific detachment. ‘I thought you liked coming to dives like this,’ he said mildly. ‘Seeing a bit of life. That’s what you always say. I’ve smelled worse things in my time than aniseed. What’s the matter with the place, anyhow?’
Most, but not quite all, of the fight went out of Hermione. She said, a bit dramatically, lowering her voice: ‘Well, you never take me anywhere I really want to go.’ She raised her voice again. ‘Just these dreadful, dreary dives.’
If Hermione had hoped by this gesture to raise any kind of sympathy in the people looking on, she was mistaken. Clearly, the basement was used to scenes. The shirtsleeved old man gave a little shrug of his shoulders, as if to say that the tribulations of the world should be philosophically borne. The monkey chattered furiously. Tyler Kent gave a sharp, decisive little smile, leaned over the table, and grabbed Hermione’s wrist.
‘I think I get it,’ he said. ‘What time did you say you were meeting your cousin?’
‘About three o’clock. But …’
‘Well, why don’t you get off now? That way you’ll have plenty of time to arrange things, and not have to hang about in dreary dives. You needn’t worry about me. I’ll be fine with Miss Kirkpatrick here.’
There was nothing in the least discourteous in the way Tyler Kent said this. Equally, it was clear that he expected Hermione to agree with him, that resistance was futile, that there was nothing for it but for her to go o
ff calamitously ahead of schedule—it was now about half-past one—and get ready to meet her cousin. Though he continued to hold her wrist after he had stopped talking, Hermione did not try to remove his hand. Instead, she said, ‘Perhaps you’re right, and I really ought to go.’
‘That’s the spirit,’ Tyler Kent said. He was still holding her wrist. ‘While you’re at it, could you give your father a message from me?’
‘What sort of a message?’
‘Tell him I can see him and Ramsay on Tuesday. Wednesday morning if it’s more convenient. Tell him to give me a call. But not on the Embassy number if he can help it.’
‘Not on the Embassy number?’
‘That’s right. Now, off you go. Want me to get you a taxi? No? There’s a rank down at the end of Wardour Street.’
Again, there was no way in which Hermione could have resisted this. She went off rather brightly, convinced that it was for the best.
‘The thing I’ve discovered about Hermione,’ Tyler Kent said, in a spirit of mild enquiry, as if he were formulating some behavioural law for which humanity would later want to thank him, ‘is that you should never stand any nonsense. English people are like that, I find. Well, women anyway.’
All her life, Cynthia knew, she had been impressed by men who behaved, or spoke, like this. Men who sized up situations and dealt with them, whose stealthy psychological pressure paid off. Men who managed to impose their personalities on a dinner table or a crowded room without the imposition being noticed, much less resented. Men who, meeting another car halfway along a narrow lane, always contrived, without the least hint of unpleasantness, to secure the pas.
She was even more impressed with Tyler Kent’s behaviour in the moments that followed. He did not simply imply that now they had disposed of Hermione, they could have some fun. Rather, he began to talk about things that had not been discussed while she was there, while hinting that the conversation had moved on to a higher intellectual plane to which Hermione, even had she been there, could sadly not have aspired.
In particular, they talked about the war.
‘I give it three months,’ Tyler Kent said. ‘Time for Desmond to bring out three numbers of his magazine and then have to call it something else.’
‘But everyone says’—everyone was Peter Wildgoose—‘that the Germans wanting peace talks is just a bluff.’
‘Well, that’s not how we see it. The way I look at it is: how did the whole thing happen at all? What’s it to anyone here whether the Germans have a piece of central Europe where a whole lot of Germans happen to live anyhow? This isn’t a war that anyone wants. No one in America wants it, and not a hell of a lot of people here either. Do you know who the person was who put himself out most to stop it? I’ll tell you—the King.’
‘You’re part of the King’s Party, aren’t you?’ Cynthia said. ‘The … what is it … the Faction?’
‘Oh, so you’ve heard about that, have you?’ Tyler Kent grinned. He did not seem at all put out by this. On the other hand, when he started speaking again his voice was not so loud as it had been. ‘Well, I wouldn’t say I was a Kingsman, being the citizen of a republic. But I’ll have to admit that’s where my sympathies lie.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to ask something about Captain Ramsay, and even Norman Burdett, but she decided not to. Instead, she said, ‘How did you come to be so thick with Hermione?’
‘The deuce if I know. A couple of dinners at the Bannisters’ and suddenly I’m a kind of brevet son-in-law. No, that makes it sound worse than it is. I’m sure Ma and Pa Bannister were just as surprised as I was. Nothing to do with me, you understand. It’s just that whenever I pick up the telephone, there’s Hermione on the other end. Do you know, just the other day she told me I could call her Hermy?’
Suddenly female solidarity renewed itself. ‘You should take that as a compliment,’ Cynthia said.
‘I guess I should. She’s a nice girl, Hermione,’ Tyler Kent said. ‘But you know what I’d do if I were her? I’d stop getting my hair fixed in that ridiculous way, and I’d stop rearranging the furniture every time I walked across a room. And most of all I’d stop bawling out people who don’t always appreciate the bawling. That’s what I’d do. But she’s a very nice girl.’
Outside the rain beat on the windows. The monkey, balked of his peanuts, gave an almighty snarl and then subsided.
When she got back to Belgrave Square, it was gone four and there were dense pools of shadow over the sitting-room carpet. Lucy sat in one of the armchairs eating a biscuit.
‘My dear,’ she said, ‘you absolutely reek of gin. If this goes on I shall have to tell Mother and Dads you aren’t at all the kind of young woman I should be sharing a flat with.’
‘How were they?’
‘Frightful. They want me to marry Hector Kilbannock.’
This was a new one. ‘Who exactly is Hector Kilbannock?’
‘He’s Lord Kilbannock’s son. He runs their estate up in Aberdeenshire and spends his spare time tossing cabers in the garden.’
‘He doesn’t sound very suitable.’
‘No, he doesn’t. But I keep being told there’s a war on and all us young women should be grateful for anything we can get.’
Later they had an omelette made from the eggs that Mrs Yeoward had sent home with Lucy, listened to Dance Cabaret on the radio, and tried to repair some of the pieces of brown paper that had come away from the window. It seemed the most natural thing in the world that Tyler Kent should telephone three days later to ask if she wanted to go out for a drink and that, after a moment or two’s prevarication with a bogus engagement diary, she should say yes.
Part Two
Chapter 7
All the Conspirators
They were drinking coffee in Hegarty’s office. This was at the end of a long corridor, which looked out onto an enclosed green space, where in summer astonishingly pretty girls sometimes came to eat their packed lunches. But it was deep into autumn now, and the pretty girls had all disappeared.
Hegarty said: ‘I stuffed one of the secretaries in B.3 the other evening.’
‘Who was the lucky girl?’ Johnson asked politely.
‘That tall blonde with the coil of hair that looks like a rope twisted round her head. Nancy Oglethorpe.’
‘I thought she was married.’
‘She very possibly is,’ Hegarty said. He was a tall, thin man in his early thirties who shook with nervous excitement as he spoke. ‘All I can say is that it didn’t seem to make much difference.’
‘No?’
‘Quite the reverse. Went off like a firecracker.’
‘And where did this meeting of true minds take place?’ Experience had told him that you had to talk to Hegarty ironically.
‘Actually it was in the kitchen down at the end of the B.3 corridor, if you really want to know.’
Hegarty was always saying things like this. The fact that the kitchens were locked up at five when the charwoman went home, and that everybody knew they were locked up, meant nothing to him. The war had been going on for eight weeks now without being able to extinguish the essential hedonism of his temperament.
He said: ‘What are you doing this morning?’
‘I’m going to that meeting of the League of St George,’ Johnson told him. ‘At the place in Bayswater.’
‘On your own?’
‘With the girl who acts as secretary. Miss Frencham.’
‘That’s turning into quite a romance.’
‘Not if I can help it.’
‘Don’t do what Inkerman in B.2 did. He went away for a weekend with that woman he met at the Nordic League—the one who had a picture of Adolf in her bedroom—and there was the hell of a row.’
‘Well, I don’t think I shall be going away for a weekend with Miss Frencham.’
‘More’s the pity.’
It was not true, as some of Hegarty’s fellow-workers in B.1 alleged, that he was only interested in sex. In fact, he had several other hobbies. They included dressage and US Confederate Issue postage stamps. But it was always sex that predominated. He had a genius for recasting the area of the department in which he worked in his own image. Before his arrival in B.1 it had been a model of probity, where even a sprig of mistletoe hung over the typewriting console had been frowned upon. Now it seemed to sprout moral laxness from every tuber.
Oddly enough, as he went back along the corridor he met the blonde girl from B.3 walking the other way, carrying a couple of correspondence files pressed close to her chest, and they exchanged nods. There was not the slightest chance that Hegarty had done anything with her, either inside the B.3 kitchen or beyond it. Outside, rain rattled on the window and taxis clashed their gears on the building’s asphalt forecourt.
When Johnson got to Bayswater Station she was already waiting for him by the cigarette kiosk at the top of the step: a spare, dark-haired, expensively dressed girl with over-bright eyes. Her father was a rear-admiral, or something. When she saw him she gave a little tremor of recognition—the wire-rimmed glasses on the bridge of her nose shook—came over and touched him lightly on the arm.
‘It’s very good of you to come, Charles, especially in your lunch-hour.’ She had taken to calling him ‘Charles’ rather than ‘Mr Blessington.’ This was a bad sign, although neither name was his own.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t have missed it,’ he said.
‘I think I heard some of the BUF people were coming. They don’t usually, but their secretary said that the situation was so serious it was important to set ideological differences aside.’
‘I’m sure that’s the best way of looking at it.’
There were times when the act of dissembling alarmed him, and times when it was possible to regard it as something fundamentally humorous. The trouble came when, as now, this bogus conviction stirred an emotional response. Worse, as well as deceiving Miss Frencham, who in peacetime had gone to parties at the German Embassy and, under her father’s auspices, shaken hands with Herr von Ribbentrop, he felt sorry for her, appreciated that her fanaticism was only English moral seriousness gone sour.