by D. J. Taylor
On the one hand he was like every young man about London Cynthia had ever met: a wearer of well-cut Anthony Eden suits and black Oxfords from Lobb’s in St James’s, a hailer of taxis and a bullier of waiters. On the other hand there were gaping compartments of English life that had somehow passed him by. Part of him was so raptly attuned to the new environment in which he found himself that the impersonation was barely noticeable, or, if detected, to be warmly applauded as a mark of his determination to fit in. But there were other parts which suffered from exposure to the detail of everyday life. The general effect was like a Professor of Medieval History, who in preparing his definitive study of Scholasticism had somehow managed to forget the date of the Battle of Hastings.
All this made him an odd person to be with: confident about some things, flustered by others, at all times liable to flare up at the least provocation. He said once, quite sincerely: ‘I’ve a very efficient and reliable character, you see. And whenever I come across people who aren’t that way inclined, I pretty soon lose my temper.’ There was something exhilarating about these explosions, and also something alienating. Like the map of Custer’s last expedition, they hinted at a border that was better not crossed.
One crucial boundary had already been breached. Cynthia was used to pink-faced subalterns who sat in taxis holding her hand as if it were a lump of marble. Tyler Kent, on the other hand, regarded sex as a kind of endless lunch-counter where all the snacks were free. She was not much shocked by his matter-of-factness, but preferred to keep some of its implications at arm’s length.
As a general rule they met at the flat on Saturday afternoon: the sun long since disappeared beyond the park, the tennis courts already gathered up in shadow. There was always something faintly theatrical about these occasions, a sense of everything being pre-arranged, gestures stylised to the point where it was odd to think that human beings had contrived them. Afterwards they would lie across the big divan bed, beneath the photograph of Tyler Kent and his fellow Princetonian sophomores, and talk. Or rather he would talk, and she, coverlet pulled up to her neck, eyes fixed on a rather dramatic crack in the whitewashed ceiling, would listen.
Curiously, Cynthia never minded the one-sidedness of these interludes. She had spent her life listening to men laying down the law: it seemed almost morally wrong that Tyler Kent, his proprietorial rights established by her presence under the sheets, should be denied his chance to impress, instruct, and edify. There was also the fact that the subjects Tyler Kent thought it his duty to lecture her on had a definite air of novelty.
Once, in the course of one of these harangues, she said: ‘Does this kind of thing happen in Baltimore?’
‘What kind of thing?’ Tyler Kent’s really elemental quality, and the one that separated him from all the Englishmen of her acquaintance, was his suspicion.
‘Young men from the diplomatic service taking ladies back to their apartments and seducing them.’
The Princeton sophomores looked glassy-eyed, like rabbits that had lain too long on the ice. Some of them wore risible bow ties. Tyler Kent, whom she had located in the second row, was weighed down by a kind of heavy-duty sports coat. To anyone used to looking at Oxford college photographs, the effect was unutterably bizarre: as if Anthony Eden had appeared on a newsreel dressed as a costermonger.
‘I guess they might,’ he said, the suspicion gone. ‘It’s a long time since I was there. Things could have changed.’
Before arriving in London, Tyler Kent had worked in the embassies at Paris and Vienna. These formed the subject of most of his lectures.
‘It’s not that I don’t appreciate the challenges of diplomacy,’ he said. ‘Far from it. But there’s a line that diplomats shouldn’t be expected to cross. Take dear old Fred, Ambassador Bullitt, promising support to the French, or the fellow in Warsaw advising the Polish government. That kind of thing is just as likely to promote war as Hitler marching into the Sudetenland.’
‘I suppose it depends what you think about Hitler,’ she said.
‘It depends what you think about the international policy of your government, which in this case is to keep out of a European war.’
‘It sounds very odd to hear you, of all people, saying you’re an isolationist.’
It was a good joke, for it had to do with the freight of Tyler Kent’s mantelpiece. Here, at any given time, could be found eight or nine stiff-backed invitation cards advertising soirées in South Kensington or bridge parties in Pont Street. Half of Belgravia, it seemed, wanted Mr Tyler Kent to come and dine with them. Cynthia, whose social antennae were finely tuned to social distinctions of this kind, had been impressed.
‘Don’t mind my asking,’ she said, after one of these inspections, ‘but how do you know Lady Colefax?’
‘Sybil?’ An Englishman would not have called Lady Colefax ‘Sybil,’ but Tyler Kent liked having his egalitarian cake and eating it too. ‘I suppose I just met her someplace.’ Tyler Kent had a genius for meeting people someplace.
‘And the Honourable Mrs Pemberton-Green. Where on earth did you come across her?’
‘Is that the little old lady with the sausage curls?’ Tyler Kent asked, with absolutely unaffected sincerity. ‘I think I met her at the Huntercombes. Or played bridge with her somewhere.’
‘I think you’re a dreadful arriviste,’ she said, half-mockingly.
‘In America,’ he said, still with the same unaffected seriousness, ‘we go where we like and don’t mind about the people.’
Sometimes these society women rang up the flat demanding to speak to him. They seemed abashed, not quite themselves, as if they suspected the impulse that had led them to the receiver in the first place, fearful that some infinitely superior intelligence might be having a little game at their expense. There had been a moment once when, lying on the divan bed while Tyler Kent, half-dressed, hunted a lost cuff-link, she had wondered whether the whole thing might not have been an imposture, the Princeton sophomore chosen for his phantom resemblance, the trail leading back not to the Baltimore brownstone but to squalor and despair.
But this was an imaginative leap too far. No, Tyler Kent was indisputably who he said he was, a cipher clerk who had swum self-confidently out of his depth and found the other bathers friendly. There were other callers, too, beyond the orbit of Lady Colefax and the Honourable Mrs Pemberton-Green. Once, picking up the telephone when he was out buying cigarettes, she found herself talking to a sharp, high, male voice that instantly returned her to the autumn pinewoods and Sussex-by-the-Sea.
‘Is Mr Kent at home? This is Captain Ramsay.’
It was on the tip of her tongue to say that she knew who he was, that she had listened to him reciting Andrew Lang in the antique shooting brake, but for some reason she did not do this. She had not liked Captain Ramsay, and wanted him kept as far away from her as possible. He could make his own identifications. When she heard the noise of Tyler Kent’s feet coming up the staircase—he managed to invest even the job of walking upstairs with an intent, sober seriousness—she went out onto the landing in her, or rather his, dressing gown and said, ‘Captain Ramsay was on the telephone for you.’
The cigarettes were in a brown paper bag, borne with a certain reverence, like a votive offering. ‘Oh yes? What did he want?’
‘He didn’t say. I told him you’d call him later.’
‘Ah, the joys of diplomatic immunity,’ Tyler said mysteriously. Voluble about society hostesses, he was unexpectedly silent when it came to Captain Ramsay. ‘You want to stay here and eat or go out someplace?’
The flat usually got on Cynthia’s nerves after an hour or two, or perhaps it was being with Tyler Kent in it that produced this effect. He was a restless host, forever picking things up and putting them down again, or seizing up piles of papers and locking them away in cupboards. In the end she got dressed, pulled down the front of her skirt in the hope of disguising a rent th
at had appeared in the knee of her stocking, and they went out to a party in Redcliffe Gardens given by some people who had made their money in the Baltic timber trade and were understandably cross about its cessation.
They went to a lot of parties in that winter—it was a relaxation from sex and ambassadorial failure—not all of them as grand as the Belgravia routs of the Bishop’s Park mantelpiece: drinks parties in odd, subterranean flats in North Kensington given by spinster ladies with their hair marcelled like Queen Mary’s; a party in a house in Pimlico where the host had placed a framed photograph of Mussolini on the piano; a party in the East End where half the guests seemed to be Blackshirts in roll-neck jumpers and whipcord breeches. If there was anything that brought these entertainments together it was the conversation, which was profoundly defeatist. Had there ever been quite so many English people who were quite so thoroughly ashamed of themselves? Cynthia wondered.
There was talk about approaching the Germans through the neutral embassies, about British regiments who would refuse to fight, about dear departed Margaret and her job on Berlin radio, about the King and what he might do if the politicians would only leave him alone. It was all very daring, and very self-conscious, and difficult to believe a word of, and turned yet more fanciful by being caught up in the usual chatter about blackout curtains and servants and the price of stewing steak.
Once, at one of these parties—at the higher end of the scale, with a band and hired waiters and people in dinner jackets—they came across a tall fair-haired woman in a sea-green evening dress smoking a cigarette balanced in a pair of tiny brass tongs.
‘Anthea,’ Cynthia said, ‘what on earth are you doing here?’
Cynthia was always telling herself that she had lost her awe of Anthea, and that the way to proceed was to give as good as you got. So far this had produced quite promising results.
‘Odd as it may seem,’ Anthea said, ‘our hostess and my mother were brought out at the same time. If one can imagine Mrs Featherstonehaugh ever being brought out anywhere. God knows I have few enough family obligations, but this is one of them. This must be your American friend that I’ve heard so much about.’
The party was in its later stages. There were bald old men with damson faces in paper hats jigging gamely with their daughters on the dance floor, and the fog of cigarette smoke had risen almost to the ceiling. A waiter went by carrying the wreck of a salmon, into which someone had amused themselves by jabbing twenty or thirty cocktail sticks.
‘This is Mr Kent,’ Cynthia volunteered.
‘Charmed, I’m sure,’ Anthea said, in a tone so languid that at the Duration office it would immediately have been taken as a joke. ‘How are they all in Grosvenor Square? Is Frank Thistlewood still on the strength, or did he finally make the place too hot to hold him?’
‘Oh, Frank’s still on the strength, all right,’ Tyler Kent said, not exactly goggling at her but making plain by his expression that this wasn’t at all the kind of thing he was used to. ‘For all his little failings.’
‘I must come down there and look some of you up one of these days,’ Anthea said. The band was playing ‘In a Mountain Greenery’ now, at foxtrot pace, which was too much for the damson-faced old men.
‘Yes, you must,’ Tyler Kent said. His face was showing the strain. ‘How’s Desmond? I ought to come over to Bloomsbury and look him up.’
‘Oh, Des,’ Anthea said, as if Desmond was the greatest joke that anyone had ever minted, but that no one else had ever seen his comic possibilities. ‘He’s like an old hen just about to lay an egg again. Well, I must be going, Mr Kent. Very nice to have met you. And please don’t keep my friend Miss Kirkpatrick up late. She has a great deal to do in the morning.’
The oddity of this conversation, Cynthia decided, was simply unfathomable. It was not possible to establish from it what Anthea and Tyler Kent knew about each other, what assumptions they had made about each other, what traps they might have been laying for each other’s discomfort. As she could not crack this code, and knew that no one involved would give her any help, she contented herself with quarrelling with Tyler Kent on the way home.
As his habit of losing his temper with people who disagreed with him was sometimes anaesthetised by a studious gallantry towards members of the opposite sex, this was not as easy as it looked, but happily the party had provided her with ammunition.
‘I suppose you’re one of those people who want us to lose the war?’
‘I wouldn’t say that,’ Tyler Kent said. The taxi had declined to take them any further than the bottom of the Fulham Road. ‘It’s more that there shouldn’t have been a war in the first place.’
‘But now there is, you don’t want us to win it? Isn’t that just being defeatist?’
‘I don’t think you want to win it yourselves. Otherwise something would be happening out in Europe, rather than the fellows just staring at each other over the parapets. It’s the weirdest thing. Three months into an armed conflict, only there’s no conflict, no arms, and anyone with any sense knows it could be stopped tomorrow if only the right people were calling the shots.’
‘But what about if there was a conflict? What about if the Germans invaded? Surely half the people you meet at parties would end up in prison? Come to think of it, you might easily end up in prison yourself.’
‘You know what I think?’ Tyler Kent said. As he grew crosser he became more saturnine in appearance, more genuinely alarming. ‘I don’t think anyone’s going to invade anybody. I think there’ll be a new government and a peace settlement, and all that stuff about gallant little Poland can be shut in the drawer again. And all us cipher clerks can just sit at our desks and go on with decoding our cables… . Say,’ he said, ‘who is this Anthea woman, anyhow?’
‘I told you. She works at Duration.’
‘I met her someplace before, I think,’ Tyler Kent said seriously. He could not disguise the fact that he knew more about Anthea than he was telling. They were walking past the tennis courts now, and the cinder surfaces welled up like black ink. ‘And fancy her knowing about Frank Thistlewood. She must get around, all right. Frank’s a great guy, but I guess he’s one of the crosses we have to bear.’
And in this spirit of new-found amity they came back to Bishop’s Park, its slew of taped-up box-files, its life-size American eagle, its map of Custer’s last journeyings around Montana, and its divan bed.
In Bloomsbury the fog was slowly settling over the plane trees. This gave the passing traffic of the square a sinister look: other-worldly, drowning in the murk, like a Turner painting gone horribly wrong. A file of children, led by a cadaver in an overcoat, went skulking round the furthest corner, up to no good. There was no one in the Duration office but herself, although a double sheet of grey page proofs had been laid out lengthways on each of the desks. Setting down her bag, and shaking her scarf out in the space between the top of her typewriter and the hat-stand, she discovered that it was Desmond’s editorial for the first number.
The artist, in time of war, cuts a lonely figure. The combatant has his regiment, his orders and his duty; the civilian has his anxiety, his ration-book, and his sense of ulterior purpose; but the artist has only his art. The ivory tower from which he once looked out over a landscape that was less and less to his liking has gone. In its place rises only an ivory shelter, in which, cheek by jowl with people who resent his freedom, such as it is, and question his relevance, he wearily subsists. For him to write, or to paint, or indeed to say anything at all, is a paradox, for war is the enemy of creative autonomy, and writers and painters are right both to ignore it and to concentrate their talents on other subjects.
Once Mr Eliot’s waste land was a prophecy: now it is a reality. Soon it will be a memory, an elegiac recollection of a world that, however resonant its despair, was not yet ruled over by autocrats and commissars. For ten years we have been adrift on a sea of ‘commitment.’ For the
artist this war is an opportunity to fling back this tide, to restate the conviction that writing is an art, that it is an end in itself as well as a means to an end, and that good writing, like all art, is capable of producing a deep and satisfying emotion in the reader, whether it is about Mozart, the flora of the Antarctic, or the habits of bees… .
There was quite a lot more of this: Marxism; Auden’s flight to America; almond blossom; shabby streets—rolling periods, dulled by familiarity. All over London, it seemed, sensitive middle-aged men were reaffirming the quality of their Angst, writing open letters to younger cousins in the Navy, or pondering the artist’s duty in wartime. But she was a dutiful girl and she read on to the end.
Out in the square the wraith-like children had disappeared and the fog was growing denser. She was just putting the proof sheets back on the desk when there was a rasp of shoe-leather and she looked up to find Desmond emerging from the doorway of his office.
‘Hello, Des. Would you like a cup of tea?’
The Duration tea was unexpectedly good. It was genuine Pekoe Points, delivered each Thursday morning by the Harrods van and charged to Peter Wildgoose’s mother’s account.
‘It’ll be the first nourishment I’ve had this morning,’ Desmond said, rather vaguely. He gave a faint impression of having spent the night in his clothes. ‘One gets out of the habit of doing normal things, don’t you think?’
She resolved not to be embarrassed by Desmond, who had begun to flap his arms weakly against his sides, like an outsized bird deprived of the powers of flight, and went off to boil the kettle. The war had made some men more purposeful, less ground-down by the circumstances of their lives. Desmond seemed somehow more fraught.
She put the teacup on a tray and carried it through into the office. Here a sea of proof sheets covered the floor, like a dull grey blanket, and there was a copy of the contents page lying on the desk. Letter to a combatant. Death of the Georgians. A Symbolist manifesto.