by D. J. Taylor
‘Did you like it?’ Desmond asked. His fist had closed around the cup, almost concealing it from view.
There would be no quarter here. ‘Did I like what?’
‘The editorial letter.’
‘I thought it was very good,’ Cynthia said, who actually thought it was surprisingly feeble. There was an unspoken agreement among the editorial assistants that whatever Desmond believed about the magazine he should be informed was true.
‘Not too much like what Connolly writes in Horizon?’
‘Not really.’
‘Peter thinks we ought to compete with them. You know, have articles about sculpture and the latest gallery openings.’
There was no knowing how long this might go on. Desmond had once kept Lucy prisoner by the stationery cupboard for twenty minutes while he talked about Mallarmé. The nearest of the proof sheets had a mouse-dropping on it, Cynthia noticed. She wondered what Tyler Kent was doing in Grosvenor Square and whether he had anyone like Desmond to contend with.
‘Do you know,’ Desmond said finally, after what seemed like an eternity of silence, ‘I heard some extraordinary news the other day?’
Desmond’s revelations were always quite unforeseen. It could be anything from the literary editor of the Sunday Times losing his job to sugar going off the ration.
‘You’re always hearing extraordinary pieces of news, Des,’ Cynthia said, consciously modelling herself on Anthea. ‘What was this bit?’
‘It’s about Sylvester. Sylvester Del Mar,’ Desmond elaborated, as if there were half a dozen other people called Sylvester clamouring to write short stories for his magazine. ‘Actually it’s Peter’s scoop, not mine at all. You know how he always said that he’d come across Sylvester before, but couldn’t remember where? Well, apparently the other night he was going through some old variety-hall programmes—you know he sometimes likes going to the Holborn Empire for the second house—and there was Sylvester on one of them, third on the bill.’
‘What sort of thing was he doing?’
‘Plate-spinning, I think. Or it may have been paper-tearing. Some kind of novelty act, at any rate. Peter was quite impressed.’
‘Does Sylvester know his cover’s been blown?’
‘That’s the odd thing. We had a drink last night. He had a couple of new pieces he wanted me to see. I thought he’d take it quite humorously, Peter finding his name on the programme, but do you know he was almost distraught? Said it was a part of his life that was inexpressibly painful to him. In the end he practically begged me to promise not to mention it to anyone.’
‘And shall you?’
‘Certainly not,’ Desmond said virtuously. He had stopped flapping his arms against his sides and was rubbing his forefingers up and down his chin—possibly, Cynthia thought, to establish whether he had remembered to shave or not. ‘I shall keep absolutely schtum. It’s Peter who always seems to forget what one can and cannot say.’
This was such a travesty of their respective attitudes to confidential information that Cynthia assumed it was meant as a joke. She was bored with Desmond. It was not that he lived in his own world, but that he failed to realise that the other worlds he so blithely infiltrated had their own admission charges. She wondered what it might be like to be married to Desmond, and found her mind instantly occupied by a series of paralysing visions: Desmond lying in the bath smoking a cigar; Desmond making a spill out of an income tax form; or eating a plate of jellied eels that had been left out for the cat. Behind her she could hear the noise of other people arriving: a clatter of footsteps, the sound of someone taking off the cover of a typewriter.
‘I think I ought to help Anthea with the post.’
Desmond looked disappointed. Of all things, he required an audience. Even hell would be tolerable, he sometimes said, if the demons took an interest in one. And then, as she moved back into the doorway with the teacup, tugged unwillingly out of Desmond’s scarlet paw, in her hand, there came another noise of a door being flung open and someone moving rapidly over the carpet of the ante-room.
‘Peter, my dear fellow,’ Desmond said anxiously. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’
‘Did you see that note I left on your desk last night?’ Peter Wildgoose said. He was immaculately dressed, in a bowler hat and a British Warm overcoat, half-open and exposing the blue pinstripe suit beneath. The only hint that he might be seriously upset came in the exasperated little nod he sent in the direction of the page proofs.
‘I can’t say I did. There are so many things get left about there. Was it something special?’
‘Well, it might interest you to know,’ Peter said, ‘that I received a telephone call yesterday evening from a director of the Norwich Press. The six thousand copies of Duration that they printed and had bound up yesterday are lying on the floor of their warehouse at Sevenoaks. And that is where they’re going to stay. The Norwich Press has printed them, but they are not—I repeat, not—going to distribute them.’
‘Why’s that, then?’ It was possible, Cynthia thought, that Desmond had not realised quite how annoyed Peter was.
‘It’s that story of Del Mar’s. They say the shops won’t accept it on moral grounds.’
‘“Miss Harrington Hunts the Hairbrush”? But that’s absurd. There isn’t a line in it that anyone could take the faintest exception to. You went through it twice yourself.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Des,’ Peter said. ‘It’s not that one they’re complaining about. It’s the other story about the car-smash in Delhi. The one that begins: Fact is there was bugger-all I could do about it. The Norwich Press say they’ve just signed a contract with the MOI for printing government stationery, and the last thing they want is to be involved in an obscenity case.’
‘But they’ve already printed the bloody thing,’ Desmond said.
‘They may have printed it. But they are under no legal obligation to distribute it if, as they firmly believe, it contains material that anyone who purchases it may find objectionable.’
‘Well, we’ll just have to distribute it ourselves,’ Desmond said. He had a rapt, ingenious look on his face. ‘It shouldn’t be too difficult if we hire a couple of vans. The ones for the London book-shops we could take round by hand.’
It was not immediately obvious that Peter Wildgoose had lost his temper. For a moment or two he stared hard at various objects that lay to hand—a reproduction Cézanne that hung on the wall behind Desmond’s desk, a copy of a book called The Modernist Dilemma that stuck out from the shelf next to it, and a postcard lying face-up on the desktop sent from Biarritz from someone called Brian—as if each of them somehow symbolised the awful, bottomless depths into which Desmond had dragged him. Then he said very briskly: ‘I shan’t argue with you. There’s no point. There never is. You’d just start whining about the sanctity of the artist. At times like these you couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. Anyway, I’ve settled it with the Norwich Press. They’re going to bring the copies up here by lorry later this morning and you—we—are going to alter them.’
Desmond looked thoroughly baffled. ‘But you know as well as I do that we haven’t got any printing equipment.’
‘I didn’t say that we had. We are going to alter them by hand.’ Some of Peter’s bad temper had begun to recede: one or two of the situation’s comic possibilities had perhaps occurred to him. ‘And you can oblige me, Des, in the midst of your many, onerous duties, by coming up with an acceptable substitute for “bugger-all” … oh, and Cynthia.’
‘Yes, Mr Wildgoose?’
‘I owe you an apology. Barging in here like a helot without so much as a good morning. Do you think you could find it in yourself to make me a cup of tea?’
Being married to Peter Wildgoose would be a very different thing: a town house in a Chelsea square; a solid oak table beneath the dining-room napery; sepia-inked maps of the English counties hu
ng on the wall. Humbled and a little exalted by these imaginings, she went off to make the tea.
The rest of the day passed as Peter had foreseen. At twelve a van arrived from Sevenoaks bringing the copies of Duration in two dozen cardboard boxes, and they set to work. At Anthea’s suggestion ‘bugger-all’ became ‘damn-all.’ Desmond took half a dozen unaltered copies and locked them in the drawer of his desk. ‘A hedge against old age,’ he explained. ‘In twenty years’ time I shall be able to sell them at Sotheby’s.’ Come the early afternoon, when Peter had gone out to the bank, he began to cheer up.
‘You might not think it,’ he said, ‘but Peter can be very theatrical at times. I can remember once at school when he had some kind of a row with the Lower Master, and do you know what he did?’ Nobody knew. ‘He got hold of one of those toy engines that you can buy at Gamages and took it into chapel hidden under his jacket. Then, just as we were about to sing the hymn, he sent it off in the direction of the choir stalls. The Lower Master nearly had a fit.’
Outside the fog had grown denser still. There was no sign of the barrage-balloon. A man from a solicitors’ firm came and tried to serve them a writ relating to an unpaid bill for a set of filing cabinets, but they sent him away. There was a queer but rather comforting sense of camaraderie about the afternoon that followed. The girls sat on the floor with the copies piled up around them and half-empty teacups threatening their skirts, their fingers black with printer’s ink. So far Anthea had not referred to their meeting at the party, but finding a moment when Lucy had gone off to wash her hands she said: ‘So that was your interesting American friend.’
You had to be non-committal at these times.
‘Yes, that was him.’
‘I always think, don’t you,’ Anthea said, ‘that the Grosvenor Square manner takes some getting used to? At least I never met anyone in the Foreign Office who was at all like that. But, take it from me, there are one or two things you ought to know about your Mr Kent.’
‘What sort of things?’
‘Well, the company he keeps, for a start. Don’t say you haven’t wondered about that, or I shall think you won’t ever confirm the good opinion I’ve formed of you.’
But they were interrupted by Peter Wildgoose coming into the room to say that the Norwich Press expected to return for the corrected copies by half-past five, and whatever it was that Anthea wanted to say about Tyler Kent had to wait. Priorities, as Desmond liked to say, were the first rule of magazine publishing.
It was an odd time altogether. The war news was curiously sporadic: rumours of troop movements in North Africa; submarines in the North Atlantic; Russians in Poland. A passenger ship was sunk off Galway, but without great loss of life. A motion calling for a peace conference brought to the House by a pacifist Labour back-bencher was defeated by a hundred votes.
From Portugal came picture-postcards: the Escurial in bright sunshine; peasants in national costume; cathedrals; donkeys; schoolgirls in First Communion frocks. It was hard to connect them with her parents. Mr Kirkpatrick was said to be doing well. Of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s hopes, fears, and mythological projections there was not the faintest hint.
Advertised, finally, on news-stands, on sale in book-shops next to copies of Horizon and old novels left over from before the war, Duration sold briskly. An extract from Desmond’s editorial was broadcast on the radio, and a Times third leader maintained that he had demonstrated the essential integrity of the artist, however unpromising the political circumstances that surrounded him. Still, though, Cynthia thought, there was something unreal about all of this. A great stretch of time seemed to have passed before her in which nothing had happened. It was hard to believe that she had ever sat in the Ritz Bar talking to Anthea and Norman Burdett, harder still to imagine that she had ever sat in the shooting brake by the Sussex beach listening to Captain Ramsay recite poetry.
Captain Ramsay turned up quite a lot in the parliamentary news these days, asking questions about the war’s effects on the Scottish woollen industry and how many servicemen enlisting in the armed forces were of Jewish ancestry. But the odd, phantom quality of the world she inhabited seemed to extend to the people she knew. Like the PLA lighters, glimpsed sometimes from the window in Bishop’s Park, they were moving away downstream, borne on the tide. There was no knowing where they might be washed up. The Escurial palace; a Times third leader; Tyler Kent’s divan bed—who could tell?
And there were people other than Anthea who wanted to talk to her about Tyler Kent. She was walking through Bishop’s Park to the Underground one Saturday afternoon when a woman who had been lurking under one of the dripping elm trees scurried over and clawed rather belligerently at her arm.
‘Oh, hello, Hermione. What are you doing here?’
‘You’ve ruined everything,’ Hermione said, unexpectedly, in her high, desperate voice. Her head sat more awkwardly than ever on her shoulders, and she had exaggerated the effect by wearing a tiny pillbox hat and having her hair done in a kind of deranged bob that allowed the tendrils to fall over her cheek-bones like giant commas. ‘I should never have introduced you to him in the first place.’
‘Introduced me to whom?’ For one brief, disturbing second Cynthia thought of Henry lying in his jungle tomb.
‘To Tyler, of course.’ There was a flurry of movement at about the level of her waist, and Cynthia realised that Hermione was trying to hit her with her handbag. ‘You rotten, rotten bitch.’
So that was it. The part of Bishop’s Park they were standing in abutted the church, and they scuffled there for a moment or two beneath a placard advertising the next day’s services, until finally Cynthia managed to wheel Hermione towards her—it was curiously like manoeuvring a dustbin you wanted to fill with refuse—and administer a single, sharp slap to her cheek. She could deal with Hermione Bannister.
The pillbox hat fell off onto the asphalt path, and for some reason Cynthia stamped her foot on it. As it turned out, this was the right thing to do. Clearly the hat had a symbolic value to Hermione. All the fight instantly went out of her and she collapsed against the church railings. A young man with a hard, bony face went loping by on his way into the park and Cynthia caught the sardonic glint in his eye.
‘Come on, Hermione,’ Cynthia said. ‘You can’t go around behaving like this.’
‘No, I can’t, can I?’ Hermione said. After this she began to cheer up. It was as if some point had been proved. ‘Actually, it wasn’t you I wanted to see. I was going round to the flat.’
‘Well, there wouldn’t be much point in that. There’s no one there. Why don’t you come and have a cup of tea?’
The way to deal with hysteria, Mrs Kirkpatrick had always said, was to stand no nonsense. It was one of her better pieces of advice. Hand clasped firmly in Cynthia’s—the skin of her knuckles was scratched and earthy, Cynthia noticed, as if she had been digging far underground—pillbox hat jammed brokenly on her head, Hermione allowed herself to be propelled across the Putney Bridge Road.
‘I suppose the places round here are rather awful, aren’t they?’ she said meekly.
In the end they found a café across the street from Putney Bridge Station. It was a broken-down establishment, smelling of bacon fat and full of tram-drivers, and their arrival had the effect of a pair of flamingos alighting on a starling-strewn lawn, but Cynthia, having dealt with Hermione, thought she was equal to this challenge. She ordered two cups of tea and a bun and took them back to the table by the window where Hermione had arranged herself.
‘I’m awfully sorry,’ Hermione said. ‘I really don’t know what came over me. It must be my Bannister blood, I suppose.’
The tea was the colour of tan boot-polish. ‘What does your Bannister blood have to do with it?’
‘Wasn’t there a Bannister who fought a duel with Lord North? I forget his name. Father’s always talking about him.’
All this, Cynthia thought
, could not be tolerated. Not because it was ridiculous, but because it took the vacant space in front of her and filled it with Bannisters: Mr Bannister standing in the drawing room in Colombo; terrier-faced Mrs Bannister proudly unveiling the memorial stone. She had had enough of the Bannisters, and she wanted redress.
‘Don’t mind my asking, Hermione, but when did you last see Tyler?’
‘A week ago. Ten days. We had tea at the Ritz.’
There were advertisements on the wall for variety theatres and greyhound puppies: hints of the teeming, human life that presumably went on in this part of London, and far more interesting than Hermione.
‘No, you didn’t. At least I don’t believe you did.’
‘No, we didn’t,’ Hermione said. The look of cunning on her face had yielded up to a pained awareness of some of the starker realities of life. ‘I’m sorry, Cynthia, truly I am, but you don’t know how awful it’s been.’ There was something unexpectedly drastic about this return to rational thought, like a light-switch going on in a darkened room. ‘We seemed to be getting on so well. And then he came to Ashburton. And Father liked him so much.’
‘Does he still see your father?’ Cynthia asked.
‘Oh, they’re frightfully thick. What with this business of the Faction and the peace settlement. Father says he’s a godsend. I think he was at Ashburton last week. Not that I care about that. I thought we were going to get engaged.’
‘Honestly, Hermione,’ Cynthia said. ‘I had no idea.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I suppose it would have been too much to expect you would. And it was very foolish of me to think he cared for me. Men are so thoughtless in the way they behave sometimes, aren’t they?’ For some reason the pace at which Hermione spoke increased with every word she brought out. ‘I’m so glad we’ve had this talk. And you must promise that you’ll do me a little favour.’
‘What’s that?’
‘You must come and stay at Ashburton again. Mother and Father love having you there. They often say so.’