by D. J. Taylor
Cynthia removed the paperweight from the little pile of correspondence on Desmond’s desk and looked at a page or two. The first letter was from a clergyman in the West Country diffidently correcting a misused classical tag. The second, from a serving soldier, complained about ‘a lack of genuine engagement with the real issues of the war.’
‘Poor old Des,’ Anthea said. Her tone had softened a little. ‘He doesn’t realise how unpopular you make yourself by sitting on the fence these days.’
‘Is that what Desmond’s doing? Sitting on the fence, I mean.’
‘Oh no. Far too conspicuous. Skulking around somewhere underneath, I should say. Do you know, as soon as the war began and he got Peter to put up the money for Duration, he rushed round to the MOI and got himself classified as “Reserved Occupation”? One or two people were very cross about that.’
Outside in the square there was a sound of lorries turning: the mechanised hum of another world. Moving in counterpoint there came a second noise of footsteps on the staircase. Cynthia returned the letters to the desk and shifted the paperweight back on top of them, but not before Desmond, moving hastily into the room, saw her do it.
‘So you’ve been reading the subscribers’ letters?’ he said cheerfully. ‘What did you think of them?’
Cynthia wondered what she thought about the subscribers’ letters. Like the progress of the war, or the fragments of embassy gossip that Tyler Kent occasionally let fall into his conversation, it was difficult to know what view to take, or whether, if it came to it, you had to take a view at all.
‘I think they want to know where you stand, Des,’ Anthea said.
For some reason Desmond seemed delighted to hear this. He rubbed his hands together enthusiastically. ‘I think we could all do with knowing where we stand,’ he said. ‘I think that at this point in time it’s an absolutely fundamental human requirement.’
Desmond often said things that were meant to be taken humorously. But this had precisely the opposite effect. All three of them looked at each other dumbstruck for a moment, as if not knowing where one stood was a crime of unimaginable seriousness, shameful to acknowledge, impossible to evade. Cynthia wondered exactly where she stood, and what this lack of precise definition implied. She was not at all happy, and suspected that the fault was Tyler Kent’s.
‘Are you allowed to bring this kind of thing home with you?’ she had enquired about the copy of the presidential telegram.
‘Maybe not,’ Tyler Kent had told her, ‘but sometimes there are risks you just have to take.’
There had been something deeply intimidating about him as he said these words. She found herself staring hard at Desmond and wondering why, when it was a party and she and Anthea had bothered to put on frocks, he was dressed more oddly than ever in a kind of furry jacket, grey flannel trousers, and a pair of tennis shoes that seemed several sizes too large for his already substantial feet.
Taking her cue, Anthea said: ‘You didn’t tell us it was fancy dress, Des. And I thought you were bringing Mrs Gurvitz.’
‘I am,’ Desmond said. He looked even more flustered, as if he suspected that this combination of the subscribers’ letters, not knowing where he stood, and having fun poked at his clothes augured badly for the evening ahead. ‘She’ll be along in a bit. She’s had to go to one of Sybil Colefax’s cocktail parties, and there’s no knowing how long everyone will be kept hanging about.’ Something seemed to strike him and he went on: ‘But what I meant to say was, has either of you seen the Star? Somebody was telling me there was a huge article in it about Del Mar.’
‘What? About the first line of his story having to be censored by hand?’
‘Not that,’ Desmond said, looking unexpectedly stern. ‘About his being a variety-hall performer before he took up writing. There was even a picture of him doing his act, next to a girl in sequins. And all across a couple of pages, my informant said.’
‘I think someone’s left a copy in the waste-paper basket,’ Anthea said. ‘I’ll go and look.’
The misery of not knowing where they stood had passed. Unexpectedly, they had a purpose. The dim lights of Desmond’s office gleamed fitfully down upon their enterprise. The newspaper, unfurled across Desmond’s desk, confirmed his summary. There was a photograph of Sylvester, picturesquely attired in cape and evening suit, a cane in each hand, on the top of which rested a revolving plate, and a third cane balanced on the bridge of his nose. A woman in a bathing dress and high-heeled shoes looked on with reluctant admiration.
‘“The Amazing Del Mar”,’ Cynthia read, genuinely stirred. ‘I wonder if she’s his wife.’
It was Anthea who discovered the final paragraph, tucked away at the foot of the second page, in which ‘Mr Desmond Rafferty, editor of Duration, London’s latest highbrow monthly,’ welcomed the arrival of ‘a prodigious literary talent.’
‘Des,’ she said soberly, the governess chancing upon an upturned pot plant, fragments of glass, an incriminating stone, ‘did you do this?’
Desmond had lost interest in the newspaper, and was trying to decipher a message that someone had left on his desk written on the back of a matchbox. ‘Did I do what?’
‘Did you ring up the Star and tell them about Sylvester?’
‘I don’t see why I should be held responsible for every scrap of publicity this magazine manages to attract, though heaven knows we can do with it.’
‘You did, didn’t you?’
‘I may have done,’ Desmond said, not obviously abashed. ‘At least I think I mentioned Del Mar as the new writer I was keenest on.’
‘But you know how put out he was when Peter found his name in the programme. How on earth do you think he’ll react to this?’
‘Del Mar is a man of the world,’ Desmond said, without much conviction. ‘I’m sure he’ll see the amusement in it, Anthea, even if you don’t.’
What Anthea began to say in return was cut short by the arrival of Peter Wildgoose in the room. He was so immaculately turned out that he and Desmond might have stepped from the advertisement in which the well-dressed man and the badly-dressed man debate which fifty-shilling tailor to try. He said, ‘I was just coming up the south side of the square in the blackout when I saw a girl fixing a sticky-back to a lamp-post. She ran off as I got near, but I brought it with me.’
He put the yellow flyer face-up on the table next to the open pages of the Star and they all lowered their heads and looked at it.
your new year’s resolution
We appeal to the working men and women of Great Britain to purchase the new Defence Bank and Savings Certificates, thus keeping the war going as long as possible. Your willing self-sacrifice and support will enable the Jew war-profiteers to make bigger and better profits and at the same time save their wealth from being conscripted. Help to defend the right of British manhood to die in a foreign quarrel every 25 years. Don’t be selfish! Save for sheds and slaughter. Forget about the slums, the unemployed, the old age pensioners and other social reforms your money could be invested in. Just remember that your savings are much more usefully spent on the cause of death and destruction. Be patriotic! Come on—we confidently await the first million pounds!
‘Fifth columnists, I suppose,’ Desmond said. He did not seem particularly interested. ‘There are enough of them about.’
‘I saw another one the other day that went: Land of dope and Jewry/Land that once was free/All the Jew boys praise thee/While they plunder thee,’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘What on earth’s that on the desk? It looks like Sylvester.’
They explained about Desmond’s conversation with the journalist on the Star.
‘Des, you are a bloody fool,’ Peter said, not crossly as he had done about the unbowdlerised story, but with an infinite weariness. ‘You know how sensitive Sylvester is about all this. And now you go and encourage a newspaper to crack it up. Well, I shan’t be answ
erable. You’ll have to tell him yourself.’
‘That’s exactly what I intend to do,’ Desmond said peevishly. All the high good humour of his first appearance had vanished. He looked like a music-hall comedian at whom the audience refuses to laugh. ‘I shall discuss it with him as soon as he arrives—he said he’d be here quite early on—and I guarantee you there won’t be any trouble.’
As if at a given signal, the quartet broke up. Desmond stood staring unhappily at the newspaper with one hand clasped dramatically to the top of his head. Anthea went back to her vegetable mosaic. Peter dragged a chair out into the centre of the room and sat miserably on it. He said, ‘Anthea. Cynthia. You must think I didn’t notice, but those are very elegant dresses you’re wearing. It was very good of you to make the effort.’
Really, Cynthia thought, looking at him as he perched uneasily on the chair-end, still brooding about Desmond’s indiscretion, she could think of no more desirable outcome to her life than being married to Peter Wildgoose. There would be no presidential telegrams lying around any mansion flat inhabited by him, nor any telephone calls from the likes of Captain Ramsay. All would be order, restraint, and punctilious transparency.
For a moment she wanted to leap over to the chair and fling her arms around Peter, but she knew that she could not do this. Instead she thought about the painfully thin line that seemed to separate the comic things in her life from the sinister ones. She had started off being amused by Tyler Kent and his intrigues and the curious parties he had taken her to, and now she was alarmed by and slightly ashamed of them. What had been mildly ridiculous had become definitely ominous. Worse, it was no longer possible to separate the Tyler Kent with whom, quite gratefully and enthusiastically, she lay on the divan mattress from the Tyler Kent who talked about isolationism and American ambassadors sticking to their script, for they were essentially the same person.
All this, she knew, made her unhappy, but she felt that taking any decisive step to extricate herself would make her unhappier still. It was the war that had done this to her, she thought bitterly, the war that had turned Tyler Kent into the kind of man whose flat she visited three evenings a week rather than the kind of man her mother liked to escort her to golf-club dances and ‘look in’ for supper on Sunday nights. All over London, presumably, there were people silently regretting things that the war had pushed them into doing, a great tide of moral insalubrity sent rushing across the city by a single telegram to Berlin.
It was about a quarter to seven now, and the first of the guests had begun to arrive. They were a mixed lot. One or two of the older people were in dinner jackets, and looked around them with faint bewilderment, fearing that they had misjudged the gathering’s tone. The younger ones wore duffel coats or bohemian motley. At least a quarter of them were unknown to the Duration staff.
‘The odd thing about parties,’ Desmond said, surveying this tatterdemalion horde, ‘even the ones that one gives oneself, is how few of the people one actually recognises. I suppose they must have had the invitations passed on.’ His good humour had quite returned, and he made occasional stately progresses across the outer office, wineglass in hand, altogether conscious of the figure he cut.
‘Des is good at parties,’ Anthea said, appearing suddenly at Cynthia’s elbow. She, too, seemed less cross than before. ‘There’s a man on the telephone asking for you.’
Cynthia went into Desmond’s room, where two or three people were picking avidly through the pile of review copies and a bearded man in an Inverness cape had got hold of Desmond’s address book, and grasped the receiver. Tyler Kent’s voice said: ‘Everyone having a good time, I hope?’
‘It’s not so bad. Will you be able to come over?’
‘I don’t think so. There’s a bit of a flap on. The old man’s cancelled his dinner engagement. We’ve all got to stand to. Shall I see you later?’
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘Till then, then.’
‘That’s right, then. Till then.’
She put the receiver back on its cradle and went into the main room, where some more people were coming in. Somebody had had the bright idea of hanging paper streamers down the sides of the blackout curtains, but the general effect was not prepossessing. Cynthia thought of the Christmases of her childhood, which had nearly always taken place abroad: plum puddings made with ghee instead of butter, eaten in bright sunshine under the winnowing fans; old men in topis bending to inspect the nativity scene; Adeste Fideles sung before a backdrop of palm trees.
Lucy, who was a good-natured girl, had sent invitations to the London representatives of the printer, the distributor, and the advertising agent. These men, who wore dark suits and had anointed themselves with hair-oil, stood in a suspicious knot by the door. Later they would go back to their homes in the suburbs and tell their scandalised wives what they had seen.
‘There’s Sylvester,’ Anthea said suddenly. ‘Somebody had better go and get Des.’
If there was any kind of harmonising factor about the party, it came by default, which was to say that all the people who came to it were surprisingly ill-sorted. In these circumstances an individual guest would have had to make a very great effort to stand out from the crowd.
Even so, Sylvester Del Mar looked far more incongruous, far less sure of himself, than the printers’ representatives in their subfusc suits or the grey-haired women in knickerbockers and pince-nez. As well as wearing his usual mackintosh and trilby hat, he was carrying a large brown-paper envelope with the words d. rafferty esq. editor duration written on it in letters so large that they could be seen halfway across the room. When he saw Cynthia and Anthea, he gave a little nod of recognition, clicked his heels smartly together, and made a mock-salute.
‘Evening, ladies. Nice to be with you again. Very charming dresses you’ve got on, if you don’t mind my saying.’
‘Good evening, Sylvester,’ Anthea said. ‘I expect you’ll be wanting to say hello to Des.’
‘If Mr Rafferty has a brief moment to spare I should be very grateful to talk to him.’ Sylvester was definitely worse at being obsequious than hail-fellow-well-met. ‘I’ve brought those other stories he wanted to see. In fact, I spent the whole night sitting up to finish them.’
Cynthia wondered if he had brought the same intense absorption to his other career. She had a vision of him sitting in his digs at Finsbury Park, dance music blaring from the radio, spinning plates deep into the night. Desmond had seen him across the room and began to shoulder his way into view, waving as he came.
‘Sylvester! It’s very good to see you. We were wondering if you’d be able to make it.’
There were dark, purplish patches under Sylvester’s eyes, Cynthia noticed. She wondered if he had any other life beyond the commissions that Desmond threw his way. For all his jauntiness, his respectful compliments, and his mock salute, he gave off a sense of huge discomfort, of not fitting in with any of the arrangements other people saw as necessary for their survival.
‘I nearly didn’t come,’ he said. ‘Not had any sleep for thirty-six hours, as a matter of fact. Been trying to finish those stories you said you wanted to see.’
‘Well, that’s splendid,’ Desmond said, not quite mock-heartily. ‘Really splendid, Sylvester. I wish all my contributors were so committed to their craft. Why don’t we go into my office and have a talk about it, eh? And why don’t we have something to drink?’
‘What I’d really like,’ Sylvester deposed, ‘is a cup of tea.’
Anthea volunteered to make the tea. Cynthia wondered if Desmond was losing interest in Sylvester. Anthea said: ‘I feel sorry for Sylvester. He’s got about another fortnight basking in Desmond’s shadow and having his stories accepted, and then it’ll all be over. He should enjoy it while he can.’
‘Why’s that?’ Cynthia asked, less interested in Sylvester’s undoing than in the reason for Desmond’s capriciousness.
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‘Oh, Des doesn’t like to be harassed. And then he gets tired of people. His ideal contributor would be a fighter pilot who produced a sheaf of absolutely wonderful poems and then went off and got himself killed somewhere, leaving Des to write a memoir of his life. I daresay he’ll find one soon if the war goes on. Now with women it’s exactly the other way round. He gets fixated on them and can’t leave them alone. I knew a girl who was having a walk-out with him, and he used to send her a note every other morning saying she’d broken his heart.’
As if on cue, the office door swung dramatically open and a large, platinum-haired woman came into the room. Here was someone else whose presence in the Duration office seemed wholly outlandish. She was wearing a fur coat—chinchilla, Cynthia thought—and the platinum hair was arranged in a style that she remembered from the bound volumes of Punch that had lain in the Government House library at Colombo.
Unlike Sylvester Del Mar, who had shuffled onto the premises with the greatest unease, the woman glanced across the room with a rather complacent air, as if to say that while this might not have been the world to which she was accustomed, she had some experience of it and would not be shocked by anything she found there.
Catching sight of Anthea and Cynthia, she said, rather in the manner of a headmistress questioning a couple of her prefects: ‘Is this the party for Duration? I’m Mr Rafferty’s guest. I’m afraid I was delayed. The taxi driver got lost in the blackout. Perhaps you could tell Mr Rafferty I’m here?’
There was something altogether mesmerising about Mrs Gurvitz, if this was what the apparition was: kindly but giving off an air of faint menace, like a monstrous carp passing sedately through a pond full of goldfish. Anthea, conscious that here, finally, was another woman who might be somewhere near to her own fighting weight, decided to bestow on her what was very nearly respectful attention.
‘I think he’s in that room over there. Would you like me to fetch him for you?’