by D. J. Taylor
‘Not at all,’ Mrs Gurvitz said. She looked as if she might be about to divest herself of the fur coat, which shimmered a little in the light, but thought better of it. ‘This is a democratic age, or so everyone tells me. We’ve got past people being announced. I shall go and find him.’
They watched her make her way, politely yet insistently, through the banks of duffel coats and girls in trousers. Peter Wildgoose came up, almost shaking with suppressed laughter.
‘So Esme Gurvitz has come, has she?’ he said. ‘I never for a moment thought she would. I just assumed it was Des getting intoxicated by the fumes of some cocktail party he’d been to where she turned up.’
‘Who is Mrs Gurvitz?’ Anthea asked. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever explained to me quite why she’s so famous.’
Peter Wildgoose looked his best when he laughed. His face lost its worried expression and his surprisingly even teeth were displayed to advantage. He said, rather thoughtfully, as if this was an interesting anthropological question that ought to be gone into with the greatest rigour: ‘I don’t know that she’s so very famous. She was Augustus John’s mistress, I think, or was it the Prince before he took up with Lady Furness? And then she married an insurance broker called Gurvitz who died and left her a lot of money. But I shouldn’t have thought she was one of Desmond’s girls.’
‘What makes you say that?’ Anthea asked, sounding genuinely interested.
‘Well, Des likes to be dominated by women but not exactly trampled on, if you see what I mean. But perhaps he’s decided that what he really wants from life is to be ordered about.’
Desmond came out of his room. There was no sign of either Sylvester or Mrs Gurvitz. He touched Peter’s arm just above the elbow. ‘Have we got any champagne?’
‘You know very well we haven’t.’
‘Only I can’t offer Mrs Gurvitz a glass of Algerian red wine. I’d never hear the last of it.’
‘She’ll just have to put up with it,’ Peter said. ‘Tell her there’s a war on.’
‘That’s what she’s just been telling me. She had dinner with Winston the other night. I don’t know how she manages these things, but there it is.’
‘What did Winston have to say?’
‘Oh, apparently they’re very worried about the King. They think he’s about to say something foolish… . Isn’t there a bottle of Bordeaux left over somewhere?’
‘No, there isn’t,’ Peter said.
He was being brusquer than usual with Desmond, Cynthia thought. Perhaps the sight of Mrs Gurvitz had emboldened him. A foot or so of the blackout curtain had come away and she could see the dark outlines of the plane trees in the square quivering in the breeze.
‘How did Sylvester take it?’ Anthea asked.
‘How did Sylvester take what?’ Desmond wondered, immersed in his brand-new world of champagne, Mrs Gurvitz, and bottles of Bordeaux that might have been left over somewhere.
‘The story in the Star.’
‘Oh, about as well as could be expected,’ Desmond said. He was looking nervously over his shoulder at the wall, as if there were invisible guests standing there whose presence was discernible only to himself. ‘He agreed with me that these kinds of things were more or less inevitable. Said he quite understood the paper could do with the publicity.’
‘So you told him that it was your fault?’
‘I won’t say I went quite that far,’ Desmond said. One of his fat red hands was wrapped so tightly around a wineglass that only the stem was visible.
‘Where is Sylvester?’ Cynthia asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Desmond said. ‘I really can’t be personally responsible for all my guests. Emerald Cunard does that, you know. She follows them from room to room and match-makes. I expect Sylvester’s gone to the lavatory or something. I really hope he isn’t going to start turning into a pest. Do you know, he brought in another six stories just now? I looked at the first and it seemed to be a dialogue between various parts of an internal combustion engine.’
Cynthia yawned. A great stretch of time seemed to have elapsed since she and Anthea had stood in Desmond’s office cutting up the vegetables, but, looking at her watch, she discovered that it was only half-past seven. She had not been to many literary parties in her life, but she had a feeling that this one had a very long way to go.
A man she did not recognise, wearing a blue, collarless shirt and with streaks of paint on his fingers, came over and said, ‘I say, didn’t you sit for me once?’
Cynthia could deal with this sort of thing. ‘I don’t think I did.’
‘Oh, but you did. You were the girl who always wanted the heater turned up because you thought the studio was too cold.’
‘No, I wasn’t.’
‘Well, if you ever did feel like sitting for me I’d be absolutely delighted to oblige.’
A yard or so away, Desmond, Mrs Gurvitz, and Peter Wildgoose, all of whom seemed to be getting on very well with each other, were talking about definitions of happiness.
‘Easy,’ Desmond said. ‘Writing a tolerably good book while travelling south in the company of someone your conscience permits you to love.’
‘Do you know?’ Mrs Gurvitz said—her high colour had grown higher still—‘I think it’s to do with people not making demands on one. If I woke up one morning in the knowledge that nobody was going to write to me, send me a bill, or ask me to lunch, then the rest of the day would be a pleasure to contemplate.’
‘And what would you do?’ Peter Wildgoose said, who looked as if he wanted to burst out laughing but was constrained by a sense of social obligation. ‘I mean, if nobody wrote or sent in a bill or telephoned to ask you to lunch?’
‘Well, I don’t know,’ Mrs Gurvitz admitted. ‘I expect in the end I should read the Sketch, smoke three cigarettes instead of two, and go for a walk around Kensington Gardens. But it’s the principle of the thing.’
‘Yes,’ Peter Wildgoose was saying absently, ‘yes … yes.’ And Cynthia gazed at him so intently that for a moment the world was composed entirely of this dapper little man in his dark suit, straw-coloured hair neatly parted at the side of his head and a quizzical expression on his face.
There was a sudden commotion at the far end of the room, a quick, purposeful displacement of bodies, a noise of glass smashing on the carpet, and Lucy came hurrying towards them.
‘Des,’ she said urgently. ‘It’s Sylvester. You’ll have to come and talk to him.’
‘Why?’ Desmond wanted to know. He was still travelling south in the company of someone his conscience permitted him to love. ‘What has he done?’
‘He’s locked himself in the lavatory and won’t come out.’
‘Why has he done that?’
‘I don’t know. But he says that it’s all your fault.’
The lavatories were on the further side of the landing: two cubicles preceded by a Spartan ante-room containing a washbasin, a mirror, a pair of hand-towels and a poster warning that coughs and sneezes spread diseases. As they made their way through the crowd, Lucy supplied further details.
‘I’d just gone in there to wash my hands, and then I heard the sound of someone, well, crying.’
‘He’s not doing any harm,’ Desmond said. They had reached the ante-room by now. ‘Don’t you think it would be better to leave him there until he feels like coming out?’
‘No, I don’t,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He looked horribly pale. ‘I think that’s a dreadful idea. We’ll have to talk to him. Sylvester,’ he said, in a voice too loud for the room, ‘are you all right in there? Lucy said you weren’t feeling too well. Is there anything we can do to help?’
‘What an awfully squalid place,’ Mrs Gurvitz said, who had accompanied them over from the office. ‘I hope it’s not the one you girls have to use.’
The cubicle door ended about six inches from the t
ile floor. Anthea bent down slightly and lowered her head, as if she was attempting to perform a piece of old-fashioned physical jerks. ‘Is he actually in there at all?’ she demanded. ‘I can’t see his feet.’
‘Sylvester,’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘You really ought to come out of there. It won’t do you any good to stay in, and it will inconvenience anyone else who wants to use the place. Now what is the matter?’
‘When I was a girl,’ Mrs Gurvitz said, reminiscently, ‘whenever anyone locked themselves in the lavatory it was always to take cocaine.’
‘Christ,’ Peter Wildgoose said suddenly. ‘Des, you’d better give me a hand. Anthea, would you take Cynthia and Mrs Gurvitz outside please? And whatever you do, don’t let anyone else in here.’
They went and stood on the landing as directed. Almost immediately there came a noise of smashing wood and shouted instructions. This was followed, shortly afterwards, by what sounded like the rush of water. Peter Wildgoose’s head appeared in the doorway. He had taken off the jacket of his suit and was breathing hard.
‘Someone go to the office and telephone for an ambulance, please.’ There was a sharp and faintly inhuman cry behind him. ‘Oh, and a plumber too. I think the cistern’s about to come down.’
They brought Sylvester—purple-faced and with staring eyes—out on the lavatory cubicle’s shattered door. He had attempted to hang himself with his braces from one of the overhead pipes. After a short while he was able to sit up and drink a glass of water. There was a terrible red mark round his neck where the braces had caught. Desmond stood staring at him with an odd mixture of bewilderment and resentment.
Within a moment a quantity of water began to leak out of the washroom door and flow down the staircase. Presently three ambulancemen—not best pleased at having to climb the flights of stairs—arrived on the landing bearing a stretcher. When they saw Sylvester their faces brightened.
‘Tried to do himself in?’ they asked.
‘It really is none of my business,’ Desmond said. And Cynthia knew that whether he lived or died, won the Nobel Prize for Literature or sank into obscurity, no more of Sylvester’s stories would ever appear in Duration.
‘Someone ought to turn the water off,’ one of the ambulancemen said.
There was no knowing how long this might have gone on. In the end, Peter Wildgoose managed the business. He was adroit in a crisis. Five minutes later the ambulancemen and their burden had disappeared down the staircase, the stopcock been run to earth in an obscure cupboard on the next landing, and the water turned off.
To the duffel-clad youths who came out onto the landing to see what was going on, Peter said: ‘I’m afraid one of our guests has been taken rather ill. Sylvester Del Mar, who writes those brilliant short stories. Perhaps you’ve heard of him?’ Each time he moved his feet, standing water rose up from the carpet over the tips of his shoes.
But even Peter Wildgoose’s sangfroid could not save the party. Too many people had seen the ambulancemen arrive, too many people heard the shouted instructions from the lavatory cubicle and the thud as the cistern went down. A presentiment of doom was in the air. Within another quarter of an hour the office was almost empty.
‘It really is too bad,’ Desmond said. He was still treating Sylvester’s attempt at suicide as a personal insult. ‘Why did he have to do a thing like that? After all, plenty of people get written about in the newspapers, and for more disagreeable reasons than this. Perhaps he has a mythological view of himself. So many people do these days.’ Nobody paid him any attention. Mrs Gurvitz, who might have offered some consolation in the circumstances, had disappeared along with the duffel-clad hordes.
Cynthia washed up some of the wineglasses desultorily in the sink. She felt sorry for Sylvester Del Mar, who seemed to her in some incalculable way a victim of the environment in which she imagined herself to reside: not up to his opponents’ fighting weight; brought down by secrets he struggled all too vainly to conceal. The outer office had an altogether debauched air, as if some unimaginable orgy had been held in it. Clouds of cigarette smoke hung under the ceiling and there were carrot slices all over the floor. An effort was made to clear them up.
Then Anthea said, ‘There’s no point in staying here. The only thing we can do is leave the windows open. I think I’ll go. Come on, Cynthia.’
There was no way in which this invitation could be refused: the look on Anthea’s face confirmed it. Cynthia tried to accept it in one of those all-girls-together invitations one heard flung out half a dozen times a day in Lyons cafés and cinema queues, but failed miserably. Together they went off down the pitch-black stairs. Halfway down the second flight, Cynthia’s foot struck against something soft and yielding. It was Sylvester Del Mar’s hat, dropped there by the ambulancemen.
In the square the wind was still up and the plane trees writhed. A few cars went by, showing tiny streaks of light. Somewhere in the distance there was a booming noise, almost hydraulic, like water rising in some ancient plumbing system. They went westward in silence towards the Tottenham Court Road. Anthea said, ‘If I do go home, there’ll only be bread-and-butter and sardines. Besides, I need to talk to you. Let’s go and have something to eat.’
A hundred yards further on they came to a tiny café, set back from the street and advertising its existence by tiny traceries of light behind the rims of the shutters. Inside, a fat woman lurked behind the chromium counter, polishing teacups.
‘Gracious,’ Anthea said. ‘Straight out of Ed Burra. Look, there’s some cheese. I wonder if one could get some Welsh rarebit.’
They negotiated with the fat woman for a while and then went and sat down at a table aggrandised over by two outsize, high-backed chairs.
‘Well, that was a depressing evening,’ Anthea said. ‘Desmond’s parties are always like that in the end. Rain or shine, war or peace. It makes no difference. But someone trying to hang themselves from the lavatory cistern is hitting a new low, even for Des. But that’s not what I want to talk to you about. Tell me about your American friend.’
Cynthia had been prepared for this. ‘About Tyler Kent?’
‘About Mr Kent. Unless there are other American friends you’ve been keeping under your hat. Don’t think me brutally inquisitive, but what is his attraction?’
Something told Cynthia she did not have to answer this. Something else told her that, mesmerised as she was by Anthea’s personality, she was incapable of remaining silent. The Welsh rarebits came, and proved to be a great disappointment.
‘Well?’ Anthea said.
‘I suppose,’ Cynthia found herself saying, ‘it’s because he’s not English.’
‘You don’t mean he’s feeding you silk stockings and packets of Lucky Strikes? That sounds a bit mercenary.’
She could not tell if Anthea was joking or not. ‘That’s not what I meant at all. I meant that he’s different from anyone else. He doesn’t work for a timber firm, or talk about where he went to school, or play tennis, or drink pink gins when the sun’s behind the yardarm. You can’t imagine how awful Englishmen are in the East. After all, they wouldn’t be sent there if they were any good at anything.’
‘Rather a comment on our colonial system,’ Anthea said. ‘And I can see all that being fairly dreary. But do you know what he’s like?’
For God’s sake, Cynthia found herself wanting to say, I go to bed with him three times a week and twice on Sundays. He says ‘nice to see a couple of old friends again’ when I take my brassiere off. I think I ought to know what he’s like. And then she remembered that, with the exception of certain easily grasped essentials, she did not really know what Tyler Kent was like at all.
‘Let me tell you what he’s like,’ Anthea said briskly. ‘He’s a cipher clerk at the American Embassy. How he leads the life he does on a cipher clerk’s pay is a very interesting question. But he spends his time going to defeatist parties where everyone sta
nds around saying that of course they didn’t approve of Kristallnacht but at least Adolf’s giving the Germans a lead. He’s great friends with Captain Ramsay. As for what he does with the information that comes his way at the Embassy, well, it rather pains me to tell you.’
Cynthia remembered the presidential telegram, with its superscription: W. S. Churchill. First Sea Lord. ‘How do you know all this?’
The fat woman had disappeared on some errand in the back parts of the café. Anthea made sure she was out of earshot. For the first time in their acquaintance, Cynthia thought, she looked a little less assured, a little less certain that the ground beneath her feet could not possibly give way.
‘Cynthia. Why do you think I go off to the Ritz to see people like Norman Burdett? What do you think I was doing at that party you turned up to with Kent? What do you imagine I do at Duration, if it comes to that?’
‘I don’t know. What do you do at Duration?’
‘Well, for one thing I keep an eye on Des.’
‘Keep an eye on Des?’ This seemed extraordinary. ‘What on earth for?’
Anthea laughed. ‘Poor old Des. He’s not much of a security risk, but he’s been CP since 1934. Probably not much in it, but one likes to know. I expect he only did it to impress his left-wing friends. Only you can never tell with Des.’
‘You mean you’re spying on him and Peter?’
‘My dear, you’ve been reading too many newspaper articles. Nobody is spying on Des, and certainly not on Peter. It’s just that there are certain things one’s supervisors like to know about him. I’m sorry, is all this very shocking?’
‘No, not really.’
‘Yes, it is. But you needn’t alarm yourself about it. Des isn’t a complete idiot. I expect he has a pretty good idea what I’m up to. I should think he finds it all rather funny. But it’s not Des I’m interested in. It’s your Mr Kent.’
‘What has he done?’
‘If I didn’t think you might be able to help me, I wouldn’t be telling you this. Now, you’ve heard about the King’s Party, the “Faction” they call it? The people who want a negotiated peace? Well, it’s certainly not treasonable to want there not to be a war. It’s what everybody wants, apart from a few armaments manufacturers. But it probably is treasonable to assume you can do the negotiating yourself. I think—we think—Mr Kent is up to his neck with Captain Ramsay and your Mr Bannister in this, that he’s giving them copies of telegrams from foreign embassies, that he’s allowing Ramsay to make use of his diplomatic immunity.’