by D. J. Taylor
‘How can he do that?’
‘Very easily. For one thing, the Faction has a membership book. I haven’t seen it. Nobody has. But I can tell you that it’s spent several weeks in a safe in Grosvenor Square where no one can get hold of it, and there’s a man whom your Mr Kent pays to carry it around London. It’s probably been brought to the flat. Have you seen it?’
‘No, I haven’t, Anthea.’ Cynthia was close to tears. ‘You know I haven’t.’
‘It’s all right, darling. Nobody’s accusing you of anything. Not anything much, that is. You’re just—how do I put this officially?—spending a lot of your time with a foreign national who is known to be associating with people who, according to a strict definition of the term, are traitors to the Crown. The only question is: what are you going to do about it?’
Half of Cynthia thought that the men she slept with were her own affair. The other half was dimly aware that, without in the least intending to, she might have morally compromised herself. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’
‘Do you know,’ Anthea said suddenly, ‘I haven’t the least idea what you think about any of this? None at all. You might think Hitler’s a jolly good thing. You might think Mosley is just the kind of chap we want in these difficult times. You might think that if there are Germans living in Poland, then lots of other Germans are perfectly entitled to invade it. I mean, where do your parents stand on this?’
‘I don’t know. Mother always said she could never take Hitler seriously since someone took her to see Chaplin in The Great Dictator. Father says that he’s a perfect expression of one side of the German temperament, but that was never any reason why you should quarrel with him.’
‘And what does Mr Kent say?’
Cynthia thought about the many—the very many—things that Tyler Kent had said about Hitler, Chamberlain, and Roosevelt, late at night in the flat, head bent studiously over his desk, scissors poised above the litter of press cuttings.
‘He says it’s nothing to do with America. That it’s just the Jews making mischief, and if somebody took the trouble to go to Berlin the whole thing could be settled quite happily.’
‘Just at this moment there are a dozen army divisions right behind the German border,’ Anthea said. ‘Does that make it sound as if the whole thing could be settled quite happily by Lord Halifax or someone taking a plane to Berlin?’
At various stages in her life, quite a few people had tried to lecture Cynthia in this way. Mrs Kirkpatrick had done it in high-walled Eastern gardens, with the sun flaring over the rhododendron bushes. Henry Bannister had done it in yachts tracking across the Solent. Schoolmistresses had done it in gloomy South Kensington basements, with the smell of gravy haunting the passageways beyond. This eternal sense of being kept up to the mark, of being told—kindly, condescendingly, or encouragingly—that she was failing to fulfil the expectations that other people had of her had always grated. It grated on her now, here in the Bloomsbury café, with the steam rising from the urns and the hideously contorted reflection of her face gleaming off the burnished chrome.
Without caring what the consequences might be, she said, ‘I don’t think you have to speak to me like that, Anthea, and I don’t think I have to listen.’
‘Fair enough,’ Anthea said, not sounding in the least put out. ‘But do you know, Norman Burdett nearly died that night in Jermyn Street? And even Desmond is going about saying he needs to know where he stands. Fancy that of Desmond, who never knew where he stood in his life before. Well, I shan’t say any more. But there are things that you might do for us. Things that only you could do for us, if you take my meaning. And things that have to be done soon. If you won’t do them, then I dare say we shall have to find someone else. Which will be a great bore, and an inconvenience, and quite frankly a disappointment.’
The moral arbiters of the Eastern gardens, the Solent yachts, and the Kensington basements had all dealt in disappointment. There seemed to be no other form of rebuke. Looking at Anthea as she leaned across the table, not exactly craftily but with an immense and inscrutable guile, Cynthia wondered if she had always been like this. In the nursery? In the schoolroom? She was supposed to have had a husband. What had he thought about it? She had a swift and rather embarrassing vision of Anthea, stark naked on the marital bed, still offering up these witty remarks as some eager bridegroom plunged gamely into her. Glancing at her watch, she saw it was nearly half-past nine.
‘I really think I should be going.’
‘I shouldn’t dream of keeping you for a moment,’ Anthea said. ‘Just think about what I’ve said. It’s not your fault. I’m sure Mr Kent makes a nice change from all those dull young men one comes across. I know the ladies in Belgravia who send him invitations think he’s a dear. Do you know, Sybil Colefax had him to lunch at the Ritz the other day? It’s like something out of Henry James. He’ll be marrying an heiress if this goes on much longer. And whatever you do, don’t worry about Mr Kent. He can take care of himself. It’s the people like Des that I agonise about. People who don’t know where they stand.’
When she got back to Tyler Kent’s flat, it was a quarter-past ten and there was light spilling out in a long, yellowish bar from under the door and the sound of a radio playing faintly in the background. Her first thought was that Tyler Kent was back early from the embassy, but when she stepped into the drawing room the first thing she saw was Captain Ramsay sitting at the desk, with a pair of spectacles pushed up to the crown of his balding head. There was another man standing at the side of the desk, younger and tough-looking, dressed in a mackintosh with a brown-paper parcel under his arm, smoking a cigarette, who looked at her incuriously.
With his semi-detached spectacles and his bald head, Captain Ramsay looked almost comically sinister, like someone doing an impression of a man up to no good. He said, ‘Do excuse me, Miss Kirkpatrick. I had no idea you would be arriving. Mr Kent sometimes lets me do a little work here of an evening. Don’t let us disturb you. Please do whatever you want to do.’
There was something rather subtle about this. It implied that someone—possibly Tyler Kent—had been seriously remiss in not letting Captain Ramsay know of her arrangements for the evening, while hinting that whatever she might now want to do was bound to be almost dangerously frivolous. The young man took the cigarette out of his mouth.
‘I was just going meself,’ he said. He had a northern accent, like some of the comedians one sometimes endured on the radio, and she had a vague suspicion that she had seen him before. ‘You mustn’t mind me.’
‘I won’t,’ Cynthia said. She went and made herself a cup of tea and, for want of any better location, took it into the bedroom and drank it sitting beneath the faces of Tyler Kent and his Princeton classmates. A moment or two later the front door slammed shut and there was a sound of footsteps rapidly descending. The blackout curtain had not yet been lowered, and she went across to the window to fix it. She had just finished the tea and was wondering about making herself a piece of toast when there were further noises from outside—a door opening, a snatch or two of conversation—and Tyler Kent came into the room.
‘Sorry about Ramsay,’ he said. ‘Guess I should have told you he’d be here.’
‘Who was the other man?’
‘Which other man?’
‘The one with the parcel.’
‘That would be Rodney. Was he here long?’
‘I don’t know. He said he was just going when I arrived.’
‘How was the party?’
Cynthia explained about the party: Desmond and the Star; the raw, red mark around Sylvester Del Mar’s neck; Mrs Gurvitz. Tyler looked interested.
‘I’ve heard of Esmé Gurvitz,’ he said seriously. ‘Wasn’t she that painter’s mistress? And didn’t her husband die and leave her a lot of money? She sounds quite a girl. I wish I’d been there.’
Waking next morning, she wa
s gripped by a suspicion that Captain Ramsay might still be sitting in the drawing room with his spectacles pushed back over his forehead, but there was no sign of him or indeed any hint that he had ever been there.
She wondered just exactly what she did believe in. That remark had stung. She was not at all sure that she believed in Tyler Kent, either personally or politically. She supposed that, when it came to it, she believed in people’s right to be left alone, and not be made to do things they didn’t want, not to be picked up by the tidal waves of other people’s scheming and deposited on alien beaches, far from home, and with no prospect of a return passage. But her suspicions had been roused and she was determined to pay more attention to the world laid out before her.
At the Duration office everybody was in the foulest imaginable temper. Cynthia and Lucy spent the morning picking up shreds of carrot from the carpet and dealing with the ashes of a small fire that seemed to have been lit in the corner of Desmond’s room. The latest news on Sylvester Del Mar was that he had gone away somewhere for a rest.
‘Poor old Sylvester,’ Desmond said cheerfully. ‘On the other hand, I daresay that in twenty years’ time somebody will write it all up in a book called Literary Life in Wartime London and we shall all be interviewed for the Sunday papers.’
All that morning Cynthia waited for Anthea’s arrival, not because she wanted to say anything, but because she had an expression ready for her that would say: yes, I will do what you want. But it turned out that Anthea had telephoned in to say that she was ill.
It was a strange time: everyone agreed. The landlord, keen to apportion blame for the flood, the damaged carpet, and the wrecked cistern, sent in a bill for £59 7s. Captain Ramsay asked a question in the House about the percentage of Jewish personnel known to be serving in the armed forces. A reconnaissance plane crash-landed on the sands at Beachy Head and its pilot, a minor German aristocrat who was popularly supposed to have brought a sheaf of peace proposals with him, was taken away for questioning.
In early December, the newspapers began to wonder what the King might say in his Christmas Day speech to the nation, in a world where, it was quickly established, spruce trees, mincemeat, turkeys, and mistletoe were in chronically short supply.
Chapter 12
December
It is too early to go home, but nonetheless Cynthia goes. There is nothing much happening at the office—the New Year issue is with the printer—and in any case since Sylvester Del Mar tried to hang himself Desmond’s behaviour has become erratic.
She wanders back to Belgrave Square through the Knightsbridge side-streets, where the winter light is turning grey and dusk-ridden and the Friday afternoon sounds of children playing on area steps and errand-boys’ bicycles are borne on the air behind her. There are soldiers walking back and forth from the Knightsbridge barracks, red-faced and curiously unmartial, as if their proper destiny was to swell an operatic chorus rather than pick up a rifle.
The landscape has been familiar to her since childhood: spacious, anonymous, and barren. From the basement windows, fenced in behind area steps, come glimpses of dozens of miniature, fenced-in worlds, like the dioramas at the Science Museum: a maidservant ironing shirts; a double row of small girls in gingham frocks having their tea; a man staring balefully at a typewriter. Some of the houses are shuttered up and have for sale boards in their upper windows. The old tribes are in retreat, gone elsewhere. There is no traffic except for the errand-boys’ bicycles and a Rolls-Royce, carrying an old lady with yellow-white hair the colour of piano keys, which steals softly round the corner of West Halkin Street and moves off in the direction of the park.
Just lately there have been articles in the newspapers hazarding that the age of the little old lady in the Rolls-Royce is dead, and that the war, whatever its outcome, will have a ‘democratising influence.’ Cynthia isn’t so sure. But she would like to know where the other old ladies, with their fox-furs and their feathered hats, have gone. Perhaps there are colonies of them camped out in the Yorkshire stately homes, twenty to a butler. Who can tell? The Rolls-Royce is fifty yards away now and gathering speed, a bullet shot from one world into another.
She stops at a kiosk on the corner of the square and buys a newspaper. Here the weekly and monthly magazines are piled up in long, rippling mounds, like brightly coloured roof tiles. Cage Birds. John O’London’s. Blackwood’s. Her father subscribed to Blackwood’s. She has a memory of it lying on the veranda table at the villa in Colombo next to the tea-brokers’ catalogues and the back-numbers of the Island News.
Belgrave Square is so dark that the plane trees at the further end can barely be seen: the ghosts of old sentinels marching through fog. She rolls the newspaper up into a taut cylinder and holds it wedged under her elbow like a swagger-stick. There will be no one in the flat, she thinks, and she can enjoy something that has lately been rather denied her: a little private time. Everybody is feeling the strain, of course. Like democratising influences, the privations of the home front are a newspaper staple. There is a whole new iconography made up of tired housewives, overworked machinists falling asleep at their lathes. If there is one consolation, it is that we are all in this together.
Sometimes Cynthia thinks she is marshalling her inner resources; at other times she despairs of her inability to cope. Just now she is thoroughly demoralised by the conversation with Anthea and the responsibility it brings. In fact, the memory of the evening in the Bloomsbury café has been nagging at her for days, an instant rebuke whenever she hears Tyler Kent’s voice on the telephone. She suspects that this kind of life is not good for her. Late nights in Bishop’s Mansions and rackety Knightsbridge parties take their toll. Better to lie fallow: the Bachelor Girl taking her ease. When she first heard that phrase she imagined a woman in a pinstripe suit with a burnt-cork moustache, like an actress in a musical comedy.
The pavement in Belgrave Square is unnaturally sticky. There are traces of slime on its surface, as if somebody has dropped a tray of chicken-fat. There is no one about.
She walks up the flight of steps to the front door and passes through it, the heels of her shoes sticking in the holes of the coconut matting, and stops awkwardly just inside the doorway, half with the aim of freeing her feet, half out of sheer exhaustion.
On the far side of the vestibule the ballroom gapes grey and ghostly. There is talk of turning it into a regimental recruiting office, but no decision has yet been made. Here in the late afternoon, the lower parts of the house are still prey to human traffic. On the first floor, in sight of the embassy’s brass plate, a crisis presents itself. A swarthy man with odd tints of ochre in his face sits half-tumbled on the topmost stair, attended by two other men so similar in size and skin-tone that they look like middle-aged triplets.
‘Is he all right?’ Cynthia asks briskly, in the tone her mother used for childhood injuries.
‘A little faintness, that is all,’ one of the attendants tells her in impeccably accented English. ‘It is kind of you to enquire,’ the other adds. The seated man is making odd little growling noises that are practically canine in their pitch. Clearly it is not only tired housewives and machinists at their lathes who are feeling the strain.
Courteously, and with a practised economy of gesture, the triptych rearranges itself to allow her to pass. On the second floor there is a light behind the frosted glass of the literary agency, a smell of cigar smoke and a pair of silhouetted figures in conversation. The book trade is in the doldrums, Desmond says—the second volume of his autobiography has been mysteriously stymied—but here, it seems, some kind of business still precariously survives. On the third landing the bags of old clothing piled up before the quarter-open door of the Catholic charity reach halfway to the ceiling. A middle-aged nun with a pair of tennis shoes sticking out from under her vestments is gravely inspecting them.
‘Are you from the Red Cross?’ the nun asks as Cynthia heaves into view. She has curiousl
y milky eyes, like those rogue marbles that disintegrate at the pressure of a thumb.
‘No, I’m not,’ Cynthia says, with the same briskness she brought to the fainting diplomat. ‘I live upstairs.’
The nun does not answer. Perhaps Cynthia’s appearance is somehow a symbol of the working-out of divine providence? Some of the bags have rents in them and are disgorging soiled underclothes onto the polished floor. At the same time there is something comforting about this transit of four flights of Belgravian stairs, the presumption of harmony. Diplomacy, commerce, charity—each has had its say. Now domesticity awaits.
On the topmost stair of the topmost flight, one of the ribs she cracked in Henry Bannister’s car gives a twinge, and she thinks of Ceylon: the green jungle canopy beneath Sigiriya Rock; parakeets screeching in the tree-tops; Jaffna, Kandy, and Trincomalee; the flying fish in the bay at Colombo. Five months gone, it seems a lifetime away.
The nun, a dozen feet below but still visible in the murk, is singing quietly to herself, like the nuns in story books. London is full of these solitary entertainers: old men with the medals of the Great War on their chests playing the mouth-organ at the Tube entrances; picturesque charwomen holding forth on the tops of buses. Half of her is still in Ceylon, hearing the detonation of the holiday fire-crackers that sound uncomfortably like small-arms fire, watching the bright chips of colour that are the saris of the Tamil tea-pickers moving up and down the hillside. The other half is thinking about Tyler Kent.