by D. J. Taylor
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ Anthea said, as if Cynthia had complained about the complexity of the enterprise. ‘Bannister and Ramsay know their errand boy was stopped. They need to keep it as far away from London as possible. The Embassy isn’t safe anymore, diplomatic immunity or no diplomatic immunity. So it’s down at Ashburton in Bannister’s study.’
‘Why can’t you just go and take it?’
‘We’d need a search warrant. By the time we’d got one, the thing would have gone. No, much better to rely on you.’
‘What on earth do you mean?’
‘You can go down there and liberate it. Isn’t that the word the Russians used whenever they stole anything from the bourgeoisie? What could be more natural? An old friend of the family come for the weekend. Ring up Hermione and sort it out,’ Anthea said. ‘I hear she’s out of the bin, or whatever they call that nursing home in South Kensington, and feeling a great deal better. I’m sure she’d be delighted to see you.’
She found that the prospect of stealing around Ashburton Grange with a torch, bent on ransacking Mr Bannister’s study, filled her with terror.
‘You’re not being serious.’
‘Believe me, Cynthia, there is one person in London uniquely qualified to perform this act, and that person is you.’
‘Anthea, I can’t.’
‘Yes, you can,’ Anthea said. ‘It will be the best piece of war-work you ever did. Much better than typing Des’s letters to print-brokers or running down the stairs after Peter when he’s forgotten his hat. Just think, it will be practically heroic. In twenty years’ time young men will come up to you at parties and ask you to tell them about it.’
‘I don’t want young men coming up to me at parties in twenty years’ time,’ Cynthia said, tears starting up in her face. ‘And I don’t want to go down to Ashburton Grange ever again. I can’t so much as look in a mirror without Henry’s face staring back out of it. You have no idea.’ The enormity of the plan baffled her. ‘What will happen if I bring the book back?’
‘As things currently stand,’ Anthea said, ‘I should say that Captain Ramsay and your chum Mr Bannister will probably be interned for the duration. I can’t imagine you’ll find that any great loss.’
It was twenty past two now, and the pub was almost empty. The floor was full of shiny little blue-green rectangles that turned out to be empty cigarette packets stamped into the sawdust. Quite of its own accord the door flew open once again to reveal a vista of grey pavement, passing feet, a shop window advertising a New Year sale.
January had got becalmed somehow, Cynthia thought, like the cigarette packets in their sawdust. At Bishop’s Mansions the fog hung so low that it was impossible to see the tennis courts, and the Palace might not have been there at all. The task Anthea had outlined for her did not sound in the least heroic. It was more like a practical joke that one schoolboy might play on another.
‘And how is your American friend?’ Anthea asked, as if the express purpose of this lunch-hour flight from the Bloomsbury square had been to discuss Tyler Kent, his habits and inclinations.
‘Perfectly all right, thank you,’ Cynthia said. ‘Friend’ as in ‘gentleman friend’ had been one of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s code words, and implied distrust of motive. Henry Bannister, significantly, had always been ‘Henry.’
‘That’s the thing about sugar,’ Anthea said mysteriously. ‘It’s only sweet some of the time.’
They took up their bags and went out into the street, past the pub’s dismal frontage and a large hole surrounded by lanterns and charcoal braziers at which a group of workmen were desultorily engaged.
‘I suppose,’ Anthea said, ‘that you’ve got scruples about all this? Well, you can forget about them, I can tell you. Bannister and Ramsay don’t have any, and neither does your Mr Kent. Nor that boy who hit Norman on the head in the blackout. It’s not a game, for all it might sound like one. If you won’t do it I shall think you’re a poor fish who only wants a quiet life. Just like poor old Des.’
The wind blew in against their legs as they turned onto the Tottenham Court Road, and Cynthia nodded her head, modestly surprised at how heroic and unscrupulous she felt.
Back at the office things were at a surprisingly low ebb. Lucy was stuffing a pile of rejected manuscripts back into their envelopes.
Desmond was having what sounded like quite a serious conversation with Peter Wildgoose about Mrs Gurvitz.
‘The thing I like about Esmé,’ he said, as Anthea and Cynthia came into the room, ‘is that she really has seen a bit of life. One doesn’t have to keep explaining who people are, for example.’
‘You mustn’t mind my saying this, Des,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He was wearing a suit that was marginally less smart than usual. ‘After all, you know how keen I am on candour. But really, I can’t for a moment imagine what she sees in you.’
‘You know, people are always saying that,’ Desmond said, with what for him was unusual humility, ‘and yet I’ve had some surprising successes with women in my time.’
‘I expect she sees you as her long-lost son, Des,’ Anthea said. She slapped her canvas bag down on the desk and the scent of ammonia began rapidly to pervade the room.
After that, some semblance of industry returned. Lucy took the stack of rejected manuscripts in their envelopes and dumped them unceremoniously in the post sack. Anthea began to proof-read some translations from the Chinese that Desmond had had set up in type but could not decide whether or not to print. Peter Wildgoose got up hastily from his chair, took out his pocket-book, and started hunting for somebody’s telephone number.
Only Desmond seemed disinclined to apply himself. He stood rather forlornly in the centre of the room watching the activities going on around him with a suspicious look. Finally he said: ‘Where are all the war poets? People say they exist, but I never seem to see any.’
‘I believe Sir John Squire had a sonnet in The Times the other day,’ Peter Wildgoose suggested, not quite able to keep himself from laughing.
‘It’s an important cultural point,’ Desmond said, sounding much crosser than he had a right to, ‘and not something to have jokes made about.’
There were times, Cynthia thought, when Desmond and Peter Wildgoose could barely tolerate each other, but were restrained by the solidarity of their upbringing. Desmond went back to his office and shut the door behind him. Once things had quietened down, and Anthea was safely out of the way, Cynthia picked up the telephone and had herself connected to the American Embassy. Outside it had begun to rain, and there were coin-sized blobs of water beginning to streak the surface of the window.
‘Hello there,’ said Tyler Kent’s voice. He was always superbly unflappable on the telephone, but also faintly impersonal, like a Hollywood actor trying out his lines. It would not have been surprising if he had said the words several times over, giving them different inflexions as he went. ‘How are you? What have you been up to?’
‘I’m very well,’ Cynthia told him. It was the first time they had spoken since the weekend. ‘I’ve just been having lunch with Anthea.’
‘The redoubtable Miss Carey? I guess there are worse ways of spending your lunch-break. Do we have an appointment tonight?’ It was a mark of Tyler Kent’s absorption in the protocols of the Old World that he said ‘appointment’ rather than ‘date.’
‘I thought we were going to that film,’ Cynthia said. She did not particularly want to see the film, but she had an old-fashioned notion that social agreements ought to be stuck to.
‘No can do,’ Tyler Kent said, still sounding as if he were reading from a script. ‘There’s a lot of work on here. Half a dozen things just come in from Paree. You know how it is.’
Cynthia knew how it was. The downward curve in her relationships with men rarely surprised her, for she had always been adept at seeing the warning signs. There was a piece of foolscap paper on t
he desk in front of her, and she began to draw a series of concentric circles with a fountain pen on it to distract herself while she talked. Part of her resented Tyler Kent for his off-handedness, but the other half, curiously enough, was anxious to grab at any lifeline that offered itself.
‘Are you sure you can’t get away? I think I saw in the newspaper that there was a showing at half-past eight.’
‘No can do,’ Tyler Kent said again. He sounded a little less like an actor reading from a script. ‘I shall be here until at least nine.’
‘Oh well, it can’t be helped then.’
‘That’s the only way to look at it, I guess.’
‘Yes—I suppose it is.’
‘After all,’ Tyler Kent said, without the least shred of irony, ‘there is a war on. Why don’t you come over on Saturday? No, wait. A fellow from the Italian Embassy’s asked me to go to Greenford to see the trotting races. Why don’t you come over on Sunday and we’ll have lunch somewhere?’
‘As it happens, I’m rather busy on Sunday,’ Cynthia said, thinking that she really could not put up with any more of this, ‘but I’ll see.’ After that she put the phone down.
Five minutes later, while typing up one of Desmond’s garbled letters to the printer, Cynthia considered her relationship with Tyler Kent. It was not so much Tyler Kent she was angry with, she decided, but the process of which he was a symbol: an environment in which the Tyler Kents of this world danced through a succession of parties and mansion flats, dallying with women when they felt like it and on terms that were theirs alone.
At the same time she had a feeling that she was just as bad as Tyler Kent, on the grounds that people only treated other people in this way if the person encouraged or permitted them to. There were other girls of her age—girls from the Kensington day school, girls met on the boats plying back and forth from the East—who were settled down with nice young men they would shortly marry. The problem was that the nice young men tended to be horrible bores whom no girl of any spirit would want to go anywhere near.
There was no getting away from this conundrum, or resolving it, and when she finished Desmond’s letter, with its complaints about the typesetter’s inability to reproduce Greek epsilons, she sat at her desk and cried silently for twenty minutes, while Lucy stared anxiously at her from behind her typewriter keys, and Peter Wildgoose, whose tact in these matters was immense, fetched her a cup of tea and stood vigilantly over her while she drank it. After a bit she felt better, and for some reason curiously resolute, convinced in some indefinable way that if anyone was to blame for her difficulties it was Tyler Kent and the Bannisters and people like them, and that in stealing the membership book from Mr Bannister she would be taking the first steps towards reparation.
She came out of this reverie to discover that Desmond had emerged from his study once more, and was talking to Peter Wildgoose about the King’s speech.
‘Actually I was tremendously impressed,’ Desmond said. He had a cup of tea in his hand and was standing against the mantelpiece in a rather flamboyant attitude. ‘It’s so rare that a member of the Royal Family takes any kind of stand. I should imagine the Government was livid, which makes it all the better.’
‘Sheer defeatism,’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘Playing into the enemy’s hands. I can’t imagine what he thought he was doing. But they say he’s been very odd ever since Wallis died.’
‘Honestly, Peter,’ Desmond said. ‘Do you really think that? You aren’t just trying to unsettle me?’
‘Yes, I do. No, I’m not,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He gave the impression of not really being interested in what Desmond had to say, but still determined, for auld acquaintance’s sake, to conciliate him. ‘But if there’s another confidence vote in the House, I shall know who to blame.’
‘So shall I,’ Anthea said, looking up from her desk.
‘You know, I sometimes think that if Anthea had been living at the time of the French Revolution she’d have been the kind of girl who went round in a muslin fichu stabbing people in their baths,’ Desmond said. It was meant as a light remark, but nobody laughed.
Eventually the afternoon wore on. The rejected manuscripts in their brown-paper envelopes were taken away by the postman. Desmond went back to his study to telephone various of his friends. Anthea left early with her parcel of fish.
As for the weekend at Ashburton Grange, it turned out to be the easiest thing in the world to organise. Hermione, tracked down to the Bannisters’ town-house, and betraying no memory of the altercation in Bishop’s Park, proved thoroughly amenable, and a date was set forthwith.
Chapter 17
Goodbye Mrs McKechnie
Yellow light, slanting in through the cracks in the blinds, gathering in odd patches on the ceiling and burning off the polished surface of the oak bedstead, gave the room an oddly medical air, as if an operation was about to be performed in it. Or perhaps the operation had already taken place, and this was its aftermath. In her own idiosyncratic way, Mrs McKechnie—sitting up in bed, cardigan half-askew over her bony shoulders, one hand reaching for her spectacles on a bedside table crammed with ashtrays and patent-medicine bottles, like a grey still-life from the Camden school—was a part of this imposture.
Languid and resentful, temper clearly not improved by what had been, or was about to be, done to her, she looked every inch a hospital patient, confined against her will, anxious to pick a quarrel with her nurses. Outside in the square, in a long series of preliminary shocks, volcanic detonations, and sinister after-tremors, another train went by.
Mrs McKechnie, her spectacles now retrieved from beneath a bottle of Parrish’s Health Food, the creased skin of her nose livid against the merciless light, said, ‘I don’t like those trains. They get on my nerves. I’d sooner live in the country. There all you’d get would be cows and cockerels.’
‘Just as soon get a bomb fall on you in the country as here,’ he said. ‘That’s if they ever drop any.’
‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘What’s the point of dropping a bomb in the countryside? I’d go and live there tomorrow, only Edgar says he couldn’t stand not being in London.’
Without dramatically proclaiming the fact, the McKechnies’ bedroom was like an extension of their shop. There were calf-bound editions of Jane Austen’s novels flanking Mrs McKechnie’s dressing table. Two reproductions of paintings by Sickert balanced against the lamp-stand.
Recumbent among this clutter, Mrs McKechnie looked less dangerous than when downstairs prowling the shop, but still not completely tamed. She said: ‘What is there to make a noise outside where you come from, anyhow?’
‘I don’t know. Trolley-buses. Trams. The mills start early. Most days there’s no sleep after five.’
‘I wonder you don’t go back there,’ Mrs McKechnie said, with a terrifying dispassionateness. ‘A boy like you. What is there for you here?’
‘It’s a point of view,’ he conceded. The room smelled of sweat and face-powder, and the light was exhausting to look at. From twenty feet below came the sound of a locked door being tried.
‘Somebody trying to get into the shop,’ he said.
‘The shop!’ Mrs McKechnie said. ‘Who cares about the shop? I don’t. It could burn down tomorrow. I shouldn’t care.’
Rodney caught sight of his reflection in what, from its position between a razor-strop and a pot of brilliantine, was presumably Mr McKechnie’s shaving mirror, and saw that two of his shirt-buttons were still undone. It was the third occasion on which they had done this. The first and second time Mr McKechnie had been out at sales. This time he was visiting his aunt in Roehampton. Trying to determine exactly how it had happened, he could find no explanation, no heightening of the emotional atmosphere, no causative chain, no evidence that the idea had been either hers or his.
‘I’ve a good mind to burn the place down myself,’ Mrs McKechnie said, with slightly less con
viction. ‘That would show him.’
Mrs McKechnie was always saying things like this. Sticks of dynamite quietly fizzing behind the pewter pots. Sickerts and Winterhalters in bright conflagration. The brass ashtrays melting into the gutter, and flaming disarray. Downstairs the shop door rattled again.
‘How long have you been married?’ he demanded. He didn’t care in the least how long Mrs McKechnie had been married, but it was preferable to her talking about the shop burning down.
There was a little cluster of birthmarks on her shoulder, drifting away into the buffer-zone of her cardigan. In a great rush, as if there was only a limited amount of time in which these confessions could be made, she said, ‘I met him when I was seventeen. I bet that surprises you. A young girl like me falling for an old man like that. I daresay I was a fool. We used to have a shop in Camberwell. And after that we sold horse-brasses in Ewell village. But Edgar said they were all stuffed shirts and retired majors and so we came here.’
He was lost in this world. Camberwell. Ewell village. It might as well have been the moon. The American had not come for a week now, and the five-pound notes had been spent. Mrs McKechnie was still talking, but in a more mannered style, like a film-star dictating her memoirs to a stenographer.
‘Edgar’s not such a bad old sort in his way. His own sweet way. I won’t have you making jokes about him. He’s been very good to me. There are some women don’t have half the freedom. I daresay he takes a drop too much sometimes. I don’t hold that against him. We can’t all be perfect. Last Christmas he took me to Denbighshire and we stayed in a hotel. I call that nice, don’t you?’
He was about to make his way onto the landing when he realised that he was still in his stockinged feet. Somehow his shoes had ended up under the bed. There was comfort in putting them on: a return to routine; a way out of Mrs McKechnie’s mottled boudoir, her sinewy clutch. He would not go there again, he thought. There was something voracious about Mrs McKechnie, some deeper hunger that went beyond physical desire, which alarmed him. Mrs McKechnie was still talking about her Christmas in Rhyl.