by D. J. Taylor
He sat at the back and smoked a cigarette until it was time to get off, looking backwards and forwards along the aisle of the bus, measuring the potential threat of the people he saw. There was a man with a gas mask reading the Daily Sketch who let him walk down the gangway in front of him and the gesture terrified him and he ran to get away.
Oxford Street was crowded, with heat spreading out from the shop entrances and expensive-looking women in fur coats coming in and out of doorways, and he went gladly into the throng, as if it was a football crowd assembling for match day. Here he could disappear, far away from Ikey, the American, whoever else might be on his trail. There was a bottleneck of people halfway along all trying to get into a radio shop as another group tried to get out, full of old ladies with monstrous black hats and coats that made them look like crows, and he bumped into the man with the Daily Sketch, who seemed somehow to have accompanied him down the street.
He knew now that the man with the Daily Sketch had him in his sights, and the realisation made him increase his pace, only to find that the man increased his own pace to keep up with him. He went another fifty yards along Oxford Street without looking back, but the sensation that he was being followed burned up in him. There were shop doorways crying out for him to hide himself, but he could hear the footsteps behind him and knew that an enclosed space would be his ruin.
Suddenly there were fewer people around and the evil old ladies seemed to have disappeared. He had a sudden feeling, cancelling out all his previous schemes, that he ought to stow himself away somewhere, that he was too conspicuous out in this street with all the shoppers passing by and staring at him, that something dreadful and unnegotiable lurked around the corner ready to destroy him.
Just then another man stopped in front of him and said in the pleasantest possible way, ‘Excuse me, sir, I think you dropped this,’ and as he turned to look—Mrs McKechnie was in his mind somewhere, and Ikey with his Roquefort-veined forehead, and the American with his mock-machine-gun spray—the man with the Daily Sketch came up behind him, jerked his arm up behind his back in an agonising twist, and held him fast.
Chapter 18
Returning
On the morning of the afternoon on which she was due to travel down to Ashburton Grange, two disagreeable things happened, each of which involved, in one way or another, the shattering of an illusion. The wonder was that neither of these had anything to do with Tyler Kent. But then, as Cynthia later reflected, most of her illusions regarding Tyler Kent had long since been blown into fragments.
Since the beginning of the New Year a change had come over the Bloomsbury square. It was as if, to put the matter mechanistically, the life of the quarter had somehow rattled on while most of the personnel involved had been redeployed or moved to subsidiary establishments far away. The crocodile of schoolchildren and their attendant wraith had gone, no one knew where. In their place came squads of tall, blue-chinned foreigners, thought, like the Poles in the Percy Street pub, to be foreign airmen, who practised extraordinarily vigorous physical jerks on a patch of bare earth in the corner of the square gardens. Meanwhile the army lorries continued to thunder past at the rate of six or seven an hour.
All this realised an air of purposeful activity whose implications, to the onlookers of the Duration office, were practically moral. As Desmond had once put it, with his hand curved guiltily around a bottle of Algerian red wine left over from the party: ‘Looking out of a window and finding something going on in which one isn’t directly involved always makes me uneasy. It’s as if one is being judged for absenting oneself. Like watching the fifteen in training at school when one had a sprained ankle. I like a landscape to be a landscape. Half the reason the Romantic movement in art collapsed is to do with motorised transport. Constable could never have painted a charabanc.’
There was a suspicion, never openly voiced either inside the office or out of it, that Desmond was losing his grip.
It was about a quarter to eleven, and neither the editor of Duration nor its proprietor had yet arrived. Mr Woodmansee, on the other hand, had been at his desk for the past hour and a half. He was a tall, spare, austere-looking man, dressed unselfconsciously in a morning coat and striped trousers, whose task, as Peter Wildgoose had put it, was ‘to make us all a little more aware of our financial responsibilities.’ Whatever his achievements in raising fiscal awareness, Mr Woodmansee’s arrival in the outer office had had one unlooked-for effect, which was to dispel the faint air of moral laxity that had hung there since the previous autumn. In fact, the girls were quite daunted by his presence.
For some reason nobody, seeing him at his desk in the far corner of the room, felt like discussing the party they had been to the previous night or the man they had danced with the previous weekend. Conversation either became anodyne or lapsed altogether. For his own part Mr Woodmansee ate occasional pink-wafer biscuits out of a tin kept in his briefcase, looked at the cartoons in Punch with an expression of absolute impassivity, and did his best to laugh at jokes.
Brow furrowed over her desk, a pile of booksellers’ invoices to hand as camouflage, the light from the bulb above her head making queer patterns on the arms of her dun-coloured cardigan, Cynthia thought about Ashburton Grange, the Bannisters, and the task that loomed before her. The difficulty, she knew, lay in choosing a context in which to frame her part in it, and denied this resource she alternated between finding it irresistibly funny and horribly sinister. It was like a Ruritanian romance, except that the figure in coloured tights at the end of the drawbridge, cutlass raised and knife clenched between his teeth, was Mr Bannister.
None of these imaginings had been helped by the postcard that Hermione had sent her yesterday, which read: Longing to see you. So much to tell you about. What had Hermione done in the weeks since they had last met that she had to tell her about, she wondered? Joined a glee-singing club in Hampstead Garden Suburb? Engaged herself to the butler? Anything was possible. She had a vision of Hermione’s fat, discontented, over-sized face—like a woman in a modernist painting, where all the proportions were deliberately mismanaged—and felt appalled at the prospect of having to spend time with her.
The thought oppressed her so much that she tipped over the tray of invoices—white, melancholy documents addressed to Bumpus and Heywood Hill—and had to go down on her knees to retrieve them, while Anthea and Lucy—anchorites now, insensible to diversion—stared at the space above her head. As she straightened up and returned the invoices to their tray, she heard a male voice speak her name.
‘Yes, Mr Woodmansee?’
‘I was wondering, Miss Kirkpatrick,’ Mr Woodmansee said—he looked more than ever like the bursar at her old school—‘if you could identify this signature for me?’
‘I’ll do my best. Where is it?’
But Mr Woodmansee did not like relinquishing documents from his grasp. He laid out the bill—it was from a wine merchant, and six weeks old—reverently on his desk, and let her look at it over his shoulder. Close up he smelt of mothballs, Churchman’s pipe tobacco, and, incongruously enough, patchouli.
‘I think it must be Desmond’s—Mr Rafferty’s.’
‘I confess that that was my assumption,’ Mr Woodmansee said, giving a little vulpine grin to show that he meant to be humorous. ‘But this is an exceptional specimen, surely, even for him?’
This was a new side to Mr Woodmansee: a bright, capering spirit come to confound the workaday accessories of bank-book and cash-tin. Cynthia was wondering if he knew any more tricks of this kind—might be about to jump on the mantelpiece or sing a comic song—when there was a noise of footsteps on the stair. Instantly Mr Woodmansee seized up the sheet of paper in both hands and looked for a file to stow it in. Clearly the smile had been a mistake. Any levity that had passed between them was at an end. The dust-motes swarmed in the air and the outer door rattled in its frame.
‘That’ll be Des,’ Anthea said. ‘Provid
ed he’s managed to tear himself away from Mrs G.’
Desmond’s courtship of Mrs Gurvitz was the great joke of the office. People waited for him to start talking about her, like auxiliary firemen anticipating the sirens’ call. She was supposed to be putting up the money for a galleries supplement. But it was not Desmond. Instead a dark-skinned young man with extraordinarily white teeth and wavy, blue-black hair came sidling into the room.
‘Hello, Tambi,’ Anthea said, with the air of one who sees the pulse of life quickening around her. ‘How are you?’
Just as the staff of the Duration office had been added to in the four weeks since Christmas, so had its extraneous personnel. Sylvester Del Mar was a distant memory, entombed behind the hospital wall. In his place came a tribe of aspiring writers Desmond had met at parties or had pointed out to him in Soho. Tambi was one of these. He had arrived in England on a boat from Ceylon six months before with a letter of introduction to T. S. Eliot, wrote colourful articles about the poetry of the New Apocalypse, and was, as Desmond remarked, more adept at borrowing money than anyone he had ever met.
‘I am very well,’ Tambi said, a bit stiffly. He was wary of Anthea. ‘But it is very cold. I do not find it at all conducive to my work.’
‘You should wear more clothes,’ Lucy said encouragingly. ‘An overcoat, or one of those nice duffels that Jaeger sells.’
All the girls were solicitous of Tambi, far more so than they had ever been of Sylvester Del Mar.
‘That is an excellent suggestion,’ Tambi said. He spoke precise, old-world English, like the natives in E. M. Forster. ‘In fact Mr Rafferty has kindly offered to bestow upon me a greatcoat for which he has no further use.’
‘Good old Des,’ Anthea said. ‘I expect he borrowed it from someone else, but it’s a kind thought.’
‘Yes … yes,’ Tambi said. He looked hopelessly woebegone, as if no material comfort could ever soothe the spiritual oppression from which he suffered.
‘But what about your work?’ Lucy asked. ‘Have you met anyone interesting?’
Tambi perked up immediately. He liked nothing better than to be asked about his adventures in literary London. ‘It is kind of you to ask, yes. I attended a most fascinating evening at the house of Mr Charles Morgan, in the course of which Sir Hugh Walpole did me the honour of saying that he had read and admired my poems.’
For her own part, Cynthia was bored with Tambi. In all her years in Ceylon, she had never heard of the Sinhalese dynasty whose heir he claimed to be. Instead she thought about Tyler Kent, who on the last time they had met, a week ago now, had shown a certain amount of interest in her trip to Ashburton Grange.
‘Why on earth are you going there?’ he wondered. ‘I thought you couldn’t stand Hermione.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she had said. ‘She’s rather amusing in small doses, don’t you think?’
There was something mysterious going on at the Embassy, about which Tyler Kent could not be drawn.
‘And then,’ Tambi continued, ‘I was most fortunate to be asked to the house of the Honourable Mrs Pelly, and to read some of my work to her guests.’
There was no knowing how long this might go on. On a previous visit Tambi had spent twenty minutes discussing a fancy-dress party he had been to at Cyril Connolly’s flat. Glancing at Mr Woodmansee, Cynthia saw that he was staring at Tambi with a look of absolute bewilderment, as if he could not comprehend the lineaments of a world that set him to work in a room where a Sinhalese prince with blue-black hair talked about Hugh Walpole. It was Anthea who decided to break the spell.
‘I’m afraid we’re all rather busy, Tambi,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to come back later. But do give me anything you want to leave for Mr Rafferty and I’ll make sure he sees it.’
Sylvester Del Mar would have found half a dozen ways of prolonging this interview, of minting some satirical remark that would have kept the ball rolling for another minute or two. But Tambi was not in this category of pest. Reluctantly, as if a small part of his soul was being yielded up in the transaction, he took a wad of grimy paper out of the inside pocket of his jacket and passed it across.
‘And if Desmond should come up with that greatcoat,’ Anthea said, ‘I’ll be sure to let you know. It’s the Meard Street address, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, yes, Meard Street. Please to give Mr Rafferty my humble good wishes.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Anthea said.
After he had gone an air of gloom settled over the office.
‘The worst of it all is that the people Tambi thinks it wonderful to meet are so passé,’ Anthea said, ‘and one never dares tell him.’
There was no getting away from this: its implications hung in the air like a gas-cloud. A bit later she went into Desmond’s office and left the wad of grimy paper on the desk next to an invitation card for a reception at the Danish Embassy and a pamphlet entitled War Never Pays. Cynthia, her mind still roving through the corridors of Ashburton Grange, found that the absurdity of what she proposed to do now terrified her. On the other hand she knew that if she did not do it Anthea would never forgive her: Anthea had said as much.
It was about a quarter-past eleven, and great stretches of time seemed to be passing before them. Somebody went out and bought a paper which said that 140 Conservative MPs wanted to put down an early day motion criticising the Government’s conduct of the war, and which had a picture of the King inspecting ARP wardens in Stoke Poges. A man from the printers brought a box containing early copies of the February number and left it on the carpet next to Cynthia’s desk. Outside it began to rain, and the water raised thin, snail-like trails on the window panes. In another half-hour, she thought, if the going was good, she would fetch her suitcase—this was propped up against the coat-stand—and make haste for Waterloo.
There was a conspiratorial glint in Anthea’s eye and Cynthia glanced back. Anthea had put her up to this. Anthea had made her aware of her moral duty. Anthea would reap whatever displeasure it threw up. Whatever it cost her, Anthea would pay her share.
The invoices to Bumpus and Heywood Hill were all in their envelopes now, awaiting dispatch, and nothing could be done with Desmond’s last lot of letters until he signed them. The light was still splashing off the sleeves of her cardigan, and for some reason she thought of her mother’s green, sea-horse face bobbing around the Colombo kitchen. The box containing the advance copies of the February issue was half-open, and she reached into it and drew one out. The funeral urn with its attendant cupids and incidental inscriptions (Duration: A Monthly Review of Art and Letters: Edited by Desmond Rafferty) stared up at her.
Most of the contents were advertised on the cover: ‘The Symbolist’s Challenge’; ‘Two New Poets’; ‘Kierkegaard versus Kafka.’ There would be no surprises here. Not quite knowing why she did it—boredom having long since descended—she turned to Desmond’s editorial, which was about the shame of being a non-combatant when all one’s friends were in uniform, and found, to her surprise, that it was not about this subject at all.
From any kind of progressive standpoint, Desmond had written in his final paragraph, the monarchical prerogative were better not exercised at all. But on this occasion we can thank His Majesty for giving a lead where one was sorely needed.
For a moment she thought that this transformation was simply a piece of magic. Then she realised that Des must have jettisoned the existing editorial at some late stage in the proceedings and substituted the stuff about the monarchical prerogative and its exercise. Cynthia found that this piece of duplicity shocked her profoundly, and that it seemed to her on a level with forging someone’s signature. She read the paragraph above it and discovered that Desmond thought the war almost entirely a bad thing and called for ‘progressive forces’—whatever they were—to work for its being brought (‘honourably’) to a halt.
She wondered what Peter Wildgoose thought about this, and rea
lised that it diverged so markedly from his own view of the war that he could not possibly have seen it. Mr Woodmansee had disappeared somewhere and Anthea and Lucy were having a conversation about somebody called Marjorie Chevenix-Trench, and the unexploded bomb that lay on her desk sat quietly ticking, unnoticed by anyone except herself. There will be trouble about this, she thought, terrible, terrible trouble.
Worse even than this was the fact that the trouble was connected to other trouble, to the King’s voice heard on the radio that Christmas Day in The Bell at Aston Clinton, to Anthea’s pale, serious face bent over the table of the Bloomsbury café, to Norman Burdett with his head smashed in on the Jermyn Street pavement, to the pearl waiting to be plucked from the oyster of Mr Bannister’s study, and to the small matter of herself. The rain swept in against the window, a little scream broke from above the ceiling as the dentist’s drill did its work, and she thought of Mr Bannister, wax-faced and malign, looming over her in the Colombo drawing room, and what might happen if the plan went wrong.
And trouble there was, though it was preceded by a different kind of trouble that had nothing to do with Duration and was exclusive to herself. A moment or so after she had put the copy of the magazine back into its box, Desmond came into the office. There was some doubt, what with the arrival of Mrs Gurvitz in his life, as to where Desmond might currently be living, who was looking after his clothes, whether, in fact, he had any kind of settled domestic existence at all.
‘Poor old Des is worse than when he was at school,’ Peter Wildgoose had pronounced. ‘Much worse. At least then he had buttons on his shirt.’
This particular morning he was wearing a pair of green corduroy trousers, patent-leather evening shoes, and an overcoat so decrepit that there was a hint of verdigris on its collar. White-faced, but with patches of red, tomato-coloured skin on his neck, he looked horribly ill at ease, but also completely indifferent to the effect he might have on the people around him.