by D. J. Taylor
This warning had been uttered so many times during Cynthia’s adolescence, had been pronounced over so many variegated female heads, that its implications were unguessable. It could mean that the person referred to was clinically insane, mildly unwell, or simply in a bad temper. Cynthia had no idea what it implied in relation to Hermione. But she said, rather gamely in the circumstances, ‘You must be very glad about Walter.’
‘Oh, that,’ Mrs Bannister said. They could hear Hermione’s footsteps rattling away on the staircase, like some Pied Piper calling her charges to destruction among the attics.
It was difficult to tell what had gone wrong with Ashburton Grange in the three months since she had last been there. The glass still sparkled on its mahogany sideboards. There were still the photographs of ancestral Bannisters, posed athwart slaughtered tigers, to divert the eye. The Carlton Club lecture list and the hunt-ball invitations still marched bras dessous, bras dessous across the mantelpiece. But not even the arrival of Mr Bannister at his most piratical, so that one almost expected to see a cutlass rather than a watch-and-chain dangling from his waistcoat, could dispel the faint air of desuetude that hung over the place.
It was a moot point as to whether Mr Bannister had been warned of Cynthia’s arrival, but at any rate he took it like a trouper, came skilfully to attention on the drawing-room carpet and made a kind of pawing motion at her shoulder which, had it come from a man thirty years younger, would have been rewarded with a slap round the ear.
‘Cynthia,’ he said. ‘You are always welcome here. We were lamenting just the other day that we saw so little of you.’
There was a terrible bogusness about this, so much so that she almost expected a trap door to spring open and plunge her into some icy lagoon reserved for those unfortunates on whom the Bannisters had pronounced their curse. But the floorboards were still solid beneath her feet.
Still looking like the heavy father in an Edwardian comedy, Mr Bannister went on: ‘And how are your parents? Are they still removed from these shores?’ It was extraordinary how Mr Bannister had come by these antique phrases. He must have read them in a book. Or perhaps someone had said something patriotic in the House that afternoon and this had turned his head.
‘Father is getting on nicely, thank you,’ she said. This was the official line from Mrs Kirkpatrick. ‘Of course, they would like to come home. But the Channel shipping is very precarious.’
‘Between you and me, danger from that quarter is exaggerated,’ Mr Bannister said, who now seemed to be modelling himself on Metternich at the Congress of Vienna. ‘I don’t think our friend Adolf has much interest in the British merchant fleet.’
Somehow it was not the ‘our friend Adolf’ that irked but the expressions on the faces of the other Bannisters. Mrs Bannister looked, if not exactly admiring, then comradely, proud to be in this together. Hermione, who had lashed a bandeau round her bulging forehead again, gave a little village halfwit’s simper.
‘I heard a dreadful story today,’ Mr Bannister said. ‘Can’t think how I wasn’t told it before. Lord Falconhurst’s girl. Minna, I think her name is. Well, Minna had been spending a lot of time in Berlin. Very keen on Anglo-German fellowship. Might even have been engaged to a German, chap who told me thought. Anyway, when she heard that war had been declared she was so affected that she walked into the Englischer garten and shot herself in the head. Only the wound wasn’t fatal. Just damaged her brain in some way. They brought her home in an ambulance a week before Christmas. But do you know what I think was a nice gesture? Apparently Falconhurst tried to reimburse the travelling expenses, but the Führer wouldn’t hear of it.’
‘Poor Minna Falconhurst,’ Hermione said, thoughtfully. ‘She used to have such lovely hair. But I expect it’s all had to be cut off now.’
After that they went in to dinner.
It was in the Bannisters’ dining room that what had gone wrong with Ashburton Grange over the past three months came plainly into view, for they dined off grilled anchovies on toast and shepherd’s pie handed round by a maidservant, and the bottle of thin claret that lay on the sideboard was uncorked and decanted by Mr Bannister himself.
‘We had to let two of the girls go,’ Mrs Bannister explained, looking suddenly like her old burra memsahib self, back in the gardens of some colonial bungalow. ‘I think they’re working at the munitions factory outside Chichester. And of course you can’t get a footman now for love nor money. Half the agencies have closed down.’
And Cynthia thought of Minna Falconhurst, whom she had seen once at a party, plain and indignant behind her three beautiful sisters, with the blood streaming over her hands onto the turf of the Englischer garten. The dinner was so awful, what with the intensity of its silences and the implications of its chatter, that she could have screamed. But then, when she came back to earth, she realised that it was merely the Bannisters at table: Mr Bannister, whom she had known all her life, been chaffed by, waved off in cars by, even, on one dreadful occasion, bought a frock by, playing the heavy father in the company of his wife and daughter.
It was the same with the magnitude of the task she was bent on accomplishing, which in the context of the house and the Bannisters and her relationship with it and them had no magnitude at all and was simply a kind of gargantuan practical joke, like those weekend parties in country houses where you went about at dead of night stealing people’s chamber-pots and putting salt-cellars in their beds. Here at Ashburton Grange, with Victorian Bannisters grinning from their frames, with the scent of Henry filling the air like marsh gas, she could not make any connection between the address book—if indeed there was one—lying in Mr Bannister’s study drawer and the tumbling world beyond. Someone else could do that. Her own aims, if they were aims, could not be disentangled from the personal resentment she felt. The fate of Europe was one thing. But it had nothing on her hatred for her hosts.
Mr Bannister, meanwhile, was clearly pregnant with some great secret. When the remains of the anchovies had gone out, and the shepherd’s pie lay congealing on the plates before them, he said, ‘I think I can safely say that within a fortnight’s time we shall have a settlement.’
‘Good gracious,’ Mrs Bannister said, turning over something nasty-looking that had come to rest between her knife and fork. ‘You’re not saying that Chamberlain isn’t safe?’
‘I’m not saying that at all,’ Mr Bannister said. He could not quite decide whether he was playing the great statesman or the confidential husband. ‘Only that I have it on very good authority that a peace proposal will be coming in soon by way of one of the neutral embassies. Something concrete. Of the kind that would provoke an outcry were it to be ignored. Something that would really put the warmongers on the back foot.’
After that the entertainment lapsed, and they had to make do with Hermione, who had clearly decided to turn the second half of the meal into a showcase for her dramatic talents. During the eating of the shepherd’s pie she played the part of the young ingénue, confused and chastened by the world’s enticing snares. Then, when the dessert was brought in, she switched to the role of hard-bitten politician’s confidante, dishing up a row of Cabinet heads on their metaphorical salvers. To all this Mr Bannister attended benignly and Mrs Bannister with what passed for tolerance. But there came a moment when even Hermione went too far.
‘Isn’t Dr Goebbels nice-looking?’ she said. ‘I saw a picture of him in The Times and thought how nice he looked.’
‘I think that will do, Hermione,’ Mr Bannister said.
‘I don’t see why I shouldn’t say if I think a man’s good-looking.’
‘Hermione,’ Mrs Bannister warned.
‘Do you know something?’ Hermione said, jumping to her feet in a gesture that was, for once, genuinely dramatic. ‘I hate you all. I shall ring up Walter and get him to take me away from all this.’
After she had gone, Mr Bannister said with immense gl
oominess, grim and predatory beneath the raw light that burned off the wall behind him: ‘I think I ought to say, in case there should be any doubt, that Hermione is certainly not going to marry Walter Partridge. Nor anyone else, I should imagine, if she carries on like that.’
Come the morning, Hermione had still not calmed down and Cynthia was left to her own devices. There were blue-black clouds massing towards the sea and the landscape looked as uninviting as any she had seen outside Ceylon in the rains, but she put on an ancient Inverness cape that someone had left parcelled up in the vestibule and trudged gamely around the estate.
Lichen was beginning to grow on Henry’s memorial stone and the descent of some heavy object had chipped one of its corners, but she stared at it dutifully for a moment while the wind blew her hair into her face and the dogs howled listlessly in their kennels. Back inside, she did her best to appear unobtrusive. This was not hard, as nobody appeared to want to take any notice of her at all.
For a house with so few people in it, Ashburton Grange seemed extremely chaotic. The telephone bell rang every ten minutes, two telegraph boys arrived within the space of half an hour, and there was an unexpected visit from the Chairman of the Arundel and South Downs Conservative Party. While Mr Bannister dealt with these interruptions, Mrs Bannister sat on the drawing-room sofa, made a nuisance of herself with the parlourmaids, and affected to read the same page of the Bystander for two hours at a stretch.
In these circumstances it was nearly inevitable that Cynthia should find herself in Henry’s old room: no longer a shrine to his memory, it turned out, but a repository for sets of fire-irons, old packing cases, and other miscellaneous junk. But there were still sufficient traces of Henry’s personality to give her pause for thought: a pair of monogrammed cuff-links that had come to rest under a chair; the ancient shotgun he had taught her to shoot with; a row of boys’ school stories; Loeb editions of Hesiod and Xenophon that no one had bothered to return to Balliol College library.
In one of them she found what was fairly evidently a draft of a love letter, its subject indisputably not herself, not at all sparing in its physical detail, and the effect was so unsettling that she simply sat on the single high-backed armchair that remained in the room and stared at it: not because she was jealous of the other girl, or angry with Henry for wanting to sleep with her, or shocked by the language that he brought to his anticipation of the task, but because she could not connect the words with the person she knew had written them.
The copies of The Liveliest Term at Templeton and The White House Boys stared back at her, and she thought that there were whole areas of English life that she had altogether failed to understand, that there was some vital qualification missing from her repertoire that would have enabled her to better comprehend Henry Bannister and his kind, to sympathise with them, and deal with them, and not be so discountenanced by their actions or the letters they wrote to anonymous girls, with (apparently) enormous breasts, that they left lying around in Loeb editions of Xenophon for people to stumble on after their deaths.
At various times during her years in the East, on mildewed verandas set back from the maidan, up-country in Ceylon, in broken-backed armchairs in ships’ libraries tacking across the Indian Ocean, Cynthia had read novels about weekends in English country houses, where girls in jumpers and tweed skirts ate chocolates in front of a roaring fire and laid bare their most intimate secrets. But life at Ashburton Grange could not aspire to this exacting paradigm. You either had to listen to Mrs Bannister discussing the rubbish in the Bystander, or Hermione talking about nightclubs she had pretty obviously not been to, men she had pretty obviously not met, and the particular man that she was pretty clearly not going to marry. And all the time the momentous task Cynthia was bent on accomplishing hung in the air before her, terrifying her and exhilarating her by turns.
As for the obstacles lying in the way of her expedition, these removed themselves almost at a stroke. Shortly after lunch the sky cleared and Mr and Mrs Bannister declared their intention of taking the car into Arundel on some unspecified errand. Hermione, launched onto another of her roles—that of the galumphing country girl with much to accomplish—announced that she would clean out the kennels. Even Mrs Bannister seemed surprised at this. But the upshot was that at three o’clock Cynthia found herself in the dining room, a half-drunk cup of coffee in her lap, a picture of the Duke of Connaught on Torquay seafront staring up at her from Mrs Bannister’s copy of the Bystander, and around her an empty house.
Mr Bannister’s study was at the end of a serpentine corridor, preceded by various billiard-rooms and store cupboards, on the opposite side of the house. No difficulty there. Remembering a film she had once seen in which a rebellious schoolgirl had robbed her headmistress’s trophy cabinet, she took off her shoes to negotiate it. The study door was half-open and she ducked under the lintel and closed it behind her.
Here, as she expected, there was nothing to surprise her. Apart from a few trifling idiosyncrasies of decor and ornament, Mr Bannister’s study was exactly like every other gentleman’s study she had been into. There was a picture of Henry in a gilt frame on the desk—a toothy and faintly scrofulous Henry who might then have been about eighteen—a group portrait of the Bannister children, out of which Hermione’s face stared like a giant vegetable, and several other photographs of Mr Bannister on horses, in the uniform of a Territorial Army colonel, dyspeptic at a banquet and wearing a rather ridiculous cocked hat. She was used to this, reassured by it, so comforted by the ordinariness of it that she found herself examining the bookshelves to see if, among the copies of The War in the Air and the memoirs of General Haig, there were smaller, incriminating volumes with titles like Behind Convent Walls and Hard-hearted Hannah.
But there was nothing like this, and in some ways its absence lowered Mr Bannister a further rung in her estimation. The drawers of the desk were unlocked. Beyond the window rain had begun to lash the Bannisters’ melancholy garden. In the third of the drawers, beneath a pile of stationery and a stapling machine, exactly as Anthea had predicted, she found the thing she had come to find. It was a slender volume, no bigger than a diary, bound in red leather, embossed across the spine with the letters ‘PJ’ in gold, and secured by a metal clasp with a tiny lock. She hunted for the key for a moment, but there was nothing else in the drawer except myriad paper clips. Well, Anthea could worry about that.
She was just replacing the stationery, and balancing the stapling machine on top of it at the same 45-degree angle, when something else nosed out into view from its hiding place between two sheets of notepaper. This was a letter, apparently sent from the Foreign Ministry in Berlin, addressed to Mr Bannister, or rather Herr Bannister, dated six weeks before, written in dignified but not absolutely flawless English, and signed by no less a correspondent than von Ribbentrop.
For a second or two she gazed despairingly at the letter. Half of her recoiled from it, found it almost painful to the touch, as if it might burn her fingers if she held on to it. The other half knew that Anthea would never forgive her if she left it there. For this, whatever gloss that Herr Bannister might like to put on it, was treason. After another second or two, while the rain continued to lash the Bannisters’ melancholy garden and drummed on the window, she stuffed it into the pocket of her skirt.
She found, rather to her surprise, that she was exalted by what she had done and what Anthea would say about it. The book, she now saw, was small enough to conceal in the neck of her sweater, provided she kept a hand in the vicinity. She had reached the end of the corridor, and was almost in sight of the staircase, when there was a rustle of Lisle stockings and one of the parlourmaids—the glamorous, sullen one—slunk into view.
‘Were you wanting anything, miss?’
‘No,’ would have been inadmissible. No one could possibly be returning along the approach road to Mr Bannister’s lair unless they wanted something. The book was pressed hard against the ga
p between her throat and her breast-bone. Instead she said, ‘I was looking for Mr Bannister.’
‘He’s gone out, miss, and Mrs Bannister with him.’ It was not, perhaps, meant to sound insinuating, but somehow it did so. ‘Can I get you anything?’
‘No, thank you.’
Back in her bedroom, with the parlourmaid’s tread uncomfortably close on the staircase nearby, she searched for a hiding place. Under the bed was too obvious, she thought. In the end she wrapped the book up in a chiffon scarf and hid it at the bottom of her suitcase. Her hands were shaking and she remembered lying in the wrecked car bawling for Henry while the noise of the jungle fizzed and echoed around her.
When she had calmed down, she decided to read the letter. This was not as easy as it appeared, for it was written in a kind of code, referred to previous communications whose significance eluded her and was light on background detail. On the other hand it seemed to have less to do with peace proposals than with assurances of the high regard in which Mr Bannister was held by the German Foreign Ministry and the opportunities that might be available to him in some vague and unspecific war-free future.
There was also, about halfway through, a curious, and rather slighting, reference to Captain Ramsay, and mention of the latter’s ‘futile manoeuvrings,’ all of which led her to wonder whether Mr Bannister might not be playing some game of his own, infinitely more sinister and deserving of exposure. After a few minutes more she folded the letter up into a tiny square, hid it under the book, went downstairs and returned to the drawing room.
Here, just as she entered it, the telephone began to ring. It continued to ring, parlourmaid or no parlourmaid, and there seemed no reason why she should not pick it up. After a certain amount of scrabbling and the sound of the operator neighing in the background, a man’s voice, oddly familiar and carrying some echo of the room in which she now stood, said: ‘Is Mr Bannister there?’