by D. J. Taylor
‘I’m afraid they’re all out,’ Cynthia said, and then remembering the prescriptions of her upbringing, ‘this is Cynthia Kirkpatrick.’
‘How do you do, Miss Kirkpatrick?’ the voice went on, not uncourteously. ‘Delighted to speak to you again. Captain Ramsay here. Could you ask Mr Bannister to telephone me when he gets in?’
‘Certainly.’
‘Tell him something important has come up.’
‘I’ll do that.’
‘Goodbye then.’
‘Yes, yes, goodbye.’ There was something so awful about the coincidence of Captain Ramsay telephoning at the precise moment after she had returned from reading von Ribbentrop’s low opinion of him that all her sangfroid disappeared and she sprawled on the sofa clenching and unclenching her fists. It was here that Hermione found her when she came back from the kennels.
‘Having a nap, eh?’ Hermione said. She was still doing her stable-girl routine. ‘Do you know, I went and gave the horses a rub-down as well and I’m absolutely certain that Creditor has a spavined hock. Father will be simply furious at having to get the vet out again.’
Later they had tea in front of the dying fire and Hermione talked some more about Walter Partridge and the nature of his duties at RAF Coastal Command, which was all horribly dull but at any rate a relief from Captain Ramsay, the book with the letters ‘PJ’ embossed on its spine, and the letter from Herr von Ribbentrop concealed in her suitcase.
Meanwhile, there was the rest of the weekend to get through. Whatever Mr and Mrs Bannister had or had not done in Arundel had put them into unimaginably foul tempers, but Mr Bannister cheered up at the news of Captain Ramsay’s telephone call, went away to return it and was not seen again until dinner. In the evening they played bezique in the drawing room while the rain beat against the window frames and she thought about the contraband in the suitcase.
What were the chances of Mr Bannister going to examine his study drawer between now and Sunday lunchtime? And even if he noticed the contents were gone, what were the chances of his associating their disappearance with her? She had a feeling they were unwarrantedly high.
There was a train leaving Arundel Station at 11 to which the Bannisters had promised to convey her. She tipped the glamorous but sulky parlourmaid a whole ten shillings, which might have been regarded as an admission of guilt. The wind was raging across the gravel drive, bending the stunted larches at its further end nearly in two, and the Bannisters, father, mother, and daughter, assembled in the hallway to see her off.
‘It was jolly good of you to come all this way,’ Hermione said, as if, against all evidence to the contrary, it had been a weekend full of late nights and spectacular entertainment. Mrs Bannister was unexpectedly subdued. Mr Bannister teetered on his big, ungainly feet, as if a single push would send him flying. The door was half-open and the car in which Hermione had volunteered to drive her to Arundel twenty feet away on the gravel, so that she could see that the RAC badge was badly tarnished, and she was shaking hands—Hermione’s fingers were still whorled with dirt, as if she had spent the night labouring far underground—when Mr Bannister, looming into the space between door and jamb, said unexpectedly:
‘It pains me to have to say this, Cynthia, but I think you have two pieces of rather valuable property of mine.’
She had no idea if the other Bannisters were in on the act, nor any way of stopping her face from turning bright red.
‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I really am terribly afraid, Cynthia, that I am going to have to ask you to turn out your suitcase.’
‘Gracious,’ she heard herself saying emphatically, ‘I never heard anything so ridiculous.’
But Mr Bannister had the case in his hands now. He looked more than ever like a pirate: mad, grim, unappeasable, up to no good.
She gave a little tug at his elbow and had it briskly rebuffed. Mrs Bannister gave one of her mad-terrier barks. In the end the suitcase fell on the floor, disgorging two pairs of directoire knickers, the pot of home-made jam that Mrs Bannister had loftily presented her with at breakfast, the book in its crimson binding, and Herr von Ribbentrop’s letter. Henry Bannister’s dead face stared up at her from the jungle floor and behind her the door slammed shut.
Chapter 19
Emerald Isle
In Dublin it is raining. Relentless, implacable rain, like something out of a Victorian novel. Merrion Square is awash under what looks like off-colour gravy: turning into Mount Street, the taxi sends up a sheet of water four feet high. The Grand Canal gleams beneath them. From the back seat, squeezed in between his two companions, Captain Ramsay eyes the wet streets with misgiving.
Dublin, he suspects, is not his kind of place. There is too much history, but of the wrong kind. Even the street names—Wolf Tone Quay, Parnell Place—carry a freight of mockery, that grinning Hibernian contempt for discipline and order. Gaunt Victorian architecture and rebel posturing: it is like London gone wrong, turned Gothic and sinister. But there is more to his unease than the Catholic cathedrals and memorials to famine, dull Irish faces and newspapers for whom an overturned pony and trap on the Maynooth Road is a very serious business, while the news from Europe rates a paragraph on the inside page.
Something tells Captain Ramsay that he has made a mistake in coming here, this February Sunday, and would much better have stayed away, or sent Bannister in his stead, were it not for the fact that Bannister seemed very anxious not to attend this particular excursion. It is not just the complexity of the journey, and the necessity to hide up incognito in a vile little commercial hotel in Mulholland rather than a respectable establishment in Temple Bar, but something else, not quite frameable, always hanging a little way beyond the taxi as it surges along the Shelburne Road.
Like the Gothic pinnacles, the Dublin cab drivers are a throwback to another world. You can imagine them on the box of a stagecoach, gathering up the traces of a four-in-hand. There is a ghostliness about their vigour, a sense of being fetched up somewhere beyond the place they really want to be. Captain Ramsay thinks that he can sympathise with this. Half the world’s problems, he sometimes tells himself, are down to creeping modernity.
Beyond the Shelburne Road there is scarcely any traffic at all. A few ancient touring cars labouring into Mass at St Patrick’s. Picturesque provision carts transporting God knows what to God knows where. A handful of girls, be-hatted and wearing long floral skirts beneath their mackintoshes, on bicycles. Dr Clavane, who has previously been half-asleep behind the Sunday Press, perks up at this and stares over the top of his thick spectacles.
‘The finest peasantry in Europe,’ he says, the hint of mischief in this voice daring anyone to take him wholly seriously. ‘But the stage Irishman, you know, is self-created. The Victorians came looking for local colour, and by God the natives were determined to let them have it. Just like the agricultural labourers in Dorset. Didn’t somebody once say that after Hardy they all went about behaving like artists’ models?’
Dr Clavane is always saying things like this—little seeds of quasi-intellectual inquiry, fated to fall on stony ground. Captain Ramsay isn’t interested. Amery, on the other hand, still sprawled against his shoulder, is merely ignorant. He has probably never heard of Hardy, although, Ramsay thinks, he could probably claim acquaintance with one or two artists’ models.
‘Of course,’ Dr Clavane declares, ‘Ireland is going to have to play its part in the new Europe. It’s a pity de Valera can’t make up his mind which it ought to be.’
Dr Clavane has some curious ideas about Europe. It is almost like the Federal Union people, yet more atavistic, as if some new Charlemagne is suddenly going to rise up and subjugate a dozen sovereign states from Dublin to Prague to his will. Hitler, to him, is a modern version of Barbarossa. Captain Ramsay wonders what on earth they make of him in Cambridge, or at the various learned societies whose notep
aper his name adorns.
The rain is falling away. The dark clouds are moving off to Slane and Monaghan. Queerly, this does not improve the view. The streets—levelling out into suburbs now, with patches of waste ground and occasional scrubby fields—look even greyer and more nondescript.
Perhaps, Ramsay thinks, it is actually the people he has brought along for the ride that disquiet him. Dr Clavane he can put up with. Beneath the bluster and the Billy Bunter trousers and the air of ineffable complacency, Dr Clavane means no harm. This is more than can be said for Amery, the Cabinet Minister’s son, still sound asleep at his side, so profoundly unconscious, in fact, that one of his inexpensively shod feet—soleless, Ramsay is pained to observe—is banging metronomically against the floor of the taxi. What is it, Ramsay wonders, about the children of celebrated men? He can think of half a dozen political friends with delinquent heirs still hanging around, jobless, in the parental drawing room, racketing off into the world’s unsuitable margins, having to be bailed out from hare-brained business ventures.
They are passing through Donnybrook now: Mortonstown and its beach are only a mile or so away. It is about half-past ten: hopelessly early. Krastner and the other men from the Embassy will like as not wait until eleven. The implications of what he is doing have occurred to Captain Ramsay, but do not greatly concern him. He can brazen it out. There are a dozen reasons why a British Member of Parliament, accompanied by a Cambridge don and a Cabinet minister’s wayward son, might be taking the seaside air at Mortonstown. Doesn’t Halifax know, or can he not have inferred, that he is here?
Ramsay thinks that, in the matter of awkward questions, he can look after himself. More alarming to him are some of the rumours that are coming out of Berlin. These suggest that, contrary to all expectations, and every speech that Ramsay has made to every political meeting he has addressed in the past six months, the Germans are serious about the war. He wishes that Bannister were here to provide reassurance, but there is something odd about Bannister at the moment, the sense of a mind not fully committed to the cause, or perhaps of someone committed to a cause that is merely his own.
Meanwhile, if the Germans are serious about the war, then a peace-seeking patriot may very well look like a stooge. But still here he is, on a Sunday in February, with the last vestiges of the rain disappearing behind him, far from home, his anxieties about Bannister set momentarily to one side, come to see Herr Krastner of the Dublin Embassy and his associates. Anything is possible, he feels, with a sudden surge of exhilaration. The destiny of Europe is in his hands.
Beside him, Amery is slowly coming awake. There is quite a lot about Amery that does not inspire confidence. One of these things is the fact that, even now, at half-past ten on a Sunday morning, he smells not exactly of gin but of some deeper, more elemental reek. Another is his habit of making grand-sounding pronouncements about European politics and his role in them. On the other hand, Ramsay thinks, as the taxi judders over a pot-hole—the Irish roads are shockingly bad—one can be too fastidious about these things. If Amery is the price of his meeting with Herr Krastner, then it is worth paying.
They are in sight of the sea now: oddly mutinous with great high breakers in the distance. Nearer at hand, the water surges up over the beach like a live thing: blue-black at the peak but descending into brown. The joke about Amery—although this is something that Ramsay would never mention—is that he is a quarter Jewish. Uncoiling his legs, and patting the knee of his trousers with a thin hand—he has managed cuff-links, Ramsay sees—he says out of nowhere: ‘Of course, we may be entirely mistaken over the right kind of mediator. If it were left to me, I should try Grandi, that fellow who used to be the Italian ambassador to London, and see if he couldn’t get Mussolini to intervene.’
‘I think you’ll find,’ Ramsay says, ‘that he’s now the Minister of Justice at Rome. How would we reach him?’
‘I’d do the job myself,’ Amery responds, ‘if anyone could put a plane at my disposal. Fly to Switzerland and then get over the Italian border. Grandi would know me, of course. He used to come to the house when we were children.’
This is so fanciful, so implausibly far-fetched, that Ramsay almost laughs. Even Clavane, who is rather in awe of Amery, is grinning. Amery turns his head from side to side, puzzled by the lack of response, as if he has brought an eleventh commandment down from the mountain and yet, queerly, no one is interested.
The taxi is negotiating a small esplanade next to the seashore. There are a few beach-huts, a shed or two bolted up against the summer’s return.
‘Dear me, what a place,’ Clavane says, his dreams of a new Europe come to grief amid half a mile of oily sand, scattered seaweed, and driftwood.
Amery has begun to shiver beneath his trench-coat. He looks horribly seedy. There are gulls crying above their heads, more birds further out to sea moving slant-wise against the wind. ‘I think you underestimate Mussolini’s capacity for taking effective action,’ Amery says seriously. There is no stopping him, no defying his self-belief. He and Mussolini, or Count Grandi, will sort things out, if only the forces that are keeping them apart can be pushed aside.
Ramsay pays off the taxi man, who agrees to wait a little way down the front for their return, and they descend awkwardly onto the sand: Amery in a nervous frenzy; Clavane as if the whole business of movement is deeply inimical to him and back in Cambridge his journeys are undertaken by richly brocaded palanquin. It is then that one of the things Ramsay has dreaded—not the worst thing, but one of them—happens, and a plump, blithe, hatless man who has been bumbling along the esplanade towards them stops by the winded taxi and gives Clavane a friendly pat on the arm.
‘Clavvy!’ this apparition exclaims. He has odd, protruding teeth, bursting out at an angle from his upper jaw and almost green-coloured. ‘Fancy seeing you here. I didn’t know you were a Shamrock! What brings you to Dublin?’
‘I’m just making a little trip with these gentlemen,’ Clavane says, with what in the circumstances is an impressive sobriety. ‘But what about you? Are you still at the Architectural Review?’
‘Not possible, old chap, when your pa-in-law’s a retired field marshal. You have to follow the guns. Or at least watch where the guns are being dragged. Right now I’m press attaché at the embassy. I don’t expect it will last. These things rarely do.’
‘And how’s Penelope?’ Clavane wonders.
‘Oh, couldn’t be better. Grand, in fact. Do you know, I think the reason I come here of a Sunday is to work out what I’m going to put in my letter home. But look, don’t let me keep you from your friends. We’re bound to bump into each other sometime in London, I daresay.’
‘I daresay we shall,’ Clavane says.
They watch him toddle off into the wind: plump, gammy-legged—like Clavane, he seems to find the whole business of locomotion curiously confusing—but oddly formidable. ‘Who was that?’ Ramsay demands.
‘He’s called Betjeman,’ Clavane says. ‘You wouldn’t credit it, but we were at school together. There’s not the faintest chance of his suspecting anything. He’s the most unworldly man in England.’
A hundred yards ahead of them, at a point where the last cluster of beach-huts gives out, another car has appeared. The wind has reached an astonishing pitch now. A hat worn by one of the men getting out of the car goes racing away towards the breakwaters and he bounds off to retrieve it. Ramsay is still thinking about Mr Betjeman the press attaché with his greeny-grey teeth and blithering chatter, who surely cannot fail to have recognised him. Or perhaps he is quite as guileless as he makes out. It is difficult to tell.
The wind is gusting so violently that there are little eddies of grit moving through the air, lashing the legs of the unwary. Silently the two groups of men move towards each other. Ramsay can recognise Krastner, whom he met once years ago. The other two are unknown to him.
‘Gentlemen,’ Krastner says, and the word is
caught up and flung away by the wind. Six inches shorter than Ramsay, he is not much of an advertisement for Aryan supremacy. But then, Ramsay recalls, so many Germans are not. Himmler looks like a janitor; Goering as if he ought to be standing behind the counter of a butcher’s shop. Perhaps, on the other hand, that is part of their attraction. Krastner introduces his colleagues: again the names go flying off into the breeze.
‘This is Dr Clavane,’ Ramsay explains. ‘And Mr Amery.’
‘Herr Doktor,’ Krastner says, inclining his head an inch or two and clicking his heels. The Nazis like titles, even non-aristocratic ones. But for Amery there is only the briskest of nods. Perhaps Krastner has done his homework on Amery and knows him for what he is.
Amery says something else about it being a pity that official channels do not allow for this sort of communication, and Krastner gives him an unutterably contemptuous smile that would stop any other man dead in his tracks but is entirely lost on the Cabinet Minister’s son.
There is something horribly conspicuous about all this, Ramsay thinks, the six of them slowly processing along the Mortonstown shore in the bitter wind. On the other hand, there is no one about. Mr Betjeman, a rapidly retreating dot a quarter of a mile away, shows no interest in them. Krastner, having given up on Amery, stands a foot or two from the sea looking up at the wheeling gulls.
‘With whose authority do you attend this meeting, Captain Ramsay?’
‘All the authority I need,’ Ramsay says equably. ‘I am an elected representative of a party which governs my country.’
‘Certainly that is so,’ Krastner agrees. ‘But does that make you a representative of, let us say, Lord Halifax?’
‘I can convey any proposals you may care to make to Lord Halifax without delay.’
‘And so can my ambassador. What is the advantage to us of dealing with yourselves?’