by D. J. Taylor
‘I should say she has,’ Hegarty said warmly. Anthea was once supposed to have dislocated his little finger in an incident in a lift.
‘Well, just lately Miss Carey has been working at Duration. Officially, she’s been keeping an eye on that Rafferty fellow—you remember how interested B.3 were in him a couple of years ago when he attended that conference in Sofia? But now it turns out she’s persuaded some friend of Bannister’s daughter to go down there and retrieve it.’
‘Will she be able to do that?’
‘I don’t see why not. If she’s anything like Miss Carey she’ll probably blow the place up with thermite. Now, going back to Ramsay, there’s a rumour—only a rumour, mind—that he was in Dublin the other day. At any rate a man called Ismay was booked onto the Rosslare ferry last Friday. Ismay is his wife’s Christian name, by the way. Also on the boat were a Mr Amery and a Dr Clavane—both names which, as I’m sure you’ll remember, are not unknown to this department. We believe that they may have been meeting an attaché from the German Embassy there.’
‘Isn’t that an indictable offence, sir?’
‘It would be if we could prove that it happened. Unfortunately, as soon as he reached Dublin, Mr Ismay went to ground. No one could find him at any of the hotels. The Embassy people went off on some wild-goose chase to Roscommon and made complete asses of themselves.’
‘What about the others?’
‘I sent a man to Cambridge to interview Clavane. He had the most impeccable bona fides. Spent the weekend with Dr Seamas O’Coughlan, who, as you may or may not know, is an expert on seventeenth-century Irish social history and the author of a standard work entitled Cromwell and Hibernia.’
‘So what are we to do, sir?’
‘What are we to do?’ Shillito looked suddenly mournful, as if all the talk of the last few minutes had been dealt out simply for effect and beneath it lay nothing of any conceivable substance. ‘We are to monitor the situation, and we shall continue to allow Ramsay to dig himself into a pit from which, with any luck, he will not be able to extricate himself. Bannister I have serious doubts about. As for Mr Kent and the important work he takes home from Grosvenor Square, I think we’ll bide our time. But there would be no harm in rounding up a few of the smaller fry, just to show we mean business. Why not the League of St George people? Why not bring half a dozen of them in here and see what they know?’
There was an odd look on Shillito’s face as he said this, as if the instructions about the League of St George were merely camouflage, and the really serious business of the conversation lay concealed beneath. Eventually he said, ‘I don’t mind saying there are some extraordinary rumours flying about at the moment. One report came in which said that in the event of the Germans invading, Ramsay would be appointed gauleiter of Scotland on the spot. There’s talk of Bannister having letters smuggled in from Berlin, though we’ve never set eyes on one. And then we heard just the other day that a platoon at Catterick was refusing to serve, laid down its arms and confined itself to barracks. In the end it turned out it was a dispute over allowances, but the CO was so scared he put in a request for half a dozen armoured cars.’
‘What about the King?’ Johnson asked.
‘The King? The King’s on a tour of the northern counties, inspecting troops and visiting regional nursing centres. After that he’s doing the same thing in Devon and Cornwall. Best place for him. If he hadn’t opened his mouth like that, most of this wouldn’t have happened. Which reminds me, what has that fellow Nichols been up to?’
‘Very little, so far as we can tell, sir. No contact with the Palace. We did track him to a Turkish bath in Swallow Street the other night, but I’m reliably informed that the only offences he may have committed there were of a kind liable to outrage public decency. We’ve been looking at those articles of his in the Chronicle for code words, but the last one was all about his hardy perennials.’
‘I suppose that’s the difference between us and the Continentals,’ Shillito offered. ‘If they want a change of government policy, they get up and start shooting people in the streets. If we want one, it’s a question of deciphering what some pansy writes in his newspaper column or working out whether Captain Ramsay went to Dublin on the Rosslare ferry. Makes you glad to be British, I suppose.’
There was a short silence, in which they all felt glad to be British.
‘If you don’t mind, sir,’ Hegarty said, ‘I think I ought to finish talking to the Maida Vale suspect.’
‘You do that,’ Shillito said. ‘And tell him we can keep him for as long as we like under Regulation 18b. It’s not strictly true, but I don’t expect he has any legal training.’
They walked back along the corridor, Hegarty whistling as he went. He seemed in extraordinarily good spirits. When they reached the first-floor landing again, he gave a little mock salute with the fingers of his left hand and continued down into the basement. After he had disappeared, the sound of his feet echoed for a long time on the concrete steps.
When Johnson got back to his room he discovered that someone had left another large buff-coloured envelope on his chair. This turned out to harbour a page cut from a back number of the Tatler, showing a series of photographs of the crowd at the Eton–Harrow match. One of them was marked with a cross. Here Captain Ramsay and Davenport were staring bleakly at a woman with a hat like a modernist lamp-shade. A speech bubble had been inked in over Captain Ramsay’s head, encircling the words isn’t that herr von ribbentrop over there?
He scooped up the sheet of paper and flung it into the waste-paper bin. Best not to leave such things lying around. It was about half-past four and the chaos of the desk oppressed him more than ever. The uppermost file was labelled White Knights of St Athelstan. There were perhaps a dozen White Knights of St Athelstan. They met weekly in the upstairs room of a public house in Chiswick and complained of Soviet infiltration of the legal profession. Who cared about these arcane activities? On the other hand, such things might, if allowed to proceed unchecked, have some faint bearing on the political situation. It was hard to tell.
That reminded him of Shillito’s order to ‘bring in’ half a dozen members of the League of St George. By rights, this sample would include Miss Frencham. Try as he might, he could not rid himself of a degree of guilt about Miss Frencham and her white, anguished face. In the end he took a picture postcard of Admiral Nelson that happened to be lying on the desk, wrote Security investigation imminent. Suggest you leave London. All the best, C. on it, and sealed it in an envelope addressed to the house in Powis Square.
About half an hour passed before Hegarty came back. His face had a guilty, exuberant look and his hands were trembling.
‘Everything go well?’
‘Certainly did.’
‘Anything to alter your opinion?’
‘Not so harmless after all,’ Hegarty said. ‘Halfway through I realised that no one had searched the beggar. So I did. And guess what turned up?’ He unclenched the palm of his right hand, where a newspaper clipping hovered uncertainly, and bent his face over it as if it were a butterfly about to take wing.
That evening the newspapers said that new peace proposals had emerged, which the Government was invited urgently to consider.
Chapter 21
A Room with a View
‘Where’s Cynthia?’ Peter Wildgoose wondered at about half-past eleven on Monday morning. ‘Is it just my imagination, or haven’t I seen her today?’
‘I think she went somewhere for the weekend,’ Anthea said guilelessly. ‘I expect she got delayed.’
‘It’s not like her to neglect her duties,’ said Peter Wildgoose, quite crossly for him.
‘No, it isn’t, is it?’ Anthea said, even more guilelessly than before.
They were in the process of clearing out Desmond’s office, and already regretting that such a Herculean endeavour had not been left to someone better qu
alified to undertake it, possibly even Desmond himself.
‘Well, I do hope she turns up soon,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He looked irritated and unhappy, as if the high standards he had previously demanded, and obtained, from the world had now been revealed as a desperate chimera. ‘It would be awful to lose a member of one’s staff two days running.’
‘I think it was somewhere down in the West Country,’ Anthea said. ‘I expect the trains have failed again. Now, what had I better do with all these cards?’
There was something impressive about the room’s chaos, as if a single person could not possibly have been responsible for it. Half of the books seemed to have no connection with the magazine’s activities at all, and the number of dinner receipts amounted to seventeen. Peter Wildgoose looked at the stack of picture postcards, each with its fervent salutation, its fond valedictory wish and its hope of employment, and shook his head.
‘They’re Des’s personal property. I can’t have them destroyed. It wouldn’t be fair. You’d better put them in an envelope and send them back to him.’
Outside in the main office Mr Woodmansee, a wafer biscuit clutched in his gnarled left hand, was staring in a terrier-like way at a file of invoices. There was no sign of Lucy.
‘Peter,’ Anthea said, ‘never mind the postcards. What are you going to do about Des’s editorial?’
‘What do you mean, “What am I going to do about it?”’
‘Well, you haven’t done anything about not getting this month’s number distributed, have you? The Norwich Press’s vans will be out on the road by now, I expect.’
‘No, I haven’t, have I?’ Peter Wildgoose said. He was inspecting the pages from a book he had taken from the pile on Desmond’s window ledge called Dawns in Wardour Street. ‘Do you know, I was thinking about this over the weekend, and in the end I decided that I had to let it stand even though I disagreed with it so much. After all, Des was editor of the magazine, so I suppose it was up to him what went into it, and I thought he ought to have the satisfaction of seeing it in print. If it is a satisfaction. Anything else would have been rather letting him down.’
‘You know, Peter,’ Anthea said, ‘you really are awfully scrupulous. Just think of how many times Des has let you down.’
‘Am I?’ Peter Wildgoose said. He looked surprised, then smiled and dropped the copy of Dawns in Wardour Street into the waste-paper basket to mingle with Desmond’s discarded cigar butts. ‘I sometimes think I’m not nearly scrupulous enough. But thank you all the same.’
They took her upstairs and put her in a bedroom under the eaves of the house. It had once done service as a nursery, and there were pixies romping on the wallpaper and an evil-looking rocking horse in the corner. Mrs Bannister stood at the bottom of the staircase wearing her mad-terrier’s stare, wholly disassociated from this act of violence. There was a cacophony of sound—wind rattling against the panes, Hermione’s laboured breathing, feet skidding on polished wood, a key turning in the lock. After they had gone she beat at the door with her hands, but the footsteps in the corridor rattled away into silence and did not come back.
There was a chamber pot under the bed, and a water jug on the stand, but no electric light. Beyond the window grey fields sprinkled with sheep climbed into the middle distance. When she had stopped shaking she ransacked her suitcase—thankfully this had arrived in the room with her—ate the bar of chocolate she found there and stared out into the dim February light. The house had gone quiet; the music had stopped; there was only herself, like some castaway on a rock, cruelly exposed.
Presently the warmth generated in her by the struggle wore off and the room grew cold, so she stood by the window stamping her feet up and down and squeezing her arms around her chest. In this way several hours passed. Once or twice she hammered loudly on the door. It began to get dark, but nobody came.
Towards midnight she fell asleep on the blanketless bed. Still nobody had come. Whoever had set out the chamber pot had omitted to provide lavatory paper. In the small hours she thought she heard footsteps in the corridor. This filled her with an all-consuming terror, but the steps—if that was what they were—seemed to patter off in a different direction. The rocking horse’s ivory teeth looming up through the shadow frightened her so much that she could not bear looking at them. They would tear her clothes off her while she slept and devour her whole when she woke.
Then in the early morning there was a scrabbling at the door and a tremendous tearing of metal in the lock, and she shrank back in horror, only to find that the black-clad figure which tumbled into the room was not Mr Bannister, bent on embarrassing her, but a parlourmaid with a vague, vacant-looking face bringing in her breakfast on a tray.
For quite a long time, waking up in the early mornings, with bitter white light seeping through the gaps in the bedroom curtains and the rocking horse’s teeth poised to bite her, she was oppressed by the thought of something stealing away into the outer margins of consciousness, the vestiges of some memory in which the sights that met her after she woke—the light, the glint of a watercolour painting on the far wall, the bands of shadow beyond—played some part. Eventually she realised that the memory had nothing to do with her present situation but was of living in the East.
Once she had arrived at this conclusion, all the stanchions of this earlier life fell smartly into place: the flying fish in the bay at Colombo; the warm froth of the Indian Ocean; the Rangoon Gazette with its stories of leopard-hunts, rogue elephants, and governors’ visitations. She was aware, deep down, that the East had not been like this at all—that it had largely consisted of heat and dirt, inedible food, and Mrs Kirkpatrick being tiresome, and the grass seeds from the maidan working their way up the insides of your stockings like little metal burrs—but there was something about the room, and her terror, that encouraged these imaginings and she found as she lay there, with the light getting brighter and somehow more ominous, that she could indulge herself in them for what seemed like hours at a time, and that this daydreaming—if that was what it was—was in some way more important to her than the material challenges that lay in wait beyond it.
The oddest thing about her life in the room, she quickly discovered, was that she had no yardstick to compare it against. It was like being ill, except that the symptoms of illness had been replaced with a permanent sense of anxiety, while the bell on the bedside table was quite likely to go unanswered or bring someone she did not at all want to see.
The routines of life at Ashburton Grange—or her life at Ashburton Grange—were military in their precision. At 8 a.m. the plain but kindly parlourmaid, whose name was Gladys, brought her a cup of tea and carried off her chamber pot. At 8:30 the glamorous but sullen parlourmaid, whose name was Eunice, brought her breakfast on a tray and returned the pot. Each of these operations was constrained by the door having to be unlocked to admit them, shut while they were transacting the business of the visit, unlocked again to let them out and shut again when they were on the other side. The breakfast was always the same: two slices of toast and some ghastly patent cereal that Mrs Bannister took for her digestion.
After them came Mr Bannister.
‘I want to know one thing,’ he said on the first of these occasions, ‘and that is who you are working for.’
‘I really don’t know that I’m working for anyone,’ Cynthia said.
She had decided that she was not going to be frightened of Mr Bannister.
‘Was it that woman Carey who put you up to this?’
‘I suppose you think I’m too stupid to understand,’ Cynthia said. ‘Well, you’re wrong. I understand it all. And you can’t keep me here. The people in the office know where I am. They’ll be wondering why I haven’t come back.’
‘I have telephoned your office and told them you are suffering from a bad attack of influenza.’
‘They won’t believe you.’
‘On the contrary. T
hey wished you a speedy recovery. Tomorrow I shall telephone again and say that it has developed into a very bad attack. Now, where did you meet my friend Captain Ramsay?’ Mr Bannister went pompously on. ‘What do you know about him?’
‘You know very well I met Captain Ramsay at this house,’ Cynthia told him. Her voice was cracking into hysteria. ‘You must have a bad memory, as well as being quite mad. If you don’t let me out of this room, I shall start screaming.’
But there was no point in screaming, for nobody came and nothing was done, and Mr Bannister merely stood there like the demon king on the edge of the underworld, with a pained but slightly malevolent expression on his face, before turning on his heel and stalking away. She tried to run past him and make her escape, but when she did so he merely reached out a fat hand, twisted her arm in a V, and threw her back into her chair, and she forgot her resolve and was genuinely frightened of Mr Bannister.
And there were other visitors, in some ways worse than Mr Bannister. On the second afternoon the key, turning in the lock, brought Hermione, very red in the face and dressed in a pair of blue factory-worker’s overalls.
‘I just wanted to say that I never liked you,’ Hermione said. ‘Never at all. You always laughed at me. I could have married Tyler Kent if it hadn’t been for you.’
‘Hermione,’ Cynthia said. There were tears running down her face. ‘You know that isn’t true. You know it isn’t.’
‘Yes, it is,’ Hermione said, with unexpected venom. ‘I hate you, and I hope you starve to death.’
And this was worse than Mr Bannister asking her who she was working for, or the look on the glamorous but sullen parlourmaid’s face as she brought back the empty chamber pot.
‘I never realised anyone could be so cruel,’ she said to Mr Bannister on the afternoon of the third day. ‘You can’t possibly keep me here any longer. People will be wondering where I am. And then what will you do?’