by D. J. Taylor
It was only after she had spoken the words that she wondered just exactly who these people were.
‘Here’s something,’ Hegarty said to Johnson. They were standing in the kitchen at the end of the B.3 corridor watching a pair of charladies manoeuvre a tea urn into place. ‘That girl Anthea Carey sent down to Bannister’s house in Sussex hasn’t come back.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Anthea rang up Shillito and told him. Apparently someone telephoned to say she’d gone down with the ’flu, but Anthea says she doesn’t believe it.’
Miss, or Mrs, Oglethorpe came walking down the corridor towards them coiling up the thick hair on the top of her head as she went, but they ignored her. ‘What does Shillito say?’
‘He says we have to monitor the situation. He says Bannister is a distinguished public servant and you can’t just go down with a search warrant and demand to see one of his guests.’
‘Does anyone know what Bannister’s up to?’
‘This is where it gets even more interesting. Apparently Bannister and Ramsay are booked to see the Foreign Secretary tomorrow morning. There’s talk of an all-party delegation going with them.’
‘The PM won’t like that.’
‘The PM won’t like all sorts of things,’ Hegarty said, ‘if what I hear from the War Office is true.’
On the morning of the fourth day she tried Gladys, the plain but kindly parlourmaid, with a little conversation.
‘It must be difficult, working all the way out here,’ she said. ‘Being so far from town, I mean.’
‘Yes, miss.’
‘Don’t you find yourself wishing you had more people around you? I know I would.’
‘There are always places to find company, miss.’
‘If I gave you a letter, would you post it for me in the village?’
‘No, miss.’
‘Not even for five pounds?’ This was the sum Cynthia had in her purse.
‘No, miss, I can’t.’
Mr Bannister’s questions became more insistent. He gave the impression that during the first few days of her sojourn in the room he had merely been polite, but that now he wanted to get down to business. At the same time there was something apologetic about him.
‘I daresay you’re wondering why we continue to keep you here,’ he said.
There was no answer to this. To say that she was being kept at Ashburton Grange because she knew that Mr Bannister was in league with Herr von Ribbentrop would not have helped either of them.
Mr Bannister continued, more courteously than on previous occasions: ‘But it is imperative that I know exactly what brought you here. And the people who sent you. Unless you tell me that, I cannot possibly let you go. There are negotiations going on that a single unguarded word might upset. Do you understand what I am saying?’
‘Up to a point,’ she said, thinking that it was best to admit to something.
‘It is absolutely vital to the well-being of our country that the plans my friends and I are engaged upon should succeed. You must understand that. Surely you must want them to succeed as well?’
‘I want a car to take me to Arundel Station,’ she said. ‘That is what I want.’
‘Had I allowed you to walk out of the house with the things you stole from my study, who would you have given them to?’
‘I really can’t answer that,’ she said.
‘Then we are going to keep you here until you do.’
‘My friends will wonder where I am.’
‘Your friends have been told that your influenza was much more serious than was first thought and that you are convalescing.’
At least Anthea won’t believe that, she thought.
‘Now, let me try again,’ Mr Bannister said, still sounding uncannily like the man who had once tried to teach her to say ‘Is your mistress in the garden?’ in Tamil, but with a dreadful overlaid malignity. ‘When you got back to London with the book and the letter, who would you have given them to?’
‘It turns out Cynthia’s gone down with the ’flu,’ Anthea told Peter Wildgoose. ‘Quite a bad case. Anyway, she’ll have to stay where she is for a while.’
‘Poor Cynthia,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He was sitting at his desk signing cheques from a book held reverently before him by Mr Woodmansee. ‘Send her my good wishes, won’t you, and tell her I hope she doesn’t get too bored.’
‘Certainly,’ Anthea said. ‘And you really ought to have a look at this morning’s Telegraph.’
‘Not a paper I generally consult,’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘What does it say?’
‘They’re not at all pleased about Des’s editorial. There’s a lot of stuff about the sanctimonious appeasement of the pacifist conscience.’
‘That’s what comes of being scrupulous,’ Peter Wildgoose said.
Sometimes Mr Bannister was lofty. Sometimes he was ingratiating, at others calculating. There were times when he had clearly been consulting with other people, and the questions he asked did not seem to come naturally to him. There were occasional moments when he seemed uncertain, as if he might suddenly be considering the full implications of the task he had set himself, only for the uncertainty to be replaced by a steely resolve. On balance, these were the worst times.
‘It is very foolish of you to give us all this trouble.’
There was no point in answering this and she hung her head to one side, out of range of his glare.
‘I suppose you think,’ Mr Bannister said, ‘that family association will win out. Because it nearly always does. Because we have known each other so long. Because …’ For a moment Henry’s ghost hung between them, vivid and menacing, looming up from the Ceylonese verdure. ‘Well, let me tell you that nothing could be further from the case.’
She told herself that she would leap out of the chair and make for the door again, kicking over the rocking horse into Mr Bannister’s path, but by the time she had summoned up the courage the door was shut once more and Mr Bannister vanished on the other side of it.
Not having got anywhere with Gladys, the plain but kindly parlour-maid, she decided to try Eunice, the glamorous but sullen one.
‘Eunice, I’d be obliged if you’d do something for me,’ she said one morning when the breakfast tray had just been brought in and Mrs Bannister’s patent cereal, which you made with milk, sat steaming nastily in its bowl.
‘What’s that then, miss?’
‘I want you to go and telephone to the local police station and say that I am being held here against my will.’
‘I can’t do that, miss.’
‘Is there anything I could say to persuade you to do it?’
‘No, miss.’
After that she gave Eunice up as a bad job.
In the absence of very much human contact, Cynthia got by on sound.
The maids’ shoes on the stairs: a succession of precise, purposeful steps, each following on from the other like some slow-motion tap dance.
Mrs Bannister’s voice giving instructions in the hallway: a kind of high-pitched babble, verging on hysteria, like a children’s party getting out of hand.
A radio playing dance music in the hall.
The paralysing detonation of Mr Bannister’s attempts to shut the front door.
A key turning in the lock.
A monotonous drumming sound, sometimes seeming to come from far away, sometimes uncomfortably close at hand, that turned out to be the beating of her heart.
Something Mr Bannister said once, in the course of his interrogations, stuck in her head: ‘It’s not enough to say that England will muddle through. England has always muddled through. That has been the problem. What we are fighting for is civilisation. Christian civilisation. The chance to manage our destiny. When have we been allowed to do that, I should like to know? When have we been allowed to do
that?’
There were times when her spirits lifted. One of Mr Kirkpatrick’s favourite sayings—born of long experience of the East—was that anyone engaged on a tediously repetitive task would eventually neglect their duty. There would be a moment, Cynthia knew, when someone responsible for her welfare would make a mistake.
It came quite unexpectedly one morning when she found that the door of her room had been left an inch or two open. Curiously, this discovery impressed itself upon her first as a lapse in routine rather than a chance to escape. Then she remembered that Gladys, who for some reason had brought her breakfast that morning rather than Eunice, had been summoned down the corridor by a sergeant-major’s shout of Mrs Bannister’s and for some other reason failed to return. It was about a quarter to nine and the house seemed to have fallen silent, so she went stealthily along the corridor and down the staircase, picking her way between some cardboard boxes that had been left here and there along its lower flight.
There was nobody about, and the pale February sunshine was streaming over the polished oak floor of the hallway. She discovered that this temporary freedom had badly disconcerted her, and that the various possibilities that now offered themselves were a confusion rather than a spur to action. The front door turned out to be locked and there was no sign of the key. Nothing doing there.
She swept off into the back parts of the house and eventually found herself in the kitchen, which was empty apart from a tortoiseshell cat licking up a puddle of milk that had been spilled on one of the surfaces, but the back door was shut too. There were butcher’s weights lying on the table, great thick ones weighing two or three pounds, and she resolved to take them into the drawing room and hurl them through the window.
She had just got herself into the room and was levering up the first weight to the level of her shoulder like a shot-putter when Gladys, very breathless and with her maid’s cap fallen over her forehead, appeared in the doorway behind her.
‘You mustn’t do that, miss. You mustn’t. The master’s out in the garage and he’ll hear as soon as the glass goes.’
In its way, this counted as an overture of friendship.
‘You go back to your room, miss,’ Gladys said. There was an air of authority about her, as if Cynthia was a boisterous younger sister she had decided to face down.
‘It’s all your fault I’m here, Gladys,’ Cynthia said. ‘It was you that left the door open for me to get out. I’ll tell Mr Bannister.’
‘There’s no need for you to do that, miss,’ Gladys said gravely. ‘Leastways, if you don’t I won’t say anything about you coming downstairs.’
The weight was still in Cynthia’s hand. In the split second that Gladys—moving surprisingly quickly—came towards her she hurled it at the drawing-room window, but it was too heavy for her and went glancing against the frame, bounced away and shattered one of the side panels. The glass burst out and Cynthia screamed, but it was no good, for by the time she reached down to pick up the next weight, Gladys had her by the wrist and the fight went out of her. She tried to wrench her arm away, but it was no good.
‘I told you you shouldn’t do that, miss,’ Gladys said, but there was no malice in her voice.
They took the weights back into the kitchen and the even tenor of the day resumed.
Standing next to the bedroom’s solitary bookshelf one afternoon after Mr Bannister had left the room, she discovered half a dozen children’s books with Hermione’s signature scrawled in the front. The first of these was called The Snack-boat Sails at Noon. The book had clearly been dropped in the bath at some point, but that did not lessen its allure. It was about a family of children who lived in a house on the Norfolk Broads, whose mother was dead and whose father, who wrote detective novels, struggled to find the money for their school fees.
The children, though in reduced circumstances, set out for the day in roll-necked pullovers and were prostrated with shame if they broke a plate or threw a tennis ball through the conservatory window. They were conscientious children, who ran errands for their elderly neighbours and went punctiliously to church on Sunday mornings, but at the same time were not above playing practical jokes on such local dignitaries who made themselves objectionable to them or simply got on their nerves.
The most resourceful of them was the eldest, a girl named Myfanwy, and it was she, one hot summer’s afternoon, who came up with the idea of the snack-boat: a reconditioned motor launch found rotting in a local boatyard but made seaworthy by a kindly uncle, which, stocked with homemade cakes, punnets of blackcurrants, and flagons of lemonade, plied its trade among the pleasure-cruisers of the vicinity. The book ended with the death of a half-forgotten great-aunt and the bequeathing of a small fortune, the sale of one of their father’s detective novels to a film company, and the purchase by Myfanwy of an evening dress in which piece of finery she was able to attend the local hunt ball.
It was a queer sensation, reading this book, curled up in a chair behind the locked door of the Ashburton Grange bedroom, with the sound of the maids’ heels clattering on the stair, the chamber pot stinking under the bed, and the wind beating against the window. In her own childhood she had read dozens of similar books, and she was shrewd enough to realise that the childhoods set out here were not so much idyllic as purely mythological. Friendship; solidarity; pleasure; purpose. All the things of which a childhood ought ideally to consist were there.
And yet it struck her that if no one had ever had a childhood like Myfanwy’s, then there must be people who had had a childhood that approximated to it, who had been benignly neglected, made the most of their opportunities, and emerged, their personalities all a-glimmer, into the late-adolescent light. Or perhaps such books were merely snares for the unwary, designed to fill their readers’ heads with false hopes and unreal expectations. Mrs Kirkpatrick had been very severe on books like The Snack-boat Sails at Noon, which she said gave children a highly misleading view of the world.
All this begged the question: how did you stop children forming a misleading view of the world? And, given what was likely to happen to them afterwards, wasn’t a misleading view of the world a rather desirable thing to have?
When she had finished reading The Snack-boat Sails at Noon, she hid it in a nest of old stockings at the bottom of her suitcase. This, it turned out, was the thing she had really wanted to steal from Ashburton Grange.
She was lying on her bed early one afternoon when the key turned so rapidly in the lock that she barely had time to get up, and of all people Tyler Kent came into the room. He was as sprucely dressed as ever, and if not exactly jaunty then not particularly put out by the situation in which he found himself.
‘I was just here to see Bannister,’ he said, ‘so I thought I’d better come and look you up.’
‘Tyler, you’ve got to get me out of here.’
‘You know I can’t do that,’ Tyler Kent said. He had not turned the key in the lock. He stood there holding it in his hand, which gave a kind of dreadful symbolism to these exchanges.
‘Yes, you can, Tyler. You have to.’
‘I can’t,’ Tyler Kent said again. ‘Not with the way things are at the moment. You don’t understand. It would upset everything.’
‘How could it? How could taking me to Arundel and putting me on the train to London possibly upset anything? How could it?’
‘I suppose Anthea Carey got you to do this, didn’t she?’ Tyler Kent said. ‘I very soon figured that out. But then she’s quite a girl. Enough to make you wish she was on our side. Do you know she used to be Ramsay’s secretary? She did such a good job of it that it took him three months to work out that she was passing copies of his letters to Jermyn Street, where her friend Mr Burdett could read them. Social life: that’s the trouble with England. Just because somebody’s mother was presented at Court with somebody else’s mother, they couldn’t possibly be a security risk. If there’s one thing we have to
do, it’s to keep you away from Anthea until everything’s signed and sealed.’
‘What is? What’s being signed and sealed?’
It occurred to her that Tyler Kent’s defining flaw was vanity, that the impulse that had led him to leave presidential telegrams lying around his flat was sheer vaingloriousness. As it was he reminded her of Johnnie Town Mouse. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you this,’ Tyler Kent said, but sounding as if he very much wanted to tell her. ‘But there are people in Dublin right now working on a set of peace proposals. Pretty soon they’ll be on Halifax’s desk. If he doesn’t accept them, I daresay there’ll be all kinds of trouble.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Trouble from people who don’t want war. Who think it’s feudal.’
‘Feudal?’ she said, getting a sudden vision of knights in chain mail stalking the Ashburton Grange turrets, and Mr Bannister in a crusader’s surtout attended by a couple of pageboys. ‘How could it possibly be that?’
‘Feudal,’ he said again, quite furious at having been caught out in this elementary English usage, and she realised that this was how an American pronounced ‘futile.’
‘What kind of peace proposals?’
‘Oh, I daresay something about protecting the rights of German minorities in Czechoslovakia and Poland while respecting the interests of indigenous peoples. I guess there might be something about the colonial territories. Not sure about that.’
‘Tyler,’ she said, ‘there was a letter in the same drawer as the book from von Ribbentrop. It didn’t say anything about peace proposals. It was more about what might happen to Mr Bannister after the Germans invaded.’
‘That’s a good joke,’ said Tyler Kent, not quite confidently enough. ‘I’m sure your friend Miss Carey would just love to hear it.’
Suddenly she found that she did not care about the colonial territories and what might happen to them, or Mr Bannister and what von Ribbentrop might do for him, or Captain Ramsay and his futile manoeuvrings. She wanted only to be back in the flat in Belgrave Square with Lucy to talk to and the nuns coming and going beneath them, or in Bloomsbury having Peter Wildgoose thank her for making him a cup of tea. The bombs could fall on Ashburton Grange, on Hermione and Tyler Kent and anyone else who happened to be passing, and she would not raise a hand to stop them.