by D. J. Taylor
It was about four o’clock and already threatening dusk. Tyler Kent’s face loomed menacingly through the half-light. He was still getting over the misunderstanding about ‘feudal.’
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you,’ he said. ‘We just need to know what you know. And all the things you’ve told Anthea Carey. It’s the only way we can cover ourselves. As for anyone taking an interest in where you are, why, you’re staying with old friends of your family while you recover from a bad attack of ’flu. As soon as the war’s over, no one will care about presidential telegrams and membership books or even letters from von Ribbentrop, and Bannister will be delighted to let you go. There might be a little coolness next time you see him in London and quite how he’ll explain things to your parents I don’t know. That’s something for Bannister.
‘My line,’ Tyler Kent said, in what was really quite a friendly way and looking so like Johnnie Town Mouse that it was as if he had a tail slung over his arm, ‘would be the greater good needing a few personal sacrifices. That usually goes down well in dear old England. Not to mention,’ he went on, suddenly sounding a great deal less friendly, ‘one or two fundamentally misguided people being taught the error of their ways.’
The odd thing about Tyler Kent’s visit to Ashburton Grange was that, for the first time, she was allowed out of her room to eat dinner with the Bannisters. Her first thought, when this idea was suggested to her, was that nothing short of main force could carry her anywhere near the Bannisters’ dining room, but in the end curiosity got the better of her and she put on the dress she had worn on her first night, rapped half a dozen times on the locked door, and was eventually escorted downstairs by the glamorous yet sullen parlourmaid.
Even odder than being allowed to eat dinner with the Bannisters was the atmosphere that she found in the dining room, which was one of studious politeness and a determination to ignore the unpleasantnesses of the past few days. Mr Bannister hacked up a couple of capons with such bogus joviality that he might have been wearing a paper hat, Tyler Kent—very spruce again in a dinner jacket and a made-up tie—offered what were presumably Logan-derived remarks about the claret, and she could have screamed at the artificiality of it, the sense of unseen horrors gliding away into the darkness beyond the window.
Such entertainment as there was came from Hermione. Halfway through the capons, she said, ‘Do you know, this afternoon I was listening to that new radio station?’
Mr Bannister looked at her warily. ‘Which radio station was that?’
‘The one Captain Ramsay mentioned in the House the other day. The New British Broadcasting Service, I think it must be called. When he asked the Minister if he would confer with the BBC to demolish its arguments objectively rather than just calling them German propaganda.’
‘Hermione,’ Mr Bannister said weakly.
‘It was very good on the way that the Jewish financiers and the continental Freemasons are combining to enforce a credit monopoly.’
‘Hermione,’ Mr Bannister said, a little more loudly, ‘will you kindly be silent?’
A minute or two into the dessert, without warning, during a discussion of the spring fishing prospects, Hermione threw her spoon and fork on the floor and ran out of the room.
‘Did you ever take Hermione to that fellow in Harley Street?’ Tyler Kent asked.
‘Yes, I did,’ Mr Bannister said, giving an agitated little snap of his hand, like a trap springing shut.
‘And what did he say?’
‘He said she was becoming very nervous and excitable.’
‘Yes,’ Tyler Kent said, ‘I can see that.’ He gave a little anxious grin, as if he were not quite certain of Mr Bannister or the company he was keeping, shot his cuffs forward over his wrists, glanced at Cynthia as if to say that he was still master of the situation, that the Bannisters and Hermione were, after all, merely pawns in the devious game of chess he had laid out before him, and went on with his dessert.
‘Ramsay was wrong to mention that radio station in the House,’ Mr Bannister said. ‘Very wrong. He made it sound like an advertisement.’
‘I thought everything Ramsay said in the House was an advertisement,’ Tyler Kent said, not quite as suavely as before.
After that they went back to talking about the fishing prospects.
There was a brief moment as they sat taking their coffee in the drawing-room, in a kind of ethereal haze created by the Lalique lamps, when Cynthia thought that some kind of sanity had been restored to the situation, that when he got up to go Tyler Kent would be allowed to help her on with her coat, fetch her suitcase and escort her from the premises, while Mr Bannister offered his apologies for the inconvenience to which she had been put. Despite all the evidence to the contrary this feeling grew so strong in her that when, at half-past ten, Tyler Kent sprang to his feet and began thanking Mr and Mrs Bannister for the pleasant evening he had spent, she went and stood next to him as if to sustain the illusion that they were a hospitably entertained couple taking their leave.
‘It was good to see you, Cynthia,’ Tyler Kent said, buttoning on his gloves in the hallway. The heads of stuffed animals loomed above him in the flaring light. ‘But you really have to be more helpful.’
For a second or two she wondered about making a scene, dashing off in the direction of the door and seeing if anyone would stop her, while telling Tyler Kent in a few well-chosen words what she thought of him. But a glance around the hallway told her that there was nothing that could be done, no object that could be usefully smashed, no insult that would have the faintest chance of hitting home, that Mr Bannister, if it came to that, would stop at absolutely nothing. A moment or two later she heard the sound of Tyler Kent’s car skidding off across the gravel. After that the plain but kindly parlourmaid led her up to bed.
The routines persisted. Mr Bannister took to coming into her room just after breakfast. Sometimes he would talk nostalgically about his past dealings with her parents, the implication being that they would be thoroughly ashamed of her disloyalty if the facts were put before them. At other times he stood by the window and briskly cross-examined her.
‘Did you ever meet any of Miss Carey’s colleagues?’
‘I met a man called Burdett. Norman Burdett.’
‘And what did you say to him?’
‘I didn’t say anything to him. It was while we were having a drink at the Ritz.’
‘I suppose that once you had walked away with the book, you were going to take it to Burdett.’
There were other occasions—faintly bewildering as they tended to follow on from the first and second kind—in which Mr Bannister abandoned nostalgia or briskness and began to lecture her in an almost fatherly manner about the complexities of the political situation.
‘I suppose somebody has been filling your head with rubbish. “Democracy in peril” and that sort of thing. Isn’t that right? But one has to try to see the situation from the German position. I daresay they shouldn’t have gone into Czechoslovakia, but what has it got to do with us? Every country in Europe is crawling with minorities who think their interests are being neglected. If you asked an international commission to investigate the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire they’d spend five years working out what the problems were, and another ten coming up with recommendations to solve them. By which time the problems would have moved on and become even less manageable. But it’s no business of ours. We can’t go around behaving as the Policeman of Europe. Those days are gone. Bad enough trying to manage the Empire. And that’s another thing that any kind of prolonged European war is going to throw into jeopardy. In any case, no European war these days can be won without the Americans, and this time even the Americans aren’t interested. You only have to talk to Kennedy to appreciate that. They don’t forget what they went through in 1918.’
It occurred to Cynthia that when he pronounced these remarks, Mr Bannister was not
really speaking to her but to some unseen audience high above his head, and that there was uneasiness in his voice which suggested that this invisible jury might have its doubts.
‘Now, take Hitler. I’m not saying I like him. I think you’d have to be a German, or even a particular kind of German, to do that. But there’s no doubting the man’s ability. There are plenty of people who say we ought to have someone like him here. I wouldn’t go as far as that. Demagoguery isn’t part of the English tradition. If the Household Brigade started goose-stepping when it came round Hyde Park Corner, people would laugh. On the other hand …’
Cynthia had heard this kind of thing before, from one or two of the pink-faced subalterns who had taken her here and there in the pre-Henry days, and was not much impressed by it. Curiously, these public lectures—if that was what they were—coincided with a general air of slightly fraught activity at Ashburton Grange. Telephones rang at odd hours of the day. News bulletins crackled from the radio. There were times when Mr Bannister disappeared, or at any rate did not come to see her, for as much as forty-eight hours, other times when he stood nervously in the doorway as if he half-expected to be dragged off before he could impart whatever it was he had come to say.
Meanwhile, there was the plain but kindly parlourmaid, to cultivate. If not positively forthcoming, Gladys was at any rate prepared to answer questions, provided they were suitably innocuous.
‘Do you know where Mr Bannister is today, Gladys?’
‘I can’t say I do, miss.’
‘Has he gone to London, do you think?’
‘Mr Bannister doesn’t tell me what he does most of the time, miss, and I don’t tell him what I do.’
All this was what Mrs Kirkpatrick, a martyr to irritations she was quite capable of fostering herself, would have called ‘provoking.’ But Cynthia had other lines of attack.
‘How far is it to the village, Gladys? About three miles?’
‘Two miles and a half I should say, miss.’
‘Within walking distance, then?’
‘I usually bicycles it, miss, unless I have Thomas to take me.’
Thomas, excluded from military service on account of his flat feet, was the under-gardener. Gladys’s engagement to him was the great business of her life. But none of this was any help to Cynthia. After a bit she conceived another stratagem.
‘What do you think of these shoes, Gladys? Are they ruined beyond repair? They were rather good when I got them.’
Gladys turned out to be interested in shoes. She fitted a hand inside the more battered of the two and held it up to her face.
‘I don’t think it’s as bad as all that, miss. Look, the heels aren’t hardly damaged at all. And you could get rid of the scuff-marks if you was to put something on it.’
The upshot of this was a smuggled pot of blacking. Some of this Cynthia rubbed carefully into the cracks of the court shoes, but the majority she spread, using her fingers as a pen, onto a rectangle of torn-up undersheet to form the words help me, and hung in the window.
The girls in the boarding school novels Cynthia had read as a girl—Dimpsy and Maeve and Peggy—had spent much of their time escaping from things. No detention class was big enough to hold them. They were capable of abseiling out of upstairs windows on a rope of knotted sheets, of stopping nature rambles in their tracks with a feint into the bushes. But Dimpsy and Maeve and Peggy had not had Mr Bannister to deal with. He burst into the room just at the moment when she was taking down the banner, tore it out of her hand and ripped it in half.
‘If you do this again,’ he said, ‘I’ll put you in the cellar. You won’t find any windows there.’
‘I’ll never forgive you for this,’ she shouted at him. ‘I don’t care why you’re doing it, but I shall never forgive you. And neither will Mummy and Daddy.’
‘Believe me, Cynthia,’ Mr Bannister said, ‘that is the least of my worries. The very least.’ He was looking extraordinarily red-faced and savage—like Henry, once, when she had seen him playing cricket.
‘You’re a traitor,’ Cynthia said, ‘that’s what you are. A lousy traitor. And I hope they put you in Holloway with all the other ones.’
After that she screamed for quite a long time at the locked door, until she remembered that there was no point in screaming, and eventually subsided.
‘You won’t be seeing me tomorrow, miss,’ said Gladys, who had been quietly sympathetic about the banner. ‘Only I’ve got the day off to visit my aunt in Islington.’
‘Gladys,’ Cynthia said. ‘If you’re going to London, would you do something for me?’
‘What’s that, miss?’ Gladys wondered nervously. She was very pale-faced and clearly not happy about the world she found herself in.
‘Could you take a message to a friend of mine? She’s called Anthea. She works in one of the Bloomsbury squares. It can’t be all that far from where you’re going to see your aunt.’
‘I can’t do that, miss,’ Gladys whined. ‘You know I can’t.’
Outside the window there was a weak sun shining, and a faint vestige of spring. Mrs Kirkpatrick had always advocated a firm hand with the servant class.
‘Gladys,’ Cynthia said, hearing her voice crack as she spoke. ‘If you do this for me I’ll give you anything you want. Anything. I’ll give you fifty pounds. A hundred pounds, even. I’ll pay for your wedding. I’ll buy you a dress from Hartnell. Just tell me what it is and I’ll do it. Truly I will.’
There was an odd look on Gladys’s face that Cynthia had never seen before: one of shrewd calculation. Catching her breath in gulps, clearly marvelling at her own effrontery, she said:
‘I’ll have your clothes, miss.’
‘Which clothes? What do you mean?’
‘Not all of them. I’ll leave enough to keep you decent. And we can borrow some of Miss Hermione’s. But I want the dress you had dinner in when you was here the first day, and that jumper you wore when you went out for a walk with the mistress in the afternoon. And two pairs of stockings. Then I might deliver a message to your friend in the Bloomsbury square, whatever her name is.’
While Cynthia wrote the note to Anthea and sealed it up in a half-torn envelope she found at the bottom of her suitcase, Gladys held the dress against her torso and silently appraised it.
‘I’ll look nice in this,’ she said, taking the envelope and putting it in her pocket. ‘Thomas, now, he’d like to see me in this.’
‘Yes,’ Cynthia said. She saw that her hand was shaking. ‘I’m sure he would.’
Peter Wildgoose and Anthea were standing in what had been Desmond’s office—emptier now, but still with a strew of unopened letters lying across the desk and little clumps of cigar butts disfiguring the carpet.
‘And there’s another thing about that wretched editorial of Des’s,’ Peter Wildgoose said. He had a book under his arm called Divagations. ‘All the readers seem to think it’s a kind of rallying call. Every contribution I’ve had in the past fortnight has shown pacifist tendencies. Even the poems.’
‘Anth,’ Lucy said, appearing suddenly in the doorway. ‘There’s a woman here wants to speak to you.’
‘Not that girl from the advertising agent’s?’ Anthea said sharply. She was wearing what looked like workmen’s overalls with splashes of paint over them and had had her hair cut even shorter than usual.
‘I don’t think so,’ Lucy said. ‘She looked more like a char-woman come for a job.’
‘Well, you’d better ask her in,’ Peter Wildgoose said courteously. ‘She could start by clearing up Des’s cigar-ends.’
Chapter 22
From a View to a Death
In Chester Square Peter Wildgoose sat writing letters. In the corner of the room a radio announcer was efficiently reciting the names of towns in north-eastern France, and the irrelevance of the task he was embarked on grew stronger by the moment.
But he had decided to write letters this morning, and write them he would.
Dear Des, he began, still half-listening to the announcer’s recitation (‘Sedan … Dinant … Chanton-sur-Marne’),
Thank you for yours, which in spite of everything amused me very much. I was wondering just the other day quite how long we had known each other, and decided that it must be all of twenty-five years. If you had half as good a recollection of all that has passed between us in that time as I do—and perhaps you have, and I am simply underestimating your powers of recall—you would realise that I can’t possibly go back on what was said.
Don’t you find these days that everyone always assumes that a quick handshake solves all and that any amount of moral evasion can be swept under the carpet if the people doing the sweeping believe that solidarity has the edge over whatever happens to be at stake? I certainly do.
But one has—I’m sure you will agree with me when you come to think about it—to be vigilant about these things. We live in a world of betrayals, and somehow the ones practised by people who know each other and don’t have the excuse of international realpolitik to console themselves with are always the worst, don’t you think?
Anyway, please excuse this lecture. I can’t possibly throw the doors of Duration open to you again as if nothing had happened, and you know I can’t. In any case, I gather you have another quarry in view …
Peter Wildgoose wondered whether this was too censorious, or too sarcastic, or even too subtle, and decided that, on the contrary, it was none of these things, and that Desmond deserved it, would understand it and perhaps even benefit from it. The announcer had got on to a statement that General Gamelin was supposed to be making on French radio, and there was nothing more to be done.