The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  She had not seen the room since Florence had occupied it, and was quite shocked to see how much it had been subdued. Pretty and frilly as it was, like any room done up by Sophia, Florence had done something intangible to it by her mere presence, and it was looking frightful. The dressing-table, exquisite with muslin, lace, roses and blue bows, like a ball dress in a dream, and which was designed to carry an array of gold-backed brushes, bottles, pots of cream and flagons of scent, was bare except for one small black brush and a comb which must have originally been meant for a horse’s mane. The Aubusson carpet had its pattern of lutes and arrows, with more roses and blue bows, completely obscured by two cheap-looking suitcases. A pair of stays and a gas-mask case had been thrown across the alluring bed cover, puckered with pink velvet and blue chiffon. Sophia, who herself wore a ribbon suspender-belt, looked in horrified fascination at the stays. ‘No wonder Florence is such a queer shape,’ she thought, picking them up, ‘she will never be a glamour girl in stays like that, and how does she get into them?’ She held them against her own body but could not make out which bit went where; they were like medieval armour. As she put them back on the bed she saw that the gas-mask carrier contained a Leica camera instead of a gas mask, and she thought it was simply horrible of Florence never to have taken a photograph of Milly with it. The pigeon, in its cage, was dumped on a beautiful satinwood table, signed by Sheraton; considering how much Florence was supposed to love it, she might have provided it with a larger cage. The poor thing was shuffling up and down miserably. Sophia stroked its feathers with one finger through the wire netting, and remembered a beautiful Chippendale birdcage for sale in the Brompton Road. She might give it to Florence for Christmas, but Florence seemed so very indifferent to pretty objects. Perhaps, she thought, the bird wants to go out. She opened the cage, took it in her hands, stroked it for a while, and put it out of the window, just too late, evidently, for it made a mess on her skirt.

  When she had shut the window and wiped her skirt, Sophia felt an impulse to tidy up; it was really too annoying of Elsie, the housemaid, to leave the room in such a mess. She put away the stays and gasmask case, and then took hold of a hatbox, intending to take it upstairs to the boxroom, but although, as she did so, the top opened, revealing that it was quite empty inside, it was so heavy that she could hardly lift it, so she gave up the idea. Really, her pain was quite bad and she must find the cachets. She opened a few drawers, but they were all full of papers. Then she remembered that there were some shelves in the built-in cupboard so she opened that.

  In the part of the cupboard which was meant for dresses stood Heatherley Egg.

  Sophia’s scream sounded like a train going through a tunnel. Then she became very angry indeed.

  ‘Stupid,’ she said, ‘to frighten me like that. Anyway, what’s the point of waiting in Florence’s cupboard – she’s on duty, doesn’t come off till six.’

  Heatherley slid out into the room and gripped her arm. ‘Listen,’ he said, ‘we have got to get this straight.’

  ‘Oh, don’t let’s bother,’ said Sophia, who had lost interest now that she had recovered from her fright. ‘God knows I’m not a prude, and Florence’s private life has nothing to do with me. Live in her cupboard if you like to; I don’t care.’

  ‘See here, Sophia, you can’t get away with that. Now, sit down; we have to talk this over.’

  ‘You haven’t seen some Cachets Fèvre anywhere, have you? I lent her a box and, of course, she didn’t bring them back; people never do, do they? It doesn’t matter to speak of, I must go to bed. Well, good night, Heatherley. What about breakfast? Do you like it in your own cupboard, or downstairs?’

  She went towards the door.

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ said Heatherley, in quite a menacing sort of voice, very different from his usual transatlantic whine. ‘You can’t fool me that way, Sophia. Very clever, and I should have been quite taken in, but I happened to watch you through the keyhole. Those bags have false bottoms, haven’t they, the gasmask contains a camera, doesn’t it, and there are code signals sewn into the stuffing of those stays. Eh?’

  ‘Are there, how simply fascinating! Is that why they are so bumpy? Do go on!’

  ‘Quite an actress, aren’t you, and I might easily have believed you if you hadn’t sent off the pigeon with a phoney message.’

  ‘The dear thing asked to go out.’

  ‘Yes, knowing how stupid you are, Sophia, I might have believed that everything had passed over your head, but you can’t laugh off that pigeon. So come clean now; you’ve known the whole works since Greta disappeared, haven’t you?’

  ‘What works? Darling Heth, do tell me; it does sound such heaven.’

  ‘As you know so much already, I guess I better had, too, tell you everything. Florence, of course, as you are no doubt aware, is a secret agent, working under a pseudonym, and with a false American passport. Her real name is Edda Eiweiss and she is the head of the German espionage in this country.’

  ‘You don’t say so! Good for Florence,’ said Sophia. ‘I never thought she would have had the brains.’

  ‘Gee, Florence is probably the cleverest, most astute and most daring secret agent alive today.’

  ‘Do go on. What are you? Florence’s bottle-washer?’

  ‘Why no, not at all. I am engaged in counter-espionage on behalf of the Allied Governments, but Florence, of course, believes that I am one of her gang. Now, what I want to know is, are you employed by anybody, or are you on your own?’

  ‘But neither,’ said Sophia, opening her eyes very wide.

  ‘Sophia, I want an answer to my question, please. I have laid my cards on the table; let’s have a look at yours.’

  ‘Oh, on my own, of course,’ said Sophia. As Heatherley seemed to be crediting her with these Machiavellian tactics it would be a pity to undeceive him.

  ‘I thought so. Now, Sophia, I need your help. A woman’s wits are just what I lack, so listen carefully to me. I have found out a great deal, but not all, about the German system of espionage. By November tenth, I shall have all the facts that will enable the Government to round up the entire corps of spies at present operating in this country. On that day we can catch the gang, Florence and her associates, but not before. Will you come in on this with me, Sophia?’ He clutched her shoulders and stared with his light blue eyes into her face. ‘Before you answer, let me tell you that it is difficult and dangerous work. You risk death, and worse, if you undertake it, but the reward, to a patriotic soul, is great.’

  ‘Rather, of course I will.’ Sophia was delighted. She, and not Olga, was now up to the neck in a real-life spy story.

  ‘Understand, you must take all your orders from me. One false step might render useless my work of months.’

  ‘Yes, yes.’

  ‘And not act on your own initiative at all?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Sophia, you are a brave woman and a great little patriot. Shake.’ They shook.

  ‘Can I ask you a question?’

  ‘Go right ahead.’

  ‘Well, what happened to Greta in the end?’

  ‘What did she say to you?’ asked Heatherley, with a searching look.

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘What did she say when you saw her in the Post on that stretcher?’

  ‘Well, but she couldn’t speak. She had a sort of bandage on her tongue, you see.’

  ‘Sophia,’ Heatherley’s voice again took on that horrid rasping tone, ‘you promised to be perfectly frank with me. Come clean now, what was she doing with her eyes?’

  ‘Oh, her eyes. Yes, she must have had a great grit in one of them, I should imagine. She was blinking like mad; I had quite forgotten.’

  ‘She was winking out a message to you in Morse Code. What was that message, Sophia? No double crossing –’

  ‘My dear Heatherley, however should I know?’

 
‘You don’t know Morse Code?’

  Sophia saw that she might just as well have admitted to an Ambassador of the old school that she knew no French. She decided that as she did long to be a counter-spy with Heatherley and that as she could quite quickly learn the Morse Code (she knew that stupid-looking Girl Guides managed to do so) there would be no harm in practising a slight deception.

  ‘Semaphore perfect,’ she said airily. ‘But I must confess my Morse needs brushing up. And anyhow, if you remember, I was running to the telephone when I passed you in that dark passage and had no time at all to see what Greta was winking about. She was such a bore, anyway, I never could stick her. So what happened to her after that?’

  Heatherley pursed his lips. ‘I’m afraid, my dear Sophia, that it was not very pleasant,’ he said. ‘You must remember that my job is counter-espionage, that I have to suppress my own personal feelings rigidly, and that very very often I am obliged to do things which are obnoxious to me.’

  ‘Like in Somerset Maugham’s books?’

  ‘Just like – I am glad you appreciate my point. Well, it seems that Florence wasn’t feeling any too sure about Greta, who was, of course, one of her corps, and was particularly anxious that Greta should not come up before the Aliens’ tribunal as she would probably have made mistakes and given them all away, Florence and the rest of them. Also her papers were not foolproof. So, at Florence’s bidding, of course, Winthrop and I carried her on the stretcher, just as you saw her, gagged and bound, and put her into the main drain which flows, as you may not know, under the First Aid Post.’

  Sophia screamed again. Heatherley went on, ‘Yes, my dear Sophia, counterespionage is a dangerous, disagreeable profession. I should like you to remember this and be most careful, always, how you act. It is absolutely necessary for you to trust me and do exactly what I say on every occasion. We are in this together now, remember, you and I.’

  Sophia did not so much care about being in anything with Heatherley, and hoped that all this would not lead to being in bed with him; she seemed to remember that such things were part of the ordinary day’s work of beautiful female spies. On the other hand, she felt that she would, if necessary, endure even worse than death in order to be mixed up in this thrilling real-life spy drama. The horrible end of poor Greta served to show that here was the genuine article. Fancy. The main drain. Sophia shuddered. No wonder Miss Edwards saw something queer going on under her feet.

  ‘Now, Sophia, I hope you realize,’ Heatherley said, ‘that whatever happens you are not to tell a living soul about all this. You and I are watched day and night by unseen eyes. These are evil things that we are fighting – yes, evil, and very clever. The telephone, to this house and to the Post, is tapped by Florence’s men; our letters are read and our movements followed. We may have got away with this conversation simply by daring to hold it here, in the heart of the enemy country; on the other hand, we may not. As you leave this room, masked men may seize upon us and carry us, on stretchers, to the fate which befell you know who. Of course, if you were to go to anybody in authority with this tale, the gang would know it, and would disperse like a mist before the sun – at the best my work of months would be destroyed, at the worst you and I would suffer the supreme penalty. I may tell you that the War Office and Scotland Yard are watching over us in their own way, and I have secret means of communicating with them. By the tenth of November, as I told you before, I shall have all the evidence I need, and then the whole lot can be rounded up. Meanwhile, you and I, Sophia, must be a team. Now you should go back to your room; this conversation has already lasted too long. I shan’t be able to speak to you like this again until all is over, SO REMEMBER.’

  Heatherley squeezed back into his cupboard, and Sophia, highly elated and with her pain quite forgotten, skipped off and slid down the banisters to her own landing. They had evidently got away with that conversation all right, as no masked men pounced out on her and she was soon in bed, kicking Milly off the warm patch which she wanted for her own feet.

  10

  When Sophia awoke the next day, she had the same feeling with which, as a child, she had greeted Christmas morning, or the day of the Pantomime. A feeling of happy anticipation. At first, and this also was like when she was little, she could not even remember what it was all about; she simply knew that something particularly lively was going to happen.

  Elsie, the housemaid, called her and put a breakfast tray in front of her on which there were coffee, toast and butter, and a nice brown boiled egg, besides a heap of letters and The Times. Sophia had woken up enough to remember that she was now a glamorous female spy; she put on a swansdown jacket, sat up properly, and admonished Milly for refusing to go downstairs.

  ‘Drag her,’ she said to Elsie. Elsie dragged, and they left the room with a slow, shuffling movement, accompanied by the bedside rug.

  The letters looked dull; Sophia began on her egg, and was attacking it with vigour when she saw that something was written on it in pencil. Not hard-boiled, she hoped. Not at all. The writing was extremely faint, but she could make out the word agony followed by 22.

  Sophia was now in agony, for this must be, of course, a code. She knew that spies and counter-spies had the most peculiar ways of communicating with each other, winking in Morse and so on; writing on eggs would be everyday work for them. She abandoned the delicious egg, done so nicely to a turn, and rolled her eyes round the pink ceiling with blue clouds of her bedroom while she tried the word agony backwards and forwards and upside down. She made anagrams of the letters. She looked at the egg in her looking-glass bed-post, but all in vain. She would have to get hold of the Chief at once, but how was she to do that? Impossible to send Elsie upstairs with instructions to see if Mr Egg was still in Miss Turnbull’s cupboard, if so, Lady Sophia’s compliments and would he step downstairs. In any case he was unlikely to have remained in the cupboard all night, and Florence’s bed, a narrow single one, would not harbour any but impassioned lovers with the smallest degree of comfort. This, she somehow felt, Florence and Heatherley were not.

  Elsie now returned with Milly, who once more dived under the eiderdown, and, with a piercing snore, resumed her slumbers.

  ‘Did she do anything?’

  ‘Yes, m’lady.’

  ‘Good girl. Would you be very kind,’ said Sophia, ‘and go and ask Miss Turnbull if she would give me Mr Egg’s telephone number. Say I’m short of a man for tonight.’

  Florence, who had only come off duty at six, was displeased at being woken up. She was understood by Elsie to say that Mr Egg had gone to Lympne for the day, and had her ladyship remembered that there was to be a Brotherhood meeting at 98 that evening.

  Sophia saw that she had been rather dense. Of course she might have realized that if Heth had been available to see her there would have been no need for him to write on her egg. Then she saw light.

  ‘He, Egg, is in agony, because he is unable 2 see me before 2 night.’ Sophia turned to her breakfast with a happy appreciation both of its quality and of her own brilliance.

  She picked up The Times and read about the Pets’ Programme. It seemed to have fallen very flat with the musical critic. ‘Not with Milly though.’ Then, without looking at the war news, which she guessed would be dull, she turned to the front page and read, as she always did, the agony column. She usually found one or two advertisements that made her feel happy, and today there was a particularly enjoyable one. ‘Poor old gentleman suffering from malignant disease would like to correspond with pretty young lady. Box 22 The Times.’

  When Sophia had finished laughing she became quite wistful. She always called Sir Ivor the poor old gentleman, and he called her the pretty young lady. If only he were not being a dreadful old traitor in Berlin, she would have cut the advertisement out and sent it to him. ‘I never should have expected to miss him as much as I do, but the fact is there are certain jokes which I can only share with him. Funny thing too,’ she thou
ght, ‘suffering from malignant disease, just what he is. National Socialism.’ She cut out the advertisement and put it in her jewel case, deciding that if she ever had the opportunity to do so, through neutrals, she would send it to Sir Ivor in the hopes of making him feel small. Her blood boiled as she thought again of his treachery and of the programme of Camp songs, which was exactly similar to one he had given before the Chief Scout some months previously, and which had included that prime and perennial favourite:

  There was a bee i ee i ee,

  Sat on a wall y all y all y all y all,

  It gave a buzz y wuz y wuz y wuz y wuz,

  And that was all y all y all y all y all.

  Sir Ivor and Dr Goebbels between them had altered the words of this classic to:

  The British E i ee i ee,

  Sat on a wall y all y all y all y all,

  Like Humpty Dumpt y ump ty ump ty ump ty ump,

  It had a fall y all y all y all y all.

  So queer it seemed, and so horrible, that somebody who had had the best that England can give should turn against her like that. Sir Ivor had received recognition of every kind, both public and private, from all parts of the British Empire, of his great gifts. Had he been one of those geniuses who wither in attics, it would have been much more understandable. Sophia got out of bed, and while her bath was running in she did a few exercises in order to get fit for the dangers and exactions of counter-espionage.

  On the way to St Anne’s, Sophia bought a Manual of Morse Code which she fully intended to learn that day. When she arrived however she found, greatly to her disgust, that, as it was Thursday, there was a great heap of clean washing to be counted.

  She supposed that she must have a brain rather like that of a mother bird who, so the naturalists tell us, cannot count beyond three; counting the washing was her greatest trial. There would be between twenty and thirty overalls to be checked and put away in the nurses’ pigeonholes in the ‘dressing-room’ which was a sacking partition labelled, rather crudely, Female. Now Sophia, with an effort of concentration, could stagger up to twelve or thirteen; having got so far the telephone bell would ring, somebody would come and ask her a question, or her own mind would stray in some new direction. Then she would have to begin all over again.