The Penguin Complete Novels of Nancy Mitford

by Nancy Mitford

  ‘No taxi, no indeed.’ She stepped gaily into the fog.

  ‘Sophia, you’re wonderful.’

  ‘No! No! Good-bye! Good-bye!’

  Heatherley shut the front door. Sophia waited a moment and then she went down the area steps, let herself in at the back door and took off her shoes. The servants were in the servants’ hall with the wireless blazing away, the back-stairs were pitch dark, and Sophia, using her torch, crept up them and hoped that she would not fall over Heatherley and his girl friend, quiet-timing. They could hardly have got there yet, she thought. On the first floor a door led from the back-stairs into the ballroom, a room which was used about twice a year for parties, and otherwise kept shut up, with dust sheets. She was rather surprised to notice, through the cracks of the door, that the lights were on. Wonderful how the quiet-timers seep into everything. She crept to the door and looked through the keyhole. What she saw turned her to stone.

  In a group quite near the door stood Florence, Heatherley, Winthrop, a microphone, and Sir Ivor King, the Lieder König.

  ‘I reckon,’ Heatherley was saying, ‘that she will be gone an hour at the very least, in this fog. Five minutes to the Post, ten minutes to copy out the notices, three-quarters of an hour to the Regal and back. And this is a very conservative estimate, I may add, for the fog is thick outside, and I have not allowed for her stopping to talk to anybody at the Post. So you see there is no danger, and we have ample time for everything. If the servants should happen to hear us, they will only think we have switched on the radio and old Ivor is coming over the air better than usual. But they will surely be listening to him themselves downstairs.’

  Florence was looking cross. ‘I still think it was perfectly stupid of you to tell her anything at all.’

  ‘Say, we’ve talked all this over before, haven’t we? She was wise to everything already, and it was a choice between making her think she was in on the racket, or taking her for a ride. If we had adopted the latter course, the police would have been rubbering round this house and the First Aid Post, and we should have been in a regular spot. Another thing, how would I have got her away this evening if she hadn’t been told the works, or some of them – as it is she’s just eating out of my hand, will do anything I order her to.’

  ‘Yes, there’s something in that,’ said Florence grudgingly.

  ‘I tell you,’ Heth continued, ‘I shall be glad when this business is over and we can do a bunk. I’m not so wild about the inspection of the drain tonight; it may mean they are on to something, or it may be just a routine affair. Either way, I don’t like it.’

  ‘In one minute it will be a quarter of,’ said Winthrop. He took up a position in front of the microphone, gazing at his wrist-watch. The others fell silent.

  ‘Germany calling, Germany calling,’ Winthrop said, with a very slight German accent and in an entirely different voice from his usual one. ‘Here is the Lieder König who is going to give you one of his inimitable programmes of Song Propaganda, so popular with lovers of song and also with lovers of propaganda the world over. The Lieder König.’

  Sir Ivor stepped smartly to the microphone. Sophia saw that, out of deference no doubt to the taste of his employers, he was wearing an Aryan wig of metallic brilliance; each curl was like a little golden spring. He raised his voice in song, ‘Kathleen Mavourneen the Grey Dawn is breaking,’ then he gave a short news bulletin, during the course of which he exactly described that evening’s Low cartoon, and also reminded his listeners that Sir Kingsley Wood was due to visit three aerodromes in Yorkshire the following day.

  Then Winthrop spoke. ‘The Lieder König thinks you would like to know certain facts which have come our way recently. In your great, free, British Empire, in the colony of Kenya, to be exact, there are two honest, thrifty, industrious German farmers, Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. These worthy men have been dragged away from their homes, for no better reason than that they were German-born, and put into the local prison. The prison is a wretched hut, the beds in it are unbearably hard, and the central heating hardly works at all. The prisoners are only allowed baths twice a week. But the worst scandal is the food which is offered to these Germans. Let me read out the bill of fare, considered by your Government as being sufficient for two grown men.

  ‘Breakfast. A liquid supposed to be coffee, some milk substitute, two lumps of beet sugar, pseudo-eggs and a loaf of brackish bread.

  ‘Luncheon. A so-called veal and ham pie, things which look like potatoes and beans, crab-apple pudding, cheese which is full of mites.

  ‘Tea. Tea (a nerve tonic indispensable to the decadent English, but which we Germans despise).

  ‘Dinner. A thin soup, fish, which is well known in these parts to cause leprosy. The leg of some sheep which had had to be killed, turnips and beetroot such as one feeds to cattle.

  ‘There was no tin of biscuits by their beds in case they woke up hungry in the night.

  ‘When you hear that things like this can happen in your great, vaunted, rich Empire perhaps you will demand that your statesmen, who can allow two honest and unoffending farmers to be so treated, should stop worrying over the scum of Polish cities in luxurious concentration camps, and should be a little bit more concerned about the beam in their own eye, for a change.

  ‘Ask Mr Churchill, where is the Ark Royal?

  ‘Here is the Lieder König again.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sir Ivor, ‘I hope you have all been as much shocked as I have by the brutal ill-treatment of Herr Bad and Herr Wangel. And now I am going to sing an old favourite, “Under the Deodar”.’

  He did so, and wound up his programme with ‘Fearful the Death of the Diver Must Be, walking alone, walking alone, walking alone in the Dehehehe-he-he-pths of the Sea’, a song of which both he and his admirers were extremely fond, as, at the word ‘depths’, his voice plumbed hitherto uncharted ones, and any seals or hippos who might happen to be around would roar in an agony of appreciation. ‘Good night, dears,’ said the old König, ‘keep your hairs on. By the way, where is the Ark Royal?’

  ‘This ends,’ said Winthrop, resuming his place at the microphone, ‘our programme of Song-Propaganda in English, arranged and sung by the Lieder König.

  ‘Here are the Reichsender Bremen, stations Hamburg and D x B, operating on the thirty-one metre band. I have a special announcement for my English listeners. There will be a Pets’ Programme tomorrow from station D x B at 9.30 Greenwich mean time.’

  ‘Now we must scram,’ said Heatherley, ‘we can always wait in the Maternity Ward if the drain inspection is not finished.’

  They all, including the old gentleman, began to struggle into anti-gas clothing. Sophia waited no longer. She flew upstairs to her bedroom and locked herself in, dumbfounded by what she had seen.

  Her mind was in a whirl. If Heatherley, who pretended to be an American counter-spy, was really a German spy, perhaps the ‘King of Song’ was pretending to be a German spy, but was really an English counter-spy? Was he in the pay of the gang, or merely hoaxing them; was he perhaps longing, but unable, to get a message through to the outside world or was he only too anxious that his shameful secret should be kept? Was he neither spy nor counter-spy, but just a poor old gentleman who got a taste of the thumbscrew twice a day? She wondered, irrelevantly, whether he had seen in the newspapers the pæans of praise followed by the dirges of disillusionment which had so prominent a place in them. Suddenly she remembered that advertisement in The Times: ‘Poor old gentleman suffering from malignant disease would like to correspond with pretty young lady.’ Perhaps he did want to correspond with the pretty young lady, perhaps in fact, it was he who had written on her egg ‘Agony (column, box) 22’, and who had sent in the advertisement. But if he could do all this, surely he could equally well write to her, to Rudolph, or even to poor Fred directly.

  Sophia felt that life had become very complicated all of a sudden. She wished she were more versed in the intri
cacies of spying, and she very much wished that she could remember more about what had happened in the limited number of spy stories which she had read at various times (generally, of course, on journeys, and how often does one remember anything read on journeys?) At what stage, for instance, does the beautiful heroine abandon her lone trail and call in the heavy hand, large boots and vacant faces of The Yard? She rather thought not until the whole plot had been brilliantly unmasked, except for a few unimportant details, by the glamorous amateur spy herself. This was a point of view which appealed to Sophia, who had to consider Rudolph and Olga as well as King and Country. She went to sleep, having decided on a policy of watchful waiting.

  The next day, when Sophia arrived at her First Aid Post, she found an atmosphere of subdued but horrified excitement. She immediately concluded that something untoward had happened at the Theatre; the nurses were always retailing awful atrocities they had witnessed there, and by Theatre they did not at all mean, as anybody else would have, the play; the ‘He’ of these entertainments was not Tom Walls, but the Surgeon, the ‘She’ not Hermione Baddeley but the Patient; in short, ‘the Theatre’ was not the Gaiety but St Anne’s Hospital Operating Theatre. The dramas enacted there alternated, as at the Grand Guignol in Paris, between gruesome tragedy and roaring farce. Sophia supposed that a dead man must have come to life; the reverse, which too often happened, could never have caused such a stir.

  Nurses were standing about in little groups, whispering, their eyes as round as marbles. Even Sister Wordsworth and Mr Stone, whom Sophia found in the office, were looking quite concerned.

  ‘Don’t tell Lady Sophia, she wouldn’t like it,’ said kind Sister Wordsworth, remembering about the knees.

  ‘What?’ said Sophia. ‘But of course you must tell me. I am so curious, I have the most curious nature in the world. If you don’t tell, I shan’t get a wink of sleep, or give you one minute’s peace until you have. So please, dear Sister Wordsworth.’

  Of course they were dying to tell her really. It seemed that, during the drain inspection of the previous night, something too horrible had been found down there, brought up, carried through the Post (dripping, my dear, the smell), and taken to the Hospital mortuary. Sophia began to guess what this object might be, and sure enough, it was the body of a young woman, bound and gagged, and with its face completely gnawed away by rats. Greta.

  ‘But how on earth could it have got there?’ she asked, in a shaking voice.

  ‘Why, poor Lady Sophia looks as white as a sheet. I told you we shouldn’t tell her. Sit down here, my dear, and have a cup of tea.’

  ‘They say it must have been washed down from much higher up. Nothing to do with this place at all.’

  ‘I should hope not indeed,’ said Sophia. ‘We should never get another outside patient for practices if they thought they were going to be popped down the main drain when we had finished with them.’

  ‘Outside patient – what an idea. Whatever made you think of that? Well, here’s your tea, drink it up, and you’ll feel better. We all think it was so clever of Miss Edwards, the way she saw something queer under our feet. I’m longing to have my fortune done again, now that there isn’t any more.’

  Sophia, however, was beginning to think that there was something very queer indeed, no less a thing than the head-quarters of Florence’s gang and the hide-out of Sir Ivor King himself; otherwise, why did they hold their broadcast in her ballroom on the night of the drain inspection? Why did they all work so assiduously at the Post? She had seen a plan of the hospital and knew that underneath the garage there were vast cellars and tunnels, as well as the main drain, no doubt admirably suited to Florence’s purpose. A more convenient place, in fact, it would be hard to imagine, a place where people wander in and out at all hours, often bandaged and on stretchers, or disguised in the sinister uniform of the decontamination squad. Could anything be more ideal? Then if, for any reason, the Post became temporarily unsuitable for their purposes, as it had done the previous evening during the drain inspection, they could repair, with their old ally (or victim) to Granby Gate, and under the guise of Brothers could hold their meetings and conduct their broadcasts there. Florence might not be a glamour girl, but she seemed to be a most efficient spy. Sophia hoped that this would all be a lesson to Luke, and that he would, in future, investigate the antecedents of his soulmates before introducing them into the home.

  12

  Luke wrote an extremely entertaining letter from America. The change of scene had evidently done him good; he appeared to be in high spirits, and to have cast off the gloom in which he had been enveloped before leaving England.

  He said that, having always heard from Mary Pencill that America was the one truly democratic country in the world, quite free from class distinction of any kind, it had seemed to him rather odd that the talk should run almost entirely on such subjects as how charming the late Lady Fort William used to be. ‘Another topic which is nearly always introduced, sooner or later, is what do the English think of America? When I reply that, although most Englishmen have heard of America, not one in ten actually believes in it, they seem almost incredulous.’ He also said that they were quite indignant at what seemed to them to be the boring progress of the war, and that on the whole, he thought, they hoped that Germany would win. They hoped this, of course, in the kind of irresponsible, guilty way a child hopes the house will catch fire. ‘They have a juvenile point of view and in particular an extreme love of sensation.’ He had nearly finished his work, he said, and would soon be home. Had had an interesting time, but was looking forward to being back in England again; he would be flying home by clipper. No mention of Florence, Herr Hitler, or the Brotherhood, and in fact Luke’s journey to the New World would seem to have readjusted his perspective as regards the Old.

  The news that her husband’s return was imminent put an altered complexion on things for Sophia, who realized that she must hurry up with her unmasking activities. Luke was already much disliked owing to his well-known sympathies of the last few years, and it would be extremely awkward for him if a nest of spies were to be found lodged in his house while he himself was there. If, on the other hand, they were tracked down and handed over to justice, by means of the great brilliance and deep cunning of his wife while he was engaged in work of national importance abroad, it would be quite a different affair, and could reflect only to his credit.

  Sophia decided that she must immediately find out where the King of Song was hiding, or being hidden, and get into communication with that treacherous and venal (or, alternatively, loyal and disinterested) old body. She felt that even if the former adjectives proved to be correct, he would not have lost all his affection for his godchild; she could not somehow imagine him handing her over to Heatherley, the drain and thumbscrew. If really on the side of England all along, he would be only too glad to be assisted from the clutches of his captors. She hoped he would not prove to be drugged, like Van der Lubbe, but supposed that he would hardly be in such good voice if so. The more she thought of it, the more she felt certain that he must be underneath the First Aid Post, and that one clue to his whereabouts lay in the snacks which Florence and Heatherley carried from the canteen in such quantities. Their appetites had become quite a joke with the nurses. The Maternity Ward was too small to hide a mouse, but next door to that was the Hospital Museum, a huge, half dark vault, of a most sinister shape and size. The manhole which led to the main drain was in Mr Stone’s little office, so they would not be able to use that; investigation, she felt, should be made in the Museum.

  She also decided that it was no longer possible for her to blaze a lone trail through the jungle of spies and counter-spies that her life had now become. After all, she had a lot of valuable counter-espionage work to her credit; the brilliant piece of feminine intuition which had prevented her from leaving the house on Heatherley’s bogus errand, as many a lesser woman might have done, having led to the sensational discoveries t
hat the King of Song was still in this country, that Heatherley Egg, far from being a counter-spy, was a counter-counter-spy, and that Winthrop, if not Heatherley himself, was a German. In The Thirty-Nine Steps, even Scudder, who, like her, preferred to work on his own, had finally bequeathed his little black notebook to an accomplice; Sophia had no black notebook: all the more necessary that she should have an accomplice. At any moment she might be drained, and then nobody would ever know that she had been a beautiful female spy all along. It was a dreadful prospect.

  The choice of an accomplice lay between Fred and Rudolph, and while Rudolph probably had more initiative and more spare time at present, she really favoured Fred on account of his being so much more under her thumb. There was quite good reason, knowing what she did of Fred’s character, to hope that in his eyes she would be the Chief; Fred was used to Chiefs, and in fact had never yet been without one during the whole of his life. Rudolph, as she very well knew, would order her about or ignore her, just as it suited him; besides, it would give her the most intense pleasure, as well as serving him right for flirting with Olga, to leave Rudolph out of all this until she could point to the fruits of her activities in the shape of at least three prisoners in the Tower. Having therefore, quite decided upon Fred, to the point of lifting the receiver of her telephone to ring him up, she suddenly remembered the main drain and the possible fate of inept counter-spies. Fred had a young and lovely wife who seemed to be devoted to the idea of him; he also had two fat babies. Rudolph had nothing but a perfectly horrible sister who had often been very rude to Sophia. She rang up Rudolph.

  Rudolph was by now bored to death with Olga and her long stories about a job and a Chief that too palpably did not exist. On the other hand, she having been the cause of his break with Sophia, he had felt himself obliged to haunt her company. When he realized that he was being summoned back into the fold he made no secret of his delight.