by A. N. Wilson
‘The guests of honour have not met her,’ he said.
‘They are in for shock, no?’ asked Helene, but he answered her by placing one of his white-gloved fingers on her lips.
TWENTY-SEVEN
Mary Much was as tall as Esmé Worledge was squat; her ash-blonde bob as expensively chic as Esmé’s yellow hair shrieked disaster. Aubrey Bird remarked afterwards that Esmé might as well have come to the dinner with the words SURBITON WOMAN pinned to her back. When Mary phoned L.P. with this gem, the columnist dismissed it as unfair.
‘Esmé,’ he told Mary, ‘was making a post-modern statement. She had come to the dinner in fancy dress. She was posing – as a reader of The Daily Legion!’
This was a classic. It would certainly run and run.
Certainly, from the moment of their all tumbling through the front door, and handing their coats to Piet and Helene, there was a sense of the new editor of the Daily and his nervous wife being visitants from outer space. Aubrey Bird said that to define Derek Worledge you’d say that though he wore hand-made Jermyn Street shirts with the monogram D.W. on the pocket, he wore them as if they were polycotton from British Home Stores. And who ever wore shirts with a breast pocket? As for Esmé, from the top of her cheap blonde hair to the peep-toes of her deeply unfashionable patent-leather high-heeled evening shoes, she was Mrs BHS – Madama Suburbia, Essence of Esher. The outfit would have been more suitable for handing round slices of home-made quiche, or even those little chunks of cheese impaled on toothpicks, at a Tupperware party than for celebrating the appointment of her husband to a position in the world.
For Esmé’s part, fear and loathing battled for pre-eminence as she was led into the large drawing room by the two women, Mary Much so patronizing, as she took her arm, Martina so scornful with that fixed smile. And then – the old lady. Well, as she ventured to say on the way back to Surrey in the car, she did think she might have been warned.
At dinner, Esmé prodded the glistening grey sludge on her plate with a timid fork. The black boy had given her far too much. She did not think she could bring herself to eat so much as one granule of it. The sight of Mr Mark spooning it into his mouth made her swallowing muscles freeze.
‘Just eat a little,’ snapped Derek, as if coaxing a three-year-old. He spoke to her across the table. It seemed an alarming gathering of people – the old, rather effeminate gentleman who wrote the gossip column; the Watsons, evidently not very well matched; the Blimbys (Derek had always said that little Blimby couldn’t edit a paper bag – and his wife Sal, a disconcertingly posh-sounding woman, up from the country) … None of these were people Esmé knew. She did not expect to know anyone, but such things seemed to matter less on the Sunday red-top which Derek had edited before his appointment at the Legion.
Half the table – the Kurtmeyers, Lennox Mark himself, Derek – were talking about the future of the Legion. The other half were gossiping, and talking nonsense. Some were reliving poor Mrs Mark’s experience of being burgled some weeks before, but they did so in a frivolous tone which Esmé found baffling. Nor did she understand Derek’s angry, anxious tone when she sounded sympathetic rather than trying to be clever.
‘If anything like that ever happened to me …’ Her voice trailed away at the horror of it.
‘But it didn’t,’ said Derek. Then, with a switched-on smile, he sycophantically said, ‘Martina – you were saying.’
He was sitting between Martina Mark and Mary Much, and both of these women smiled with inscrutable cruelty whenever he leaned over to correct his wife.
Mr Blimby, the editor of The Sunday Legion, was a small man with a loud booming voice. His social origins were really on a level with Esmé. Sal’s family – he referred to them as Sal’s ‘people’ – had been appalled when she’d come home with a man who only reached up to her shoulder and whose father was a dentist. They had also been appalled that he was a journalist. These views had been modified when Simon Blimby became deputy editor of a broadsheet. The salary enabled them to buy an Old Rectory, and by the time he’d got the editorship of The Sunday Legion, Simon was a passable shot, and could, in the views of his brothers-in-law, be mistaken for a White Man.
‘Frankly,’ he boomed, ‘in any contest between a Yardie from Brixton and our beloved Martina, I’d rate the bloke’s chances of survival rather low!’
Sal loyally guffawed.
‘Zere were tsree of zem – tsree!’ squawked Frau Fax like some one-eyed vulture.
‘I mean,’ said Esmé.
‘Just don’t,’ interrupted her husband. ‘Just don’t mean, will you?’
Then, when she drank some champagne to steady herself, he added brusquely, ‘Watch that stuff. Remember!’
In clear reference to some earlier social occasion at which his wife had disgraced him, Derek Worledge imitated someone suppressing a burp.
‘I’m afraid if a nig-nog or anyone else broke in on us,’ said Sal – thanking Piet with a silent display of dentistry as he came round to fill her glass with Pouligny Montrachet – ‘it would be out with the 2.2 and bang, bang. Off goes a woolly head!’
Mary Much sighed at this countrified remark. She had no ‘views’ – if people wished to be coarse, let them. It was simply that there were certain things, in London, you couldn’t say. This kind of talk, especially with Piet in the room, was simply not permissible.
‘I’m afraid,’ Derek Worledge told her, ‘that we’ve all grown too soft. That man who shot a burglar – locked up for murder – that can’t be right.’
Mary sighed again.
Piet, the beautiful house-boy, placed his cheek quite close to hers and asked if everything was all right.
‘Just wait until Mr Mark has finished his caviar,’ she murmured. Then with those long white fingers she touched his sleeve. ‘It’s all fine, fine. Thanks for everything.’
He shimmied away. So much had been put into that one complicit glance between them.
When Martina and Mary had planned the evening, as they planned everything together, they had realized that socially speaking, they were facing a poser. Derek Worledge had been educated in Leeds, where his father was a doctor. He had retained his northern accent through three years at Bristol University and twenty years in London working as a journalist. Something clearly marked him out from the Court. It was not in the simple, socio-economic sense, social class, since Worledge was (and in some circumstances he would be blunt enough to say as well as think it) the equal of any of them. It was something to do with style, the quality which Mary and Martina had in such buckets and which the Worledges did not even seem to covet. Another way of putting it (though none of them would have done so in Lennox Mark’s hearing) was that Derek Worledge, alone in that assembly, was following his true inclinations and ambitions. For the others, journalism was a means to some quite detached end.
‘I am Sviss,’ Frau Fax was noisily leaning over to croak at Derek – for she had insisted on being near the new editor at table, and was pursuing a monologue of her own with anyone who would care to listen. He smiled politely, as a doctor’s son would in such a circumstance, while trying to stop his eyes playing too obviously over the sight which greeted him: the gaping eyeless socket with its sagging pink and white stringy scars set in that sallow bony cheek; the crooked mouth; the half-built nose. ‘Sviss – from Basel. Ve stood out very strongly against ze Nazis.’
The others – this was it, this was what Martina later agreed with Mary Much – felt slightly – not ashamed exactly, but in need of protecting themselves from the full blast of the Legion’s atmosphere. They did so by conversing in an irony which was quite lacking in either Mr or Mrs Worledge. Perhaps L.P. and Aubrey Bird and the others were all smeared with Lennox Mark’s own sense of moral failure, his refusal to hear God’s word in Africa in his teens.
Martina for her part was impatient with such scruples or introspections. In the various interviews and profiles she had given since she married Lennox, she had freely adapted her age, her past,
her nationality. It was more helpful to be Swiss. Her mother had added the attractive detail of her father having been an eminent cancer doctor in whose prestigious clinic many were treated free of charge. No one knew how to check details – this was one of the first lessons Martina had learnt when she made the career switch and became a journalist. Let Lennox worry his fat rich conscience about God. For Martina and her mother, God, if He had ever existed, had been bulldozed out of their lives in East Germany in ’45 and she saw no reason to try to resurrect Him when she re-established herself in Frankfurt in ’63. She was incapable of sentimentality about money. Such a moral luxury was never hers. She knew from an early age that she had two assets – her looks, and her adamantine character. These could command the highest prices. When she’d moved to London in the year that England beat her country in the World Cup, she did not mess about – she’d moved in at the top of the market. At the end of two years she had made enough for her mother and herself to be able to retire. A client – never mind who – was just as happy as herself to bury the past. No ugly words or threats were ever uttered, but she got her ‘break’ in journalism with the same ease that had earned her the freehold of a small house in Chelsea.
Martina would let no one, and certainly not Lennox Mark’s Christian God, judge her for the way she’d lived. As a two-year old child, she had been carried by her mother through flames – their apartment building on fire, their street a heap of smouldering rubble. The Western Allies showed their gallantry by raining fire on a hundred thousand women and children in Berlin. Then these English and American lovers of democracy showed their devotion to freedom by handing those German civilians who had survived the air-raids into the loving protection of Marshal Stalin and his German stooges.
After the Royal Air Force destroyed their home and their hopes, Martina and her mother (left a widow by the war) found themselves citizens of Communist East Germany. The skinny, undernourished, red-headed infant flowered into a precocious twelve-year-old Martina. Herr Hoffmann, the manager of their condominium and a keen Party member, said he could get waitressing work for Martina after school. She and Frau Fax both joined the Party. Her mother chose to be out in the afternoons if or when the waitressing led to more lucrative activities, first with Herr Hoffmann, then with other privileged Party activists. Between twelve and fifteen, Martina developed looks which could not merely disturb, but could bewitch men. By her late teens, by the time she and her mother had made their decision to escape to the West, she was working the tourist hotels, posing with gullible foreign businessmen or politicians in full view of the hidden cameras.
Then came the moment of choice. You could not trust anyone in Berlin in those days, and even though they bribed someone who said they knew someone who could nobble the guards on the Wall, neither of them had expected their escape to be easy. They actually retraced their steps, crept along the same street where her mother, that night of flaming nightmare in ’45, had carried her as a baby. That first night, in ’45, they had been among crowds of thousands, as screaming, panic-stricken women and children, many of them in flames, ran in all directions. The second night, eighteen years later, they were alone. The street was dark. The first patch of barbed wire was reached soundlessly, and from the air of desertion in the street, both women formed the hope, or expectation, that the ‘friend’ had been trustworthy, and their escape assured. They tore their clothes on the wire, but what the hell. Then began the climb up the concrete, the grazed shins, the bleeding palms as they scrabbled desperately in the dark for their freedom.
That first night, in ’45, the noise of explosions had been all around them. The second night, of escape, in ’63, was silent until the explosive gunfire began, and it seemed all the louder for being directed just at them. Here were no thousands of German women being butchered for the sin of living in the wrong European country. These were just two individuals facing death itself. First, the sniper’s shot, just as they got over the top of the wall. Then, as her mother slumped there, impaled on the wire, they switched on the arc lights and steady gunfire followed. It was for Martina the definitive moment of her life. The world was against them. Somehow, they had slithered or fallen on the Western side of the wall but the lights were still on them from the East and the guns were still firing. She held her mother under the armpits. It looked like they’d shot off her face. In the arc lights Olga’s head was just a splash of blood. While the guns continued to fire, Martina dragged her mother (whom she believed at that moment to be dead) across a scrub of urban wasteland. She felt determined to live. The bastards she’d left behind were not going to have her mother’s dead body. The bastards she was running to join were going to pay her for the privilege of having her body alive, and pay her handsomely. She’d taken enough shit to last her a lifetime.
Derek Worledge and his wife were absurd, but if they did the trick, lifted the Legion from its doldrums, made some more fucking money, Martina was prepared to give them a try.
Worledge was built like a bruiser, his neck rolling over his shirt collar, his cruel heavy mouth jutting out as he spoke. Martina and Mary put him through his paces. His voice seemed to be scrambled, like the devices used to disguise a voice on anti-bugging equipment. It came shaken through gravel, this noise.
‘Basically, it speaks for England, doesn’t it, the Legion?’
‘So true.’ Mary Much sucked in her cheeks.
This had always been Mary’s line, since she entered Martina’s life and they together discovered Lennox, and all the potential which a marriage between Lennox and Martina would provide. The Legion spoke for England, and the successful editor of the Legion, like the successful Prime Minister, had his finger at any one moment on England’s pulse. Martina was never more conscious of the cold winds of East Berlin blowing at the back of her head than when Mary spoke of England’s heartbeat. None of them need know of the German past. Mary knew when not to be inquisitive and had never probed. Lennox himself appeared positively gratified by the chance to be vague about origins. Germany, Switzerland, what was the difference?
Perhaps one ingredient in the success of their marital partnership was this dread of England they shared: a respect for an image of England. Mary imitated Derek Worledge’s gravelly accent, but Martina could not really hear it: the voice gave her no signals. Lennox had comparable feelings of alienation when such matters as class were aired. His Englishry had been ersatz in Lugardia. The rugger matches had been played on hard pitches at Queen Alexandra College, clouds of blood-red dust came from the sun-caked mud of the pitch if you tried a free kick: none of your genuine oozing black mud of the playing fields of Eton.
(Father Vivyan, he would say, was the first ‘proper Englishman’ he had ever met; he was never more conscious of it, absurdly, than when the priest, with his record of great valour in the army and his manly bearing, had touched the elbow of an armed policeman at the border checkpoint going into the Karkara mine compound.
‘My dear, there’s no need for guns.’)
That my dear – Anthony Eden English, rather than mincing camp – had suggested a world to colonial Lennie. He still felt himself excluded from it. Martina, likewise, did not really under-stand what Worledge was talking about – the rights of the trueborn Englishman to shoot burglars, to keep out foreigners, to retain pounds, shillings and pence as opposed to the hated euro, these he asserted. Just as African-born Lennox and mysteriously born Martina heartily endorsed this man’s Little Englandry, so ‘Dr Arbuthnot’, poor mincing Aubrey Bird, seemed to be agreeing as Worledge laid into homosexuals. He asked if they’d seen a feature he’d commissioned for his final edition of the Sunday red-top he was leaving: six tell-tale signs to see if the vicar’s ‘one of those’.
‘It was a bit of fun,’ he gravelled, ‘but it had an underlying serious point. I don’t mind standing up and being counted. Those perverts …’
Esmé pursed her lips.
‘These perverts in the Church, for fuck’s sake …’
Mary Much co
uld number few among her close circle who did not come among the categories of human being excoriated by the editor-elect. Modern artists, Europeans, homosexuals … This man saw them as the enemy.
‘He is the most inspired piece of retro,’ she cooed into Martina’s ear when they had all gone home, and it was just the two of them again.
‘I do hope we know what we are doing,’ said Martina.
‘With Worledge?’
‘Lennie says the money situation is very bad.’
Martina sat at her dressing table. Mary stood behind her stool, a hairbrush in her hand, brushing her friend’s coppery tresses. They had learned so well, these two, how to make use of contradictions in life. The brutality of the Legion, even when directed against people or things which they liked, was not without its uses. (The conceptual art of Hans Busch was a case in point. The more the Legion derided it, the more ‘controversial’ its appeal in other quarters.)
‘How bad?’ asked Mary.
‘Kurt and Spottiswood say the Sunday and the Daily will have to merge. They’ll lose a lot of jobs, which is a good thing.’
‘Very good,’ cooed Mary.
‘But the advertisers will be scared away.’
‘Not good.’
Mary’s long white fingers caressed and massaged Martina’s neck. Martina looked at the face of her friend in the glass. Had one of Burne-Jones’s models dyed her hair ash-blonde, and dressed in a shapely little black dress and black tights, the effect would have been similar. This intensely worldly woman had a way of looking almost disembodied.
‘The Watsons were snappy with one another,’ said Martina.
‘She was crazy this evening. That moment when L.P. said, Oh Martina’s brill … and before he’d said the word ‘brilliant’, Julia was tearing at her hair and saying that if her husband told another woman she was brilliant, she would scream!’
