There was a pause. Moreland cleared his throat uncomfortably. Mrs Maclintick sniffed. In the far distance, unexpectedly soon, the All Clear droned. It was followed, an instant later, by a more local siren.
‘That one didn’t take long,’ Moreland said.
‘Another tip-and-run raider,’ said Pilgrim. ‘The fashion of the moment.’
‘It was a single plane caught the Madrid?’
‘That’s it.’
‘I’ll make some tea,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘Do us good.’
‘Just what I need, Audrey, my dear,’ said Pilgrim, sighing. ‘I couldn’t think what it was. Now I know it’s tea—not beer at all.’
He drank the beer all the same. Mrs Maclintick went off to the kitchen. It became clear that an unpleasant duty must be performed. There was no avoiding it. Priscilla would have to be told about the Madrid as soon as possible. If I called up the Jeavonses’ house right away, the telephone, with any luck, would be answered by Molly Jeavons herself. I could tell her what had happened. She could break the news. So far as that went, even to make the announcement to Molly would be bad enough. It might be hard on her to have to tell Priscilla, but at least Molly was, by universal consent, a person adapted by nature to such harrowing tasks; warm-hearted, not over sensitive, grasping immediately the needs of the bereaved, saying just what was required, emotional yet never incapacitated by emotion. Molly, if I were lucky, would do the job. There was always the chance Priscilla herself might be at the other end of the line. That was a risk that had to be taken into consideration. In a cowardly way, I delayed action until Mrs Maclintick had returned with the tea. After finishing a cup, I asked if I might use the telephone.
‘By the bed,’ said Moreland.
Pilgrim began to muse aloud.
‘Strange those young Germans up there trying to kill me,’ he murmured to himself. ‘Ungrateful too. I’ve always had such good times in Berlin.’
The bedroom was more untidy than would ever have been allowed in Matilda’s day. I sat on the edge of the bed and dialled the Jeavons number. There was no buzz. I tried again. After several unsuccessful attempts, none of which even achieved the ‘number unobtainable’ sound, I rang the Exchange. There were further delays. Then the operator tried the Jeavons number. That, too, was unproductive. No sound of ringing came. The line was out of order. I gave it up and returned to the sitting room.
‘I can’t get through. I’ll have to go.’
‘Stay the night, if you like,’ said Mrs Maclintick. ‘You can sleep on the sofa. Maclintick often did in our Pimlico place. Spent almost more time there than he did in bed.’
The offer was unexpected, rather touching in the circumstances. I saw she was probably able to look after Moreland better than I thought.
‘No—thanks all the same. As I failed on the telephone, I’ll have to go in person.’
‘Priscilla?’ said Moreland.
‘Yes.’
He nodded.
‘What a job,’ he said.
Max Pilgrim gathered his dressing gown round him. He yawned and stretched.
‘I wonder when the next one will arrive,’ he said. ‘Worse than waiting for the curtain to go up.’
I said goodnight to them. Moreland came to the door.
‘I suppose you’ve really got to do this?’ he said.
‘Not much avoiding it.’
‘Glad it’s not me,’ he said.
‘You’re right to be.’
There seemed no more taxis left in London. I walked for a time, then, totally unlooked for at that hour, a bus stopped by the place I was passing. Without any very clear idea of doing more than move in a south-westerly direction, I boarded it, in this way travelled as far as a stop in the neighbourhood of Gloucester Road. Here the journey had to be resumed on foot. The pavements were endless, threading a way down them like those interminable rovings pursued in dreams. Cutting through several side turnings, I at last found myself among a conjunction of dark red brick Renaissance-type houses. In one of these the Jeavonses had lived for twenty years or more, an odd centre of miscellaneous hospitality to which Chips Lovell himself had first taken me. In the lower reaches of their street, two fire-engines were drawn up. By the light of electric torches, firemen and air-raid wardens were passing in and out of one of the front-doors. This particular house turned out to be the Jeavonses’. In the dark, little was to be seen of what was happening. Apart from these dim figures going to and fro, like the trolls in Peer Gynt, nothing seemed abnormal about the façade. There was no sign of damage to the structure. One of the wardens, in helmet and overalls, stopped by the steps and lit a cigarette.
‘Did this house get it?’
‘About an hour ago,’ he said, ‘that last tip-and-run raider.’
‘Anybody hurt?’
He took the cigarette from his mouth and nodded.
‘I know the people—are they about?’
‘You know Mr Jeavons and Lady Molly?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve only just arrived here?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Mr Jeavons and me are on the same warden-post,’ he said. ‘They’ve taken him down there. Giving him a cup of tea.’
‘Was he injured?’
‘It was her.’
‘Badly?’
The warden looked at me as if I should not have asked that question.
‘You hadn’t heard?’ he said.
‘No.’
‘Didn’t survive.’
He went on speaking at once, as if from a kind of embarrassment at having to announce such a thing.
‘She and the young lady,’ he said. ‘It was all at the back of the house. You wouldn’t think there was a jot of damage out here in front, but there’s plenty inside, I can tell you. Dreadful thing. Used to see a lot of them. Always very friendly people. Got their newspapers from me, matter of fact. If you know them, there’s a lady inside can tell you all about it.’
‘I’ll go in.’
He threw away the stub of his cigarette and trod on it.
‘So long,’ he said.
‘So long.’
He was right about there being a mess inside. A woman in some sort of uniform was giving instructions to the people clearing up. She turned out to be Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.
‘Eleanor.’
She looked round.
‘Hullo, Nick,’ she said. ‘Thank goodness you’ve come.’
She did not seem at all surprised to see me. She came across the hall. Now in her middle thirties, Eleanor was less unusual in appearance than as a girl. No doubt uniform suited her. Though her size and shape had also become more conventional, she retained an air of having been never properly assimilated to either sex. At the same time, big and broad-shouldered, she was not exactly a ‘mannish’ woman. Her existence might have been more viable had that been so.
‘You’ve heard what’s happened?’ she said abruptly.
Her manner, too, so out of place in ordinary social relations, had equally come into its own.
‘Molly’s . . .’
‘And Priscilla.’
‘God.’
‘One of the Polish officers too—the nice one. The other’s pretty well all right, just a bang over the head. That wretched girl who got into trouble with the Norwegian has been taken to hospital. She’ll be all right, too, when she’s recovered from the shock. I don’t know whether she’ll keep the baby.’
It was clear all this briskness was specifically designed to carry Eleanor through. She must have been having a very bad time indeed.
‘A man at the door—one of the wardens—said Ted was down at the post.’
‘He was there when it happened. They may have taken him on to the hospital by now. How did you hear about it? I didn’t know you were in London.’
‘I’m passing through on leave.’
‘Is Isobel all right?’
‘She’s all right. She’s in the country.’
Just for the moment I felt
unable to explain anything very lucidly, to break through the barricade of immediate action and rapid talk with which Eleanor was protecting herself. It was like trying to tackle her in the old days, when she had been training one of her dogs with a whistle, and would not listen to other people round her. She must have developed early in life this effective method of shutting herself off from the rest of the world; a weapon, no doubt, against parents and early attempts to make her live a conventional sort of life. Now, while she talked, she continued to move about the hall, clearing up some of the debris. She was wearing a pair of green rubber gloves that made me think of the long white ones she used to draw on at dances.
‘We shall have to have a talk as to who must be told about all this—and in what order. Are you in touch with Chips?’
‘Eleanor—Chips has been killed too.’
Eleanor stopped her tidying up. I told her what had happened at the Madrid. She began to take off the green gloves. People were passing through the passage all the time. Eleanor put the rubber gloves on the top of the marquetry cabinet Molly’s sister had left her when she died, the one Ted Jeavons had never managed to move out of the hall.
‘Let’s go upstairs and sit down for a bit,’ she said. ‘I’ve had just about as much as I can take. We can sit in the drawing room. That was one of the rooms that came off least badly.’
We went up to the first floor. The drawing room, thick in dust and fallen plaster, had a long jagged fissure down one wall. There were two rectangular discoloured spaces where the Wilson and the Greuze had hung. These pictures had presumably been removed to some safer place at the outbreak of war. So, too, had a great many of the oriental bowls and jars that had formerly played such a part in the decoration. They might have been valuable or absolute rubbish; Lovell had always insisted the latter. The pastels, by some unknown hand, of Moroccan types remained. They were hanging at all angles, the glass splintered of one bearing the caption Rainy Day at Marrakesh. Eleanor and I sat on the sofa. She began to cry.
‘It’s all too awful,’ she said, ‘and I was so fond of Molly. You know, she usen’t to like me. When Norah and I first shared a flat together, Molly didn’t approve. She put out a story I wore a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie. It wasn’t true. I never did. Anyway, why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to? There I was in the country breeding labradors and bored to death, and all my parents wanted was for me to get married, which I hadn’t the least wish to do. Norah came to stay and suggested I should join her in taking a flat. There it was. Norah was always quite good at getting jobs in shops and that sort of thing, and I found all the stuff I knew about dogs could be put to some use too when it came to the point. Besides, I’d always adored Norah.’
I had sometimes wondered how Eleanor’s ménage with Norah Tolland had begun. No one ever seemed to know. Now it was explained.
‘Where’s Norah now?’
‘In Scotland, driving for the Poles.’
She dried her eyes.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We must get out some sort of plan. No good just sitting about. I’ll find a pencil and paper.’
She began to rummage in one of the drawers.
‘Here we are.’
We made lists of names, notes of things that would have to be done. One of the wardens came up to say that for the time being the house was safe to stay in, they were going home.
‘Where are you spending the night, Nick?’
‘A club.’
‘There might be someone who could take you part of the way. The chief warden’s got a car.’
‘What about you?’
‘I shall be all right. There’s a room fitted up with a bed in the basement. Ted used it sometimes, if he had to come in very late.’
‘Will you really be all right?’
She dismissed the question of herself rather angrily. The ARP official with the car was found.
‘Goodbye, Eleanor.’
I kissed her, which I had never done before.
‘Goodbye, Nick. Love to Isobel. It was lucky I was staying here really, because there’ll be a lot that will have to be done.’
The fire-engines had driven away. The street was empty. I thought how good Eleanor was in a situation like this. Molly had been good, too, when it came to disaster. I wondered what would happen to Ted. The extraordinary thing about the outside of the house was that everything looked absolutely normal. Some sort of a notice about bomb damage had been stuck on the front-door by the wardens; otherwise there was nothing to indicate the place had been subjected to an attack from the air, which had killed several persons. This lack of outward display was comparable with the Madrid’s fate earlier that evening, when a lot of talking in a restaurant had been sufficient to drown the sound of the Warning, the noise of the guns. This must be what Dr Trelawney called ‘the slayer of Osiris and his grievous tribute of blood’. I wondered if Dr Trelawney himself had survived: when Odo Stevens would receive the news: whether the Lovells’ daughter, Caroline, would be brought up by her grandparents. Reflecting on these things, it did not seem all that long time ago that Lovell, driving back from the film studios in that extraordinary car of his, had suggested we should look in on the Jeavonses’, because ‘the chief reason I want to visit Aunt Molly is to take another look at Priscilla Tolland, who is quite often there.’
3
THE FIRST MEAL eaten in Mess after return from leave is always dispiriting. Room, smell, food, company, at first seemed unchanged; as ever, unenchanting. On taking a seat at table I remembered with suddenly renewed sense of internal discomfort that Stringham would be on duty. In the pressure of other things that had been happening, I had forgotten about him. However, when the beef appeared, it was handed round by a red-haired gangling young soldier with a hare-lip and stutter. There was no sign of Stringham. The new waiter could be permanent, or just a replacement imported to F Mess while Stringham himself was sick, firing a musketry course, temporarily absent for some other routine reason. Opportunity to enquire why he was gone, at the same time to betray no exceptional interest in him personally, arose when Soper complained of the red-haired boy’s inability to remember which side of the plate, as a matter of common practice, were laid knife, fork and spoon.
‘Like animals, some of them,’ Soper said. ‘As for getting a message delivered, you’re covered with spit before he’s halfway through.’
‘What happened to the other one?’
If asked a direct question of that sort, Soper always looked suspicious. Finding, after a second or two, no grounds for imputing more than idle curiosity to this one, he returned a factual, though reluctant, reply.
‘Went to the Mobile Laundry.’
‘For the second time of asking, Soper,’ said Macfie, ‘will you pass the water jug?’
‘Here you are, Doc. Those tablets come in yet?’
Macfie was gruff about the tablets, Soper persuasive. The Cipher Officer remarked on the amount of flu about. There was general agreement, followed by some discussion of prevalent symptoms. The subject of Stringham had to be started up again from scratch.
‘Did you sack him?’
‘Sack who?’
‘The other Mess waiter.’
‘What’s he got to do with you?’
‘Just wondered.’
‘He was transferred to the Laundry from one day to the next. Bloody inconvenient for this Mess. He’d have done the job all right if Biggy hadn’t been on at him all the time. I complained to the DAAG about losing a waiter like that, but he said it had got to go through.’
Biggs, present at table, but in one of his morose moods that day, neither denied nor confirmed his own part in the process of Stringham’s dislodgement. He chewed away at a particularly tough piece of meat, looking straight in front of him. Soper, as if Biggs himself were not sitting there, continued to muse on the aversion felt by Biggs for Stringham.
‘That chap drove Biggy crackers for some reason,’ he said. ‘Something about him. Wasn’t only the way he talked. Certainly w
as a dopey type. Don’t know how he got where he was. Had some education. I could see that. You’d think he’d have found better employment than a Mess waiter. Got a bad record, I expect. Trouble back in Civvy Street.’
That Stringham had himself engineered an exchange from F Mess to avoid relative persecution at the hands of Biggs was, I thought, unlikely. In his relationship with Biggs, even a grim sort of satisfaction to Stringham might be suspected, one of those perverse involutions of feeling that had brought him into the army in the first instance. Such sentiments were hard to unravel. They were perhaps no more tangled than the rest of the elements that made up Stringham’s life—or anybody else’s life when closely examined. Not only had he disregarded loopholes which invited avoidance of the Services—health, and, at that period, age too—but, in face of much apparent discouragement from the recruiting authorities, had shown uncharacteristic persistence to get where he was. One aspect of this determination to carry through the project of joining the army was no doubt an attempt to rescue a self-respect badly battered during the years with Miss Weedon; however much she might also have accomplished in setting Stringham on his feet. An innate restlessness certainly played a part too; taste for change, even for adventure of a sort; all perhaps shading off into a vague romantic patriotism that especially allured by its own ironic connotations, its very lack, so to speak, of what might be called contemporary intellectual prestige.
‘Awfully chic to be killed,’ he had said.
Death was a prize, at least on the face of it, that war always offered. Lovell’s case had demonstrated how the unexpected could happen within a few hours to those who deplored a sedentary job. Thinking over Stringham’s more immediate situation, it seemed likely that, hearing of a vacancy in the ranks of the Mobile Laundry, he had decided on impulse to explore a new, comparatively exotic field of army life in his self-imposed military pilgrimage. Bithel could even have marked down Stringham as a man likely to do credit to the unit he commanded. That, I decided, was even more probable. These speculations had taken place during one of the Mess’s long silences, less nerve-racking than those at the general’s table, but also, in most respects, even more dreary. Biggs suddenly, unexpectedly, returned to the subject.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3 Page 38
