‘What number did you say?’
‘It must be the one on the corner.’
She drew up the car in front of a large grey house in the midst of a complex of streets that had on the whole escaped bomb damage. Several steps led up to a sub-palladian porch, the fanlight over the open door daubed with dark paint to comply with blackout regulations. The place had that slightly sinister air common to most of the innumerable buildings hurriedly converted to official use, whether or not they were enclaves of a more or less secret nature.
‘Will you wait with the car? I shan’t be long.’
After the usual vetting at the door, my arrival being expected, quick admission took place. A guide in civilian clothes led the way to a particular office where the report was to be obtained. We went up some stairs, through a large hall or ante-chamber where several men and women were sitting in front of typewriters, surrounded by walls covered with a faded design of blue and green flowers, enclosed above and below by broad parchment-like embossed surfaces. This was no doubt the double-drawing-room of some old-fashioned family, who had not redecorated their home for decades. I was shown into the office of a Polish lieutenant-colonel in uniform, from whom the report was to be received. We shook hands.
‘Good afternoon . . . Please sit down . . . Procze, pana, procze, pana . . . I usually see Major Pennistone, yes.’
He unlocked a drawer and handed over the report. We spoke about its contents for a minute or two, and shook hands again. Then he accompanied me back to where I could find my way out, and, after shaking hands for the third time, we parted. Halfway down the stairs, I grasped that I was in the Ufford, ancient haunt of Uncle Giles. The place of typewriters, so far from being the drawing-room of some banker or tea-broker (perhaps that once), was the combined ‘lounge’ and ‘writing-room’, in the former of which my Uncle used to entertain me with fishpaste sandwiches and seed cake. There, Mrs Erdleigh had ‘set out the cards’, foretold the rows about St John Clarke’s book on Isbister, my love affair with Jean Duport. The squat Moorish tables of those days had been replaced by trestles: the engraving of Bolton Abbey in the Olden Time, by a poster of characteristically Slavonic design announcing an exhibition of Polish Arts and Crafts. On the ledge of the mantelpiece, on which under a glass dome had stood the clock with hands eternally pointing to twenty minutes past five, were photographs of General Sikorski and Mr Churchill. It struck me the Ufford was in reality the Temple of Janus, the doors between the lounge and the writing-room closed in peace, open in war.
Reaching the entrance, I saw the hotel’s name had been obliterated over the front door, as had also that of the De Tabley opposite, to which Uncle Giles had once, at least, briefly defected; only to return in penitence—had he been capable of that inner state—to the Ufford. The De Tabley was now the local branch of the Food Office. The name always recalled an incident at school. Le Bas used to make a habit of reading from time to time the works of the lesser-known Victorian poets to his pupils. He had been doing this on some occasion, declaiming with his accustomed guttural enunciation and difficulty with the letter ‘R’:
‘Sweet are the ways of death to weary feet,
Calm are the shades of men.
The phantom fears no tyrant in his seat,
The slave is master then.’
He asked where the lines came from. Of course no one knew.
‘Lord de Tabley’s chorus from Medea.’
‘Never heard of him, sir.’
‘A melancholy fellow, but not without merit.’
Stringham, who had previously appeared all but asleep, had asked if he might see the book. Le Bas handed it over. He always rather liked Stringham, although never much at ease with him. Stringham turned the pages for a moment or two, then returned to the poem Le Bas had read aloud. Stringham himself spoke the second verse:
‘Love is abolished; well that that is so;
We know him best as Pain.
The gods are all cast out, and let them go!
Who ever found them gain?’
Le Bas was prepared, in moderation, to have Death commended, but he never liked references to Love; probably, for that matter, was unwilling to have the Gods so peremptorily dismissed. He had, I suppose, been betrayed into quoting the earlier lines on account of some appositeness they bore to whatever he had been talking about. He must have seen that to allow Stringham to handle the volume itself had been a false step on his own part.
‘Love, of course, had a rather different meaning—indeed, two quite separate meanings in Ancient Greece—from what the modern world understands by the term,’ he said. ‘While railing against the gods was by no means unknown in their mythological stories.’
‘Not bad for a peer of the realm, do you think, sir?’ said Stringham.
That was rather cheek, but Le Bas had let it pass, probably finding a laugh the easiest channel for moving on to less tricky matters.
As I went down the steps, I saw a uniformed Pole had strolled out of the Ufford—as I now thought of the place—and was chatting with Pamela Flitton. He seemed to be making a better job of it than myself, because, although continuing to look sullen, she was listening with comparative acceptance to what seemed the commonplaces of conversation. At first I thought the Pole was an officer, then saw he was an ‘other rank’, who wore his battledress, as most of them did, with a tough air and some swagger. He was dark, almost oriental in feature, showing a lot of gold teeth when he smiled and saluted, before withdrawing up the steps. We set off on the return journey. In the far distance sounded the gentle lowing of an Air Raid Warning. They were to be heard intermittently in the daytime. As the car passed once more through the park, the All Clear sounded, equally faint and far.
‘Sounds as if they let off the first one by mistake.’
She did not answer. Perhaps she only liked foreigners. In any case, the thought of Stringham put things on an unhappy, uncomfortable basis. I was not sure, in truth, whether she wanted to avoid discussing the subject because she herself felt so deeply, or because she was really scarcely at all interested in anything but her own personality. We reached the staff entrance. I made some further remark about a message to her mother. She nodded, disappearing once more behind the screen. Pennnistone had returned from the meeting.
‘How did it go?’
‘Finn brought off one of his inimitable French phrases—Kielkiewicz is, as you know, more at ease in French. During a moment’s silence, Finn suddenly murmured very audibly: Le Commandant-Chef aime bien les garçons.’
‘What provoked this startling revelation?’
‘The Polish cadets—a message came down from the top approving of them as potential training material. Thank God, Bobrowski wasn’t there. He’d have had a stroke. Even Kielkiewicz went rather red in the face and pretended to blow his nose.’
‘You didn’t ask Finn to amplify?’
‘One was reminded of the French judge comforting the little boy cross-questioned in court. “Ne t’inquiètes-pas, mon enfant, les juges aiment les petits garçons”—then remembering himself and adding: “Pourtant les juges aiment les petites filles.”’
A day or two later Pamela Flitton drove me again when I was going to Bobrowski’s office. This was in the Harley Street neighbourhood (ten years later I used to sit in a dentist’s chair where once I had talked with Horaczko), from where I should proceed to the Titian. Horaczko’s business was likely to be completed in a few minutes, so she was told to wait with the car. As it happened, Horaczko himself wanted to visit Polish GHQ and asked for a lift. When we came out together from the military attaché’s office, Pamela Flitton was standing by the car, surveying the street with her usual look of hatred and despair. Horaczko, seeing her, lightly touched the peak of his cap. For a moment I thought this just another example of well-applied technique in what was generally agreed to be the eminently successful relationship established by the Polish forces with the opposite sex in the country of their exile, but, although her acknowledgment was of the
slightest, it was plain they had met before. As there were two of us, Horaczko and I sat at the back of the car. We talked about official matters all the way to the Titian.
Passing through its glass doors, guarded by Military Police wearing red covers, like our own, on their angular ethnic Polish lancer caps, Eastern Europe was instantaneously attained. A similar atmosphere imposed, though in a less powerful form, on the Ufford, no doubt accounted to some extent for the brief exorcism there, on first arrival, of the ghost of Uncle Giles. At the Titian, this Slav ethos was overwhelming. Some Poles, including Horaczko, who prided himself on assimilation with things British, found his own nation’s characteristics, so he said, here rather depressingly caricatured. To me, on the other hand, the Titian offered an exotic change from the deadly drabness of the wartime London backcloth. The effect was to some extent odorously created, an aroma that discreetly blended elements of eau-de-cologne and onions, sweat and leather, the hotel’s Edwardian past no doubt contributing its own special Art Nouveau pungency to more alien essences.
‘I see you know our driver. She’s the daughter of a friend of mine, as it happens.’
Horaczko at once became tremendously diplomatic in manner, as if large issues were raised by this remark, which was certainly the product of curiosity.
‘Miss Flitton?’ he said. ‘Oh, yes. She’s—well, a rather delicate situation has been raised by her.’
He smiled and looked rather arch, if that is the right word.
‘She is a beautiful girl,’ he said.
We shook hands and he went off to whatever duties concerned him. Horaczko was always immensely tactful. For once he had been surprised into giving away more than he was usually prepared to do. It looked as if Pamela Flitton was already quite a famous figure in Polish military circles. I mounted the stairs to General Kielkiewicz’s ante-room. One or more of his ADCs was always on duty there, usually in the company of a Polish colonel of uncertain age, probably a good deal older than he looked at first sight, with features resembling those of a death’s head, who sat on an upright chair, eternally reading Dziennik Polski. This colonel seemed to be awaiting an interview for which the General was never available. Now, he rose, folded his newspaper, shook hands with me and left the room. Michalski was on duty at that moment. We too shook hands.
‘I hope the Colonel did not go away on my account?’
‘It is to be arranged that he should write a history of cavalry,’ said Michalski. ‘The General has not yet found time to break the news to him.’
A week or two later, there was trouble about the Section’s car. Finn had specially ordered it for an important meeting and it was not at the door when he went down. One of the other ATS drivers said she thought the vehicle was out on duty, but no one could trace a Section officer who was using it, or had sent it out on an errand. When Driver Flitton was in due course traced, she said she had been given instructions some weeks before to deliver certain routine papers of a non-secret nature to several of the Neutral military attachés. She had been out by herself doing this. The precise degree of truth in that matter was hard to pinpoint. It was alleged, with apparent conviction, that those particular instructions had later been countermanded, the documents being not at all urgent, though some of them had certainly been sent out. Even if correct that Driver Flitton had misunderstood the instruction, she had taken an unusually long time to make the rounds. Rather a fuss took place about the whole matter. Either on account of that, or simply because, quite by chance, she was given another posting, Driver Flitton was withdrawn from duties with the Section.
2
LIKE FINN’S ACHING jaw on the line of march, the war throbbed on, punctuated by interludes when more than once the wrong tooth seemed to have been hurriedly extracted. Meanwhile, I inhabited a one-room flat on the eighth floor of a prosaic Chelsea tenement. Private life, apparently at a standstill, as ever formed new patterns. Isobel’s brother, George Tolland (by then a lieutenant-colonel serving as ‘A & Q’ on a Divisional staff in the Middle East), badly wounded in the campaign defeating Rommel, was in hospital in Cairo. Her sister Susan’s husband, Roddy Cutts, major of Yeomanry transformed into Reconnaissance Corps, had recently written home to say he had fallen in love with one of the girls decoding cables at GHQ Persia/Iraq Force, and, accepting risk of spoiling a promising political career, wanted a divorce. This eventuality, not at all expected by Susan, nor any of the rest of the family, as Roddy had always been regarded as rather unadventurous in that sort of situation, caused a good deal of dismay.
If not required to stay late in the Whitehall area, I used, as a general routine, to come straight back from duty to a nearby pub, dine there, then retire to bed with a book. At that period the seventeenth century particularly occupied me, so that works like Wood’s Athenae Oxonienses or Luttrell’s Brief Relation opened up vistas of the past, if not necessarily preferable to one’s own time, at least appreciably different. These historical readings could be varied with Proust. The flat itself was not wholly unsympathetic. The block’s ever-changing population, a mixed bag consisting largely of persons of both sexes working for the ministries, shaded off on the female side from high-grade secretaries, officers of the women’s services, organisers of one thing and another, into a nebulous world of divorcées living on their own and transient types even less definable, probably all but unemployable where ‘war work’ was concerned, yet for one reason or another prepared to stay in London and face the blitz. On warm evenings these unattached ladies were to be met with straying about on the flat roof of the building, watching the bombers fly out, requesting cigarettes or matches and complaining to each other, or anyone else with whom they made contact, about the shortcomings of Miss Wartstone.
On another floor of the block, Hewetson, the Section’s officer with the Belgians and Czechs, also rented a flat. For a time he and I used to set out together every morning; then, deciding to share a larger place with a friend in the Admiralty (who had a hold over a woman who could cook) Hewetson moved elsewhere. He was a solicitor in private life, and, although he did not talk much of such things, gave the impression of being more fortunate than Borrit in chance relationships. He did admit to some sort of an adventure that had arisen from sunning himself on the roof during a period of convalescence after a bout of flu with one of these sirens of the chimney pots. Another told him she could only achieve emotional intimacy with her own sex, so Hewetson probably knew the roof better than one might think. All the same, he could not get on with Miss Wartstone. She was manageress of the flats. Her outward appearance at once prepared residents for an unusually contentious temperament. Miss Wartstone had, indeed, passed into a middle-age of pathological quarrelsomeness, possibly in part legacy of nervous tensions built up during the earlier years of the blitz. Latterly, nothing worse than an occasional window broken by blast had disturbed the immediate neighbourhood, but, as the war progressed, few tempers remained as steady as at the beginning.
Miss Wartstone used to put up notices, like those at school, and, in the same way, people would draw pictures on them and write comments. ‘Disgasting Management’, somebody scrawled, probably one of the Allied officers, of whom quite a fair number were accommodated at the flats. Hewetson himself would go white if Miss Wartstone’s name was mentioned.
‘That woman,’ he would say.
When the Eighth Army moved into Tripoli, Hewetson was offered promotion in a new branch of the Judge-Advocate General’s department proliferated in North Africa. As things turned out, this resulted in a change of my own position in the Section. It could be dated, more or less, by the fact that, when Hewetson came down from speaking with Finn about his own departure, Colonel Cobb, one of the American assistant military attachés, was in our room at that moment, talking of the capture of the German generals at Stalingrad. Although the Americans had a mission of their own for the bulk of their business, Cobb used to visit Finn from time to time about a few routine matters. He usually dropped in afterwards for a minute or two, chie
fly, I think, to satisfy a personal preoccupation with the British Army and its unexpected ways, an interest by now past the stage of mere desire for professional enlightenment and become fairly obsessive. He would endlessly question people, if opportunity arose, about their corps, Regular or Territorial, its special peculiarities and customs: when raised: where served: what worn. In the banter that sometimes followed these interrogations, Cobb rather enjoyed a touch of grimness, smiling with grave acquiescence when, in the course of one such scrutiny, it was by chance revealed that my own Regiment had borne among the Battle Honours of its Colours the names of Detroit and Miami.
‘Ah, Detroit?’ he said, speaking as if it had happened yesterday. ‘An unfortunate affair that . . . Miami . . . The name reminds me of my great-aunt’s grandfather, a man not to be trifled with, held a commission from King George in the West Florida Provincials.’
To his own anecdotes, of which he possessed an impressive store, Cobb brought a dignified tranquillity of manner that might have earned a high fee in Hollywood, had he ever contemplated acting a military career, rather than living one. He narrated them in a low unemphasized mumble, drawing the words and sentences right back into his mouth, recalling certain old-fashioned types of Paris American. Like Finn, though in a totally different genre, Cobb indulged these dramatic aptitudes in himself, which, one suspected, could even motivate a deliberate visit—for example, the day after Pearl Harbour—should he feel an affirmation required to be made in public.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3 Page 50
