‘What’s America’s next step, Colonel?’ someone had asked on that occasion.
Cobb did not answer at once. Instead, he threw himself into a relatively theatrical pose, one of those attitudes, stylized yet unforced, in which he excelled; this time in the character of a man giving deep attention to a problem of desperate complexity. Then he spoke a considered judgment.
‘The US Navy are prohibited alcohol,’ he said. ‘We’ll have to call in their golf-clubs, I guess.’
Years later in New York, I repeated that comment to Harrison F. Wisebite’s nephew, Milton, met at a publisher’s party at the St Regis. Milton Wisebite, who worked in the Time-Life office at that period, had himself served in Europe with his country’s expeditionary force.
‘Courthouse Cobb?’ he said. ‘Haven’t thought of him in decades.’
‘That was his nickname?’
‘Throughout the US Army.’
‘What did it mean?’
‘There was reference to a supposed predilection towards severity in the exercise of discipline.’
That was a side of Colonel Cobb, imaginable, though happily never imperative to encounter. However, Milton Wisebite’s words recalled the stern tone in which Cobb had referred to the capitulation of Paulus on that day, endorsing thereby in memory the progress of the war and the moment when Hewetson left the Section. Finn was unwilling to replace him with an officer lacking any previous experience of liaison work. Accordingly the new man, Slade, a schoolmaster by profession, was given to Pennistone as second-string, and I was ordered to take over the Belgians and Czechs.
As it happened, on that evening at the St Regis, when everyone had had a good deal to drink, Milton Wisebite had gone on to ask news of Pamela Flitton, with whom, so it then appeared, he had enjoyed a brief moment of intimacy at some stage of the war. Apparently the episode had been the high peak of romance in his life, more especially as she was a kind of relation of his. Whatever took place between them—he was not explicit—must have been at an appreciably later period than the other surrender at Stalingrad, but, within the year or less that had passed since she had driven for the Section, Pamela Flitton’s name had already become fairly notorious for just that sort of adventure.
The stories, as such stories do, came in gradually. For example, the affair of which Horaczko had hinted, when our ways had parted in the hall of the Titian, was confirmed later by Michalski, less reserved in discussing such matters, who said he thought things had ended by a Polish major being brought before one of their army’s Courts of Honour. Even if that were an exaggeration, there was much else going round to suggest it might be true. To mention a few of these items: two RAF officers, one from Bomber, the other from Fighter Command, were court-martialled as a consequence of a fight about which was to drive her home after a party. The Naval Police had separated them, and, although a serious view was not taken by the authorities, the episode had made too much disturbance to be disregarded. The Navy was involved again in the person of a paymaster-lieutenant commander, who for some reason received a severe reprimand on her account. He was reported to be a scatterbrained fellow anyway. More ominously, a relatively senior official in the Treasury, a married man with several children, gave her a lift in his car one night at Richmond station—goodness knows what she was doing there in the first instance—starting a trail of indiscretion that led to his transference to a less distinguished ministry. Barker-Shaw, who had been Field Security Officer at my former Division, now at MI 5, hinted there had nearly been an unofficial strike about her down at the docks. These were only some of the tales one heard. No doubt most of them were greatly inflated in the telling, if not positively untrue, but they indicated her range, even if you discounted ones like pouring the wine on the floor when Howard Craggs, the left-wing publisher, now a temporary civil servant of some standing, had given her dinner at an expensive black market restaurant; even less to be believed that—like Barbara Goring discharging the sugar over Widmerpool–she had emptied the bottle over Craggs’s head. The latter version was agreed to be untrustworthy if only because he was known still to pursue her.
Even if these highly coloured anecdotes were to be disbelieved, their very existence indicated a troublesome personality. Myth of such pervasive volume does not suddenly arise about a woman entirely without reason. One thing was certain. She had left the ATS. This was said to be due to bad health, trouble with a lung.
‘I never yet met a pretty girl who didn’t tell you she had TB,’ said Dicky Umfraville. ‘Probably the least of the diseases she inherited from Cosmo.’
Umfraville had been unsuccessful in his efforts to find a niche in one of the secret organizations, and was now commanding a transit camp with the rank of major.
‘Giving men hell is what Miss Flitton likes,’ he said. ‘I know the sort. Met plenty of them.’
There was something to be said for accepting that diagnosis, because two discernible features seemed to emerge from a large, often widely diversified, canon of evidence chronicling Pamela Flitton’s goings-on: the first, her indifference to the age and status of the men she decided to fascinate: the second, the unvarying technique of silence, followed by violence, with which she persecuted her lovers, or those who hoped to be numbered in that category. She appeared, for example, scarcely at all interested in looks or money, rank or youth, as such; just as happy deranging the modest home life of a middle-aged air-raid warden, as compromising the commission of a rich and handsome Guards ensign recently left school. In fact, she seemed to prefer ‘older men’ on the whole, possibly because of their potentiality for deeper suffering. Young men might superficially transcend their seniors in this respect, but they probably showed less endurance in sustaining that state, while, once pinioned, the middle-aged could be made to writhe almost indefinitely. In the Section her memory remained with Borrit.
‘Wonder what happened to that juicy looking AT,’ he said more than once. ‘The good-lookers never stay. Wouldn’t mind spending a weekend with her.’
‘Weekends’ took place once a fortnight, most people saving up their weekly one day off to make them up. Once in a way Isobel managed to come to London during the week and we went out for a mild jaunt. This was not often, and, when she rang up one day to say Ted Jeavons had got hold of a couple of bottles of gin and was asking a few people in to share them with him, the invitation presented itself as quite an excitement. After Molly’s death, Isobel and her sisters used to keep in closer touch with Jeavons than formerly, making something of a duty to see him at fairly regular intervals, on the grounds that, a widower, he needed more attention than before. I had not seen him myself since suggesting Templer should take a room at the Jeavons’ house, but heard Templer had done so. Whether he remained, I did not know. Jeavons, keeping up Molly’s tradition of always welcoming any member of the family, had shown surprising resilience in recovering from the unhappy night when he had lost his wife. Certainly he had been greatly upset at the time, but he possessed a kind of innate toughness of spirit that carried him through. Norah Tolland, who did not care for any suggestion of sentimentality that concerned persons of the opposite sex—though she tolerated the loves, hates and regrets of her own exclusively feminine world—insisted that Jeavons’s recovery was complete.
‘Ted’s perfectly capable of looking after himself,’ she said. ‘In some respects—allowing for the war—the place is better run than when Molly was alive. I get a bit sick of those long disjointed harangues he gives about ARP.’
His duties as an air-raid warden had now become Jeavons’s sole interest, the whole background of his life. Apart from his period in the Army during the previous war, he must have worked longer and more continuously at air-raid precautions than at any other job. Jeavons, although to be regarded as not much good at jobs, had here found his vocation. No one knew quite how the money situation would resolve itself when Molly died, Jeavons no longer in his first youth, with this admitted lack of handiness at earning a living. It turned out that Molly,
with a forethought her noisy manner concealed, had taken steps to compound for her jointure, a financial reconstruction that had included buying the South Kensington house, thereby insuring (air raids unforeseen in that respect) her husband having a roof over his head, if she predeceased him. Although she was older, that possibility seemed unlikely enough in the light of Jeavons’s much propagated ‘rotten inside’, the stomach wound so perpetually reviled by himself. However, the unlikely had come to pass. Chips Lovell, when alive, had never tired of deploring Sleaford stinginess where their widows were concerned, but at least Jeavons had reaped some residue. One felt he deserved that at his age, though what precisely that age was, no one knew. Fifty must be in the offing, if not already attained.
‘Norah’s bringing a girl-friend with her,’ he said. ‘Wonder what she’s got hold of this time. The last one had a snub nose and freckles with biggish feet.’
Norah Tolland was a driver in one of the several classifications of women’s services, a corps which regarded themselves as of rather more consequence than mere ATS, whose officers they were not required to salute. Norah had taken pleasure in explaining that to a very important ATS officer wearing red tabs who had hauled her up for a supposed omission of respect.
‘Sorry your friend Templer’s gone, Nick,’ said Jeavons. ‘We got on pretty well. Used to have long talks at odd moments of the night when we’d both come off duty in the small hours. He told me a thing or two. Stories about the ladies, my hat.’
Jeavons’s thick dark hair, with its ridges of corkscrew curls, had now turned quite white, the Charlie Chaplin moustache remaining black. This combination of tones for some reason gave him an oddly Italian appearance, enhanced by blue overalls, obscurely suggesting a railway porter at a station in Italy. Jeavons continued to wear these overalls, though by now promoted to an administrative post at the local ARP headquarters. He poured out glasses of gin-and-orange, a drink for ever to recall world war.
‘Why did Templer leave?’
‘Been fed up for ages. Wanted a more active job. Quite worried him.’
‘He told me all that nearly a year ago.’
‘There was a woman in the case. Usually is. That’s why he wanted to do something more dangerous. London’s quite dangerous enough for me. Templer didn’t think so.’
‘It sounds unlike him.’
‘He went off to some training place,’ said Jeavons. ‘Never know how people will behave. Look at poor Charles Stringham, missing at Singapore. Remember when he lived on the top floor here with Miss Weedon trying to cure him of the booze. He and I used to have one on the sly once in a way. Mrs Conyers, I should call her, not Miss Weedon. Bad luck her husband dropping dead like that, but in your nineties you must be prepared for accidents.’
General Conyers, also an air-raid warden, had collapsed in the street one night, pursuing looters attempting to steal a refrigerator from a bombed house. He died, as he had lived, in active, dramatic, unusual circumstances; such, one felt, as he himself would have preferred.
‘Tuffy, as Charles used to call her, is in MI 5 now,’ said Jeavons. ‘Don’t think she has to get into evening dress and jade ear-rings and vamp German agents. Just supervises the girls there. Always looked as if she knew a lot of secrets. Those black dresses and white collars. I expect they want reliable people, and she’s reliable all right. This girl of Templer’s made him feel he was getting old. He wanted to find out whether that was true or not. Of course, you might argue he oughtn’t to have been playing around at all. You’ve got to remember the circumstances. Wife’s in a mental home, as you probably know. Awful thing to happen. It’s hard to keep straight, if you’re on your own. I remember Smith, that butler of your brother-in-law Erry’s, using those very words. Erry used to lend us Smith from time to time, when he was away from Thrubworth. Of course, Smith’s wife had been dead for years, luckily for her. I warrant there’d been some high jinks on Smith’s part at one time or another. Terrible chap, Smith. Oughtn’t to say it, but I’m really glad he’s dead. No chance of his ever working here again.’
‘Erry said it was a rather ghastly business when Smith pegged out.’
‘Ghastly?’ said Jeavons. ‘Just about. Didn’t you know? He was bitten by Maisky, that monkey Molly used to own. It seems Smith tried to take a biscuit away from that tenacious ape. Probably wanted it himself to mop up some of the gin he’d drunk. God, the way that man used to put back our gin. I marked the bottle, but it wasn’t a damn bit of use. Silly thing to do, to take issue with Maisky. Of course Smith came off second-best. Perhaps they both reached out for the biscuit at the same moment. Anyway, Maisky wouldn’t have any snatching and Smith contracted septicemia with fatal results. Meant the end of Maisky too, which wasn’t really just. But then what is just in this life? Still, I suppose some things are, if you think about them. Smith’ll be the last butler I’ll ever find myself employing—not that there’s likely to be many butlers to employ, the way things are going. That fact doesn’t break my heart. Taking them all in all, the tall with the short, the fat with the thin, the drunk with the sober, they’re not a profession that greatly appeals to me. Of course, I was brought in contact with butlers late in life. Never set eyes on them in the circles I came from. I may have been unlucky in the butlers I’ve met. There may be the one in a hundred, but it’s a long time to wait. Read about butlers in books—see ’em in plays. That’s all right. Have ’em in the house—a very different matter. Look what they do to your clothes, apart from anything else. I started without butlers and I’ll die without butlers, no less a happy man. There’s the bell. No butler, so I’ll answer it myself. Probably some of the pals from my ARP dump.’
He went off down the stairs. After the bomb damage, the house had been shored up to prevent collapse, but no interior renovation had taken place. A long, jagged crack still zigzagged across one of the walls, which were in many places covered with large brown patches, like maps showing physical features, or the rather daring ornamental designs of a modernistic decorator. All the pictures, even the Moroccan pastels, had been removed, as well as the oriental bowls and jars that used to clutter the drawing-room. A snapshot of Molly, wearing a Fair Isle jumper and holding Maisky in her arms like a baby, stood on the mantelpiece, curled and yellowing. Maisky, heedless of mortality, looked infinitely self-satisfied. Jeavons returned, bringing with him several ARP colleagues, male and female.
‘Room’s not looking very smart for a party,’ he said.
A minute or two later Norah Tolland arrived. Her companion—‘girl-friend’, as Jeavons had termed her—turned out to be Pamela Flitton. Norah was in uniform, which suited her. She was, in general, more settled, more sure of herself than when younger, though on this particular occasion the presence of Pamela seemed to make her both elated and nervous.
‘Ted, I felt sure you wouldn’t mind my bringing Pam,’ she said. ‘She’s having dinner with me tonight. It seemed so much easier than meeting at the restaurant.’
‘Most welcome,’ said Jeavons.
He looked Pamela over. Jeavons examining a woman’s points was always in itself worth observing. If good-looking, he stared at her as if he had never before seen anything of the kind, though at the same time determined not to be carried away by his own astonishment. Pamela justified this attention. She was wearing a neat black frock, an improvement on her battledress blouse. It was clear she had established over Norah an absolute, even if only temporary, domination. Norah’s conciliatory manner showed that.
‘Have a drink?’ said Jeavons.
‘What have you got?’
Pamela glanced aggressively round the room, catching my eye, but making no sign of recognition.
‘Gin-and-orange.’
‘No whisky?’
‘Sorry.’
‘I’ll have gin-and-water—no, neat gin.’
I went across to her.
‘Escaped from the ATS?’
‘Got invalided.’
‘A lady of leisure?’
‘My job’s a secret one.’
Jeavons took her lightly by the arm and began to introduce her to the other guests. She shook his hand away with her elbow, but allowed him to tell her the names of two or three persons who worked with him. When introductions were over, she picked up a paper from the table—apparently some not very well printed periodical—and took it, with her glass of gin, to the furthest corner of the room. There she sat on a stool, listlessly turning the pages. Norah, talking to Isobel, gave an anxious glance, but did not take any immediate steps to join Pamela, or try to persuade her to be more sociable. A talkative elderly man with a red face, one of the ARP guests, engaged me in conversation. He said he was a retired indigo planter. Jeavons himself went across the room and spoke to Pamela, but he must have received a rebuff, because he returned a second or two later to the main body of the guests.
‘She’s reading our ARP bulletin,’ he said.
He spoke with more surprise than disapproval; in fact almost with admiration.
‘Read the poem in this number?’ asked the indigo planter. ‘Rather good. It begins “What do you carry, Warden dear?” Gives a schedule of the equipment—you know, helmet, gas-mask, First Aid, all that—but leaves out one item. You have to guess. Quite clever.’
‘Jolly good.’
Norah, evidently not happy about Pamela, separated herself from Isobel soon after this, and went across to where her friend was sitting. They talked for a moment, but, if Norah too hoped to make her circulate with the rest, she was defeated. When she returned I asked her what her own life was like.
‘I was with Gwen McReith’s lot for a time. Quite fun, because Gwen herself is amusing. I first met Pam with her, as a matter of fact.’
‘Pam seems quite a famous figure.’
Norah sighed.
‘I suppose she is now,’ she said.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3 Page 51
