‘Donners has to be looked after too,’ she said. ‘I’m rather worried about him at the moment as a matter of fact.’
‘His job must be a great strain.’
Matilda brushed such a banal comment aside.
‘Will you come and see me?’ she said. ‘We’re going to Washington next week—but when we’re back.’
‘My Release Group comes up reasonably soon. We’ll probably go away for a bit when I get out of the army.’
‘Later then. Is Isobel here?’
‘Last seen on her way to the harem upstairs.’
Sir Magnus had now begun to make signs indicating that he wanted Matilda to return to him and be introduced to someone. She left me, repeating that we must meet when they came back from America. I had always liked Matilda and felt glad to see her again and hear that her life seemed endurable. Widmerpool reappeared at my side. He seemed agitated.
‘I wish Pamela would turn up,’ he said. ‘I shall be late if she doesn’t arrive soon. I can’t very well leave until she comes—ah, thank God, there she is.’
Pamela Flitton came towards us. Unlike the night at The Bartered Bride, she had this evening taken no trouble whatever about her clothes. Perhaps that was untrue, and she had gone out of her way to find the oldest, most filthy garments she possessed. She was almost in rags. By this time the party had advanced too far for it to be obvious to a newcomer whom to greet as host. She had in any case obviously not bothered about any such formalities.
‘Hullo, my dear,’ said Widmerpool. ‘I didn’t guess you’d be so late.’
He spoke in a conciliatory voice, making as if to kiss her. She allowed the merest peck.
‘I’ll just introduce you to His Excellency,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll have to fly.’
Pamela, who was looking very pretty in spite of her disarray, was having none of that.
‘I don’t want to be introduced,’ she said. ‘I just came to have a look round.’
She gave me a nod. I made some conventional remark about their engagement. She listened to this rather more graciously than usual.
‘I think you ought to meet the Ambassador, dearest.’
‘Stuff the Ambassador.’
The phrase recalled Duport. Widmerpool laughed nervously.
‘You really oughtn’t to say things like that, darling,’ he said. ‘Not when you’re at a party like this. Nicholas and I think it very amusing, but someone else might overhear and not understand. If you really don’t feel like being introduced at the moment, I shall have to leave you. Nicholas or someone can do the honours, if you decide you want to meet your host later. Personally, I think you should. If you do, make my apologies. I shall have to go now. I am late already.’
‘Late for what?’
‘I told you—I’m dining with the Minister.’
‘You’re giving me dinner.’
‘I only wish I was. Much as I’d love to, I can’t. I did explain all this before. You said you’d like to come to the party, even though we couldn’t have dinner together after. Besides, I’m sure you told me you were dining with Lady McReith.’
‘I’m going to dine with you.’
I was about to move away and leave them to it, feeling an engaged couple should settle such matters so far as possible in private, but Widmerpool, either believing himself safer with a witness, or because he foresaw some method of disposing of Pamela in which I might play a part, took me by the arm, while he continued to speak persuasively to her.
‘Be reasonable, darling,’ he said. ‘I can’t cut a dinner I’ve gone out of my way to arrange—least of all with the Minister.’
‘Stand him up. I couldn’t care less. That’s what you’d do if you really wanted to dine with me.’
She was in a sudden rage. Her usually dead white face now had some colour in it. Widmerpool must have thought that a change of subject would cool her down, also give him a chance of escape.
‘I’m going to leave you with Nicholas,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you first, what you probably don’t know, that Nicholas used to be a friend of your uncle, Charles Stringham, whom you were so fond of.’
If he hoped that information would calm her, Widmerpool made a big mistake. She went absolutely rigid.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and Charles isn’t the only one he knew. He knew Peter Templer too—the man you murdered.’
Widmerpool, not surprisingly, was apparently stupefied by this onslaught; myself scarcely less so. She spoke the words in a quiet voice. We were in a corner of the room behind some pillars, a little away from the rest of the party. Even so, plenty of people were close enough. It was no place to allow a scene to develop. Pamela turned to me.
‘Do you know what happened?’
‘About what?’
‘About Peter Templer. This man persuaded them to leave Peter to die. The nicest man I ever knew. He just had him killed,’
Tears appeared in her eyes. She was in a state of near hysteria. It was clearly an occasion when rational argument was going to do no good. The only thing would be to get her away quietly on any terms. Widmerpool did not grasp that. He could perhaps not be blamed for being unable to consider matters coolly. He had now recovered sufficiently from his earlier astonishment to rebut the charges made against him and was even showing signs of himself losing his temper.
‘How could you utter such rubbish?’ he said. ‘I see now that I ought never to have mentioned to you I had any hand at all in that affair, even at long range. It was a breach of security for which I deserve to be punished. Please stop talking in such an absurd way.’
Pamela was not in the least calmed by this remonstrance. Quite the contrary. She did not raise her voice, but spoke if possible with more intensity. Now it was me she addressed.
‘He put up a paper. That was the word he used—put up a paper. He wanted them to stop supporting the people Peter was with. We didn’t send them any more arms. We didn’t even bother to get Peter out. Why should we? We didn’t want his side to win any more.’
Widmerpool was himself pretty angry by now.
‘Because my duties happen to include the promulgation of matters appropriate for general consideration by our committees—perhaps ultimately by the Chiefs of Staff, perhaps even the Cabinet—because, as I say, this happens to be my function, that does not mean the decisions are mine, nor, for that matter, even the recommendations. Matters are discussed as fully as possible at every level. The paper is finalized. The decision is made. I may tell you this particular decision was taken at the highest level. As for not getting Templer out, as you call it, how could I possibly have anything to do with the action, right or wrong, for which the Operational people on the spot are responsible? These arc just the sort of disgraceful stories that get disseminated, probably at the direct instance of the enemy.’
‘You were in favour of withdrawing support. You said so. You told me.’
‘Perhaps I was. Anyway, I was a fool to say so to you.’
His own rage made him able to stand up to her.
‘Therefore you represented Peter’s people in as bad a light as possible. No doubt you carried the meeting.’
She had absorbed the jargon of Widmerpool’s employment in a remarkable manner. I remembered noticing, on occasions when Matilda differed with Moreland about some musical matter, how dexterously women can take in the ideas of a man with whom they are connected, then outmanoeuvre him with his own arguments. Widmerpool made a despairing gesture, but spoke now with less violence.
‘I am only a member of the Secretariat, darling. I am the servant, very humble servant, of whatever committees it is my duty to attend.’
‘You said yourself it was a rare meeting when you didn’t get what you wanted into the finalized version.’
This roused Widmerpool again.
‘So it is,’ he said. ‘So it is. And, as it happens, what I thought went into the paper you’re talking about. I admit it. That doesn’t mean I was in the smallest degree responsible for Templer’s d
eath. We don’t know for certain even if he is dead.’
‘Yes, we do.’
‘All right. I concede that.’
‘You’re a murderer,’ she said.
There was a pause. They glared at each other. Then Widmerpool looked down at his watch.
‘Good God,’ he said. ‘What will the Minister think?’
Without another word, he pushed his way through the crowd towards the door. He disappeared hurriedly through it. I was wondering what on earth to say to Pamela, when she too turned away, and began to stroll through the party in the opposite direction. I saw her smile at the Swiss military attaché, who had rather a reputation as a lady-killer, then she too was lost to sight. Isobel and Madame Philidor reappeared from their visit to our hostess in purdah.
‘The first wife looked kind, did you not think?’ said Madame Philidor. ‘The other perhaps not so kind.’
After this extraordinary incident, it seemed more certain than ever that an announcement would be made stating the engagement had been broken off. However, there were other things to think about, chiefly one’s own demobilization; more immediately, arrangements regarding the Victory Day Service, which took place some weeks later at St Paul’s. I was to be on duty there with Finn, superintending the foreign military attachés invited. Among these were many gaps in the ranks of those known earlier. The several new Allied missions were not accommodated in the Cathedral under the Section’s arrangements, nor were the dispossessed—Bobrowski and Kielkiewicz, for example—individuals amongst our Allies who had played a relatively prominent part in the war, but now found themselves deprived of their birthright for no reason except an unlucky turn of the wheel of international politics manipulated by the inexorable hand of Fate.
This day of General Thanksgiving had been fixed on a Sunday in the second half of August. Its weather seemed designed to emphasize complexities and low temperatures of Allied relationships. Summer, like one of the new régimes abroad, offered no warmth, but chilly, draughty, unwelcoming perspectives, under a grey and threatening sky. The London streets by this time were, in any case, far from cheerful: windows broken: paint peeling: jagged, ruined brickwork enclosing the shells of roofless houses. Acres of desolated buildings, the burnt and battered City, lay about St Paul’s on all sides. Finn and I arrived early, entering by the south door. Within the vast cool interior, traces of war were as evident as outside, though on a less wholesale, less utterly ruthless scale. The Allied military attachés, as such, were to be segregated in the south transept, in a recess lined with huge marble monuments in pseudo-classical style. I had been put in charge of the Allied group, because Finn decided the Neutrals, some of whom could be unreliable in matters of discipline and procedure, required his undivided attention. The Neutrals were to occupy a block of seats nearer the choir, the wooden carving of its stalls still showing signs of bomb damage.
‘I’m glad to say no difficulties have been made about Theodoric,’ said Finn. ‘He’s been asked to the Service in a perfectly correct manner. It’s not a large return for a lifetime of being pro-British—and accepting exile—but that’s all they can do, I suppose. He’d be even worse off if he’d plumped for the other side. By the way, an ambulance party has been provided in the crypt, should any of your boys come over faint. I shall probably need medical attention myself before the day is over.’
I checked the Allied military attachés as they arrived. They were punctual, on the whole well behaved, whispering together with the air of children at a village Sunday school, a little overawed at the promised visit of the bishop of the diocese, glancing uneasily at the enigmatic sculptural scenes looming above them on the tombs. Among them, as I have said, were many absences and new faces. One regretted Van der Voort. A churchly background would have enhanced his pristine Netherlandish countenance. Colonel Hlava had returned to Prague. ‘Russia is our Big Brother’ (the phrase had not yet developed Orwellian overtones), he had remarked to me some weeks before he left; even so, when the moment came to shake hands for the last time, he said: ‘We can only hope’. Hlava was promoted major-general when he got home. Then, a year or two later, he was put under house arrest. He was still under house arrest when he died of heart failure; a flying ace and man one greatly liked.
Kucherman had gone back to a ministerial portfolio in the Belgian Government, his place taken by Bruylant, a quiet professional soldier, with musical leanings, though less marked than Hlava’s and not of the sort to be expressed actively by playing duets with Dempster, had Dempster still been with the Section, not returned to his Norwegian timber. In place of Marinko—out of a job like the rest of his countrymen who had supported Mihailovich’s Resistance Movement, rather than Tito’s—was a newly arrived, long haired, jack-booted young ‘Partisan’ colonel, who talked a little French and, although possessing a Polish-sounding name, designated himself as ‘Macédoin,’ Macedonia was perhaps where Szymanski had come from too. One wondered what had happened to him.
Examining the neighbouring monuments more closely, I was delighted to find among them more than one of those celebrated in The Ingoldsby Legends, a favourite book of mine about the time when we lived at Stonehurst. There, for example, only a few feet away from where the military attachés sat, several figures far larger than life were enacting a battle scene in which a general had been struck from the saddle by a cannon ball, as his charger bore him at a furious gallop across the path of a kilted private from some Highland regiment. There could be no doubt whatever this was:
‘. . . Sir Ralph Abercrombie going to tumble
With a thump that alone were enough to dispatch him
If the Scotchman in front shouldn’t happen to catch him.’
Stendhal had seen these monuments when he visited London.
‘Style lourd,’ he noted. ‘Celui d’Abercromby bien ridicule.’
Nevertheless, one felt glad it remained there. It put on record what was then officially felt about death in battle, begging all that large question of why the depiction of action in the graphic arts had fallen in our own day almost entirely into the hands of the Surrealists.
‘La jolie figure de Moore rend son tombeau meilleur,’ Stendhal thought.
This was against the wall by the side door through which we had entered the Cathedral, at right angles to the Abercrombie memorial. Less enormously vehement, this group too had its own exuberance of style, though in quite another mood. Here a sinister charade was being enacted by several figures not so gigantic in size. What they were doing was not immediately clear, until Barham’s lines threw light on them too:
‘Where the man and the Angel have got Sir John Moore,
And are quietly letting him down through the floor.
I looked about for ‘that queer-looking horse that is rolling on Ponsonby’, but disappointingly failed to identify either man or beast in the immediate vicinity of the recess. The field of vision was too limited, only a short length of the nave to be viewed, where it joined the more or less circular area under the dome. However, recognition of these other episodes, so often pictured imaginatively in the past when the book had been read aloud by my mother—yet never for some reason appraised by a deliberate visit to St Paul’s to verify the facts—mitigated an atmosphere in other respects oddly frigid, even downright depressing. With a fashionably egalitarian ideal in view, those responsible for such things had decided no mere skimming of the cream from the top echelons, civil and military, should be assembled together to give symbolic thanks for Victory. Everyone was to be represented. The congregation—except for those who had a job to do—had been handpicked from the highest official levels to the lowest.
For some reason this principle, fair enough in theory, had in practice resulted in an extension of that atmosphere of restraint, uneasy nervous tension, common enough in a larger or smaller degree to all such ceremonies. The sense of being present at a Great Occasion—for, if this was not a Great Occasion, then what was?—had somehow failed to take adequate shape, to catch on the win
g those inner perceptions of a more exalted sort, evasive by their very nature, at best transient enough, but not altogether unknown. They were, in fact, so it seemed to me—unlike that morning in Normandy—entirely absent. Perhaps that was because everyone was by now so tired. The country, there could be no doubt, was absolutely worn out. That was the truth of the matter. One felt it in St Paul’s. It was interesting to speculate who, among the less obvious, had been invited to the Service. Vavassor, for example? If so, was he wearing his blue frockcoat and gold-banded top hat? One of the ordinary security guards could look after the front-door for an hour or two. Had Blackhead been torn from his files to attend this Thanksgiving? If so, it was hard to believe he would not bring a file or two with him to mull over during the prayers. Q. (Ops.) Colonel? Mime? Widmerpool?
Meanwhile, the band of the Welsh Guards strummed away at Hoist, Elgar, Grieg, finally Handel’s ‘Water Music’. Bruylant almost imperceptibly beat time with his forefinger, while he listened to these diversions, of which I felt Moreland would have only partially approved. The Jugoslav Colonel, rather a morose young man, did not seem altogether at ease in these surroundings. Possibly to reassure himself, he produced a pocket-comb and began to smooth his hair. General Cobb, contemplating the verdict on life’s court-martial, was frowning darkly. I had all my charges in their seats by now, with a place to spare at the end of the row on which the Partisan could leave his cap. Someone might have failed to turn up because he was ill; possibly Colonel Ramos indisposed again. Then I saw Ramos in the back row, anxiously studying the service paper. I checked the list. They all seemed to be there. The Neutrals, in their position further east of the transept, had some of them shown inferior mastery of the drill; at least, not all were in their places in such good time as the Allies. Finn had rightly estimated them a more tricky crowd to manipulate. He appeared to be finding difficulty in fitting his party into the available seats. It was too far to see for certain, but looked as if some flaw had been revealed in the organization. Finn came across the transept.
Dance to the Music of Time, Volume 3 Page 64
