The Dower House

by Malcolm Macdonald

  ‘Even if you gave it to him, it might do no harm. One of the directors of the Home and Colonial told me that if only the law allowed it, they would sometimes sell sugar, flour, milk, etcetera at a loss.’

  ‘That would be crazy.’

  ‘No. Everyone has to buy those things so the word would spread like a bush fire. And then the shop assistant would say “We have Bath chaps in peak condition, moddom – off-ration, of course . . . And long spaghetti at last . . . shall I just slip a packet in with your delivery?” . . . and so on. And the sixpence profit on these choice items would easily cover the penny loss on the staples. If they ever abolish resale-price maintenance, that’s what will happen.’

  ‘Thank God I’m not in trade.’

  ‘But you are, my pet. As Fogel says, “Vee are all prostitoots nowadays.” He’s one of the greatest party-givers in Hampstead. Within three months your sculpture will be seen by every important man and woman in London’s artistic and literary circles – not to mention bankers . . . captains of industry. How can that be bad?’

  As they rounded the corner, where Rathbone Place wiggles into Charlotte Street, Felix caught sight of Angela just as she was entering Schmidt’s. ‘Tell you what,’ he said to Faith. ‘Why don’t we try that little working-class Greek café just off Goodge Street?’

  ‘Oh but I’ve set my heart on Schmidt’s,’ she pleaded – but her smile told him that she, too, had spotted Angela up ahead. She giggled and took his arm. ‘I think it’s about time I met her, don’t you?’

  ‘There’s nothing between us,’ he assured her.

  ‘Yes . . . well . . . I was watching you that day when you first set eyes on her! Tell me what you know about her – anything – in the next hundred yards. And walk slower.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something odd. Maybe shameful. Don’t ever breathe a word about it to her – but she and I did meet once, before the war. We had a date – just one afternoon together, in a rowing boat on the Wannsee. She did the rowing. I was quite a chubby little chap then. Lazy, too. And I mentioned the occasion to her a couple of weeks ago and she clearly did remember it and then I panicked and pretended I’d forgotten all the details. And later, when I wanted to admit I hadn’t been quite honest . . . the moment had passed. How do I undo all that? The longer I leave it, the harder it gets.’

  Several other diners entered and left the restaurant before Faith answered, ‘I think you’ll be the best judge of that – knowing when the time is right.’

  Inside, he made a good show of surprise at seeing her. ‘Hallo, Angela! I’ve missed you – where have you been? Sorry – may I present Miss Faith Bullen-ffitch? Faith . . . Miss Angela Worth.’

  They shook hands. ‘Please to join me,’ Angela said. ‘Felix has told me much of you, Miss Bullen-ffitch.’ She gestured to Fritz to reorganize her table for three.

  ‘You have the advantage of me, Miss Worth. He has told me very little of you – but all of it very interesting. You work at the BBC, I understand? At Broadcasting House?’

  Angela shook her head and turned to Felix. ‘That’s the answer to your question. I’ve been up at Ally Pally, as we BBC types call it. For the last three weeks.’

  ‘Alexandra Palace!’ Faith interpreted for Felix. ‘I’ve pointed it out to you on the train.’ She turned back to Angela. ‘Television? When are they going to make it a national thing? It’s ridiculous that only London can get it. The audience is so small there’s no budget – so the programmes are appalling – so nobody wants to lash out on a set. It’s absurd.’

  Angela nodded. ‘Are you interested in television, Miss Bullen-ffitch? It’ll be less than a year now before the service goes national.’

  Fritz planted water-filled tumblers on the table, one before each. ‘Das Menu.’ He started to proffer it but then tucked it firmly under his arm. ‘Das kennen Sie, ja,’ he said.

  ‘Menu!’ Felix mocked, thinking the word far too grand for Schmidt’s limited, austerity offering.

  Angela asked for her usual salami and salad; the other two went for a Wienerschnitzel and surrendered their ration books for clipping.

  ‘I work in publishing, as you probably know,’ Faith said. ‘But every time I hear the word television something inside me leaps up at it. “Less than a year” might suit me down to the ground. D’you know an illustrated magazine called Forward! Miss Worth? My present boss is its publisher.’

  ‘Mister Fogel. Yes, I see copies lying around editorial desks at Broadcasting House.’

  ‘But do you ever look at the contents? It’s a mixture of a fairly academic text, slightly popularized, but made highly accessible by brilliant graphics. I feel in my bones that some such thing could also be done in television, too. Graphics.’

  This final statement was so abstract, and so unlike Faith – who always cut to the heart of the matter – that Felix suddenly realized how serious she must be. These ideas were miser’s gold to her. Angela must have caught something of it, too, for she said, ‘One day – and quite soon I think . . . five or six years – we can record TV like we now record sound – on tape. Commercially. Then . . . well, so many things will become possible.’

  Unspecified ‘graphics’ . . . unspecified ‘so many things’! They were both doing it! Like dogs (and unlike bitches) they were scent-marking their respective territories. Felix almost laughed aloud.

  ‘I adore your dress!’ Faith said. ‘Especially the pattern. Not English, surely? Did you run it up yourself?’

  ‘It’s my own print.’ Angela tried to sound modest. ‘A discharge print on self-coloured cloth. I do evening classes in textile printing at the Camden Town Working Men’s Institute. Two nights a week. You can’t just work-work all the time.’

  ‘I totally agree,’ Faith began.

  ‘She kills foxes,’ Felix put in.

  ‘I ride to hounds,’ she said wearily. ‘I don’t care two hoots if they put up a fox or not.’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘D’you know what I really enjoy? I love to see three gentlemen riders refuse a fence, just before Jupiter and I go thundering between them and simply fly it for a gold medal! No, it’s better than any old gold medal.’

  Angela laughed. Her eyes were shining. ‘Oh, yes!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘So how does the BBC work?’ Faith spoke as if the question followed on quite naturally. ‘Is it all Civil-Servicey or would I need a friend to dig a hole on the inside and pull me through?’

  ‘Are you now jumping ship for a gold medal?’ Felix asked.

  ‘Of course not,’ she replied impatiently. ‘But one should never get into anything without knowing where all the exits are.’ She turned again to Angela. ‘How did you get in, for example?’

  ‘I was invited. Have you heard of tape recording?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘It was invented in Germany by BASF. We used it at the UFA film studios in the war so I knew more about it than anyone at the BBC.’

  ‘Yes but how did they know that? Who put you and them in touch? I like to know how these things work.’

  Angela, aware that Felix was about to protest, said, ‘I don’t mind. I was a political prisoner and all political prisoners were seen by Allied intelligence people before they resettled us.’

  ‘You scratched their back – they scratched yours, eh?’

  Angela laughed. ‘What a language! Do you ever say anything straight?’

  ‘I mean you each helped the other.’

  ‘Yes, I understood. They soon realized that what I knew about tape-recording was still years ahead of the BBC.’

  ‘And what made them think of the BBC?’

  ‘Intelligence people? Perhaps because a lot of them work there.’ She shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Work there? Intelligence people? At the BBC?’

  ‘They filled a whole floor of Broadcasting House in the war – and they’re still there, most of them.’ After a pause she added, ‘You don’t think the government dares leave the BBC in the hands of itself, surely?’

  ‘I
suppose not.’ Faith grimaced.

  ‘Changing your mind about working there?’ Felix asked. He admired Angela’s performance. These ‘intelligence people’ were the ones who had lost – or claimed to have lost – her transcript of that meeting at the Interpol HQ – the minutes that sent her to a KL for years. But she gave no hint of it in her voice or manner. He knew precisely where, when, and why she had acquired such skill, but it still left him filled with admiration.

  Their meals arrived.

  ‘What would you like to do at the BBC?’ Angela asked.

  ‘I don’t know so much about radio – but television when it’s truly national . . . that could be very exciting. You remember the way . . .’ She suddenly recalled how Felix and Angela had spent the war. ‘Well . . . newsreels – the way they were filmed, the way they did interviews . . . every aspect – they changed enormously between the start of the war and the end. And they’re still changing – newsreels and documentaries. And I’ve often thought it would be wonderful to do that on little screens in people’s drawing rooms. Or “lounges” as they probably call them. Making a documentary for four or five people round the fireside would have to be very different from the way we present it to a single audience of several hundred in a cinema. Don’t you think? We’d have to invent a new visual language.’ She turned to Felix. ‘That’s one of the exciting things about what we’re doing at Manutius. We’re inventing a new graphic language for presenting information in print. On the page. Wouldn’t it be exciting to do that same sort of thing in an utterly new medium? On that tiny screen?’

  ‘I can see the logic,’ Felix told her. ‘But I still don’t get a concrete picture in my mind. What d’you think I will actually see on this little screen?’

  ‘A face, of course – exactly what you’d expect to see around your own fireside. A friendly face. And the friendly face will tell you something . . . and then you can have a bit of the documentary or travelogue or newsreel . . . anything. But it will always come back to the friendly face.’

  ‘Did you just think this up?’ Angela asked.

  Faith shrugged. ‘Well, it’s not new really. I was listening to Christopher Stone the other night, playing those simple melodies on These You Have Loved on the wireless, and I suddenly thought, Why are you listening to this . . . this awful kitsch? And it’s because he’s such a lovely old man with such a mellow voice and so relaxed. And then I started thinking, What sort of man or woman would I choose to play hot jazz records or some heavy classical stuff? And they’d each be different, of course, but they’d each be utterly right for the job. And then, when I started thinking about television, that all came back to me and I thought, I know exactly who should present a television programme on . . . I don’t know, “modern housing” or “chaos in the docks” or “the last days of the Music Hall” . . . that sort of thing.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Oh – I don’t know any actual names but I absolutely know the sort of person to go looking for. There’s only one problem.’ She smiled at Angela. ‘D’you think I’m arrogant enough for the job?’

  Saturday, 14 June 1947

  There will be a Communal Meeting at the Palmers’ tonight, immediately after our meal together.

  Agenda:

  1. Sharing out of electricity bill (£12.7s.4d.)

  2. Establishment of a Communal Fund.

  3. Essential rewiring?

  4. Central heating and hot water supply?

  5. Possible purchase of items of communal equipment.

  6. Deliveries of post and milk – where to make a central point?

  7. Suggested new arrangements for communal meals.

  8. Broad ideas for the vegetable garden.

  9. Provisional plans for other flats.

  10. Preliminary structural survey.

  11. Special arrangements for Christmas

  12. A. O. B.

  Willard glanced through the list. ‘See how the civil service is eating into his soul – everything is “possible, provisional, broad . . . suggested”. And when he runs out of those words, he just tacks on a question mark at the end.’

  ‘Well, he can strike out “suggested” in item seven. We girls have decided already. We shall have one last try for communal meals. Just weekends.’ She raised her eyes ecstatically. ‘Oh, and never more shall we eat off plates licked clean by Xupé and Fifi and then washed in half-warm water and called “good enough” by Nicole!’

  ‘I still don’t like this communal stuff. Communal . . . communist . . .’

  ‘Nicole shall do all the cooking, which she loves. Sally to do all the marketing, which she’s good at. And I to do all the washing-up, which I don’t mind.’

  Willard shook his head. ‘Tony won’t like it.’

  ‘Nicole will just remind him of the last two meals Sally cooked.’

  ‘Just those last two? I guess they were pretty spectacular, though. But it’s a shame you should get all the coarse work, honey. I thought you liked cooking, too?’

  ‘I like cooking for you and me – and for our guests when we’re ready.’

  ‘Well, it won’t last long. Just wait till we’ve all got families here. And kids. It’ll fall apart.’

  That evening Nicole celebrated her new appointment as effective chef de cuisine to the community with a superb ragout of a roadkill pheasant. Their apartment had been greatly improved – in an artistic sense – since the day of the Brandon’s first visit. Nicole had acquired a whole parachute from somewhere, an item that most women used for making blouses, knickers, slips, and nighties. But Nicole had turned it into a dramatic feature, with a pre-war tailor’s dummy, based on Leslie Howard, and several objets trouvés. It broke up the view of the back of the sofa that had so upset Isabella Brandon.

  As this was their first, formal Communal Meeting, they opened a couple of bottles of wine, too. But the resulting goodwill did not last ten minutes into item one.

  Willard was astounded. The trifling little electricity bill seemed such a cut-and-dried business that he had not even bothered to discuss it with Marianne. Obviously he and she had used the most electricity – with all their power tools. Felix, who only had a few lights and one electric ring, had obviously used the least. Willard therefore proposed a simple division: Johnsons, £5; Wilsons and Palmers, £3 each; the Prentices £1; and Felix the small change. No one else had been there long enough to have used a meaningful amount. Next item.

  ‘Not so fast please!’ Nicole had ideas of her own. ‘I think Johnsons six quid, Wilsons and Palmers two-fifty.’ She turned on Marianne. ‘You have that beeeg American oven. Ours is small.’

  Marianne disagreed. ‘But it’s summer. I cook very little.’

  ‘I don’t mean only cooking.’ Nicole addressed the meeting, ‘She heats the whole upstairs with it.’

  ‘Not true!’ Marianne objected. ‘Vous n’êtes pas honnête! I have seen you dry Fifi with your oven when her furs get wetted.’

  Tony turned aghast to Nicole, who had covered her ears to blot out Marianne. ‘Fifi in the oven?’

  ‘I open the oven door and hold her over it,’ she admitted crossly. ‘But only a few minutes. It’s a tiny oven, anyway. Not like that big American—’

  ‘And you heated the bathroom with it. You carried it in there and opened the oven door, too.’

  ‘Just twice! It’s a little portable oven. How much can it use?’

  ‘Funny – I was only in that part of your flat twice, and both times you had it in the bathroom, open and . . . I could feel the radiation even just walking past.’

  ‘Anyway,’ Felix said, ‘I don’t think Faith and I should only pay the loose change. I think we should split it four ways evenly.’

  Tony said, ‘I don’t think you should pay at all until you’ve got an oven. They’re the big users. But I think perhaps Marianne has a point. I suggest we and the Johnsons go fifty-fifty and leave Felix out this time.’

  ‘That’s so bloody patronizing!’ Faith blurted out to Felix. She’d alread
y put away a few snifters before they came over for the meal. ‘Are you going to let them patronize you like that? Pay the fucking lot yourself. You can afford it easily. Stuff them!’

  ‘Faith, dear,’ Tony said mildly. ‘There is a matter of principle involved here.’

  ‘Oh, sod your principles!’ she sneered. ‘This bickering is just so petty bourgeois. I’ll pay it if Felix won’t – so there! God – how I hate democracy.’

  Then everyone began talking at once.

  ‘For Christ’s sake!’ Willard shouted above it all. ‘I mean, what the hell are we talking about here? A lousy twelve quid and a few odd pence!’

  They fell to silence.

  ‘Anyway,’ Marianne said, ‘we don’t know how much should be communal electricity. The hall light often gets left on all night. That’s communal.’

  ‘You mean I leave it on?’ Nicole accused.

  ‘It doesn’t matter who leaves it on. It’s just a fact. The hall light should be communal – paid for communally.’

  ‘Which brings us on to item two,’ Faith said. ‘For Christ’s sake let’s get on or we’ll be up all night.’

  ‘We must finish item one first,’ Tony insisted.

  ‘You’ll be up all night anyway,’ Nicole sneered at Faith. ‘Your light’s always on over there.’

  ‘I don’t believe this,’ Willard said. ‘Why don’t we draw lots for who pays and how much?’

  ‘It would be equally as fair as anything else,’ Marianne said. ‘How can we know who owes more than anyone another?’

  Eric Brandon spoke. ‘I think we should chip in with at least a quid. I know we’re not living here full time yet, but we have—’

  Marianne interrupted, ‘And besides – Willard has got the front lawn looking like grass again—’

  ‘So?’ Nicole challenged.

  ‘So – he has done more for this community than some other people. No one else bothers.’

  ‘Did you speak, my darling?’ Isabella Brandon asked her husband.

  He brought the flat of his hand down on the table and raised it again to reveal a pound note. ‘Actions speak louder than words,’ he said.