by John Moore
“The Bank!” she repeated, in that superior and dismissive tone which she reserved for the objects of her ideological disapprobation. John had once amused himself by mentally making a catalogue of them: Banks and Yanks, foxhunting, debutantes, Punch, Boy Scouts, beefsteaks, Saint George.… He suspected that she secretly disapproved of balloons also, since it was frequently their destiny to be popped by drunken revellers at night-clubs, and of beach-balls, since the Idle Rich were apt to play with such idle toys when they disported themselves on the Riviera.
And yet, oddly enough, he liked her. The complexities and nuances of character, which he didn’t understand, always puzzled and disquieted him; so he would pick out from a person’s make-up some simple virtue and cling to his belief in it for dear life. In Miss Foulkes’ case the virtue was loyalty. It was a loyalty, he knew, which he shared with the Communist Party; and this amused him, since he didn’t take politics very seriously. If at some time in the fantastic future the Communist Party should take it into its crackpot head to order Miss Foulkes to blow up the factory, then poor Miss Foulkes, he imagined, torn asunder, schizophrenic, would probably go mad. Meanwhile he found a strange comfort in her loyalty, and now that things were going badly he relied upon it more and more.
“Bank or no Bank,” he said, “we’ll carry on, shall we, until we’re down to that last halfpenny in the Petty Cash?”
She nodded, unsmiling, for she didn’t think there was anything funny about the halfpenny.
“We’ll make a few thousand elephants on spec,” he said. “Elephants always do go well at Christmas. Or shall it be pigs?”
“Pigs were more in demand last year.”
“Shall we put a squeak in them?”
“It adds to the cost, but they go better with a squeak.”
“Our last dying squeak.” Still she did not smile. “Now I’ll go and tell Jim to change the formas. You’d better put those roses in water,” he said.
The salmon-pink blush rose like a tide up her neck and arms and he hurried to the door, aware once again of her vulnerability, puzzled and embarrassed by it because it didn’t fit in with the rest of her, it was one of those complexities which he didn’t understand.
V
The Committee Meeting, that typically and terribly English thing, had been going on for nearly two hours, and Stephen’s wounded knee, cramped under the table, was nagging him like a toothache. The end was not yet in sight.
Originally the Committee had consisted of eight; but its membership had been doubled by the co-option of people who were said to have “felt hurt.” To-day there were several new members whom Stephen did not even know. The deliberations of this multitude, as it seemed to him, followed a course as tortuous as that of the town’s own river. They meandered, they ran in circles, they tied themselves in knots; unpredictable cat’s-paws of wind rippled them and uncharted currents stirred their depths. A proposal to insure against rain had just given the Vicar an excuse to deliver a considerable sermon on the subject of anticyclones. Stephen, who had heard it several times before, let his mind wander away while the voice of the Vicar bumbled on and a distant cuckoo mocked the whole proceedings through the open window.
His thoughts went back through time and space to a spring morning in 1944, that had been full of unseen cuckoos too, and to an olive-grove in Thessaly. The occasion was the only one in his life when he had been really important; and his importance was due to the fact that a crumpled parachute lay in folds at his feet and he held a tommy-gun in his hands. Until that moment he had been a very ordinary person: in peace-time a history master at second-rate prep schools eking out his miserable pay by conducting archæological tours to Greece every summer holidays, in war-time a clerkly intelligence officer, one more dogsbody among all the dogsbodies on the swollen staff at Cairo. Then, quite suddenly, he had been translated—there was no other word for it—into a sort of Prometheus; for he brought fire from heaven, in the shape of grenades and mortar shells, to the men who had fought for years with old rifles and their bare hands. For thirteen months he had lived like an Olympian; until on VE-day a bone-shaking lorry had carried him back to Athens with a shattered knee, back to the ordinariness of hospital, demobilisation, unsuccessful bookselling, and small-town Committee Meetings at which the subject under discussion at the moment was, of all things, horse-manure.
“A dollop of muck,” Mr. Handiman was saying, “from the Council’s stables would do ’em a world of good.”
Nearly two years ago, when the Festival was first mooted, Mr. Handiman the ironmonger had received a poetic inspiration, although at the time he was fishing with maggots for eels. Born of the sunshine and the buttercups, it had concerned flowers: let every cottage garden at Festival-time put on a special display, let every street corner blossom its welcome to the visitors from afar! When he began to elaborate this pretty notion, his thoughts naturally turned to roses, red roses and white, the favours of Lancaster and York. The ancient borough should be embowered in roses! The Council, in a mood of midsummer madness, had approved the idea and passed a resolution asking every gardener to plant roses where they could be seen from the streets. More daring still, it had even voted a halfpenny rate as a contribution towards the cost. The imaginative gesture had earned the town a good deal of free publicity, including a neatly-turned fourth leader in The Times; and the only protests had come from Miss Foulkes, who wrote to Mr. Runcorn pointing out that the workers couldn’t eat roses, and from Mr. Gurney, who unkindly drew attention to the fact that Councillor Noakes was in business as a nurseryman and florist.
But now Mr. Handiman’s innocent suggestion about a free dollop of muck for the roses seemed to cause some embarrassment to the Mayor, who at last had to admit that Councillor Noakes regularly took away the horse-manure “under a long-standing arrangement.” Stephen was aware of deep currents stirring as Mr. Gurney demanded “What does he pay for it?” and Councillor Noakes shouted “I protest!” The argument went on for quite a long time, with the Mayor patiently explaining that there were only two old horses which pulled the dust-carts “so the amount involved is really very small,” and Mr. Gurney muttering something about “wheels within wheels.”
“The next item on the agenda,” said the Mayor swiftly, “is headed ‘Sideshows.’” And at once there rose up a large lady in furs and feathers who observed—and Stephen could hardly believe his ears—that she was the President of the Fur and Feather League, and what about an exhibition of chinchilla rabbits? During the subsequent silence Stephen took pleasure in watching the expression on Lance’s face; for the young poet, whose bright new world was brimming over with fascinating absurdities, was delighting in the discovery of a new one, and had plainly taken the furry lady to his heart. He stared at her in an ecstasy of wonder, oblivious of Robin, who had a simpler sense of fun and was poking him in the ribs with a pencil.
“I’m not absolutely certain,” murmured the Mayor, “although of course we want to encourage all local activities, whether rabbits … But perhaps you’ll have a word with Mr. Tasker about it afterwards?” And with a kindly glance at Stephen he passed on to the next item, which concerned the unveiling of a statue of Dame Joanna, poetess and prioress, in the Pleasure Gardens.
Stephen, who had been growing steadily more apprehensive about the Festival for several weeks, felt that the prospect of a rabbit show justified his worst fears. Already it had been decided that the Women’s Institute would be allowed to tell fortunes, that the Rowing Club should bring Bloody Mary ashore in a decorated barge, and that the Master of Foxhounds should gallop with his pack past the grandstand tally-hoing an imaginary fox. “What am I but a hack?” Stephen asked himself miserably. “The Town Hack, and a poor, ineffectual, useless one at that?” He was sick and tired of the whole business already; it could end only in ridicule, of which he would be the principal butt. There would be four more of these dreadful Committee Meetings before the Festival achieved its consummation in farce or shame or a ghastly mixture of the two; a
nd this one was by no means over. His knee was hurting so badly that he was quite unable to concentrate on the proceedings; but fortunately he had no responsibility for the statue of Dame Joanna (it was practically the only thing he wasn’t responsible for) so he allowed his wayward mind to stray again, and like a homing bird it flew straight to the olive-groves.
Lately he had often caught himself looking back upon his year in Greece as if it were an experience in a frame, a sort of illuminated picture, or a theatrical interlude played within the arch of a proscenium. It glowed in his memory with an unnatural brightness; the sky was a painted cyclorama, extravagantly blue, the snow was whiter than white, the glaucous olives seemed carved in relief on tawny hillsides, the anemones were projected in technicolor on to emerald alpine meadows. Against this incandescent background moved figures larger than life, and in particular one figure, gigantic among giants, that of his friend and companion Polycarpos. Huge and heroic, laughing at the sky, a bottle of wine in one hand, a grenade in the other, Polly stood outside their headquarters on VE-day. “Let’s have a good bang,” he said, “to celebrate. …”
Suddenly the Mayor’s voice (“Our ’ome-made Pageant, our ’ome-made ’istory”) brought Stephen back to the present with a jerk. There was an argument going on about the vexed question of an extra episode, and Mr. Gurney had just remarked that in his humble opinion the town had been going from bad to worse for three centuries, and that the trivial doings of its wretched population during this period were of no conceivable interest to anybody. The Mayor ignored this and proceeded to make a suggestion of his own. He was not, he said, like Councillor Noakes a literary man; he was not like Mr. Gurney a scholard. But Pageants were meant for ordinary chaps, and what could appeal more to ordinary chaps than the paragraph he had chanced upon in the Intelligencer only last week under the heading “Seventy-Five Years Ago”? He fumbled in his pocket for the cutting, put on his spectacles, and solemnly declaimed the following passage from Mr. Runcorn’s predecessor’s extraordinary prose:
“Last Saturday upon our hallowed greensward the wielders of the willow included among their number one whose fame resounds far beyond the confines of this his native county, nay, throughout the whole civilised world. In the course of scoring 172 Dr. W. G. Grace kept the leather-chasers on the run for nearly two hours ere his seemingly impregnable citadel fell; and towards the close of his innings he smote the spheroid three times in succession into the willow-girt river. …”
The Mayor looked up.
“I don’t know,” he said modestly, “whether you’d call that ’istory?”
There was a murmur of applause. Everybody seemed delighted with the idea except Lance, who was appalled at the prospect of having to write a Chorus about cricket, and Stephen, whose already enormous cast would be increased by twenty-two. “Mr. Tasker will see to it, then,” said the Mayor, flushed with triumph. “No doubt the Cricket Club will co-operate. And now it only remains for me to thank you for your attendance and to say how safe we feel our arrangements all are in Mr. Tasker’s capable hands. …” He got up to go.
Stephen had scarcely taken three steps to ease his throbbing knee before the furry lady was on to him, babbling of chinchillas. Why did it seem so much worse, he wondered, to wear your own rabbits than to eat them? She terrified him, and mumbling some excuse, he made his escape from her, hurrying down the stairs although all the nerves in his left leg seemed to be dancing an infernal jig together. At the bottom of the stairs something like panic overtook him as there flooded into his mind the full realisation of what lay ahead: W. G. Grace and chinchillas superadded to Odo and Dodo and the Beauty Queens. He had an impulse to turn back, intercept the Mayor, and hand in his resignation on the spot; but he lacked the courage to do so, and he limped on down the slumberous street, past the offices of the Weekly Intelligencer outside which Virginia, on her way home, favoured him with an Enigmatic Smile, past the Mayor’s shop, JNO. WILKES, LADIES’ OUTFITTER, displaying grey bloomers, dreadful pink corsets, and peculiar garments called spencers, past the poor little dusty window of Mr. Handiman’s ironmongery with its fishing-floats, its mousetraps, its rusty garden trowels, and its bundle of skates which had hung there ever since the great frost of 1946—Mr. Handiman having routed them out from his store-room just in time for the thaw. Festival Committee Meetings always had a curious effect on Stephen: they implanted in his mind a rebellious disbelief in history; and now as he paused outside Mr. Handiman’s to rest his knee, he found it quite incredible that great events had ever happened here —that the knights had clattered down the street on their heavy chargers, striking sparks from the cobbles, pennons bravely flying, a red rose or a white one worn for a challenge in their shining helmets—that a Prince had been slain but half a mile away, and a King hunted like a fox had given the slip to his foes—that Shakespeare himself, if Mr. Gurney was right, had set foot here, had trodden where Stephen now trod! Yet these were the ancient glories he must somehow bring to life: with Councillor Noakes the literary man dressed up as Shakespeare, with a foxhunting squire in armour as Prince Edward of Wales.
He knew that he could not do it. In a moment of self-revelation he saw himself as he was, well-meaning and timid and ineffectual, a faint-hearted dabbler alike in books and living. He had only been brave and competent once, and that was when he had Polly beside him—Polly laughing at the sizzle of bullets from the hidden ambush even as he cried “Get your head down!” and then suddenly toppling forward with a grunt. Stephen had lobbed three grenades one after another into the blackness of the wood, dragged Polly into the truck, and driven away. It had not occurred to him even that he had done well until Polly, returned from hospital, had thanked him for saving his life; and they had got rather drunk together on some wine that tasted like resin.
Three days later the news of Germany’s capitulation came through on the wireless, and they got drunk again. It was a particularly exhilarating experience to drink with Polly, who when he was at the top of the world somehow managed to carry his companions there with him. He and Stephen danced down the village street with the whole population of sixty at their heels, and Polly kissed all the women, including an old crone who was said to be a hundred and hadn’t been kissed, she croaked, for seventy years. Then Polly climbed a chimney, the tallest in the place, and unfurled a Stars and Stripes at the top of it; for although his father had been a carpet dealer from Salonika he was an American citizen, whose home was in New Orleans. He made a long speech in Greek, and another in English, and sang some scandalous songs in both languages, and danced a hornpipe on the top of the chimney before he could be persuaded to come down. Then they went back to the Headquarters and drank some more wine; and Polly, swaying in the doorway, took a grenade out of his pocket and very slowly, almost thoughtfully, pulled out the pin. “Must have a bang, Stevie. …” In a world of bangs he always wanted another. But the baseball player’s pitch for once in a way failed to come off; the grenade hit the telephone wire in front of the Headquarters, and fell to earth within ten yards of Stephen. He was lucky indeed to lose no more than his knee-cap and half his shin.
Yet oddly enough he bore Polly no ill-will; indeed it was impossible to feel resentment against such a man. Somehow it cheered him up, now, simply to remember Polly, to remember his hip-swinging walk, his slow wide grin, his laughing dark eyes which spoke of the Mediterranean even while his mouth drawled of New Orleans. And the extraordinary hats he wore, a match for Mr. Churchill’s—once he had gone out on patrol in a ridiculous little baseball cap, perched with the peak pointing skyward on top of the big prognathous head which had caused Stephen to nickname him the Piltdown Man; and the five Bulgarian prisoners he brought back in the morning had seemed more alarmed by his cap than by his tommy-gun.
Indeed there was nobody in the world like Polly! Nobody, surely, who could do so many things so well— from driving a truck at fifty along the side of a precipice to handling a boat in a rough sea; from climbing a mountain to riding a half-wild horse; fr
om singing songs to making love! And in this latter respect he was indeed unique, for he had not only made love to all the eligible young women in a valley forty miles long (the population, though small, was widely scattered), but he had done so in spite of an embarrassing idiosyncrasy at the memory of which Stephen nearly laughed aloud. Whenever Polly experienced the least premonitory stirrings of passion he sneezed; sometimes indeed the sneeze came first, and gave him early warning that yet another affair of the heart was on the way. “I bin to a psychiatrist about it, Stevie,” he confessed gravely; “but the guy said there was nothing to be done. I reckon it’s something like hay-fever; but you can’t get inoculated against dames.” And after all, it didn’t really matter, he added with a grin; for when the dames got wise to it they’d naturally take a violent fit of sneezing as an exceptional compliment.
Nevertheless, this singularity of Polly’s had once nearly cost him his life. During the time of the troubles with Elas he happened to be courting a Communist schoolmistress who lived in a village held by bandits. At considerable risk he visited her under cover of darkness, entering her parents’ house by means of an open window. At a tender moment he was assailed by such a paroxysm of sneezing that, according to him, the whole house was shaken by it, her father woke up, the guards were aroused, and he found himself in the same awkward predicament as Samson at Gaza. He went one better than Samson, however, for instead of carrying away the doors of the gate he fought his way out with the protesting girl slung over his shoulder; and taking her to a place of safety he was able as he put it to unconvert her from Communism in no time.
