We were interrupted by my father in his tail coat with red-and-white striped waistcoat, come to serve the evening cocktails.
'You must be pleased to have Jim home again, Elgar,' remarked Sir Edward, still scribbling.
'He uses too many of them Jerry words, sir.'
'But aren't you glad he's become proficient in the German language?'
'What's wrong with English, sir, I always say,' my father disagreed cheerfully.
He was carrying a large oval silver tray by its handles, ceremoniously breast-high. He lowered it slowly on the eighteenth-century pier table, marble topped, its legs a vulgar profusion of gilt mermaids and dolphins. Then he filled a glass with pale sherry from a square decanter and transferred it to a silver salver. All was performed with a solemnity, an exaggeration of movement, to imply that any action in Sir Edward Tiplady's personal service was of importance, or that a butler's performance of tasks as easily done by his master was worth the money.
'Edward, you haven't changed yet.' Lady Tiplady appeared almost on the heels of my father. 'You know we're going to the theatre.'
'Are we? What a bore.' He was reading a letter through his monocle. 'What's the show?'
'It's the Lunts-_Reunion in Vienna,_ at the Lyric: The Rothschilds asked us before Christmas to join their box. Surely you remember?'
'I've laid out your evening dress, sir,' came from my father, who had to play the valet in the same way that my mother was obliged to double as housekeeper. The War had replaced servant plenitude with the servant problem, the ingredient of all middle-class conversation.
'Well, Jim, you would seem to have resisted the siren voice of _Die Lorelei.'_ 'Lady Tip', as she was known downstairs, directed to me a voice laced with the acid she kept for servants, tradesmen, gossip, and dinner guests either boring or more intelligent than herself. She was tall, slim and dark-haired, in her late thirties but looking younger, beautiful and beautifully dressed.
'Perhaps I was lucky to resist it, your Ladyship. As it is a voice reputed to deprive a man of his sight and hearing.'
'Then the siren's voice would seem to have caught the ear of a good many people in Germany today, by all accounts.' She took a gin-and-french from my father's salver without glancing at him. 'What are we going to do about Jim?' she asked her husband.
'Do?' he asked vaguely, sipping his sherry at the desk.
'I mean, he can't go on living here, can he?'
I had noticed how the upper classes frequently assumed their language incomprehensible to the lower. There were many things which they would never discuss before the servants. The servants' affairs they could discuss freely over their own heads. But I was not listening. The Tipladys' only child, Elizabeth, had come into the room.
The year which may have changed me had transformed her. I had previously disregarded her as a household nuisance, like Sir Edward's half dozen cats. Now she was nearing fifteen, and already developed as a young woman. She had the same glistening dark hair, pale complexion and high cheekbones as her mother, but her eyes were softer, her lips full and as inviting as June strawberries, her breasts straining impatiently against the maidenly cut of her short blue dress. She seemed infinitely innocent, submissive and explosive-the look of Leonardo da Vinci. She sat on the sofa, turning her attention idly to a copy of the Tatler lying on the fireside table with three or four new novels from Harrod's library. The likes of me were to be ignored.
'Why not?' asked Sir Edward. 'Why shouldn't he still live with us?'
'The situation has become perfectly bizarre.' Lady Tip sat beside Elizabeth on the sofa, smoothing the sheath-like crimson silk evening gown over her long legs. 'It was all right when he was the butler's boy, but now he's a grown man and perfectly able to look after himself. He can't expect us to go on feeding and housing him in times like these.'
Lady Tip hated me. She was naturally jealous of the attention and affection which I diverted from her husband. My whole education I owed to Sir Edward's urging, expense and inspiration. The ladder of learning was then steep, sharply tapering and rickety. I was lucky to be the child in ten who progressed from elementary to secondary school, and among the four in a thousand who stepped further into university. There were only three hundred State scholarships, and three hundred more from Oxford and Cambridge, fought over by every clever poor child in the country.
Sir Edward had spurred me to win one of each, he had himself coached me in Latin for Cambridge 'Little Go', his cheques at Trinity arrived for birthdays, May Week or out of the blue. Aside froth the unmentionable part of our relationship, he was generous because he had no son and because he hated to see a good brain go to waste. Without Sir Edward, I should today look back on a life scribbled away as a clerk in some benumbing office. Or I should be a millionaire.
'Jim could at least get a job, and make some contribution to his keep,' Lady Tip continued.
'Perhaps I could persuade Almroth Wright to take you back at Mary's,' Sir Edward said to me. 'Though of course, Sir Almroth hates chemists in any shape or form. I'm seeing Alexander Fleming next week, I'll sound him out. God, what a bore old Flem is getting!' he broke off. 'It must be five years now since he found penicillium mould contaminating his Petri dishes and killing off his staphylococci. He still keeps working it into a discussion on anything whatever at the Research Club. Not of course that anyone can hear a word Flem says beyond the first two rows.'
'There's always the dole,' said Lady Tip, sipping her gin-and-french.
This annoyed Sir Edward. 'You really can't expect Jim to queue at the Labour Exchange with a lot of unemployed tram drivers and road menders.'
'Why on earth not?' she asked calmly.
Another cat, a tortoiseshell, appeared mysteriously and jumped on to Sir Edward's lap. My father impassively poured a second glass of sherry. Elizabeth continued turning the shiny pages of the Tatler, the unattainable eyed by the unspeakable.
13
I signed on the dole at a Labour Exchange just behind Oxford Street. The middle-aged clerk behind the grille, with his yellowish celluloid collar and dandruff, luxuriated in the same official arrogance as the two young Nazis in Wuppertal police station. I got twenty-nine and threepence a week. I paid ten shillings through my father, less as a contribution to Lady Tip's household than to her meanness. People like the Tipladys passed through the Depression as comfortably as passengers in a _wagon lit_ across the bleak, peasant-sustaining plains of Eastern Europe.
Though in 1934, and in London, things weren't as bad as they were remembered. The British national income had dropped by barely a tenth, compared with the American by half. 'The Hungry Thirties' was a will o' the wisp risen from the industrially rotting areas of coal, steel and shipbuilding up north. The unemployed marched on London, but the fire had gone out of the fight since the General Strike of 1926. It was then that. Britain edged the way Germany slid. 'The Organization for the Maintenance of Supplies' was a private army blessed by Home Secretary Joynson-Hicks (scourge of the decade's touchingly coy pornographers), which the various British Fascist Societies began to infiltrate. But in the mid-1930s, the unemployed were a force as submissive to authority as those who advanced at Ypres or the Somme and other names which lodged in British folk memory-like 'the dole' itself.
In the land to which I returned, like the land which I had left, the political party system was suspended. Britain had a 'National' Government, created in 1931 under the threat of imminent national bankruptcy and continued until 1945 under the threat of imminent national extinction. Ramsay MacDonald had won his last election by asking for 'A Doctor's Mandate', a slogan suggested by Sir Edward Tiplady's _bete noire_ Sir Thomas Horder, who breakfasted _tкte-а-tкte_ every Tuesday with this self-doubting, self-despairing Prime Minister. Meanwhile, King George the Fifth gazed upon his subjects in or out of work with unfathomable benignity, the Prince of Wales cut a dash round the Empire and Cambridge continued to win the Boat Race.
The wages of unemployment was boredom. I was imprisoned
in the basement, irritated by the ringing of the patients' doorbell to which my father continually ministered. I read books from the library and spent afternoons in art galleries and museums, obtaining a cultural education denied the usual biochemist. As summer came I tramped London from Parliament Hill to the Crystal Palace, patching the soles of my shoes with scraps of leather my father bought at a penny a bag from a kindly cobbler.
One early June evening, I was idling away watching my father cleaning the silver in his butler's pantry, which was hardly more than a large cupboard off the basement kitchen. He sat in shirt-sleeves and green baize apron, an emaciated hand-rolled cigarette dangling from his lips.
'Got your eye on young Miss Elizabeth, ain't you?' he remarked abruptly.
I coloured at the discovery of a deadly and guilty secret. When she came home from boarding school I always contrived to glimpse her round corners and through the cracks of doors, or more delightfully skipping past our high window. I could only romance about her, but our fantasies are always more solidly satisfying than our realities. As I was incapable of reply, my father added casually, while polishing a silver flower bowl, 'She's not his, you know.'
I was equally shocked and intrigued. 'What makes you think that?' I asked sceptically. I had often romanticized my own true parentage, but I bore a frustrating resemblance to my father.
'I hear things,' He continued polishing in silence. 'Fact, there's precious little about the family what I don't know. When I goes into a room and they clam up tight, I says to myself, "'Ullo, something fishy here". It doesn't take much to overhear a thing or two if you're careful, though often it's not worth the bother, just a row about who they're having to dinner.'
Such duplicity increased my respect for my father. He was not entirely the simpleton I took him for. 'But whose child is she? Do you know?'
'Remember Dr Ross? Sir Ronald Ross, I should say, him of "Malaria Day"? He died a couple of years back.'
'Surely not Ross!' I exclaimed. I remembered Sir Ronald calling regularly at the house the summer we had moved in, eight years previously. He was then nearing seventy, bull necked and square jawed, wearing a grey moustache with spiked ends as might have decorated a sergeant-major. On August 20, 1897, in a small laboratory facing Queen Victoria's statue in Calcutta, Ross had discovered the parasite which caused malaria, in the stomach of the spotted-winged anopheles mosquito. This was the last link in the casual chain of a fever which had baffled man since it had speeded the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The day was celebrated by annual oratorical lunches at the Ross Institute for Tropical Diseases at Putney. But Ross was mostly proud of his four novels and his poetry (which Osbert Sitwell mysteriously found of unforgettable beauty). Men always flatter themselves at doing at all what they do badly, rather than easily and well. He gave me one of his books and asked when I was going to join the Army.
'Nah, not him,' said my father contemptuously. 'There was an Italian doctor what came with him, and what had bin aht to India and China and such places.' He knocked a spike of ash with his little fingernail into the cracked saucer which passed as an ashtray. I remembered a tall, thin, sallow lank-haired younger visitor in Ross' shadow. 'When Sir Edward was still a doctor in the Army, Lady Tip was having an affair. It was during the flu, what killed so many people.' He continued steadily applying silver powder dissolved in methylated spirits from another cracked saucer.
'Lady Tip didn't catch the flu. She caught something what's more common all the year round.'
My amazement was followed by a pleasant feeling of conspiracy in lиse-majestй, and the desanctification of the goddess Elizabeth. 'They still sees each other to this day. And he still gets a bit of tail of her, for all I know. Bloody good thing, keeps the bitch in a better temper. Shouldn't think she gets even half an inch out of Sir Edward. He's a sissy, you know, written all over him.'
My father dropped his voice. The pantry door was open, and from the clatter in the kitchen it seemed Rosie was laying the trays for tomorrow's early morning teas. She always seemed to create undue noise, whatever she did.
'Why doesn't Sir Edward divorce Lady Tip?' I asked simply.
'Don't be barmy. The King's physician? A divorce would be the end of him at the Palace, that's for sure. And in a lot of other respectable houses as well. He'd never live down the scandal.' The bell rang. My father cursed, pinched out his cigarette, took off his baize apron and put on his tail coat. 'Lady Tip wants her booze, I suppose. Polish that, Jim, there's a good lad.' He tossed me the chamois leather. I started clearing the film of powder from the silver bowl, ruminating on our sensational conversation. I have refrained from giving the Italian doctor's name, because it is perpetuated in a laboratory dye for bacteria, and is familiar to the meanest medical student.
I did not anticipate being alone for long.
'Give us a kiss.'
Rosie appeared at the pantry door, red-faced, bright eyed, lips pursed invitingly. She was in her black art silk afternoon dress-it was rough brown calico for the morning's cleaning-but she had taken off her lace apron and her collar and cuffs, her dark curls tossed free of a cap, giving her an excitingly undressed look. I grabbed her, she pressed hard against me, seeming to exhale the heat of the glowing fires which she was continually reviving. 'When are you going to take me to the pictures?' she asked pertly.
'I can't afford it. I'm on the dole.'
'Go on! I'll pay.'
'That would never do.'
'Why not? Lots of girls stand treat these days.' She rubbed her rough, square nailed fingers against my cheek. As I smiled, without conceding to her, she said, 'Regular toff, ain't you?'
'I'm one of the servants, same as you are.'
'You speaks like a toff.' She slowly and voluptuously cradled my neck in her raw red arms. She had 'set her cap' at me, as they said in the paper-covered novels on greyish pages which she read beside the basement stove. I was drawn into her soft embraces like a bee into a summer flower. In common with Gerda, she never used perfume. She couldn't afford even Woolworth's. But unlike Gerda, her body had that heady tang which the Italians call _odure di donna._ She whispered, 'If you came upstairs one night, I wouldn't mind.'
'I'd wake the whole house up,' I objected.
'No you wouldn't. Not if you went careful, up the back stairs.'
'Supposing Lady Tip found out? You'd lose your position.'
Rosie wrinkled her nose, but made no reply. I had already planned the route of a tiptoe Romeo, but had refused to let myself risk it. Not through chancing Rosie the sack. But because life was humiliating enough, without taking a housemaid as a mistress. I should be letting down the toffs.
We leapt apart. The green baize door leading down to the basement creaked on its spring. Rosie was clattering at her trays again when my mother came in. She wore her best black overcoat and her black hat with a bow and black gloves. She had been to weekday evensong at Holy Trinity Church by Regent's Park, Sunday matins being precluded by the Tipladys' lunch. She stood looking through the pantry door, taking off her gloves. I was busy polishing the silver with my leather.
'Don't put them cups down so, you'll break them,' she said quietly to Rosie.
Rosie looked round sharply and irritatingly set out the rest of the crockery with exaggerated tenderness. Then she tossed her dark curls and disappeared.
'What was you two up to?'
For a moment I was about to profess amazed innocence, like a child. Then I said simply, 'It's nothing whatever to do with you.'
My mother stared at me without changing her expression. She looked abruptly at the floor. 'Don't waste yourself.' She raised her glance round the kitchen. 'You can get yourself out of all this,' she said, just loudly enough to carry the hate in her voice.
The baize door creaked, my father clattered down the stone steps. 'It was the bloody cats what wanted feeding,' he announced bad temperedly. He added in the same tone, 'You ain't got far with that silver.'
'I'm a chemist, not a scullerymai
d.'
He grunted. Picking up his nipped out cigarette from the saucer, he turned away in silence. It was the first time I dared to perform the experiment which demonstrated how terrified my parents were of me.
The bruised and silent atmosphere was fortunately shortly broken by the baize door opening again and Mrs Packer appearing, in her hat and about to leave for the day.
'Jim, there you are-Sir Edward wants you upstairs.'
The secretary was definitely not of the servants. She could ring for her tea from her small white office beside the consulting room at the back of the ground floor. She was pale and gingery with freckles, she wore starched white coats tightly belted round her narrow waist. Before leaving for Wuppertal I had imagined her middle-aged, but now I realized she could not have been much older than Gerda. No one seemed to know of Mr Packer, nor to mention him.
'You saw Sir Edward's been to the Palace today?' she said proudly as we reached the hall. 'It's in the evening papers.'
I had not noticed it. 'What's Sir Edward want me about?'
'Good news, I hope. He had a meeting with Sir Almroth Wright earlier. Perhaps he's found a job for you.'
I felt indifferent to this information, when six months earlier I should have been elated. Idleness had become my life, and the arduousness and discipline of employment looked distinctly uninviting. The same spiritual enfeeblement was probably suffered by the three million Britons who shared my experience.
'I do hope so.' She was looking at me smiling, head on one side. 'It does seem such a criminal waste, just kicking your heels down there. I mean with a Cambridge degree, and everything.'
She always sympathized with my being trapped in the lower classes, as she would have sympathized with a convict wrongfully imprisoned. That the social structure of the country was at blame crossed her mind as little as the prospect that it could ever be altered.
THE INVISIBLE VICTORY Page 10
