It's a Battlefield Page 13

  And he had brought trouble on her. This was not happiness brushing his umbrella, not love watching him at second-hand, from the mirror. ‘Shut the door.’ She whispered the words. She was full of shame and fear and unhappiness. Her skin was as dry as a child’s with fever. She was a child who had been aged suddenly by sickness. He remembered a boy at school who had died from influenza, how in the last hours before the nurses had put a screen round the bed, he had watched all that went on in the sickroom with a fallacious, an elderly wisdom; he was not really wise, not really old; he was only feverish and very weak.

  ‘Did you hear what she said?’ Milly asked, ‘that it was rotten for me? Did you hear what she’d been doing?’ If he had felt the slightest lust, he would have fled; it was the unexcitement in his love, the element of pity, that kept him there. It seemed unbearable to him that she should suffer.

  ‘You ought to turn her out of the house.’

  ‘Conrad,’ she said, ‘don’t be a fool. Don’t be a fool, Conrad. She’s right. Eighteen years. Do you think I could stand it? One’s got to begin some time.’ He wanted to tell her that this was sick-room wisdom, but there was no time to argue. She was speaking to him and he wanted to stop her. Otherwise she would suffer later at having been the one to ask, and she had already enough suffering to bear; he wanted to spare her anything he could. ‘I want –’ she said, and even then, in his hurry to interrupt, he noted with pain and without surprise that she was too honest to use a kindlier or more tender word.

  ‘Listen,’ he said quietly, ‘you know I love you. Let me stay. That was why I came upstairs. I couldn’t sleep.’ He felt no guilt at all; this did not harm his brother, this hopeless attempt to shield her, for she had not even been deceived; she was glad, she was grateful, she was his friend, but she didn’t believe a word he said. Then she touched him with timidity, and his flesh stirred, and he felt a degree of guilt which only the bed and the tiring of his body and the forgetting of his love in the direct contact of skin with skin, the thrust of lust, could temporarily and in part assuage. When he felt her shudder, he had a dull sense of an irrevocable injury which one of them had done to the other. Love had been close to him, in the kitchen, before the glow and the hum of the gas, between chair and chair, which had escaped him now in the bed, in the dark. One of them had injured the other, but it was not their fault. They had been driven to it, and holding her body close to him with painful tenderness, it was hate he chiefly felt, hate of Jim, of a director’s nephew, of two men laughing in Piccadilly. When he awoke in the night she was crying, and nothing that he could do would stop her tears. He thought of Kay happily asleep in the next room and lust, he thought, they call that lust and this is love. He meant the hate and the pain and the sense of guilt and the sound of crying in the greying room and sleeplessness and the walls shaking as the early morning lorries drove out of London.

  *

  ‘Caroline,’ the voice said, ‘Caroline.’ It added with metallic kindliness. ‘It’s not like you to forget a friend. Ten years ago . . .’ The Assistant Commissioner plodded back through those years; they led through suffering, through home-sickness, through resignation; along jungle paths, across mosquito-haunted nights, past a good many deaths of one sort or another. But the telephone did not allow much time for reflection. ‘I want you to dine with me – on Monday.’

  He had just time to emerge, as it were backwards, at the other end of ten years; the final dinner at the Army and Navy to the only man with whom he cared to spend his last hours in England; his valet waving decorously from the quay; the mist which hid the Needles, hid England altogether, so that he could not give the final glance which sentiment would conventionally have compelled from him. Before that – of course Caroline telling him to write, pouring out tea, turning to a politician.

  ‘I really don’t think . . .’ His table was littered with papers; the wireless invention was not satisfactory; the unofficial reports on Drover were coming in from various districts.

  ‘You can’t refuse me. It’s absurd. The day after tomorrow. Only two hours.’

  ‘If you could – er – see my, my desk.’

  ‘Such old friends. We mustn’t allow the threads to be dropped. Too absurd. After ten years.’ The appeal to sentiment was heartlessly efficient; it had struck him in the place where he was most vulnerable and at the hour when he was most alone. Even his secretary had left him in his room at the Yard; all those men, whose hours of duty corresponded with his, were departing; their voices faded down the long passages between the glass cubicles.

  ‘When I’m a bit, a bit clearer. I’ve got a lot to learn here. Different methods, Caroline. I’m really busy.’

  The voice said, ‘But I want you particularly.’ It hesitated. ‘I’m going abroad next week. I don’t know when I shall be back.’ He was quite sure that she was lying; but there were very few people who lied to get his company. The men on night duty were arriving; he heard them walking softly by his door; he could see the shadows through the ground glass. He knew that they resented his presence. They believed that he was prying into the affairs of their departments, interfering. When he first came, he explained several times as clearly as his inarticulate tongue would permit that he wanted to understand how each department worked, not in order to criticize but in order himself to pull his weight. They had never made the least pretence of believing him. He had tried to convince them; against his conscience he had sometimes refrained from criticism when criticism was required; they merely concluded that he was saving up for some grand devastating report to the Home Secretary.

  ‘Thank you very much then. I’ll come, but I shall have to, have to hurry away.’ He rang off, and the sudden cessation of that harsh but friendly voice made him feel his isolation acutely. The room all round him was dark; only his desk was lit by the green-shaded lamp. Somewhere a long way off a telephone bell rang and a voice could be heard speaking, but through the glass door the long passage was now in complete darkness. He was like a general left alone at headquarters to study the reports from every unit; they littered his desk. But he was not sheltered in a château behind miles of torn country; the front line was only a hundred yards away, where the trams screamed down the Embankment and the buses circled Trafalgar Square.

  It was hard, he thought, to get any clear idea of a war carried on in this piecemeal way throughout a city. He was not used yet to visualizing a situation from a policeman’s colourless report; he had been accustomed in the East to seeing with his own eyes the casualties of law: the stabbed soldier, the smouldering hut, the body hanging from a branch.

  ‘No references were made to the Drover case at the Labour demonstrations at . . .’

  ‘A collection in aid of Mrs Drover was made at the strike headquarters at . . .’

  ‘A proposal to hold a demonstration against Drover’s sentence in Trafalgar Square tomorrow was vetoed by headquarters, who have expressed their willingness to meet the employers on the subject of short-time rates . . .’

  ‘It is generally assumed here that a reprieve will be granted. Five thousand people have signed the petition.’

  ‘Some indignation . . .’

  ‘Generally apathetic . . .’

  ‘Pronounced feeling against members of the Force . . .’

  ‘No particular interest . . .’

  With some impatience he pushed these reports on one side and turned to the Streatham papers; here was something about which it was possible to feel, I am fighting for what is right. In the case of Drover he was upholding a system in which he had no interest because he was paid to uphold it: he was a mercenary, and a mercenary soldier could not encourage himself with the catchwords of patriotism – my country right or wrong; self-determination of peoples; justice. He fought because he was paid to fight, and only occasionally did the sight of some brutality lend conviction to the brain with which he fought. At other times the highest motive he could offer was that of doing his job; there were no abstract reasons to compel him to forbid this meet
ing, to break up that, to have this Socialist arrested for seditious speaking, to guard that Fascist’s platform while he spoke in terms of bayonets and machine guns; it was the will of the organization he served. It was only when he was tired or depressed or felt his age that he dreamed of an organization which he could serve for higher reasons than pay, an organization which would enlist his fidelity because of its inherent justice, its fair distribution of reward, its reasonableness. Then he told himself with bitterness that he was too old to live so long. His thin face, yellowed by more fevers than he could count, lined by the years of faithful mercenary service, would grow for a moment envious at the thought of younger men who might live to serve something which they believed worthy of their service.

  4

  ‘MARGARET,’ Mr Surrogate said, and turned his hand palm upwards on the sheet, ‘Margaret.’ His voice fell, his words became inaudible, and Davis laid a towel across the hot-water can and hesitated by the window. Should he draw up the blind and let in the sunlight? In Woburn Square the children were yelping on the pavement and the man with the Sunday papers called to the taximen on the rank.

  ‘Good food,’ Mr Surrogate said suddenly, still with that explanatory and reasonable palm outspread. Davis decided: let him sleep, let the bastard sleep: and tiptoed respectfully out, a gentleman’s gentleman.

  The sands were pink of an evening, the sea silver. At the rippled edge, far across the pink sands, the sea-birds sat, small and white and upright, like unlit candles. Margaret stood and stared and would not come in to dinner. ‘Good food wasted,’ Mr Surrogate said, pecking at her elbow like a hungry bird. ‘Oh, go to hell,’ and she was Kay leaning away from him towards the bed. Mr Surrogate woke and sat up and faced Margaret Surrogate’s cold appraisal from the wall. ‘I married the artist in her,’ he explained to the reporter at the funeral; he was prepared; had expected several journalists; hid his disappointment with difficulty from the single inexperienced boy from a news agency. ‘She was always, to me, more than a woman.’ The boy stared at him and blew his nose: he had a streaming cold.

  It’s true, Mr Surrogate said, not aloud, for Davis was in the next room, you were more than a woman. I wasn’t worthy of you. He was daunted by the canvases which now decorated Caroline Bury’s wall, daunted by the brief uncomfortable sexual passion in which Margaret had been the leader, leaving him worn out, humiliated, with the knowledge of her dissatisfaction. More than a woman. Kay was a woman, leaning back towards the bed, calling out, ‘No, Mr Surrogate, no. Please not,’ afterwards on the pillows whispering into his ear how bad he was, how strong.

  I’ve betrayed you again, Mr Surrogate said humbly to the face. Man is a beast, a lecherous beast. He may mate above him, but presently he finds his proper level. Nasty, brutish, short, that was how Hobbes described a man’s life. Mr Surrogate patted the grey hair above his ears, squinting sideways at the mirror. One ran through life quickly: the Fabian Society, hansoms at midnight, friendships with cultured plumbers, fighting for truth and justice, seeing violence prevail, lust prevail over the memory of love. Mr Surrogate’s thoughts withdrew from that unhappy honeymoon in Cornwall. One grew old.

  But Mr Surrogate’s thoughts rose resiliently: one was not too old to conquer and satisfy a young and pretty woman. Things would have been different, he told himself, avoiding the photograph, if Margaret had been less artist, more woman, had been less cold; he stamped deep down the memory of that unsated passion. She never understood me.

  ‘Davis, Davis,’ he called, ‘what’s the time? My watch has stopped.’

  ‘Half past nine, sir,’ Davis called from the pantry. ‘Will you take cereals or porridge, sir?’

  ‘Cereals.’ His complexion would not stand porridge too often. A small spot would appear on his nose. In four hours I shall have her here again. But he felt very little excitement. He even wondered whether he really wanted to see her again. He was not passionate; in middle age two days together with a girl were enough to exhaust him; after that passion had the same effect as porridge, a spot on the nose.

  He stroked his skin gingerly; he was humble again before a mirror. It was odd that a young and pretty girl should fall for him. Of course there is my position. But the girl was stupid. She could never follow the reasoning of No Compensation. She wanted me to help her brother-in-law. But I had already spoken to Caroline; there was nothing more I could do. My bed, he thought, with a flash of intuition, she liked my bed, and he stared across the pink blankets, screwing up his lips histrionically at the thought that a bed might mean more to a girl than the authorship of No Compensation.

  ‘Tea or coffee, sir?’

  ‘Coffee, Davis.’

  After all I am a public figure; I am the most advanced economic thinker in this country (a glance from those amused appraising eyes) and reluctantly he thought – I’m Margaret’s husband – Margaret whose malicious vision lay in state in the picture galleries of every capital in Europe. A girl like that is not really fit for me. His ageing body, sated by its single indulgence, made not the least protest.

  She may mean blackmail. The horrible thought occurred to him for the first time.

  ‘Are you never going to bring breakfast, Davis?’ he called irritably. I will not meet her. I’ll lie in bed. I’m tired.

  Oh, Margaret. Margaret. She was only twenty when she had married him; she had hardly begun to realize her power in paint. All those pictures, the three at the Tate, those on Caroline’s walls, at Manchester, at Munich, in Berlin, belonged to him. ‘To Mr W. H., the onlie begetter.’ He was not proud of his inspiration. Those landscapes in which nature was so deftly, so wearily, so faintly caricatured meant nights of exhaustion, and the shrieking nerve. I’ve done you enough harm, Margaret. I’ll be faithful. I’ll give this girl up. He wanted to compel the portrait to believe him this time, that it was not the fear of blackmail which restrained him, that it was for her. I’ve only loved you, Margaret, he told her and thought a minute later: God knows, that may be true.

  Davis brought in the breakfast tray and tactfully pushed under the bed with his foot a girl’s hair slide.

  ‘You’ve forgotten the soft sugar again, Davis.’

  You dirty old bastard, you’ve been at it again, Davis thought, stepping on patent leather toes softly and quickly to the door.

  *

  ‘A nice little woman,’ Conder said. He had breakfast in the café, rolls and coffee. It was not that he preferred a Continental breakfast or that he could not afford a larger one; he was well paid. But an accumulation of uneaten breakfasts was exchanged for holidays in Belgium, in France, in Switzerland, for pockets musical with foreign coins.

  ‘You’ve forgotten the butter, Jules.’

  ‘You’ve forgotten the sugar.’

  ‘No knife, Jules.’

  The young man ran back and forth from his counter with a lost look like a dog taken shopping. ‘If only I could remember things. Even faces.’

  Faces. Faces. Conder sat upright with a jerking neuralgic movement. I’d forgotten. I’m tired. I’m not myself. Milly’s perplexed, suddenly flushed face (after three sherries), suddenly joyful (watching him scribble in a notebook), fled. He saw instead, behind Milly, Bennett watching him from a table near the door. ‘What ought I to have done?’ he asked Jules. ‘He’d followed me. He must have followed me. The coincidence. Last night when I was talking to a friend, and again the night before that, after the meeting. He follows me everywhere. I haven’t done him any harm.’

  ‘You should be like me,’ Jules said. ‘I forget faces. You know, even Kay – I’m not clear what she looks like. My mother – I remember a sort of chintz effect; she had huge breasts. My father – a moustache, a huge moustache. It seemed huge then. That’s all I remember.’

  Conder said: ‘I’m afraid. I don’t know what to do. Suppose he’s in the street now, watching. I haven’t done him any harm. But he may think I have, you see. I printed that story about the fight. And there’s something else as well.’

  ‘Does h
e know you?’

  ‘I called on him once. Collecting for the Party. He may have an eye for faces. Like me. I have an eye for them.’ They were like the portraits in an intimate picture gallery, hanging there always at the back of his mind: politicians, policemen, thieves; the man who drowned his wife at Shoreham, flushed and neat in the dock with a tiepin in the shape of a horse’s head; the widow of the grocer who drew the Derby winner and who, dead drunk the same night, drove his car into the Thames, a widow with £20,000 of her own; she said, ‘I’ve always been lucky at such things, raffles, I mean, and so on’: Milly Drover. He could not keep her any longer in the centre of his attention, her portrait must be relegated to a gallery which was not often visited – perhaps a few years later a similarity of dress or scent would remind him (‘a nice little woman’); he had an amazing memory for faces, for phrases, for stories of a startling kind. But now, for the moment, because he was tired, his memory was a jumble of pictures, a cacophony of sound. I’ve got to pull myself together. He poured out his coffee black.

  Jules said: ‘My memory. I’ve even forgotten that letter. I’ve been thinking of nothing but poor Drover.’

  ‘Ought I to go to him,’ Conder wondered, ‘and explain?’