It's a Battlefield Page 14

  ‘Curious. It was from France. I don’t know anyone in France except my father. And this was typed. Father would never have the money for a typewriter. I put it down for a moment and then you came in and there was the meeting. and all yesterday there was this and that. I’ll open it when I go up.’

  ‘Come with me,’ Conder said. ‘He won’t cut up rough if there are two of us. I can’t stand all this watching and spying. I want to have it out with him. Oh, hell, Jules, you haven’t given me a spoon.’

  ‘What do you want a spoon for?’ Jules said. ‘Use your fingers. Listen. I’ve got to go to Mass, and then I want to see the priest about this petition. Don’t you think it might help if a priest signed it? I must do something. I know how it’ll be. Everyone’ll get bored and just let it alone.’

  ‘I’ve done what I can. I’ve got something else to think about now.’

  ‘You see there’s Kay’s sister. I’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Before you forget it like my spoon,’ Condor said. ‘Or that letter.’

  ‘No, no. They’re different. None of you are going to do as much for Drover as I am. I feel it. None of you are going to do as much.’

  ‘Packet of “Weights”,’ a man said at the counter. ‘I’ve bin standin’ here while you talk long enough. I want a packet of “Weights”. Unless I get a packet of “Weights” I’ll break somethin’.’

  ‘All right. All right,’ Jules said.

  Conder drank up his coffee and went out. The street was full of dogs and women and onion peel. The bells of one of the Soho churches were ringing. In the height of a pale-blue sky an aeroplane turned and twisted, leaving a trail of smoke which hung about for a time, then blew away. It was as if the pilot had begun an advertisement and then remembered it was Sunday. Men stood in their doorways and read the News of the World and spat. In Wardour Street and Shaftesbury Avenue they were reading the Sunday Express; in the almost empty Circus Conder bought an Observer and, sitting on a bus top, he read the editor’s warning to Europe. ‘War?’ splashed a whole page. A book reviewer wrote: ‘I am not in the habit of discovering masterpieces, but . . .’

  ‘Camden Town,’ Conder said. Mr MacDonald was going to fly back from Lossiemouth; there were to be several international conferences in agreeable cities in Southern Europe; a few thousand men had been knocked off the dole.

  I won’t be followed around, Conder thought. I won’t be treated as he treated that treasurer. It’s bad for my nerves. Indeed his nerves were in a shocking condition. Ever since he had rapped the skull of the wooden bear in Mrs Coney’s passage he had lost control of the present and the past. Tentatively to Milly he had sketched in the children and the bath and the new house; all the familiar world was being snatched from him and sent tumbling over the Schaffhausen falls to be flung in spray against the coloured windows of a summer house. He clutched at a memory, but it was torn from him; even the tiepin in the shape of a horse’s head whirled away on the rapids. ‘Come with me,’ he said to Jules, but Jules vanished. Milly’s face blurred and disappeared. He who boasted a memory of faces could remember nothing but the features of one girl whose skirt he had clutched among the cuckoo clocks. What he remembered only too distinctly were despair, shame, tears. He had to remind himself that these were past. I need a holiday, he told himself. This is serious. It even occurred to him quite plainly for a moment that he had been too inventive; he had to draw the line immediately between what was real, Bennett following him, Bennett threatening him, and what was unreal, the child with whooping cough, the bath, again the past.

  ‘Mr Bennett?’ he said to the man on the ground floor. ‘I want to see him. Is he in?’ Dogs barked and bit each other in a zoological shop across the way, and very faintly, because the traffic was almost stilled, it was possible to hear the lions in Regent’s Park roaring to be fed.

  ‘There’s nobody here called Bennett,’ the man said. He leant across the doorway and smoked a cigarette. ‘Nice little dawgs,’ he said. He was the kind of man, in his height and breadth and roughness, in the threat of his broken nose, who sells puppies in back streets.

  Conder said, ‘I know he lives here. On the top floor,’ but he was beginning to doubt his memory.

  ‘Take off your hat,’ the man said. ‘Take off your hat,’ he repeated so fiercely, that Conder obeyed, raising his hat politely before the other’s mutilated gaze.

  ‘Bald,’ the man said. ‘Bald. I just guessed it was you. Come upstairs.’

  Conder said, ‘I wanted to apologize. In case he thought. . . .’ He clung to the drab street; a bus went by and in an upper window across the way a man was shaving. This was real, this he had to keep hold of. ‘Come upstairs,’ the man repeated, and Conder obeyed him, obeyed him because he had a loud voice and an assured manner, just as he had obeyed the elderly American reeking of eau-de-Cologne who had assured him that the Schaffhausen falls were something which no intelligent man should miss. So this mounting the dim staircase with fear loosening his bowels; so the long drive in the cold and an expensive tea and no pocket handkerchief and the girl laughing at him, while the pink and green falls went by.

  ‘I only wanted to say –’

  ‘Now look, just you look,’ the man said and threw the door open.

  ‘What at?’ Conder asked. ‘There’s nothing.’ A fire sank out of existence on the hearth; a table, a chair, a bed, but nothing else, not even a picture on the walls.

  ‘Nothing,’ the man said, ‘he’s gone, hopped it, and why? Left me with the room to let, hasn’t paid his rent, hopped it, skedaddled, shot the moon. Have you a better name for it, and why?’ The man advanced on Conder and Conder backed. ‘And why? Because a mean, small, shabby rat who couldn’t keep his finger out of other people’s pies was following him around. His nerves couldn’t stand it.’ The big man’s manner softened. ‘Be reasonable. You don’t need to have done much to get nerves. And how would you like to have been followed wherever you went by a mean, small, shabby rat with a bald head? I said to him, “Stick it out, the man doesn’t know anything, he’s just trying it on,” and he promised he would. But when I got back last night that’s what I found. Hopped. Skedaddled. Be reasonable,’ the big man repeated. ‘He’s even took my pictures.’

  ‘But,’ Conder said, and he made the motion of pushing the stranger away with the palm of his hand, ‘but I thought he was following me.’ The other stared at him for a while and then began to laugh.

  In the silent shabby street the sound was enough to wake the caged dogs, who behind the lowered shutters of the Sunday peace began again to bite and snarl and whine.

  Conder cleared his throat and put his hand towards his bald head in an habitual gesture. It was comic, of course, it was comic. But islanded on one moment of the past, cabined above the rocking falls, he had the impression of all human contacts whirling from him in laughter, in fear, or simply (and he thought of Milly for almost the last time) in the press of other business.

  *

  Jules prayed, while the fat priest rose above the pulpit, and the congregation withered into attitudes of meekness, piety and inattention. He prayed with his face in his hands for Jim Drover. As his emotion welled out between his fingers, he felt the satisfaction of doing all he could for someone he had never seen; he was ready for incredible sacrifices, feeling a kinship with the crude Christ in plaster.

  The priest addressed the congregation in French on the subject of sin; the word péché, péché, péché, held down his sermon like so many brass tacks driven into a wood coffin. The restaurateurs of Soho folded their hands and translated the term into ‘femme, femme, femme,’ ‘grue, grue, grue.’

  Jules, praying for Jim Drover, thought of Kay. He joined her life to his (the tea urn and the counter and the cigarettes), her life of eight to five tending a machine, in a mutual dissatisfaction. He wanted to release her, to release Drover. Always in the badly lit church, surrounded by the hideous statues of an uncompromising faith, listening to the certainty of that pronouncement – péch
é, péché, péché – he was given confidence, an immense pride, a purpose. However lost in the café, forgetful of knives and sugar, here he was at home.

  When the Host was raised, Jules remembered, in the cave of his hands, the letter he had left unopened. Here in the middle of the only France he knew, the nuns and the prostitutes and the restaurateurs and the statues, he was filled with curiosity by this message from the real France. In the café the day before he had been uninterested, all his mind absorbed with the need of remembering things, but in the church while the wine was made blood, the most unlikely things seemed possible, emotion came easily, the desire for sacrifice, the desire for love, the desire for tenderness. It was as if a stranger whom he had long admired from a distance had asked him the time. The typewritten envelope was reassuring; his country was not importunate in its tenderness; no personal hand had passed him an appeal. In twenty minutes Mass would be over; I will go back and open the letter. But no, he told himself, I am going to see the priest about the petition.

  Domine, non sum dignus. . . . Domine, non sum dignus. . . . Domine, non sum dignus . . .

  He thought of his mother, how she had beaten him for what she called ‘French ways’, for his sudden raids into the larder, his debauch among the sultanas. She had impressed on him that he was English now, that the English did not steal, that the English were serious, counted their money at night, and earned money only by hard work. Regularly every week she lost two shillings on a horse, and regularly she impressed on Jules that the English did not gamble. Regularly she told him that the English did not drink, regularly once a month he heard through the thin wall the hiccups in the neighbouring room. Regularly she told him that the English never thought of sex, regularly he heard the moans between the hiccups, for the man in France, the husband whom Jules supposed did all that the English thought should not be done, gambled and drank and laughed and looked at women and did not count the money for which he had not worked. He would have liked to know his father, but no word came from that paradisal land, even when his mother died.

  Ite missa est.

  When Mass was over, Jules went to the vestry to find the priest, but he was surrounded by Knights of Columba, stout elderly men with slips to their waistcoats, who were talking of rummage sales, whist drives, lantern lectures. I will catch him, Jules thought, after benediction. He walked quickly home and up to his room and opened the letter.

  For some time he failed to understand it. He did not recognize his disreputable absconding father under the name of Heysan-Bretau, for his mother had altered their name at once to Briton. Nor was it like his father to be dead, after the proper rites, without pain, buried in the Catholic cemetery at Petit Tourville, ‘mourned by his fellow townsmen and fellow councillors’. Jules was a little cast down; it seemed wanting in respect to have thought of him so lately gambling, drinking, making love. He had certainly counted his money; his solicitor spoke with cold formality of how respected his father had been, how no local tradesman had contributed more generously during his life to charity, how in the coming year he would have been Mayor of Petit Tourville. The black-coated phrases conveyed no pictures to Jules of life in a small town, of Sunday Mass, of municipal politics. This respected figure, so nearly ‘our respected Mayor’, made a last attempt to wander round the Eiffel Tower, slipping Napoleon coppers into cigarette machines, crossing himself before holy statues in grottoes decorated with oyster shells, making eyes at women, pinching their bottoms as he passed; not without a struggle did he slip into his six-foot hole while the Fire Brigade presented arms and the town council laid a wreath. Could his spirit have refrained from laughter at the thought of the hiccups and the moans of his deserted wife?

  ‘A bequest of 10,500 francs to my son, Jules, trusting that he will invest the sum in sound Government securities and waste none of it in games of chance, gambling or the pleasures of the senses. The residue of my estate to be divided equally between the Governor of the Home for Indigent Trades-people, Petit Tourville, and the Pastor of the Church of Notre Dame, Petit Tourville, the interest in the latter case to be used to augment the annual income of the Altar Society.’

  Ten thousand five hundred francs: it was about a hundred and fifty pounds. ‘My God,’ Jules said aloud: he began to laugh. He ran downstairs; there was no one in the café; I must celebrate; he called down to the kitchen: ‘My father’s dead,’ and ran into the street. Mon père est mort, vive mon père. He ran back into the café and called up the stairs to Conder, but Conder was out. Kay, he thought, there’s Kay; she’ll love me today, nobody could help loving me today. I’m rich. I’ve got ten thousand francs. I’m happy. How to find her? We’ll celebrate, we’ll marry. I’ll take a car, we’ll ride into the country, we’ll have lunch, tea, dinner together, we’ll love each other, I’m so happy. She mustn’t go to work tomorrow. I’m so happy. How can I find her? Mon père est mort, vive mon père.

  He carried the paper round with him, he showed it to everyone; he felt that he had everything in the world he wanted. Everyone was kind to him and laughed with him. Yes, they said at the garage, he could have a car for the whole day, for the whole night if he wanted; it was just the day for a ride in the country, they said; the beechwoods out by Beaconsfield would have their autumn colourings; in Ashdown Forest the heather would be out. Yes, they said at the rooms in Dean Street, he could have them tomorrow if he chose; it was just the time of year to be married in, they said: ‘a summer’s child was healthy and wise’. Yes, they said at the Presbytery, if he got a special licence there would be no difficulty. Yes, they said at the café, they’d serve a wedding breakfast in the private room. It seemed to Jules that he had been very much alone, but that now he would never be alone again.

  And then to crown the perfect day, his only difficulty was solved, and there was Kay smiling with bright lips outside Leicester Square Station. He could hardly believe his eyes; it was as if he had been rolling his life laboriously up, up a steep hill, and now it topped the rise and now it rolled before him faster and faster, so that he had to run to keep behind it, this gay, this fortunate life. Mon père est mort, vive mon père. She had been waiting for someone, she said, but he had not come. She had been waiting half an hour. She was tired of waiting. ‘A hundred and fifty pounds. We are going to take a car. We are going into the country.’ Everything was arranged; he had known somehow that he would find her.

  ‘But I ought to wait – another five minutes.’

  ‘Listen. Where shall we go, south, east, west, north?’ He moved restlessly on the edge of the pavement; people stared at him; they pushed him on one side as they scrambled for their buses. He was longing to be out of London, somewhere quiet, away from the traffic, where he could tell her everything he had planned.

  ‘You’re crazy, Jules.’

  ‘We’ll go north. We shall get out of London so quickly then. Camden Town, Golders Green, Hendon, and there you are. No distance then to Berkhamsted, to Ashridge Park, Ivinghoe.’ He had gone there two years ago in a side-car for a motor-cycle trial; it had been winter: red berries in the hedges and a thin rime sparkling on the downs; in the Park the grass had crackled under foot.

  ‘But, Jules, I must be back quite early. Work at eight tomorrow.’ He nearly told her then: you’ll never go to work again, you’re marrying me. I’ve got the room, I’ve ordered the breakfast, I’ve all but bought the licence. Something restrained him: a little inherent caution native to France, to Petit Tourville – ‘Government securities – waste none of it in games of chance . . . the pleasures of the senses’. He thought that he was waiting till night; there were things expressed better in the dark, so that, ‘You’re crazy, Jules,’ might sound like a caress, when ‘I’ve such a lech for you’ was passion and poetry.

  It was not a large share of caution he had inherited; his driving was reckless. He could not keep his eyes on the road with Kay beside him. I shall never be alone again, he thought over and over again. In Camden Town he saw Conder walking rapidly down the pavement towa
rds the Carreras Factory with his head bent and his hat in his hand; Jules shouted and waved his hand, but Conder did not see him, people were stepping out of his way, he seemed to see no one. They stopped for a drink at ‘Jack Straw’s Castle’. The dogs were yapping round the toy boats on Whitestone Pond, and an old man kept on saying that he could see St Paul’s and nobody listened to him.

  ‘But where are we going, Jules?’

  ‘You’ll see.’

  Down into Golders Green and out to Hendon, the miles drummed out at seventy to the hour on the great curved road, down to the road house by Huntonbridge. They had lunch there, and again he nearly told her everything. But the waiter brought the cheese and the waiter brought the coffee and somehow there was no time to tell her that they were going to be married and live in Dean Street and have a wedding breakfast in the café’s private room.

  After lunch she was sleepy and curled up beside him, and he drove with one arm round her. It occurred to him, driving very slowly now, watching the hedges and the cows (near Boxmoor a barge drawn to the bank and the old horse feeding), that he had never before had quite this sense of happiness. He thought of his father with tenderness, who had given him Kay sleeping at his side and this autumnal drive with the old year dying and the old horse nodding and the old leaves rotting on the ground. In a field a blue smoke rose from a pyre of weeds which had been lit the evening before and burned gently still in the dry clear air. Cars continually outpaced them; but the joy of speed had left him; he ambled down the road and let high-powered screaming purpose vanish round the corner; he had no purpose beyond the preservation of this peace, beyond carrying peace gently like a precious vase into the evening. He had not been out of London since his drive to Ivinghoe two years ago, tossed in a side-car, silence shattered by the explosions of the exhaust.

  In Berkhamsted purpose plunged down the High Street, roared past for Tring and dinner, Jules turned by the church, over the canal and under the railway bridge, along the moat and the fractured walls of the castle. As they climbed above the town, evening swept the common, the gorse, the clay, wounded by old trenches, the abandoned butts, and cast the hillside ferns in shadow. Kay slept and moved and slept again and came awake. She said: ‘It’s cold.’