Twenty-One Stories Page 7

  ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if Uncle had five hundred. He’d put it all down for Lord Driver’s son.’

  ‘We’d take over this college business. With a bit of capital we could really make it go. It’s just chicken-feed now.’

  They fell in love for no reason at all, in the park, on a bench to save twopences, planning their fraud on the old frauds they knew they could outdo. Then they went back and Elisabeth declared herself before she’d got properly inside the door. ‘Frederick and I want to get married.’ She almost felt sorry for the old fools as their faces lit up, suddenly, simultaneously, because everything had been so easy, and then darkened with caution as they squinted at each other. ‘This is very surprising,’ Lord Driver said, and the President said, ‘My goodness, young people work fast.’

  All night the two old men planned their settlements, and the two young ones sat happily back in a corner, watching them fence, with the secret knowledge that the world is always open to the young.

  1941

  MEN AT WORK

  RICHARD SKATE had taken a couple of hours away from the Ministry to see whether his house was still standing after the previous night’s raid. He was a thin, pale, hungry-looking man of early middle age. All his life had been spent in keeping his nose above water, lecturing at night-schools and acting as temporary English master at some of the smaller public schools and in the process he had acquired a small house, a wife and one child – a rather precocious girl with a talent for painting who despised him. They lived in the country, his house was cut off from him by the immeasurable distance of bombed London – he visited it hurriedly twice a week, and his whole world was now the Ministry, the high heartless building with complicated lifts and long passages like those of a liner and lavatories where the water never ran hot and the nail-brushes were chained like Bibles. Central heating gave it a stuffy smell of mid-Atlantic except in the passages where the windows were always open for fear of blast and the cold winds whistled in. One expected to see people wrapped in rugs lying in deckchairs and the messengers carried round minutes like soup. Skate slept downstairs in the basement on a camp-bed, emerging at about ten o’clock for breakfast, and these imprisoned weeks were beginning to give him the appearance of a pit-pony – a purblind air as of something that lived underground. The Establishments branch of the Ministry of Information thought it wise to send a minute to the staff advising them to spend an hour or two a day in the open air, and some members did indeed reach the King’s Arms at the corner. But Skate didn’t drink.

  And yet in spite of everything he was happy. Showing his pass at the outer gate, nodding to the Home Guard who was a specialist in early Icelandic customs, he was happy. For his nose was now well above water: he had a permanent job, he was a Civil Servant. His ambition had been to be a playwright (one Sunday performance in St John’s Wood had enabled him to register as a dramatist in the Central Register), and now that the London theatres were most of them closed, he was no longer taunted by the sight of other men’s success.

  He opened the door of his dark room. It had been built of plywood in a passage, for as the huge staff of the Ministry accumulated like a kind of fungoid life – old divisions sprouting daily new sections which then broke away and became divisions and spawned in turn – the five hundred rooms of the great university block became inadequate: corners of passages were turned into rooms, and corridors disappeared overnight.

  ‘All well?’ his assistant asked: the large-breasted young woman who mothered him, bringing him cups of coffee when he looked peaky and guarding the telephone.

  ‘Oh, yes, thanks. It’s still there. A pane of glass gone, that’s all.’

  ‘A Mr Savage rang up.’

  ‘Oh, did he? What did he want?’

  ‘He said he’d joined the Air Force and wanted to show you his uniform.’

  ‘Old Savage,’ Skate said. ‘He always was a bit wild.’

  The telephone rang, and Miss Manners grasped it like an enemy.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘yes, R.S. is back. It’s H.G.,’ she explained to Skate. All the junior staff called people by initials: it was a sort of social compromise, between a Christian name and a Mr. It made telephone conversations as obscure as a cable in code.

  ‘Hello, Graves. Yes, it’s still standing. Will you be at the Book Committee? I simply haven’t got any agenda. Can’t you invent something?’ He said to Miss Manners, ‘Graves wants to know who’ll be at the Committee.’

  Miss Manners recited quickly down the phone, ‘R.K., D.H., F.L., and B.L. says he’ll be late. All right, I’ll tell R.S. Goodbye.’ She said to Skate, ‘H.G. asks why you don’t just put Report on Progress down on the agenda.’

  ‘He will have his little joke,’ Skate said miserably. ‘As if there could be any progress.’

  ‘You want your tea,’ Miss Manners said. She unlocked a drawer and took out Skate’s teaspoon. No teaspoons had been supplied in the Ministry after the initial loss of 6,000 in the opening months of the war, and indeed it was becoming more and more necessary to lock everything portable up. Even the blankets disappeared from the A.R.P. shelters. Like the wreck of a German plane the place seemed to be the prey of the relic-hunters, so that one could foresee the day when only the heavy Portland stone would remain, stripped bare, scorched by incendiaries and pitted with bullet-holes where the Home Guard unloaded their rifles.

  ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ Skate said, ‘I must get this agenda done.’ His worry was only skin deep: it was all a game played in a corner under the gigantic shadow. Propaganda was a means of passing the time: work was not done for its usefulness but for its own sake – simply as an occupation. He wrote wearily down ‘The Problem of India’ on the agenda.

  Leaving his room Skate stood aside for an odd little procession of old men in robes, led by a mace-bearer. They passed – one of them sneezing – towards the Chancellor’s Hall, like humble ghosts still carrying out the ritual of another age. They had once been kings in this palace, the gigantic building had been built to house them, and now the civil servants passed up and down through their procession as though it had no more consistency than smoke. Long before he reached the room where the Book Committee sat he heard a familiar voice saying, ‘What we want is a really colossal campaign . . .’ It was King, of course, putting his shoulder to the war-effort: these outbreaks occurred periodically like desire. King had been an advertising man, and the need to sell something would regularly overcome him. Memories of Ovaltine and Halitosis and the Mustard Club sought an outlet all the time, until suddenly, overwhelmingly, he would begin to sell the war. The Treasury and the Stationery Office always saw to it that his great schemes came to nothing: only once, because somebody was on holiday, a King campaign really got under way. It was when the meat ration went down to a shilling; the hoardings all over London carried a curt King message. ‘DON’T GROUSE ABOUT MUTTON. WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOUR GREENS?’ A ribald Labour member asked a question in Parliament, the posters were withdrawn at a cost of twenty thousand pounds, the Permanent Secretary resigned, the Prime Minister stood by the Minister who stood by his staff (‘I consider we are one of the fighting services’), and King, after being asked to resign, was instead put in charge of the Books Division of the Ministry at a higher salary. Here it was felt he could do no harm.

  Skate slid in and handed round copies of the agenda unobtrusively like a maid laying napkins. He didn’t bother to listen to King: something about a series of pamphlets to be distributed free to six million people really explaining what we were fighting for. ‘Tell ’em what freedom means,’ King said. ‘Democracy. Don’t use long words.’

  Hill said, ‘I don’t think the Stationery Office . . .’ Hill’s thin voice was always the voice of reason. He was said to be the author of the official explanation and defence of the Ministry’s existence: ‘A negative action may have positive results.’

  On Skate’s agenda was written:

  1. Arising from the Minutes.

  2. Pamphlet in Welsh on German la
bour conditions.

  3. Facilities for Wilkinson to visit the A.T.S.

  4. Objections to proposed Bone pamphlet.

  5. Suggestion for a leaflet from Meat Marketing Board.

  6. The Problem of India.

  The list, Skate thought, looked quite impressive.

  ‘Of course,’ King went on, ‘the details need working out. We’ve got to get the right authors. Priestley and people like him. I feel there won’t be any difficulty about money if we can present a really clear case. Would you look into it, Skate, and report back?’

  Skate agreed. He didn’t know what it was all about, but that didn’t matter. A few minutes would be passed to and fro, and King’s blood would cool in the process. To send a minute to anybody else in the great building and to receive a reply took at least twenty-four hours; on an urgent matter an exchange of three minutes might be got through in a week. Time outside the Ministry went at quite a different pace. Skate remembered how the minutes on who should write a ‘suggested’ pamphlet about the French war-effort were still circulating indecisively while Germany broke the line, passed the Somme, occupied Paris and received the delegates at Compiègne.

  The committee as usual lasted an hour – it was always, to Skate, an agreeable meeting with men from other divisions, the Religions Division, the Empire Division and so on. Sometimes they co-opted another man they thought was nice. It gave an opportunity for all sorts of interesting discussions – on books and authors and artists and plays and films. The agenda didn’t really matter: it was quite easy to invent one at the last moment.

  Today everybody was in a good temper; there hadn’t been any bad news for a week, and as the policy of the latest Permanent Secretary was that the Ministry should not do anything to attract attention, there was no reason to fear a purge in the immediate future. The decision, too, eased everybody’s work. And there was quite a breath of the larger life in the matter of Wilkinson. Wilkinson was a very popular novelist who wanted to sound a clarion-note to women, and he had asked permission to make a special study of the A.T.S. Now the military authorities refused permission – nobody knew why. Speculation continued for ten minutes. Skate said he thought Wilkinson was a bad writer and King disagreed – that led to a general literary discussion. Lewis from the Empire Division, who had fought in Gallipoli during the last war, dozed uneasily.

  He woke up when they got on to the Bone pamphlet. Bone had been asked to write a pamphlet about the British Empire: it was to be distributed, fifty thousand copies of it, free at public meetings. But now that it was in type, all sorts of tactless phrases were discovered by the experts. India objected to a reference to Canadian dairy herds, and Australia objected to a phrase about Botany Bay. The Canadian authority was certain that mention of Wolfe would antagonize the French-Canadians, and the New Zealand authority felt that undue emphasis had been laid on the Australian fruit-farms. Meanwhile the public meetings had all been held, so that there was no means of distributing the pamphlet. Somebody suggested that it might be sent to America for the New York World Fair, but the American Division then demanded certain cuts in the references to the War of Independence, and by the time those had been made the World Fair had closed. Now Bone had written objecting to his own pamphlet which he said was unrecognizable.

  ‘We could get somebody else to sign it,’ Skate suggested – but that meant paying another fee, and the Treasury, Hill said, would never sanction that.

  ‘Look here, Skate,’ King said, ‘you’re a literary man. You write to Bone and sort of smooth things over.’

  Lowndes came in hurriedly, smelling a little of wine. He said, ‘Sorry to be late. Had to lunch a man on business. Seen the news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Daylight raids again. Fifty Nazi planes shot down. They are turning on the heat. Fifteen of ours lost.’

  ‘We must really get Bone’s pamphlet out,’ Hill said.

  Skate suddenly, to his surprise, said savagely, ‘That’ll show them,’ and then sat down in humble collapse as though he had been caught out in treachery.

  ‘Well,’ Hill said, ‘we mustn’t get rattled, Skate. Remember what the Minister said: It’s our duty just to carry on our work whatever happens.’

  ‘Yes, I didn’t mean anything.’

  Without reaching a decision on the Bone pamphlet they passed on to the Meat Marketing Leaflet. Nobody was interested in this, so the matter was left in Skate’s hands to report back. ‘You talk to ’em, Skate,’ King said. ‘Good idea. You know about these things. Might ask Priestley,’ he vaguely added, and then frowned thoughtfully at that old-timer on the minutes, ‘The Problem of India’. ‘Need we really discuss it this week?’ he said. ‘There’s nobody here who knows about India. Let’s get in Lawrence next week.’

  ‘Good chap, Lawrence,’ Lowndes said. ‘Wrote a naughty novel once called Parson’s Pleasure.’

  ‘We’ll co-opt him,’ King said.

  The Book Committee was over for another week, and since the room would be empty now until morning, Skate opened the big windows against the night’s blast. Far up in the pale enormous sky little white lines, like the phosphorescent spoor of snails, showed where men were going home after work.

  1940

  ALAS, POOR MALING

  POOR inoffensive ineffectual Maling! I don’t want you to smile at Maling and his borborygmi, as the doctors always smiled when he consulted them, as they must have smiled even after the sad climax of September 3rd, 1940, when his borborygmi held up for twenty-four fatal hours the amalgamation of the Simcox and Hythe Newsprint Companies. Simcox’s interests had always been dearer to Maling than life: hard-driven, conscientious, happy in his work, he wanted no position higher than their secretary, and those twenty-four hours happened – for reasons it is unwise to go into here, for they involve intricacies in British income-tax law – to be fatal to the company’s existence. After that day he dropped altogether out of sight, and I shall always believe he crept away to die of a broken heart in some provincial printing works. Alas, poor Maling!

  It was the doctors who called his complaint borborygmi: in England we usually call it just ‘tummy rumbles’. I believe it’s quite a harmless kind of indigestion, but in Maling’s case it took a rather odd form. His stomach, he used to complain, blinking sadly downwards through his semi-circular reading glasses, had ‘an ear’. It used to pick up notes in an extraordinary way and give them out again after meals. I shall never forget one embarrassing tea at the Piccadilly Hotel in honour of a party of provincial printers: it was the year before the war, and Maling had been attending the Symphony Concerts at Queen’s Hall (he never went again). In the distance a dance orchestra had been playing ‘The Lambeth Walk’ (how tired one got of that tune in 1938 with its waggery and false bonhomie and its ‘ois’). Suddenly in the happy silence between dances, as the printers sat back from a ruin of toasted tea-cakes, there emerged – faint as though from a distant part of the hotel, sad and plangent – the opening bars of a Brahms Concerto. A Scottish printer, who had an ear for good music, exclaimed with dour relish, ‘My goodness, how that mon can play.’ Then the music stopped abruptly, and an odd suspicion made me look at Maling. He was red as beetroot. Nobody noticed because the dance orchestra began again to the Scotsman’s disgust with ‘Boomps-a-Daisy’, and I think I was the only one who detected a curious faint undertone of ‘The Lambeth Walk’ apparently coming from the chair where Maling sat.

  It was after ten, when the printers had piled into taxis and driven away to Euston, that Maling told me about his stomach. ‘It’s quite unaccountable,’ he said, ‘like a parrot. It seems to pick up things at random.’ He added with tears in his voice, ‘I can’t enjoy food any more. I never know what’s going to happen afterwards. This afternoon wasn’t the worst. Sometimes it’s quite loud.’ He brooded forlornly. ‘When I was a boy I liked listening to German bands . . .’

  ‘Haven’t you seen a doctor?’

  ‘They don’t understand. They say it’s just indigestion and not
hing to worry about. Nothing to worry about! But then when I’ve been seeing a doctor it’s always lain quiet.’ I noticed that he spoke of his stomach as if it were a detested animal. He gazed bleakly at his knuckles and said, ‘Now I’ve become afraid of any new noise. I never know. It doesn’t take any notice of some, but others seem . . . well, to fascinate it. At a first hearing. Last year when they took up Piccadilly it was the road drills. I used to get them all over again after dinner.’

  I said rather stupidly, ‘I suppose you’ve tried the usual salts,’ and I remember – it was my last sight of him – his expression of despair as though he had ceased to expect comprehension from any living soul.

  It was my last sight of him because the war pitched me out of the printing trade into all sorts of odd occupations, and it was only at second-hand that I heard the account of the strange board meeting which broke poor Maling’s heart.

  What the papers called the blitz-and-pieces krieg against Britain had been going on for about a week: in London we were just settling down to air-raid alarms at the rate of five or six a day, but the 3rd of September, the anniversary of the war, had so far been relatively peaceful. There was a general feeling, however, that Hitler might celebrate the anniversary with a big attack. It was therefore in an atmosphere of some tension that Simcox and Hythe had their joint meeting.

  It took place in the traditional grubby little room above the Simcox offices in Fetter Lane: the round table dating from the original Joshua Simcox, the steel engraving of a printing works dated 1875, and an irrelevant copy of a Bible which had always been the only book in the big glass bookcase except for a volume of type faces. Old Sir Joshua Simcox was in the chair: you can picture his snow-white hair and the pale pork-like Nonconformist features. Wesby Hythe was there, and half a dozen other directors with narrow canny faces and neat black coats: they all looked a little strained. If the new income-tax regulations were to be evaded, they had to work quickly. As for Maling he crouched over his pad, nervously ready to advise anybody on anything.