It's a Battlefield Read online

  Mr Surrogate rolled on to his back, opened his eyes and met his wife’s wide innocent gaze. The picture did her more than justice, for she had not been beautiful and she had not been innocent. Mr Surrogate could not have endured a realistic portrait on the wall, but he was sometimes able to persuade himself that this was the essential woman, that now she was not malicious and adroit and knowledgeable, that now she understood him as he wanted to be understood. While he dressed he told the portrait that it was not every widower who would refrain from bedding with an attractive and willing girl out of respect for a dead woman. He used the term ‘bedding’ for its Anglo-Saxon flavour, he had no use for Gallic flippancy; ‘she would certainly have bedded with me’, he told himself and had a momentary vision of flaxen-haired warriors tumbling earnestly upon rushes before departing to their curved boats. He remembered that he had made an appointment with her for the afternoon and decided that he would notice the effect upon her intelligent but uncultivated brain of the new abstract film at the Academy. ‘She is worth studying,’ he informed his wife, who dangled with propriety on the wall.

  If she could only stay there, and in the small engraved casket at Golders Green (‘with love for the wife and homage to the artist’), but she leapt at him from every wall of Caroline Bury’s drawing-room. He was alone for three minutes with her; nowhere to turn, nowhere to look; this she had painted in Greenwich Park, this at Antibes; he could remember the very occasion in Cornwall when this picture had composed itself in her mind, and she had left him immediately to make a note of it; he had complained afterwards in a letter to Mrs Bury that she did not respect his manhood. Now in the rather dim and shrouded room he turned with real agony to meet the only person left alive who knew him thoroughly, to whom in past years he had confessed all his hesitations and indeterminacies, his meannesses and studied generosities, his intellectual chaos. ‘How are you, Caroline? How long it is,’ but he winced and withdrew from the recognition of time passing, time greying the hair, making the body less agile and the brain more hopeless.

  Caroline Bury advanced into the room with an air of vagueness and distinction. She gave an impression of not knowing whom she might find in her own house, what curious personality would speak from between the bric-à-brac with which the rooms were a little overcrowded. Her haggard sunken face would have had its beauty recognized at once on an ancient fresco or an Eastern tomb, but in a theatre or a bookshop or a modern street it was likely to arouse only curiosity; Mr Surrogate had never seen her outside her home.

  She peered at him shortsightedly and grated a greeting in a voice full of discords, but again the hearer had to recognize that in another age and in another continent this sound like the scraping of metal discs, might have been thought beautiful. ‘I want to talk to you before the others come.’ In her brain Mr Surrogate knew were stored all his wife’s letters, but though he was embarrassed and embittered by the knowledge, he could not resist the compliment of her interest. After all, in this room Henry James had constructed his sentences like Chinese boxes which held at the centre a tiny colloquialism; Wilde had unloosed a torrent of epigrams; Hardy had wondered what it was all about.

  ‘Tell me about Drover.’

  Mr Surrogate had spoken of enlisting her interest; he had known, at the time, that was unnecessary. Listening to the writers round her table, Caroline Bury appeared to have a passion for literature, listening to the politicians she seemed the last of the political hostesses; those who knew her well were aware that literature and politics were only the territories in which she had chosen to exercise her passion for charity, a charity that was satirical, practical to the point of cynicism, the kind of charity which no man was too proud or vain to refuse.

  He told her all he knew, humbly, a little grudgingly, watching the wheels of a fine intellect beginning to turn. He was jealous. Beneath Drover’s story, buried only just beneath the succeeding words, ‘policeman – wife – Hyde Park – appeal’, buried so shallowly that between the phrases scraps of the old bones showed plain (‘It reminds me . . . by the way . . . you remember’), lay his own tale, the first example he knew of Caroline Bury’s passion to help.

  ‘Of course I remember. But go on. I want to hear about Drover.’

  The grey sea lapped the shingle and the rain drummed on the asphalt promenade. Mr Surrogate, a much thinner and much younger Mr Surrogate, walked up and down in the rain talking to himself, a telegram crumpled in his hand. He had been married six months and he had no money and his wife was ill in London and the doctor said that she must go south. He returned wet to the skin to Justin Bury’s house, where he was spending the week-end, and at lunch he had broken down, shivering and sneezing and weeping. It was his first complete humiliation, and when in later years he had humiliated himself again and again, Mr Surrogate himself could not have said how far he was influenced by the knowledge of how well it had paid the first time. Caroline Bury had sent them both to Hyères. Soon after that Justin died, of a cold, during the hot summer of 1921, in Spain.

  ‘Do you remember your house by the sea?’

  ‘Of course I do. But go on. How old is his wife?’ When he had finished, Caroline Bury said with a high bird-like screech of amazement and disbelief: ‘But it’s absurd. They can’t hang him. A fit of temper.’

  ‘On Thursday,’ Mr Surrogate said.

  ‘Too absurd. We must do something. I’ll ask the C.I.D. man – what’s he called? – the Assistant Commissioner to lunch.’

  ‘Do you know everyone, Caroline?’

  ‘I haven’t seen him since he came back from the East. But we were very dear friends once. Of course he’s incredibly pompous.’

  ‘He won’t be able to do anything.’

  ‘My dear Philip, don’t be so defeatist. The whole thing is absurd and therefore something can be done.’ Mr Surrogate opened his lips to protest against this assumption that life of its nature was not absurd, but cleared his throat instead. What was the good? Caroline Bury had Faith. He was not quite certain in what she had faith, whether in the God of the Jews, of Rome, of Canterbury, of Mrs Eddy or of Mrs Besant, but however vague her faith, it was unshakable; perhaps it was unshakable because of its vagueness. It was useless to disprove the divinity of Christ, for then it would be found that this was not one of the articles of her belief. She could waive the divinity of Christ, she could waive the Old Testament and the Gospels and the Acts. She could waive the Koran, she could even waive the sacred books of India; these were minor points. She had Faith.

  ‘The Assistant Commissioner’s got nothing to do with –’

  ‘He’ll know the right people to talk to. If only the Labour Government was still in, I’d have had the Home Secretary to lunch. But Beale. I don’t know anything about Beale.’

  ‘He’s a temperance maniac.’

  ‘He’s a nonentity. I’m not interested in nonentities.’

  A faint smile wavered across Mr Surrogate’s face and he smoothed his hair. Shoes creaked on the parquet outside. Caroline Bury said: ‘I expect this is Crabbe. Do you know Crabbe?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘no. His works of course.’

  ‘He’s been very tiresome since they gave him the O.M.’

  Almost immediately the room was full of people.

  At lunch Crabbe sat opposite him, an old man with a white moustache and red aggrieved eyes. He had not written a book for ten years and he was universally admired. But he was firmly convinced that people were ‘getting at’ him. Although he was known to be difficult, he was still invited everywhere, partly because of his reputation and the Order of Merit, partly because once, five years ago, he had talked brilliantly and maliciously all through lunch. Hostesses always believed that it might happen again at any moment.

  Crabbe was silent, but Sean Cassidy, the poet, was not. He talked continuously at one end of the table about astrology. The preliminary difficulty of understanding the ideas of Zoroaster was not made easier by Cassidy’s brogue. But he had his uses. He prevented the gene
ral conversation being killed by the loud, clear, faintly American accents of two critics who were discussing the ideas of a Swedish theologian.

  Mr Surrogate, aware that Crabbe was watching him with an inflamed eye, began to talk about the League of Nations with the quiet young woman beside him. ‘I believed in it once,’ he said and admitted a moment later, ‘it is perhaps a useful start towards the World State.’

  ‘Under the Hammer and Sickle?’ the young woman asked. Mr Surrogate smiled approvingly and sipped his Hock. He tried to see through Crabbe to the clock behind him. In half an hour Kay would be waiting for him. The wine made him feel young and vigorous. Thank God, he thought, I am not old like Crabbe and past my time; young women still hang on my words. ‘Yes, the Hammer and Sickle,’ but catching the next moment Caroline Bury’s eye, he plunged into humility. I am lecherous, conceited, mean, cowardly; he would have liked to confess to his neighbour all the shabby history of his marriage, to expose himself bare of intellectual and moral pretences, and what would be left? A man, Mr Surrogate thought, revolving his wine glass, no better than a criminal waiting execution, but none the less, he thought, his spirit soaring again on its perpetual seesaw, so that his fellow-guests sank swiftly below him and were flattened out among the plates, a man, the essential I.

  Crabbe cleared his throat and everybody, except Cassidy, fell abruptly silent, listening. He cleared his throat again and began to choke. ‘Gristle,’ somebody said, and his neighbour patted his back. ‘Porphyry,’ Cassidy said, ‘writing of the Sign of Cancer. . . .’ Crabbe gulped and was suddenly better, but his neighbour continued absent-mindedly to pat him on the back. Crabbe glared malignantly; it was quite obvious that he thought he was being ‘got at’. Everybody began talking again. Mr Surrogate said: ‘Under certain circumstances, I should be ready to put up with Geneva as a stop-gap.’

  ‘The moon in Virgo rules the bowels and belly.’

  ‘His treatment of the Unitarians.’

  ‘If Geneva,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘broadcast brotherhood as often as it broadcasts hate –’

  Crabbe leant forward across the table and cleared his throat. Everyone fell silent, listening. Crabbe regarded Mr Surrogate with venom. His old eyes swelled and contracted. ‘Geneva,’ he said, ‘I’ve never heard Geneva –’ He seemed at a loss for words, a little bewildered by this sudden incursion into contemporary life from his background of long Norfolk fields, low sea and tall empty churches. But everyone listened intently and humbly to hear what the creator of Dinah Cullen and Joseph Sentry and the mad Corbett had to say about Geneva. ‘I’ve heard Moscow,’ Crabbe said, ‘I’ve heard Rome, I’ve heard New York, but I can’t get Geneva. What’s your set?’ he spat out furiously at Mr Surrogate.

  ‘Really,’ Mr Surrogate said, ‘I’m sorry. You misunderstood. I wasn’t referring –’

  ‘Don’t tell me tales about a Crystal,’ Crabbe said. ‘I may be old, but I’m not daft yet. The tales people tell me about what they get with a Crystal.’

  Mr Surrogate sighed with relief, going down the steps, hearing the eighteenth-century door close behind him. That was over. He had done his best. Now he could leave everything to Caroline Bury. After business pleasure, but he was a little put out to find that Kay was not waiting for him at Oxford Circus. He bought an evening paper, but there was little in it but lists of starters and in the stop-press the results of the 2.30. All down Oxford Street the shops were closed and the street was almost empty. Little groups of people up from the country passed back and forth along the north side staring into the windows at models with black cloth faces. Mr Surrogate looked at his watch and bought another paper. ‘The Paddington Murder. Flying Squad Raid near Euston. Man Detained.’ Curious the interest in crime, Mr Surrogate thought, and turned to another column. ‘Drama at Red Meeting. Clash behind Locked Doors.’ He read the account to the end. How these pressmen exaggerated; a little fracas, worn nerves, bad temper. He turned the page: ‘Mr MacDonald Presents Golf Trophy. The Royal and Ancient Game. A Lossiemouth Welcome.’

  *

  Milly laid the newspaper open on her dressing-table while she put on her hat. Mrs Coney watched her from between the hairbrushes with frigid disapproval. Had the photograph been taken after her husband’s death? If so there was no hint of grief. Perhaps it was an old photograph, and Milly tried to imagine what kind of a wife she had been, but the cameo brooch daunted her. It was like a medal granted for some piece of inhuman rectitude. Her hair pulled back into a knot above a waste of brow, she was of the same stuff as the women who gladly ‘gave’ their sons to war and fought in parish councils for marble memorials. The face filled Milly with despair.

  Her voice was hollow with it down the telephone wire. Conrad Drover did not recognize her, laying down his pen, his eyes still following a column of figures along the sheet. ‘Who’s that? Speak up, please, I can’t hear you.’ It was his chief clerk’s voice. It had no relation to his character, it was formed defensively to rebuke office boys who stole his india-rubber, to answer the questions of the Board.

  ‘I only wanted to speak to Mr Drover.’

  ‘Speaking.’

  ‘Oh, Conrad, is it you?’ He recognized the voice then, glanced quickly through the glass door at the bent backs of the clerks, behind him at the door of the manager’s room; he was alone between the glass walls, isolated between his superiors and his subordinates. ‘Yes, Milly, what is it?’ It was hard to shed his clerk’s voice quickly, his tongue still tingled with figures, he knew that he sounded impatient.

  ‘I only wanted to tell you. When Kay came home. She said . . .’

  ‘Is the party doing anything?’

  ‘They are all signing the petition. But, Conrad, listen. Something else. Mr Surrogate’s helping. He’s speaking to a lady who has influence.’

  ‘Listen, Milly.’ He bent close over the telephone and confided to it his deep mistrust. ‘Don’t believe too much in what they’ll do. Strangers. They are interested for a time, but if things don’t go right, they lose interest. It doesn’t mean anything to them. We’ve got to do it all ourselves.’ Through the door in front of him he could hear very faintly the scratching of the clerks’ pens; somebody was reading out a row of figures; when he looked round, the shadow of the manager darkened the door behind, moving up and down, droning to a dictaphone. ‘We’re alone.’

  ‘I’m on the way to that woman now.’

  ‘I’ll see you tonight, Milly.’

  ‘I was wondering – I suppose it’s impossible – you couldn’t come with me?’

  ‘If you could wait till lunch time.’

  ‘I daren’t wait. Can’t you get away an hour earlier?’

  ‘I wish I could.’ He put his head on his hands and stared at the sheets of paper on his desk; the little black figures rose at him like swarming flies. ‘It’s impossible.’ He heard the sound of the receiver replaced and silence sweeping up the wire. He was alone again with men whom he disliked and mistrusted, above all mistrusted. Even the most inefficient clerk, he felt certain, was scheming for his place; his glass room was a tiny raft of security round which they all swam hoping to dislodge him, hoping to catch him asleep; his position was easier, but he had not their quality of eternal vigilance and concentrated cunning; other things clamoured for his attention, his brother in prison, Milly going up the suburban street in fear and despair. But he did not even trust Milly; she loved his brother, he supposed, as much as he did himself; any word of encouragement or affection she gave him was for his brother’s sake.

  But as she walked up the long suburban hill lined with little half-timbered houses with chocolate-coloured cornices: ‘Desirable Residence. Only £50 down’, she was not afraid. She was brave because suddenly she was angry. It wasn’t right how things were, that Conrad shouldn’t be allowed an hour or two to help his brother. She tugged hard at a bell and to the small grey woman who answered the door she said furiously: ‘I want Mrs Coney.’

  ‘I’m Mrs Coney.’

  Milly looked at her
with astonishment and saw now the cameo brooch, the grey hair pulled back from the forehead, the black high-necked dress, but what the newspaper had failed to indicate was the smallness of the scale; she was no more than an imitation in miniature of the harsh and unbearable woman.

  ‘I’m sorry. Could I speak to you?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sure, whether I’ve the time. Are you the Press?’ The eyes, bewildered and hunted, peered over Milly’s shoulder, flinched in dread of a battery of cameras, of tripods, of microphones. Milly thought: She’s as weak as water. She doesn’t know where to turn. She’s afraid of me. I can do what I like with her. She said gently, as if it were her part to encourage and to soothe: ‘I’m Mrs Drover.’

  ‘Yes? Yes?’ The name had conveyed absolutely nothing.

  ‘My husband’s in prison.’

  Milly could see Mrs Coney drawing up a little courage like a bucket from a deep and drying well. She began to close the door. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve no washing – or mending. I do it all myself.’

  Milly put her foot in the door. ‘You don’t understand. It was my husband who killed –’

  Mrs Coney backed against a carved wooden bear which held two umbrellas in its outstretched arms. ‘Oh.’