She stayed to the end of the party and then returned to Grosvenor Square alone. Since the war there was no lift-man on duty after midnight. She shut herself in, pressed the button for the mansard floor and rose to the empty, uncommunicative flat. There were no ashes to stir in the grate; illuminated glass coals glowed eternally in an elegant steel basket; the temperature of the rooms never varied, winter or summer, day or night. She mixed herself a large whisky and water and turned on the radio.
Tirelessly, all over the world, voices were speaking in their own and in foreign tongues. She listened and fidgeted with the knob; sometimes she got a burst of music, once a prayer. Presently she fetched another whisky and water.
Her maid lived out and had been told not to wait up. When she came in the morning she found Mrs. Lyne in bed but awake; the clothes she had worn the evening before had been carefully hung up, not broadcast about the carpet as they used sometimes to be. “I shan’t be getting up this morning, Grainger,” she said. “Bring the radio here and the newspapers.”
Later she had her bath, returned to bed, took two tablets of Dial and slept, gently, until it was time to fit the black, ply-wood screens into the window frames and hide them behind the velvet draperies.
IX
“What about Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge of the Malt House, Grantley Green?”
Basil was choosing his objectives from the extreme quarters of the Malfrey billeting area. He had struck East and North. Grantley Green lay South where the land of spur and valley fell away and flattened out into a plain of cider orchards and market gardens.
“They’re very old, I think,” said Barbara. “I hardly know them. Come to think of it, I heard something about Mr. Prettyman-Partridge the other day. I can’t remember what.”
“Pretty house? Nice things in it?”
“As far as I remember.”
“People of regular habits? Fond of quiet?”
“Yes, I suppose so.”
“They’ll do.”
Basil bent over the map tracing the road to Grantley Green which he would take the next day.
He found the Malt House without difficulty. It had been a brew house in the seventeenth century and later was converted to a private house. It had a large, regular front of dressed stone, facing the village green. The curtains and the china in the window proclaimed that it was in “good hands.” Basil noted the china with approval—large, black Wedgwood urns—valuable and vulnerable and no doubt well loved. When the door opened it disclosed a view straight through the house to a white lawn and a cedar tree laden with snow.
The door was opened by a large and lovely girl. She had fair curly hair and a fair skin, huge, pale blue eyes, a large, shy mouth. She was dressed in a tweed suit and woollen jumper as though for country exercise, but the soft, fur-lined boots showed that she was spending the morning at home. Everything about this girl was large and soft and round and ample. A dress shop might not have chosen her as a mannequin but she was not a fat girl; a more civilized age would have found her admirably proportioned; Boucher would have painted her half clothed in a flutter of blue and pink draperies, a butterfly hovering over a breast of white and rose.
“Miss Prettyman-Partridge?”
“No. Please don’t say you’ve come to sell something. It’s terribly cold standing here and if I ask you in I shall have to buy it.”
“I want to see Mr. and Mrs. Prettyman-Partridge.”
“They’re dead. At least one is; the other sold us the house last summer. Is that all, please; I don’t want to be rude but I must shut the door or freeze.”
So that was what Barbara had heard about the Malt House. “May I come in?”
“Oh dear,” said this splendid girl, leading him into the room with the Wedgwood urns. “Is it something to buy or forms to fill in or just a subscription? If it’s the first two I can’t help because my husband’s away with the yeomanry; if it’s a subscription I’ve got some money upstairs. I’ve been told to give the same as Mrs. Andrews, the doctor’s wife. If you haven’t been to her yet, come back when you find what she’s good for.”
Everything in the room was new; that is to say the paint was new and the carpets and the curtains, and the furniture had been newly put in position. There was a very large settee in front of the fireplace whose cushions, upholstered in toile-de jouy still bore the impress of that fine young woman; she had been lying there when Basil rang the bell. He knew that if he put his hand in the round concavity where her hip had rested, it would still be warm; and that further cushions had been tucked under her arm. The book she had been reading was on the lambskin hearth-rug. Basil could reconstruct the position, exactly, where she had been sprawling with the languor of extreme youth.
The girl seemed to sense an impertinence in Basil’s scrutiny. “Anyway,” she said. “Why aren’t you in khaki?”
“Work of national importance,” said Basil. “I am the district billeting officer. I’m looking for a suitable home for three evacuated children.”
“Well, I hope you don’t call this suitable. I ask you. I can’t even look after Bill’s sheepdog. I can’t even look after myself very well. What should I do with three children?”
“These are rather exceptional children.”
“They’d have to be. Anyway I’m not having any, thank you. There was a funny little woman called Harkness came to call here yesterday. I do think people might let up on calling in wartime, don’t you? She told me the most gruesome things about some children that were sent to her. They had to bribe the man, literally bribe him with money, to get the brutes moved.”
“These are the same children.”
“Well, for God’s sake, why pick on me?”
Her great eyes held him dazzled, like a rabbit before the headlights of a car. It was a delicious sensation. “Well, actually, I picked on the Prettyman-Partridges… I don’t even know your name.”
“I don’t know yours.”
“Basil Seal.”
“Basil Seal?” There was a sudden interest in her voice. “How very funny.”
“Why funny?”
“Only that I used to hear a lot about you once. Weren’t you a friend of a girl called Mary Nichols?”
“Was I?” Was he? Mary Nichols? Mary Nichols?
“Well, she used to talk a lot about you. She was much older than me. I used to think her wonderful when I was sixteen. You met her in a ship coming from Copenhagen.”
“I daresay. I’ve been to Copenhagen.”
The girl was looking at him now with a keen and not wholly flattering attention. “So you’re Basil Seal,” she said. “Well, I never…”
Four years ago in South Kensington, at Mary Nichols’ home, there was a little back sitting-room on the first floor which was Mary’s room. Here Mary entertained her girl friends to tea. Here she had come, day after day, to sit before the gas fire and eat Fuller’s walnut cake and hear the details of Mary’s Experience. “But aren’t you going to see him again?” she asked. “No, it was something so beautiful, so complete in itself”—Mary had steeped herself in romantic literature since her Experience. “I don’t want to spoil it.” “I don’t think he sounds half good enough for you, darling.” “He’s absolutely different. You musn’t think of him as one of the young men one meets at dances…” The girl did not go to dances yet, and Mary knew it. Mary’s tales of the young men she met at dances had been very moving, but not as moving as this tale of Basil Seal. The name had become graven on her mind.
And Basil, still standing, searched his memory. Mary Nichols? Copenhagen? No, it registered nothing. It was very consoling, he thought, the way in which an act of kindness, in the fullness of time, returns to bless the benefactor. One gives a jolly-up to a girl in a ship. She goes her way, he goes his. He forgets; he has so many benefactions of the kind to his credit. But she remembers and then one day, when it is least expected, Fate drops into his lap the ripe fruit of his reward, this luscious creature waiting for him, all unaware, in the Malt House, G
rantley Green.
“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink—on the strength of Mary Nichols.”
“I don’t think there’s anything in the house. Bill’s away you see. He’s got some wine downstairs in the cellar, but the door’s locked.”
“I expect we could open it.”
“Oh! I wouldn’t do that. Bill would be furious.”
“Well, I don’t suppose he’ll be best pleased to come home on leave and find the Connolly family hacking up his home. By the way, you haven’t seen them yet; they’re outside in the car; I’ll bring them in.”
“Please don’t!” There was genuine distress and appeal in those blue cow-eyes.
“Well, take a look at them through the window.”
She went and looked. “Good God,” said the girl. “Mrs. Harkness wasn’t far wrong. I thought she was laying it on thick.”
“It cost her thirty pounds to get rid of them.”
“Oh, but I haven’t got anything like that”—again the distress and appeal in her wide blue eyes. “Bill makes me an allowance out of his pay. It comes in monthly. It’s practically all I’ve got.”
“I’ll take payment in kind,” said Basil.
“You mean the sherry?”
“I’d like a glass of sherry very much,” said Basil.
When they got to work with the crowbar on the cellar door, it was clear that this high-spirited girl thoroughly enjoyed herself. It was a pathetic little cellar; a poor man’s treasury. Half a dozen bottles of hock, a bin of port, a dozen or two of claret. “Mostly wedding presents,” explained the girl. Basil found some sherry and they took it up to the light.
“I’ve no maid now,” she explained. “A woman comes in once a week.”
They found glasses in the pantry and a corkscrew in the dining-room.
“Is it any good?” she said anxiously, while Basil tasted the wine.
“Delicious.”
“I’m so glad. Bill knows about wine. I don’t.”
So they began to talk about Bill, who was married in July to this lovely creature, who had a good job in an architect’s office in the nearby town, had settled at Grantley Green in August, and in September had gone to join the yeomanry as a trooper…
Two hours later Basil left the Malt House and returned to his car. It was evidence of the compelling property of love that the Connolly children were still in their seats.
“Gawd, Mister, you haven’t half been a time,” said Doris. “We’re fair froze. Do we get out here?”
“No.”
“We aren’t going to muck up this house?”
“No, Doris, not this time. You’re coming back with me.”
Doris sighed blissfully. “I don’t care how froze we are if we can come back with you,” she said.
When they returned to Malfrey, and Barbara once more found the children back in the bachelors’ wing, her face fell. “Oh, Basil,” she said. “You’ve failed me.”
“Well not exactly. The Prettyman-Partridges are dead.”
“I knew there was something about them. But you’ve been a long time.”
“I met a friend. At least the friend of a friend. A very nice girl. I think you ought to do something about her.”
“What’s her name?”
“D’you know, I never discovered. But her husband’s called Bill. He joined Freddy’s regiment as a trooper.”
“Who’s she a friend of?”
“Mary Nichols.”
“I’ve never heard of her.”
“Old friend of mine. Honestly, Babs, you’ll like this girl.”
“Well, ask her to dinner.” Barbara was not enthusiastic; she had known too many of Basil’s girls.
“I have. The trouble is she hasn’t got a car. D’you mind if I go and fetch her?”
“Darling, we simply haven’t the petrol.”
“We can use the special allowance.”
“Darling, I can’t. This has nothing to do with billeting.”
“Believe it or not Babs, it has.”
X
The frost broke; the snow melted away; Colony Bog, Bagshot Heath, Chobham Common and all the little polygons of gorse and bush which lay between the high roads of Surrey, patches of rank land marked on the signposts W.D., marked on the maps as numbered training areas, reappeared from their brief period of comeliness.
“We can get on with the tactical training,” said the C.O.
For three weeks there were platoon schemes and company schemes. Captain Mayfield consumed his leisure devising ways of transforming into battlefields the few acres of close, soggy territory at his disposal. For the troops these schemes only varied according to the distance of the training area from camp, and the distance that had to be traversed before the cease-fire. Then for three days in succession the C.O. was seen to go out with the adjutant in the Humber snipe, each carrying a map case. “We’re putting on a battalion exercise,” said Captain Mayfield. It was all one to his troops. “It’s our first battalion exercise. It’s absolutely essential that every man in the company shall be in the picture all the time.”
Alastair was gradually learning the new languages. There was the simple tongue, the unchanging reiteration of obscenity, spoken by his fellow soldiers. That took little learning. There was also the language spoken by his officers, which from time to time was addressed to him. The first time that Captain Mayfield had asked him, “Are you in the picture, Trumpington?” he supposed him to mean, was he personally conspicuous. He crouched at the time, waterlogged to the knees, in a ditch; he had, at the suggestion of Mr. Smallwood—the platoon commander—ornamented his steel helmet with bracken. “No, sir,” he had said, stoutly.
Captain Mayfield had seemed rather gratified than not by the confession. “Put these men in the picture, Smallwood,” he said, and there had followed a tedious and barely credible narrative about the unprovoked aggression of Southland against Northland (who was not party to the Geneva gas protocol), about how to support batteries, A.F.V.s and F.D.L.s.
Alastair learned, too, that all schemes ended in a “shambles” which did not mean, as he had feared, a slaughter, but a brief restoration of individual freedom of movement, when everyone wandered where he would, while Mr. Smallwood blew his whistle and Captain Mayfield shouted, “Mr. Smallwood, will you kindly get your platoon to hell out of here and fall them in on the road.”
On the day of the battalion scheme they marched out of camp as a battalion. Alastair had been made mortar-man in Mr. Smallwood’s platoon. It was a gamble, the chances of which were hotly debated. At the moment there were no mortars and he was given instead a light and easily manageable counterfeit of wood which was slung on the back of his haversack, relieving him of a rifle. At present it was money for old rope, but a day would come, spoken of as “when we get our 1098”; in that dire event he would be worse off than the riflemen. Two other men in the platoon had rashly put in to be anti-tank men; contrary to all expectations anti-tank rifles had suddenly arrived. One of these men had prudently gone sick on the eve of the exercise; the other went sick after it.
Water-bottles were filled, haversack rations were packed in mess-tins, and, on account of Northland’s frank obduracy at Geneva, gas respirators frustrated the aim of the designers of the equipment to leave the man’s chest unencumbered. Thus they marched out and after ten minutes, at the command to march at ease, they began singing “Roll out the Barrel,” “We’ll hang out the Washing on the Siegfried Line” and “The Quartermaster’s Store.” Presently the order came back to march tactically. They knew all about that; it meant stumbling along in the ditch; singing stopped; the man with the anti-tank rifle swore monotonously. Then the order came back “Gas”; they put on their respirators and the man with the anti-tank rifle suffered in silence.
“Gas clear. Don’t put the respirators back in the haversacks. Leave them out a minute to dry.”
They marched eight miles or so and then turned off the main road into a lane and eventually halted. It was now eleven o?
??clock.
“This is the battalion assembly position,” announced Captain Mayfield. “The C.O. has just gone forward with his recce group to make his recce.”
It was as though he were announcing to a crowd of pilgrims, “This is the Vatican. The Pope has just gone into the Sistine Chapel.”
“It makes things much more interesting,” said Mr. Smallwood rather apologetically, “if you try and understand what is going on. Yes, carry on smoking.”
The company settled itself on the side of the road and began eating its haversack rations.
“I say, you know,” said Mr. Smallwood. “There’ll be a halt for dinner.”
They ate, mostly in silence.
“Soon the C.O. will send for his O group,” announced Captain Mayfield.
Presently a runner appeared, not running but walking rather slowly, and led Captain Mayfield away.
“The C.O. has sent for his O group,” said Mr. Smallwood. “Captain Brown is now in command.”
Captain Brown announced, “The C.O. has given out his orders. He is now establishing advanced Battalion H.Q. The company commanders are now making their recces. Soon they will send for their O groups.”
“Can’t think what they want us here for at all,” said the man with the anti-tank rifle.
Three-quarters of an hour passed and then an orderly arrived with a written message for Captain Brown. He said to the three platoon commanders, “You’re to meet the company commander at the third E in ‘Bee Garden.’ I’m bringing the Company on to the B in Bee.”
Mr. Smallwood and his orderly and his batman left platoon headquarters and drifted off uncertainly into the scrub.
“Get the company fallen in, sergeant-major.”
Captain Brown was not quite happy about his position; they tacked along behind him across the common; several times they halted while Captain Brown worried over the map. At last he said, “This is the company assembly position. The company commander is now giving out orders to his O group.”