“Can’t we muck his house up, just a bit?” said Micky wistfully.
“Yes, I don’t see why not, just a bit.”
“Mister,” said Doris, near tears. “Kiss me once before you go.”
“No. Mr. Todhunter wouldn’t like it. He’s terribly jealous.”
“Is he?” she said, lightening. “I love jealous men.”
When Basil left her, her fervent, volatile affections were already plainly engaged with her new host. Marlene remained passive throughout the interview; she had few gifts, poor child, and those she was allowed to employ only on rare occasions. “Mayn’t I be sick here, Doris? Just once?”
“Not here, ducky. Wait till the gentleman billets you.”
“Will that be long?”
“No,” said Mr. Todhunter decisively, “not long.”
So the scourge of the Malfrey area moved South into the apple-growing country and the market gardens; and all over the park at Malfrey, dispersed irregularly under the great elms, tents sprang up; and the yeomanry officers set up their mess in the Grinling Gibbons saloon; and Barbara had Colonel Sproggin and Major Cathcart to live in the house; and Freddy made an agreeable sum of money out of the arrangement; and Bill spent many blissful uxorious hours in the Malt House, Grantley Green (he was quite satisfied with the explanation he was given about the cellar door). And Basil returned to London.
II
He decided to pay one of his rare, and usually rather brief visits to his mother. He found her busy and optimistic, serving on half a dozen benevolent committees connected with comforts for the troops, seeing her friends regularly. The defeat of Finland had shocked her, but she found it a compensation that Russia was at last disclosed in the true light. She welcomed Basil to the house, heard his news of Barbara and gave him news of Tony. “I want to have a little talk with you sometime,” she said, after half an hour’s gossip.
Basil, had he not been inured to his mother euphemisms, might have supposed that a little talk was precisely what she had just had; but he knew what a little talk meant; it meant a discussion of his “future.”
“Have you arranged anything for tonight?”
“No, Mother, not yet.”
“Then we will dine in. Just the two of us.”
And that night after dinner she said, “Basil, I never thought I should have to say this to you. I’ve been pleased, of course, that you were able to be of help to Barbara with her evacuees, but now that you have returned to London, I must tell you that I do not think it is man’s work. At a time like this you ought to be fighting.”
“But, Mother, as far as I know, no one’s fighting much at the moment.”
“Don’t quibble, dear, you know what I mean.”
“Well, I went to see that colonel when you asked me to.”
“Yes. Sir Joseph explained that to me. They only want very young officers in the Guards. But he says that there are a number of other excellent regiments that offer a far better career. General Gordon was a Sapper, and I believe quite a number of the generals in this war were originally only gunners. I don’t want you just lounging about London in uniform like your friend Peter Pastmaster. He seems to spend his whole time with girls. That goose Emma Granchester is seriously thinking of him for Molly. So is Etty Flintshire and so is poor Mrs. Van Atrobus for their daughters. I don’t know what they’re thinking of. I knew his poor father. Margot led him a terrible dance. That was long before she married Metroland of course—before he was called Metroland, in fact. No,” said Lady Seal, abruptly checking herself in the flow of reminiscence. “I want to see you doing something important. Now Sir Joseph has got me one of the forms you fill in to become an officer. It is called the Supplementary Reserve. Before you go to bed I want you to sign it. Then we’ll see about getting it sent to the proper quarter. I’m sure that everything will be much easier now that that disgraceful Mr. Belisha has been outed.”
“But you know, mother, I don’t really fancy myself much as a subaltern.”
“No, dear,” said Lady Seal decisively, “and if you had gone into the army when you left Oxford you would be a major by now. Promotion is very quick in war time because so many people get killed. I’m sure once you’re in, they’ll find great use for you. But you must begin somewhere. I remember Lord Kitchener told me that even he was once a subaltern.”
Thus it was that Basil found himself again in danger of being started on a career. “Don’t worry,” said Peter. “No one ever gets taken off the Supplementary Reserve,” but Basil did worry. He had a rooted distrust of official forms. He felt that at any moment a telegram might summon him to present himself at some remote barracks, where he would spend the war, like Alastair’s Mr. Smallwood, teaching fieldcraft to thirty militiamen. It was not thus that he had welcomed the war as the ne’er-do-well’s opportunity. He fretted about it for three days and then decided to pay a visit to the War Office.
He went there without any particular object in view, impelled by the belief that somewhere in that large organization was a goose who would lay eggs for him. In the first days of the war when he was seeking to interest the authorities in the annexation of Liberia, he had more than once sought an entrance. Perhaps, he felt now, he had pitched a little too high. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff was a busy man. This time he would advance humbly.
The maelstrom, which in early September had eddied round the vestibule of the building, seemed to have subsided very little. There was a similar—perhaps, he reflected sadly, an identical—crowd of officers of all ranks attempting to gain admission. Among them he saw a single civilian figure whom he recognized from his visit to the Ministry of Information.
“Hullo,” he said. “Still hawking bombs?”
The little lunatic with the suitcase greeted him with great friendliness. “They won’t pay any attention. It’s a most unsatisfactory office,” he said. “They won’t let me in. I was sent on here from the Admiralty.”
“Have you tried the Air Ministry?”
“Why, bless you, it was them sent me to the Ministry of Information. I’ve tried them all. I will say for the Ministry of Information they were uncommon civil. Not at all like they are here. At the M. of I. they were never too busy to see one. The only thing was, I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere.”
“Come along,” said Basil. “We’ll get in.”
Veterans of the Ashanti and the Zulu campaigns guarded the entrance. Basil watched them stop a full general. “If you’ll fill in a form, sir, please, one of the boys will take you up to the department.” They were a match for anyone in uniform but Basil and the bagman were a more uncertain quantity; a full general was just a full general, but a civilian might be anyone.
“Your passes, gentlemen, please.”
“That’s all right, sergeant,” said Basil. “I’ll vouch for this man.”
“Yes, sir, but who are you, sir?”
“You ought to know by this time. M.I.13. We don’t carry passes or give our names in my department.”
“Very good, sir; beg pardon, sir. D’you know the way or shall I send a boy up with you?”
“Of course I know my way,” said Basil sharply, “and you might take a look at this man. He won’t give his name or show a pass, but I expect you’ll see him here often.”
“Very good, sir.”
The two civilians passed through the seething military into the calm of the corridors beyond.
“I’m sure I’m very obliged,” said the man with the suitcase; “where shall I go now?”
“The whole place lies open to you,” said Basil. “Take your time. Go where you like. I think if I were you I should start with the Chaplain General.”
“Where’s he?”
“Up there,” said Basil vaguely. “Up there and straight on.
The little man thanked him gravely, trotted off down the corridor with the irregular, ill co-ordinated steps of the insane, and was lost to view up the bend in the staircase. Not wishing to compromise himself further by his act of cha
rity, Basil took the opposing turning. A fine vista lay before him of twenty or more closed doors any one of which might open upon prosperity and adventure. He strolled down the passage in a leisurely but purposeful manner; thus, he thought, an important agent might go to keep an appointment; thus, in fact, Soapy Sponge might have walked in the gallery of Jawleyford Court.
It was a vista full of potentiality but lacking, at the moment, in ornament—a vista of linoleum and somber dado; the light came solely from the far end, so that a figure approaching appeared in silhouette, and in somewhat indistinct silhouette; a figure now approached and it was not until she was within a few yards of Basil that he realized that here was the enrichment which the austere architectural scheme demanded: a girl dressed in uniform with a lance-corporal’s stripe on her arm—with a face of transparent, ethereal silliness which struck deep into Basil’s heart. The classical image might have been sober fact, so swift and silent and piercing was the dart of pleasure. He turned in his tracks and followed the lance-corporal down the lane of linoleum which seemed, momentarily, as buoyant as the carpet of a cinema or theatre.
The lance-corporal led him a long way; she stopped from time to time to exchange greetings with passers-by, showing to all ranks from full general to second-class scout the same cheerful affection; she was clearly a popular girl in these parts. At length she turned into a door marked ADDIS; Basil followed her in. There was another lance-corporal—male—in the room.
This lance-corporal sat behind a typewriter; he had a white, pimply face, large spectacles and a cigarette in the corner of his mouth. He did not look up. The female lance-corporal smiled and said, “So now you know where I live. Drop in any time you’re passing.”
“What is ADDIS?” asked Basil.
“It’s Colonel Plum.”
“What’s Colonel Plum?”
“He’s a perfect lamb. Go and take a peer at him if you like. He’s in there.” She nodded towards a glass door marked KEEP OUT.
“Assistant Deputy Director Internal Security,” said the male lance-corporal without looking up from his typing.
“I think I’d like to come and work in this office,” said Basil.
“Yes, everyone says that. It was the same when I was in pensions.”
“I might take his job.”
“You’re welcome,” said the male lance-corporal sourly. “Suspects, suspects, suspects all day long, all with foreign names, none of them ever shot.”
A loud voice from behind the glass door broke into the conversation. “Susie, you slut, come here.”
“That’s him, the angel. Just take a peer while the door’s open. He’s got the sweetest little moustache.”
Basil peered round the corner and caught a glimpse of a lean, military face and, as Susie had said, the sweetest little moustache. The colonel caught a glimpse of Basil.
“Who the devil’s that?”
“I don’t know,” said Susie lightly. “He just followed me in.”
“Come here you,” said the Colonel. “Who are you and what d’you want in my office?”
“Well,” said Basil, “what the lance-corporal says is strictly true. I just followed her in. But since I’m here I can give you some valuable information.”
“If you can you’re unique in this outfit. What is it?”
Until now the word “Colonel” for Basil had connoted an elderly rock-gardener on Barbara’s G.P.O. list. This formidable man of his own age was another kettle of fish. Here was a second Todhunter. What could he possibly tell him which would pass for valuable information?
“Can I speak freely before the lance-corporal?” he asked, playing for time.
“Yes, of course. She doesn’t understand a word of any language.”
Inspiration came. “There’s a lunatic loose in the War Office,” Basil said.
“Of course there is. There are some hundreds of them. Is that all you came to tell me?”
“He’s got a suitcase full of bombs.”
“Well I hope he finds his way to the Intelligence Branch. I don’t suppose you know his name? No, well make out a card for him, Susie, with a serial number and index him under suspects. If his bombs go off we shall know where he is; if they don’t it doesn’t matter. These fellows usually do more harm to themselves than to anyone else. Run along, Susie, and shut the door. I want to talk to Mr. Seal.”
Basil was shaken. When the door shut he said, “Have we met before?”
“You bet we have. Djibouti 1936, St Jean de Luz 1937, Prague 1938. You wouldn’t remember me. I wasn’t dressed up like this then.”
“Were you a journalist?”
Vaguely at the back of Basil’s mind was the recollection of an unobtrusive, discreet face among a hundred unobtrusive, discreet faces, that had passed in and out of his ken from time to time. During the past ten years he had usually managed to find himself, on one pretext or another, on the outer fringe of contemporary history; in that half-world there were numerous slightly sinister figures whose orbits crossed and recrossed, ubiquitous men and women camp-followers of diplomacy and the Press; among those shades he dimly remembered seeing Colonel Plum.
“Sometimes. We got drunk together once at the Bar Basque, the night you fought the United Press correspondent.”
“As far as I remember he won.”
“You bet he did. I took you back to your hotel. What are you doing now besides making passes at Susie?”
“I thought of doing counter-espionage.”
“Yes,” said Colonel Plum. “Most people who come here seem to have thought of that. Hullo—” he added as a dull detonation shook the room slightly, “that sounds as if your man has had a success with his bombs. That was a straight tip, anyway. I daresay you’d be no worse in the job than anyone else.”
Here it was at last, the scene that Basil had so often rehearsed, the scene, very slightly adapted by a later hand, in order to bring it up to date, from the adventure stories of his youth. Here was the lean, masterful man who had followed Basil’s career saying, “One day his country will have a use for him…”
“What are your contacts?”
What were his contacts? Alastair Digby-Vane-Trumpington, Angela Lyne, Margot Metroland, Peter Pastmaster, Barbara, the bride of Grantley Green, Mr. Todhunter, Poppet Green—Poppet Green; there was his chicken.
“I know some very dangerous communists,” said Basil.
“I wonder if they’re on our files. We’ll look in a minute. We aren’t doing much about communists at the moment. The politicians are shy of them for some reason. But we keep an eye on them, on the side, of course. I can’t pay you much for communists.”
“As it happens,” said Basil with dignity, “I came here to serve my country. I don’t particularly want money.”
“The devil you don’t? What do you want, then? You can’t have Susie. I had the hell of a fight to get her away from the old brute in charge of pensions.”
“We can fight that out later. What I really want most at the moment is a uniform.”
“Good God! Why?”
“My mother is threatening to make me a platoon commander.”
Colonel Plum accepted this somewhat surprising statement with apparent understanding. “Yes,” he said. “There’s a lot to be said for a uniform. For one thing you’ll have to call me ‘sir’ and if there’s any funny stuff with the female staff I can take disciplinary action. For another thing it’s the best possible disguise for a man of intelligence. No one ever suspects a soldier of taking a serious interest in the war. I think I can fix that.”
“What’ll my rank be?”
“Second-Lieutenant, Cross and Blackwell’s regiment.”
“Cross and Blackwell?”
“General Service List.”
“I say, can’t you do anything better than that?”
“Not for watching communists. Catch a fascist for me and I’ll think about making you a Captain of Marines.” At this moment the telephone bell rang. “Yes, ADDIS speaking… oh, yes, th
e bomb… yes, we know all about that… the Chaplain General? I say that’s bad… oh, only the Deputy Assistant Chaplain General and you think he’ll recover. Well, what’s all the fuss about?… Yes, we know all about the man in this branch. We’ve had him indexed a long time. He’s nuts—yes, N for nuts, U for uncle, nuts, you’ve got it. No, I don’t want to see him. Lock him up. There must be plenty of padded cells in this building, I should imagine.”
News of the attempt to assassinate the Chaplain General reached the Religious Department of the Ministry of Information late in the afternoon, just when they were preparing to pack up for the day. It threw them into a fever of activity.
“Really,” said Ambrose pettishly. “You fellows get all the fun. I shall be most embarrassed when I have to explain this to the editor of The Godless Sunday at Home.”
Lady Seal was greatly shocked.
“Poor man,” she said, “I understand that his eyebrows have completely gone. It must have been Russians.”
III
For the third time since his return to London, Basil tried to put a call through to Angela Lyne. He listened to the repeated buzz, five, six, seven times, then hung up the receiver. Still away, he thought. I should have liked to show her my uniform.
Angela counted the rings, five, six, seven; then there was silence in the flat; silence except for the radio which said, “… dastardly attempt which has shocked the conscience of the civilized world. Messages of sympathy continue to pour into the Chaplain General’s office from the religious leaders of four continents…”
She switched over to Germany where a rasping, contemptuous voice spoke of “Churchill’s attempt to make a second Athenia by bombing the military bishop.”
She switched on to France where a man of letters gave his impressions of a visit to the Maginot Line. Angela filled her glass from the bottle at her elbow. Her distrust of France was becoming an obsession with her now. It kept her awake at night and haunted her dreams by day; long, tedious dreams born of barbituric, dreams which had no element of fantasy or surprise, utterly real, drab dreams which, like waking life, held no promise of delight. She often spoke aloud to herself nowadays, living, as she did, so much alone; it was thus that lonely old women spoke, passing in the street with bags of rubbish in their hands, squatting, telling their rubbish. Angela was like an old woman squatting in a doorway picking over her day’s gleaning of rubbish, talking to herself while she sorted the scraps of garbage. She had seen and heard old women like that, often, at the end of the day, in the side streets near the theatres.