Time and Time Again Page 17

  'There aren't as many.'

  'Darling, that's far more crushing than anything SHE said.'

  The odd thing was that after this incident they both got along much better with Lady Thornton--indeed, it could almost be said that she showed signs of liking them. She was a remarkable woman and doubtless much could be learned from her example. The atmosphere at her parties was far too disciplined, but they were socially efficient and set a standard. She worked hard. She devoted herself to local charities. She bullied the American Minister (a poker-playing millionaire politician) into serving on committees for the care of refugee children and the restoration of ancient cathedrals. Duty was her watchword and attention to duty her prime requirement in others. In her opinion all diplomats under forty were ill-trained and bad-mannered, frivolous and deplorably slack. She considered Charles to be most of these things to an extent made worse by his pleasant disposition, and she conveyed her misgivings to Jane with the implied suggestion that Jane and she were sisters under the skin, steel-ribbed in contrast to the invertebrates all around them. Jane was amused. 'She really thinks that,' she told Charles. 'And I'm afraid to disillusion her.'

  'I don't think you're afraid of anything and I don't think she could be disillusioned about anything,' Charles answered, baiting Jane affectionately. 'And maybe you ARE a bit like her. She's not a bad sort.'

  'Poor Papa.'

  'How do we know?'

  'She puts him in his place all the time.'

  'Perhaps that's just exactly where he likes to be.'

  One thing was certain: the rigidities of Embassy functions under Lady Thornton pointed up the fact that Jane's parties, which she gave often and unostentatiously and with a clever mingling of seniors and juniors, became noted among the diplomatic crowd for their sparkle and general enjoyability. Nor did they lack moments at which things were said and discussed of some importance. Afterwards Jane and Charles would hold their own intimate post- mortems.

  'I thought the new Bulgarian was sweet.'

  'Battleaxe won't approve of him. Especially that long cigarette- holder.'

  'It suits him, though. Did you talk to Madame Lesinsky?'

  'Not much. Did you?'

  'She said Delafours told her the outlook for the new German loan isn't promising. . . . By the way, I must teach Héloďse to make ice cream properly or else get it sent in next time. Cintara poured his wine into his. Did you notice?'

  'Maybe an old Portuguese custom . . . I wonder where Rampagni's wife got those earrings?'

  'Either an heirloom or very bad taste. . . . What did you think of Beatrice Kindersley?'

  'Perfectly delightful.'

  'She told von Ahndorf the reason her father plays poker so well is because he learned it at his mother's knee and other joints.'

  'I've heard that gag before, but it sounds good about Kindersley. I rather like the old boy. Must be a headache to his staff, but he's refreshingly out of place among all the career men. Wherever he goes there'll be some corner of a foreign field that's forever Texas.'

  'That's not a bad gag either.'

  'Grandison's was the best. He said Kindersley always made him think that perhaps a tired salesman in a china shop must sometimes just LONG for a bull.'

  * * * * *

  Those were the gay years, the gayest perhaps for centuries, perhaps also for centuries to come. The First World War had become something one did not bring up unless one had to; personal recollections of it were nearly always a bore or the mark of one. How ironical to recall, if one could, the recruiting poster that had pictured a father being asked by his son: 'What did you do in the Great War?' Charles hadn't a son, but if he had, he couldn't imagine the question, much less the answer. The only time the matter had point was if one became friendly with individual Germans . . . 'Were you on the Somme?' 'Why, yes, so was I'--and then leave it at that, with some sort of freemasonry established. But Charles's experience did not yield any such item. Once, however, he met a German who said he came from Ingolstadt, and Charles was able to reply: 'Indeed? My brother died there--in a prison camp just after the war ended. The flu epidemic.' Just the casual common denominator of a past that one hoped was on the way to oblivion.

  But it was this curious interval, during which the first war was not quite forgotten and the next one not yet feared, that made for a sudden short-lived fashion of remembrance. Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues swept the world; so did Sherriff's Journey's End. Charles and Jane made up a party to see this play when it came to their city, performed in the language of the country; and afterwards, at a restaurant, memories were unleashed by guests of half a dozen nationalities. For once, it seemed, and perhaps never again, Europeans could unite in a single emotion if not in a common cause; the only faint division line, indeed, was between the ex- warriors and the neutrals who had missed the ordeal. 'Would you fight again?' was asked, and the answers of the diplomats were both undiplomatic and unnecessary, for surely they would never have to face the problem. Even an enemy would whisk them safely home across frontiers with full honours.

  Charles said to Jane on the way back to their house: 'I wonder what all our Foreign Offices would say if they got a verbatim report of that conversation. Give us all the boot, maybe.'

  'And then there wouldn't be any younger generation to take over from people like Papa.'

  But Sir Richard also saw the play and discussed it later in an equally undiplomatic way, though privately in his office. 'Were you in the war, Anderson?'

  'No, sir, I was just too young.'

  'I'd say you were damned lucky then. My son was killed. Makes you wonder--almost--how human beings could be forced to endure such things . . . I mean if they'd all packed up suddenly and run home-- both sides--who could have stopped them?' This was surely a naďve thought for an Ambassador to utter, and perhaps he realized it, for he continued hastily: 'Funny the effect a play can have. You ever met this fellow Sherriff?'

  'No, sir.'

  'If I ever do I'll tell him how much I was impressed.'

  'I'm sure he'd be very glad if you wrote to him and said so.'

  'All right. Draft me a letter. . . . I was in London during one of the Zeppelin raids. Happened to be at Liverpool Street Station-- you know Liverpool Street Station?'

  'Yes.'

  'It's got a very high glass roof. . . . I was in a train just about to leave when a bomb fell. Killed about twenty people in another train coming in across the platform. Hope I never see anything like that again--people on their way to business from the suburbs--lots of girls . . . I pulled some of them out of the mess-- the glass did the worst . . . I'll never forget those office girls--cut to ribbons, some of them . . . Well, well, must work. Fetch me Herstlett, I want to look up something. . . . Oh, and--er-- don't bother about a letter to that writer fellow--might lead to a lot of useless correspondence. . . .'

  * * * * *

  Charles was transferred again. Already he was beyond the stage at which his work was mostly simple and routine; it began to present problems, and these he thought he tackled rather more than adequately. There were times when he was bored and fancied he would have been happier in some other job, but with later detachment he usually decided that he wouldn't--he didn't really envy the lawyers, politicians, and business men whom he frequently had to meet. The ones he did occasionally envy were shy engineers on their way to some project, or a few stray writers globetrotting for local colour and showing off their freedom at all the parties they could pick up en route. There were times also when Charles thought of the millions living around him whom he would never encounter unless they figured personally as servants or tradespeople or impersonally as statistics in books of reference-- people who might, by some movement of force beyond the reach of protocol, become suddenly 'allies' or 'enemies'. Like all the great professions, diplomacy seemed to him a marvellous conspiracy that never did, in the long run, quite succeed in either achieving or defeating the ends of something bigger than itself.

  He was at a South Ame
rican post in 1929 when Wall Street crashed and he received a lugubrious letter from Havelock bemoaning the way the London market had dropped in sympathy. Since Charles had American friends whose plight was almost desperate, he did not waste much concern on his father's financial position, but he was sorry to learn from Cobb that Aunt Hetty was ill. His father had not mentioned it. A few months later Aunt Hetty died, and Havelock did mention the matter then, listing it as another of the crosses he had to bear. But the next letter was reassuring--it enclosed a cutting from The Times, to which Havelock seemed to have contributed the blithest letter of his career. It narrated how, in the churchyard of Pumphrey Basset, Berks., he had discovered the resting-place of a forgotten female dwarf, judging from the inscription on the eighteenth-century tombstone, which read 'Aged 42 Years, Height 35 inches, "Parva sed apta Domino".' Havelock made a good story of it, and Charles pictured him kneeling and feeling on the grassy grave, for (as he remembered from having taken part as a boy in several of these expeditions) the stone was apt to be so flaky and moss-covered that it chipped away if one tried to clean it, and in such cases the sensitive fingertip was often a safer reader than the eye.

  Charles was still in South America five years later when the sudden death of Jane's father summoned her to England. Charles would have asked for leave to accompany her, but he was First Secretary now and it was possible that his chief might also be taking a leave in the near future, so he said he had better stay. Jane agreed with him. What they both meant was that he mustn't miss the chance of being Chargé for a time. It was only a small Legation, but to have full authority and responsibility at his age, even temporarily, could be a stroke of luck in his career. So little ever happened to stir the placid relations between His Majesty's Government and that particular country that Jane and Charles tried to cheer themselves, the night before she sailed, by imagining some incident that would give him scope to show his capabilities.

  'If Argentina were to grab the Falkland Islands,' was Charles's choice.

  'An earthquake,' Jane countered. 'You plunge into the wreckage and save some red boxes.'

  They agreed that both these suggestions would involve unnecessary disaster. It was the Commercial Attaché who joined them then and, being admitted to the game, scored easily by his vision of an airman making a forced landing near the top of the Andes. 'First of all, no one can climb to rescue him but Charles. And then it turns out the fellow hasn't any passport or visa--a man without a country. But he carries a secret formula that will revolutionize the art of warfare--'

  'In that case,' interrupted Charles, 'I'd leave him there.'

  'Which would spoil my point--so I'll change the formula. It's for something beneficial to humanity--a cure for bubonic plague or pellagra or foot-and-mouth disease. Anyhow, because of this you promptly confer on him honorary British citizenship.'

  'Having just then decided to invent such a thing,' Charles interjected.

  'That's where I get to my point--you take a chance. The Nelson touch--so rare among Chargés d'Affaires.'

  This Attaché, Claud Severing, was a young man whom they had come to like and had taken with them on several climbing expeditions. Jane was glad she was leaving Charles with a real friend, and Charles, though he was sorry to see her go, felt that three months of bachelorhood might yield austere pleasures. It would be agreeable, anyhow, to spend so much time with Severing, with a few trips into the mountains if they could be arranged.

  Yet after Jane had gone Charles made a discovery that surprised him: he not only missed her but he missed something in himself that seemed to vanish when she left. Perhaps it was the way she managed things in the house, her decisions about parties and party-giving, her advice on small matters of etiquette or behaviour, even her actual help in his work, for she liked to spend time in the Chancery odd-jobbing in a way that would have been impossible in a larger and more systematized Legation. So now his extra work was quite often a symbol of her absence even when he was thinking of other things. When he most acutely missed her was late in the evening after a party, when they would have held their post-mortem on the guests and conversation. Because they were both popular, Charles received a rush of invitations well meant to appease his loneliness, but somehow accepting them only seemed to increase it; he missed the flash of Jane's eye across the dinner-table, signalling in secret what her partner was like; or the quizzical look which conveyed that she had overheard him say something witty at his end. Without her, indeed, he found it twice as hard to be only half as amusing, and since he had the reputation for being amusing he wondered if his hosts were thinking him bad company or merely realizing what a good wife for him Jane was. He thought so too, but he wished he need not prove it quite so negatively. Partly from this somewhat obscure motivation he began a small flirtation with Madame Salcinet, the wife of the French Minister. She was pert and youngish and apparently ready for the diversion, since the place bored her and her elderly husband was tetchy enough to regard his post as the Quai d'Orsay's equivalent of Devil's Island. 'Of course Edouard will retire after this,' she confided. 'There is really nothing for me to do but count the days--and even more depressingly, the nights.'

  'Where will you retire to?' Charles asked.

  'I shall live in Paris and he will live at Limoges. That is where he comes from. Nothing on earth would induce me to spend the rest of my life at Limoges.'

  'It's not a bad place,' Charles said. 'I have a French friend who paints--we once made Limoges a centre for a very pleasant holiday. We found many beautiful scenes.'

  'You paint also?'

  'Not as much as I used to. I don't get the time.'

  'You spend so much of your time climbing mountains.'

  'Well, that's true. I enjoy it.'

  'I think you enjoy it because your wife enjoys it. She does not enjoy painting so you do not paint. If she enjoyed snake-hunting I think you would hunt snakes.'

  Charles laughed. 'You're absolutely right. It's the recipe for a perfect marriage.'

  'You think your own marriage proves that?'

  Lightly and without much thought behind the merely verbal dialectic Charles countered: 'Does yours DISprove it?'

  Whereupon Madame Salcinet became suddenly indignant and with a touch of hysteria. 'You have no right to say such a thing to me! You take an unpardonable liberty! I shall certainly inform Sir Bancroft--it was a most insulting and improper remark to make to the wife of one of your Minister's colleagues!'

  Charles, astonished at her vehemence, apologized and said no more. It was during the interval at an afternoon concert, where they had met by accident. He believed the outburst had not attracted attention, since they had spoken in French, but he sat rather unhappily through the rest of the music; and walking back to the Legation afterwards he could not help thinking: Oh God, if only Jane were here. . . . It was not that he had been dangerously indiscreet with Madame Salcinet, or that the remark she had taken exception to had been in worse taste than several of hers to him. Nor did he think that anything she said to Banky could do him much harm, and Banky would certainly take his word against hers if there were any disputed accusations. But the whole thing was just one of those incidents that Jane would have handled so capably--or rather, it was the kind that wouldn't have happened at all if she had been on the spot.

  The Germans were giving a small party the following week for chiefs and their wives only. As the time for it approached, Charles had slight qualms, not quite of apprehension but of a somewhat glum curiosity as to whether Madame Salcinet still planned her complaint. Nor was this curiosity ever resolved, for several days before the party it became known that she had been removed to a private institution. 'Completely off her rocker, so I heard,' Banky said. 'I must write a note of sympathy to Salcinet. . . . Anderson, didn't you meet her at the Brahms the other day? Somebody said he saw you talking to her. What was she like then?'

  'Just charming as always,' Charles answered. 'And Toscanini was wonderful as always.' He was really becoming a diploma
t.

  * * * * *

  Banky didn't take leave after all, so Charles was denied his spell as Chargé. Then Jane returned, tanned and refreshed after the long sea trip. Her stay in England had been full of legal business and sad visits to relatives; she was glad to be back. Her father had left her some money--it was not yet clear how much, but of course the bulk went to her brothers. The family would probably get rid of Burton Bridgwater if they could find a buyer. It would be easier to sell than most such houses (Beeching, for instance), since it had been ruinously modernized and provided with more bathrooms than anybody could use. Perhaps some American would want it. Jane chattered on thus during the taxi ride from the docks to their house near the Legation; not till they were alone in its cool Spanish-style interior did she turn to him in a personal way. 'Well, Charles, have you been missing me?'

  'You bet I have. I don't suppose you've missed me, though.'

  'Oh yes, I have.'

  'Not as much, anyhow.'

  'Much more, I'm sure.'

  'Impossible.'

  'This is a childish conversation. . . . Come here, Andy.'

  She called him Andy at moments when they were closest, and presently at such a moment somebody opened the door and hastily backed out. They thought it must be Severing, but when Severing came later he denied this so stoutly that they were quite certain-- and rather relieved--it had been only he. Of course it didn't really matter. They drank champagne and were very merry. After Severing left, Jane said that someone she had met in London had told her that Charles was highly thought of at the Foreign Office and could expect a transfer to Europe before long.

  She had also seen his father once or twice. He seemed to keep very well for his age. 'He's taken up kindness to animals.'

  'Good . . . not that he was ever UNkind to them, I must say.'

  'But he won't have traps that KILL mice any more--he has a kind that click down and imprison them in a sort of cage, and in the morning he goes round the kitchens collecting the cages. Then he sets the mice free in the middle of the lawn and they all run back to the kitchens.'