Lady Seal’s most devoted friend and she had many would not have credited her with more than human discretion, and some quite preternatural power would have been needed to deal with Basil’s first steps in adult life. The system she decided on was, at the best, unimaginative and, like many such schemes, was suggested to her by Sir Joseph Mainwaring; it consisted, in his words, of “giving the boy his bread and butter and letting him find the jam.” Removed from the realm of metaphor to plain English, this meant allowing Basil Ł400 a year, conditional on his good behaviour, and expecting him to supplement it by his own exertions if he wished for a more ample way of life.
The arrangement proved disastrous from the first. Four times in the last ten years Lady Seal had paid Basil’s debts; once on condition of his living at home with her; once on condition of his living somewhere, anywhere, abroad; once on condition of his marrying; once on condition of his refraining from marriage. Twice he had been cut off with a penny; twice taken back to favour; once he had been set up in chambers in the Temple with an allowance of a thousand a year; several times, a large lump sum of capital had been dangled before his eyes as the reward of his giving himself seriously to commerce; once he had been on the verge of becoming the recipient of a sisal farm in Kenya. Throughout all these changes of fortune Sir Joseph Mainwaring had acted the part of political agent to a recalcitrant stipendiary sultan, in a way which embittered every benevolence and minimized the value of every gift he brought. In the intervals of neglect and independence, Basil had fended for himself and had successively held all the jobs which were open to young men of his qualifications. He had never had much difficulty in getting jobs; the trouble had always been in keeping them, for he regarded a potential employer as his opponent in a game of skill. All Basil’s resource and energy went into hoodwinking him into surrender; once he had received his confidence he lost interest. Thus English girls will put themselves to endless exertion to secure a husband and, once married, will think their labour at an end.
Basil had been leader writer on the Daily Beast, he had served in the personal entourage of Lord Monomark, he had sold champagne on commission, composed dialogue for the cinema and given the first of what was intended to be a series of talks for the B.B.C. Sinking lower in the social scale he had been press agent for a female contortionist and had once conducted a party of tourists to the Italian lakes. (He dined out for some time on the story of that tour, which had, after a crescendo of minor vexations, culminated in Basil’s making a bundle of all the tickets and all the passports and sinking them in Lake Garda. He had then travelled home alone by an early train, leaving fifty penniless Britons, none of whom spoke a word of any foreign language, to the care of whatever deity takes charge of forsaken strangers; for all Basil knew, they were still there.)
From time to time he disappeared from the civilized area and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence of having worked for the secret police in Bolivia and advised the Emperor of Azania on the modernization of his country. Basil was in the habit, as it were, of conducting his own campaigns, issuing his own ultimatums, disseminating his own propaganda, erecting about himself his own blackout; he was an obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians. He was used, in his own life, to a system of push, appeasement, agitation and blackmail, which, except that it had no more distinct aim than his own immediate amusement, ran parallel to Nazi diplomacy. Like Nazi diplomacy it postulated for success a peace-loving, orderly and honourable world in which to operate. In the new, busy, secretive, chaotic world which developed during the first days of the war, Basil, for the first time in his life, felt himself at a disadvantage. It was like being in Latin America at a time of upheaval and, instead of being an Englishman, being oneself a Latin-American.
The end of September found Basil in a somewhat fretful mood. The air raid scare seemed to be over for the time, and those who had voluntarily fled from London were beginning to return, pretending that they had only been to the country to see that everything was all right there. The women and children of the poor, too, were flocking home to their evacuated streets. The newspapers said that the Poles were holding out; that their cavalry was penetrating deep into Germany; that the enemy was already short of motor oil; that Saarbrucken would fall to the French within a day or two; air raid wardens roamed the remote hamlets of the kingdom, persecuting yokels who walked home from the inn with glowing pipes. Londoners, who were slow to acquire the habit of the domestic hearth, groped their way in darkness from one place of amusement to another, learning their destination by feeling the buttons on the commissionaires’ uniforms; revolving black-glass doors gave access to a fairyland; it was as though, when children, they had been led blindfold into the room with the lighted Christmas tree. The casualty list of street accidents became formidable, and there were terrifying tales of footpads who leaped on the shoulders of old gentlemen on the very steps of their clubs, or beat them to jelly on Hay Hill.
Everyone whom Basil met was busy getting a job. Some consciously or unconsciously had taken out an insurance policy against unemployment by joining some military unit in the past; there were those like Peter, who in early youth had gratified a parental whim by spending a few expensive years in the regular Army, and those like Freddy who had gone into the yeomanry as they sat on the Bench and the county council as part of the normal obligations of rural life. These were now in uniform with their problems solved. In later months, as they sat idle in the Middle East, they were to think enviously of those who had made a more deliberate and judicious choice of service, but at the moment their minds were enviably at rest. The remainder were possessed with a passion to enroll in some form of public service, however uncongenial. Some formed ambulance parties and sat long hours at their posts waiting for air raid victims; some became firemen, some minor civil servants. None of these honourable occupations made much appeal to Basil.
He was exactly the type of man who, if English life had run as it did in books of adventure, should at this turn in world affairs have been sent for. He should have been led to an obscure address in Maida Vale and there presented to a lean, scarred man with hard grey eyes one of the men behind the scenes; one of the men whose names were unknown to the public and the newspapers, who passed unnoticed in the street, a name known only to the inner circle of the Cabinet and to the heads of the secret police of the world… “Sit down, Seal. We’ve followed your movements with interest ever since that affair in La Paz in ‘32. You’re a rascal, but I’m inclined to think you’re the kind of rascal the country needs at this moment. I take it you’re game for anything?”
“I’m game.”
“That’s what I expected you to say. These are your orders. You will go to Uxbridge aerodrome at 4:30 this afternoon, where a man will meet you and give you your passport. You will travel under the name of Blenkinsop. You are a tobacco grower from Latakia. A civil aeroplane will take you by various stages to Smyrna, where you will register at the Miramar Hotel and await orders. Is that clear?…”
It was clear, and Basil, whose life up to the present had been more like an adventure story than most people’s, did half expect some such summons. None came. Instead he was invited to luncheon by Sir Joseph Mainwaring at the Travellers’ Club.