“Certainly not.”
“Then you do like blondes,” said Doris sadly.
Next day she disappeared alone into the village, returned mysteriously with a small parcel, and remained hidden all the morning in the bachelors’ wing. Just before luncheon she appeared in the orangery with her head in a towel.
“I wanted you to see,” she said, and uncovered a damp mop of hair which was in part pale yellow, in part its original black, and in part mottled in every intervening shade.
“Good heavens, child,” said Barbara. “What have you done?”
Doris looked only at Basil. “D’you like it? I’ll give it another go this afternoon.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Basil. “I’d leave it just as it is.”
“You like it?”
“I think it’s fine.”
“Not too streaky?”
“Not a bit too streaky.”
If anything had been needed to complete the horror of Doris’ appearance, that morning’s work had done it.
Basil studied the address book with care. “Finding a new home for the Connollies,” he said.
“Basil, we must do something to that poor child’s head before we pass her on.”
“Not a bit of it. It suits her. What d’you know of the Graces, of the Old Rectory, Adderford?”
“It’s a pretty little house. He’s a painter.”
“Bohemian?”
“Not the least. Very refined. Portraits of children in water-colour and pastel.”
“Pastel? He sounds suitable.”
“She’s rather delicate I believe.”
“Perfect.”
The Connollies stayed two days at the Old Rectory and earned twenty pounds.
London was full again. Those who had left in a hurry returned; those who had made arrangements to go after the first air raid remained. Margot Metroland shut her home and moved to the Ritz; opened her home and moved back; decided that after all she really preferred the Ritz and shut her home, this time, though she did not know it, for ever. No servant ever folded back the shutters from the long windows; they remained barred until, later in the year, they were blown into Curzon Street; the furniture was still under dust sheets when it was splintered and burned.
Sir Joseph Mainwaring was appointed to a position of trust and dignity. He was often to be seen with generals now, and sometimes with an admiral. “Our first war aim,” he said, “is to keep Italy out of the war until she is strong enough to come in on our side.” He summed up the situation at home by saying, “One takes one’s gas-mask to one’s office but not to one’s club.”
Lady Seal had not troubled him again about Basil. “He’s at Malfrey, helping Barbara with her evacués,” she said. “The Army is very full just at present. Things will be much easier when we have had some casualties.”
Sir Joseph nodded but at heart he was sceptical. There were not going to be many casualties. Why, he had been talking to a very interesting fellow at the Beefsteak who knew a German Professor of History; this Professor was now in England; they thought a great deal of him at the Foreign Office; he said there were fifty million Germans “ready to declare peace tomorrow on our own terms.” It was just a question of outing those fellows in the Government. Sir Joseph had seen many Governments outed. It was quite easy in wartime they had outed Asquith quite easily and he was a far better fellow than Lloyd George, who succeeded him. Then they outed Lloyd George and then they outed Macdonald. Christopher Seal knew how to do it. He’d soon out Hitler if he were alive and a German.
Poppet Green was in London with her friends.
“Ambrose has turned fascist,” she said.
“Not really?”
“He’s working for the Government in the Ministry of Information and they’ve bribed him to start a new paper.”
“Is it a fascist paper?”
“You bet it is.”
“I heard it was to be called the Ivory Tower.”
“That’s fascist if you like.”
“Escapist.”
“Trotskyist.”
“Ambrose never had the proletarian outlook. I can’t think why we put up with him as we did. Parsnip always said…”
Peter Pastmaster came into Bratt’s wearing battledress and, on his shoulder, the name of a regiment to which he had not formerly belonged.
“Hullo. Why on earth are you dressed like that?”
Peter smirked as only a soldier can when he knows a secret. “Oh, no particular reason.”
“Have they thrown you out of the regiment?”
“I’m seconded, temporarily, for special duty.”
“You’re the sixth chap I’ve seen in disguise this morning.”
“That’s the idea security, you know.”
“What’s it all about?”
“You’ll hear in time, I expect,” said Peter with boundless smugness.
They went to the bar.
“Good morning, my lord,” said Macdougal, the barman. “I see you’re off to Finland too. Quite a number of our gentlemen are going tonight.”
Angela Lyne was back in London; the affairs of the hospital were in order, her son was at his private school, transported at the outbreak of war from the East coast to the middle of Dartmoor. She sat at the place she called “home” listening to wireless news from Germany.
This place was a service flat and as smart and noncommittal as herself, a set of five large rooms high up in the mansard floor of a brand-new block in Grosvenor Square. The decorators had been at work there while she was in France; the style was what passes for Empire in the fashionable world. Next year, had there been no war, she would have had it done over again during August.
That morning she had spent an hour with her brokers giving precise, prudent directions for the disposition of her fortune; she had lunched alone, listening to the radio from Europe; after luncheon she had gone alone to the cinema in Curzon Street. It was darkening when she left the cinema and quite dark now outside, beyond the heavy crimson draperies which hung in a dozen opulent loops and folds, girded with gold cord, fringed with gold at the hem, over the new black shutters. Soon she would go out to dine with Margot at the Ritz. Peter was off somewhere and Margot was trying to get a party together for him.
She mixed herself a large cocktail; the principal ingredients were vodka and Calvados; the decorators had left an electric shaker on the Pompeian side-table. It was their habit to litter the house where they worked with expensive trifles of this sort; parsimonious clients sent them back; the vaguer sort believed them to be presents for which they had forgotten to thank anyone, used them, broke them and paid for them a year later when the bills came in. Angela liked gadgets. She switched on the electric shaker and, when her drink was mixed, took the glass with her to the bathroom and drank it slowly in her bath.
Angela never drank cocktails except in private; there was something about them which bore, so faintly as to be discernible to no one but herself, a suggestion of good fellowship and good cheer; an infinitely small invitation to familiarity derived perhaps from the days of Prohibition, when gin had ceased to be Hogarthian and had become chic; an aura of naughtiness, of felony compounded; a memory of her father’s friends who sometimes had raised their glasses to her, of a man in a ship who had said “Á tes beaux yeux.” And so Angela, who hated human contact on any but her own terms, never drank cocktails except in solitude. Lately all her days seemed to be spent alone.
Steam from the bath formed in a mist, and later in great beads of water, on the side of the glass. She finished her cocktail and felt the fumes rise inside her. She lay for a long time in the water, scarcely thinking, scarcely feeling anything except the warm water round her and the spirit within her. She called for her maid, from next door, to bring her a cigarette; smoked it slowly to the end; called for an ash tray and then for a towel. Presently she was ready to face the darkness, and the intense cold, and Margot Metroland’s dinner party.