“You’ll see,” said Barbara. “Basil will be covered with medals while your silly old yeomanry are still messing in a Trust House and waiting for your tanks.”
There were duck on the lake and she let Freddy talk about them. She led him down his favourite paths. There was a Gothic pavilion where by long habit Freddy often became amorous; he did become amorous. And all the time she thought of Basil. She thought of him in terms of the war books she had read. She saw him as Siegfried Sassoon, an infantry subaltern in a mud-bogged trench, standing-to at dawn, his eyes on his wrist watch, waiting for zero hour; she saw him as Compton Mackenzie, spider in a web of Balkan intrigue, undermining a monarchy among olive trees and sculptured marble; she saw him as T. E. Lawrence and Rupert Brooke.
Freddy, assuaged, reverted to sport. “I won’t ask any of the regiment over for the early shoots,” he said. “But I don’t see why we shouldn’t let some of them have a bang at the cocks round about Christmas.”
Lady Seal was at her home in London. She had taken fewer precautions against air raids than most of her friends. Her most valuable possession, her small Carpaccio, had been sent to safe-keeping at Malfrey; the miniatures and Limoges enamels were at the bank; the Sevres was packed in crates and put below-stairs. Otherwise there was no change in her drawing-room. The ponderous old curtains needed no unsightly strips of black paper to help them keep in the light
The windows were open now on the balcony. Lady Seal sat in an elegant rosewood chair gazing out across the square. She had just heard the Prime Minister’s speech. Her butler approached from the end of the room.
“Shall I remove the radio, my lady?”
“Yes, by all means. He spoke very well, very well indeed.”
“It’s all very sad, my lady.”
“Very sad for the Germans, Anderson.”
It was quite true, thought Lady Seal; Neville Chamberlain had spoken surprisingly well. She had never liked him very much, neither him nor his brother if anything she had preferred the brother but they were uncomfortable, drab fellows both of them. However, he had spoken very creditably that morning, as though at last he were fully alive to his responsibilities. She would ask him to luncheon. But perhaps he would be busy; the most improbable people were busy in wartime, she remembered.
Her mind went back to the other war, which until that morning had been The War. No one very near to her had fought. Christopher had been too old, Tony just too young; her brother Edward had begun by commanding a brigade they thought the world of him at the Staff College but, inexplicably, his career had come to very little; he was still brigadier in 1918, at Dar-as-Salaam. But the war had been a sad time; so many friends in mourning and Christopher fretful about the coalition. It had been a bitter thing for them alclass="underline" accepting Lloyd George; but Christopher had patriotically made the sacrifice with the rest of them; probably only she knew how much he had felt it. The worst time had been after the armistice, when peerages were sold like groceries and the peace terms were bungled. Christopher had always said they would have to pay for it in the long run.
The hideous, then unfamiliar shriek of the air raid sirens sang out over London.
“That was the warning, my lady.”
“Yes, Anderson, I heard it.”
“Will you be coming downstairs?”
“No, not yet at any rate. Get all the servants down and see they are quiet.”
“Will you require your respirator, my lady?”
“I don’t suppose so. From what Sir Joseph tells me the danger of gas is very slight. In any case I daresay this is only a practice. Leave it on the table.”
“Will that be all, my lady?”
“That’s all. See that the maids don’t get nervous.”
Lady Seal stepped onto the balcony and looked up into the clear sky. They’ll get more than they bargain for if they try and attack us, she thought. High time that man was taught a lesson. He’s made nothing but trouble for years. She returned to her chair thinking, Anyway I never made a fuss of that vulgar man von Ribbentrop. I wouldn’t have him inside the house, even when that goose Emma Granchester was plaguing us all to be friendly to him. I hope she feels foolish this morning.
Lady Seal waited with composure for the bombardment to begin. She had told Anderson it was probably only a practice. That was what one told servants; otherwise they might panic not Anderson but the maids. But in her heart Lady Seal was sure that the attack was coming; it would be just like the Germans, always blustering and showing off and pretending to be efficient. The history Lady Seal had learned in the schoolroom had been a simple tale of the maintenance of right against the superior forces of evil, and the battle honours of her country rang musically in her ears Crecy, Agincourt, Cadiz, Blenheim, Gibraltar, Inkerman, Ypres. England had fought many and various enemies with many and various allies, often on quite recondite pretexts, but always justly, chivalrously, and with ultimate success. Often, in Paris, Lady Seal had been proud that her people had never fallen to the habit of naming streets after their feats of arms; that was suitable enough for the shortlived and purely professional triumphs of the French, but to put those great manifestations of divine rectitude which were the victories of England to the use, for their postal addresses, of milliners and chiropodists, would have been a baseness to which even the radicals had not stooped. The steel engravings of her schoolroom lived before her eyes, like tableaux at a charity fete Sidney at Zutphen, Wolfe at Quebec, Nelson at Trafalgar (Wellington, only, at Waterloo was excluded from the pageant by reason of the proximity of Blücher, pushing himself forward with typical Prussian effrontery to share the glory which the other had won); and to this tremendous assembly (not unlike, in Lady Seal’s mind, those massed groups of wealth and respectability portrayed on the Squadron Lawn at Cowes and hung with their key plans in lobbies and billiard rooms) was added that morning a single new and rather improbable figure, Basil Seal.
murgatroyd The last war had cost her little; nothing, indeed, except a considerable holding of foreign investments and her brother Edward’s reputation as a strategist. Now she had a son to offer her country. Tony had weak eyes and a career, Freddy was no blood of hers and was not cast in a heroic mould, but Basil her wayward and graceless and grossly disappointing Basil, whose unaccountable taste for low company had led him into so many vexatious scrapes in the last ten years, whose wild oats refused to correspond with those of his Uncle Edward Basil, who had stolen her emeralds and made Mrs. Lyne distressingly conspicuous Basil, his peculiarities merged in the manhood of England, at last was entering on his inheritance. She must ask Jo about getting him a commission in a decent regiment.
At last, while she was still musing, the sirens sounded the All Clear.
Sir Joseph Mainwaring was lunching with Lady Seal that day. It was an arrangement made early in the preceding week before either of them knew that the day they were choosing was one which would be marked in the world’s calendars until the end of history. He arrived punctually, as he always did; as he had done, times out of number, in the long years of their friendship.
Sir Joseph was not a church-going man except when he was staying at one of the very rare, very august houses where it was still the practice; on this Sunday morning, however, it would not have been fantastic to describe his spirit as inflamed by something nearly akin to religious awe. It would be fantastic to describe him as purged, and yet there had been something delicately purgative in the experiences of the morning and there was an unfamiliar buoyancy in his bearing as though he had been at somebody’s Eno’s. He felt ten years younger.