“What have you got up to date?”
“You wouldn’t sooner wait until I can give you the whole case cut-and-dried?”
“No.”
“Well, I’m on to a very dangerous woman who calls herself Green. Among her intimates she’s known as ‘Poppet.’ She pretends to be a painter, but you have only to look at her work to realize it is a cloak for other activities. Her studio is the meeting place for a Communist cell. She has an agent in the United States named Parsnip; he has the alias of Pimpernell; he puts it about that he is a poet, two poets in fact, but there again, the work betrays him. Would you like me to quote some Parsnip to you?”
“No.”
“I have reason to believe that Green is the head of an underground organization by which young men of military age are smuggled out of the country. Those are the lines I have been working on. What d’you think of them?”
“Rotten.”
“I was afraid you might say that. It’s your own fault. Give me time and I would have had a better story.”
“Now you can do some work. Here’s a list of thirty-three addresses of suspected fascists. Check them up.”
“Now?”
“Now.”
“Shan’t I keep track of the woman Green?”
“Not in office hours.”
“I can’t think what you see in your Plum,” said Basil when he regained the outer office. “It must simply be snobbery.”
“It’s not: it’s love. The officer in the Pensions office was a full Colonel, so there.”
“I expect you’ll be reduced to subalterns, yet. And by the way, Lance-Corporal, you can call me ‘sir.’”
Susie giggled. “I believe you’re drunk,” she said.
“Drunk with chivalry,” said Basil.
That evening Cedric Lyne left to rejoin his regiment. The forty-eight hours of embarkation leave were over and although he had chosen to start an hour earlier rather than travel by the special train, it was only with difficulty that he found a carriage free from brother officers who had made the same choice. They were going to the North to embark at dawn next-day and sail straight into action.
The first-class carriage was quite full, four a side, and the racks piled high with baggage. Black funnel-shaped shields cast the light onto the passengers’ laps; their faces in the surrounding darkness were indistinguishable; a naval paymaster-commander slept peacefully in one corner; two civilians strained their eyes over the evening papers; the other four were soldiers. Cedric sat between two soldiers, stared at the shadowy luggage above the civilians’ heads, and ruminated, chewing the last, bitter essence from the events of the last two days.
Because he was thirty-five years of age, and spoke French and was built rather for grace than smartness, they had made Cedric battalion Intelligence officer. He kept the war diary and on wet days was often borrowed by the company commanders to lecture on map reading, security, and the order of battle of a German infantry division. These were Cedric’s three lectures. When they were exhausted he was sent on a gas course and after that on a course on interpretation of air photographs. On exercise he stuck pins in a map and kept a file of field messages.
“There really isn’t very much you can do until we get into action,” said his commanding officer. “You might ring up the photographers in Aldershot about taking that regimental group.”
They put him in charge of the Officers’ Mess and made his visits there hideous with complaints.
“We’re out of Kümmel again, Cedric.”
“Surely there’s some perfectly simple way of keeping the soup hot, Lyne.”
“If officers will take the papers to their quarters, the only answer is to order more papers.”
“The Stilton has been allowed to go dry again.”
That had been his life; but Nigel did not know this. For Nigel, at eight years of age, his father was a man at arms and a hero. When they were given embarkation leave, Cedric telephoned to Nigel’s head-master and the child met him at their station in the country. Pride in his father and pleasure at an unforeseen holiday made their night at home an enthralling experience for Nigel. The home was given over to empty wards and an idle hospital staff. Cedric and his son stayed in the farm where, before she left, Angela had fitted up a few rooms with furniture from the house. Nigel was full of questions; why Cedric’s buttons were differently arranged from the fathers’ and brothers’ buttons of most of the fellows; what was the difference between a Bren and a Vickers; how much faster were our fighters than the Germans’; whether Hitler had fits, as one fellow said, and, if so, did he froth at the mouth and roll his eyes as the girl at the lodge had once done?
That evening, Cedric took a long farewell of his water garden. It was for the water principally that he and Angela had chosen the place, ten years ago, when they were first engaged. It rose in a clear and copious spring in the hillside above the house and fell in a series of natural cascades to join the considerable stream which flowed more solemnly through the park. He and Angela had eaten a picnic lunch by the spring and looked down on the symmetrical, rectangular building below.
“It’ll do,” said Angela. “I’ll offer them fifteen thousand.”
It never embarrassed Cedric to be married to a rich woman. He had not married for money in any gross sense, but he loved the rare and beautiful things which money could buy, and Angela’s great fortune made her trebly rare and beautiful in his eyes.
It was surprising that they should have met at all. Cedric had been for years in his regiment, kept there by his father, who gave him an allowance, which he could ill spare, on that condition alone. It was that or an office for Cedric, and despite the tedious company, there was just enough pageantry about peace-time soldiering to keep his imagination engaged. Cedric was accomplished; he was a beautiful horseman but hated the rigours of fox-hunting; he was a very fine shot and because that formed a single tenuous bond with his brother officers and because it was agreeable to do anything pre-eminently well, he, accepted invitations to pheasant-shooting in houses where, when they were not at the coverts, he felt lost and lonely. Angela’s father had a celebrated shoot in Norfolk; he had also, Cedric was told, a collection of French impressionists. Thither that autumn ten years ago Cedric had gone and had found the pictures too obvious and the birds too tame and the party tedious beyond description, except for Angela, past her debutante days, aloof now and living in a cool and mysterious solitude of her own creation. She had resisted at first every attempt on the defences she had built up against a noisy world and then, quite suddenly, she had accepted Cedric as being like herself a stranger in these parts, as being, unlike herself, full of understanding of another, more splendid, attainable world outside. Angela’s father thought Cedric a poor fellow, settled vast sums on them, and let them go their own way.
And this was the way they had gone. Cedric stood by the spring, enshrined, now, in a little temple. The architrave was covered with stalactites, the dome was set with real shells and the clear water bubbled out from the feet of a Triton. Cedric and Angela had bought this temple on their honeymoon at a deserted villa in the hills behind Naples.
Below in the hillside lay the cave which Cedric had bought the summer that Angela had refused to come with him to Salzburg; the summer when she met Basil. The lonely and humiliating years after that summer each had its monument.
“Daddy, what are you waiting for?”
“I’m just looking at the grottoes.”
“But you’ve seen them thousands of times. They’re always the same.”
Always the same; joys for ever; not like men and women with their loves and hates.
“Daddy, there’s an aeroplane. Is it a Hurricane?”
“No, Nigel, a Spitfire.”
“How d’you tell the difference?”
Then, on an impulse, he had said, “Nigel, shall we go to London and see Mummy?”
“We might see ‘The Lion Has Wings’ too. The fellows say it’s awfully decent.”
“All right, Nigel, we’ll see both.”
So the two of them went to London by the early morning train. “Let’s surprise her,” said Nigel, but Cedric telephoned first, wryly remembering the story of the pedantic adulterer “My dear, it is I who am surprised; you are astounded.”
“I am coming round to see Mrs. Lyne.”
“She isn’t very well this morning.”
“I’m sorry to hear that. Is she able to see people?”
“Yes, I think so, sir. I’ll ask…yes, madam will be very pleased to see you and Master Nigel.”
They had not met for three years, since they had discussed the question of divorce. Cedric understood exactly what Angela had felt about that; it was curious, he reflected, how some people were shy of divorce because of their love of society; they did not want there to be any occasion when their presence might be an embarrassment, they wanted to keep their tickets for the Ascot enclosure. With Angela reluctance came from precisely the opposite motives; she could not brook any intrusion of her privacy; she did not want to answer questions in court or allow the daily paper a single item of information about herself. “It’s not as though you wanted to marry anyone else, Cedric.”
“You don’t think the present arrangement makes me look rather foolish?”
“Cedric, what’s come over you? You used not to talk like that.”
So he had given way and that year had spanned the stream with a bridge in the Chinese Taste, taken direct from Batty Langley.
In the five minutes of waiting before Grainger took him into Angela’s bedroom, he studied David Lennox’s grisailles with distaste.
“Are they old, Daddy?”
“No, Nigel, they’re not old.”
“They’re awfully feeble.”
“They are.” (Regency…This was the age of Waterloo and highwaymen and duelling and slavery and revivalist preaching and Nelson having his arm off with no anesthetic but rum, and Botany Bay and this is what they make of it.)
“Well, I prefer the pictures at home, even if they are old. Is that Mummy?”
“Yes.”
“Is that old?”
“Older than you, Nigel.”
Cedric turned from the portrait of Angela. What a nuisance John had been about the sittings! It was her father who had insisted on their going to him.
“Is it finished?”
“Yes. It was very hard to make the man finish it, though.”
“It hardly looks finished now, does it, Daddy? It’s all sploshy.”
Then Grainger opened the door. “Come in, Cedric,” Angela called from her bed.
Angela was wearing dark glasses. Her make-up things lay on the quilt before her, with which she had been hastily doing her face. Nigel might have asked if it was finished; it was sploshy, like the John portrait.
“I had no idea you were ill,” said Cedric stiffly.
“I’m not really. Nigel, haven’t you got a kiss for Mummy?”
“Why are you wearing those glasses?”
“My eyes are tired, darling.”
“Tired of what?”
“Cedric,” said Angela petulantly, “for God’s sake don’t let him be a bore. Go with Miss Grainger into the next room, darling.”
“Oh, all right,” said Nigel. “Don’t be long, Daddy.”
“You and he seem to be buddies these days.”
“Yes, it’s the uniform.”
“Funny your being in the Army again.”
“I’m off tonight, abroad.”
“France?”
“I don’t think so. I mustn’t tell about it. That’s why I came to see you.”
“About not talking about not going to France?” said Angela in something of her old teasing way.
Cedric began to talk about the house; he hoped Angela would keep on to it, even if anything happened to him; he thought he saw some glimmerings of taste in the boy; he might grow to appreciate it later. Angela was inattentive and answered absently.
“I’m afraid I’m tiring you.”
“Well, I’m not feeling terribly well to-day. Did you want to see me about anything special?”
“No I don’t think so. Just to say good-bye.”
“Daddy,” came a voice from the next room. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Oh dear, I wish I could do something about it. I feel there’s something I ought to do. It’s quite an occasion really, isn’t it? I’m not being beastly, Cedric, I really mean it. I think it’s sweet of you to come. I only wish I felt up to doing something about it.”
“Daddy, come on. We want to get to Bassett and Lowkes before lunch.”
“Take care of yourself,” said Angela.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Why will you all ask questions?”
And that had been the end of the visit. At Bassett and Lowkes, Nigel had chosen a model of a Blenheim bomber. “The fellows will be jealous,” he said.
After luncheon they went to see “The Lion Has Wings,” and then it was time to put Nigel into the train back to school. “It’s been absolutely ripping, Daddy,” he said.
“Has it really?”
“The rippingest two days I ever spent.”
So after these ripping days Cedric sat in the half-dark, with the pool of light falling on the unread book on his knees, returning to duty.