I got up and stretched.
“If you’ll pardon me,” I said to Stanhope, “I feel the need of some fresh air.” He stared up at me, another smile on his lips.
“I could do with a walk on deck myself,” he said. “It’ll set me up nicely for dinner. Besides, it can be most inspiring to lean on the rail and look out at the setting sun.”
I tried to look pleased at the offer of company. No peace for the wicked, I told myself.
CHAPTER THREE
It was three days later. A favourable wind had got us in early, and I stepped off the bullet tram at Victoria shortly after 1pm. From here, I walked through a light drizzle to The Drivers’ Arms, just off Regent Street. The pavement heating was still on at full pelt, and the resulting clouds of steam had given London the appearance of an old-fashioned fog. If the kerb lighting hadn’t switched itself on, I’d surely have fallen under one of the newer and more silent electric cars. As it was, one of the pedestrians bumped into me, and there was a whole minute of apologies and hunting about as he helped me recover my hat.
At last, I settled myself in my usual place in the pub and called for a dish of pork chops and a quart of ale. As I tucked in, I felt myself sinking back into the dull certainty—no, the safe certainty—of life among my own in my England.
And this is a good place for being in England. You get a mixed crowd in The Drivers’ Arms. There’s the usual mob of lawyers and other professional men, come to skive off their management of and dipping into the great river of gold that runs through London. There’s taxi drivers, come in for a quick drink. You get the occasional off duty police officer. Mostly, though, it’s actors and their hangers-on. Even the ones who aren’t queer act queer, and their raucous screams keep the saloon bar lively all afternoon till theatre business begins to call them back.
Sadly, though, the landlord had given in while I was away, and installed a television set. I was burping my way through a second quart when someone insisted on having it switched on. It was one of the new models, with bright, exaggerated colours and stereophonic speakers. Even through the smoke and chatter of the theatrical set, I had trouble keeping my eyes from being drawn to the beastly thing.
It was the last item in the home news. This was about the heart and lung transplant man. He’d been out of hospital now for a hundred days, and was setting off for a golf tournament in France. The overseas news was less cheerful. Then again, it might have been worse. The big crisis that had filled every newspaper front page and news bulletin before my going away had fizzled out. I’d already learned on the flight home that the Dalai Lama had caved in and handed over the Tokyo metro bombers. The Japanese had then withdrawn their army of three—or was it seven?—millions from the Tibetan border, and we’d returned our bombers to their base at Peshawar. All was lovey-dovey again with the Japs, and the more lunatic writers for Lord Beaverbrook had given up insisting that this was an opportunity to see if atom bombs really would set fire to the atmosphere.
The only sadness in all this was that gold had collapsed even lower than before the crisis blew up. Bad news for me, I thought gloomily.
But even if war was right off the cards, the East remained unsettled. While they’d been breathing fire at Lhasa, the Japanese had taken their eye off the puppet Tsar they’d set up in Ulan Bator. He’d slipped his leash and called for a Crusade against Moscow. Or perhaps he hadn’t. I couldn’t quite make out the nutter from the Moslem League. But he seemed to be claiming the Tsar had converted to Islam and was preaching jihad against the British in India. Except he was making his usual call for moderation, the man from the Indian National Party looked equally insane, with his dry lips and swelling eyes. Certainly, Bombay was back under martial law. With equal certainty, Beria’s foreign propaganda fronts were all talking up a double or quits war with Japan. Adding to all this, word was drifting in that old Goering was about to make a speech in Warsaw, threatening his own long-delayed crusade against Bolshevism.
There was another story I couldn’t follow above the loud chatter that had footage of the Indian Ocean Fleet airships floating over what looked like somewhere in Africa. This was followed by footage of Lord Halifax inspecting the Suez Canal. Again, I’d already gathered on the flight that he was going about his Prime Ministerial duties by chairing some conference in Nairobi that involved the French and Belgians. I could hear nothing of what he was saying to the cameras. But there was no mistaking how doddery he was beginning to look. I’d seen him only the previous September, walking up Piccadilly. Though seventy seven, he might have passed for sixty. Now, six months on, he was looking well past eighty.
The noise diminished somewhat when the football came back on. It was Jamaica v Sudan for the Vickers Cup. Through some technical marvel that involved rockets, film of the previous day’s match had been rushed in from Wellington, and was now being broadcast as if live. I’d have had little trouble watching that—assuming I enjoyed the sight of coloureds running about in the sun. Some of the theatrical set did, which is why the pub had fallen into comparative silence. “Once you’ve tried black,” someone shrilled, “you’ll never go back!” There was a little shriek of laughter. This was immediately drowned by a cheer as a goal was scored, and then by a groan as a burst of interference turned the screen to white noise.
It was as it ought to be. In America, I’d soon learned that listening to the news was compulsory. Breakfast every morning in my hotel had been suspended for a full quarter hour, as everyone had to stand and shake his fist when the names of the newest traitors were read out over the wireless. One evening, when I’d retired early, the management even sent a wireless into my room, with someone to stand over me as I listened to President Anslinger’s sermon of moral uplift. It was just one more sign of being back in a free country that football was more important than the news. No one in The Drivers’ Arms had paid much attention to the painted newsreader. Now she was gone, about half the pub was glued to the screen.
“You finished with that glass, love?” Old Elsie whispered. I smiled and pushed the glass across the table. If no one else had, she’d been glad to see me again. It was a pity I had nothing to say about America that corresponded to the crisp, black and white celluloid version that, after all these years, still played in her head. She sang a few bars from an old musical and asked about the dark magnificence of Chicago. I, of course, had been better informed about conditions there when I set out. Even so, I hadn’t been prepared for the smell of burst sewers, and for the burnt-out cars and no-go squatter camps that filled the wider streets. No point telling her about the endless turf wars between Italian and coloured and Jewish gangs that had kept me awake night after night until I was used to the sound of gunfire. Nor any point telling her about the black helicopters that hovered by day above the streets, and that only ever came down to snatch pedestrians, seemingly at random, off to probable torture and death in one of the Fellowship Camps. Elsie had the vision of America common to people of her generation, and it would have been cruelty to tell her exactly how it had all been broken in pieces. I smiled as she sang again and cleared the little table. As she came back with a damp cloth, it looked as if she’d forgotten again about the bill. I put a shilling on the table, and told her to keep the change. I pushed my chair back and got to my feet.