‘I ask you a question,’ Rudi said. ‘It is a simple question. He wants monarchy, he wants anarchism. What does he want? These two are enemies in all of history. Simple answer is, he is a mess.’
‘How old was the barrow-boy?’ Jane said.
‘And again,’ said Joanna’s voice from the upper window.
Dorothy Markham had joined the girls on the sunny terrace. She was telling a hunting story. ‘… the only one time I’ve been thrown, it shook me to the core. What a brute!’
‘Where did you land?’
‘Where do you think?’
The girl at the piano stopped and folded her scale-sheet with seemly concentration.
‘I go,’ said Rudi, looking at his watch. ‘I have an appointment to meet a contact for a drink.’ He rose and once more, before he handed over the book, flicked through the type-written pages. He said, sadly, ‘Nicholas is a friend of mine, but I regret to say he’s a non-contributive thinker, by the way. Come here, listen to this:’
There is a kind of truth in the popular idea of an anarchist as a wild man with a home-made bomb in his pocket. In modern times this bomb, fabricated in the back workshops of the imagination, can only take one effective form: Ridicule.
Jane said, “‘Only take” isn’t grammatical, it should be “take only”. I’ll have to change that, Rudi.’
*
So much for the portrait of the martyr as a young man as it was suggested to Jane on a Sunday morning between armistice and armistice, in the days of everyone’s poverty, in 1945. Jane, who lived to distort it in many elaborate forms, at the time merely felt she was in touch with something reckless, intellectual, and Bohemian by being in touch with Nicholas. Rudi’s contemptuous attitude bounded back upon himself in her estimation. She felt she knew too much about Rudi to respect him; and was presently astonished to find that there was indeed a sort of friendship between himself and Nicholas, lingering on from the past.
Meantime, Nicholas touched lightly on the imagination of the girls of slender means, and they on his. He had not yet slept on the roof with Selina on the hot summer nights — he gaining access from the American-occupied attic of the hotel next door, and she through the slit window — and he had not yet witnessed that action of savagery so extreme that it forced him involuntarily to make an entirely unaccustomed gesture, the signing of the cross upon himself. At this time Nicholas still worked for one of those left-hand departments of the Foreign Office, the doings of which the right-hand did not know. It came under Intelligence. After the Normandy landing he had been sent on several missions to France. Now there was very little left for his department to do except wind-up. Winding-up was arduous, it involved the shuffling of papers and people from office to office; particularly it involved considerable shuffling between the British and American Intelligence pockets in London. He had a bleak furnished room at Fulham. He was bored.
*
‘I’ve got something to tell you, Rudi,’ said Jane.
‘Hold on please, I have a customer.’
‘I’ll ring you back later, then, I’m in a hurry. I only wanted to tell you that Nicholas Farringdon’s dead. Remember that book of his he never published — he gave you the manuscript. Well, it might be worth something now, and I thought —‘
‘Nick’s dead? Hold on please, Jane. I have a customer waiting here to buy a book. Hold on.’
‘I’ll ring you later.’
*
Nicholas came, then, to dine at the club.
I thought of Chatterton, the marvellous Boy,
The sleepless Soul that perished in his Pride;
‘Who is that?’
‘It’s Joanna Childe, she teaches elocution, you must meet her.’
The twittering movements at other points in the room, Joanna’s singular voice, the beautiful aspects of poverty and charm amongst these girls in the brown-papered drawing-room, Selina, furled like a long soft sash, in her chair, came to Nicholas in a gratuitous flow. Months of boredom had subdued him to intoxication by an experience which, at another time, might itself have bored him.
Some days later he took Jane to a party to meet the people she longed to meet, young male poets in corduroy trousers and young female poets with waist-length hair, or at least females who typed the poetry and slept with the poets, it was nearly the same thing. Nicholas took her to supper at Bertorelli’s; then he took her to a poetry reading at a hired meeting-house in the Fulham Road; then he took her on to a party with some of the people he had collected from the reading. One of the poets who was well thought of had acquired a job at Associated News in Fleet Street, in honour of which he had purchased a pair of luxurious pigskin gloves; he displayed these proudly. There was an air of a resistance movement against the world at this poetry meeting. Poets seemed to understand each other with a secret instinct, almost a kind of prearrangement, and it was plain that the poet with the gloves would never show off these poetic gloves so frankly, or expect to be understood so well in relation to them, at his new job in Fleet Street or anywhere else, as here.
Some were men demobilized from the non-combatant corps. Some had been unfit for service for obvious reasons — a nervous twitch of the facial muscles, bad eyesight, or a limp. Others were still in battle dress. Nicholas had been out of the Army since the month after Dunkirk, from which he had escaped with a wound in the thumb; his release from the army had followed a mild nervous disorder in the month after Dunkirk.
Nicholas stood noticeably aloof at the poets’ gathering, but although he greeted his friends with a decided reserve, it was evident that he wanted Jane to savour her full joy of it. In fact, he wanted her to invite him again to the May of Teck Club, as dawned on her later in the evening.
The poets read their poems, two each, and were applauded. Some of these poets were to fail and fade into a no-man’s-land of Soho public houses in a few years’ time, and become the familiar messes of literary life. Some, with many talents, faltered, in time, from lack of stamina, gave up and took a job in advertising or publishing, detesting literary people above all. Others succeeded and became paradoxes; they did not always continue to write poetry, or even poetry exclusively.
One of these young poets Ernest Claymore, later became a mystical stockbroker of the 1960s, spending his week-days urgently in the City, three weekends each month at his country cottage — an establishment of fourteen rooms, where he ignored his wife and, alone in his study, wrote Thought — and one week-end a month in retreat at a monastery. In the 19605 Ernest Claymore read a book a week in bed before sleep, and sometimes addressed a letter to the press about a book review: ‘Sir, Maybe I’m dim. I have read your review of …‘; he was to publish three short books of philosophy which everyone could easily understand indeed; at the moment in question, the summer of 1945, he was a dark-eyed young poet at the poetry recital, and had just finished reading, with husky force, his second contribution:
I in my troubled night of the dove clove brightly my Path from the tomb of love incessantly to redress my Articulate womb, that new and necessary rose,
exposing my …
He belonged to the Cosmic school of poets. Jane, perceiving that he was orthosexual by definition of his manner and appearance, was uncertain whether to cultivate him for future acquaintance or whether to hang on to Nicholas. She managed to do both, since Nicholas brought along this dark husky poet, this stockbroker to be, to the party which followed, and there Jane was able to make a future assignment with him before Nicholas drew her aside to inquire further into the mysterious life of the May of Teck Club.