The Invisible Victory

'It's his title, I suppose?'

'It helps,' she answered frankly.

There was a long silence. 'Well, if you love Archie-'

'I do, I do,' she said quietly. 'Ever since you first introduced him, I think.'

'And if you've arranged to marry him-'

'Soon, now he's likely to be posted overseas any minute.'

'Overseas? There's nowhere left to go.'

'It's terribly secret. Somewhere hot.'

'Then there's nothing whatever I can do about it, is there?'

She laid a hand on the arm of my tweed jacket. 'Darling Jim! I knew you'd understand.' I have never heard words uttered with more intense relief.

I was invited to the wedding. I decided that my absence would afford Archie more gratification than my presence embarrassment. We gathered together in the sight of God in St Giles, Belgrave Square, on the Saturday of September 7. It was an unhappy choice of wedding-day. Hermann Gцring had failed by a hair's breadth to eliminate the fighter stations amid the fair fields of Kent, and lost 225 of his aircraft to the Hurricanes and Spitfires the previous week. The feared Stuka dive-bomber was a flop, needing ten thousand feet of clear visibility, with which the skies of Britain were not generous. Gцring had not planned the Luftwaffe for night bombing, but to work with the Army as the tanks came rolling over the rubble. So he sent his Heinkel Dornier and Junker bombers with swarms of protective Messerschmitts to attack London in broad daylight.

The air-raid warning sounded. After a whispered discussion with the happy couple at the altar, the vicar announced in canonical tones that the ceremony would continue. Archie declared that he would have Elizabeth as his wedded wife. The Vicar asked her, 'Wilt thou have this man-' and a stick of bombs fell nearby, I thought right on Buckingham Palace. 'We shall adjourn to the crypt,' he said hastily.

In the stone-vaulted crypt with Sir Edward and Lady Tiplady and a hundred people I did not know, I found myself on a bench against the wall next to Archie with Elizabeth. He was still a sergeant in the Brigade of Guards.

'I honestly didn't expect you to come,' he said to me, sounding offended. Leaning away from Elizabeth, he added in a lower voice, 'I'm sorry about all this.'

'Do you think we should shake hands like gentlemen?'

'No, no, not now!' he said in alarm. Another bomb fell. 'I suppose this old church is safe?'

'You're not afraid, are you?'

'Of course I am.'

'I'm not.'

'Then I congratulate you on your courage.'

'It's not a matter of courage. I don't care any longer if I die.'

The reception was in a restaurant in Sloane Square. There was an iced cake and champagne. Sir Edward talked archly to me about fungi. Lady Tip pointedly avoided me. It came time for the happy pair to leave. There was a hired limousine, even confetti. At the door I found myself in a knot of guests and relatives close to Elizabeth. She looked up at me with bright eyes. 'It was because of the butler's boy,' she whispered. 'I'm telling you that because it's cruel, but not nearly as cruel as…as the other. Jim, darling, I love you.'

They left for Llandudno. That was Elizabeth.

29

My own wedding day was Wednesday, February 12, 1941.

I realized that I was getting on. I had turned thirty in the New Year. We had only a few air-raids on Oxford, but the previous summer, after Elizabeth had thrown me over, we were taking the warnings seriously enough to troop down to the lodging-house cellar at night. In such informal, half-dressed intimacy I made the acquaintance of Jean. She was a medical registrar at the Radcliffe Infirmary, like David Mellors. She had qualified in Scotland, she was slim and sandy, with delicate skin and freckles, she had blue eyes and wore tweed skirts with a silver thistle brooch on her blouse. She radiated homely comfort like prewar Mr Therm of the Gas, Light and Coke Company.

'How did you come to meet Sir Edward Tiplady?' she asked.

We were engaged. We were walking through the grounds of the Radcliffe Infirmary, one of the most beautiful places to lie sick in. It was built in the eighteenth century with a bequest from Dr John Radcliffe, and a little on the side from the Duke of Marlborough. You could still recognize the original country infirmary of thirty beds, one operating theatre and its own beerhouse, in the grey stone Georgian building facing a quad with a chapel, like a college.

During the war, Lord Nuffield from Cowley was following the Duke of Marlborough from Blenheim by pouring his profits from motorizing the nation into its wards. Jean and I were passing Wren's Radcliffe Observatory, built to resemble the Athenian Temple of the Four Winds, and providing the most charming view from any operating theatre in the world.

'My father was his butler.' She stared at me. 'Why are you so surprised?' I asked.

'I suppose one never thinks of butlers as having sons, somehow,' she replied, flustered.

'I assure you they breed, like other mammals.' She said nothing to this, seeing that she had hurt me. I added, 'Don't worry, I was long ago reconciled to the butler's supreme unimportance in the society he moves among. I suppose that's a quality he shares with the eunuch.'

'It doesn't mean a thing to me, honestly.' She did not see how uncharitable this was. 'I'm not a snob, you know that. And anyway, nobody in Scotland has a butler, except the dukes.'

I thought I should mention something I had overlooked. 'By the way, I was married once before.'

She made an angry response. 'This is a fine time to tell me.'

'I'm sorry. It's always rather embarrassing to bring out. I was waiting for the right moment, but of course right moments never arrive. When we were laughing it was too serious, and when we were glum it would only have deepened the gloom.'

'You seem to take a rather light-hearted view of matrimony.'

'It was over six years ago,' I excused myself. 'It seems longer, because the war's broken the perspective.'

'What happened to her?' Jean began to recover her temper and enjoy a womanly interest.

'She died.'

Jean looked shocked. 'Oh. I'm sorry,' she said apologetically. 'What was it from?'

'My wife died in childbirth at the beginning of 1935. She was the very first patient Leonard Colebrook treated for puerperal fever with sulphonamide. But it didn't do the trick. I had only a few tablets which I'd smuggled out of Germany, and when they ran out we just had to watch her die.'

'What about the child?'

'She survived all right. I had her adopted.'

'So you've a daughter aged six about the place somewhere?'

'Yes.'

'I'd never have thought it of you.' I wondered if she meant this as a compliment. 'What was your wife like?' she asked inevitably.

'She was Rosie the housemaid.'

'I see.'

We walked in silence until we reached the hospital rear gate leading to the Woodstock 'toad. 'Do you want to call it off?' I asked.

'Oh, no. I don't suppose it makes any difference.'

We were to marry in the Radcliffe Infirmary chapel. My mother came from Budleigh Salterton. When Hitler's Wehrmacht had appeared opposite Eastbourne, my mother's hotel closed down and she went as companion to an old lady in South Devon, though I had never thought of her as the companionable sort. My mother had grown grey, wrinkled and more religious than ever, for which the war to date had offered much encouragement.

Jean's family seemed all doctors and nurses, and looked about them with Scots severity. David Mellors was my best man. We both wore hired tail coats. The bride was late, and David himself hurried into the church only when the organist had started repeating his repertoire.

'Where the hell have you been?' I asked in an angry whisper as he joined me on the front pew.