The following day the British Government proposed that an International Naval Conference should meet in London to make a preliminary survey of the problem. A disposition among some of those invited to quibble about the locale was quenched by the unsympathetically urgent mood of the public. The Conference assembled in Westminster within three days of the announcement, and, as far as England was concerned, none too soon. In those three days cancellations of sea-passages had been wholesale, overwhelmed air-line companies had been forced to apply priority schedules, the Government had clamped down fast on the sales of oils of all kinds, and was rushing out a rationing system for essential services, the bottom had dropped out of the shipping market, the price of many foodstuffs had doubled, and all kinds of tobacco had vanished under the counters.
On the day before the Conference opened Phyllis and I had met for lunch.
'You ought to see Oxford Street,' she said. 'Talk about panic-buying! Cottons particularly. Every hopeless line is selling out at double prices, and they're scratching one another's eyes out for things they wouldn't have been seen dead in last week. Every decent piece of stuff has disappeared, presumably into store for later on. It's a better picnic than any of the Sales.'
'From what they tell me of the City,' I told her, 'it's about as good there. Sounds as if you could get control of a shipping-Line for a few bob, but you couldn't buy a single share in anything to do with aircraft for a fortune. Steel's all over the place; rubbers are, too; plastics are soaring; distilleries are down; about the only thing that's holding its own seems to be breweries.'
'I saw a man and a woman loading two sacks of coffee-beans into a Rolls, in Piccadilly. And there were ' She broke off suddenly as though what I had been saying had just registered. 'You did get rid of Aunt Mary's shares in those Jamaican Plantations?' she inquired, with the expression that she applies to the monthly housekeeping accounts.
'Some time ago,' I reassured her. 'The proceeds went, oddly enough, into aero-engines, and plastics.'
She gave an approving nod, rather as if the instructions had been hers. Then another thought occurred to her:
'What about the Press Tickets for to-morrow?' she asked.
'There aren't any for the Conference proper,' I told her. 'There will be a statement afterwards.'
She stared at me. Aren't any? For heaven's sake! What do they think they're doing?'
I shrugged. 'Force of habit, I imagine. They are planning a campaign. When you plan a campaign, you tell the Press as much as it is good for it to know, later on.'
'Well, of all the '
'I know, darling, but you can't expect a Service to change its spots overnight.'
'It's absolutely silly. More like Russia every day. Where's the telephone in this place?'
'Darling, this is an International Conference. You can't just go '
'Of course I can. It's sheer nonsense!'
'Well, whatever VIP you have in mind will be out at lunch now,' I pointed out.
That checked her for a moment. She brooded. 'I never heard of such rubbish. How do they expect us to do our job?' she muttered, and brooded some more.
When Phyllis said 'our job' the words did not connote exactly what they would have implied a few days before. The job had somehow changed quality under our feet. The task of persuading the public of the reality of the unseen, indescribable menace had turned suddenly into one of keeping up morale in the face of a menace which everyone now accepted to the point of panic. EBC ran a feature called News-Parade in which we appeared to have assumed, as far as we understood the position, the roles of Special Oceanic Correspondents, without being quite sure how it had occurred. In point of fact, Phyllis had never been on the EBC staff, and I had technically left it when I ceased, officially, to have an office there some two years before; nobody, however, seemed to be aware of this except the Accounts Department which now paid by the piece instead of by the month. We had been briefed together on this change to a morale-sustaining angle by a director who was clearly under the impression that we were a part of his staff. The whole situation was anomalous, but not unrewarding. All the same, there was not going to be much freshness of treatment in our assignment if we could get no nearer to the sources than official handouts. Phyllis was still brooding about it when I left her to go back to the office I officially didn't have in EBC.
She rang me up there about five.
'Darling,' she said, 'you have invited Dr Matet to dine with you at your club at seven-thirty to-morrow evening. I shall be there, too. I explained how it was, and he quite agreed that it was a lot of nonsense. I tried to get Captain Winters to come as well, as he's a friend of his he thought it was a lot of nonsense, too, but he said the Service was the Service, and he'd better not come, so I'm having lunch with him to-morrow. You don't mind?'
'I don't quite see why the Service should be less the Service tete-a-tete,' I told her, 'but I appreciate the Matet move. So, darling, you may pat yourself on the back because this town must now be full of assorted ographers that he's not set eyes on for years.'
'He'll be seeing plenty of them by day,' Phyllis said, modestly.
This time there was no need for Phyllis to coax Dr Matet. He started off like a man with a mission, over sherries in the bar.
'The Service makes its own rules, of course,' he said, 'but no pledges were required from the rest of us, so I choose to regard myself as at liberty to discuss the proceedings I think it's a duty to let people know all the main facts. You've heard the official pronouncement, of course?'
We had. It amounted to little more than advice to all shipping to keep clear of the major Deeps when possible, until further notice. One imagined that many masters would already have taken this decision for themselves, but now they would at least have official advice to quote in any argument with their owners.
'Not very specific,' I told him: 'One of our draughtsmen for television has produced a work of bathymetric or do I mean hydrographic? art showing areas over twenty thousand feet. Very pleased with it, he was, but last seen tearing his hair because someone had told him that it's not technically a Deep unless it's over twenty-five thousand.'
'For present purposes the danger area is being reckoned as anything over four thousand,' said Dr Matet.
'What? I exclaimed, wildly.
'Fathoms,' added Dr Matet.
'Twenty-four thousand feet, darling. You multiply by six,' said Phyllis, kindly. She ignored my thanks, and went on to Dr Matet:
'And what depth did you advise as marking the danger area, Doctor?'
'How do you know I did not advise four thousand fathoms, Mrs Watson?'
'Use of the passive, Doctor Matet "is being reckoned,"' Phyllis told him, smiling sweetly.
'And there are people who claim that French is the subtle language,' he said. 'Well, I'll admit that I recommended that three thousand five hundred should be regarded as the safe maximum, but the shipping interests were all for keeping the extra distances involved as low as possible.'
'Isn't this supposed to be a Naval Conference?' Phyllis asked.
'Oh, they have the real say on strategy, of course, but this was in the first general session. And, anyway, the Navies agreed. You see, the more sea they declare unsafe, the worse it is for their prestige.'
'Oh, dear. Oh, dear. Is it going to be one of those Conferences?' said Phyllis.