“The mail, sir,’ reported the orderly.
‘Better leave that for Major de Souza in the morning. You know he’s taking command here now?’
‘Yes, we got the buzz from the air force. Two personal for you, sir.’
Guy took the flimsy air-mail forms that were then the sole means of communication. One, he noted, was from Virginia, the other from Angela.
Virginia’s letter was undated but had clearly been written some six weeks ago.
Clever Peregrine tells me he managed to persuade them to accept a telegram for you announcing the Birth. I hope it arrived. You can’t trust telegrams any more. Anyway it is born and I am feeling fine and everyone especially Angela is being heavenly. Sister Jennings – Jenny to me – says it is a fine baby. We have rather an embarrassing joke about Jenny and gin and my saying she is like Mrs Gamp – at least it embarrasses other people. I think it quite funny as jokes with nurses go. It’s been baptized already. Eloise Plessington who believe it or not is now my great new friend was godmother. I’ve made a lot of new friends since you went away in fact I’m having a very social time. An intellectual who says he knows you called Everard something brought me a smoked salmon from Ruben’s. And a lemon! Where does Ruben get them? Magic. I hope you are enjoying your foreign tour wherever you are and forgetting all the beastliness of London. Ian talks of visiting you. How? Longing for you to be back. V.
Angela’s letter was written a month later:
I have dreadful news for you. Perhaps I should have tried to telegraph but Arthur said there was no point as there was nothing you could do. Well, be prepared. Now. Virginia has been killed. Peregrine too and Mrs Corner. One of the new doodle bombs landed on Carlisle Place at ten in the morning yesterday. Gervase is safe with me. They were all killed instantly. All Peregrine’s ‘collection’ destroyed. It was Virginia’s idea that I should have Gervase and keep him safe. We think we shall be able to get Virginia and Peregrine taken down to Broome and buried there but it is not easy. I had Mass said for them here this morning. There will be another in London soon for friends. I won’t attempt to say what I feel about this except that now more than ever you are in my prayers. You have had a difficult life, Guy, and it seemed things were at last going to come right for you. Anyway you have Gervase. I wish papa had lived to know about him. I wish you had seen Virginia these last weeks. She was still her old sweet gay self of course but there was a difference. I was getting to understand why you loved her and to love her myself. In the old days I did not understand.
As Arthur says there is really nothing for you to do here. I suppose you could get special leave home but I expect you will prefer to go on with whatever you are doing.
The news did not affect Guy greatly; less, indeed, than the arrival of Frank de Souza and the jeep and the ‘Praesidium’; far less than the departure of his two Jewish protégés. The answer to the question that had agitated Kerstie Kilbannock (and others of his acquaintance) – what had been his relations with Virginia during their brief cohabitation in Uncle Peregrine’s flat? – was simple enough. Guy had hobbled into the lift after their return as man and wife from the registrar’s office and had gone back to bed. There Virginia had joined him and with gentle, almost tender, agility adapted her endearments to his crippled condition. She was, as always, lavish with what lay in her gift. Without passion or sentiment but in a friendly, cosy way they had resumed the pleasures of marriage and in the weeks while his knee mended the deep old wound in Guy’s heart and pride healed also, as perhaps Virginia had intuitively known that it might do. January had been a month of content; a time of completion, not of initiation. When Guy was passed fit for active service and his move-order was issued, he had felt as though he were leaving a hospital where he had been skilfully treated, a place of grateful memory to which he had no particular wish to return. He did not mention Virginia’s death to Frank then or later.
Frank came to the farmhouse at dawn, accompanied by two partisans and talking to them cheerfully in Serbo-Croat. Guy had waited up for him, but dozed. Now he greeted him and showed him his quarters. The widows appeared with offers of food, but Frank said: ‘I’ve had no sleep for thirty-six hours. When I wake up I’ve a lot to tell you, uncle,’ raised a clenched fist to the partisans and shut his door.
The sun was up, the farm was alive. The partisan sentries changed guard. Presently the men of the British Mission stood in the bright yard shaving. Bakic breakfasted apart on the steps of the kitchen. The bell in the church tower rang three times, paused and rang three times again. Guy went there on Sundays, never during the week. Sunday Mass was full of peasants. There was always a half-hour sermon that was unintelligible to Guy whose study of Serbo-Croat had made little progress. When the old priest climbed into the pulpit, Guy wandered outside and the partisan police pressed forward so as not to miss a word. When the liturgy was resumed Guy returned; they retired to the back shunning the mystery.
Now the sacring bell recalled Guy to the duty he owed his wife.
‘Sergeant,’ he said, ‘what rations have we got to spare?’
‘Plenty since last night.’
‘I thought of taking a small present to someone in the village.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait and ask the major, sir? There’s an order not to give anything to the natives.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
He crossed the yard to the Air Force quarters. Things were freer and more easy there. Indeed the Squadron Leader did a modest and ill-concealed barter trade with the peasants and had assembled a little collection of Croatian arts and crafts to take home to his wife.
‘Help yourself, old boy.’
Guy put a tin of bully beef and some bars of chocolate into his haversack and walked to the church.
The old priest was back in his presbytery, alone and brushing the bare stone floor with a besom. He knew Guy by sight though they had never attempted to converse. Men in uniform boded no good to the parish.
Guy saluted as he entered, laid his offering on the table. The priest looked at the present with surprise; then broke into thanks in Serbo-Croat. Guy said: ‘Facilius loqui latine. Hoc est pro Missa. Uxor mea mortua est.’
The priest nodded. ‘Nomen?’
Guy wrote Virginia’s name in capitals in his pocket book and tore out the page. The priest put on his spectacles and studied the letters. ‘Non es partisan?’
‘Miles Anglicus sum.’
‘Catholicus?’
‘Catholicus.’
‘Et uxor tua?’
‘Catholica.’
It did not sound a likely story. The priest looked again at the food, at the name on the sheet of paper, at Guy’s battle-dress which he knew only as the uniform of the partisans. Then: ‘Cras. Hora septem.’ He held up seven fingers.
‘Gratias.’
‘Gratias tibi. Dominus tecum.’
When Guy left the presbytery he turned into the adjoining church. It was a building with the air of antiquity which no one but a specialist could hope to date. No doubt there had been a church here from early times. No doubt parts of that structure survived. Meanwhile it had been renovated and repainted and adorned and despoiled, neglected and cosseted through the centuries. Once when Begoy was a watering place it had enjoyed seasons of moderately rich patronage. Now it had reverted to its former use. There was at that moment a peasant woman in the local antiquated costume, kneeling upright on the stones before the side altar, her arms extended, making no doubt her thanksgiving for communion. There were a few benches, no chairs. Guy genuflected and then stood to pray asking mercy for Virginia and for himself. Although brought up to it from the nursery, he had never been at ease with the habit of reciting the prayers of the Church for particular intentions. He committed Virginia’s soul – ‘repose’ indeed, seemed the apt petition – to God in the colloquial monologue he always employed when praying; like an old woman, he sometimes ruefully thought, talking to her cat.
He remained standing with his eyes on the altar
for five minutes. When he turned he saw Bakic standing behind him, watching intently. The holy water stoup was dry. Guy genuflected at the door and went out into the sunlight. Bakic was standing by.
‘What do you want?’
‘I thought maybe you want to talk to somebody.’
‘I don’t require an interpreter when I say my prayers,’ Guy said. But later he wondered, did he?
The bodies of Virginia, Uncle Peregrine, and Mrs Corner were recovered from the debris of Bourne Mansions intact and recognizable, but the official impediments to removing them to Broome (Mrs Corner, too, came from that village) proved too many for Arthur Box-Bender. He had them buried by the river at Mortlake where there was a plot acquired by one of the family in the last century and never used. It lay in sight of Burton’s stucco tent. The requiem was sung a week later in the Cathedral. Everard Spruce did not attend either service but he read the list of mourners aloud to Frankie and Coney.
He had met Virginia only in the last weeks of her life but he had long enjoyed a vicarious acquaintance with her from the newspapers. Like many men of the left he had been an assiduous student of ‘society gossip’ columns, a taste he excused by saying that it was his business to know the enemy’s order of battle. Lately in the decline of social order he had met on friendly terms some of these figures of oppression and frivolity – old Ruby, for instance, at the Dorchester – and many years later, when he came to write his memoirs, he gave the impression that he had frequented their houses in their heyday. Already he was beginning to believe that Virginia was an old and valued friend.
‘Who are all these people?’ asked Coney. ‘What’s the point of them? All I know about Mrs Crouchback is that you gave her enough smoked salmon to keep us for a week.’
‘Before we’d even had a nibble at it,’ said Frankie.
‘And a lemon,’ said Coney.
The flying bombs had disturbed the good order of the Survival office. Two of the secretaries had gone to the country. Frankie and Coney remained but they were less docile than of old. The bombs came from the south-east and were plain in view in the wide open sky of the river. All seemed to be directed at the house in Cheyne Row. They distracted the girls from their duty in serving and revering Spruce. His manner towards them had become increasingly schoolmasterly, the more so as his own nerves were not entirely calm. He was like a schoolmaster who fears that a rag is brewing.
He spoke now with an effort of authority:
‘Virginia Troy was the last of twenty years’ succession of heroines,’ he said. ‘The ghosts of romance who walked between the two wars.’
He took a book from his shelves and read: ‘She crossed the dirty street, placing her feet with a meticulous precision one after the other in the same straight line as though she were treading a knife edge between goodness only knew what invisible gulf. Floating she seemed to go, with a little spring in every step and the skirt of her summery dress – white it was, with a florid pattern printed in black all over it – blowing airily round her swaying march. I bet neither of you know who wrote that. You’ll say Michael Arlen.’
‘I won’t,’ said Coney; ‘I’ve never heard of him.’
‘Never heard of Iris Storm “that shameless, shameful lady” dressed pour le sport? “I am a house of men,” she said. I read it at school where it was forbidden. It still touches a nerve. What is adolescence without trash? I dare say you’ve not heard of Scott Fitzgerald either.’
‘Omar Khayyam?’ suggested Frankie.
‘No. Anyway the passage I read, believe it or not, is Aldous Huxley 1922. Mrs Viveash. Hemingway coarsened the image with his Bret, but the type persisted – in books and in life. Virginia was the last of them – the exquisite, the doomed, and the damning, with expiring voices – a whole generation younger. We shall never see anyone like her again in literature or in life and I’m very glad to have known her.’
Coney and Frankie looked at each other with mutiny in their eyes.
‘Perhaps you are going to say “the mould has been broken”,’ said Coney.
‘If I wish to, I shall,’ said Spruce petulantly. ‘Only the essentially commonplace are afraid of clichés.’
Coney burst into tears at this rebuke. Frankie held her ground. ‘Exquisite, doomed, damning, with an expiring voice,’ she said. ‘It sound more like the heroine of Major Ludovic’s dreadful Death Wish.’
Then another bomb droned overhead and they fell silent until it passed.
The same bomb passed near Eloise Plessington’s little house where she was sitting with Angela Box-Bender. Directly overhead, it seemed, the engine cut out. The two women sat silent until they heard the explosion many streets away.
‘It is a terrible thing to admit,’ said Eloise, ‘but, whenever that happens, I pray, “Please God don’t let it fall on me.”’
‘Who doesn’t?’
‘But, Angela, that means, “Please God let it fall on someone else.”’
‘Not necessarily. It might land on Hampstead Heath.’
‘One ought to pray, “Please God let it fall on me and no one else.”’
‘Don’t be a goose, Eloise.’
These two women of the same age had known each other since girlhood. Charles Plessington had been one of the young men who seemed suitable for Angela to marry. He came of the same little band of landed recusant families as herself. She, however, had confounded the match-makers of the Wiseman Club by preferring the Protestant and plebeian Box-Bender. Eloise married Charles and became not only a Catholic but a very busy one. Her sons were adult and well married; her only family problem was her daughter, Domenica, now aged 25, who had tried her vocation in a convent, failed, and now drove a tractor on the home farm, an occupation which had changed her appearance and manner. From having been shy and almost excessively feminine, she was now rather boisterous, trousered, and muddied and full of the rough jargon of the stockyard.
‘What were we talking about?’
‘Virginia.’
‘Of course. I’d got very fond of her this winter and spring but, you know, I can’t regard her death as pure tragedy. There’s a special providence in the fall of a bomb. God forgive me for thinking so, but I was never quite confident her new disposition would last. She was killed at the one time in her life when she could be sure of heaven – eventually.’
‘One couldn’t help liking her,’ said Angela.
‘Will Guy mind awfully?’
‘Who can say? The whole thing was very puzzling. She’d begun the baby, you know, before they were re-married.’
‘So I supposed.’
‘I really know Guy very little. He’s been abroad so much. I always imagined he had completely got over her.’
‘They seemed happy enough together that last bit.’
‘Virginia knew how to make people happy if she wanted to.’
‘And what is to become of my godson?’
‘What indeed? I suppose I shall have to look after him. Arthur won’t like that at all.’
‘I’ve sometimes thought of adopting a baby,’ said Eloise, ‘a refugee orphan or something like that. You know the empty nurseries seem a reproach when there are so many people homeless. It would be an interest for Domenica, too – take her mind off swill and slag.’
‘Are you proposing to adopt Gervase?’
‘Well, not adopt of course, not legally, not give him our name or anything like that, but just look after him until Guy gets back and can make a home for him. What do you think of the idea?’
‘It’s wonderfully kind. Arthur would be immensely relieved. I’d have to ask Guy, of course.’
‘But there would be no objection to my taking him to visit me while we’re waiting for an answer.’
‘None that I can see. He’s a perfectly nice baby, you know, but Arthur does so hate having him at home.’
‘Here comes another of those beastly bombs.’
‘Just pray, “Please God let it be a dud and not explode at all.”’
It was
not a dud. It did explode but far from Westminster in a street already destroyed by earlier bombs and now quite deserted.
‘You’ve read The Death Wish?’ Spruce asked.
‘Bits. It’s pure novelette.’
‘Novelette? It’s twice the length of Ulysses. Not many publishers have enough paper to print it nowadays. I read a lot of it last night. I can’t sleep with those damned bombs. Ludovic’s Death Wish has got something you know.’
‘Something very bad.’
‘Oh, yes, bad; egregriously bad. I shouldn’t be surprised to see it a great success.’
‘Hardly what we expected from the author of the aphorisms.’
‘It is an interesting thing,’ said Spruce, ‘but very few of the great masters of trash aimed low to start with. Most of them wrote sonnet sequences in youth. Look at Hall Caine – the protégé of Rossetti – and the young Hugh Walpole emulating Henry James. Dorothy Sayers wrote religious verse. Practically no one ever sets out to write trash. Those that do don’t get very far.’
‘Another bomb.’
It was the same bomb as had disturbed Angela and Eloise. Spruce and Frankie did not pray. They moved away from the windows.
Frank de Souza kept partisan hours, sleeping all the morning, talking at night. On his first day he appeared at lunch-time.
‘Better quarters than I’m used to,’ he said. ‘Until a few days ago I was living in a cave in Bosnia. But we shall have to do some quick work making them more comfortable. We’ve got a distinguished party coming to visit us. If I may, I’ll leave the arrangements to you. I put the General and the Commissar in the picture last night. You’ll find them very ready to help.’
‘Perhaps you’d put me in the picture.’
‘It’s a very pretty picture – an oil painting. Everything is moving our way at last. First, the Praesidium – that’s the new government – ministers of education, culture, transport – the whole bag of tricks. Officially, it is temporary, de facto, ad hoc, and so forth pending ratification by plebiscite. I don’t suppose you saw much of them last night – they’re a scratch lot collected from Vis and Montenegro and Bari. Two of them are duds we had to take on as part of the deal with the London Serbs. The real power, of course, will remain with the partisan military leaders. The Praesidium is strictly for foreign consumption. Now I’ll tell you something highly confidential. Only the General and the Commissar know. It mustn’t get to the ears of the Praesidium for a day or two. Tito’s in Italy. He’s a guest of honour at allied headquarters in Caserta and from what I picked up from Joe Cattermole I gather it’s on the cards he’s going to meet Winston. If he does, he’ll make rings round him.’