Anglo-Saxon Attitudes (27 page)

'Oh, I know, but I've been rather silly lately, thrusting Lionel Stokesay's views down everyone's throat. He was far too great an historian to need my canvassing for him. Anything he did that's disputed will be vindicated sooner or later without my help.' She smiled roguishly at Sir Edgar. 'No, Gerald, I would like to do the chapter for you on the development of royal administration down to the fourteenth century. I'll limit myself to the Exchequer, if you prefer that, but I'd like to do the whole bag of tricks really - Exchequer, Chancery, Wardrobe, and all. I've got a demon in me to get down to some really hard work.' She paused for a moment and then looked at Gerald. 'I think you'll find I'll do good work for you,' she said. 'You mustn't judge by the last few years. I haven't been at all well, you know.'

It was Sir Edgar who answered her. 'It's wonderful to see you yourself again,' he said. Gerald felt that he had failed in not replying first, so he tried to make up the deficiency by the warmth with which he said, 'My dear Rose.'

Rose Lorimer fumbled again in her handbag for a moment and both men were horrified lest she should start to cry. Gerald said quickly, 'Why don't you dine with me, Rose, and discuss the details? It's far too long since you were my guest.'

'Oh dear! how I should have loved to.' She turned to Sir Edgar. 'To have to refuse one of Gerald's magnificent dinners! But I'm going to supper with the Robertses. Have you been there, Gerald? They have such a pleasant little flat in Cromwell Road. Betty Roberts has been so kind to me. They've told me to make it a second home. Of course, we've been brought together by our common interest in Pforzheim's work, and now that Jasper Stringwell-Anderson has gone over to Heligoland, I hear all the new developments through the letters he writes to Theo Roberts. ...'

Gerald interrupted her excited flow. 'I can't think what's possessed Jasper to go flying off to Heligoland of all places at this moment. In term too. I particularly wanted his help in compiling the editorial rules.'

Sir Edgar raised his eyebrows. 'The poor chap
has
got a Sabbatical and the work there is rather important on any grounds,' he said. 'For the English historian it must have peculiar importance because of the possible new light it throws on Melpham. By the way, Middleton, Pforzheim wants to get your first-hand account of the excavation there.'

Gerald was perplexed by all these references to the Heligoland excavations, but he had determined resolutely not to open the question of Melpham to his conscience, so he said rather grimly, 'Maybe. I don't know. I can't tell him anything anyway. My ankle was sprained.'

Rose was deterred by his expression from questioning him further; she contented herself by saying, 'Well, it doesn't really matter now. Everything's going along so nicely. I'm convinced that we're only at the beginning of even more extraordinary finds.' She, too, seemed to have agreed with herself upon censored topics, for she pulled up short and remarked with a cosy smile, 'But what's so wonderful for me is the way that it's brought me into touch with people again, especially the young people. I'd got badly cut off, you know. But they're so awfully kind, Sir Edgar. Mr Stringwell-Anderson took me to a restaurant in Soho. He knows almost as much about food as you do, Gerald. Do you know
Shaslik?
Well, we had that. Rather highly seasoned, but then it's oriental. Theo Roberts said he preferred a good mince.' She laughed in reminiscence of the unwonted world of wit and sparkle in which she now lived. 'They took me to see this new Italian actress Magnani. Such a wonderful film about peasants. It took me back to my holiday in Assisi. Of course, I used to love the cinema, but I'd quite stopped going. It's all new names now and cowboys. I used not to like cowboys, but they do take one out of oneself. But this evening I'm taking the Robertses to something
they've
never seen - Duvivier's
Joan of Arc.
I do so hope they like it, because I shall certainly weep myself. Theo's coming here to fetch me in his little Austin. Is that all right, Sir Edgar?'

The old man came to suddenly from a half-sleep. He reflected that the price of Rose's return to normality was inevitably tedious. Gerald, too, was wondering, as he had so often in the past, how so childish a mind could be so accurate, so painstaking, and, yes, so intelligent when it came to the study of the Middle Ages.

A moment later the manservant announced that Gerald's car was waiting for him. 'I'm sorry to miss Theo,' Gerald said. 'Tell him to get in touch with me as soon as he can. "Why don't you lunch with me on Friday, Rose?'  He had no engagement that prevented him from waiting to see Theo, yet he felt unwilling to witness the material evidence of Rose's new-found friendships. He suddenly knew envy for the easy happiness with which she had returned to life, while his own return was so lonely and uneasy.

As the Daimler was held up in a traffic block near the Brompton Oratory, Gerald saw with pleasure a tall, dark girl walking ahead of them towards Knightsbridge. He followed the curve of her hips beneath her tight black skirt, and her thighs as they rubbed their vigorous way forward.

It was only when he had put his lust aside with vexation and regret, telling himself in compensation how unattractively fat she would soon become, that he realized that it was his son John's secretary, Elvira Portway. He leaned forward and told Larwood to draw up beside her. He peered out into the cold, darkening air, 'How are you?'  he asked. He enjoyed for a moment the trembling of her body as she was jostled from abstraction and the cold stare with which she evidently met cruising wolves.             

'Oh it's you,' she cried. 'I thought you were in Vienna or somewhere heavenly.'

'I was wishing I were still there until the evening rewarded me by meeting you,' he said.

She took the compliment as though its stilted conventionality had brought her face to face with old Q or Prirmy or some other long-dead satyr. 'Oh, it's just the same here as it always is,' she said. 'Nobody has anything new to say and everybody's going to bed with the same boring people as usual, or, if they aren't, it's worse.'

He wondered for a moment what the circle of society could be like that failed to entertain her. 'No one I know is going to bed with anyone,' he replied, 'but that's because they're so old.' Then, feeling that perhaps he was being a little comically sophisticated for an old man, he asked, 'How is my son?'

Elvira paused for a moment as though uncertain of what the words meant, then she cried, 'Oh!
Johnnie!
I've left him, you know. But I think he's all right. At least, as all right as he'll ever be. He's in the thick of this boring Pelican business still. There's a ghastly article of his about it in this evening's paper.'

There was a moment's silence, then Gerald said, 'I suppose you're full of engagements this evening.' He regretted the choice of words instantly but knew that any other would have been as bad.

'Oh! no,' she cried. 'Mondays are one of the evenings when we ...' She stopped and said, 'No, I'm going home to read the new Compton Burnett.'

The allusion was only vaguely familiar to Gerald. 'Would you care to dine with me?'  he asked.

'I'd love to,' she answered directly, and, when he asked her to choose a restaurant, she said, 'No, you do that thing. I'd much rather it was your choice.' He suggested Scott's, and she said, 'But that sounds absolutely the right thing.' He hoped that she was not going to put him in his place the whole evening. She rejected Larwood's offer of a fur rug and settling herself beside Gerald, she said, 'Do you do a lot of this picking up?'  He wondered if this meant what he hoped, but when he looked at her face, her expression was entirely perfunctory. He felt depressed, flattened. 'I don't often get such pleasant opportunities,' he said in a dulled voice.

'I believe it's usually salesmen,' she said. 'The gowns must get in the way so.' She pronounced 'gowns' in a comic cockney accent. He felt tired at the prospect of an evening's such superior, amusing talk.

When they got to Scott's, he dismissed Larwood for the evening. 'We can take a taxi,' he said. He saw her look of annoyance and regretted his action. He might, he supposed, have guessed that these intellectually snobbish young women would also be snobbish about money and social superiority.

'I wish you'd kept the car,' she said, as they sat down at their table; 'I like everything to be as luxurious as it can be. It's such a bore when people do things they don't have to.' Once again he warmed to her.

She chose oysters and lobster Delmonico. 'I suppose you'd better tell me now what's your attitude to Robin and me,' she remarked, picking at the torn quick of her thumb. Gerald looked blank. 'Oh God!' she cried, 'how boring! That's what I always do. I suppose it's being English. The English are the most ghastly egocentrics, aren't they?'  She took the evening paper from where it lay with her bag. 'I think perhaps it would be better if I read Johnnie's article to you in a funny voice. Do you like people imitating? I can do Johnnie rather well.' She began to read: '"I am delighted to hear that some Members of Parliament of both parties are to ask questions of the Government about the unfortunate mishandling of Mr Cressett's market-garden. More power to their elbow, I say."' Elvira read the phrase in a parody of John's schoolboy manner. 'Oh God!' she cried, 'isn't it hell?'  She continued reading: '"As a late member of the House of Commons, I welcome any movement that will reduce the danger of the oldest of all representative bodies becoming a mere rubber stamp. But make no mistake, this is not just a party matter. Those Labour members who use this issue as a stick to beat the Government are as much in the wrong, or almost as much so, as those tireless Tories who seek to use it in their selfish battle against nationalization and their self-interested attack on the Civil Service. The British are proud of their Civil Service and they have reason to be so. It is one of the finest instruments of government in the world today, but it is an instrument, not an agent. It is wrong that successive governments should have allowed civil servants the power to order the lives of citizens without redress. It is wrong of the citizens to permit it. It is unfair to the hard-worked civil servants to place them in such a position of power. The redress of Mr Cressett's ills is not an attack on individual civil servants, it is a demand that the Civil Service shall once again return to those traditions of service which have made it so respected. But we must never forget that behind all these matters of principle there lies the story of an individual. Cressett has no wish, I am sure, that his already trampled-upon market-garden should become the battle-ground of party politics. He wants only, in the words of Voltaire's
Candide,
to cultivate his garden or so much of it as is left to him." Oh! God!' cried Elvira,
'Candide!
Isn't it squalid?'

'I don't care for John's language, certainly,' Gerald replied, 'but as to the rights and wrongs of the case I haven't enough knowledge to judge.'

'But that's the whole
point.'
Elvira was almost shouting. 'There
isn't
any knowledge. It's just one of these awful British occasions for moralizing. You take up something where somebody's in the wrong and make an arbitrary decision about the goats and the sheep and then start making moral noises. It's just an English parlour game,' she said, twisting her hair with her fingers, 'and what's so
ghastly
is that it's got into our literature. It's all there in Morgan Forster and those people.'

Gerald noticed that the more vague the content of her words became the more emphasis she laid on them. 'You seem very much against English things,' said Gerald.

'But
of course
I am,' she cried. 'Any ordinary person who wants to lead a civilized life and who's even reasonably aware of literature and painting and so on
has
to be. It may be all right for scholars, I really don't know. And, of course, it's wonderful for geniuses. We all know about English Philistinism forcing geniuses into rebellion, killing Keats, and all that. But for ordinary civilized people like me it's simply ghastly.' She waved her fork at him menacingly. 'It's easy enough to make fun of the intelligentsia of Europe, their earnestness and their cafés, but at least they aren't provincial.
Every single
English intellectual is
provincial
and bloody,' she ended savagely.

She leaned back in her chair, her breasts swelling with indignation. That's the part
I
like, Gerald thought.

'Don't let's say any more about it. It's
too
ghastly,' she said. 'Can we have another bottle of wine?'  The arrival of the second bottle seemed a signal for her to relax. She lit a cigarette, turned sideways in her chair, and crossed her legs. Gerald decided that he would at least allow himself the pleasure of staring at them.

'I think really I'd better tell you all about Robin and me,' she said, blowing a cloud of smoke as though she were retreating in battle. 'You're almost certain to hear sooner or later. Though, goodness knows, I probably only say that because I can't conceive anybody not living on the gossip of my own little circle. It's probably some other reason entirely really - some awful English thing about my needing a father figure to confess it to. Anyhow, I
do
rather hope we may get to know each other, and there's a limit to hypocrisy, isn't there really?

At least, I mean, now it's not the nineteenth century, there is, isn't there? The awful thing is that it's almost impossible to say it in English, because the English always divide up sex and love so much that they haven't got any real words that do for both. All the awful people I know would say "going to bed with each other", but it isn't that only, and anyway that's an awful genteelism. In any respectable language I could say I was Robin's mistress and leave it at that, only in English that would mean either something commercial or a lot of nonsense about France and
l'amour.
Anyhow, that's what I
have
been for two years.'

Gerald could find no words but 'I see'.

'Oh, for God's sake, don't say silly things,' cried Elvira. 'Of course you can't see. Nobody can unless they're one of the two people concerned.'