Unconditional surrender (23 page)

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.’

‘Who’ll make rings round whom?’

‘Tito round Winston of course. The old boy is being briefed to meet a Garibaldi. He doesn’t know Tito’s a highly trained politician.’

‘Well, isn’t Winston Churchill?’

‘He’s an orator and a parliamentarian, uncle. Something quite different.

‘All we have to do now is to square the Yanks. Some of them are still a bit shy of left-wing parties. Not the President, of course, but the military. But we’ve persuaded them at this stage of the war the only relevant question is: who is doing the fighting? Mihajlovic’s boys were given a test – told to blow a bridge by a certain date. They did nothing. Too squeamish about reprisals. That’s never worried our side. The more the Nazis make themselves hated, the better for us. So Mihajlovic is definitely out. But the Yanks don’t like taking our intelligence reports on trust. Want to see for themselves. So they’re sending a general here to report back how hard the partisans are fighting.’

‘As far as I know, they aren’t.’

‘They will when the Yanks come. Just you wait and see.’

Guy said, ‘The thing that’s been worrying me most is the refugee problem.’

‘Oh yes, the Jews. I saw a file about them.’

‘Two went out last night. I hope they get proper attention in Bari.’

‘You can be sure they will. The Zionists have their own funds and their own contacts with UNRRA and allied headquarters. It isn’t really any business of ours.’

‘You talk like a partisan.’

‘I am a partisan, uncle. We have more important things to think about than these sectarian troubles. Don’t forget, I’m a Jew myself; so are three of the brighter members of the Praesidium. Jews have been valuable anti-fascist propaganda in America. Now’s the time to forget we’re Jews and simply remember we are anti-fascist. You might just as well start agitating Auchinleck about Scottish nationalism.’

‘I can’t feel like that about Catholics.’

‘Can’t you, uncle? Try.’

When Guy went to church next morning at seven there were two partisans on watch. The priest in his black chasuble was inaudible at the altar. The partisans watched Guy. When he went up to communion they followed and stood at the side, their sten guns slung from their shoulders. When they were sure that nothing but the host passed between Guy and the priest, they returned to their places, watched Guy saying his prayers for Virginia, and followed him back to the mission headquarters.

At luncheon that day de Souza’s first words were: ‘Uncle, what’s all this about you and the priest?’

‘I went to Mass this morning.’

‘Did you? That won’t be any help. You’ve upset the Commissar seriously, you know. They made a formal complaint last night saying you had been guilty of “incorrect” behaviour. They say you were seen yesterday giving the priest rations.’

‘That’s quite true.’

‘And passing a note.’

‘I simply gave him the name of someone who’s dead – what we call a “mass intention”.’

‘Yes, that’s what the priest told them. They’ve had the priest up and examined him. The old boy’s lucky not to be under arrest or worse. How could you be such an ass? He produced a bit of paper he said was your message. It had your name on it and nothing else.’

‘Not mine. Someone in my family.’

‘Well you can’t expect the Commissar to distinguish, can you? He naturally thought the priest was trying to put something over on them. They searched the presbytery but couldn’t find anything incriminating, except some chocolate. They confiscated that of course. But they’re suspicious still. You must have realized what the situation is here. If it wasn’t for our American guests they might have made real trouble. I had to point out to them that the general was not only going to report back about the fighting. He would also be asked what Begoy was like now it’s for the moment the capital of the country. If he found the church shut and cottoned on to the fact that the priest had just been removed, he might, I told them, just possibly get it into his noodle that this wasn’t exactly the liberal democracy he’s been led to expect. They saw the point in the end, but they took some persuading. They’re serious fellows our comrades. Don’t for goodness’ sake try anything like that again. As I said yesterday, this is no time for sectarian loyalties.’