Unconditional surrender (9 page)

Next morning Kerstie came early to Virginia’s room.

‘Mrs Bristow’s here,’ she said. ‘I can hear her banging about. I’ll go down and tackle her. You keep out of it.’

Virginia did not take long preparing herself for these days. There was no longer the wide choice in her wardrobe or the expensive confusion on her dressing-table. She was ready dressed, sitting on her bed waiting, fiddling with her file at a broken fingernail, when Kerstie at length came back to her.

‘Well, that was all right.’

‘Mrs Bristow can save me?’

‘I didn’t let on it was you. I rather think she suspects Brenda and she’s always had a soft spot for her. She was most sympathetic. Not at all like Dr Puttock. She knows just the man. Several of her circle have been to him and say he’s entirely reliable. What’s more he only charges twenty-five pounds. I’m afraid he’s a foreigner.’

‘A refugee?’

‘Well, rather more foreign than that. In fact he’s black.’

‘Why should I mind?’ asked Virginia.

‘Some people might. Anyway, here’s the name and address. Dr Akonanga, 14 Blight Street, W2. That’s off the Edgware Road.’

‘Different from Brook Street.’

‘Yes and quarter the price. Mrs Bristow doesn’t think he has a telephone. The thing to do is go to his surgery early. He’s very popular in his district, Mrs Bristow says.’

An hour later Virginia was on the doorstep of number fourteen. No bombs had fallen in Blight Street. It was a place of lodging houses and mean tobacconists, that should have been alive with children. Now the Pied Piper of the state schools had led them all away to billets and ‘homes’ in the country, and only the elderly and the slatternly remained of its inhabitants. The word ‘Surgery’ was lettered on what had once been a shop window. A trousered woman, with her hair in a turban, was smoking at the door.

‘Do you know if Dr Akonanga is at home?’

‘He’s gone.’

‘Oh dear.’ Virginia suffered again all the despair of the previous evening. Her hopes had never been firm or high. It was Fate. For weeks now she had been haunted by the belief that in a world devoted to destruction and slaughter this one odious life was destined to survive.

‘Been gone nearly a year. The government took him.’

‘You mean he’s in prison?’

‘Not him. Work of national importance. He’s a clever one, black as he may be. What it is, there’s things them blacks know what them don’t that’s civilized. That’s where they put him.’ She pointed to a card on the jamb of the door which read:
DR AKONANGA, nature-therapeutist and deep psychologist, has temporarily discontinued his practice. Parcels and messages to
and there followed an address two doors from the bombed house where she had peered into the darkness the evening before. ‘Brook Street? How odd.’

‘Gone up in the world,’ said the woman. ‘What I say, it takes a war for the clever ones to be appreciated.’

Virginia found a cab in the Edgware Road and drove to the new address, once a large private house, now in military occupation. A sergeant sat in the hall. ‘Can I see your pass, please?’

‘I’m looking for Dr Akonanga.’

‘Your pass, please.’

Virginia showed an identity card issued by HOO HQ. ‘That’s OK,’ said the sergeant. ‘You can’t miss him. We always know when the doctor’s at work. Hark.’

From high overhead at the top of the wide staircase came sounds which could only be the beat of a tom-tom. Virginia climbed towards it thinking of Trimmer who had endlessly, unendurably crooned ‘Night and Day’ to her. The beat of the drum seemed to be saying: ‘You, you, you.’ She reached the door behind which issued the jungle rhythm. It seemed otiose to add the feeble tap of her knuckles. She tried the handle and found herself locked out. There was a bell with the doctor’s name above it. She pressed. The drumming stopped. A key turned. Virginia was greeted by a small, smiling, nattily dressed Negro, not in his first youth; there was grey in his sparse little tangle of beard; he was wrinkled and simian and what should have been the whites of his eyes were the colour of Trimmer’s cigarette-stained fingers; from behind him there came a faint air blended of spices and putrefaction. His smile revealed many gold capped teeth.

‘Good morning. Come in. How are you? You have the scorpions?’

‘No,’ said Virginia, ‘no scorpions this morning.’

‘Pray come in.’

She stepped into a room whose conventional furniture was augmented with a number of hand-drums, a bright statue of the Sacred Heart, a cock, decapitated but unplucked, secured with nails to the table top, its wings spread open like a butterfly’s, a variety of human bones including a skull, a brass cobra of Benares ware, bowls of ashes, flasks from a chemical laboratory stoppered and holding murky liquids. A magnified photograph of Mr Winston Churchill glowered down upon the profusion of Dr Akonanga’s war-stores, but Virginia did not observe them in detail. It was the fowl that caught her attention.

‘You are not from HOO HQ?’ asked Dr Akonanga.

‘Yes, as a matter of fact I am. How did you guess?’

‘I have been expecting scorpions for three days. Major Allbright assured me they were being flown from Egypt. I explained they are an essential ingredient for one of my most valuable preparations.’

‘There’s always a delay nowadays in getting what one wants, isn’t there? I don’t know Major Allbright I’m afraid. Mrs Bristow sent me to you.’

‘Mrs Bristow? I am not sure I have the honour—’

‘I’ve come as a private patient,’ said Virginia. ‘You’ve treated lots of her friends. Women like myself,’ she explained with her high incorrigible candour, ‘who want to get rid of babies.’

‘Yes, yes. Perhaps a long time ago in what you would call the “piping days” of peace. All that is changed. I am now in the government service. General Whale would not like it if I resumed my private practice. Democracy is at stake.’

Virginia shifted her gaze from the headless fowl to the unfamiliar assembly of equipment. She noticed a copy of
No Orchids for Miss Blandish.

‘Dr Akonanga,’ she asked, ‘what can you think you are doing that is more important than me?’

‘I am giving Herr von Ribbentrop the most terrible dreams,’ said Dr Akonanga with pride and gravity.

What dreams troubled Ribbentrop that night, Virginia could not know. She dreamed she was extended on a table, pinioned, headless and covered with blood-streaked feathers, while a voice within her, from the womb itself, kept repeating: ‘You, you, you.’

LUDOVIC’S
command was stationed in a large, requisitioned villa in a still desolate area of Essex. The owners had been ready to move out when they saw and heard, a few flat fields away, the bulldozers move in to prepare the new aerodrome; a modest enough construction, a single cross of runway, a dozen huts, but enough to annihilate the silence they had sought there. They left behind them most of their furniture, and Ludovic’s quarters in what had been designed as the nurseries were equipped with all he required. He had never shared the taste of Sir Ralph and his friends for bric-à-brac. There was a certain likeness between his office and Mr Crouchback’s sitting-room at Matchet, without the characteristic smell of pipe and retriever. Ludovic did not smoke and he had never owned a dog.

When he was appointed, he was told: ‘It’s no business of yours who your “clients” are or where they are going. You simply have to see they’re comfortable during the ten days they spend with you. Incidentally, you will be able to make yourself pretty comfortable too. I don’t imagine the change will be unwelcome’ – looking at his file – ‘after your experiences in the Middle East.’

For all his tutelage under Sir Ralph Brompton in the arts of peace Ludovic lacked Jumbo Trotter’s zest for comfort and his ingenuity in pursuing it. He shared a batman with his staff-captain, Fremantle; his belt and boots always shone. He cherished an old trooper’s fetish for leather. His establishment drew a special scale of rations, for it catered for ‘clients’ who were taking vigorous physical exercise and suffering, most of them, from nervous anxiety. Ludovic ate heavily but without discrimination. His life was the life of the mind and there was little to occupy it in his official duties. The staff-captain had charge of administration; three athletic officers performed the training and these brave young men went in fear of Ludovic. They had less information even than he about the identity of their pupils. They did not know even the initial letters of the departments they served, and they believed, rightly, that when they visited the market town, security police in plain clothes offered them drinks and tried to draw them into indiscretion on the subject of their employment. They reported at the end of each course on the prowess of their ‘clients’. Ludovic transcribed and where necessary paraphrased their verdicts and forwarded them in a nest of envelopes to the sponsors.

One morning at the end of November he settled to this, which was almost his only task. Training reports lay on his desk.
PT OK
, he read,
but a nervous type. Got worse. Had to be pushed out for last jump. NBG.
–
His excellent physique is not matched by psychological stamina
, he wrote. Then he consulted Roget and under the heading of Prospective Affections found: ‘Cowardice, pusillanimity, poltroonery, dastardness, abject fear, funk, dunghill-cock, coistril, nidget, Bob Acres, Jerry Sneak.’

‘Nidget’ was a new word. He moved to the dictionary and found: ‘
Nidget
; an idiot. A triangular horseshoe used in Kent and Sussex.’ Not applicable. ‘Dunghill-cock’ was good, but perhaps too strong. Major Hound had been a dunghill-cock. He tried ‘coistril’ and found only: ‘
Coistrel
: a groom, knave, base fellow’ and the quotation: ‘the swarming rabble of our coistrell curates.’

His eyes followed the columns, like a prospector’s panning for gold. Everywhere in the dross of ‘coition … cojuror … colander’ nuggets gleamed. ‘
Coke-upon-Littleton
: cant name of a mixed drink …’ – He seldom frequented the bar in the anteroom. He could hardly call for Coke-upon-Littleton. Perhaps it could be used in rebuke. ‘Fremantle, it seemed to me you had had one too many Cokes-upon-Littleton last night.’ – ‘Coke’ he noted was pronounced ‘cook’. ‘Colaphize: to buffet and knock …’; and so browsed happily until recalled to his duties by the entrance of his staff-captain with an envelope marked ‘secret’. He hastily completed the report:
Failed to eradicate faults in training. Not recommended for active operations
, and signed at the foot of the sheet.

‘Thank you, Fremantle,’ he said. ‘You can take the confidential reports, seal them and give them to the despatch rider to take back. What did you think of our last batch?’

‘Not up to much.’

‘A rabble of coistrell curates?’

‘Sir?’

‘Never mind.’

Each batch of ‘clients’ left early in the morning to be succeeded by the next in the late afternoon two days later. The intervening period was one of ease for the staff when, if they were in funds, they could go to London. Only the chief instructor, who was a man of few pleasures, remained on duty that day. He did not like to be long parted from the gymnastic apparatus in which the station abounded, and was resting in the ante-room from a vigorous hour on the trapeze when the staff-captain found him. He refused a drink. The staff-captain mixed himself a pink gin at a bar, scrupulously entered it in the ledger, and said after a pause:

‘Don’t you think the old man is getting rather rum lately?’

‘I don’t see much of him.’

‘Can’t understand half he says these days.’

‘He had a bad time escaping from Crete. Weeks in an open boat. Enough to make anyone rum.’

‘He was babbling about curates just now.’

‘Religious mania, perhaps,’ said the chief instructor. ‘He doesn’t give me any trouble.’

Upstairs Ludovic opened the envelope, removed the roll of the ‘clients’ arriving next day and scanned it cursorily. An all military batch he noted. He had only one slight cause of uneasiness. So much remained from his early training that he would not have liked to find an officer of the Household Cavalry under his command. This had not occurred yet, nor did it now. But there was a name of more evil omen. The list was alphabetically arranged and at its head stood: ‘Crouchback, G. T/Y Capt. RCH.’

Even in the moment of horror his new vocabulary came pat. There was one fine word which exactly defined his condition: ‘Colaphized’. It carried a subtle echo, unsupported by its etymology, of ‘collapse’.

To be struck twice in a month after two years’ respite; to be struck where he should have been most sheltered, in the ivory tower of avant garde letters, in the keep of his own seemingly impregnable fastness, was a disaster beyond human calculation. He had read enough of psychology to be familiar with the word ‘trauma’; to know that to survive injury without apparent scar gave no certainty of abiding health. Things had happened to Ludovic in the summer of 1941, things had been done by him, which, the ancients believed, provoked a doom. Not only the ancients; most of mankind, independently, cut off from all communications with one another, had discovered and proclaimed this grim alliance between the powers of darkness and justice. Who was Ludovic, Ludovic questioned, to set his narrow, modern scepticism against the accumulated experience of the species?

He opened his dictionary and read: ‘
Doom
: irrevocable destiny (usually of adverse fate), final fate, destruction, ruin, death.’ He turned to Roget and found ‘Nemesis: Eumenides; keep the wound green;
lex talionis
; ruthless; unforgiving, inexorable; implacable, remorseless.’ His sacred scriptures offered no comfort that morning.

At the same time as Ludovic was contemplating the arcane operation of Nemesis in the lowlands of Essex, Kerstie was causing dismay in Eaton Terrace by revealing the effects of causality in the natural order.

Ian had returned from his tour of the Highlands. He had dismissed his party of journalists on the platform at Edinburgh and delayed a night to visit his mother at the castellated dwelling on the Ayrshire coast which his grandfather, the first baron, had built as the family seat. The main building had been requisitioned and, though massive, was being eroded by soldiers. The Dowager Lady Kilbannock lived in the factor’s house and there gratefully entertained Ian’s sons in their school holidays. It was his first visit since the beginning of the war. He was still savouring the unaccustomed warmth of his welcome.

He had arrived in London that morning but had no intention of reporting back to his office until afternoon. Virginia was there to help his depleted secretariat deal with the telephone. He had bathed after his night journey, shaved, and breakfasted, lit a cigar from a box given him by his mother, and was prepared for an easy morning, when Kerstie had joined him. The cipher clerks worked irregular hours according to the press of business. She had been on night shift and returned home hoping for a bath. She was not pleased to find that Ian had used all the hot water. In her vexation she sprang the news of Virginia’s predicament.

Ian’s first words were: ‘Good God. At her age. After all her experience;’ and then: ‘Well, she can’t have it here.’

‘She’s in an odd mood,’ said Kerstie. ‘She seems to have lost all her spirit. The country must still be teeming with helpful doctors or for that matter midwives. I believe a lot of them make a bit on the side that way. She happens to have struck it unlucky twice. Now she’s just given up trying. Talks about Fate.’

Ian drew deeply at his cigar, wondered why Scotland was still stocked with commodities that had long disappeared from the south, then turned gentler thoughts towards Virginia. He had momentarily seen himself as a figure of melodrama driving her from his door. Now he said:

‘Has she thought of the Loot?’

‘As a doctor?’

‘No, no. As a husband. She should marry someone. That’s what a lot of girls do, who funk an operation.’

‘I don’t think the Loot likes women.’

‘He’s always about with them. But he wouldn’t really do. What she needs is a chap who’s just off to Burma or Italy. Lots of chaps marry on embarkation leave. She needn’t announce the happy event until a suitable time. When he comes home, if he does come home, he won’t be likely to ask to see its birth certificate. He’ll be proud as Punch to find a child to greet him. It happens all the time.’ He smoked in silence before the gas fire, while Kerstie went up to change and wash in cold water. When she returned, wearing one of Virginia’s 1939 suits, he was still thinking of Virginia.

‘How about Guy Crouchback?’ he asked.

‘How about him?’

‘I mean as a husband. He’s off to Italy quite soon, I believe.’

‘What a disgusting idea. I like Guy.’

‘Oh, so do I. Old friends. But he’s been keen on Virginia. She told me he made a pass at her when she first came back to London. They were saying in Bellamy’s that he’s been left a lot of money lately. Come to think of it, he was once married to Virginia in the remote ages. You’d better put the idea into her head. Let it lie there and fructify. She’ll do the rest. But she must look sharp.’

‘Ian, you absolutely nauseate me.’

‘Well perhaps I’d better have a word with her at the office as her boss. Got to see to the welfare of one’s command.’

‘There are times I really detest you.’

‘Yes, so does Virginia. Well, who else do you suggest for her? I dare say one of the Americans would be the best bet. The trouble is that, from the litter of contraceptives they leave everywhere, it looks as though they lacked strong philoprogenitive instincts.’

‘You couldn’t get Trimmer recalled?’

‘And undo the work of months? Not on your life. Besides Virginia hates him more than anyone. She wouldn’t marry him, if he came to her in his kilt escorted by bagpipes. He fell in love with her, remember? That was what sickened her. He used to sing “Night and Day” about her, to
me
. “Like the beat, beat, beat of the tom-tom, when the jungle shadows fall.” It was excruciating.’

Kerstie sat close to Ian by the fireplace in the cloud of rich smoke. It was not affection that drew her but the warmth of the feeble blue flames.

‘Why don’t you go to Bellamy’s,’ she asked, ‘and talk to your beastly friends there?’

‘Don’t want to run into anyone from HOO HQ. Officially I’m still in Scotland.’

‘Well, I’m going to sleep. I don’t want to talk any more.’

‘Just as you like. Cheer up,’ he added, ‘if she can’t qualify for a ward for officers’ wives, I believe there are special state maternity homes now for unmarried factory-girls. Indeed, I know there are. Trimmer visited one during his Industrial Tour and was a great success there.’

‘Can you imagine Virginia going to one of them?’

‘Better than her staying here. Far better.’

Kerstie did not sleep long but when she came downstairs at noon, she found that the lure of Bellamy’s had proved stronger than Ian’s caution and that the house was empty save for Mrs Bristow who was crowning her morning’s labour with a cup of tea and a performance on the wireless of ‘Music while you Work’.

‘Just off, ducks,’ she said using a form of address that had become prevalent during the blitz. ‘I’ve got a friend says she can give me another doctor as might help your friend.’

‘Thank you, Mrs Bristow.’

‘Only he lives in Canvey Island. Still you can’t find things where you want them now, can you ducks? Not with the war.’

‘No, alas.’ 

‘Well, I’ll bring the name tomorrow. So long.’

Kerstie did not think Canvey Island a promising resort and was confirmed in this opinion when, a few minutes later, Virginia telephoned from her office.

‘Canvey Island? Where’s that?’

‘Somewhere near Southend I think.’

‘That’s out.’

‘It’s Mrs Bristow’s last hope.’

‘
Canvey Island.
Anyway, that’s not what I rang up about. Tell me, does Ian know about me?’

‘I think he does.’

‘You told him?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘Oh, I don’t mind but, listen, he’s just done something very odd. He’s asked me to lunch with him. Can you explain that?’

‘No, indeed not.’

‘It’s not as though he didn’t see all too much of me every day at home and in the office. He says he wants to talk to me privately. Do you think it’s about my trouble?’

‘I suppose it might be.’

‘Well, I’ll tell you all about it when I come back.’

Kerstie considered the matter. She was a woman with moral standards which her husband did not share. Finally she tried to telephone to Guy but a strange voice answered from the shade of the megalosaurus saying that Captain Crouchback had been posted to another department and was inaccessible.