We Saw The Sea (3 page)

Paul wanted to tell Anne the news immediately but there were disadvantages to telephoning her. She had only just passed her secretarial examinations and worked in a room full of girls under the supervision of a lady called Mrs Grant. Mrs Grant watched over her girls as zealously as though they were inmates of a Turkish seraglio and she allowed no private telephone calls during working hours and certainly none from young men. While Mrs Grant knew of no case where a seduction had actually taken place over the telephone she knew of many where the telephone had been the means to the end; she was determined that hers would be one typists’ pool at least which would not feature in the Sunday newspapers.

On second thoughts, Paul considered that it was worth trying. This was a special occasion, after all.

Paul dialled and waited. The telephone was answered by a Wagnerian voice which could only belong to Mrs Grant.

“The RossCommon-Rogers Copying Agency,” boomed The Voice, as though it were announcing the twilight of the gods.

“Is that Mrs Grant speaking?”

“It is.”

“Mrs Grant, how nice to have the opportunity of speaking to you! I’ve heard so much about you. . . “

“Young man, what do you want?”

“Well, I really wanted to speak to Miss Maconochie. . . .”

“Certainly not!”

“Please let me explain, Mrs Grant. This is her brother speaking and I have something to tell her which is extremely delicate and private. There’s been some trouble. . .”

“I see,” said Mrs Grant, in an ominous voice.

“Oh no, it’s nothing like that, I can assure you. . .

“Like what, young man?”

“It’s something she should know right away, ma’am. I’m sure you would understand if you knew the whole story.”

“Very well,” Mrs Grant said in a mollified tone. “Who shall I say is calling?”

“Mr Vin-Maconochie. Just say it’s Paul calling, please.”

“Paul?”

“Yes please, ma’am.”

Paul noticed that the clicking of typewriters in the background had stopped. He heard Mrs Grant calling out Anne’s name. He could imagine the other girls staring at each other at this unprecedented breach of the pool’s regulations. Then he heard Anne, breathless and nervous.

“Paul, you clown, I told you not. . .”

“Quiet, wench. We have matters of great pith and moment to discuss. First let me say that I love you. . . .”

“Paul,” Anne whispered desperately, “they’re all looking at me.”

“Let ’em look. Honey, my appointment has come. It’s to
Carousel
. She’s in the Far East.”

“The Far East! “

“Don’t shout. They’re all listening to you too, I don’t doubt. Meet me tonight and I’ll tell you all about it. By the statue of Richard the Lionheart.”

“Paul, where on earth’s that?”

“Six o’clock. Don’t be late. Cedric’s giving a party tonight and he’s invited us. No more now, Mrs Grant will be pawing at the deck and champing. I love you very much. Good-bye.”

“But Paul. . .

“Remember Mrs Grant!”

Paul hung up with a sense of a mission well accomplished.

He had broken the Grant Barrier, compared with which the sound barrier was a mere hurdle, he had told Anne he loved her and he had arranged to meet her that evening. Romeo himself could have done no more.

Anne finished work at half-past five. She repaired her make-up, washed her hands, telephoned her mother to say she would be late, bought a new lipstick and asked a policeman the way to the statue of Richard the Lionheart and arrived at ten minutes past six. She was annoyed when she discovered that the statue was near her office on Millbank and she must have passed Paul at least once but she did not allow him to notice it.

“Come on,” said Paul, brusquely. “We’re picking Michael and Mary up on the way and they’re always early.”

“I’m sorry I’m late, Paul.”

“That’s all right. Most girls would have still been looking. Who is this person Mrs Grant? Anyone would think I was trying to ring up the Kremlin!”

“Oh, she was sweet when you rang off. She wanted to know if I was in any trouble and could she help. I hadn’t the heart to deceive her so I told her about you. She wishes you luck.”

“That’s big of her.”

“She said she guessed what was going on but she liked your voice, although she didn’t believe a word you said.” Paul breathed over his knuckles and brushed them on his lapel. He was flattered to be told that he could charm women over the telephone.

“Bully for Mrs Grant,” he said. “I told Michael that we’d meet them outside St Martin-in-the-Fields. I insisted on meeting you here and he insisted on meeting Mary where he always meets her so we split the difference. He’s a most unoriginal chap. He always meets his woman in the same old place. He must know the pavement outside Swan and Edgars like the back of his hand.”

Anne felt a momentary twinge of envy. She would have loved to have been a woman who always met Paul in the same old place.

Michael and Mary were waiting on the steps of St Martin’s amongst the home-rushing crowds, the pigeons overhead, and the newspaper sellers shouting their curious international language.

“Right,” said Paul. “Let’s get a bus
du côté de chez
Cedric.”

Cedric lived in Stanhope Gate with his butler Thomas and his collections. Cedric was a kleptomaniac, though in perfect taste, and his collections were famous. His collection of glassware and drinking cups rested in Hepplewhite cabinets and enjoyed an international reputation. Cedric had champagne glasses of Venetian glass, waxed leather blackjacks with silver rims, enamelled humpers, Georgian pewter tankards, and a scintillating array of punchbowls, chalices, tumblers and sets of glasses of soda metal and glass of lead with their stems fluted, chased, knobbed, serpentine, quatre-foiled and engraved. Cedric’s collection was a museum dedicated to the art of drinking; his friends from the London clubs made pious pilgrimages to see it.
Country Life
published an article on it and thereafter Cedric received letters from elderly ladies in Perth, Western Australia, enquiring whether his collection included the Holy Grail and postcards from schoolgirls in Weston-super-Mare asking if he possessed the human skull from which Darius, the Great King of Persia, was wont to drink the blood of his slaughtered enemies.

Cedric had other collections, of snuff boxes, dragon china, walking-sticks, bullfight posters, Japanese armour, spinning-wheels and clockwork toys. He also had a large collection of friends whom he was pleased to invite to his house and to whom he explained his collections with their histories. Cedric was erudite without being pedantic and an arbiter of good manners who still preferred champagne from a tankard because it brought out the flavour. “Like Dr Johnson,” Paul said, “only not so fat and argumentative.”

Cedric himself met them at the door. He looked sternly at Michael.

“Never get into a habit with one woman, my boy,” he said. “Before you know where you are you’ll wake up and find yourself married to them and there’s no greater habit than that. You may laugh. I’ve seen it happen too often.”

Thomas, Cedric’s butler, who looked and spoke like an ex-flyweight champion of Donegal, poured sherry and madeira from cut-glass decanters which were part of the collection and Mrs Vincent, wearing a flame-coloured dress with a high collar, took Michael under her wing.

“Paul, darling you know lots of people, but you don’t, Michael, so let me introduce you. Let’s see. There’s that round man from the B.B.C. whose name I can never remember. He won’t do. The Admiralty have just banned his book about the Wrens. Then there’s that big stuffed dummy who advertises that nauseating whisky ... I know.”

Mrs Vincent led Michael and Mary towards a tall man who was standing next to one of the most beautiful women Michael had ever seen but who was looking quizzically at his glass as though he were wondering how soon he could get it refilled. The man looked up as Michael approached. The face was unmistakable. It was Lieutenant Commander Robert Bollinger Badger, Royal Navy, otherwise known as The Bodger.

“Good God,” The Bodger said. “It’s Hobbes.”

“Of course,” said Mrs Vincent. “I’d forgotten you knew each other.”

“Know him,” said The Bodger, “I brought him up! How are you, Hobbes? How are you, Mary? I remember you from some time ago. Julia, you haven’t met these two young people. This is Mary and this is Lieutenant Michael Hobbes. My wife, Julia.”

“How do you do, Michael,” Julia said. “You must be one of the cadets who gave Robert his grey hairs! “

“I hope not, ma’am.”

Michael may have been rather naive for his age, he may still have been shy and awkward when meeting a woman for the first time, but he had the true naval officer’s instinct for a beautiful woman. He recognized a superb specimen when he saw one and Julia, The Bodger’s wife, was the kind of woman at whom Michael would have unabashedly goggled in the street. She was almost as tall as her husband with jet black hair swept up to a coronet of curls. Her figure inside her black dress, her white shoulders, full red lips and black eyes with long lashes made Michael feel vaguely yearning. She looked perfectly composed; Michael could not imagine her ever being put out by anything. She would entertain midshipmen and admirals; cope with the water supply and the servants in a Maltese flat; and be hostess to the Royal Family without raising her voice.

The Bodger noticed Michael’s face and the circle of men who were beginning to converge upon his wife, and grinned widely.

“You look surprised to see me, Hobbes,” he said.

Michael recollected himself. “I am a little, sir. I thought you were in the South Pacific.”

“The
what?
”

Michael blushed. “I must have made a mistake, sir. I thought you were R.N.O. in Nassau.”

The Bodger let out a roar of Rabelaisian laughter which reminded Michael vividly of many occasions at Dartmouth and in
Barsetshire
.

“Did you really think I was off to be a beachcomber, Hobbes? Actually, you’re partly right, I did get a draft chit to the South Seas and it gave me furiously to think for a while. However, there was one very simple way out of that. Julia and I went into this question of the South Seas in a big way. We drew up piles of graphs about copra and pearls and black men generally. We had statistics about the rainfall in Fiji and the number of red-headed men in Tonga and so on. It took the little Wren in my office some time to type it all. Then I sat down and wrote an official letter to the Admiralty recommending that an N.O. be appointed to look after this hive of industry. I damn soon got an answer saying that Their Lordships did not see any operational requirement for an N.O. in Nassau. After that, I went to see Jerry Leanover, an old chum of mine at the Admiralty, and that was that. It’s just another case of what I was always telling you blokes about. There’s always a way of making the other chap do what you want him to do without realizing it, if you’ll only take the trouble to sit down and think about it!“

“Where are you going now, then, sir?”

“
Carousel
, as First Lieutenant and Defence Officer.”

“Good heavens, Vincent and I are going to
Carousel
as well, sir.”

“I’ve no doubt we shall meet a lot of friends there,” the Bodger said. “I know the Commander, Jimmy Forster-Jones, very well indeed, and there’s Ginger Piggant, as Senior Engineer and of course, Dickie Gilpin as Captain. The chap I’m supposed to be relieving was carted away in a strait-jacket a fortnight ago I hear. He had a nervous breakdown trying to sort out the messdecks. There’s been so much special gear fitted in that ship, all of it in messdeck space, and none of it ever taken out. One of these days, probably in about two hundred years time, the boffins will get around to designing a special type of human being to live in warships. They’ll all be about two feet high with arms six feet long. They’ll never need anything to eat or drink. They won’t even need air to breathe. They won’t have families to give trouble, nor will they need mail, nor
leave
. They’ll have about one hour’s sleep a night when they’ll put out a long prehensile tail and hook up on rails where they’ll hang like bats until it’s time for them to go to work again. They won’t want women or alcohol or tobacco. They’ll be a mixture of bat, Mormon, Puritan, and duck-billed platypussesses. . .

Julia turned to Mary. “I’m afraid Robert is well and truly on one of his hobby-horses now,” she said. “We might as well stay here quietly until they remember that we’re here. I like your brooch.”

It was a silver pin carrying a naval crown in silver and small diamonds.

“Michael gave it to me last Christmas. He says it’s my uniform. All naval wives and girl friends have one.”

“It’s certainly your uniform. Robert gave me one before we were married. He said he won it in a poker game! When are you going to get married?”

“I don’t know. You weren’t supposed to know about it.”

“I guessed. And Cedric told us.”

“
He
did?”

“He came to dinner with us last summer. I can hear him now. ‘Julia, my girl,’ he said, ‘I’m very much afraid there’s another good man gone there. If I know anything about such things, I fear those two are going to get married’! “

“Oh, he would!”

“I should get Michael to marry you as soon as possible. Robert and I were married when he was a junior sub-lieutenant. We hadn’t any money so his father lent us a lodge in Scotland for our honeymoon. We only had four days and it rained the whole time. Robert always tells everyone that it was a splendid place for a honeymoon because we used to look out of the window, see that it was still raining, and go straight back to bed again!”

The Bodger looked over his shoulder. “Name of a name,” he said, “they’re giggling again! “

Cedric joined them. “Jolly hockey-sticks, Julia,” he said.

“Hello, Cedric. We were just talking about you.”

Cedric rolled his eyes and sighed. “That’s just it. We’ve always got to remember that we’re encompassed about by a great cloud of witnesses. D’you know, last week I went into Spry’s to buy myself a buttonhole and within half an hour people were ringing me up asking me who I was engaged to! Oh dear, that poor B.B.C. man. Bodger’s giving him the treatment. Shall we go and help him? I think not.”