James Hilton: Collected Novels (61 page)

“What opinion?”

“That the fall will go much further.”

“How would you make money by backing your opinion?”

“Selling short, as they call it. That means—”

“I know—I learnt all about it at Kirby when we used to gamble in Rainier shares. Remember?”

“You must have lost everything.”

“Nearly everything. About thirty-two pounds all together.” She laughed. “Well why
don’t
you sell short?”

“I will, if it amuses you. But I’d have no other reason.”

“Yes do it—to amuse me. Please, Charles.”

“Then there’s two things I have to do at the office tomorrow morning.” He took out his notebook and made a pretense of writing something down. “Sell short to amuse Kitty. Also get Miss Hanslett to send out the wedding invitations.”

“Who’s Miss Hanslett?”

“My new secretary. You saw her last time you called.”

“Oh, that quiet girl?”

“I suppose she’s quiet. I certainly wouldn’t want her to be noisy.”

“Darling, how soon can we leave—afterwards?”

“You mean for our world tour? Maybe next month. It’ll be too late for the Danube, though, this year. We’d better do the Amazon first. Or the Nile.”

“No, not the Nile—Jill’s there.”

“What’s she doing?”

“Looking at the tombs, I suppose, and having a good time.”

But the laugh they rallied themselves into failed to shift the mood that made him, as soon as dinner was over, confess that he felt tired and would prefer an early night in bed. He dropped her at Jill’s new house in St. John’s Wood, where she was living with a cook-housekeeper, and kept the taxi for his own journey to Smith Square. But his apartment seemed so inexplicably cheerless that after a drink and an attempt to feel sleepy, he called another cab and drove round the West End till he found a film that looked tolerable enough for whiling away the rest of the evening. He stayed in the cinema less than an hour, his restlessness increasing all the time, so that at last he walked out and paced up and down the thronged pavements till past midnight, longing suddenly for the sun and snow of the Jungfraujoch, yet knowing that it was only a mirage of what he would still long for if by some miracle he were to be transplanted there.

Usually when he could not sleep he was quite satisfied to stay up reading, often until dawn; but that night he felt he would be far too restless to concentrate on any book, so he bought tablets and took several on his return to Smith Square. They gave him a heavy unrefreshing sleep, from which he woke about noon to find a penciled letter from Kitty at his bedside. It had been delivered by hand early that morning, and contained, in effect, the breaking of their engagement and an announcement that she was leaving immediately to join her stepmother in Luxor.

T
HE FIRST GRAY SMUDGE
was peering over the hills and it seemed that we both saw it together. “Well, we’ve talked all night—and for the second time. Aren’t you sleepy yet?”

“No. … You were telling me about that letter, the one Kitty left for you. Didn’t it give any reasons?”

“Plenty. But I really think we’d better go to bed if we’re to be in any decent condition tomorrow. The crowd will soon be on us, worse luck.”

“Then why do you have them here?”

“That’s part of another story. Well, I must have a nightcap, even if it
is
morning. Have one with me?”

We went down to the library, feeling our way in the dim dawn shadows without switching on any of the house lights. Meanwhile he continued: “I’d show you that letter if I had it here, but it’s locked up in my safe in the City. I admit I’m sentimental about it—a little puzzled also. It’s the last word I ever had from her, except picture postcards from all kinds of places. What happened to her afterwards is what she said would happen—except that it didn’t last for long. She married a man she met in Egypt—she was quite happy—and he was a man I liked when I met him, but I didn’t meet him till after she was dead. He had plantations in the F.M.S. and she went out with him there and died of malaria within six months.”

He bent over the decanter, his shape and movements ghostly against the gray pallor from the windows. The moon had gone down, and it was darker than at midnight.

“And then?” I said.

He handed me a drink and raised his own.

“The rest,” he declaimed half-mockingly, “is a simple saga of success. I flung myself into business with renewed but disciplined abandon: I sold short and made more money out of the slump than I’d ever done out of ordinary trading; I accepted directorships in other companies and became what they call ‘a figure in the City’—I even assumed the burden of two other family heritages, by taking over Stourton and by allowing myself to stand for my father’s old Parliamentary seat of West Lythamshire. And a few years later, my affairs having more than survived the storms of 1931 and the doldrums of 1932, I married a lady who had become quite indispensable to me in this struggle for fresh fame and fortune—Miss Hanslett, the quiet girl. That again turned out to be an astonishing success. You never know what these quiet girls can do. From being quiet, she became one of the busiest and cleverest of London’s hostesses—and the miracle is, she’s
still
quiet—you’d hardly know the machine’s running at all.”

“So different from Miss Hobbs—but that, I suppose, is because you chose her yourself.”

“Or else
she
chose
her
self. She was just a girl in the general office first of all, until one evening I was working late and she invaded my private office to ask outright if she could work for me personally. Said she knew the other girl was leaving and she was certain she’d be better than anyone else. After that I simply had to give her either the sack or the job.”

“Anyhow,
you
made the right choice there.”

He laughed. “Oh yes, and I soon knew it. She was everything she promised. I’ve nothing but praise for her. I’d never have made so much money or acquired such style in after-dinner oratory but for her. She’s intensely loyal, tremendously ambitious for me, and personally charming. I love her more than most men love their wives. She’s guided my career—in fact she’s almost made a personally conducted tour of it. I never do anything, in politics or business, without seeking her advice. She runs Stourton and Kenmore like a pair of clocks—she doesn’t care if I’m in or out to lunch or dinner, or if I go to India or South America for six months or merely to Brighton for a week end. She’s everything a man like me could wish for in a wife—always provided—” He paused and took a drink, then added: “Always provided he’s completely satisfied to be a man like me.”

“And aren’t you?”

He took my arm. “Let’s save up something for another night. I’m going to bed, and after all this, I really think I shall sleep. Tell Sheldon not to wake me till the guests begin to arrive.”

The guests began to arrive in groups during the following afternoon, but I did not see Rainier till tea time, when he appeared on the terrace to greet the assembly; and from then throughout the week end I had no chance to talk with him alone. Nor with Woburn either, for that young man, after initial shyness, turned into a considerable social success. Observing him from time to time I felt there was a certain scientific detachment in his obvious effort to make good at his first fashionable houseparty (he had told me it was his first, and that he had never mixed in that class of society before); it was as if he were exploring himself, discovering his own powers; experimenting with the careless flatteries, the insincere attentions that make up the small change of such occasions; finding that he could do it just as well as people born to it, perhaps even a little better after practice. He was clearly a very adaptable and cool-headed young man, and the whole party was a good deal pleasanter for his being always at hand to pass interesting conversational cues, to make up a bridge four, to play a not offensively good game of tennis, and to dance with otherwise unpartnered matrons. One could almost read in his face the question, too wondering to be smug: Is this all there is to it?

Mrs. Rainier was the perfect hostess as usual, and I should have been lost in admiration at everything she did had it not been a repetition on a larger scale of what she habitually did at Kenmore. All, in fact, was as gay and brilliant and smooth-running as usual, but something else was not
quite
as usual—and I don’t know how to describe it except as a faint suspicion that the world was already swollen with destiny and that Stourton was no longer the world—a whiff of misgiving too delicate to analyze, as when, in the ballroom of an ocean liner, some change of tempo in the engines far below communicates itself to the revelers for a phantom second and then is lost behind the rhythms of the orchestra.

The simile was Rainier’s as we drove back to London on Monday evening, leaving Woburn and Mrs. Rainier at Stourton. Within a few weeks the same misgiving, many times magnified, had become a headline commonplace; trenches were being dug in the London parks; the curve of the September crisis rose to its monstrous peak. Rainier lived at his Club during those fateful days and we were both kept busy at all hours transcribing reports, telephoning officials, and listening to the latest radio bulletins. Diplomatic machinery had swung into the feverish gear of guesswork and divination: Was Hitler bluffing? What sort of country was this new Germany? Would Russia support the Czechs? When would the bombers come over? Every chatterer could claim an audience; journalists back from Europe were heard more eagerly than ambassadors; the fact that all seemed to depend on the workings of one abnormal human mind gave every amateur psychologist an equal chance with politicians and crystal gazers. And behind this mystery came fear, fear of a kind that had brought earlier peoples to their knees before eclipses and comets—fear of the unknown, based on an awareness that the known was no longer impregnable. The utter destruction of civilization, which had teemed a fantastic thing to on grandfathers had become a commonplace of schoolboys’ essays, village debating societies, and after-dinner small talk; for the first time in human history a sophisticated society faced its own extinction not theoretically in the future, but by physical death perhaps tomorrow. There was a dreadful acceptance of doom in all our eyes as we sat around, in restaurants and at conference tables and beside innumerable radios, listening and talking and drinking, the only three things to do that one could go on doing—paralyzed as we were into a belief that it was too late to act, and clinging to a last desperate hope that somehow the negation of an act might serve as well.

That negation was performed, if performed is the word; talking, listening, and drinking then merged into a sigh of exhausted relief, and only a few Cassandra voices, among whom was Rainier’s, murmured that no miracle had really happened at all. But national hysteria urged that it had, and that one must not say otherwise, even if it hadn’t. Anyhow, the crisis passed, the rains of autumn soaked into half-dug trenches, and as the days shortened and darkened the Kenmore lamplight glowed again in the faces of
diseuses
and diplomats—Sir Somebody This and the Maharanee of That, the successful novelist and the Wimbledon winner, delegates from somewhere-or-other to the something-or-other conference, as well as visiting Americans who thought they were experiencing a real pea-souper fog because the sun of a November midday had turned red over the roofs.

I went to a good many of those lunches, and somehow, I don’t remember exactly when, it became a recognized thing that I should have a place at all of them unless my duties with Rainier called me elsewhere.

Often they did. Many days during that strange, almost somnambulist winter of 1938-1939 I sat in the Gallery of the House of Commons, listening to dull debates and hearing Big Ben chime the quarters till I saw Rainier get up and push his way through the swing doors with that casualness which is among the specialties of House procedure—a form of self-removal that implies neither rudeness nor even indifference to the speech in progress. Then he would dictate letters in a Committee Room, or order tea, or we might stroll along the usually empty Terrace, watching the last spears of sunset fade from the windows of St. Thomas’s Hospital, or staring over the parapet at a train of coal barges on their way upstream. It was at such moments that I came to know him most intimately, and to feel, more from his presence than from words, that the years he no longer talked about were still haunting; that he was still, as two women had said, vainly searching for something and never at rest. Yet outwardly, and to others, there were few signs of it. Indeed, the disfavor into which he fell as a result of his attitude towards official policy seemed to come rather as a release than as a suppression. It was not that he blamed the government for what had happened at Munich; such blame, he said, when history assessed it, would doubtless be spread over many years and many personages, of which the men of 1938 were but last in a tragic line. He did, however, blame those who had stepped out of panic only to sink back into hypnosis. “These are the last days,” he said to me once. “We are like people in a trance—even those of us who can see the danger ahead can do nothing to avert it—like the dream in which you drive a car towards a precipice and your foot is over the brake but you have no physical power to press down. We should be arming now, if we had sense,—arming day and night and seven days of the week,—for if the Munich pact had any value at all it was not as a promise of peace to come, but as a last-minute chance to prepare for the final struggle. And we are doing
nothing
—caught in the net of self-delusion and self-congratulation. We don’t realize the skill and magnitude of the conspiracy—the attempt to reverse, by lightning strokes, the whole civilized verdict of two thousand years.”

Such talk, during the winter of 1938-1939, was heresy in a country that permitted heresy, but could not regard it as in good taste. People began to remark, in advance of any argument about him, that they
liked
Rainier—this also was a bad sign in a society where likings are rarely expressed except by way of fair-minded prelude to disparagement. And one reflected that there had always been something against his chances of attaining high office—something expressed by his political enemies when they praised him as “brilliant,” and by his political friends when they doubted if he were altogether “safe.” Such doubts were now running high.