Sea of Glass (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) (25 page)

‘We must have remained under cover for about half an hour. Then there was another outbreak of shooting, but this time no bullets came our way. The reports sounded as if they were actually inside the house. I was just wondering whether to give the order to rush the place from the front, when the front door burst open and Colin came staggering out. Even at that distance I could see that he had blood on his forehead, and he was walking bent forward with one hand pressed to his middle. I said to Sergeant Dewes, “My God, he’s hit in the stomach.” Old Dewes didn’t answer for a moment, then he muttered, “Ask me, sir, I should say the Captain was laughing.” I could have bashed him at that moment: but when I looked again, Colin was near enough for me to see the expression on his face. He was practically doubled up with mirth. In another few yards he began to make signs and shout to us—“O.K., you can all come out now. There’s been a slight misunderstanding.” Then he went off into another fit of laughing.

‘I ran across the lawn feeling sure that it was all a dream. Nothing Colin said at first made me change my mind. He kept on repeating the words, “leopard skin”, and “nuns” and “bicycle” and then going off into another paroxysm. I had to tell him quite sharply to pull himself together in front of the men.

‘Finally I got the story out of him. He and his detachment had worked round to the back of the house where everything was quiet. They forced up a window and climbed into the pantry where they found an old butler-chap soundly stewed and sleeping in front of an empty bottle of port. To cut a long story short, they went up through the various floors without meeting a soul until they came out by a trapdoor onto the roof. There behind one of the chimney-stacks was an outsize bit of crumpet, in the act of drawing another bead on me and my wretched chaps. Colin crept up behind her, but just when he was a couple of paces away she heard him and whipped round and bashed him over the face with the butt of her gun. There was a terrific battle and it took practically every man to immobilize her. In the process Colin gathered something rather peculiar. He naturally thought she was a German, but it took him back when he found that the idea was mutual. You see, she told him that he would be captured and shot for wearing British uniform.

‘At last they got it straight. This girl had been reading the usual newspaper stories about Jerry ruses. I don’t know if you remember but some of the Dutch towns were supposed to have been attacked by parachutists who were dressed as women either in leopard-skin coats or nuns’ habits. They carried folding bicycles too. Quite a coincidence, eh? Anyhow, when the girl saw Clara and the two holy women proceeding up the drive she drew her own deductions. After that, of course, everybody who came along must be in disguise. Rather gallant of her to engage the enemy single-handed! She was bloody tough and as brave as a lion.’

‘Did you actually meet her?’ I asked.

‘Most certainly. She gave us a terrific party. The old butler chap was woken up and swayed round with lashings of drink. The men were hitting it up in the kitchen. It was just as well a real invasion scare didn’t blow up that evening. Still it was very enjoyable. She was a damned odd woman and frightfully disconcerting at times, but I liked her. She was bloody pretty, too, if you could take the size.’

For the first time in his narrative my friend showed a certain hesitation; but finally he went on:

‘I don’t know whether I ought to tell you this . . . but what I found embarrassing was the way she went for Colin; though I must say he came halfway to meet her. They suited each other, both being big and full of the same kind of energy. She spoke quite normally, but I think she must have been a bit foreign. I mean, you wouldn’t find a real English girl telling you how hard it was for her to be a widow because of her instincts and how she prayed to overcome them.’

He tipped the remains of the whisky briskly into our cups. ‘Somehow, I don’t think her prayers were answered that night. I could see they wanted to be alone, so I decanted the men and poured them back into camp. I’m not sure whether Colin came back at all that night. Certainly he was up at the Manor at all hours for the next two weeks. Nosey Clara soon got wind of it and was she furious! Does these managing women a lot of good to be wronged occasionally.’

‘What happened in the end?’

‘Oh, nothing dramatic. We were shunted up to Warwickshire. I never saw the place again till this evening.’

The train began to slow as we pulled into the junction at which our local line joined the main one. My companion got up and gathered his cane and respirator from the rack.

I interrupted his goodbyes, rather rudely, I am afraid:

‘Can you remember her name?’

‘That’s funny! Now you mention it, I can’t.’

‘Not either sur—or Christian?’

He tried for a moment.

‘Sorry, but they’ve both clean gone.’ He looked at me, amused. ‘Were you thinking of trying your luck in that quarter? If so, I’m afraid you’re too late. Fellow I met in a pub who knew the district told me some different people had the Manor now.’

I like that one better. In fact, it is my favourite of the three, perhaps because it seems to point up a factor which was always strong in my affection for Varvara; I mean the admiration which I bore towards her father. If she it was upon the roof-top, he was certainly there beside her, blazing away in spirit at the supposed Nazis, grumbling about the damned uproar but secretly glorying in it.

The sequel with Colin, however morally deplorable, gives me a cosy sense of still moving within the family. I am sure that he was rather like Fulk. But perhaps this is a line better left unpursued. At any rate I am not jealous.

And then that ancient and boozy butler. . . . Turpin would not have been much more than seventy in
1940
. How nice to think that he had survived, defying the moralists, to follow his Blasting Bud through her efflorescence! Box on, Bud!

I return to the Press for my third and most transient glimpse, seen as from an express train through an arrow-slit. This time the material comes from a well-known American magazine.

‘Tangling again this week with Californian State Police was blonde, six-foot high priestess of T.I.N.D. sect, Mrs. Varvara Calderon. T.I.N.D.’s, claiming membership of two hundred thousand, take title from initials of the succinct phrase embodying their basic belief—There Is No Death—a proposition they support by appeal to authorities ranging from Isaiah to time-theorist J. W. Dunne. Of the two, Dunne is more important as supplying, allegedly, the mechanics of the creed. Idea is that every living “observer” is geared to an infinite number of viewpoints. Death is merely a shift from one to the next and is never felt or observed by the sufferer. For him life appears to go on without a break, though so-called decease of other people is noted. Reading her views described in Catholic Los Angeles
Harvester
as a “collection of poisonous drivel, propagated by cowards who cannot face our mortal destiny”, eloquent, uninhibited Mrs. Calderon reacted strongly. Form of reaction was to hire Aspiration Stadium for mass-meeting of T.I.N.D.’s critics and sympathizers. At end of meeting Mrs. Calderon undertook to refute accusations of cowardice and give practical testimony to faith in T.I.N.D. doctrine by shooting herself through the head.

‘Intervention of Floyd C. Deil, Los Angeles’ chunky, lantern-jawed top cop, scotched her disinterested project. Cracked he: “If there ain’t no death, she’s wasting time. If there is, she’s violating the law against suicide . . .’

When I knew her Varvara was a most fervent devotee of the Orthodox Church, a religion which does not lack colour. In it she would no doubt find her ultimate spiritual refuge. All the same, I would bet that there was some period in her life when she craved for still brighter hues. Given fertile environment, she was capable of plunging into the extremes of mystic crankery, and probably of inventing her own material.

T.I.N.D.-ism is not an impossible faith to have gained her allegiance. She spoke much and familiarly of death, which she must often have seen at close quarters. Yet, despite her Christianity, I never had the impression that she could reconcile herself to it, either then or in later years. All her references to mortality were impliedly identified in her mind with some loss of power or failure of vigilance; in fact with the triumph of an enemy who had been allowed to prove himself the stronger. Against him, in middle age, I can imagine her hardening her heart; and when he proved intractable, not trying to placate him or beg him off, but deciding to abolish his existence. She was not a woman who would ever willingly lie down without her faculties.

There is no reason to accept any of these conjectures. My belief in them is purely collective and undistributed; it rests on a conviction that a person of Varvara’s force could not disappear, even in a world as big as that of today, without leaving some ripples by which an alert mind could trace her. That does not mean that I expect to see her again. I do not; when the interval is too long the wheels of chance grow stiff and rusty. A belated reunion might bring only disappointment. Her oddity might have become a mere commonplace pretentiousness. If so, she would destroy more than a personal image; a whole panorama would be wiped out, and with it part of the permanent furniture of my mind. Railed off in a corner, where it has survived many years of conscientious pettifogging, is a small zone in which Doljuk blends with Aynho Terrace. The Swiss clocks are chiming over enormous empty spaces, wicked Cedric marshals his forces and storms and bullies and plots, and the nomad horsemen come charging down with cups of tea.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Dennis Arthur Parry
was born in
1912
and was educated at Rugby School. He read Classics at King’s College, Cambridge and obtained a first class degree. He then read Law and qualified as a Chancery Barrister. In
1937
, he married Kathleen Arona Forbes, with whom he had two children, Susan and Jonathan. He was rejected for service in the Second World War owing to very poor eyesight and instead joined the civil service, eventually rising to the post of Permanent Under-Secretary to the Minister for Coal Production. After the war, his marriage collapsed, and after a divorce, married his second wife, Audrey Dockerill, with whom he had one son, Mark.

Parry published his first novel,
Attic Meteor
(
1936
) at age
24
, and would go on to publish nine others. None of these books achieved large sales, though they generally earned good reviews. An obituary in the
Times
characterized Parry’s works as “entertaining on the surface, and written in an easy, forceful prose . . . continuously witty rather than comic, and penetrating rather than profound. . . . All his books are enjoyable, and almost all successful within the limits which Parry set himself.” His final book,
Sea of Glass
(
1955
), was probably his most successful, earning widespread critical acclaim and running into a second edition. Unfortunately, the book’s modest success was overshadowed by Parry’s death shortly after its publication; he was injured in a car accident in June
1955
and died two days later at age
42
.