The Brides of Solomon (18 page)

‘Of course I did! It was obvious that—how shall I put it?—that you had broken your sword over your knee. The face of a girl after a little triumph, even if she were disgusted
with herself—wouldn’t you recognise it?’

‘You asked me if you could help.’

‘Did I? So openly?’ the German smiled. ‘I suppose it was essential to be frank quickly.’

‘I loved the way you carried yourself, Herta.’

‘For me it was your voice.’

The conversation had been, then as now, all composed of omissions. The secretary had complimented Clémence upon the beauty of her hair. Clémence offered to send her a packet of
shampoo of pre-war quality, forgetting that it was impossible legally to buy it. The German accepted gladly.

‘But don’t tell me where it comes from,’ she reminded the girl.

It was extraordinary that on so short an acquaintance the reminder should have been necessary.

‘What am I to do?’ Clémence had asked.

The secretary glanced contemptuously through her father’s file.

‘These penalties are so stupid,’ she exclaimed. ‘At the most he deserves a fine of fifty thousand francs.’

Clémence was again compelled to think in terms of the unfamiliar. She had heard, like everyone else, that some of the employees of the Gestapo were not above adding to their pay. She had
decided nearly at once that this splendid older woman did not intend a hint.

The maître d’hotel presented in its copper chafing dish the woodcock ordered for her guest. Clémence inspected it closely, and raised three fingers in approval.

‘One is very doubtful at seventeen,’ she said. ‘All that one is going to be is already there, but one cannot know it.’

‘I was so angry with myself.’

‘We are thinking of the same thing, Herta?’

‘Fifty thousand francs? One makes such remarks forgetting what they might mean. And when I saw you hesitate I could have killed myself. There was no time for explanations. Either we
trusted each other or nothing mattered.’

The woodcock flamed under the match. Clémence composedly withdrew her immense and charming sleeves. She heard her own strained voice at seventeen asking if a fine were impossible, and
dreading the answer.

‘Impossible. But, my dear, your father will be home tomorrow.’

The secretary pinned the papers together and transferred them bodily to another file.

‘Release and keep under surveillance,’ she explained. ‘There are so many of them who give orders. No one will ever question it.’

‘Oh, thank you! Thank you!’

‘Try to keep him from being a fool. I could not do it twice.’

‘What shall I tell my father?’

‘I should not tell him anything. He would only misunderstand.’

‘They find it so difficult to believe that women can be friends.’

‘My dear,’ said the secretary, opening the door for her, ‘they do not even know how to salute one another without using their hands.’

H
AVE
you ever insulted a man without speaking to him, without anything more than a casual meeting of eyes? I did, and the injustice of my thoughts about
him still haunts me. I will give you the evidence just as it was presented to me. You may be cleverer than I was.

I was lunching alone in a Soho restaurant—a pleasant little place, expensive only if you wish it to be, without any uniformed porter outside the door or any chromium plate inside. It runs
to lace curtains and red plush seats round the wall. At least they give the old-fashioned impression of red plush.

Across the room to my left a man and a girl were sitting at a corner table, close enough for me to watch them, not so close that I could hear what they were saying. There appeared to be some
eighteen or twenty years between their ages. The fellow looked as if he spent a couple of hours at his barber twice a week, perfecting the he of his grey hair and smoothing the wrinkles out of his
distinguished skin. He might have been a quack doctor pretending to be a fashionable surgeon, or an unsuccessful actor modelling himself upon a matinée idol of thirty years ago, or a movie
producer trying to resemble the illustration of a diplomat in a woman’s magazine. All which was certain was pretence.

His manner was intolerably affected. It did not fit his maturity or his quiet and luxurious clothes. He kept fidgeting with his glasses, putting them on to read the menu, taking them off to show
he did not need them, putting them on again to regard waiters and customers with a faintly defiant patronage. He was determined to impress us all, and especially his companion, that there could be
nothing wrong with a world in which he talked and existed.

The girl with him seemed as resentful as I of his affectations. She showed no interest in the delicately feminine meal which he ordered for her. She made no reply, or the shortest, to his
remarks. His conversation, continually restarted, was so forcedly gallant in approach and so emptily bright in delivery that perhaps no reply was demanded.

She was disillusioned to a point of utter demoralisation. She had not even bothered to put powder and lipstick on her pale, heavy face. I could see it was not used to such deprivation. In the
evening, with a little patience, it must have recovered some most attractive remains of youth. She stared in front of her, giving me the impression that she would as soon be dead as play the game
of conversation any longer. She might have been trying to cut him, his presence and his memory right out of her life. He was something she had once treasured and simply could not bear any more.

I ruled out at once all the normal relationships between two generations. Even if he were godfather or family solicitor and the lunch a boring duty, there would be an occasional smile, some sort
of flirtation with the harmless old friend, however tiresome. Conjecture worried away at the problem. When alone and expansive, one insists on entertaining oneself with fantasies, but they must be
logical enough to entertain a companion if he or she were there.

His wife or divorced wife, then? No, there was not even a resentful intimacy. So I fitted her into my possible world as a young woman who had been too fascinated by all that profile and
perfection and had discovered, after a week or a month of both of them, that there was little else. I wondered if he kept putting on and taking off his glasses when he wore pyjamas.

Much as I loathed that artificial middle-aged man, I could not help feeling—when my bottle was empty and my speculations more charitable—that she was taking too seriously her
weariness of him, whatever the reasons for it. After all, the fellow had his qualities. He was behaving for his public as if there was nothing wrong whatever; and that was bitterly hard to do by
the side of a person whose only contribution had been a short speech of exasperation, unless the pattern into which she was rolling innumerable bread pills had some significance.

He offered her a liqueur. She refused it. He took a brandy himself and lit a cigar. He looked at me. On my side of the room the restaurant had thinned, and I had become his only audience.
There’s nothing wrong
, his eyes said to me,
nothing which cant he put right in time.
He was determined to ignore the irrevocable disaster. By ignoring it, it ceased to
exist. A typical reaction of the desperate male.

He paid his bill and fussed gallantly over her gloves and bag. While he was taking his hat from the attendant, she, too, seemed to accept me as a public. She shrugged her shoulders at
me—or made some other disloyal little gesture—as much as to ask how the devil a girl was supposed to stand things for ever.

I left the restaurant. An hour later those two had faded from all but an occasional memory. My imaginative world had died for its creator, and it had no right to live again, to collide with our
common world, to muddle itself with justice.

I have never since set eyes on that immaculate pretender, but his pale young woman I met again. She was no longer emotionally dead—at any rate in outward appearance—and her make-up
was now vivid and in need of repair. The swing door of a pub just off the Charing Cross Road catapulted her at me. The place was only a hundred yards from the restaurant where I had first seen her.
That fringe of theatre-land may have been her world, though she had probably no professional status, theatrical or other. To judge by her accent and what was left of her bearing, I should say that
she had a small income of her own, and that she belonged by right to Knightsbridge but found drinking in Soho more to her taste.

She clung to me for physical support and addressed me as Ronnie. Then, talking fast and heartily to herself as much as to me, she said that of course I wasn’t Ron: I was the man who had
stared at her when she was having lunch with her father.

Father and daughter. That was a relationship I had dismissed at once. The age difference did not seem enough, and the manner was all wrong. A woman can show contempt for her father or anger, but
not that bored, hopeless indifference with which she treats a stupid and unwanted lover.

I repeated vaguely the word
father
, recalling the man of pretences, so nervously eager to persuade the restaurant and her that they were two people of distinction who had every right to
draw attention to themselves.

‘He is on the stage?’ I asked.

‘Stage? Hell, no! Government contractor, all dressed up to impress the beak! He had just bailed me out that morning. He’ll never let anyone see he’s ashamed of me, Ron.
I’ll say that for the old fool.’

M
RS
S
WALLOP
had been working her twenty-acre holding single-handed ever since Tom Swallop was killed in the Boer War when she was seventeen years
old and a six-months’ bride. He left her his scrap of freehold land, no child, and apparently so pleasant a memory that she preferred to live with it rather than change her status.

Her farm—if you can call it a farm—was up at the end of a grass track: a patch of cultivation in a dry bottom surrounded by the thorn and bracken on the slopes, and well fenced
except for short stretches of queer material such as old bedsprings and rusty sheets of corrugated iron. It had a name on the map, but no one for ten miles round ever called it anything but
Noah’s Ark.

The birds and animals were not, however, in biblical couples. Mrs Swallop stocked her land with breeding females, for she had her own ways of encouraging them. There were two enormous turkey
hens, a goose, a saddle-backed sow, a flock of undisciplined chickens, a black cow, a black nanny-goat and a big black cat who was fierce as a watch-dog when she had kittens. The only
representative of the male sex was a buck rabbit who attended to the comfort of several prolific does.

She was a bright and cleanly old body—so far as one can be when farming alone—but her dress and her ways were odd. She might be wearing an old tweed skirt below an upper half swathed
in sacking, or a new purple jersey with a horse blanket for a skirt. She had a black moustache, and she used to whisper under it to her animals.

Mrs Swallop would whisper for her neighbours, too, if she liked them; so they were always ready to lend her a male when she turned up driving one of her females in front of her, or pushing it,
squawking, in the large dilapidated perambulator which was her only farm transport. If there were anything else in the bottom of the pram, such as eggs or cream, they would buy it from her by some
careful method which would not draw the attention of Percy Crott.

Those were the days just after the war when farmers were making a lot more money than now. On the other hand they had to put up with fellows like Crott. He had been a village schoolmaster till
one of his fourteen-year-olds sent him to hospital; and when he came out he got a job in the Ministry of Food. How he rose to be an inspector, no one ever discovered—for all he knew about
food were the regulations to prevent the public eating it. He had a blotchy pink face as smooth as a pig’s, with a nasty little mouth in the middle of it and a round chin which he used to
stick out when he was speaking—like one of those business men who are so proud of their faces that they put their pictures in the advertisements in spite of the sales they must lose.

Crott could never catch the big farmers who generally obeyed the law, and had a dozen inspector-proof ways of covering themselves up when they didn’t. If he wanted to bring a neighbour
before the courts and make an example of him, he went for the little man who was sure to be breaking regulations because he had no time to read them. And he made a dead set at Mrs Swallop because
she built a breeding hutch for the rabbits out of all the pamphlets and government forms which the postman brought her. Those rabbits fairly flourished under the welfare state, but when Percy Crott
saw the hutch he said it was a scandal, and carried on as if Mrs Swallop had built it out of a stack of bibles.

All the same, it was difficult to find an offence by which he could put her out of business. She had no books or accounts—for she insisted that she could not write—and old Trancard
was always ready to tell any lie for her. Crott’s only hope was to catch her red-handed selling eggs to the public.

Trancard took a very friendly interest in the old lady, for his sheep-run surrounded her land on the north and east, and the luck he had with the lambing was marvellous. He guessed what Percy
Crott was up to when he saw him hiding behind a hedge and counting Mrs Swallop’s birds. So he persuaded her to turn over a new leaf, and register herself as a Poultry Producer.

‘It won’t give ’ee no trouble at all, missus,’ he told her. ‘I’m a licensed packer, and you hand over your eggs to me for grading and packing, and get paid by
the government at fifty shillings for ten dozen. But what you must not do, missus, is to sell ’em to anyone who ain’t licensed. And if that young Crott catches you at it, you’ll
fetch up before the beaks.’