Time and Time Again (19 page)

Life at the Legation was tranquil, and the work so simple for a junior staff-member that, except for further language study, Charles was able to give his brain a long and satisfying rest. He had little responsibility, and was amused to discover that after all his abstruse cramming most of the tasks that fell to him (such as deciphering and copying despatches) were not beyond the resources of a reasonably intelligent sixth-former. He spent the mornings in the Chancery, often with long intervals of leisure during which he could read French and German novels; he got to know his colleagues, and the entire atmosphere, with its air of a cheerful enclave whose chance-chosen inmates might as well make the best of each other, reminded him a little of the Brookfield Sanatorium in which, as a boy with some slight ailment, he had found a haven from the rigours of the outside world. Sir Lionel was a comfortable chief and did not count the hours his staff put in provided the job was done. Charles naturally took the menial duties, if that adjective could be applied to any of them; again it was rather like being a new boy at school. He began to make friends, most of them among the resident English--it was surprising how few, or at any rate how slowly, relationships developed with the people of the city. After leaving cards at the other Legations he was asked out to dinners, and found many pleasant acquaintances among his opposite numbers. Most afternoons, though, he spent alone from choice, exploring the city or attending some lecture or concert. After that he would return to the Legation in case anything had been left for him to do; even if so it rarely made him late for dinner. Sometimes there was a rush of business when a bag came in, and once a royal visit threw everybody into a well- controlled commotion that lasted several weeks, but as a rule one could watch the European world through a delightful window on the edge of it--for the country had been neutral during the war and was consequently quite spotless and a little smug.

Charles shared a flat with the Second Secretary, a man named Snowden, who was unmarried; the First Secretary had a Swedish wife who sang Schubert and Hugo Wolf songs exquisitely. There was also a very handsome Military Attaché who drifted in and out of the Chancery with gossip about parties he had been to the night before; so far as Charles could judge, his functions were almost entirely decorative, and most of all at requiem masses whenever it was obligatory for the corps diplomatique to attend them. At these affairs the Military Attaché looked as if he had stepped right out of the pages of Ouida.

(Later in life, when some of Charles's moments were more arduous, and those who shared them with him pictured whimsically or ironically the kind of heaven they would choose for themselves, Charles would say: 'Ah, you should have been en poste at ---- during the twenties--those were the days!' But once, when he so expressed himself, a very old and distinguished-looking gentleman in a dressing-gown replied, as urbanely as was possible within the confines of an air-raid shelter: 'My boy, they were only the pale shadow of the life before you were born! Those were the real days-- to be a youth of good family sixty years ago, when you could get into the Diplomatic without all this modern fuss about Firsts and degrees--when all you needed was a private income and a father or uncle or somebody in high places to take care of you. It was simply the best club that ever existed--founded by the Congress of Vienna, developed by the wealth and conveniences of the industrial revolution, and not yet affected by all the political and social changes that have finally upset the applecart; a club of charming people living a gay life in every capital from Lisbon to what was then St. Petersburg--a few thousand families supplying the personnel, so that wherever you went you met people who knew the people you knew--a truly international set in a world full of international settings and social counterparts in every country-- Ascot and Chantilly, Sandhurst and St. Cyr, Osborne and Ischl, the Quai d'Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse and the Ballplatz, all the Bristol Hotels and the Compagnie Internationale des Grands Express Européens . . . The very words are remembered music that even guns and bombs cannot shatter! Ah, what a lovely world if you were born into the golden ranks of the inheritors!' And then the old man ended startlingly: 'But I wasn't, and I hated its guts.' Charles never saw him again or found out his name.)

* * * * *

Though in retrospect they acquired an austere and compensating glamour, Charles's first professional years contained many misgivings and a great deal of boredom. Occasionally also he was visited by a lost look that Lady Treves noticed and took to be some mysterious kind of reserve. It usually lifted amongst a crowd, and once or twice at some dinner party a few drinks released him into a mood in which he was apt to talk wittily enough for her to comment afterwards to her husband: 'Charles was quite amusing, wasn't he? Madame Papadoulos was much taken with him--asked me where he was from . . . I didn't know a great deal, I'm afraid.'

'He comes of a very decent family, my dear. Sir Havelock Anderson was a successful K.C. till he made a fool of himself--they say he still does.' Sir Lionel searched still further in the card index of his mind. 'The mother was a Calthorpe, one of the Irish Calthorpes--she's been dead a long time. I think there was another son killed in the war. Not too much money. Charles will inherit what there is. . . . I met the father once--bit of a character-- rather like a crazy old Viking. Young Anderson's a more normal type, thank goodness.'

'He has an interesting face. Is he going to do well?'

'I wouldn't be surprised. Fairly good school--and Cambridge. He did well there. Oh yes, he might have his own Legation some time. The other day I had to tell him that.'

'You HAD to tell him?'

'He suggested a brilliant idea for completely reorganizing the Register. So damned brilliant the Foreign Office would have had a fit. I told him that by the time he had his own Legation it would probably be adopted, but that for the present he'd better hide it as he would an affair with the mistress of one of the Russians. . . . I think I managed not to hurt his feelings.'

'I hope so. He's really one of the nicest men we've had.'

'If only he'd write a bit larger--or else I'll have to get some new spectacles. I think he could put the Lord's Prayer on a threepenny- bit if he tried hard.'

'Did you know he paints?'

'Snowden mentioned it, but he's never offered to show me anything.'

'I caught him at it once. He was doing the view of the square from the big window on a Sunday afternoon when he thought no one was about.'

'Any good?'

'I wondered. But I couldn't very well ask him, could I? Anyhow, I could see he wasn't bad.'

* * * * *

During his leaves Charles sometimes spent short holidays with Brunon and for the rest of the time rented a service flat in London. He rarely visited Beeching for longer than a week at a stretch because, he told himself, the country bored him--which was easier if less truthful than to admit that he found his father's company a strain. It was not that they quarrelled or failed to get along; indeed their relationship seemed more cordial than it had formerly been. Yet there was still an unease about it . . . a feeling that made Charles, if ever he heard his father going downstairs after they had gone to bed for the night, tiptoe to the landing with a curiosity he could hardly define--because he would never have acted thus with Snowden or Brunon, though in the morning he would probably have asked them what they had been roaming about the house for. But with his father he never put such a question.

Havelock, now approaching his seventies, had retained much of his fine physique and all his capacity for charming those he wanted to charm. Nor could it be said that he had become more eccentric, since he had already reached a limit beyond which the word would seem inadequate. What had happened was a sort of levelling off along a high plateau of singular behaviour, in which the singularities were often so trifling that the mean average distance from normal could easily be overlooked. Much of his life was outwardly like those of his neighbours, and his pastimes, though odd, were no more so than those of many another man of his age and income. The porter at his club could doubtless have capped any queer story about him with other queer stories about other club members. Letters to The Times continued without further complications, for there were still old tombstones to be discovered and written about. All this was acceptable. So were parties at Beeching at which he could be a delightful host. It was just that sometimes in his company one could feel, by a heightened awareness, that one was in the presence . . . of a presence. Once Charles came upon him in the library pasting a typed poem inside a copy of the Oxford Book of English Verse. Here again, a normal curiosity would have made Charles approach and look over his father's shoulder, but he felt unable to do this; later, however, he found the book and inspected it. To his astonishment there were many of these pasted inserts, and most were obscene parodies of well-known poems. A few were rather clever. Charles was no prude, and quite unshockable by words, but what he did find depressing was the thought of so many busy hours devoted to some of the loveliest things in literature with only such a purpose in mind. He never mentioned the matter.

More discussable were Havelock's political views, which had become increasingly bitter and at odds with almost every charted orbit. He had hated the Coalition Government, but he hated the Labour Party just as much, and he despised the Liberals. If anything he was a Conservative, but of such an extreme variety that only a few men in Parliament ever said anything he approved, and these often belonged to other parties. He sometimes found things he agreed with in the unlikeliest quarters--a remark, for instance, by D. H. Lawrence--'Let there be a parliament of men and women for the careful and gradual unmaking of laws.'

A book that impressed him a great deal was Spengler's Decline of the West, which was having an enormous vogue just then throughout Europe. Charles had been less impressed--partly, he admitted, because he had talked to so many professors who found innumerable technical errors in those parts of the book that concerned their own fields.

'But of course they would,' Havelock retorted. 'Ever watched a schoolteacher marking an exercise? The giggles of glee when he spots a mistake?' Havelock took a silver paper-knife and scored deeply into the mahogany desk top as if crossing out a wrong answer. 'That's how professors read Spengler--missing the point because they're waiting for their own pounce.'

Charles thought there was some truth in this, but he was also puzzled by his father's vehemence and physical violence. After a pause Havelock said: 'I suppose you're thinking I've spoilt that desk?'

'Well, you haven't improved it, have you?'

'It's not an antique. Came from a priest's house in Maynooth--my father-in-law bought it. Just a Victorian piece.'

'But rather nice.'

'So you really do care about these things--furniture, heirlooms, silver, all the stuff there is here?'

'I didn't say I really cared FOR them, but I'd do my share of taking care OF them. There's a bit of difference, I think.'

'Do you ever wonder what will happen to it all?'

'Well . . . what do YOU think?'

'One of these days it will burn.'

'You mean catch fire? I hope not--but a great many country houses do. The wiring's bad--Cobb tried an electric toaster the other day and nearly set the kitchen alight.'

A moment later Charles was sorry he had mentioned this matter, for it made Havelock remember that they hadn't had a fire-drill for over a year. So they had to have one--and immediately, since (as Havelock said) the essence of a fire-drill is that you don't plan for it in advance. They fixed the canvas chute, with the guide- ropes inside, that led down to the lawn from one of the top-floor windows. Havelock rang the big brass handbell whose only other function was to summon guests to the tea tent at garden parties. Since the servants slept in their own quarters away from the main house-block, there was little reason for them to take part in the demonstration, but it was geared into Havelock's enjoyment of the whole thing that they should, especially the housemaids, whose nervousness and disordered skirts made him feel quite blithe. Aunt Hetty and Cobb were excused on account of age, but Havelock himself, older than either, sometimes made the descent twice, emerging at the bottom like some excited thrill-seeker at an amusement park. Charles did not much care for the experience, for he usually slid down too fast and got scratched, but he realized that since his own bedroom was on the top floor there was some point in it. His chief doubt was whether, if a fire ever started in the middle of the night, anyone would wake up in time to unroll the thing out of the window.

One June afternoon during his leave Charles had just made such a descent when a young woman came cycling up the drive. Without any introduction or preamble she exclaimed, amidst her own astonished laughter: 'What on earth are you doing? You came shooting out as if it was the Tunnel of Love or something. . . . Have you hurt your arm?'

'No,' said Charles, 'but I've torn my trousers, that's why I'm keeping my hand there. . . . Is there--er--anything I can do for you?'

'I'm your new neighbour--Jane Coppermill--we've just moved into Burton Bridgwater. I thought I'd pay a call.'

'Delighted. I'm Charles Anderson. My father's in the house somewhere. This is a fire-drill we have once a year or so. . . . Those top rooms--as you can see--a regular trap. I believe the insurance company recommended this contrivance.' He felt he had to offer some plausible reason for it all. 'Excuse me and I'll go in and change, if you don't mind hanging around till I come back.'

'Can't I go in and meet your father?'

'Why, er--certainly, if you wish.'

She leaned her bicycle against the portico and entered the house with him. As they crossed the hall she whispered: 'Tell me first, though--is it true he's a little mad?'

Charles answered: 'Yes, we all are. The Mad Andersons. Didn't you know that? We're the talk of the county.' How else could one deal with such a question? He would rather have snubbed her, but he could not think of a snub in time, so the badinage would have to do, and if she caught behind it a reproof, so much the better. Meanwhile, without helping her to search for Havelock, he left her standing in the hall and went upstairs. When he came down she had apparently gone without seeing Havelock, but Havelock had seen her through the window and asked who she was. Charles explained.