Time and Time Again (21 page)

Jane soon showed her qualifications not only as a wife but as a Second Secretary's wife. She tackled the job with a respect for it that muted the strings of her personality without putting any of them out of tune. The Ambassador, Sir Richard Thornton ('Papa'), was a senior diplomat who (someone once said) possessed many merits developed to a marked degree of averageness; he had married late, and for the second time, and it was his wife who set the key and pace of the Embassy. Older than he was, sharp-tongued and domineering, of an aristocratic family and twice widowed by men who had won high distinction in the Foreign Service, she had an air of making comparisons that must always be unsatisfactory. Perhaps Sir Richard guessed this. He was completely under her thumb, and therefore astute enough to pretend not to like Jane as much as he did; while Jane, sizing up the situation, knew that sooner or later Lady Thornton would have to be tackled.

The clash came over Jane's behaviour at a reception given by a foreign Embassy to a visiting royalty. The entire diplomatic corps was present and protocol reigned heavily. Somebody, however, must have spilled the bear-pit story, for when Jane was presented to His Majesty, he mentioned it, and the result was a rather long and jovial tęte-ŕ-tęte later in the evening, which nobody failed to observe. Jane happened to have lived for a time in His Majesty's country and to have a smattering of the language, all of which helped. When the affair was over she thought she had done quite well to give royalty such a chance to unbend, but the next day Lady Thornton made a point of snubbing her for it in Charles's presence. 'I suppose,' she remarked, 'he was your first king and he went to your head?'

Since Jane was not one to take rebukes of this sort easily, Charles jumped in with excuses for her before she could reply. But then Lady Thornton turned her guns on him, interrupting: 'When you've had more experience, Mr. Anderson, you'll perhaps be less ready to contradict me.'

'He wasn't contradicting you,' Jane retorted, prompt now to defend Charles. 'He just can't think what I did wrong, and neither can I.'

'Exactly,' Charles agreed. 'After all, it was the King who started it--I daresay he felt in the mood for a joke. Those fellows must get awfully bored with formalities--it seems rather hard if they can't ever be allowed to relax like anybody else.'

'Nonsense,' Lady Thornton snapped back. 'It's no harder for them than it is for us. They EXPECT to be bored. They're usually on guard about their rank, and if you forget for a moment who they are-- no matter how much they've seemed to encourage you--they're apt to see a slight. Of course there are exceptions, but when you've met as many kings as I have, Mr. and Mrs. Anderson, you'll know it's much safer to bore them than to try to amuse them.'

'I never like doing things that are too safe,' Jane said, but she caught Charles's eye and could see that he too was somewhat disarmed as well as astonished by Lady Thornton's frankness.

'Then you'll run grave risks of damaging your husband's career. And believe me, that warning is well-meant.'

Afterwards Charles exchanged a glance with Jane and burst out laughing. 'Well, well . . . we're still alive, that's something. But what a crushing old battleaxe!'

Jane said, more seriously: 'I wonder if she's right--about kings. I don't suppose we shall meet as many as she has, anyhow.'

'There aren't as many.'

'Darling, that's far more crushing than anything SHE said.'

The odd thing was that after this incident they both got along much better with Lady Thornton--indeed, it could almost be said that she showed signs of liking them. She was a remarkable woman and doubtless much could be learned from her example. The atmosphere at her parties was far too disciplined, but they were socially efficient and set a standard. She worked hard. She devoted herself to local charities. She bullied the American Minister (a poker-playing millionaire politician) into serving on committees for the care of refugee children and the restoration of ancient cathedrals. Duty was her watchword and attention to duty her prime requirement in others. In her opinion all diplomats under forty were ill-trained and bad-mannered, frivolous and deplorably slack. She considered Charles to be most of these things to an extent made worse by his pleasant disposition, and she conveyed her misgivings to Jane with the implied suggestion that Jane and she were sisters under the skin, steel-ribbed in contrast to the invertebrates all around them. Jane was amused. 'She really thinks that,' she told Charles. 'And I'm afraid to disillusion her.'

'I don't think you're afraid of anything and I don't think she could be disillusioned about anything,' Charles answered, baiting Jane affectionately. 'And maybe you ARE a bit like her. She's not a bad sort.'

'Poor Papa.'

'How do we know?'

'She puts him in his place all the time.'

'Perhaps that's just exactly where he likes to be.'

One thing was certain: the rigidities of Embassy functions under Lady Thornton pointed up the fact that Jane's parties, which she gave often and unostentatiously and with a clever mingling of seniors and juniors, became noted among the diplomatic crowd for their sparkle and general enjoyability. Nor did they lack moments at which things were said and discussed of some importance. Afterwards Jane and Charles would hold their own intimate post- mortems.

'I thought the new Bulgarian was sweet.'

'Battleaxe won't approve of him. Especially that long cigarette- holder.'

'It suits him, though. Did you talk to Madame Lesinsky?'

'Not much. Did you?'

'She said Delafours told her the outlook for the new German loan isn't promising. . . . By the way, I must teach Héloďse to make ice cream properly or else get it sent in next time. Cintara poured his wine into his. Did you notice?'

'Maybe an old Portuguese custom . . . I wonder where Rampagni's wife got those earrings?'

'Either an heirloom or very bad taste. . . . What did you think of Beatrice Kindersley?'

'Perfectly delightful.'

'She told von Ahndorf the reason her father plays poker so well is because he learned it at his mother's knee and other joints.'

'I've heard that gag before, but it sounds good about Kindersley. I rather like the old boy. Must be a headache to his staff, but he's refreshingly out of place among all the career men. Wherever he goes there'll be some corner of a foreign field that's forever Texas.'

'That's not a bad gag either.'

'Grandison's was the best. He said Kindersley always made him think that perhaps a tired salesman in a china shop must sometimes just LONG for a bull.'

* * * * *

Those were the gay years, the gayest perhaps for centuries, perhaps also for centuries to come. The First World War had become something one did not bring up unless one had to; personal recollections of it were nearly always a bore or the mark of one. How ironical to recall, if one could, the recruiting poster that had pictured a father being asked by his son: 'What did you do in the Great War?' Charles hadn't a son, but if he had, he couldn't imagine the question, much less the answer. The only time the matter had point was if one became friendly with individual Germans . . . 'Were you on the Somme?' 'Why, yes, so was I'--and then leave it at that, with some sort of freemasonry established. But Charles's experience did not yield any such item. Once, however, he met a German who said he came from Ingolstadt, and Charles was able to reply: 'Indeed? My brother died there--in a prison camp just after the war ended. The flu epidemic.' Just the casual common denominator of a past that one hoped was on the way to oblivion.

But it was this curious interval, during which the first war was not quite forgotten and the next one not yet feared, that made for a sudden short-lived fashion of remembrance. Remarque's Im Westen Nichts Neues swept the world; so did Sherriff's Journey's End. Charles and Jane made up a party to see this play when it came to their city, performed in the language of the country; and afterwards, at a restaurant, memories were unleashed by guests of half a dozen nationalities. For once, it seemed, and perhaps never again, Europeans could unite in a single emotion if not in a common cause; the only faint division line, indeed, was between the ex- warriors and the neutrals who had missed the ordeal. 'Would you fight again?' was asked, and the answers of the diplomats were both undiplomatic and unnecessary, for surely they would never have to face the problem. Even an enemy would whisk them safely home across frontiers with full honours.

Charles said to Jane on the way back to their house: 'I wonder what all our Foreign Offices would say if they got a verbatim report of that conversation. Give us all the boot, maybe.'

'And then there wouldn't be any younger generation to take over from people like Papa.'

But Sir Richard also saw the play and discussed it later in an equally undiplomatic way, though privately in his office. 'Were you in the war, Anderson?'

'No, sir, I was just too young.'

'I'd say you were damned lucky then. My son was killed. Makes you wonder--almost--how human beings could be forced to endure such things . . . I mean if they'd all packed up suddenly and run home-- both sides--who could have stopped them?' This was surely a naďve thought for an Ambassador to utter, and perhaps he realized it, for he continued hastily: 'Funny the effect a play can have. You ever met this fellow Sherriff?'

'No, sir.'

'If I ever do I'll tell him how much I was impressed.'

'I'm sure he'd be very glad if you wrote to him and said so.'

'All right. Draft me a letter. . . . I was in London during one of the Zeppelin raids. Happened to be at Liverpool Street Station-- you know Liverpool Street Station?'

'Yes.'

'It's got a very high glass roof. . . . I was in a train just about to leave when a bomb fell. Killed about twenty people in another train coming in across the platform. Hope I never see anything like that again--people on their way to business from the suburbs--lots of girls . . . I pulled some of them out of the mess-- the glass did the worst . . . I'll never forget those office girls--cut to ribbons, some of them . . . Well, well, must work. Fetch me Herstlett, I want to look up something. . . . Oh, and--er-- don't bother about a letter to that writer fellow--might lead to a lot of useless correspondence. . . .'

* * * * *

Charles was transferred again. Already he was beyond the stage at which his work was mostly simple and routine; it began to present problems, and these he thought he tackled rather more than adequately. There were times when he was bored and fancied he would have been happier in some other job, but with later detachment he usually decided that he wouldn't--he didn't really envy the lawyers, politicians, and business men whom he frequently had to meet. The ones he did occasionally envy were shy engineers on their way to some project, or a few stray writers globetrotting for local colour and showing off their freedom at all the parties they could pick up en route. There were times also when Charles thought of the millions living around him whom he would never encounter unless they figured personally as servants or tradespeople or impersonally as statistics in books of reference-- people who might, by some movement of force beyond the reach of protocol, become suddenly 'allies' or 'enemies'. Like all the great professions, diplomacy seemed to him a marvellous conspiracy that never did, in the long run, quite succeed in either achieving or defeating the ends of something bigger than itself.

He was at a South American post in 1929 when Wall Street crashed and he received a lugubrious letter from Havelock bemoaning the way the London market had dropped in sympathy. Since Charles had American friends whose plight was almost desperate, he did not waste much concern on his father's financial position, but he was sorry to learn from Cobb that Aunt Hetty was ill. His father had not mentioned it. A few months later Aunt Hetty died, and Havelock did mention the matter then, listing it as another of the crosses he had to bear. But the next letter was reassuring--it enclosed a cutting from The Times, to which Havelock seemed to have contributed the blithest letter of his career. It narrated how, in the churchyard of Pumphrey Basset, Berks., he had discovered the resting-place of a forgotten female dwarf, judging from the inscription on the eighteenth-century tombstone, which read 'Aged 42 Years, Height 35 inches, "Parva sed apta Domino".' Havelock made a good story of it, and Charles pictured him kneeling and feeling on the grassy grave, for (as he remembered from having taken part as a boy in several of these expeditions) the stone was apt to be so flaky and moss-covered that it chipped away if one tried to clean it, and in such cases the sensitive fingertip was often a safer reader than the eye.

Charles was still in South America five years later when the sudden death of Jane's father summoned her to England. Charles would have asked for leave to accompany her, but he was First Secretary now and it was possible that his chief might also be taking a leave in the near future, so he said he had better stay. Jane agreed with him. What they both meant was that he mustn't miss the chance of being Chargé for a time. It was only a small Legation, but to have full authority and responsibility at his age, even temporarily, could be a stroke of luck in his career. So little ever happened to stir the placid relations between His Majesty's Government and that particular country that Jane and Charles tried to cheer themselves, the night before she sailed, by imagining some incident that would give him scope to show his capabilities.

'If Argentina were to grab the Falkland Islands,' was Charles's choice.

'An earthquake,' Jane countered. 'You plunge into the wreckage and save some red boxes.'

They agreed that both these suggestions would involve unnecessary disaster. It was the Commercial Attaché who joined them then and, being admitted to the game, scored easily by his vision of an airman making a forced landing near the top of the Andes. 'First of all, no one can climb to rescue him but Charles. And then it turns out the fellow hasn't any passport or visa--a man without a country. But he carries a secret formula that will revolutionize the art of warfare--'