It’s a Battlefield (17 page)

‘When I'm a bit, a bit clearer. I've got a lot to learn here. Different methods, Caroline. I'm really busy.'

The voice said, ‘But I want you particularly.' It hesitated. ‘I'm going abroad next week. I don't know when I shall be back.' He was quite sure that she was lying; but there were very few people who lied to get his company. The men on night duty were arriving; he heard them walking softly by his door; he could see the shadows through the ground glass. He knew that they resented his presence. They believed that he was prying into the affairs of their departments, interfering. When he first came, he explained several times as clearly as his inarticulate tongue would permit that he wanted to understand how each department worked, not in order to criticize but in order himself to pull his weight. They had never made the least pretence of believing him. He had tried to convince them; against his conscience he had sometimes refrained from criticism when criticism was required; they merely concluded that he was saving up for some grand devastating report to the Home Secretary.

‘Thank you very much then. I'll come, but I shall have to, have to hurry away.' He rang off, and the sudden cessation of that harsh but friendly voice made him feel his isolation acutely. The room all round him was dark; only his desk was lit by the green-shaded lamp. Somewhere a long way off a telephone bell rang and a voice could be heard speaking, but through the glass door the long passage was now in complete darkness. He was like a general left alone at headquarters to study the reports from every unit; they littered his desk. But he was not sheltered in a château behind miles of torn country; the front line was only a hundred yards away, where the trams screamed down the Embankment and the buses circled Trafalgar Square.

It was hard, he thought, to get any clear idea of a war carried on in this piecemeal way throughout a city. He was not used yet to visualizing a situation from a policeman's colourless report; he had been accustomed in the East to seeing with his own eyes the casualties of law: the stabbed soldier, the smouldering hut, the body hanging from a branch.

‘No references were made to the Drover case at the Labour demonstrations at . . .'

‘A collection in aid of Mrs Drover was made at the strike headquarters at . . .'

‘A proposal to hold a demonstration against Drover's sentence in Trafalgar Square tomorrow was vetoed by headquarters, who have expressed their willingness to meet the employers on the subject of short-time rates . . .'

‘It is generally assumed here that a reprieve will be granted. Five thousand people have signed the petition.'

‘Some indignation . . .'

‘Generally apathetic . . .'

‘Pronounced feeling against members of the Force . . .'

‘No particular interest . . .'

With some impatience he pushed these reports on one side and turned to the Streatham papers; here was something about which it was possible to feel, I am fighting for what is right. In the case of Drover he was upholding a system in which he had no interest because he was paid to uphold it: he was a mercenary, and a mercenary soldier could not encourage himself with the catchwords of patriotism – my country right or wrong; self-determination of peoples; justice. He fought because he was paid to fight, and only occasionally did the sight of some brutality lend conviction to the brain with which he fought. At other times the highest motive he could offer was that of doing his job; there were no abstract reasons to compel him to forbid this meeting, to break up that, to have this Socialist arrested for seditious speaking, to guard that Fascist's platform while he spoke in terms of bayonets and machine guns; it was the will of the organization he served. It was only when he was tired or depressed or felt his age that he dreamed of an organization which he could serve for higher reasons than pay, an organization which would enlist his fidelity because of its inherent justice, its fair distribution of reward, its reasonableness. Then he told himself with bitterness that he was too old to live so long. His thin face, yellowed by more fevers than he could count, lined by the years of faithful mercenary service, would grow for a moment envious at the thought of younger men who might live to serve something which they believed worthy of their service.

4

‘M
ARGARET
,' Mr Surrogate said, and turned his hand palm upwards on the sheet, ‘Margaret.' His voice fell, his words became inaudible, and Davis laid a towel across the hot-water can and hesitated by the window. Should he draw up the blind and let in the sunlight? In Woburn Square the children were yelping on the pavement and the man with the Sunday papers called to the taximen on the rank.

‘Good food,' Mr Surrogate said suddenly, still with that explanatory and reasonable palm outspread. Davis decided: let him sleep, let the bastard sleep: and tiptoed respectfully out, a gentleman's gentleman.

The sands were pink of an evening, the sea silver. At the rippled edge, far across the pink sands, the sea-birds sat, small and white and upright, like unlit candles. Margaret stood and stared and would not come in to dinner. ‘Good food wasted,' Mr Surrogate said, pecking at her elbow like a hungry bird. ‘Oh, go to hell,' and she was Kay leaning away from him towards the bed. Mr Surrogate woke and sat up and faced Margaret Surrogate's cold appraisal from the wall. ‘I married the artist in her,' he explained to the reporter at the funeral; he was prepared; had expected several journalists; hid his disappointment with difficulty from the single inexperienced boy from a news agency. ‘She was always, to me, more than a woman.' The boy stared at him and blew his nose: he had a streaming cold.

It's true, Mr Surrogate said, not aloud, for Davis was in the next room, you were more than a woman. I wasn't worthy of you. He was daunted by the canvases which now decorated Caroline Bury's wall, daunted by the brief uncomfortable sexual passion in which Margaret had been the leader, leaving him worn out, humiliated, with the knowledge of her dissatisfaction. More than a woman. Kay was a woman, leaning back towards the bed, calling out, ‘No, Mr Surrogate, no. Please not,' afterwards on the pillows whispering into his ear how bad he was, how strong.

I've betrayed you again, Mr Surrogate said humbly to the face. Man is a beast, a lecherous beast. He may mate above him, but presently he finds his proper level. Nasty, brutish, short, that was how Hobbes described a man's life. Mr Surrogate patted the grey hair above his ears, squinting sideways at the mirror. One ran through life quickly: the Fabian Society, hansoms at midnight, friendships with cultured plumbers, fighting for truth and justice, seeing violence prevail, lust prevail over the memory of love. Mr Surrogate's thoughts withdrew from that unhappy honeymoon in Cornwall. One grew old.

But Mr Surrogate's thoughts rose resiliently: one was not too old to conquer and satisfy a young and pretty woman. Things would have been different, he told himself, avoiding the photograph, if Margaret had been less artist, more woman, had been less cold; he stamped deep down the memory of that unsated passion. She never understood me.

‘Davis, Davis,' he called, ‘what's the time? My watch has stopped.'

‘Half past nine, sir,' Davis called from the pantry. ‘Will you take cereals or porridge, sir?'

‘Cereals.' His complexion would not stand porridge too often. A small spot would appear on his nose. In four hours I shall have her here again. But he felt very little excitement. He even wondered whether he really wanted to see her again. He was not passionate; in middle age two days together with a girl were enough to exhaust him; after that passion had the same effect as porridge, a spot on the nose.

He stroked his skin gingerly; he was humble again before a mirror. It was odd that a young and pretty girl should fall for him. Of course there is my position. But the girl was stupid. She could never follow the reasoning of
No Compensation.
She wanted me to help her brother-in-law. But I had already spoken to Caroline; there was nothing more I could do. My bed, he thought, with a flash of intuition, she liked my bed, and he stared across the pink blankets, screwing up his lips histrionically at the thought that a bed might mean more to a girl than the authorship of
No Compensation
.

‘Tea or coffee, sir?'

‘Coffee, Davis.'

After all I am a public figure; I am the most advanced economic thinker in this country (a glance from those amused appraising eyes) and reluctantly he thought – I'm Margaret's husband – Margaret whose malicious vision lay in state in the picture galleries of every capital in Europe. A girl like that is not really fit for me. His ageing body, sated by its single indulgence, made not the least protest.

She may mean blackmail. The horrible thought occurred to him for the first time.

‘Are you never going to bring breakfast, Davis?' he called irritably. I will not meet her. I'll lie in bed. I'm tired.

Oh, Margaret. Margaret. She was only twenty when she had married him; she had hardly begun to realize her power in paint. All those pictures, the three at the Tate, those on Caroline's walls, at Manchester, at Munich, in Berlin, belonged to him. ‘To Mr W. H., the onlie begetter.' He was not proud of his inspiration. Those landscapes in which nature was so deftly, so wearily, so faintly caricatured meant nights of exhaustion, and the shrieking nerve. I've done you enough harm, Margaret. I'll be faithful. I'll give this girl up. He wanted to compel the portrait to believe him this time, that it was not the fear of blackmail which restrained him, that it was for her. I've only loved you, Margaret, he told her and thought a minute later: God knows, that
may
be true.

Davis brought in the breakfast tray and tactfully pushed under the bed with his foot a girl's hair slide.

‘You've forgotten the soft sugar again, Davis.'

You dirty old bastard, you've been at it again, Davis thought, stepping on patent leather toes softly and quickly to the door.

*

‘A nice little woman,' Conder said. He had breakfast in the café, rolls and coffee. It was not that he preferred a Continental breakfast or that he could not afford a larger one; he was well paid. But an accumulation of uneaten breakfasts was exchanged for holidays in Belgium, in France, in Switzerland, for pockets musical with foreign coins.

‘You've forgotten the butter, Jules.'

‘You've forgotten the sugar.'

‘No knife, Jules.'

The young man ran back and forth from his counter with a lost look like a dog taken shopping. ‘If only I could remember things. Even faces.'

Faces. Faces. Conder sat upright with a jerking neuralgic movement. I'd forgotten. I'm tired. I'm not myself. Milly's perplexed, suddenly flushed face (after three sherries), suddenly joyful (watching him scribble in a notebook), fled. He saw instead, behind Milly, Bennett watching him from a table near the door. ‘What ought I to have done?' he asked Jules. ‘He'd followed me. He must have followed me. The coincidence. Last night when I was talking to a friend, and again the night before that, after the meeting. He follows me everywhere. I haven't done him any harm.'

‘You should be like me,' Jules said. ‘I forget faces. You know, even Kay – I'm not clear what she looks like. My mother – I remember a sort of chintz effect; she had huge breasts. My father – a moustache, a huge moustache. It seemed huge then. That's all I remember.'

Conder said: ‘I'm afraid. I don't know what to do. Suppose he's in the street now, watching. I haven't done him any harm. But he may think I have, you see. I printed that story about the fight. And there's something else as well.'

‘Does he know you?'

‘I called on him once. Collecting for the Party. He may have an eye for faces. Like me. I have an eye for them.' They were like the portraits in an intimate picture gallery, hanging there always at the back of his mind: politicians, policemen, thieves; the man who drowned his wife at Shoreham, flushed and neat in the dock with a tiepin in the shape of a horse's head; the widow of the grocer who drew the Derby winner and who, dead drunk the same night, drove his car into the Thames, a widow with £20,000 of her own; she said, ‘I've always been lucky at such things, raffles, I mean, and so on': Milly Drover. He could not keep her any longer in the centre of his attention, her portrait must be relegated to a gallery which was not often visited – perhaps a few years later a similarity of dress or scent would remind him (‘a nice little woman'); he had an amazing memory for faces, for phrases, for stories of a startling kind. But now, for the moment, because he was tired, his memory was a jumble of pictures, a cacophony of sound. I've got to pull myself together. He poured out his coffee black.

Jules said: ‘My memory. I've even forgotten that letter. I've been thinking of nothing but poor Drover.'

‘Ought I to go to him,' Conder wondered, ‘and explain?'

‘Curious. It was from France. I don't know anyone in France except my father. And this was typed. Father would never have the money for a typewriter. I put it down for a moment and then you came in and there was the meeting. and all yesterday there was this and that. I'll open it when I go up.'

‘Come with me,' Conder said. ‘He won't cut up rough if there are two of us. I can't stand all this watching and spying. I want to have it out with him. Oh, hell, Jules, you haven't given me a spoon.'

‘What do you want a spoon for?' Jules said. ‘Use your fingers. Listen. I've got to go to Mass, and then I want to see the priest about this petition. Don't you think it might help if a priest signed it? I must do something. I know how it'll be. Everyone'll get bored and just let it alone.'