Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

But he had conquered his peevishness and was now no more than quietly at odds with life—a sensation so familiar that he had learned every technique of coming to terms with it. He said, in a friendly way: ‘So you’ve been enjoying Switzerland, Miss Raynor?’

‘Yes, very much. It was my first visit since I was at school in Berne.’

‘Ah, Berne… a charming city.’

‘You know it?’

‘Very well. I was en poste there for a couple of years. Perhaps the world’s luckiest capital, unless you vote for Stockholm.’

‘What about Washington?’

‘It didn’t quite miss two world wars.’

‘But no air-raids—one doesn’t see all the bombed ruins.’

‘Nor does one in Paris or Rome.’

‘But in London.’

‘London, I grant you.’

‘Were you in London during any of them?’

‘Raids?… Oh yes.’

‘Were they very bad? I suppose that’s a na ve question—’

‘They were quite bad enough, though not nearly the kind of thing the German cities got towards the end of the war. Dresden, for instance.’

She said musingly: ‘How much easier it is to feel pity for cities than for countries.’

He nodded. ‘That’s because cities seem like people—lovable and helpless and innocent. Whereas countries stand for governments—cold and strong and always a bit guilty. Of course the whole notion’s false, but it suits the mythology of the times.’

‘That’s a rather calm and detached way of looking at it.’

He was suddenly aware that they were talking beyond the scope of mere acquaintance and that Gerald had relapsed into a rather prolonged silence. Charles had so often in his own youth been the victim of such a situation that he was specially anxious for it not to happen to Gerald, so he looked for a chance to bring him back into the conversation. Fortunately Miss Raynor gave it when she added: ‘Were you as calm and detached during the raids?’

He answered: ‘CALM? My dear Miss Raynor, there’s only one word for what I was. I was SCARED. So scared I packed Gerald off to some friends in Connecticut immediately.’ He smiled and looked to Gerald for confirmation. ‘Didn’t I?’

‘Yes, but you stayed in London, dad.’

Charles caught a note in Gerald’s voice that gave him an instant bewildering satisfaction. So the boy WAS proud of him, however absurdly? That was something. Something to build on. Something that would perhaps help to unsnarl the father-son relationship. It helped him now to answer cheerfully: ‘What else could I do? My job was there. Otherwise I’d have been off like a shot.’ He half turned to the girl again. ‘But actually it wasn’t as bad as some Americans may have pictured it. I think perhaps we overdid the publicity on your side.’ Yes, he liked her. She was charming and intelligent. ‘You see, we wanted you to feel sorry for us because we hadn’t time to be sorry for ourselves. We were so damned busy we didn’t know what we’d been through till it was all over.’

‘TILL IT WAS ALL OVER’

The autumn of 1939 brought the phony war and the song that so dismally suited it—the one about hanging out the washing on the Siegfried Line. As a visible symbol of the same period there was the portable boxed gas-mask, never used, emblem of false preparedness as well as a preposterous nuisance.

Charles had sent Jane and Gerald to the country (Jane’s sister’s house on the outskirts of a small Cheshire town) as soon as war was declared. He joined her at weekends, but preferred to spend the other days in London, meeting people and trying to learn what was really happening. It was a time when being officially on leave meant little; one looked around for some emergency use for oneself. Charles found none. Many men of his age and of equal status were similarly preoccupied. No older than the century, he was clearly young enough for most kinds of service, and though he did not imagine he could be usefully employed against the Siegfried Line, he would go anywhere and do anything if anybody in authority suggested it. Of course nobody did. At the Foreign Office it was assumed there would be plans for him by the time his leave was finished, but the Office was in a polite chaos owing to the return of so many personnel from enemy territory. Charles spent long lunch-times at his club talking to other men equally stranded and restive.

One day towards the end of his leave he was summoned by a Private Secretary named Gosford. It was a dark morning; a yellowish fog totally obscured the trees of St. James’s Park and Gosford himself seemed electrically bright behind the desk as he swivelled round to shake Charles’s hand. He had had a career of such sensational brilliance that though he was Charles’s junior by several years, the pages of Who’s Who supplied an accurate measure of comparison—almost half a column as against barely an inch. Yet, of course, in an Etonish All Souls’ fashion, he was friendly enough, if that be considered friendly at all. Charles knew, respected, and only slightly disliked the type.

‘How are you, Anderson?… Sit down… Smoke?… God, what a day! Don’t you wish you were basking on the Copacabana beach?’

Charles’s South American post had not been Rio, but he did not think it worth while to make the correction. He smiled, took the proffered cigarette, and murmured congratulation on Gosford’s recent K.C.M.G. Gosford replied deprecatingly: ‘Oh, well…’ and then, to add tartness to the flavour: ‘I suppose they just had to after Pelham-Frobisher got one.’ Charles knew Pelham-Frobisher as an official in the Treasury, but that was all; he supposed the joke lay in some inter-office politics of which his absence had made him ignorant.

Presently Gosford lit a cigarette himself and studied Charles through the smoke. ‘You’re living in London now, Anderson?’

‘At my club for the time being. My wife’s in Cheshire with the boy.’

‘Ah, very sensible… You don’t go to your family place then—let me see, isn’t it Beeching?’

Charles wondered how Gosford had known or why he had bothered to find out. ‘Yes, I go fairly often.’

‘Your father live there still?’

‘Yes.’

Gosford swivelled another twenty degrees till his face was cut into layers of light and shadow by the green-shaded desk lamp at eye-level. ‘I’d like to ask you a few questions about Sir Havelock if you don’t mind. Rather personal questions.’

‘Certainly. What’s he been up to now?’ This slipped out, as perhaps it should not have done from a trained diplomat, yet it was useful sometimes to give rein to the functions of an equally trained subconscious, and Charles, as soon as he had spoken the words, was not wholly regretful.

Gosford picked up the cue as Charles had known he would. ‘Oh? Does he often—er—misbehave?’

‘He can be rather naughty—at times.’

They were both fencing with these words of innocence.

‘What ARE some of the things he’s been up to?’

Charles thought a moment. ‘I think the last was a mousetrap that didn’t kill the mice but kept them imprisoned so that he could release them afterwards… He had to drop it—the servant problem was quite hard enough at Beeching.’

Gosford smiled faintly. ‘Are you on good terms with him?’

‘Personally, yes. Of course I don’t see eye to eye with all his opinions and enthusiasms.’

‘Has he visited Germany recently?’

Charles was startled by the question, but also puzzled.

‘I don’t know that he ever has. For the last ten years he hasn’t been anywhere out of England; that I’m certain of.’

‘What does he do with his life—at Beeching—so far as you know?’

‘He has hobbies. Some of them a bit eccentric, but not all. Old tombstones. Latin inscriptions. Ornithology. Writes to The Times?