Anthony Powell - Soldier's Art

“I can’t get through. I’ll have to go.”

“Stay the night, if you like,” said Mrs. Maclintick. “You can sleep on the sofa. Maclintick often did in our Pimlico place. Spent almost more time there than he did in bed.”

The offer was unexpected, rather touching in the circumstances. I saw she was probably able to look after Moreland better than I thought.

“No — thanks all the same. As I failed on the telephone, I’ll have to go in person.”

“Priscilla?” said Moreland.

“Yes.”

He nodded.

“What a job,” he said.

Max Pilgrim gathered his dressing gown round him. He yawned and stretched.

“I wonder when the next one will arrive,” he said. “Worse than waiting for the curtain to go up.”

I said good night to them. Moreland came to the door.

“I suppose you’ve really got to do this?” he said.

“Not much avoiding it.”

“Glad it’s not me,” he said.

“You’re right to be.”

There seemed no more taxis left in London. I walked for a time, then, totally unlooked for at that hour, a bus stopped by the place I was passing. Without any very clear idea of doing more than move in a south-westerly direction, I boarded it, in this way travelled as far as a stop in the neighbourhood of Gloucester Road. Here the journey had to be resumed on foot. The pavements were endless, threading a way down them like those interminable rovings pursued in dreams. Cutting through several side turnings, I at last found myself among a conjunction of dark red brick Renaissance-type houses. In one of these the Jeavonses had lived for twenty years or more, an odd centre of miscellaneous hospitality to which Chips Lovell himself had first taken me. In the lower reaches of their street, two fire-engines were drawn up. By the light of electric torches, firemen and air-raid wardens were passing in and out of one of the front-doors. This particular house turned out to be the Jeavonses’. In the dark, little was to be seen of what was happening. Apart from these dim figures going to and fro, like the trolls in Peer Gynt , nothing seemed abnormal about the façade. There was no sign of damage to the structure. One of the wardens, in helmet and overalls, stopped by the steps and lit a cigarette.

“Did this house get it?”

“About an hour ago,” he said, “that last tip-and-run raider.”

“Anybody hurt?”

He took the cigarette from his mouth and nodded.

“I know the people — are they about?”

“You know Mr. Jeavons and Lady Molly?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve only just arrived here?”

“That’s it.”

“Mr. Jeavons and me are on the same warden-post,” he said. “They’ve taken him down there. Giving him a cup of tea.”

“Was he injured?”

“It was her.”

“Badly?”

The warden looked at me as if I should not have asked that question.

“You hadn’t heard?” he said.

“No.”

“Didn’t survive.”

He went on speaking at once, as if from a kind of embarrassment at having to announce such a thing.

“She and the young lady,” he said. “It was all at the back of the house. You wouldn’t think there was a jot of damage out here in front, but there’s plenty inside, I can tell you. Dreadful thing. Used to see a lot of them. Always very friendly people. Got their newspapers from me, matter of fact. If you know them, there’s a lady inside can tell you all about it.”

“I’ll go in.”

He threw away the stub of his cigarette and trod on it

“So long,” he said.

“So long.”

He was right about there being a mess inside. A woman m some sort of uniform was giving instructions to the People clearing up. She turned out to be Eleanor Walpole-Wilson.

“Eleanor.”

She looked round.

“Hallo, Nick,” she said. “Thank goodness you’ve come.”

She did not seem at all surprised to see me. She came across the hall. Now in her middle thirties, Eleanor was less unusual in appearance than as a girl. No doubt uniform suited her. Though her size and shape had also become more conventional, she retained an air of having been never properly assimilated to either sex. At the same time, big and broad-shouldered, she was not exactly a “mannish” woman. Her existence might have been more viable had that been so.

“You’ve heard what’s happened?” she said abruptly.

Her manner, too, so out of place in ordinary social relations, had equally come into its own.

“Molly’s …”

“And Priscilla.”

“God.”

“One of the Polish officers too — the nice one. The other’s pretty well all right, just a bang over the head. That wretched girl who got into trouble with the Norwegian has been taken to hospital. She’ll be all right, too, when she’s recovered from the shock, I don’t know whether she’ll keep the baby.”

It was clear all this briskness was specifically designed to carry Eleanor through. She must have been having a very bad time indeed.

“A man at the door — one of the wardens — said Ted was down at the post.”

“He was there when it happened. They may have taken him on to the hospital by now. How did you hear about it? I didn’t know you were in London.”

“I’m passing through on leave.”

“Is Isobel all right?”

“She’s all right. She’s in the country.”

Just for the moment I felt unable to explain anything very lucidly, to break through the barricade of immediate action and rapid talk with which Eleanor was protecting herself. It was like trying to tackle her in the old days, when she had been training one of her dogs with a whistle, and would not listen to other people round her. She must have developed early in life this effective method of shutting herself off from the rest of the world; a weapon, no doubt, against parents and early attempts to make her live a conventional sort of life. Now, while she talked, she continued to move about the hall, clearing up some of the debris. She was wearing a pair of green rubber gloves that made me think of the long white ones she used to draw on at dances.

“We shall have to have a talk as to who must be told about all this — and in what order. Are you in touch with Chips?”

“Eleanor — Chips has been killed too.”

Eleanor stopped her tidying up. I told her what had happened at the Madrid. She began to take off the green gloves. People were passing through the passage all the time. Eleanor put the rubber gloves on the top of the marquetry cabinet Molly’s sister had left her when she died, the one Ted Jeavons had never managed to move out of the hall.

“Let’s go upstairs and sit down for a bit,” she said. “I’ve had just about as much as I can take. We can sit in the drawing-room. That was one of the rooms that came off least badly.”

We went up to the first floor. The drawing-room, thick in dust and fallen plaster, had a long jagged fissure down one wall. There were two rectangular discoloured spaces where the Wilson and the Greuze had hung. These pictures had presumably been removed to some safer place at the outbreak of war. So, too, had a great many of the oriental bowls and jars that had formerly played such a part in the decoration. They might have been valuable or absolute rubbish; Lovell had always insisted the latter. The pastels, by some unknown hand, of Moroccan types remained. They were hanging at all angles, the glass splintered of one bearing the caption Rainy Day at Marrakesh . Eleanor and I sat on the sofa. She began to cry.

“It’s all too awful,” she said, “and I was so fond of Molly. You know, she usen’t to like me. When Norah and I first shared a flat together, Molly didn’t approve. She put out a story I wore a green pork-pie hat and a bow tie. It wasn’t true. I never did. Anyway, why shouldn’t I, if I wanted to? There I was in the country breeding labradors and bored to death, and all my parents wanted was for me to get married, which I hadn’t the least wish to do. Norah came to stay and suggested I should join her in taking a flat. There it was. Norah was always quite good at getting jobs in shops and that sort of thing, and I found all the stuff I knew about dogs could be put to some use too when it came to the point. Besides, I’d always adored Norah.”