Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (27 page)

Sophia’s war began in that border town. She felt rather shivery when she saw the poster, and said to Rawlings, her chauffeur, ‘Did you see?’ and Rawlings said, ‘Yes, m’lady, I did.’ Then they passed by a hideous late-Victorian church, and the whole population of the town seemed to be occupied in propping it up with sandbags. Sophia, who had never seen a sandbag before, began to cry, partly from terror and partly because it rather touched her to see anybody taking so much trouble over a church so ugly that it might have been specially made for bombs. Further along the road in a small, grey village, a band of children, with labels round their necks and bundles in their arms, were standing by a motor-bus. Most of them were howling. Rawlings volunteered the remark that he had never expected to see refugees in England, that Hitler was a red swine, and he would like to get his hands on him. At a garage where they stopped for petrol the man said that we could never have held up our heads if we hadn’t finished it now.

When they got to Carlisle, Sophia decided that she must go by train to London. She had been on the road already for ten hours, and was miserably stiff, but having arranged to help with the evacuation of mothers and children, she was due at a school in the Commercial Road at eight o’clock the following morning. Accordingly, she told Rawlings to stay the night at Carlisle, and she herself boarded the London train. There were no sleepers, the train was full of drunken soldiers, and it was blacked out. Some journeys remain in the memory as a greater nightmare even than bad illness; this was to be one of them. Sophia was lucky to secure a seat, as people were standing in the corridors; she did so, however, sharing the carriage with a Scotch officer, his very young wife, a nasty middle-aged lady and several sleeping men. The nasty lady and the officer’s wife both had puppies with them, which surprised Sophia. She had wrenched herself away from her own Milly that morning, unwilling to have an extra object of search among the rubble and corpses. Soon total
darkness descended, and fellow-passengers became mere shadowy forms and voices assuming ghost-like proportions.

The officer’s wife went to the lavatory, and the little officer said confidentially to Sophia, ‘We were only married on Saturday, and she’s verra upset,’ which made Sophia cry again. She supposed she was going to spend the war in rivers of tears, being an easy crier. The nasty lady now said that it seemed foolish to go to war for Poland, but nobody bothered to take up the point.

‘You mark my words,’ she said, ‘this will mean a shilling on the income tax.’

Whether or not it be true that drowning persons are treated to a cinematograph show of their past lives, it is certainly a fact that during fiendish journeys undertaken with no cheerful object in view most people’s thoughts are inclined to take on that drowning aspect either with regard to past or future events. Sophia, achingly tired, but unable to go to sleep, began to re-enact in her mind scenes from her past life.

The only child of a widowed peer, who could write his name, Maida Vale, but little else, she had seen London for the first time at the age of eighteen. An aunt had then taken her out in the world. She fell under the influence of Maurice Baring’s novels, her ideal hero was a suave, perhaps slightly bald, enormously cultivated diplomat. Gentlemen of this description did not abound at the balls she went to, and the callow youths of twenty who did, were a source of disillusionment to her. She was not shy and she had high spirits, but she was never a romper and therefore never attained much popularity with the very young. At the end of her first London season, she went to a large house-party for Goodwood, and here one of her fellow-guests was Luke Garfield. He had just left the diplomatic service to go into the City. His very pompous, cultivated manner, excellent clothes, knowledge of foreign affairs and slight baldness gave him prestige in the eyes of Sophia, and he became her hero. On the other hand, Luke saw at once that her charm and unusual
looks would be invaluable to him in his career, and in so far as he was capable of such a warm-blooded emotion, he fell in love with the girl. He proposed to her the following November, after she had poured out tea for him in her aunt’s drawing-room. His pin-stripe trousers and perfect restraint seemed to her quite ideal, the whole scene could have come out of ‘Cat’s Cradles’, and was crowned for her by Luke’s suggestion that their honeymoon should be spent in Rome where he had recently been
en poste
.

How soon she began to realise that he was a pompous prig she could not remember. He was a sight-seeing bore, and took her the Roman rounds with a dutiful assiduity, and without ever allowing her to sit on a stone and use her eyes. Her jokes annoyed and never amused him; when she said that all the sights in Rome were called after London cinemas, he complained that she was insular, facetious and babyish. She was insular, really; she loved England and never thought abroad was worth the trouble it took getting there. Luke spoke Italian in such a dreadfully affected way that it embarrassed her to hear him.

It was on her honeymoon in Rome that she first met Rudolph Jocelyn. He made no great impression on her, being the antithesis of what she then so much admired. He was not bald, suave, or in any sense of the word a diplomat. On the contrary, he had a shock of tow-coloured hair, spoke indistinctly, dressed badly, and was always in a great hurry. Luke disapproved of him; he said that Jocelyn’s journalistic activities were continually getting the Embassy in trouble with the Italians. Besides, he kept low company and looked disreputable, and the fact that he spoke Italian like a native, and two dialects as well, failed to endear him to Luke. Some months later Sophia heard that he had mobilised the Italian army in a moment of lightheartedness; his newspaper splashed the martial news, and Rudolph Jocelyn was obliged to abandon journalism as a career.

Sophia had a happy character and was amused by life; if she was slightly disillusioned she was by no means unhappy in her
marriage. Luke was as cold as a fish and a great bore; soon however she began to regard him as a great joke, and as she liked jokes she became quite fond of him when, which happened soon, she fell out of love with him. Also she saw very little of him. He left the house before she was properly awake in the morning, returning only in time to dress for dinner, then they dined out. Every Saturday to Monday they stayed with friends in the country. Sophia often spent weeks at a time with her father, in Worcestershire or Scotland. Luke scemed to be getting very rich. About twice a week he obliged her to entertain or be entertained by insufferably boring business people, generally Americans. He explained that this must be regarded as her work so she acquiesced meekly, but unfortunately she was not very good at her work, as Luke never hesitated to tell her. He said that she treated the wives of these millionaires as if they were cottage women and she a visiting duchess. He said they were unused to being treated with condescension by the wives of much poorer men, who hoped to do business with their husbands. Sophia could not understand all this; she thought she was being wonderful to them, but they seemed to her a strange species.

‘I simply don’t see the point of getting up at six all the time you are young and working eighteen hours a day in order to be a millionaire, and then when you are a millionaire still getting up at six and working eighteen hours a day, like Mr Holst. And poor Mrs Holst, who has got up at six all these years, so that now she can’t sleep in the morning, only has the mingiest little diamond clip you ever saw. What does it all mean?’

Luke said something about big business and not tying up your capital. Mr Holst was the head of the firm of which Luke’s was the London office, and the Holst visits to England were a nightmare for Sophia. She was obliged to see a great deal of Mrs Holst on these occasions and to listen by the hour to her accounts of their early struggles as well as to immense lectures on business ethics.

‘Lady Sophia,’ Mrs Holst would say, fingering her tiny diamond clip, ‘I hope that you and Sir Luke fully realise that
Mr Holst has entrusted his good name – for the good of the business, Lady Sophia, is the good name of Mr Holst, and in fact Mr Holst has often said to me that Mr Holst’s business is Mr Holst – well, as I was saying, this good name is entrusted into Sir Luke’s keeping and into your keeping, Lady Sophia. I always say a business man’s wife should be Caesar’s wife. As I have told you, Lady Sophia, Mr Holst worked for twenty hours a day for thirty years to build up his business. Often and often I have heard him say “My home is my office and my office is my home” and that, Lady Sophia, is the profound truth. Now, as I was saying …’ and so it went on.

Sophia, who was never able to get it out of her head that the City was a large room in which a lot of men sat all day doing sums, and who was of course quite unable to distinguish between stock-brokers, bill-brokers, bankers and jobbers, found these lectures almost as incomprehensible as the fact that Mrs Holst should take so much interest in her husband’s profession when it had only produced, for her, such a wretched little diamond clip. Sophia loved jewels, she had fortunately inherited very beautiful ones of her own from her mother, and Luke, who was not at all mean, often added to them when he had brought off a deal.

The train stopped. The Scotch officer, his wife, the nasty lady and their puppies all got out. It was one o’clock in the morning. The carriage then filled up, from the corridor which was packed, with very young private soldiers. They were very drunk, singing over and over again a dirty little song about which bits of Adolph they were going to bring back with them. They all ended by passing out, two with their heads in Sophia’s lap. She was too tired to remove them, and so they lay snoring hot breath on to her for the rest of the journey.

Her thoughts continued. After some years of marriage Luke had joined the Boston Brotherhood, one of those new religions which are wafted to us every six months or so across the Atlantic. At first she had suspected that he found it very profitable in the way of
deals with older Brothers; presently however he became earnest. He inaugurated week-end parties in their London house, which meant a hundred people to every meal, great jolly queues waiting outside the lavatories, public confessions in the drawing-room, and quiet times in the housemaid’s cupboard. Sophia had not been very ladylike about all this, and in fact had played a double game in order to get the full benefit of it. She allowed people to come clean all over her, and even came clean herself in a perfectly shameless way, combing the pages of Freud for new sins with which to fascinate the Brotherhood. So, of course, they loved her. It was just at this time that everything in Sophia’s life began to seem far more amusing because of Rudolph Jocelyn whom she had fallen in love with. He came to all the week-end parties, tea parties, fork luncheons and other celebrations of the newest Christianity, and Luke disliked him as much as ever but endured him in a cheery Brotherly way, regarding him no doubt as a kind of penance, sent to chasten, as well as a brand to be snatched from the burning. Brothers, like Roman Catholics, get a bonus for souls.

Sophia and Rudolph loved each other very much. This does not mean that it had ever occurred to them to alter the present situation, which seemed exactly to suit all parties: Rudolph was unable to visualise himself as a married man, and Sophia feared that divorce, re-marriage and subsequent poverty would not bring out the best in her character. As for Luke, he took up with a Boston Brotherly soulmate called Florence, and was perfectly contented with matters as they stood. Florence, he realised, would not show to the same advantage as Sophia when he was entertaining prospective clients; Sophia might not be ideally tactful with their wives, but she did radiate an atmosphere of security and of the inevitability of upper-class status quo. Florence, however saintly, did not. Besides that, Luke was hardly the kind of man to favour divorce. Middle-aged, rather fat and very rich, he would look ridiculous, he knew, if his wife ran away with a poor, handsome and shabby young man. Let it be
whispered too that Luke and Sophia, after so many years, were really rather attached to each other.

As she sat in the train reviewing her past life, Sophia felt absolutely certain that it was now over and done with. It lay behind her, while she, with every revolution of the wheels, was being carried towards that loud bang, those ruins, corpses and absence of loved ones. She had been taken very much unawares by the war, staying with her father in a remote part of Scotland where telephone and radio were unknown, and where the newspapers were often three days late. Now in the blacked-out train crowded with soldiers, she was already enveloped by it. The skies of London were probably dark by now with enemy planes, but apprehension was of so little use that she concentrated upon the happiness of her past life. The future must look after her in its own way. She became drowsy, and her mind filled with images. The first meet she ever went to, early in the morning with her father’s agent. She often remembered this, and it had become a composite picture of all the cub-hunting she had ever done, the autumn woods and the smell of bonfires, dead leaves and hot horses. Riding home from the last meet of a season, late in the afternoon of a spring day, there would be primroses and violets under the hedges, far far away the sound of a horn, and later an owl. The world is not a bad place, it is a pity to have to die. But, of course, it is only a good place for a very few people. Think of Dachau, think of China, and Czechoslovakia and Spain. Think of the distressed areas. We must die now, and there must be a new world. Sophia went to sleep and only woke up at Euston. She went to the station hotel, had a bath, and arrived at the Commercial Road at exactly eight o’clock. Of the day which followed she had afterwards but little recollection. The women from London were wonderful, their hostesses in the country extremely disagreeable. It was a sad business.

When it was over Sophia went to bed and slept for thirteen hours.

She got up in time for luncheon. There had been no loud bang, the house was not in ruins, and when she rang her bell Greta, her German maid, appeared.