James Hilton: Collected Novels (44 page)

“As a result of the head injury you mentioned yesterday?”

“I suppose so.”

“You had a pretty bad time?”

“No, I was one of the lucky ones—comparatively, that is. But when you’re blown up, even if you’re not physically smashed to bits …” He broke off awkwardly. “I’m sorry. It isn’t Armistice Day any more. These confessions are out of place.”

“Not at all. I’m interested. It’s so hard for my generation to imagine what it was like.”

“Don’t worry—you’ll learn soon enough.”

“How long was it before you we rescued?”

“Haven’t the faintest idea. I suppose I was unconscious.”

“But you must have recovered consciousness later?”

“Presumably. I don’t remember when or where or any of the details. But I’ve some reason to believe I was taken prisoner.”

“Reason to believe? That’s a guarded way of putting it.”

“I know—but it happens to be just about all I can say. You see, I literally don’t remember. From that moment of being knocked out my memory’s a complete blank till years later when I found myself lying on a park seat in Liverpool.”

“Years
later?”

“Getting on for three years, but of course I didn’t know that at first. And it was a wet day, as luck would have it.” He smiled. “You don’t find my story very plausible?”

“I might if you’d tell me the whole of it—without gaps.”

“But there
are
gaps—that’s just the trouble.”

“What were you doing in Liverpool?”

“Once again, I haven’t the faintest idea. I didn’t even know it was Liverpool at first. The main thing was to know
who
I was—where and when were easy enough to find out later.”

“Do you mean you’d been going by some other name until then?”

“Maybe. I suppose so. That’s another of the things I don’t know. It’s as if … well, I’ve sometimes worked it out this way—there were different rooms in my mind, and as soon as the light came on in one it had to go out in the other.”

“Well, what did you do when you realized who you were?”

“What anybody else would do. I went home. I felt in my pockets and found I had a small sum in cash, so I bought a new outfit of clothes, took a bath at a hotel, and then went to the railway station. It was as simple as that, because along with knowing my own name it had come to me without apparent effort that I lived at Stourton, that my father owned the Rainier Steelworks and all the other concerns, that we had a butler named Sheldon, and any other details I cared to recall. In fact I knew all about myself in a perfectly normal way up to the moment of that shell burst near Arras in 1917.”

“Your father must have got a very pleasant shock.”

“He was too ill to be allowed it, but the family got one all right. Of course, since I’d been reported missing in the casualty lists, they’d long since given me up for dead.”

“It’s a very remarkable story.”

“Remarkable’s a well-chosen word. It doesn’t give you away.”

I thought for a moment; then I said: “But the Army authorities must have had some record of your coming back to England?”

“None—not under the name of Rainier.”

“But wasn’t there a disc or something you had to wear all the time on active service?”

“There was, but if you’d ever experienced levitation by high explosive you wouldn’t put much faith in a bit of metal tied round your neck. It’s quite possible there was nothing the Germans could identify me by when they took me prisoner.”

“What makes you think you were ever in Germany at all?”

“Surely if I’d been dragged in by my own men they’d have known who I was?”

“H’m, yes, I suppose so.”

He went on, after a pause: “I don’t blame you at all if you don’t believe a word of all this. And it’s just as well you’re the first person I’ve confided in for years—just as well for my reputation as a sober citizen.” He laughed with self-protective cynicism. “It’s been a conspiracy of events to make me talk like this—Armistice Day—our meeting on the train—and then something the dentist said tonight when I came out of his nitrous oxide.”

“The dentist? What’s he got to do with it?”

“He was making polite conversation while I spat blood. One of the things he said was, ‘So you were a prisoner in Germany?’ I asked him what gave him that idea, and he answered, ‘Because I notice you have a tooth filled with a substitute metal German dentists were having to use during the latter part of the war’—apparently he’d come across other instances of it.”

We were silent for a moment. I could hear the first stir of early morning traffic beginning along King’s Parade. Rainier heard it too, and as at a signal rose to go. “A strange business, the war. The English told the Germans exactly where I was, so that the Germans could kill me … then the Germans did half kill me, patched me up, and saw that my teeth were properly cared for … after which the English gave me a medal for having displayed what they called ‘conspicuous gallantry in the field.’ ” He fingered it on his lapel, adding: “I wear it at shows like this, along with the Most Noble Order of Something-or-Other which the Greeks gave me for arranging a loan on their currant crop in 1928.” He began putting on his overcoat, heedless of my assurance that there was no hurry and that I often sat up till dawn myself. “Please don’t bother to see me out—I’ll take a bath at my hotel and be in time for the first train.”

On his way across the room he paused at my shelves of books and asked what tripos I was taking.

“Economics. I took the first part of the History last year.”

“Really? I did the same when I was here. But where does the psychoanalysis come in?”

“Oh, that’s only a side line.”

“I see. Made any plans for when you go down?”

“I’d like to be a journalist.”

He nodded, shaking hands at the door. “Well I’ve got a few contacts in Fleet Street. Write to me when you’re ready for a job—I might be able to do something for you.”

Early the following year I took a Ph.D. and began looking around for the post which, it seemed to me then, ought to drop snugly into the lap of any bright young man who had written a two-hundred-page thesis on “The Influence of Voltaire on the English Laissez-Faire Economists.” Cambridge had deemed this worthy of a doctorate; nobody in Fleet Street, however, held it worth a regular job. I had a very small private income and could therefore afford to cadge snippets of highbrow reviewing from some of the more illustrious and penurious weeklies, reckoning myself well-paid if the books themselves were expensive and could be sold for more cash to Mr. Reeves of the Strand; but the newspaper world at that time was full of journalists out of work through amalgamations, and the chance of getting on the staffs of any of the big dailies was not encouraging. Of course I remembered Rainier’s offer, but apart from my reluctance to bother him, he was abroad—in South America on some financial business. But by the time he returned I had been disappointed often enough to feel I should take him at his word. He replied instantly to my note, asking me to lunch the next day.

Thus I made my first trip to Kenmore. “Near the World’s End pub,” Rainier used to say, and it was the fashion among certain guests to pretend it was at some actual world’s end if not beyond it—the world in this super-sophisticated sense being that part of London within normal taxi range. I went by bus, which puts you down at the corner of the road with only a hundred yards or so to walk. I had no idea how notable, not to say notorious, those Kenmore lunches were; indeed, since the invitation had come so promptly, I had beguiled myself with visions of an intimate foursome composed of host and hostess with perhaps a press magnate summoned especially to meet me. I did not know then that Mrs. Rainier gave lunches for ten or twelve people two or three times a week, enticing every temporary or permanent celebrity to meet other temporary or permanent celebrities at her house, and that these affairs were at frequently joked about as they were infrequently declined. She functioned, in fact, as a kind of liaison officer between Society and Bohemia, with a Maecenas glance at moneyless but personable young men; and though there is no kind of social service I would less willingly undertake myself, there are few that I respect more when competently performed by someone else.

Searching my memory for impressions of that first arrival, I find I cannot put Mrs. Rainier into the picture at all. She was there, she must have been; but she was so busy making introductions that she could not have given me more than a few words, and those completely unimportant. I came a little late and found myself ushered into a drawing room full of initiates, all talking with great gusto, and all—so it seemed to me (quite baselessly, of course)—resentful of intrusion by a stranger who had neither written a banned novel nor flown somewhere and back in an incredibly short time. I say this because one of the guests
had
written such a novel, and another
had
made such a flight, and it was my fate to be seated between them while they talked either to their outside neighbors or across me to each other. There was an empty place at the head of the table, and presently I gathered from general conversation that Rainier often arrived late and sometimes not at all, so that he was never on any account waited for. I had already written off the whole affair as a rather profitless bore when the guests rose, murmured hasty good-byes, and dashed out to waiting cars and taxis. (Mrs. Rainier’s lunches were always like that—one-fifteen sharp to two-fifteen sharp and not too much to drink, so that you did not kill your afternoon.) Just as I was following the crowd, a touch on my arm accompanied the whisper: “Stay a moment if you aren’t in a hurry.”

Mrs. Rainier led me a few paces back along the hall after the others had gone. “I didn’t quite catch your name—”

“Harrison.”

“Oh, yes. … You’re a friend of Charles’s—it’s too bad he couldn’t get here—he’s so busy nowadays.”

I murmured something vague, polite, and intended to be reassuring.

“It’s a pity people who can fly halfway round the world, haven’t any manners,” she went on, and I answered: “Well, I suppose there are quite a number of people who have manners and couldn’t fly halfway round the world.”

“But having manners is so much more important,” she countered. “Tell me … what … er … I mean, are you a … let me see …
Harrison
…”

I smiled—suddenly and rather incomprehensibly at ease with her. “You’re trying to recall a Harrison who’s written something, married somebody, or been somewhere,” I said. “But it’s a waste of time—I’m not
that
Harrison, even if he exists. I’m just—if I call myself anything—a journalist.”

“Oh … then you must come again when we have really
literary
parties,” she replied, with an eagerness I thought charming though probably insincere. I promised I would, with equal eagerness, and every intention of avoiding her really
literary
parties like the plague. Then I shook hands, left the house, and on the bus back to Fleet Street suddenly realized that it had been a very good lunch from one point of view. I had never tasted better eggs Mornay.

The next afternoon Rainier telephoned, profuse in apologies for his absence from the lunch, and though the matter could hardly have been important to him, I thought I detected a note of sincerity. “I gather you didn’t have a very good time,” he said, and before I could reply went on: “I’m not keen on the mob, either, but Helen’s a born hostess—almost as good as an American—she can take in twenty new names all in a row and never make a mistake.”

“She didn’t take in mine. In fact it was pretty clear she didn’t know me from Adam.”

“My fault, I expect. Must have forgotten to tell her.”

“So a perfect stranger could walk into your house and get a free lunch?”

“They’re doing that all the time—though most of ’em have invitations. … Look here, if you’re not busy just now, why not come over to the House for tea?”

I said I would, and took the bus again to Chelsea. But at Kenmore the maid told me that Rainier hadn’t been in since morning and never by any chance took tea at home; and just then, while we were arguing on the doorstep (I insisting I had been invited less than twenty minutes ago), Mrs. Rainier came up behind me and began to laugh. “He meant the House of Commons,” she said, passing into the hall. “You’d better let my car take you there.”

Extraordinary how stupid one can be when one would prefer to impress by being knowledgeable. I knew quite well that the House of Commons, along with the Stock Exchange and Christ Church, Oxford, was called “the House,” yet somehow, when Rainier had used the phrase over the telephone, I could only think of Kenmore. Most of the way to Westminster in the almost aggressively unostentatious Daimler (so impersonal you could believe it part of an undertaker’s fleet), I cursed my mistake as a poor recommendation for any kind of job. I had feared Rainier might be waiting for me, and was relieved when, after sending in my name, I had to kill time for half an hour before a policeman led me through devious passages to the Terrace, where Rainier greeted me warmly. But his appearance was slightly disconcerting; there was a twitch about his mouth and eyes as he spoke, and a general impression of intense nervous energy in desperate need of relaxation. During tea he talked about his South American trip, assuming far too modestly that I had read nothing about it in the papers. Presently the division bell rang and only as we hurried across the Smoke Room did he broach the matter I had really come about. “I inquired from a good many people after I got your letter, Harrison, but there doesn’t seem to be a thing doing in Fleet Street just now.”

“That was my own experience too.”

“So I wondered if you’d care for a secretary’s job until something else turns up?”

I hadn’t really thought about such a thing, and maybe hesitation revealed my disappointment.

He said, patting my arm: “Well, think it over, anyway. I’ve had a girl up to now, but she’s due to get married in a few weeks—time enough to show you the ropes … that is, of course, if you feel you’d like the job at all. …”

So I became Rainier’s secretary, and Miss Hobbs showed me the ropes. It had been flattery to call her a girl. She was thin, red-faced, middle-aged, and so worshipful of Rainier that no husband could hope to get more than a remnant of any emotion she was capable of; indeed, I felt that the chance of marriage was tempting her more because she feared it might be her last than because she was certain she wanted it. She hinted this much during our first meeting. “I almost feel I’m deserting
him,”
she said, and the stress on “him” was revealing. Presently, showing me how she filed his correspondence, she added: “I’m so relieved he isn’t going to have another
lady
secretary. I’d be afraid of some awful kind of person coming here and—perhaps—
influencing
him.”