The Passing Bells (19 page)

“Just off the top of your head?”

“Sort of . . . yes.” He could feel his face beginning to burn.

“Well, they're bloody damn good. You have a sharp eye and a finely tuned ear. I laughed out loud over the Yorkshire cattleshow piece. The judges were right out of Dickens. Gentle satire. Just the ticket.” He looked thoughtful. “When are you leaving for the Continent?”

“The day after tomorrow.”

“Is it absolutely vital that you go?”

“No . . . I guess not. Why?”

“Because perhaps you could postpone it for a bit. I think your style of writing would go over very well with our readers. A Yank's-eye view of Britain . . . with the emphasis on the upper-middle-class types . . . mildly satirized, like the Yorkshire squires. It'd probably be good for eight weeks at least, and being a roving feature writer for the
Post
would be jolly good experience for you. Or do you have to be back in Chicago by any fixed date?”

“No. As a matter of fact, I don't even know if I'll have a job when I get back.”

“Does that mean you're interested?”

“Sure.”

The sardonic mouth softened into a warm smile. “Jolly good. Let's hop upstairs and I'll introduce you to the chief. . . . Give the old boy the pitch, as they say in America.”

The top floor of the building formed an awesome contrast to the lower depths. No harried men there, no nerve-racking typewriters. Deep carpets and oak-paneled walls subdued all sound. Massive oak doors lined a broad carpeted corridor, all of them closed, all of them bearing discreet brass markers with engraved names:
MR. KEENE. MR. UPSHAW. MR. ROSENBERG
.

“The real powers,” Golden whispered as though in church, “reside here as the prophets reside in heaven. Policy makers all.” The hooked little smile returned. “A terribly difficult job. Does one advocate votes for women now, or wait and see how the wind's blowing? And what stand do we take on birth control? Ribald plays? The income tax? Should décolletage be more or less this season? If one stands very still and listens hard, one can hear the brains creak like rusting gears.”

The corridor ended in a double set of oak doors. No brass nameplate. None was needed. The doors opened into a vestibule in which several men were seated in leather armchairs, all of them with the resigned expression of men who had waited a long time and knew they would wait a good deal longer. A male secretary sat behind a small desk adjacent to another set of double oak doors.

“Is he busy?” Golden asked.

“Naturally,” the secretary drawled in Oxonian tones. “You know better than to ask, but he'll see you if it's important.”

“It is,” Golden said. He leaned toward the man and spoke in a stage whisper. “The chap I'm with fired the fatal shot yesterday and is willing to tell all for fifty quid.”

A few nodding heads stirred. The secretary faked a stage yawn.

“Go in, Jacob, and take your assassin with you.”

Beyond the doors was a cavernous room that seemed to be part office and part museum. Glass cases filled with Egyptian artifacts stood next to teletypewriters enclosed in soundproof glass domes. Paintings by Reynolds, Gainsborough, and Turner competed for wall space with two-shilling maps of Europe, Russia, Africa, and other sections of the world that were pinned to the oak panels with thumbtacks. Secretaries and typists, both male and female, abounded, scurrying in and out of glass-enclosed cubicles, all of them moving in a soundless frenzy. At the far end of the room was a broad oak dining table used as a desk, and behind it, in a Biedermeier chair, sat Harry Golden, Lord Crewe.

“Guv'nor,” Jacob said, “meet Martin Rilke . . . from Chicago. An eminent journalist on the
Express.”

There wasn't even the remotest family resemblance, Martin was thinking as he extended his hand across the table. If Jacob was a willow, his father was an oak, and a substantial one at that, the king of all oaks, a dark brown trunk of a man, with arms that could truly be called limbs. A sailor, Martin dimly recalled, a constant contender for the America's Cup races, and as constantly fated to lose in the trials to Sir Thomas Lipton. The hand that reached out and took hold of his own was as hard and horny as a sailor's foot.

“Rilke, did you say?” The voice fitted the man, deep and growling like a storm at sea. “Any relation to Paul Rilke of Chicago?”

“My uncle, sir,” Martin said, tensing, expecting a vise squeeze. The big, brown hand was surprisingly gentle.

“One of my good friends. Saw him two years ago, come to think of it. Right in this room. How is he?”

“Fine, sir . . . just fine.”

The brown hand slipped away and joined its mate in a lockfingered grip across a waistcoat broad as a sail. A hawser of gold chain dangled in a loop from the pockets.

“Then you'd be Hanna Rilke Greville's nephew as well. Yes. I can see the resemblance.”

Martin could detect a likeness to Jacob now. It was in the mouth. The same slash of lips. Nothing else was the same, only that. Jacob's eyes were large and luminous, his father's tiny, like black beads almost lost in a great meaty, sunburned face.

Jacob leaned across the table and placed the tightly rolled sheaf of articles in front of the press lord.

“Young Rilke here took a Cook's tour of jolly old England and came back with some very amusing observations of about a thousand words each. I'd like you to read them.”

Lord Crewe merely glanced at them. “If you say they're good, Jacob, give them to Blakely.”

Jacob scooped up the articles and shoved the roll under his arm like a baton. “Right. My idea is to run a short column every day by Rilke . . . his unjaundiced view of the London social and sporting scene. Use a nom de plume . . . Yankee Cousin, or something on that order. He's staying with the Grevilles, which gives him an inside look at society high jinks. . . . Thus the nom de plume, Rilke. Can't have you being accused of biting the hand that feeds you, can we?”

“He can feed himself,” Lord Crewe rumbled. “We've never been accused of underpaying our correspondents.”

A harassed-looking young man darted up to the table with handfuls of paper torn from the Teletype machines.

“Berlin and St. Petersburg reports, sir.”

Lord Crewe snatched them from the man's hand and read through them rapidly. His face was expressionless, the carved figurehead on a ship's prow. When he was through with them, he tossed them casually aside.

“I'll have a few memorandums to shoot down. Ask Miss Fisher to come over.”

“Yes, sir,” the young man said, hurrying away.

Lord Crewe looked at his son with a faint smile. “All your fears are proving groundless. Serenity reigns. The world is used to Hapsburgs getting themselves murdered. The new heir apparent is well thought of. Not a ripple in the European pond.”

“Still waters run deep,” Jacob said. “I do believe.”

Lord Crewe settled back in his chair. “Get on with your work, Jacob. And have the decency to telephone your mother once in a while.”

They returned to the bedlam below.

“Well, Rilke,” Jacob said, “how does it feel to be writing for the most powerful newspaper in the world?”

“Pretty good . . . but I can't stay with the Grevilles. It wouldn't be right.”

“You'll have a hard time finding suitable lodgings, old boy. This is the height of the season and London's bursting at the seams. Tell you what, I have more rooms than I know what to do with . . . a big old flat in Soho above the finest Hungarian restaurant this side of the Danube. And I know you'll like the digs, Rilke. Every chorus girl in London has a key to the place.”

By leaning out of the garret window and craning her head to see around a chimney, Ivy Thaxton had a fine view of Mayfair. True, a bit lopsided, more roofs than streets to be seen, but, still, it
was
London and she
was
there.

Dear Mum and Da and my own dearest sisters Mary and Cissy and brothers Ned and Tom and our own dear baby Albert Edward. I am penning this to you all in London town. Oh, it is the grandest place you ever did see.

Just below the window there was a flat, secluded spot near the base of the tall chimney that had probably been used during the building of the house to stack slates for the roofers. It was an easy matter to climb out the window with notebook and pencil and to sit with her back against the chimney. The roof was a wonder that she would have loved to explore, a vast place of triangular slate hills running in all directions, with narrow valleys in between to catch the rain. In the winter, those valleys would be rushing torrents of black water tumbling to the drains. Rising amid the sharp ridges was a forest of chimneys and vents, some of them emitting clouds of steam or black smoke like thin volcanoes. Her happiest moments of the long day were the few minutes she could sneak in total aloneness by popping out the window with the sureness and silence of a cat.

The sun was hot, and she turned her face to it for a moment and closed her eyes. The sun was thought to be death to a woman's beauty—she had read that somewhere—but Norfolk girls loved the sun because there was so little of it to be seen in the watery, misty fens.

The letter had been started days before, but she had so little time to complete it. Velda Jessup had thrown a fit of some kind shortly after they arrived in London, falling to the floor and frothing at the mouth. She had been carried out of the house on a stretcher, her body rigid as a broomstick. Her inopportune departure had created a crisis, as Miss Alexandra was left without a lady's maid at the hour of her greatest need for one. Mrs. Broome, who ran the Park Lane house with the same calm sureness with which she ran Abingdon Pryory, had given the job to Ivy.

“It's a big step up the ladder, my girl.”

It was also hard work. Alexandra was in a perpetual fever of activity, her days and nights spent at parties, balls, fetes, luncheons, garden-party teas, dinners, dances, riding in Rotten Row, attending fashion shows, concerts, and plays. Each activity required a new costume, from shoes to hat, and she could never make up her mind about just which dress she wanted to wear. She would try on a dozen before settling for one that halfway pleased her. And talk! The girl never ceased. A constant stream of chatter about this boy and that boy, and should she marry a barrister or should she give her hand and heart to a dashing hussar who was the youngest son of a duke? And gossip, gossip, gossip, as Ivy struggled to turn up a hem or sew on a button. Lady Jane Blake, it was rumored, was seen at the Cafe Royal with a devastatingly handsome Russian ballet dancer, while Lord Blake, surely the ugliest little man in London, was away in Dublin. And had Ivy heard the hilarious bon mot that George Bernard Shaw had uttered to Granville-Barker in the foyer of the Lyceum?

Ivy smiled in the blessed sun-filled tranquillity of the rooftop, lulled by the muted rumble of traffic and the cooing of a pigeon preening itself on a chimney pot. George Bernard Shaw indeed! How could she have possibly heard what the man had said. And who was Granville-Barker? She truly liked Miss Alexandra, but she was a flibbertigibbet if there ever was one.

Dear Mum and Da and my own dearest sisters . . .

The words seemed to wriggle across the page in the heat. She licked the point of her pencil and placed it against the notebook, but she couldn't get her thoughts together.

I am penning this to you all in London town. Oh, it is the grandest place you ever did see.

That was true enough—what she had seen of it on a few shopping trips with Miss Alexandra and one afternoon off, which she had spent sitting in Hyde Park watching the rowers on the Serpentine. Ross had offered to take her to the pictures, but she had overheard one of the parlormaids telling another maid what Ross liked to do in the dark of the picture palace.

“Put his hand clear up me knickers,” the girl had said, tittering. Tittering! Ivy glared up at the pigeon. If any man did a thing like that to her, she'd make
him
titter, right out the other side of his mouth. She began to write in a slow, precise hand:

I have been given a much more enjoyable and responsible job here, quite a rung up for your Ivy . . .

Was it? She stared thoughtfully into space. What was she? A lady's maid. Ironing and sewing and smoothing, folding things into drawers and hanging things in closets all day and half the night, too. Miss Alexandra never put so much as a stocking in its proper place, but then one didn't keep a dog and expect to do the barking.

How cheeky the pigeon was, strutting back and forth as though it owned the house beneath its tiny feet. The true London spirit all right. She had noticed that in the park, the London air, everyone strutting along the paths, rich and poor alike, cocky as lords. She had sat on a bench in her plain brown dress, one hand pressed to the crown of her straw sailor hat to keep it from spinning away across the pond in the wind. Three girls had come along the path, sharing a bag of sweets between them, nice-looking girls, her age or perhaps a bit older. Well dressed. Nice linen skirts, white shirtwaists. They had sat for a moment on the bench, talking and laughing, and then one of them had drawn a silver watch on a silver chain from a small pocket in her shirt and had glanced at it and said: “Oh, my, we'd best get back to the office or Mr. Parrot will be ever so upset.”

The other two girls had laughed merrily, and one of them had replied, cheeky as can be: “Well, you know what Mr. Parrot can do!”

Then they had walked on, not hurrying one bit, down the path toward Stanhope Gate and on into the great city to work in an office somewhere—and surely no later than six in the evening. Typing, she supposed. They hadn't taught typing at school. Hadn't taught much of anything, if it came to that. How to do sums, read, and spell. The library in Norwich had been her real school. The books of Dickens, Thackeray, Galsworthy, Austen, and, oh, all the building contained, but nothing of any practical use.