The HOPEFUL TRAVELLER Page 21

  But the feverish flame of gaiety was not to be damped down.

  ‘Now that’s a point of view I hadn’t considered!’ she applauded. ‘Could I have more coffee while I think about it? We haven’t spent more than our precious five shillings, have we?’

  ‘You can’t live on black coffee.’

  ‘But I’ve had a big meal.’

  ‘You’ve hardly eaten a morsel.’

  ‘I couldn’t eat anything more. I couldn’t!’ She was panic-stricken as an addict who has been refused a dose. He ordered more coffee. She sighed with relief and hunched back in her corner, the little spurt of energy guttering down. He wondered what he could say to her. How many times he had told himself that if only he had been able to talk to Alison he could have prevented her from taking that terrible decision, that final vote against life! Yet now, looking at Dilys, it seemed pointless to make an effort; the world had become a very small place and there was only Dilys in it.

  ‘What do you do with yourself all day?’ he asked.

  ‘Come and go.’

  ‘You need to be occupied. I think I could probably find something that would suit you. On the art side.’ A relative of Sam’s was editor of a woman’s magazine; it was time the family did something for Dilys.

  She pushed her cup aside and reached for her handbag. ‘I don’t want to be organized.’

  ‘You worked in canteens during the war.’

  ‘That was different. One got swept into things. And it was all so exciting – the searchlights and tracer bullets, shrapnel spattering on the pavements when you went home in the early morning, buildings folding up like packs of cards. And people on the move all the time.’

  As they went to the door, he said, ‘Think about it, anyway.’

  The fog had become dense while they were in the café. Cars crawled close to the curb, people walked as though blind, touching the railings outside buildings, pausing, helpless, when they came to a street corner. A man with a flare was leading a bus which loomed suddenly on top of them.

  ‘Like a dinosaur!’ Dilys said, diverted from gloom to sudden ecstasy. ‘I adore dinosaurs, don’t you? Sometimes I think that those very old, gnarled trees one sees on windy heaths are petrified dinosaurs.’

  ‘Most of them are oaks,’ Adam said.

  ‘Ah, but the ones that aren’t!’

  ‘Elms.’

  ‘Never! They are dinosaurs.’ She stood on the curb, watching the shadows materialize briefly into men and machines and then dissolve again. ‘Fog changes everything. I’ve no idea where we are. Is this England still?’

  ‘We are a few hundred yards from your block of flats.’

  ‘It may have gone. Like the island in Mary Rose.’

  They began to walk slowly along the pavement, keeping their eyes on the curb which was the only guideline now. Dilys said, ‘Have you ever been in a train and had the feeling that you are coming to a station that will have some quite ordinary name, like Queen Street, which isn’t listed on the route? And that all the subsequent stations will have names such as Fish Square, Candle Lane, Meat Market; and all the other people in the carriage seem to accept this, some get out, others get in; no one seems worried but you? And you dare not ask them where you are because they will mention the name of some town of which you have never heard?’

  ‘You’ve been reading too much Kafka on an empty stomach.’ They had reached Hyde Park Corner. He took her arm and she sheered away from his touch. He wondered whether things were getting so bad that he should write to her father. When they got to her flat she could not find the key and the porter had to open the door with his pass-key. His manner suggested that this was not the first time that he had had to oblige in this way.

  ‘I think you should see your doctor,’ Adam said. Something at the back of her eyes went quite still, as though a wary animal crouched there, not daring to breathe. He went on quickly, ‘You’re not eating enough. It’s bad for you.’

  A quiver of relief lit up her face and made her seem very gay in the hectic style of the late twenties. They went into the lounge and she put on a record of The Walk to the Paradise Gardens. Afterwards Adam felt that he never wanted to hear it again. He made up his mind to call on her doctor the next day.

  Dilys turned out the light when he had gone and sat by the window in the fuzzy darkness. The fog had covered the window with a layer of black grit and everything beyond it was unclear. But she did not mind, she saw things like this most of the time now. Peace was her undoing. When the world had had its last outbreak of peace, she had been at school of one kind or another, boarding school in Sussex, then finishing school in Switzerland. Her life had been ordered for her and she had been sheltered from the real horror of peace. When she emerged at last from school, the war had thrown its protective cloak around her. Work in the Nuffield Club and one or two other canteens had provided a routine, and incidentally kept her well-fed. Her eccentricity had not been so noticeable at a time when many people were doing extraordinary things; she had, at least on the surface, kept up an appearance of belonging in society. But now, the disorder in her life was becoming apparent. She could not cope with ration books, queues, coupons; they seemed to her at once inexplicable and unimportant. But they were not to be ignored, they were a passport to day-to-day existence, something to be shown regularly every morning. Dilys could not come to terms with them. And it was not only the ration books and the coupons that defeated her; she seemed to have lost the knack of communicating. The only time she had seen her neighbour on this floor recently was when the woman had knocked at her door, excitedly brandishing a saucepan. ‘The Army and Navy have got them!’ the woman had said. ‘I thought you’d like to know.’ When Dilys had said politely, ‘But I already have a saucepan,’ the woman had retreated baffled as a sentry who receives an incomprehensible reply instead of a password. Her complete inadequacy was making a gulf between Dilys and those around her who were gradually, sometimes unwillingly but always purposefully, coming to terms with the business of day-to-day existence.

  Lately, she was more and more drawn to her mother, who had also failed to come to terms with life. How her mother would have laughed at ration books, how she would have mocked the very idea of giving coupons before one could obtain clothes! Her mother would have seen nothing extraordinary in the fact that her daughter could not cook for herself because she never managed to bring all the ingredients of a recipe together at the same moment in time.

  And the other thing, would her mother have understood that? Dilys wondered. The thing that came with a prickle at the back of the neck; the sense, when she was in a shop, the post office, even with Adam in the cafe, that she had said something completely out of context of which she herself was unaware. It had happened only yesterday, on a number 12 bus. She had said something to the conductor that was quite inappropriate; she had seen it in his eyes as he bent quickly over the ticket machine. It had been happening for about three months now. Her mind faded, as though there was a worn valve in her brain and just for a few seconds the continuity was broken; when it was restored she was not sure what had happened during the cut-out. Had she said something silly to Adam this evening? Was that why he had wanted her to go to the doctor? She had no intention of going; whatever was wrong with her, his solution would not be hers.

  She got up quickly and put on a side light. She seldom turned on the centre light which was too bright and eliminated the shadows. She picked up the book that Adam had thrown aside and opened it. After a time, the poetry exerted its usual dreamlike enchantment. She turned to her favourite poem and read:

  ‘Let us give up, go down; she will not care.

  Though all the stars made gold of all the air,

  And the sea moving saw before it move

  One moon flower making all the foam flowers fair;

  Though all those waves went over us, and drove

  Deep down the stifling lips and drowning hair,

  She would not care.’

  A mile or so away,
Jan sat at one of the tables in the restaurant, neat piles of coins heaped in front of him. It was nearly midnight and the restaurant closed its doors at ten o’clock. The city was eerily silent, a silence without resonance that made him feel as though he had gone deaf. It was possible at such times to imagine himself abandoned in a world from which all other forms of life had been obliterated. London sometimes had this effect on him, even without the fog; although he suspected that in reality it was he and not the city that lacked some element essential to life. He had not transplanted well, something at the centre had died. There seemed to be nothing that he could do about it, so usually he ignored it as he would ha,ve ignored the fact of cancer or leukaemia or any other disease for which there is no cure. Only when he was tired, and he was very tired now, did he experience a chill fear as to what might become of him.

  ‘You will become the owner of a great hotel,’ he said aloud, speaking sternly as his father might have done when outlining some task which must be performed, however irksome and uncongenial. ‘And as a start,’ he went on, beginning to mimic his father’s measured tones, ‘you will examine the accounts.’

  He amused himself in this manner while he entered up the cash register. Custom had been poor tonight, the fog had kept people at home, except for a few regulars who lived in a block of flats near by and had begun to use the restaurant for their evening meal. But on the whole, things were not going too badly. There was not much competition in the immediate neighbourhood, several restaurants had been bombed and their owners were either dead or too dispirited to start again. Jan and Jacob were prepared to work, the restaurant was open at all hours: leisure was meaningless to them.

  Jan looked up at the windows against which the fog rested like dirty cotton wool. If only it was not so unutterably dreary! He looked round the room, at the cheap tables, the cloths stained with vinegar, the greasy, thumb-marked menus; they would start with everything clean again tomorrow, they were punctilious about that, but by the end of the day it would be just the same. And thanks to the inadequate ventilation there would be the same smell of cooking fat and vegetable water. The smell would go home with him, it clung to his clothes and even when he had thrown them off it would still be there; his skin absorbed it as a miner’s absorbs coal dust.

  ‘Some way yet from the Ritz!’ Jan proclaimed; because, of course, it would be one great hotel, not a chain of hotels. ‘But it will come, with hard work it will come . . .’ This time the measured tones faltered. Jan had a sudden vivid memory of his father, tired and sad, looking out of the train window as they travelled back from Zagreb on one of their last evenings together. He had said, ‘We destroy our dreams in order to realize them.’ Jan had not understood him then, and was not sure that he did now: perhaps his father had worked too hard all his life and had now forgotten the reason for the endeavour. Jan bowed his head. He had no use for whining self-pity, but there were times when the tide of feeling should be allowed to run its course; so now he hunched over the table and cried until the source ran dry. Then he sat up and finished his business briskly, putting away the cash register, locking up the money, checking through a pile of bills.

  Jacob ordered the food, and dealt with staff and deliveries. Jan attended to the business matters. Normally he did not trouble Jacob with correspondence; like most Slavs they were highly independent and they co-operated best when they had least to do with each other. There was one letter, however, which Jacob must see. It had come in the evening post when Jacob was already engaged in his nightly battle with the cook and could be expected to bear no other burden. Jan had put it aside to show him in the morning; but now he picked it up and read it through again.

  ‘With reference to that consignment, I really can’t wait much longer for settlement. And there is the question of interest. All in all, I think £500 would about meet it – including something for risk, you understand. If I don’t hear from you soon, I shall arrange for the money to be collected. Have it ready, won’t you? I’m not a patient man!’

  The letter was typewritten; there was no signature but an address was given to which the money could be delivered. This was the first letter of its kind, but there had been one or two telephone calls. The first call had been made about a month after Kerren and her friends had delivered the food from the farm. Jan had been doubtful about accepting this delivery from the start. It was not the law-breaking aspect which troubled him, it was the feeling that he had been the recipient of charity, however unintentional on the part of the giver. If the unknown Captain had made a straightforward appeal, Jan would have been glad to settle with him. But the threats were a mistake. Even now as he read the letter blood flushed his cheeks and his pulse quickened. He was being treated like a common crook, a creature who could be cowed with threats, made to pay a fee for survival. He put the letter back in the envelope. He would show it to Jacob in the morning; but they would, of course, ignore it.

  He had hinted to Kerren that he had received anonymous telephone enquiries because he wanted to find out whether any approach had been made to her or to Adam Grieve. John Hughes was by now at Cambridge.

  ‘What did this person say?’ she asked, immediately alarmed.

  ‘Nothing very much. I do not understand easily on the telephone,’ he answered evasively. ‘I just wondered whether you have heard anything.’

  ‘No. I’d almost forgotten about it. I don’t even know what happened when John broke the news to the man.’

  ‘He saw him, then?’

  ‘Oh yes. John was very angry. He went straight to the hospital the next day and had it out there and then.’

  ‘And how did the Captain take it?’

  ‘John didn’t say. I expect the setting rather inhibited frank discussion, don’t you? On the Captain’s part, at least.’

  ‘Did John tell him where he had delivered the food?’

  ‘He wouldn’t have done that, I’m sure. He regarded the incident as his personal affair. No one else was to be involved.’

  A naïve attitude, Jan thought, but said nothing. No doubt the Captain had made a few enquiries when he came out of hospital. The people in Breconshire could probably give the names of John’s companions and Kerren could easily be traced to the restaurant. He wondered if she had been followed, but thought it best not to ask her too many questions. If she became really frightened she would probably confide in Adam Grieve and Jan was not at all sure what Grieve would do in this situation. He had an idea that he might go to the police. Jan knew that English people of a certain class had a respect for the police; but he had heard that the police worked hand-in-glove with the black marketeers and this seemed to him an eminently reasonable assumption. He preferred to handle matters himself. He had dealt with Nazi storm troopers during the war, the Captain and his friends would be child’s play.

  He was still thinking about the Captain when he left the restaurant; as he walked through the blind night he almost longed for the Captain to materialize. He needed the brutal reality of an enemy. He needed someone to reinstate him as a full human being, but who, in this wilderness, could do this for him? He was no one, and no one could take his anonymity from him. His thoughts turned briefly to Robin. She had written to say that she hoped to see him when she came to London to do her Christmas shopping. But nothing would come of their affaire. He drove his fists into the pockets of his overcoat. He wanted to stand on the street corner and shout to this uncaring city who he was and what he stood for, only he was not quite sure himself any longer. He walked on, muttering angrily. What were they to him? These little people absorbed in their frantic scramble for rations, their mad preoccupation with queueing, their yelping denunciations of national health, nationalization of coal, meatless sausages, ersatz coffee . . . It was at this point that he missed his footing at the edge of the pavement and broke his ankle.

  It meant a lot of hard work for Jacob and the staff. Jan was not a good invalid. He insisted on coming to the restaurant every day, but was constantly in the way, howling with
pain if anyone accidentally pushed against his foot, roaring for assistance when the staff were busy in the kitchen, frustrated because he could not put little things right which would not have bothered him in the usual way. He argued about the bills and complained that Jacob was too extravagant. He harassed the pimply youth who was their only waiter, watching him until the frightened boy dropped menus and spilt soup. He would beckon the boy to the side table near the service hatch at which he seemed to have dropped anchor more or less permanently, and he would hiss:

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you that if the client orders curry you must offer chutney?’

  ‘Lady said she didn’t want it.’

  ‘You do not ask her, you offer it! All you think about is saving your legs because you do not want to go and fetch it.’

  The agitated boy nodded and headed blindly through the swing doors to the kitchen where he collided with Jacob who was carrying four laden plates.

  Kerren agreed to work an extra evening. She did this out of loyalty to Jan and to help pass the time. She was going through a difficult period with Adam. He had been neglecting her lately. He said that he was busy at the office but she could not accept this well-worn excuse; Adam occupied her mind all the time now, it was inconceivable that if he really loved her he was not similarly afflicted.

  In fact, Adam was completely absorbed in the affairs of the publishing company which was passing through one of its all too frequent periods of financial crisis. It did not occur to him that Kerren would expect him to be exclusively concerned with her, but he did not doubt for one moment that she would be there, waiting, when he was able to devote more time to her.

  Kerren wrote him angry letters, cool letters, letters that were wise and good-humoured, quiet and brave, in all of which she told him that it would be better if they did not meet again. Her waste- paper basket overflowed with them. In her least balanced moments she had visions of the pieces blowing out of the dustbin to be collected and pasted together by Mrs. Neilson. Then she would run down to the garden to reassure herself that the letters were indeed destroyed beyond recall. Once she got as far as the pillar box with a particularly impressive effort which as well as being quiet and brave indicated a magnanimity of spirit which could not fail to touch him; but at the last moment she withdrew her hand, still grasping the envelope firmly. There was something that she had forgotten to say that would make all the difference; she went back to her room and the letter suffered the same fate as its forerunners. It was useless to continue the affair of course; he was not the giving kind, a part of her would always be stifled, they would be desperately unhappy and she would become bitter and twisted. And yet, impetuous though she was by nature, she never posted one of these letters.