Here Be Dragons Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Stella Gibbons

  Dedication

  Title Page

  1 Sanctuary in Hampstead

  2 Boy in the Fog

  3 They Were Both Breathing Flame

  4 The Olive-coloured Canal

  5 Nevermore

  6 Boss’s Friend’s Relation

  7 “And All My Days Are Trances,”

  8 “And All My Nightly Dreams …”

  9 Twenty-two and Fourpence

  10 The Streets of Summer

  11 “Bohemia. A Desert Country Near the Sea”

  12 Idyll: by George Sand

  13 Elizabeth Here

  14 No-Man’s-Land

  15 “So All Day Long the Noise of Battle Roll’d”

  16 “And When She Was Good …”

  17 The Voice of My Old Love

  18 Act Three: The Garden in Surrey Again

  19 Wreck of a Happy Ship

  20 “… and With the Bloom Go I!”

  21 Journey to France

  22 “You’re Frightening Dandy”

  23 Fair Wind From Jamaica

  Copyright

  About the Book

  In the years after World War Two, Nell Sely, child of the forgotten generation, wanders blind through 1950s bohemian London, smoke-filled jazz clubs and bittersweet coffee bars in search of romantic idyll, delving into the dark backstreets of squalid yet splendid London.

  About the Author

  Stella Gibbons was born in London in 1902. She went to the North London Collegiate School and studied journalism at University College, London. She then spent ten years working for various newspapers, including the Evening Standard. Stella Gibbons is the author of twenty-five novels, three volumes of short stories and four volumes of poetry. Her first publication was a book of poems, The Mountain Beast (1930), and her first novel Cold Comfort Farm (1932) won the Femina Vie Heureuse Prize in 1933. Amongst her works are Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm (1940), Westwood (1946), Conference at Cold Comfort Farm (1959) and Starlight (1967). She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1950. In 1933 she married the actor and singer Allan Webb. They had one daughter. Stella Gibbons died in 1989.

  ALSO BY STELLA GIBBONS

  Cold Comfort Farm

  Bassett

  Enbury Heath

  Nightingale Wood

  My American

  Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm

  The Rich House

  Ticky

  The Bachelor

  Westwood

  The Matchmaker

  Conference at Cold Comfort Farm

  White Sand and Grey Sand

  The Charmers

  Starlight

  To

  ROBERT and SELENA

  STELLA GIBBONS

  Here Be Dragons

  CHAPTER ONE

  SANCTUARY IN HAMPSTEAD

  “IT’S SO EXACTLY like poor Martin to go and lose his faith now, when everybody else is finding theirs,” said Lady Fairfax.

  This sounded witty. But even her niece Nell Sely, who was sitting upright and quiet on a dressing stool, and who added to the handicap of being not quite twenty that of having arrived in London for the first time from the depths of Dorset only yesterday, felt that it was not true. Martin Sely, her father and Lady Fairfax’s brother, was not a man who did a thing when everybody else was doing the opposite, and Nell thought the remark was the kind that Aunt Peggy made when she was appearing on Television.

  “Don’t you agree, poppet?” Lady Fairfax turned suddenly from the mirror with her six-million-viewers smile, and Nell smiled back. “There’s Magda with my milk,” her aunt went on, “open the door for her, will you.” She bent forward and began to paint her eyelids.

  When Nell came back with the milk, and had put it down in a place from which her aunt with a faintly irritable smile removed it to one of greater safety, Lady Fairfax went on: “But do tell me—how do you like the house? Of course it’s hideous” (but you and your mother won’t mind that, she was thinking as she spoke, because you have the typical English bad taste which is no taste at all)—“those red-brick Edwardian-Gothic houses are coming into fashion again … if you care about fashion. I don’t suppose you or your mother do, do you? I know Martin doesn’t. Well, parsons never do, of course. (Oh dear, I keep forgetting he isn’t one any more.) Of course strictly speaking the only thing to do with that type of house is to keep it Period. Chintz covers and water colours in gilt frames and so forth. I think it was a mistake to paint the inside all those raspberry pinks and pale blues but the Palmer-Groves would do it. (It was a pity they split up. They were dears.) And they were such good tenants that I let them. But the road is charming, isn’t it? overlooking the Heath at the end. It will remind you of Dorset.” She glanced at the clock. “It really is too bad of that little wretch Gardis; she’s supposed to be back sharp at six and it’s nearly half past. And don’t you adore Hampstead already?”

  She leant forward to draw a line along an eyebrow and went on without waiting for the answer which, in any case, Nell would not have been able to give:

  “How’s your mother taking it all? I’ll let you in on the ground-floor about something, Nell; I’m just a little bit afraid of your mother. Old Hampstead family and all the rest of it. Your father and I, you see, don’t come of an old family from anywhere, and I came up the hard way.” The mirror glass, bamboo furniture, indoor plants, and exotic printed stuffs which decorated her bedroom did not give much notion of how hard the way had been, unless it was implied by contrast. “But I admire your mother. She’s so clever. (My God, how I envy brains.) Did she mind coming back to Hampstead, do you think?”

  “I don’t think so. She didn’t say anything about minding.”

  “I thought she might have minded meeting people she’d known as a girl … now she’s had a parson-husband thrown out of the Church … but I suppose there aren’t many old friends left now. It must be … what is your mother? Fifty-three? It’s getting on for thirty years. Those old aunts of her’s who had the house in Frognal, what was its name—Vernon Lodge—they died, didn’t they?”

  “Oh yes. When I was very small. Long before the war, I think.”

  “And the house was sold and pulled down … I remember. (Hold this for me, poppet, I must have it near my face.) There are some Willett-built houses on the site now, I saw them the other day. (I’m interested in properties in Hampstead; I’m going to buy all I can. They’re a wonderful investment. Always good to let or sell.)”

  If Nell’s mother, Anna of the brains, had been in the room, she would have been as little capable as her daughter of tracing to its source the impulse which caused Nell to say in a moment:

  “My mother sent you her love, Aunt Peggy, and asked me to say how kind it is of you to let us stay there.”

  “Oh well, poppet. It was empty; you might just as well have it. You couldn’t stay on in Dorset, could you; with furious Bishops and so forth.” She smiled at Nell, glanced again at the clock, then said to herself, “I shan’t get those letters done before I go, now. (Undo that varnish for me, will you; yes, that’s right, the blacky-red one. I must do my nails.) Of course, that house is what I still think of as home. I love this house, it’s so pretty, and Twenty-five Arkwood Road is so awkward to run (I did warn your mother in my letter), as well as being over fifty years old, but Charles and I went into that top flat the day after we were married—in July 1934, that was, and we had exactly one day’s honeymoon because we were appearing in a—thank you, dear, I shall have to give you a job as dresser, I think—(yes, and I’ve something really important to tell you before you go—) in a team radio show that was doing qu
ite well, and we daren’t miss turning up for it because it might be our big chance. Charles and I were always having big chances in those days.”

  She held out her hand and inspected the finished nails. “Poor Charles.”

  Nell’s silence was due to a number of feelings. One was embarrassment, for poor Charles was not dead but divorced; another was sympathy, for her aunt’s grief at the situation must be continually renewed by the (now rather infrequent) sound of his voice on the wireless and the sight of his face in the kind of newspaper that Nell herself had encountered yesterday, when unwrapping the fish for lunch. “That’s your uncle, Charles Gaunt,” her mother had said with a note of amusement in her voice, pointing with a long, work-roughened finger at the lofty brow, firm chin, and reader-regarding eyes. Nell herself was amused now, being unable to vizualize his face except under a veil of fish scales.

  “And we kept the flat on all through the war, of course, only we were away so much. I was entertaining the troops and Charles was in the Navy and John was evacuated …” She turned herself round, facing Nell. “How long is it since you saw John?” she asked.

  “Oh, a very long time. It must be quite ten years. Not since that afternoon you brought him over to tea when we were at Hinchcombe Parva.”

  “I remember. He would nag at you to tell him what you liked doing best in the world, and you got all haughty. And your mother tore a strip off him for gloating over a squashed frog in the road. I was down there opening a fête at Bath.” She turned again, smiling, to the mirror. “He looks just the same, except that he’s three feet taller. Beautiful little boy.”

  Nell, who could remember nothing about the occasion except that it had occurred, looked polite.

  “But he’s a bit of a worry to me, I must confess.” Lady Fairfax did not sigh but her voice did. “Nothing serious, you know. He’ll settle down. His father and I have great hopes of what National Service may do for him. He’s due to go into one of them next September. But meanwhile he does nothing but wander round London with the most tatty crowd of little pseudo-bohemian boys and girls. Won’t try to get a temporary job, won’t say whether he wants to go into one of the services, won’t even write.”

  “Does he—can he write?” Nell’s voice was a little awed.

  “My dear, he’s brilliant.” Lady Fairfax turned round, lipstick poised at mouth. “Quite remarkable. It’s not just my maternal prejudice. I showed some of his stuff to Phillip Lousada (I suppose even Dorset has heard of him?) and he was really impressed; I got the impression, do you know, that he was actually a little envious! I had to steal the stuff out of John’s precious portfolio to get hold of it at all, because he never lets anyone get even a smell of his writing, and when I told him about Lousada being impressed the little beast was furious with me and said he should hope so. Then he went off into the night. That was a week ago and I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Does he live here or with—his father?” asked Nell, feeling her way amidst the shoals.

  “He hasn’t lived anywhere for the last year, since he left Grantfield. (No, I’d better be frank. It usually saves trouble in the end. They sacked him. General irresponsibility, idleness, bad influence, and what-have-you. I wish now we’d sent him to a progressive school. They were made for his kind. But they are so dotty and messy.) No, he doesn’t live anywhere permanently, and that’s one of the things that worries me. He’s rooming with a friend just now, I think. I believe he looks on Twenty-five Arkwood Road as home, if he looks on anywhere. Oh, and by the way, I want you and your mother to be very kind and keep an eye on old Miss Lister for me. Daisy Lister. She’s away in hospital at the moment, recovering from an operation, but she lives in that cottage whose back-door opens into your garden, down at the end. She’s a protégée of mine.”

  “The little one that looks like a gardener’s cottage, with the door behind the bushes?”

  “Yes. It really was a gardener’s cottage years ago. She won’t be any trouble. She’s near-gentry and madly independent, except for being a complete slave to an enormous cat. I’ve kept an eye on her for years. She’s lived in that part for years, too—it must be seventy years, because she was actually born in the big old house that was pulled down to build the whole of Arkwood Road, so she really does come of an old Hampstead family. She was quite alone, all her people having died or married and gone away, and when the estate was sold and the house came down, she bought Number Twenty-five, which was then, of course, a new house, and moved into the ground-floor flat. She was letting the three other floors when Charles and I moved in, (damn, now the milk’s got cold. That always happens, every night, and where that little b——Gardis is—really she’s impossible. Useful father or not, I’m packing her back to the States as soon as I get a solid excuse.) Where was I? Yes. Well, when the war came everybody cleared out of Number Twenty-five, leaving Miss Lister holding the fort alone. She got grubbier and grubbier and more and more stubborn. Just would not budge—bombs or Government or anything; she saw it all through—blitz, buzz-bombs, rockets and what-have-you. She was delighted to see us back after the war, and let us rent the top flat for next to nothing. (Charles and me, that is; John was boarding at Grantfield—and we were so busy fighting our way back into the B.B.C. that we couldn’t have him back for the holidays; he used to spend them with those people he was evacuated to at Marlow—terribly dull types but of course he loved falling in and out of the river all day.) So, much later on, when I’d begun to do really well on T.V., I suggested to Miss L. that she should sell the house (which I’d always adored, as I told you) and move into what had been the gardener’s cottage of the old house, which she’d allowed to get derelict. Number Twenty-five was looking pretty awful by then, too. But I managed to get our war-damage claim settled rather well, and I fiddled a lick of paint for the cottage as well, and then Charles and John and I moved into the top flat again. Only we were only there for about six months. By that time Charles and I were breaking up. Come in!”

  Her famous voice sounded irritable and sharp. She did not look round as she spoke, but went on putting the finishing touches to her face. Nell, however, turned towards the door.

  It opened slowly, and slowly a girl wearing a longish coat of some shaggy fur came into the room, pushing a black knitted cap back from her white bulging forehead as she came. She looked at Nell immediately and smiled, with her full lips, painted the pale red of pomegranate fruit. The smile pushed her white cheeks up into cushions, and gave her the look of a bad little girl, a child conspirator, with eyes long and black and liquid as a Japanese doll’s.

  “Now, Gardis, this is really too bad, you know … (oh … my niece, Nell Sely. Gardis Randolph, alleged to be my social secretary). You’re nearly an hour late. I shan’t get my letters done this evening. I pay you a damned good salary even by American standards and if you call this giving value for money I don’t.”

  “You’re right, Lady Fairfax. It’s simply terrible of me and I deserve bawling out. I could blame the British rush hour but I won’t. I’ll just take off my coat and get started right away,” she answered, in a low voice whose r’s announced that she was American.

  A smaller room opened off Lady Fairfax’s, and into this she went, peeling off her coat and throwing it, with her cap, onto a chair as she passed Nell. Down fell a magnificent mane of hair, in a black cloud which reached to the middle of her back.

  “And put on a decent dress, please,” Lady Fairfax called. “Those trousers look simply terrible and when did you last have that sweater cleaned?”

  Nell heard a quiet laugh which she thought did not sound particularly amused. After a pause came the sound of typing.

  Lady Fairfax was now ready and inspecting herself for flaws, holding the mirror to the back of her head and turning herself this way and that while making unhurried, considered twitches at her short dress, which was of silk velvet of so dark a red that it looked almost black. She did not touch the curls which were arranged like a spaniel-dog’s ears on either side o
f her lively and determined face, because they were in perfect order; their premature grey rinsed with blue allowed the columnists to point out three or four times a month that Peggy Fairfax had blue hair and golden eyes. She was inspecting herself, but thinking about Anna Sely and Nell.

  She had never got on really well with either of them; and perhaps the conviction that, after poor Martin had made such a hash of things, they would shrink even more into the narrow circle of their family life and not expect to be taken up, or about, by herself, had influenced her when she had offered Twenty-five Arkwood Road, rent free for as long as they pleased, as a sanctuary for the afflicted family.

  Poor, poor old Martin; the loved elder brother; the swimmer, the Rugby-player, the all-round athlete; poor sick Martin, whom she had last seen at Lyme Regis where he was recovering, on money supplied by herself, from pneumonia. He had looked ill, and he had looked old. If Peggy knew anything of psychiatry—and somehow, like most of us nowadays, she seemed to know something—Martin the muscular Christian, Martin the once-born and the healthy-minded, was going from now on to be an invalid. He would steadily build a wall of ill-health, apparently frail but actually impenetrable, between himself and life, and behind this wall—(she soon began to say to her friends, because really if one did not laugh about it one would cry) he could cower cosily with his imaginary sin.

  She carefully smoothed one cheek with the side of her finger. Already she was feeling relief from the worry about Martin and, to some extent, his tiresome womenfolk. They were safely established in Number Twenty-five, where she could keep an eye on them; they had crept up to London and away from Dorset and the Bishop’s displeasure (that was how Lady Fairfax thought of it), and were settled near at hand in Hampstead, and now the viewers, the million-eyed Argus who did so love it when you showed any signs of jumpiness or strain, or slipped up, would look in vain for signs of imminent collapse in her. Good. She put down the mirror quickly and turned to Nell.