Here Be Dragons Read online

  The words were lost in kisses. He pressed her desperately against him, kissing her on the mouth and cheeks with despair, like a miserable child, and muttering, “Oh please, Nello, don’t leave me. You’ve got to stay with me. You’re such a comfort to me. You must come too.”

  So they went to Jumbo’s, which was in a street off Golden Square and even smokier, dimmer and quieter than Eldorado’s, and John enquired of Jumbo’s handlebar moustache, which was behind the bar, whether that fellow in the green pullover had been in this evening.

  It appeared that Davina might have seen him. She sometimes did. Davina, interviewed in a corner where she was sitting with a friend, told them she hadn’t seen Tom for days. He might have gone to the country. He sometimes did. Nell meanwhile studied Davina’s long and voluminous black skirt, dusty black sweater with a high neck, and the various huge pieces of metal hanging from her wrists, ears and throat, and remembered seeing Gardis similarly festooned. Evidently this was Fashion.

  She glanced round the room, trying to overcome her sleepiness. The people here were of another type; younger, more peculiarly dressed, with faces more intelligent than those of the Eldorado customers.

  “Tom Ennis,” John was repeating, when they were outside once more. Nell, who was learning rapidly, did not exclaim, Didn’t you even know his other name?, and, as they began to walk slowly down the dark, grimy and indescribably melancholy street, he put his arm round her and said:

  “Didn’t you think Davina wonderfully attractive? She’s the best-dressed girl in The Coffee Dish. That wasn’t The Coffee Dish, of course. We’ll go there sometime.) That’s where she usually goes; it was just luck finding her in Jumbo’s.”

  Nell, who retained a general impression of condescension and grubbiness, wondered if it really had been.

  “What does she do?” she asked diplomatically. “Has she a job?” Perhaps Davina earned sixteen pounds a week as a waitress, and chose to squander it on yards of black stuff and lumps of lead.

  “Job? Good heavens, no. Davina is pure Soho. She couldn’t stand a job now, even if she wanted to.” His tone indicated approval. “And didn’t you think Jumbo an interesting type? Ex-Battle of Britain pilot. Of course, if the Battle of Britain had been nowadays I rather doubt if people would have fought. Certainly I shouldn’t. (Not from any theory of pacifism. I loathe bloody theorizing.) But out of pure logic. Jumbo isn’t intelligent, and not very what you would call honest either. When you can get him to talk about the Battle of Britain—which we don’t often, because it’s boring—he seems to take it all for granted. He’s unimaginative. I suppose they had to be, or they would have gone mad. But I never intend to destroy my fellow-creatures. I’m much too soft-hearted. I wish you would buy yourself a skirt like Davina’s.”

  Nell had come to the end of her patience. She stood still in the middle of the frightening little street and announced:

  “John, I’m going home. I have to be at work at nine tomorrow and it must be three o’clock and we shall have to walk because I’ve no money and neither have you.”

  “But you can’t go home yet, Nello. He may be at a room in Earls Court where a friend of Benedict’s lives. And I’ve simply got to get this job. It’s the most wonderful chance.”

  Nell turned and began to walk away.

  “Nello—don’t be cross.”

  “I’m not in the least cross,” turning round, “I’m—I’m not at all cross. But I’ve got to get home.”

  “Wait, then—” He darted back into Jumbo’s, and in a moment reappeared.

  “Here—” triumphantly holding out a pound note—“Davina lent it me. Now you needn’t walk, my sweet.”

  “How did Davina get it, if she hasn’t a job?” Nell asked grimly when they were speeding in a taxi towards Hampstead, “is she a tart?”

  “Nell!” He sat upright and withdrew his arm, “Davina is a girl with the very highest ideals. She’s perhaps the purest and loftiest in her way of living of all my friends. Jumbo lent it to her.”

  Nell made up her mind to visit Jumbo at some time in the future when she might be earning more money, and repay the debt in person (for certainly John never would); then she relaxed once more against his thin, muscular young breast and almost went to sleep. He indicated, as they crept up the steps of the house, the ghostly orange moon lying tilted on her side between the branches of the trees, stopping for a moment to sweep an arm round the arc of the sky as if showing Nell the stillness, and the thin, dark air silent and asleep. She obediently looked; and did not say how sad she thought the sight; then they tiptoed on towards their beds and sleep. The taxi had cost eleven shillings and that was how the night ended.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  NEVERMORE

  DURING THE GREATER part of the bright spring mornings, Martin Sely lay in the bedroom he shared with Anna, reading, and trying not to think.

  The days had once been neatly divided by his duties to the Church; now they were divided only by meals, and the hours seemed shapeless, and long indeed. He tried not to anticipate the sound of the bells that rang for Early Service, for Evensong, and on Sunday for Matins, from the church at the end of the road, and when Anna had decidedly announced her intention of not going to church any more, he had remained silent. He knew that Nell continued to go; lying awake in the grey April dawns, he had more than once heard her making her way quietly down the stairs before seven o’clock. He had envied her, and his envy had made him ashamed, but he could chide himself no more. The springs in him of all feeling, except a sulky resentment at what had happened to him, seemed to have dried up.

  But he was still compelled, as if by some force within himself, to recall over and over again the early weeks of his misfortune; that first morning in Morley Magna, for example, in the garden where Anna had done such wonders with Michaelmas daisies, and he had admired them when he had stepped out for a turn round the paths while Nell was getting breakfast after Early Service. Oh … and if a thought can be a groan, his thought was a groan now … he was seeing again, in the merciless eye of the mind, that spider’s web, glittering with dew like a chandelier with its diamonds, and the strands so fine they were almost invisible. There might be something here for a sermon … subjects for sermons were not easy to find when one had been preaching about a hundred a year for thirty years … that spider’s web, the last thing of earth that he had looked upon with the eyes of faith.

  Conscious of a hunger which, though not acute, he knew would not be completely satisfied by the breakfast he would in a moment sit down to because cornflakes with milk, and bread and jam, were all that the Vicarage could run to, and he was a big man, he had looked closer at the web, stooping above the mossy path in his shabby clerical dress. The web hung motionless, sparkling in the early morning sunlight, between the stalks of the flowers. Then, as his eye moved across it with a reverent appreciation of the beauty and order of God’s handiwork, he had seen beneath a narrow pendent leaf the spider squatting; had even thought that he caught there, in the tiny cavern of black shade, the microscopic glint of an eye. (At this point in the miserable recapitulation, like a tune ground out over and over again on a cracked record, there always came the mocking line: I, said the fly, with my little eye, I saw him die.) He had smiled then as the nursery rhyme came into his head—and it was then and there, at that precise instant, with the indulgent smile touching his lips and his stomach subduedly signalling its need of food—that something had been withdrawn from him.

  It had begun to go—and he had felt it begin, exactly as light or warmth might withdraw from the air, but this air was within himself—before he saw, behind the spider, the trussed bundles that were the flies. He was looking into the spider’s larder, which also was the handiwork of God, and, had it been left to him, even that sight would not have shaken his acceptance of God’s world. But it had not been left to him, and slowly, so slowly, something was withdrawn from the deepest depths of his nature, and he was left exposed to the cold and the dark.

  It w
as not … how often he had tried! during the next few months, to explain: to Anna, to himself, to the Bishop … it was not that the hideous sight of the bound and helpless insects following upon the beautiful sight of the glittering web had set up some undergraduate’ish questioning within himself of God’s Plan and Nature. No, it wasn’t anything like that at all; he had never, even in the early days of his training, been troubled by such problems. Anna had sometimes teased him for being what she called a Muscular Christian; and he had taken the joke good-naturedly because he knew that he was not a clever man and because, after all, there were worse things to be than a games-loving parson, who had entered the Church because his father and grandfather had entered it before him. And he loved his Anna and he knew, without ever thinking about that either, that she loved him. That was why his wretchedness increased when he found himself unable to explain to her, or to anyone else, what had happened to him. There had been a withdrawal; and now there was a lack; and the nearest thing to it was the sun going in, leaving everything in coldness and shadow, but the coldness and shadow were inside himself, and he could no longer serve God at the altar or go on being a parson while he felt as he did. (In those days, he had still hoped that he would get better.)

  That was all. And the weeks went on, and he did not get better, but rather got worse, because a dull despair crept up and lay within him, filling the places once occupied by the honest sense of duty done and God served.

  He kept on: he preached and ministered; baptizing and marrying and burying in the small and rather surly village of Morley Magna, and as the load of his hypocrisy grew, his health, that hitherto perfect health, began to suffer; while Anna occasionally wondered to herself amidst her chicken-rearing and gardening and cooking whether her old Marty was still being tiresome about his vocation (at his time of life!), and Nell, amidst the busy boredom of her days, wondered if the parents would ever follow Aunt Peggy’s suggestion and let her find a job in the nearest town. At last, following on a chill caught bicycling in cold rain to a parishoner whom his now over-scrupulous conscience drove him out unnecessarily to visit, Martin developed pneumonia; nearly died; talked of his misery to the man who had come to take over his work; and everything came out.

  How kind they were to him at Gore House where his own Bishop sent him; where each of the fourteen bedrooms was so brimming with spiritual joy that, visitors assured one another, one did not notice the bareness and the cold. In this rest home and clinic for the spiritually perplexed, run by a young, clever enterprising parson with the help of a wife cut from the same piece of cloth as himself, Martin had been miserably aware of the sweetness and joy all about him and of the desire to help. But there was so much zeal and sparkling spiritual talk, such beauty of bare blue walls and shining floors and cold pure-sounding music and half-trees set with all their load of leaves and blossom in great tubs coopered by the spiritually regenerated, that he was confused and unhappy, feeling himself more than ever to be a dingy clot of dust, a negative unwilling thing, amidst the joy and the brightness.

  The founder of Gore House had devoted to him an entire week-end, giving of his best as he always did, and trying patiently to bring his keen joyous mind into the dimness of this bewildered and (he soon began to perceive) obstinate one. The man was certainly exceedingly obstinate. Was he also (the younger man was asking himself after some seven hours of it) rather stupid? At any rate, it was plain that this kind came not out by prayer or fasting, nor by applied psychology and a touch of spiritual healing either. All that Sely would say, at infrequent intervals, was that he “did not feel it was right” to administer the Sacraments while he felt as he did. It was like a stone wall … and really the man was awfully like a donkey looking dolefully over it!

  As usual, time was limited by the demands made upon it, by other cases, some of which were showing signs of being cured of whatever was troubling them, and Martin’s host felt that it would not be fair to give any more time when two and a half days had already been given with apparently no result. He would see to it that the poor soul was most heartily and efficiently prayed for. He blessed him, and sent him back to his own Bishop with the regretful report that Gore House must record another of its rare failures.

  Martin’s own Bishop thought it only his duty to let his deep disappointment and displeasure be made plain. Then he sent him away; out of the Church; into a poverty greater than even the Selys had so far known.

  At first this had worried Martin almost as much as his spiritual unhappiness. It had seemed the last straw that not only should the meaning of life have been taken away, but that he had also been forced to give up his livelihood. Anna and Nell were now exposed to the possibility of actual want. But, since the morning that Peg had telegraphed the money, three minutes (as she told him) after reading his letter, he had not really worried any more, for Peg would stand by them. She always had been a brick, and he felt, and knew, that she would go on being one, and later on, if he ever got back some of his former energy and strength, he could earn (his first rather dramatic notions about addressing envelopes had taken on a more sober colour by now) something by coaching boys for exams. This could be added to Anna’s income and the money earned by Nell as a typist.

  A typist. Peggy had said that Nell was secretary to a Mr. Riddle, but Martin preferred to face the fact that she was a typist: excellent girls, typists, no doubt, in their way, but as a class despised even as ‘skivvies’ had been in his youth, and he did not want to think about Nell’s being one. He never asked her about her work, although he did once enquire of Anna if she were ‘getting along in that place’, and heard with some indignation that they were ‘very pleased with her’. So he should hope; his quick, light-footed girl, who had skilfully helped nurse him while he was ill. They were lucky to have her.

  “We really are straight at last,” Anna told him one afternoon at tea, when they had been in the house about three weeks, “I hung up the infant Saint John, dear little thing, in Nell’s bedroom just after lunch and that’s the last thing to be done. More, dear?”

  He passed his cup, while the faint look of distress, brought to his face by this mention of a name from the former life, slowly faded. Anna, who was sorry for her dear old boy but did not believe in humouring him to excess, went on:

  “Of course her room hardly needs pictures, with that extraordinary desert painted on the wall by the fireplace, but I saw no reason why Saint John shouldn’t go up there. Nell always has had him.”

  “A desert picture?” he said slowly, looking across at her while he sipped his tea.

  “Peggy says that man who was here before us painted it. It’s a trompe l’oeil … I knew what it was; didn’t remember the name until Peggy told me how it came to be there.” She did not add that she had refrained from explaining to Peggy what it was. It had been a sacrifice, for Peggy’s particular brand of knowledge set her teeth on edge. To herself, she called it ‘B.B.C.’.

  “What are you smiling at, Anna? You look …”

  “Nothing really amusing. Do you like this cake? It’s a new recipe.”

  “… better, somehow, since we’ve … been here. You look … younger …”

  “Oh, my goodness.” She clumsily swept some crumbs off the mahogany cakestand, which needed polishing. “What on earth do you mean?”

  The tone held no question but she, who used never to think about her feelings or motives, was interested, as well as embarrassed. Wrong, so wrong, to talk or think about oneself; make the best of yourself and forget yourself; why on earth should anyone be interested in you? The voices of past nannies and governesses sounded faintly within her mind. Yet nowadays it was a constant temptation with her to do both. What had changed her? The cold high air of Hampstead, in which she moved about as two people, a girl and a dowdy ageing woman?

  “Well, I mean what I say, dear. You do look younger and better. You … I think … do you like it here, Anna?”

  “I like Hampstead, of course,” she answered decidedly. “I always have
. The air suits me, better than in Dorset. And I enjoy wandering about the streets, and seeing what’s new since my day and what’s been changed or pulled down. I wish you would come too, one day, Martin. Now that the weather’s more settled it would do you good.”

  “No, no, I don’t want to, I can’t do that,” he said nervously, fidgeting in his chair. “Later on, perhaps.”

  She was silent for a moment, then began to collect the tea things and pack them on the tray. She was thinking that it was no use expecting him to go outside the house when he would not even venture so far as Nell’s room on the top-storey-but-one to view the trompe l’oeil; but she herself had really enjoyed those excursions up and down the small hills of Frognal, remembered from her childhood as a place of gardens with a country spaciousness overhung by old trees, silent, yet gently astir with life. Here the white mansions had stood, diversified by many a bay window, and many a gilded clock and tower above their stable doors, and at that time still haunted by memories of the ‘arbitrary and vexatious’ Irish Lady, Miss Sullivan of The Mansion, who had offended her neighbours for many years by exercising her right to forbid carts and carriages to drive through the toll gates without her permission. Anna had heard stories about her from the aunts who had lived at Vernon Lodge.

  These aunts, Nancy and Eleanor, had played an important part in Anna’s childhood; their ‘ways’, the shady comfortable rooms of their house where the loudest sounds had been the click of the parrot’s beak as he extended his grey claw for sugar, the quick authoritative rise and fall of their voices, or the sweet straightforward airs they briskly played upon their Bechstein; these sights and sounds had seemed to her then as unchangeable and eternal as the twin towers of the Crystal Palace rising twelve miles away from the blue mist of summer lying in the valley, or as the hills on which Hampstead stood. Now there was not a trace left of Vernon Lodge. Two Willett-built houses stood upon the site, and these were almost twenty years old. When Anna, a few days since, had lingered by their trim gardens, she had fancied she could distinguish between them a slight hollow where the roots of the mighty oak tree which she had so often climbed in childhood had been wrenched from the ground, but she could not be sure. Only the sweetness of the air was unchanged.