“I know I look awful,” Peter said. “The Adjutant left me in no doubt on that subject.”
“You look sweet,” said Sonia.
“I heard they had stopped wearing cross straps on the Sam Browne,” said Alastair.
“Yes, but technically we still carry swords.”
Technically. Peter had a sword, technically.
“Darling, do you think that if we went past Buckingham Palace the sentries would salute?”
“It’s quite possible. I don’t think Belisha has quite succeeded in putting it down yet.”
“We’ll go there at once. I’ll dress. Can’t wait to see them.”
So they walked from Chester Street to Buckingham Palace; Sonia and Peter in front, Alastair and Basil a pace or two behind. The sentries saluted and Sonia pinched Peter as he acknowledge it. Alastair said to Basil:
“I suppose we’ll be doing that soon.”
“They don’t want volunteers in this war, Alastair. They’ll call people up when they want them without any recruiting marches or popular songs. They haven’t the equipment for the men in training now.”
“Who do you mean by ‘they’?”
“Hore-Belisha.”
“Who cares what he wants?” said Alastair. For him there was no “they.” England was at war; he, Alastair Trumpington, was at war. It was not the business of any politician to tell him when or how he should fight. But he could not put this into words; not into words, anyway, which Basil would not make ridiculous, so he walked on in silence behind Peter’s martial figure until Sonia decided to take a cab.
“I know what I want,” said Basil. “I want to be one of those people one beard about in 1919: the hard-faced men who did well out of the war.”
Although it was common for Freddy Sothill and Sir Joseph Mainwaring, and various others who from time to time were enlisted to help solve the recurrent problem of Basil’s future, to speak of him in terms they normally reserved for the mining community of South Wales, as feckless and unemployable, the getting of jobs, of one kind and another, had, in fact, played a large part in his life; for it was the explanation and excuse of most of Basil’s vagaries that he had never had any money of his own. Tony and Barbara by their father’s will each enjoyed a reasonable fortune, but Sir Christopher Seal had died shortly after the first of Basil’s major disgraces. If it were conceivable that one who held the office of Chief Whip for a quarter of a century could be shocked at any spectacle of human depravity, it might have been thought that shame hastened his end, so fast did one event follow upon the other. Be that as it may, it was on his death-bed that Sir Christopher, in true melodramatic style, disinherited his younger son, leaving his future entirely in his mother’s hands.
Lady Seal’s most devoted friend ? and she had many ? would not have credited her with more than human discretion, and some quite preternatural power would have been needed to deal with Basil’s first steps in adult life. The system she decided on was, at the best, unimaginative and, like many such schemes, was suggested to her by Sir Joseph Mainwaring; it consisted, in his words, of “giving the boy his bread and butter and letting him find the jam.” Removed from the realm of metaphor to plain English, this meant allowing Basil L400 a year, conditional on his good behaviour, and expecting him to supplement it by his own exertions if he wished for a more ample way of life.
The arrangement proved disastrous from the first. Four times in the last ten years Lady Seal had paid Basil’s debts; once on condition of his living at home with her; once on condition of his living somewhere, anywhere, abroad; once on condition of his marrying; once on condition of his refraining from marriage. Twice he had been cut off with a penny; twice taken back to favour; once he had been set up in chambers in the Temple with an allowance of a thousand a year; several times, a large lump sum of capital had been dangled before his eyes as the reward of his giving himself seriously to commerce; once he had been on the verge of becoming the recipient of a sisal farm in Kenya. Throughout all these changes of fortune Sir Joseph Mainwaring had acted the part of political agent to a recalcitrant stipendiary sultan, in a way which embittered every benevolence and minimized the value of every gift he brought. In the intervals of neglect and independence, Basil had fended for himself and had successively held all the jobs which were open to young men of his qualifications. He had never had much difficulty in getting jobs; the trouble had always been in keeping them, for he regarded a potential employer as his opponent in a game of skill. All Basil’s resource and energy went into hoodwinking him into surrender; once he had received his confidence he lost interest. Thus English girls will put themselves to endless exertion to secure a husband and, once married, will think their labour at an end.
Basil had been leader writer on the Daily Beast, he had served in the personal entourage of Lord Monomark, he had sold champagne on commission, composed dialogue for the cinema and given the first of what was intended to be a series of talks for the B.B.C. Sinking lower in the social scale he had been press agent for a female contortionist and had once conducted a party of tourists to the Italian lakes. (He dined out for some time on the story of that tour, which had, after a crescendo of minor vexations, culminated in Basil’s making a bundle of all the tickets and all the passports and sinking them in Lake Garda. He had then travelled home alone by an early train, leaving fifty penniless Britons, none of whom spoke a word of any foreign language, to the care of whatever deity takes charge of forsaken strangers; for all Basil knew, they were still there.)
From time to time he disappeared from the civilized area and returned with tales to which no one attached much credence ? of having worked for the secret police in Bolivia and advised the Emperor of Azania on the modernization of his country. Basil was in the habit, as it were, of conducting his own campaigns, issuing his own ultimatums, disseminating his own propaganda, erecting about himself his own blackout; he was an obstreperous minority of one in a world of otiose civilians. He was used, in his own life, to a system of push, appeasement, agitation and blackmail, which, except that it had no more distinct aim than his own immediate amusement, ran parallel to Nazi diplomacy. Like Nazi diplomacy it postulated for success a peace-loving, orderly and honourable world in which to operate. In the new, busy, secretive, chaotic world which developed during the first days of the war, Basil, for the first time in his life, felt himself at a disadvantage. It was like being in Latin America at a time of upheaval and, instead of being an Englishman, being oneself a Latin-American.
The end of September found Basil in a somewhat fretful mood. The air raid scare seemed to be over for the time, and those who had voluntarily fled from London were beginning to return, pretending that they had only been to the country to see that everything was all right there. The women and children of the poor, too, were flocking home to their evacuated streets. The newspapers said that the Poles were holding out; that their cavalry was penetrating deep into Germany; that the enemy was already short of motor oil; that Saarbrucken would fall to the French within a day or two; air raid wardens roamed the remote hamlets of the kingdom, persecuting yokels who walked home from the inn with glowing pipes. Londoners, who were slow to acquire the habit of the domestic hearth, groped their way in darkness from one place of amusement to another, learning their destination by feeling the buttons on the commissionaires’ uniforms; revolving black-glass doors gave access to a fairyland; it was as though, when children, they had been led blindfold into the room with the lighted Christmas tree. The casualty list
