Maginot Line. The French will hold on for ever, if needs be, and the German air bases are too far away for them to be able to attack us. If they do, we’ll R.D.F. them out of the skies.”
“Jo,” said Lady Seal, when they were alone with the coffee. “I want to talk to you about Basil.”
How often in the last twenty years had Sir Joseph heard those heavy words, uttered with so many intonations in so wide a variety of moods, but always, without fail, the prelude, not, perhaps, to boredom, but to a lowering of the interest and warmth of their converse! It was only in these material conferences that Cynthia Seal became less than the perfect companion, only then that, instead of giving, she demanded, as it were, a small sumptuary duty upon the riches of her friendship.
Had he been so minded Sir Joseph could have drawn a graph of the frequency and intensity of these discussions. There had been the steady rise from nursery through school to the university, when he had been called on to applaud each new phase of Basil’s precocious development. In those days he had accepted Basil at his face value as an exceptionally brilliant and beautiful youth in danger of being spoiled. Then, towards the end of Basil’s second year at Balliol, had come a series of small seismic disturbances, when Cynthia Seal was alternately mutely puzzled or eloquently distressed; then the first disaster, rapidly followed by Christopher’s death. From then onwards for fifteen years the line had dipped and soared dizzily as Basil’s iniquities rose on the crest or fell into the trough of notoriety, but with the passing years there had been a welcome decline in the mean level; it was at least six months since he had heard the boy’s name.
“Ah,” he said, “Basil, eh?” trying to divine from his hostess’s manner whether he was required to be judicial, compassionate or congratulatory.
“You’ve so often been helpful in the past.”
“I’ve tried,” said Sir Joseph, recalling momentarily his long record of failures on Basil’s behalf. “Plenty of good in the boy.”
“I feel so much happier about him since this morning, Jo. Sometimes, lately, I’ve begun to doubt whether we shall ever find the proper place for Basil. He’s been a square peg in so many round holes. But this war seems to take the responsibility off our hands. There’s room for everyone in wartime, every man. It’s always been Basil’s individuality that’s been wrong. You’ve said that often, Jo. In wartime individuality doesn’t matter any more. There are just men, aren’t there?”
“Yes,” said Sir Joseph doubtfully. “Yes, Basil’s individuality has always been rather strong, you know. He must be thirty-five or thirty-six now. That’s rather old for starting as a soldier.”
“Nonsense, Jo. Men of forty-five and fifty enlisted in the ranks in the last war and died as gallantly as anyone else. Now I want you to see the Lieutenant-Colonels of the foot guard regiments and see where he will fit in best…”
In her time Cynthia Seal had made many formidable demands on Basil’s behalf. This, which she was now asking with such an assumption of ease, seemed to Sir Joseph one of the most vexatious. But he was an old and loyal friend and a man of affairs, moreover, well-practised, by a lifetime of public service, in the evasion of duty. “Of course, my dear Cynthia, I can’t promise any results…”
Angela Lyne was returning by train from the South of France. It was the time when, normally, she went to Venice, but this year, with international politics tediously on every tongue, she had lingered at Cannes until and beyond the last moment. The French and Italians whom she met had said war was impossible; they said it with assurance before the Russian pact, with double assurance after it. The English said there would be war, but not immediately. Only the Americans knew what was coming, and exactly when. Now she was travelling in unwonted discomfort through a nation moving to action under the dour precepts “Il faut en finir” and “Nous gagnerons parce que nous sommes les plus forts.”
It was a weary journey; the train was already eight hours late; the restaurant car had disappeared during the night at Avignon. Angela was obliged to share a two-berth sleeper with her maid and counted herself lucky to have got one at all; several of her acquaintances had stayed behind, waiting for things to get better; at the moment no reservations were guaranteed and the French seemed to have put off their politeness and packed it in moth-balls for the duration of hostilities.
Angela had a glass of Vichy water on the table before her. She sipped, gazing out at the passing landscape, every mile of which gave some evidence of the changing life of the country; hunger and the bad night she had spent raised her a hair’s breadth above reality, and her mind, usually so swift and orderly, fell into pace with the train ? now rocking in haste, now, barely moving, seeming to grope its way from point to point.
A stranger passing the open door of her compartment might well have speculated on her nationality and place in the world and supposed her to be American, the buyer perhaps for some important New York dress shop ? whose present abstraction was due to the worries of wartime transport for her “collection.” She wore the livery of the highest fashion, but as one who dressed to inform rather than to attract; nothing which she wore, nothing it might be supposed in the pigskin jewel-case above her head, had been chosen by or for a man. Her smartness was individual; she was plainly not one of those who scrambled to buy the latest gadget in the few breathless weeks between its first appearance and the inundation of the cheap markets of the world with its imitations; her person was a record and criticism of succeeding fashions, written, as it were, year after year, in one clear and characteristic fist. Had the curious fellow passenger stared longer ? as he was free to do without offence, so absorbed was Angela in her own thoughts ? he would have checked in his hunt when he came to study his subject’s face. All her properties ? the luggage heaped above and around her, the set of her hair, her shoes, her finger-nails, the barely perceptible aura of scent that surrounded her, the Vichy water and the paper-bound volume of Balzac on the table before her ? all these things spoke of what (had she been, as she seemed, American) she would have called her “personality.” But the face was mute. It might have been carved in jade, it was so smooth and cool and conventionally removed from the human. A stranger might have watched her for mile after mile, as a spy or a lover or a newspaper reporter will loiter in the street before a closed house, and see no chink of light, hear no whisper of movement behind the shuttered facade, and in direct proportion to his discernment, he would have gone on his way down the corridor baffled and disturbed. Had he been told the bare facts about this seemingly cosmopolitan, passionless, barren, civilized woman, he might have despaired of ever again forming his judgment of a fellow being; for Angela Lyne was Scottish, the only child of a Glasgow millionaire ? a jovial, rascally millionaire who had started life in a street gang ? she was the wife of a dilettante architect, the mother of a single robust and unattractive son (the dead spit, it was said, of his grandfather), and her life had so foundered on passion that this golden daughter of fortune was rarely spoken of by her friends without the qualifying epithet of “poor” Angela Lyne.
Only in one respect would the casual observer have hit upon the truth. Angela’s appearance was not designed for man. It is sometimes disputed ? and opinions canvassed in popular papers to decide the question ? whether woman, alone on a desert island, would concern herself with clothes; Angela, as far as she herself was concerned, disposed of the question finally. For seven years she had been on a desert island; her appearance had become a hobby and distraction, a pursuit entirely self-regarding and self-rewarding; she watched herself moving in the mirrors of the civilized world as a prisoner will watch the antics of a rat which he has domesticated to the dungeon. (In the case of her husband grottoes took the place of fashion. He had six of them now, bought in various parts of Europe ? some from Naples, some from Southern Germany ? and painfully transported, stone by stone, to Hampshire.)
For seven years, ever since she was twenty-five and two years married to her dandy-aesthete, “poor” Angela
