“Well, I’m not feeling terribly well to-day. Did you want to see me about anything special?”
“No I don’t think so. Just to say good-bye.”
“Daddy,” came a voice from the next room. “Aren’t you coming?”
“Oh dear, I wish I could do something about it. I feel there’s something I ought to do. It’s quite an occasion really, isn’t it? I’m not being beastly, Cedric, I really mean it. I think it’s sweet of you to come. I only wish I felt up to doing something about it.”
“Daddy, come on. We want to get to Bassett and Lowkes before lunch.”
“Take care of yourself,” said Angela.
“Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Why will you all ask questions?”
And that had been the end of the visit. At Bassett and Lowkes, Nigel had chosen a model of a Blenheim bomber. “The fellows will be jealous,” he said.
After luncheon they went to see “The Lion Has Wings,” and then it was time to put Nigel into the train back to school. “It’s been absolutely ripping, Daddy,” he said.
“Has it really?”
“The rippingest two days I ever spent.”
So after these ripping days Cedric sat in the half-dark, with the pool of light falling on the unread book on his knees, returning to duty.
Basil went to the Cafe Royal to keep his watch on “the woman Green.” He found her sitting among her cronies and was greeted with tepid affection.
“So you’re in the Army, now,” she said.
“No, the great uniformed bureaucracy. How are all the Reds?”
“Very well thank you, watching your imperialists making a mess of your war.”
“Been to many Communist meetings lately?”
“Why?”
“Just wondering.”
“You sound like a police spy.”
“That’s the very last impression I want to make,” and, changing the subject hastily, added, “Seen Ambrose lately?”
“He’s over there now, the lousy fascist.”
Basil looked where she indicated and saw Ambrose at a table by the rail of the opposing gallery, sitting with a little, middle-aged man of nondescript appearance.
“Did you say ‘fascist’?”
“Didn’t you know? He’s gone to the Ministry of Information and he’s bringing out a fascist paper next month.”
“This is very interesting,” said Basil. “Tell me some more.”
Ambrose sat, upright and poised, with one hand on the stem of his glass and one resting stylishly on the balustrade. There was no particular feature of his clothes which could be mentioned as conspicuous; he wore a dark, smooth suit that fitted perhaps a little closely at waist and wrists, a shirt of plain, cream-coloured silk; a dark, white spotted bow tie; his sleek black hair was not unduly long (he went to the same barber as Alastair and Peter); his pale Semitic face gave no hint of special care, and yet it always embarrassed Mr. Bentley somewhat to be seen with him in public. Sitting there, gesticulating very slightly as he talked, wagging his head very slightly, raising his voice occasionally in a suddenly stressed uncommon epithet or in a fragment of slang absurdly embedded in his precise and literary diction, giggling between words now and then as something which he had intended to say changed shape and became unexpectedly comic in the telling ?Ambrose, like this, caused time to slip back to an earlier age than his own youth or Mr. Bentley’s, when amid a more splendid decor of red plush and gilt caryatides fin-de-siccle young worshippers crowded to the tables of Oscar and Aubrey.
Mr. Bentley smoothed his sparse grey hairs and fidgeted with his tie and looked about anxiously for fear he was observed.
The Cafe Royal, perhaps because of its distant associations with Oscar and Aubrey, was one of the places where Ambrose preened himself, spread his feathers and felt free to take wing. He had left his persecution mania downstairs with his hat and umbrella. He defied the universe.
“The decline of England, my dear Geoffrey,” he said, “dates from the day we abandoned coal fuel. No, I’m not talking about distressed areas, but about distressed souls, my dear. We used to live in a fog, the splendid, luminous, tawny fogs of our early childhood. The golden aura of the golden age. Think of it, Geoffrey, there are children now coming to manhood who never saw a London fog. We designed a city which was meant to be seen in a fog. We had a foggy habit of life and a rich, obscure, choking literature. The great catch in the throat of English lyric poetry is just fog, my dear, on the vocal cords. And out of the fog we could rule the world; we were a Voice, like the Voice on Sinai smiling through the clouds. Primitive peoples always choose a God who speaks from a cloud. Then my dear Geoffrey,” said Ambrose, wagging an accusing finger and fixing Mr. Bentley with a black accusing eye, as though the poor publisher were personally responsible for the whole thing, “then, some busybody invents electricity or oil fuel or whatever it is they use nowadays. The fog lifts, the world sees us as we are, and worse still we see ourselves as we are. It was a carnival ball, my dear, which when the guests unmasked at midnight was found to be composed entirely of impostors. Such a rumpus, my dear.”
Ambrose drained his glass with a swagger, surveyed the cafe haughtily and saw Basil, who was making his way towards them.
“We are talking of Fogs,” said Mr. Bentley.
