from the floors above.
*
On a summer night during the previous week the whole club, forty-odd women, with any young men who might happen to have called that evening, had gone like swift migrants into the dark cool air of the park, crossing its wide acres as the crow flies in the direction of Buckingham Palace, there to express themselves along with the rest of London on the victory in the war with Germany. They clung to each other in twos and threes, fearful of being trampled. When separated. they clung to, and were clung to by, the nearest person. They became members of a wave of the sea, they surged and sang until, at every half-hour interval, a light flooded the tiny distant balcony of the Palace and four small straight digits appeared upon it: the King, the Queen, and the two Princesses. The royal family raised their right arms, their hands fluttered as in a slight breeze, they were three candles in uniform and one in the recognizable fur-trimmed folds of the civilian queen in war-time. The huge organic murmur of the crowd, different from anything like the voice of animate matter but rather more a cataract or a geological disturbance, spread through the parks and along the Mall. Only the St John’s Ambulance men, watchful beside their vans, had any identity left. The royal family waved, turned to go, lingered and waved again, and finally disappeared. Many strange arms were twined round strange bodies. Many liaisons, some permanent, were formed in the night, and numerous infants of experimental variety, delightful in hue of skin and racial structure, were born to the world in the due cycle of nine months after. The bells pealed. Greggie observed that it was something between a wedding and a funeral on a world scale.
The next day everyone began to consider where they personally stood in the new order of things.
Many citizens felt the urge, which some began to indulge, to insult each other, in order to prove something or to test their ground.
The government reminded the public that it was still at war. Officially this was undeniable, but except to those whose relations lay in the Far-Eastern prisons of war, or were stuck in Burma, that war was generally felt to be a remote affair.
A few shorthand typists at the May of Teck Club started to apply for safer jobs — that is to say, in private concerns, not connected with the war like the temporary Ministries where many of them had been employed.
Their brothers and men friends in the forces, not yet demobilized, by a long way, were talking of vivid enterprises for the exploitation of peace, such as buying a lorry and building up from it a transport business.
*
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ said Jane.
‘Just a minute till I shut the door. The kids are making a row,’ Anne said. And presently, when she returned to the telephone, she said, ‘Yes, carry on.’
‘Do you remember Nicholas Farringdon?’
‘I seem to remember the name.’
‘Remember I brought him to the May of Teck in 1945, he used to come often for supper. He got mixed up with Selina.’
‘Oh, Nicholas. The one who got up on the roof? What a long time ago that was. Have you seen him?’
‘I’ve just seen a news item that’s come over Reuters. He’s been killed in a local rising in Haiti.’
‘Really? How awful! What was he doing there?’
‘Well, he became a missionary or something.’
‘No!’
‘Yes. It’s terribly tragic. I knew him well.’
‘Ghastly. It brings everything back. Have you told Selina?’
‘Well, I haven’t been able to get her. You know what Selina’s like these days, she won’t answer the phone personally, you have to go through thousands of secretaries or whatever they are.’
‘You could get a good story for your paper out of it, Jane,’ Anne said.
‘I know that. I’m just waiting to get more details. Of course it’s all those years ago since I knew him, but it would be an interesting story.’
*
Two men — poets by virtue of the fact that the composition of poetry was the only consistent thing they had so far done — beloved of two May of Teck girls and, at the moment, of nobody else, sat in their corduroy trousers in a cafe in Bayswater with their silent listening admirers and talked about the new future as they flicked the page-proofs of an absent friend’s novel. A copy of
And now what will become of us without Barbarians? Those people were some sort of a solution.
And the other smiled, bored-like, but conscious that very few in all the great metropolis and its tributary provinces were as yet privy to the source of these lines. This other who smiled was Nicholas Farringdon, not yet known or as yet at all likely to be.
‘Who wrote that?’ said Jane Wright, a fat girl who worked for a publisher and who was considered to be brainy but somewhat below standard, socially, at the May of Teck.
Neither man replied.
‘Who wrote that?’ Jane said again.
The poet nearest her said, through his thick spectacles, ‘An Alexandrian poet.’
‘Anew poet?’
‘No, but fairly new to this country.’
‘What’s his name?’
He did not reply. The young men had started talking again. They talked about the decline and fall of the anarchist movement on the island of their birth in terms of the personalities concerned. They were bored with educating the girls for this evening.
2
Joanna Childe was giving elocution lessons to Miss Harper, the cook, in the recreation room. When she was not giving lessons she was usually practising for her next examination. The house frequently echoed with Joanna’s rhetoric. She got six shillings an hour from her pupils, five shillings if they were May of Teck members. Nobody knew what her arrangements were with Miss Harper, for at that time all who kept keys of food-cupboards made special arrangements with all others. Joanna’s method was to read each
