A Kiss for the Enemy (2 page)

‘Are people as rude and boring when drunk in Germany?'

‘Worse!' said Frido, with feeling.

‘Oh well, I'm sure you've found that Oxford isn't only like that.'

‘I know that. I have two more weeks here. I have been very happy.' Frido was on an exchange from Marburg University.

‘You're going to have lunch with me tomorrow. And often thereafter.'

They walked on, Anthony skipping now and then, turning to face Frido, sometimes walking backwards, laughing a good deal. Frido interrupted him at one point –

‘I am very sorry. I did not quite understand.'

‘I'm afraid I gabble terribly, talk too fast –'

‘No, no. My English –'

‘Your English is perfect.' Anthony gazed at him. Despite Frido's gravity there seemed a touch of the south in that swarthy colouring. Austrian or Bavarian origins might have been guessed, although this was belied by a certain stiffness rather than suppleness of gesture. In fact his family came from Lower Saxony. ‘How concentrated he is!' Anthony thought. ‘How much he minds about everything.' But he had already discovered that Frido, too, could smile; and that when he did so, his whole face smiled.

They reached Carfax. In front of them Tom Tower stood out against the cloudless sky. Large numbers of undergraduates drifted up St Aldate's from the river, scarved, flannelled, laughing, shouting, chatting. The great bell of Tom tolled half past five. Frido thought, curiously, that Freddie Barnett and his friends had started the serious drinking of the evening rather early. As if responding to telepathic communication Anthony said, with a chuckle –

‘I think we got caught up in the end of what must have been a pretty extended and expensive lunch party!'

They stood for a moment, pausing at the four arms of Carfax.

‘Come on, walk with me down The High.'

‘The High,' murmured Frido, nodding happily. He was learning Oxford's language. In fifteen minutes each felt that he had known the other a long time. In an hour they would have become friends for life. They walked slowly down The High, talking, talking.

The sound of bagpipes was infrequently heard in Oxford's High Street. This now, quite suddenly, assailed them. Undergraduates habitually cultivated with success a determination to be surprised by nothing, and Anthony only raised his voice and stuttered a little more, making himself heard with difficulty above the shrill, insistent notes of the kilted piper walking
slowly up and down, just clear of the pavement, a hundred yards ahead of them.

‘Ah,' said Frido very seriously, ‘look at this!' They were approaching the twin cupolas of Queen's. The piper, now level, wheeled majestically and marched away in front of them playing ‘The Highland Wedding'. On the pavement a few yards ahead the piper's companion, a small man, a shrunken man in a threadbare coat, with only one arm and wearing dark glasses, held out a cap. His other sleeve was pinned to his side. On his chest was fastened a large piece of cardboard with an inscription.

‘For King and Country. Wounded and blinded. Ypres 1918.'

They both fumbled in pockets, Anthony frowning, shamefaced, Frido watching him for guidance, uncertain, troubled. Pennies dropped into the cap and the small, shrunken man straightened himself as if to attention. The piper wheeled once again, countermarching.

‘Plenty of those still,' said Anthony softly. It was 1937. ‘They're largely bogus,' people often said, comfortably, ‘especially the ones who pretend to be blind. They're run by crooks, put out on the beat like tarts, it's mostly a racket!' They walked on towards Magdalen, no particular destination in mind, simply delighting in the discovery of each other's company. Anthony suddenly checked, and touched the other's arm.

‘Hang on here a moment.' He darted back, weaving through the not inconsiderable number of people strolling at that hour through Oxford's streets on a fine afternoon. A moment later he had reached the small, shrunken man, wearer of the placard, ‘For King and Country'. He found a half-crown in his pocket and dropped it into the still outstretched cap.

‘Thanks, sir,' said the man without particular emphasis.

‘Well, good luck,' said Anthony awkwardly. To his embarrassment he found that Frido von Arzfeld, too, had retraced his steps. Frido said nothing, but simply nodded, as if understanding perfectly. He, too, put a silver coin in the cap. They resumed their walk, silent for a little. Anthony took his companion's arm, as he had when first befriending him in the middle of a hostile, drunken group, a half-hour before. He felt a current of sympathy pass between them.

‘We never want anything like that again. I hate seeing them.'

‘My father,' said Frido quietly, ‘also lost his arm.'

‘Well, never again! War, killing, destruction – it's madness, evil madness! Of course there are things like this wretched business in Spain. But between European nations – like last time – My God, No!'

‘I agree.'

‘So-called patriotic emotion – it's often tribal, animal emotion. Intolerance. The wolf-pack. Like those drunken fools this evening. As for war – well in spite of – oh, everything – I think that's something most people are determined not to repeat. Never again.'

‘I ndeed,' said Frido. ‘I ndeed. Never, never again.'

John Marvell stopped his large black Packard in the middle of Flintdown High Street, switched off the engine and climbed stiffly from it, one leg as ever aching somewhat. The driver of the baker's van behind him followed suit. The owners of two parked cars at the curb, returning to them with business in the little market town completed, paused and looked at their watches. A number of people came to shop doors and stood quietly. Flintdown church clock started to strike eleven. Unreliable, despite the ministrations of the verger, it was always corrected to within seconds of ‘the wireless' before this occasion. That November morning in 1937 was cold and sunny, ‘Not unlike,' thought Marvell, ‘that other morning, years ago.
Our
eleventh of November.'

Flintdown was now silent. The whole of England was silent. At this hour, on this day, ‘Eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month,' people withdrew absolutely for two minutes from the pressure of daily living, of getting and spending and chatter. Work stopped. Machines were still. Travel was checked. All stood bareheaded – in church, in the street, at their place of work, in their homes. The old remembered sons. The middle-aged – John Marvell was forty-seven, his wife forty-three – remembered brothers, lovers, husbands: above all, comrades. The young – those under the age of thirty – recalled parents. And the children, who recollected nothing directly, had grown up beneath the shadows of a great melancholy, a corporate sadness.

The notes of the church clock continued to reverberate through Flintdown, echoing, measured, relentless. It took thirty-five seconds for the hour to strike. After the last note, two minutes would elapse – nobody needed a signal to mark the end of this extraordinary, united act of homage. So it had been decreed from the first year of victory. England could have
accepted no less dignified an annual gesture. After two minutes folk would begin to walk quietly on, talking little. The first car door would close without fuss, the first engine apologetically start. Traffic would move again, commerce be resumed. Few people would refer directly to the experience just shared. There would be an occasional comment, understated, a relief of feelings:

‘My husband just has to stay at home, he has to listen to it on the wireless, from the Cenotaph –'

‘My sister lives near Croydon, they have the aeroplanes there, last year one came over during it – during the silence! It was all wrong, it could have waited, couldn't it! After all …'

‘I liked it when we had the special service, the bugles and that, no matter the day of the week, there's fewer go to that now, save the Legion.'

But on the whole, Flintdown resumed its business without introspection. For two minutes there had been peace, broken by no human voice, interrupted by no sound contrived of man. For two minutes, although they certainly did not think of the matter thus, Flintdown had been at prayer, quiet, vulnerable and receptive.

John Marvell, a very private man, always felt awkward at the ritual gatherings, the bemedalled parades at which, as a wartime ex-officer, he was invited to appear. Latterly, he had excused himself –

‘Mrs Marvell, you know – really we like to be quiet…'

His absence was regretted and by no means comprehended, but he was a respected figure in the county of Sussex, a well-liked, dutiful man and this apparent and atypical lapse in proper sentiment came to be accepted. It was now an acknowledged thing that ‘Mr Marvell doesn't come'. His presence in Flintdown High Street anyway caused no remark, for his own parish church with its war memorial was several miles away.

Marvell generally tried to be at home on the morning of Armistice Day. It was inevitable that his wife Hilda, without morbidity, thought particularly at that time of her elder and
beloved brother, killed on the last day of March, 1918 during the final great German offensive which had seemed destined to crack the British front in Picardy. John Marvell liked being with Hilda on the morning of 11th November. She was a practical, unsentimental woman; they gave each other tranquil, undemonstrative support. And John, too, had lost an elder brother. He moved his mind away. That was a corridor off which were too many locked doors and he never walked down it far.

On this occasion, however, he had needed to go to Flint-down. A meeting with a local solicitor, a matter of some urgency concerning one of the farms, had been postponed from the previous week by the solicitor's, Christie's, attack of influenza, just over. And Christie's business had taken twice as long as forecast. Hilda was not alone – not, he thought, that it would have bothered her whether she were or not. He simply liked to be there, liked her to feel his presence, unobtrusive, comprehending, not only husband but contemporary. Their generation had shared an experience at which their youngers could only guess, and sometimes, John knew, impatiently resented with a sense of exclusion. But Hilda was not alone at Bargate. Anthony was at home, down from Oxford for three weeks' convalescence after a disagreeable bout of jaundice.

John drove homeward through the lanes to Bargate, seven miles from Flintdown. As he turned in at the white painted gates, up the long drive of Bargate Manor, his heart returned to the scenes evoked by the silence in Flintdown High Street – to that morning nineteen years before, when an orderly had brought to Company Headquarters a pencilled message from the Adjutant, confirming what had been rumoured for forty-eight hours. German emissaries had accepted unconditionally the terms dictated to them by Marshal Foch. All fighting was to cease at eleven o'clock. Thereafter, no guns would fire.

It had made little immediate difference to John's battalion, ‘resting' as they were behind the lines. But it meant that no more friends – there weren't many left – would be killed. There would be no more letters to write to mothers and wives.

‘Your son was an excellent soldier, a gallant man who will be sadly missed by all his comrades in this Company. No words of mine etc. etc.'

No more of that. Was it really nineteen years ago, that extraordinary sense of light, of quiet, of anti-climax, no appropriate words to speak nor thoughts to think? ‘It seems yesterday,' John said to himself. ‘It has dominated these years so heavily.' Soon, he supposed, it would be a distant memory, a gradual emergence from a fear and a pain which later generations would be unable to imagine and would blame their elders for permitting, however young they were. He left the car by the front door and went into the house in search of Hilda.

Every house has a centre, a point where the most significant developments occur, where opinions and affections are most often formed, where the heart most memorably beats. At Bargate Manor, this centre was the inner hall. The front door opened to a flagged space, with chests, umbrella stands, shooting sticks and croquet mallets piled haphazardly, foxes' masks mounted and scrupulously marked with the date and place at which young Marvells had been honoured by successive Masters of Foxhounds. From this outer hall – echoing, functional, draughty – glass doors gave on to the inner hall. The inner hall was the heart of the house.

It was a large, low-ceilinged oak-panelled room which ran the depth of the building, so that at the far end from the outer hall, windows opened on the garden – the rose garden, with brick paths intersecting beds of musk and floribunda roses. In a huge, stone-surmounted fireplace logs burned without ceasing from early November until at least the end of March, so that although the fire seldom smoked uncomfortably there was always awareness of its scent and crackle. Tables, piled high with books and magazines, separated a large number of comfortable sofas and armchairs. There were, on one wall, a set of eighteenth-century prints of Sussex; although a few ‘good' pictures hung in the drawing and dining rooms – and some undistinguished Marvell portraits in the library – the panelling of the inner hall was beautiful in its own right and needed little embellishment. It was a dark room, yet never depressing. Colour was provided by the gentle shading of the sofa covers, by crimson curtains after dark, and, in almost all seasons, by a huge bowl of flowers which were Hilda Marvell's
skill and delight. The inner hall never seemed empty. It was irredeemably untidy, and conveyed always a sense of companionship, of voices.

Bargate was of no great architectural distinction. The oldest section – of which the inner hall formed the main part – was built in 1625. An elegant, though not altogether congruous, wing was erected at a right angle to the Jacobean house in 1768. In this wing, reached by a passage from the inner hall, was a long drawing room with French windows opening on to a lawn, next to a small, square study invariably knee-deep in John Marvell's papers. This eighteenth-century wing also contained a very delicate, curving staircase.