Christmas Pudding and Pigeon Pie (28 page)

‘Oh Greta, I thought you would have gone.’

‘Gone, Frau Gräfin?’

Arguments and persuasion from Sophia failed to prevent Greta from calling her this.

‘Back to Germany.’

‘Oh no, Frau Gräfin; Sir Luke says there will be no war. Our good Führer will not make war on England.’

Sophia was rather bored. She had never liked Greta and had not expected to find her still there. She asked whether Sir Luke was in, and was told yes, and that he had ordered luncheon for four. It was a very hot day, and she put on a silk dress which, owing to the cold summer, she had hitherto been unable to wear.

Rudolph was in the drawing-room making a cocktail.

‘I say, have you seen Florence? God has guided her to dye her hair.’

‘No – what colour – where is she?’

‘Orange. Downstairs,’ he said, pulling Sophia towards him with the hand which did not hold the cocktail shaker, and kissing her. ‘How are you?’

‘Very pleased to see you, my darling. It seemed a long time.’

Florence appeared, followed by Luke. Her hair, which had been brown, was indeed a rich marmalade, and she was rather
smartly dressed in printed crepe-de-chine, though the dress did not look much when seen near Sophia’s.

‘Have a drink,’ said Rudolph, pouring them out. Florence gave him a tortured, jolly smile, and said that drinking gave her extraordinarily little pleasure nowadays. Luke, who hated being offered drinks in his own house, refused more shortly. ‘Lunch is ready,’ he said.

They went downstairs.

‘Has the war begun?’ asked Sophia, wondering who could have ordered soup for luncheon, and seeing in this the God-guided hand of Florence. She guessed that Florence was staying in the house.

‘No,’ said Rudolph. ‘I don’t know what we’re waiting for.’

‘My information is,’ said Luke, at which Rudolph gave a great wink, because Luke so often used those words and his information was so often not quite correct, ‘my information is that Our Premier (his voice here took on a reverent note) is going to be able to save the peace again. At a cost, naturally. We shall have to sacrifice Poland, of course, but I hear that the Poles are in a very bad way, rotten with Communism, you know, and they will be lucky to have Herr Hitler to put things right there. Then we may have to give him some colony or other, and of course a big loan.’

‘What about the Russian pact?’ said Rudolph.

‘Means nothing – absolutely nothing. Herr Hitler will never allow the Bolsheviks into Europe. No, I don’t feel any alarm. We have no quarrel with Germany that Our Premier and Herr Hitler together cannot settle peacefully.’

Sophia said shortly, ‘Well, if they do, and there isn’t a revolution here as the result, I shall leave this country for ever and live somewhere else, that’s all. But I won’t believe it.’

Then, remembering from past experience that such conversations were not only useless but also led to ill-feeling, she changed the subject. She had never been so near parting from Luke as at the time of Munich, when, in his eyes, Our Premier
had moved upon the same exalted sphere as Brother Bones, founder of the Boston Brotherhood, and almost you might say, God. His information then had been that the Czechs were in a very bad way, rotten with Communism, and would be lucky to have Herr Hitler to put things right. It also led him to believe that universal disarmament would follow the Munich agreement, and that the Sudetenland was positively Hitler’s last territorial demand in Europe. Carlyle has said that identity of sentiment but difference of opinion are the known elements of pleasant dialogue. The dialogue in many English homes at that time was very far from pleasant.

‘Then a silly old welfare-worker came up to a woman with eight coal-black children and said, “You haven’t got a yellow label, so you can’t be pregnant,” and the woman said, “Can’t I? Won’t the dad be pleased to hear that now?” And when we got to the village green the parson was waiting to meet us, and he looked at the pregnant ladies and said, very sadly, “To think that
one man
is responsible for all this.” It’s absolutely true.’

Rudolph watched her with admiration. He enjoyed Sophia’s talent for embroidering on her own experiences, and the way she rushed from hyperbole to hyperbole, ending upon a wild climax of improbability with the words ‘It’s absolutely true.’ According to Sophia, she could hardly move outside her house without encountering the sort of adventure that only befalls the ordinary person once in a lifetime. Her narrative always had a basis of truth, and this was an added fascination for Rudolph who amused himself by trying to separate fact from fiction.

‘Darling Sophia,’ he said, as she came to the end of a real tour de force about her father, whom she had left, she said, blackening the pebbles of his drive which he considered would be particularly visible from the air, ‘I know what your job will be in the war – taking German spies out to luncheon and telling them what you believe to be the truth. When you look them in the eye and say “I promise it’s absolutely true”, they’ll think
it’s gospel because it’ll be so obvious that you do yourself. The authorities will simply tell you the real truth, and you’ll do the rest for them.”

‘Oh, Rudolph, what a glamorous idea!’

She took Florence upstairs. Florence wriggled a good deal which she always did if she felt embarrassed, and in spite of her conscious superiority in the moral sphere she often felt embarrassed with Sophia. Presently she said in a loud, frank voice, ‘I hope it’s all right, Sophia. I’m staying here.’

‘Oh, good. I hope you’re comfortable. If you want any ironing done, just tell Greta.’

Florence said she required extraordinarily little maiding, but this did not for a moment deceive Sophia, who had been told by Greta, in a burst of confidence, that Fraulein Turnbull gave more trouble than three of the Frau Gräfin.

Florence now drew a deep breath, always with her the prelude to an outburst of Christianity, and said that the times were very grave and that it made her feel sad to see people pay so little attention to their souls as Sophia and Rudolph.

‘We don’t think our rotten little souls so important as all that.’

‘Ah but you see it isn’t only your souls. Each person has a quantity of other souls converging upon his – that’s what makes this life such a frightfully jolly adventure. In your case, Sophia, with your looks and position, you could influence directly and indirectly hundreds – yes, hundreds of people. Think how exciting that would be.’

Sophia saw that she was in for a sermon, and resigned herself. She knew from sad experience that to answer back merely encouraged the Brotherhood to fresh efforts.

‘You know, dear, Luke feels it very much. It hurts him when you talk as you did at lunch, flippantly and with exaggeration. I wish you could realise how much happier it makes one to be perfectly truthful, even in little ways. Truth is a thing that adds so greatly to the value of human relationships.’

‘Some,’ said Sophia carelessly. ‘Now it adds to the value of my relationship with Rudolph to tell more and funnier lies. He likes it.’

‘I wonder if that sort of relationship is of much value. Personally the only people I care to be very intimate with are the ones you feel would make a good third if God asked you out to dinner.’

Sophia wished that Florence would not talk about the Almighty as if his real name was Godfrey, and God was just Florence’s nickname for him.

‘Oh, God would get on with Rudolph,’ she said.

Florence smiled her bright, crucified smile, and said that she was sure there was good material in Rudolph if one knew where to look for it. Then she wriggled about and said, very loudly, ‘Oh, Sophia, how much happier it would be for you, and for those about you, if you would give your sins to God. I feel there would be, oh! such a gay atmosphere in this house if you could learn to do just that.’

‘Only one sin, Florence, such a harmless one. I don’t steal, I honour my father, I don’t covet, and I don’t commit murder.’

‘Perhaps flippancy is the worst sin of all.’

‘I’m not flippant but I’m not religious and I never will be, not if I live to be a hundred. It’s a matter of temperament, you know.’

This was a false step. Florence now embarked on a rigmarole of bogus philosophy which no power short of an explosion could have stopped. Poor Sophia lay back and let it flow, which it did until the men came into the drawing-room, when Florence gave Luke a flash of her white and even teeth which all too clearly said ‘I have failed again.’

‘I’m just going up for a little quiet time,’ she said. ‘I’ll be ready in half an hour.’ She and Luke played golf on Saturday afternoons.

‘I’m just going down for a little quiet time and I’ll be ready in about half an hour,’ said Rudolph, picking up the
Tatler
.
When he got back, he said, ‘Come along, Sophia, I’m taking you to the local A.R.P. office to get a job.’

‘There won’t be any war,’ said Luke comfortably, as he settled down to his
Times
.

Sophia and Rudolph strolled out into the sunshine.

‘Let’s go to Kew,’ said Sophia.

‘Yes, we will when you have got your job.’

‘Oh darling, oh dear, do I have to have a job?’

‘Yes, you do, or I shall be through with you. You know that I think it’s perfectly shameful the way you haven’t done any training the last few months. Now you must get on with it quickly. There is only one justification for people like you in a community, and that is that they should pull their weight in a war. The men must fight and the women must be nurses.’

‘Darling, I couldn’t be a nurse. Florence has a first aid book and I looked inside and saw a picture of a knee. I nearly fainted. I can’t bear knees, I’ve got a thing about them. I don’t like ill people, either, and then I’m not so very strong, I should cockle. Tell you what – could I be a précis writer at the Foreign Office?’

‘There haven’t been précis writers at the Foreign Office since Lord Palmerston. Anyway, you couldn’t work in a Government Department, you’re far too moony. If you can’t bear knees and don’t like ill people, you can scrub floors and wash up for those that can and do. Now here we are, go along and fix yourself up.’

Sophia found herself in a large empty house, empty, that is, of furniture, but full of would-be workers. She had to wait in a queue before being interviewed by a lady at a desk. The young man in front of her announced that he was a Czech, and not afraid of bombs. The lady said nor are British women afraid of bombs, which Sophia thought was going too far. She gave the young man an address to go to, and turned briskly to Sophia.

‘Yes?’ she said.

Sophia felt the shades of the prison-house closing in on her. She explained that she would do full-time voluntary work,
but that she had no qualifications. For one wild moment of optimism she thought that the lady was going to turn her down. After looking through some papers, she said, however, ‘Could you do office work in a First Aid Post?’

‘I could try,’ said Sophia doubtfully.

‘Then take this note to Sister Wordsworth at St. Anne’s Hospital First Aid Post. Thank you. Good day.’

Rudolph was in earnest conversation with a German Jew when she came out. On hearing that she was fixed up he said that she might have a holiday before beginning her job. ‘You can go to St. Anne’s tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m taking you down to Kew now.’

They sat on a bench at the end of the ilex avenue and stared at Sion House across the river. Sophia asked Rudolph what he planned to do, now that the war had begun.

‘I hope for a commission, of course,’ he said; ‘failing that I shall enlist.’

‘Somebody who knows all those languages could get a job at home – I mean not a fighting job. Perhaps it is your duty to do that,’ she said hopefully.

‘Can’t help my duty: I’m going to fight Germans in this war – not Nazis, mind you, Germans. I mean huns.’

Sophia agreed with him really. The huns must be fought.

‘How strange everything seems now that the war is here,’ she said. ‘I suppose it is unreal because we have been expecting it for so long now, and have known that it must be got over before we can go on with our lives. Like in the night when you want to go to the loo and it is miles away down a freezing cold passage and yet you know you have to go down that passage before you can be happy and sleep again. We are starting down it. Oh darling, I wish it was over and we were back in bed. What shall I do when you’ve gone?’

‘Don’t you anticipate,’ said Rudolph severely; ‘you never have, so don’t begin now. You are the only person I know who
lives entirely in the present, it is one of the attractive things about you.’

‘If you are killed,’ said Sophia, paying no attention.

‘You are one of those lucky women with two strings to their bow. If I am killed, there is always old Luke.’

‘Yes, but the point is I shall have such an awful grudge against Luke, don’t you see? I do so fearfully think the war is the result of people like him, always rushing off abroad and pretending to those wretched foreigners that England will stand for anything. Cracking them up over here, too; Herr Hitler this, and Herr von Ribbentrop that, and bulwarks against Bolshevism and so on. Of course, the old fellow thought he was making good feeling, and probably he never even realised that the chief reason he loved the Germans was because they buttered him up so much. All those free rides in motors and aeroplanes.’

‘You can’t blame him,’ said Rudolph, ‘he never cut any ice over here, but as soon as he set foot in Germany he was treated as a minor royalty or something. Of course it was lovely for him. Why, Berlin has been full of people like that for years. The Germans were told to make a fuss of English people, so of course masses of English people stampeded over there to be made a fuss of. But it never occurred to them that they were doing definite harm to their own country; they just got a kick out of saying “mein Führer” and being taken round in Mercedes-Benzes. All the same they weren’t directly responsible for the war. Old Luke is all right, he’s a decent old fellow at heart. I feel quite happy leaving you in his hands. I believe he’s getting over the Brotherhood, too, you’ll see.’