The Golden Virgin (2 page)

Half an hour and two whiskeys later, Phillip left the smoke room of the Conservative Club and walked with glassy determination across the croquet lawn beyond the billiard room, and so to the banks of the Randiswell. There, with one hand on the weeping willow trailing some of its branches into the dirty water, he was sick. Afterwards a desire to hide his shame led him, with faltering steps, across the lawn and to the billiard room where, as he told his great friend Desmond and Mrs. Neville his mother at their flat later that evening, he got into a dugout under the table, and passed out.

“When I had got rid of the fumes and the nausea it was tea-time. Dr. Dashwood gave me some bromide. And before I went to see Toogood at the Workhouse I bought some violet cachous, and took care to turn my face away when the old boy sounded me. Anyway, it’s awful to breathe in anyone’s face. I think he appreciated this, for he gave me a week’s extension. So here I am!”

“
Did
Dr. Dashwood write
Middleton,
Phillip?” asked Mrs. Neville.

“I couldn’t read any of his writing, Mrs. Neville.”

“Just as well!” cried the fat woman, with sudden laughter. “Still,” she added, solemn again, “if he is a bit of a rogue, he is a charming rogue, I’ll say that for him.”

The extra leave took Phillip to Friday night. He was due to report to his new unit in Essex on the Saturday morning. But on his last night Desmond was not on duty with the searchlights, and on the Saturday morning Phillip put off his start for a cup of coffee in the flat, then another cup, then a quick game of snakes-and-ladders while eating bread and cheese; after which he took Desmond on the back of his motor cycle to Freddy’s bar in the High Street for a glass of beer, and as they were coming out in walked Dr. Dashwood. After a round of drinks they went for one for the road, as the doctor called it, in the Conservative Club, where, said the doctor, “Auld Scottie” whiskey, unlike Teacher’s he had had before, was as mild as milk, and the very thing to kill any bug which might be exploiting the dull patch in Phillip’s lung.

“The trouble with me, Doctor, is that I have never been able
to stop my thoughts racing about in all directions,” said Phillip. “When I was a child, I called this to myself the battle of the brain. I find it awfully hard to control thoughts of disaster, even of torture, however much I try to reason things out. I suppose it is bad form not to conceal one’s thoughts, but then I’m not a gentleman. Also, I’m a frightful coward, and always have been. And, as you can see, I have no reserve, as mother is always telling me. I just can’t help saying what I think.”

It was a handicap to have too much imagination, Dr. Dashwood said, kindly, after Phillip had returned to the Club to thank him for a further week’s leave. “Sometimes I think I am all imagination, and by a freak was born with the spirit of a hare,” went on Phillip, and thereupon told the doctor why he had transferred to a home-service unit.

“I get absolutely stiff and trembling with fear, when I think of facing machine guns again. That’s why I applied to be a gas officer at Loos, because I couldn’t face the idea of going over the top. I was given several days light duty afterwards, for a slight gassing, but I didn’t really get gassed at all. I saw men who did. Their faces and bodies turned the colour of plums, with saliva all over their chins and tunics. Slugs seemed to like it, when they were dead. You don’t see those things in the papers.”

“My dear Middleton, as I told you, you have too much imagination! Why should such details be put in newspapers? Surely the right thing is to keep them out? You don’t see what goes on in any hospital, ‘in the papers’. Now to change from the general to the particular, I don’t like that bronchial rasp you have. Come into the billiard room, and let me sound your bellows. Yes, definitely you have a dull patch. I’ll give you a note to Toogood.”

“But you’ve just given me one, Doctor!”

“Oh, did I? Well, that calls for a celebration!”

It was Dashwood who had done the wheezing, Phillip thought, not himself; but the main thing was that he had another week’s leave, and would be with his great friend Desmond again.

*

The Gild Hall was filling up with its Saturday evening crowd, now that the shops closed early at half past seven, owing to the war. Large straw hats of black, set well back on the head, worn with white blouses and dark skirts above the ankle, with black cotton gloves to the elbow, appeared to be the fashion among those flappers who wore their hair in plaits either over a shoulder or down the back. Many of the youths, the more envied ones,
were in uniform, although obviously under military age. Others had dressed themselves in brown shoes with slacks, sharply creased, some with turn-ups; or brown boots with lace-up breeches; both styles unauthorised and worn only on leave, to suggest a gentility above that of the ordinary private soldier. Their jackets, too, had been altered, to take away the issue roughness, to show the shape of the torso—all from aspiration to glory and freedom.

The manager of the Gild Hall was now, as he put it to himself, in evidence, as he stood beside the pay-box leading to the billiard hall proper. He was an upright figure with thin white hair, wearing an ancient pattern of frock coat with celluloid collar, dickey, ready-made flat black tie held in place by elastic, and stringy waxed moustaches that looked as though they had been thick and bushy. A scrawny neck and prominent Adam’s apple stood out of the oversize celluloid collar. This great-grandfatherly teetotal figure gave forth contentment with life, as he surveyed the youthful throng before him.

Mavis was playing dominoes, with Nina. The smooth, slurring slide of the ivory and ebony pieces, the feel of them to the finger-tips was of summer childhood, when she had loved all the world and was loved by everyone, all the faces round the big mahogany table in the sitting room, which had a new leaf in it, brought up from under the floor, through the trapdoor, because Aunt Liz and cousins Polly and Percy had come to stay, and Dads was ever so jolly as he played games of halma and ludo with them, and promised prizes of Callard and Bowser’s cherry toffee bars in silver paper. It was summer, and a wet day, but the rain did not matter, for everything was so jolly and shining inside the sitting room. Then it was dark and sad again, and it was Phil’s fault, for Dads opening his roll-top desk had found out that some of the toffee was gone, and Phil had told a lie, saying that he had not opened the desk with one of the keys on Mother’s key-ring, when he had; and Mummie had scolded her for saying that he had told a lie, and Dads had sent Phil upstairs to take down his trousers for a caning, and he had cried like a baby as he left the room and Mummie had cried, too, and it had spoiled the lovely feeling of summer and the rain on the window.

“Don’t you feel it awfully hot in here, Nina? Let’s go, shall we? There’s no point in our stopping.”

“But I’ve just ordered some more coffee, Mavis.”

“We can tell the girl we don’t want it.”

Nina was used to the sudden peremptory moods of her friend; and as her care was to save her from being upset, she got up to speak to the waitress, being sensitive about cancelling an order only when the tray should arrive. She was half way to the girl, who was standing by the pay-box at the entrance to the billiard hall proper, when she heard loud voices, then a prolonged cry between a cheer and a yell, as the glass doors leading in from the porch were pushed open and three figures staggered into the room, arm in arm, barging into one another with laughter. She recognised Phillip, his friend Desmond, and a smaller, dark man in a blue suit and bowler hat, carrying an ebony cane with large silver top, and wearing an eyeglass, who, she thought, must be Eugene, the Brazilian friend of Desmond.

They stood by the sunken pool, and appeared to be arguing about something, hands on one another’s shoulders. Their voices were loud, everyone was looking at them, the domino games suspended. Nina saw that Phillip’s jacket was dripping with water, as though a jug had been tipped over him, as indeed it had, by Mrs. Freddy in the bar over the road. Anxious for her friend, Nina went back to Mavis, whose eyes were dark and anxious.

“Are they tipsy?” she whispered.

“I don’t think so.”

“Why didn’t you let me go when I first said I wanted to? I
knew
something like this would happen, you know! I have second-sight, like Mother! Listen, what are they saying?”

The argument was apparently about whether they should play three-handed snooker, or Eugene and Desmond play a hundred up at billiards. Mavis winced at the loudness of the voices. Phillip
was
drunk, she decided; his cap was pulled down on the side of his head, and he had the weak, foolish grin on his face that made him look so undignified. Thank goodness he was not in uniform!

Very soon her worst fears, or previsions, were realised.

“All right, you two birds go and play,” she heard her brother drawl. “I’ll come and watch.” He followed them to the door. The manager stood there. She saw him put a hand on Phillip’s chest, before saying something inaudible to him.

The two others went through the door, leaving Phillip standing there. Then he tried to go through the door into the billiard room, after the others. The manager stopped him. In the silence she heard him say, “I’ve asked you to leave, now go quietly, sir.”

While he continued to stand there, a fourth figure entered the Gild Hall, wearing raincoat and bowler hat, carrying an umbrella. Seeing Phillip, he went towards him. Mavis recognised Tom Ching, and her spirit darkened. So that was it; he and Phillip had been drinking together!

“Look, that awful creature! He’s the cause of it, I bet. Oh look what’s happening.”

Throwing off Ching’s offered arm, Phillip said something to the manager; then holding out his arms he began to walk, or totter, backwards, as though he had lost all sense of balance. Back he went, a dozen paces, and fell into the goldfish pool.

Mavis went out, followed by Nina. Outside in the murky air she said, “Oh, I would have died if anyone had recognised me as his sister!”

Opposite the fire station, at the turning to Randiswell, the friends said goodbye, for Nina’s way lay to the south.

“See you tomorrow, usual time? Don’t be late, will you? And swear on your honour that you will never tell anyone what happened tonight?” Mavis allowed herself to be kissed, then she hurried across the road, unaware that she was being followed by Tom Ching, who had as powerful an impulse towards his image of Mavis as she had towards the image of her lost father.

*

Tom Ching was Phillip’s age. He was not in uniform because he was a second-grade clerk employed in the Admiralty. His excuse for not having joined up was his indispensability. He was reserved; but there was talk of a Military Service Bill coming before the Commons, and “Cuthberts in Whitehall being combed out”, and sent into the services. This was one of Ching’s dreads, for he had nothing in himself with which to resist the terrors of death should he have to face what Phillip had gone through at Messines with the London Highlanders, and again at the first battle of Ypres. If Phillip’s heritage of courage had been dissipated in childhood by the cold ignorance of a righteous father at odds with his wife, Ching’s had been liquidated by an early horror of knowing what his father did to his mother; of himself doing the same thing, in fascination and horror (at first) with his sister; and being found out, by a father who did not punish him, but in his heavy, fleshy way told him that he had committed one of the great sins which can eat into the soul of a family. This had not shocked the youth, who had been at school at the time, so much as being told by his sister, later on, that father had since done the same thing to her.

Now the father was paralysed, a mass of soft pink and white flesh above a formless heavy face, looked after by the daughter. The mother, a mental invalid, was in Peckham House, an asylum.

These complications had emphasised Ching’s feeling for the ideal, which for some years now had been centred on Mavis; but he practised his love alone, in the thoughts of unattainable deeds. And to help escape his guilt, he had taken to drinking rum, a drink acceptable to his stomach, apparently, for unlike Phillip after three or four quarterns of whiskey, he was never sick.

He hurried after Mavis, in order to confirm his worst fears.

*

In the sitting room of the Maddison house the curtains were drawn against Zeppelins and the cold November night. A coke fire glowed brightly in the hearth. It was an extravagance on his part, in war-time too, to have built up a fire so late, thought Richard, as he lay back in his armchair, legs and feet stretched to the polished steel fender. But he was not to be on special constabulary duty again until the Monday, and all Sunday’s ease lay before him. He lay back with a sigh of contentment, his cup of hot water on the plush table-cloth beside him, and took up a blue-covered booklet which he had purchased for one penny that afternoon from the London book-stall where, regularly every month, he called for his favourite
Nash’s
and
Pall
Mall
Magazine.

Always meticulous when he was not emotionally disturbed, Richard read the title-page carefully.

Report
of
the
Committee
on
Alleged
German
Outrages
appointed
by
His
Majesty’s
Government
and
Presided
over
by
The
Right
Hon.
Viscount
Bryce,
O.M.,
etc.,
etc.,
formerly
British
Ambassador
at
Washington.

He read the first two pages of the preamble, and then his eye wandered. He turned to Part 1,
The
Conduct
of
the
German
Troops
in
Belgium,
read a little, and turned over again to read a passage about Liége. Villages around the fortress burned … systematic execution of civilians, by being summarily shot … survivors of volleys bayonetted, including a young girl of thirteen. He breathed deeply, and took a few sips of hot water.