Holy Disorders

‘I mean, I introduced myself, so I thought you—’

‘Oh, yes, of course, Geoffrey Vintner. And I must thank you for acting as promptly as you did; heaven knows what would have happened to me if you hadn’t interfered.’

‘So do I.’

‘What do you mean – Oh, I see. But it occurs to me now, you know, that we really ought to have stayed and seen the police. It’s all very well dashing off like a couple of schoolboys who’ve been robbing an orchard, but there are certain proprieties to be observed.’ Geoffrey became suddenly bored with this line of thought. ‘Anyway, I had to catch a train.’

‘And our friend,’ said Fielding, ‘was presumably trying to stop you. Which brings us back to the question of what it’s all about.’ He wiped his brow again.

Geoffrey, however, was distracted, idly musing on a Passacaglia and Fugue commissioned from him for the New Year. It had not been going well in any case, and the interruption of his present mission seemed unlikely to prosper it. But not even prospective oblivion will prevent a composer from brooding despondently and maddeningly on his own works. Geoffrey embarked on a mental performance: Ta-ta; ta-ta-ta-ti-ta-ti…

‘I wonder,’ Fielding added, ‘if they’ve anticipated the failure of the first attack, and provided a second line of defence.’

This unexpected confusion of military metaphors shook Geoffrey. The spectral caterwaulings were abruptly stilled. ‘I believe you said that to frighten me,’ he said.

‘Tell me what’s going on. If I’m an enemy, I know already—’

‘I didn’t say—’

‘And if I’m not, I may be able to help.’

So in the end Geoffrey told him. As precise information it amounted to very little.

‘I don’t see that helps much,’ Fielding objected when he had finished. He examined the telegram and letter. ‘And who is this Fen person, anyway?’

‘Professor of English at Oxford. We were up together. I haven’t seen much of him since, though I happened to hear he was going to be in Tolnbridge during the long vac. Why he should send for me—’ Geoffrey made a gesture of humorous resignation, and upset the butterfly-net, which was poised precariously in a transverse position across the interior of the cab. With some acrimony they jerked it into place again.

‘I can’t think,’ said Geoffrey, after contemplating for a moment finishing his previous sentence and deciding against it, ‘why Fen insisted on my bringing that thing.’

‘Rather odd, surely? Is he a collector?’

‘One never quite knows with Fen. In anyone else, though – well, yes, I suppose it would seem odd.’

‘He seems to know something about this Brooks business.’

‘Well, he’s there, of course. And then,’ Geoffrey added as a laborious afterthought, ‘he’s a detective, in a way.’

Fielding looked disconcerted; he had evidently been reserving this rôle for himself and disliked the thought of competition. A little peevishly he asked:

‘Not an official detective, surely?’

‘No, no, amateur. But he’s been very successful.’

‘Gervase Fen – I don’t seem to have heard of him,’ said Fielding. Then after a moment’s thought: ‘What a silly name. Is he in with the police?’ His tone suggested Fen’s complicity in some orgiastic and disgraceful organization.

‘I honestly don’t know. It’s only what I’ve heard.’

‘I wonder if you’d mind my coming with you to Tolnbridge? I’m sick of the store. And with the war on, it seems so remote from anything—’

‘Couldn’t you join up?’

‘No, they won’t have me. I volunteered last November, but they graded me four, I joined the ARP, of course, and I’m thinking of going in for this new LDV racket, but blast it all—’

‘You look healthy enough,’ said Geoffrey.

‘So I am. Nothing wrong with me except shaky eyesight. They don’t grade you four for that, do they?’

‘No. Perhaps,’ Geoffrey suggested encouragingly, ‘you’re suffering from some hidden, fatal disease you haven’t known about.’

Fielding ignored this. ‘I want to do something active about this war – something romantic.’ He mopped his brow again, looking the reverse of romantic. ‘I tried to join the Secret Service, but it was no good. You can’t join the Secret Service in this country. Not just like that.’ And he slapped his hands together to indicate some platonic idea of facility.

Geoffrey considered. In view of what had happened it would almost certainly be very useful to have Fielding with him on his journey, and there was no reason to suspect him of ulterior motive.

‘…After all, war hasn’t become so mechanized that solitary, individual daring no longer matters,’ Fielding was saying; he seemed transported to some Valhalla of Secret Service agents. ‘You’ll laugh at me, of course’ – Geoffrey smiled a hasty and unconvincing negative – ‘but in the long run it is the people who dream of being men of action who are men of action. Admittedly Don Quixote made a fool of himself with the windmills, but when all’s said and done, there probably were giants about.’ He sighed gently as the taxi turned into the Marylebone Road.

‘I should very much like to have you with me,’ said Geoffrey. ‘But look here – what about your job? One must have money.’

‘That’ll be all right. I have some money of my own.’ Fielding assembled his features into a perfunctory expression of surprise. ‘Oh, I ought perhaps to have mentioned it. Debrett, Who’s Who, and such publications, credit me with an earldom.’

Geoffrey summoned up a cheerful laugh, but there was something in Fielding’s assurance which forbade him to utter it.

‘Only very minor, of course,’ the other hastened to explain. ‘And I’ve never done a thing to deserve it, I inherited it.’

‘Then what on earth,’ said Geoffrey, ‘were you doing in that shop?’

‘Store,’ Fielding corrected him solemnly. ‘Well, I heard there was a shortage of people to serve in shops, owing to call-up and so on, so I thought that might be one way I could help. Only temporarily, of course,’ he added warily. ‘Just as a joke,’ he ended feebly.

Geoffrey suppressed his merriment with difficulty.

Fielding suddenly chuckled.

‘I suppose it is rather preposterous, when you come to think of it. By the way’ – a sudden thought struck him – ‘are you Geoffrey Vintner, the composer?’

‘Only very minor, of course.’

They surveyed one another properly for the first time, and found the result pleasing. The taxi clattered into the murk of Paddington. A sudden noise disturbed them.

‘Well, I’m damned,’ said Fielding. ‘The bloody net’s fallen down again.’

2

Do not Travel for Pleasure

A crowd is not company, and faces are but a gallery of pictures, and talk but a tinkling cymbal where there is no love. BACON

After the dim, barn-like vastness of Waterloo, Paddington appeared like an infernal pit. Here there was not the order, the strict division and segregation of mechanical and human which prevailed at the larger station. Inextricably, engines and passengers seethed and milled together, the barriers provided for their separation seeming no more than the inconvenient erections of an obstacle-race. The crowds, turgid, stormy, and densely-packed, appeared more likely to clamber on to the backs of the trains, like children piling on to a donkey at the seaside, than merely to board them in the normal way. The locomotives panted and groaned like expiring hedgehogs prematurely over-run by hordes of predatory ants; any attempt at departure, one felt, must infallibly crush and dissipate these insects in their thousands – it would be impossible for them to disentangle themselves from the buffers and connecting-rods in time.

Amongst the crowds the heat banished comfort, but stimulated the itch to uneasy and purposeless movement. Certain main streams, between the bars, the platform, the ticket-offices, the lavatories, and the main entrances, were perhaps discernible; but they had only the conventional boundaries of currents on a map – they overflowed their banks amongst the merely impassive, who stood at the angles of their confluence in attitudes of melancholy or despair. Observed from ground level, this mass of humanity exhibited, in its efforts to move hither and thither, surprising divergences from the horizontal; people pressed forward to their destinations leaning forward at a dangerous, angle, or, peering round the bodies of those in front of them, presented the appearance of criminals half-decapitated. A great many troops, bearing ponderous white cylinders apparently filled with lead, elbowed their way apologetically about, or sat on kit-bags and allowed themselves to be buffeted from all angles. Railway officials controlled the scene with the uneasy authority of schoolmasters trying to extort courteous recognition from their pupils after term had ended.

‘Good God,’ said Geoffrey as he struggled forward, carrying a suitcase with which he made periodic involuntary assaults on the knees of the passers-by, ‘are we even going to get on this train?’

Fielding, still inappropriately dressed in the morning clothes belonging to his recent occupation, merely grunted; the temperature seemed to overcome him. When they had progressed, clawing and pushing, another two yards, he said:

‘What time is it supposed to go?’

‘Not for three-quarters of an hour yet.’ The relevant part of the sentence was drowned in a sudden demoniac outburst of hooting and whistling. He repeated it at the top of his voice. ‘Three-quarters of an hour,’ he bellowed.

Fielding nodded, and then, surprisingly, vanished, with a shouted explanation of which the only word audible was ‘clothes’. A little bemused, Geoffrey laboured to the ticket-office. The tickets occupied him for some twenty minutes, but in any case the train seemed likely to depart late. He waved his bag in optimistic query at a porter, passing on some nameless, leisurely errand, and was ignored.

Then he went, reflecting a little sadly on the miseries which our indulgences cause us, to get a drink.

The refreshment-room was decorated with gilt and marble; their inappropriate splendours cast a singular gloom over the proceedings. By the forethought of those responsible for getting people on to trains the clock had been put ten minutes fast, a device which led to frequent panics of departure among those who were under the impression that it showed the right time. They were immediately reassured by others, whose watches were slow. Upon discovery of the real hour, a second and more substantial panic occurred. Years of the Defence of the Realm Act had conditioned the British public to remain in bars until the latest possible moment.

Geoffrey deposited his bag by a pillar (someone immediately fell over it), and elbowed his way to the bar, which he clutched with the determination of a shipwrecked sailor who has reached a friendly shore. The sirens lurking behind it, with comparative freedom of movement, were engaged in friendly discourse with regular customers. A barrage of imperative glances and despairing cries for attention failed, for the most part, to move them. Some brandished coins in the hope that this display of affluence and good faith would jerk these figures into motion. Geoffrey found himself next to a dwarfish commercial traveller, who was treating one of the barmaids to a long, rambling fantasy about the disadvantages of early marriage, as freely exemplified by himself and many friends and relations. By pushing him malignantly out of the way, Geoffrey managed eventually to get a drink.

Fielding reappeared as inexplicably as he had gone, dressed in a sports coat and flannels and carrying a suitcase. He explained rather breathlessly that he had been back to his flat, and demanded beer. The ritual of entreaty was again enacted. ‘Travelling,’ said Fielding with deep feeling.

‘I hope we don’t have to get in with any babies,’ said Geoffrey gloomily. ‘If they don’t shriek out and crawl all over me, they’re invariably sick.’

There were babies – one, at least – but the first-class compartment containing it was the only one with two seats vacant – one of them, on to which Geoffrey at once hurled a mass of impedimenta in token of ownership, an outside corner. He then applied himself to getting Fen’s butterfly-net on to the rack, assisted by Fielding, and watched with interest by the other occupants of the compartment. It was just too long. Geoffrey regarded it with hatred: it was growing, in his eyes, into a monstrous symbol of the inconvenience, shame, and absurdity of his preposterous errand.

‘Try standing it up against the window,’ said the man sitting in the corner opposite Geoffrey’s. His plumpness and pinkness outdid Fielding’s. Geoffrey felt, regarding him, like a man who while brandishing an Amati is suddenly confronted with a Strad.

They put this scheme into practice; whenever anyone moved his feet the net fell down again.

‘What a thing to bring on a train,’ said the woman with the baby, sotto voce.

It was eventually decided to lay the net transversely across the carriage, from one rack to the other. The whole compartment rose – not with any enthusiasm, since it was so hot – to do justice to this idea. A woman seated in one of the other corners, with a face white and pock-marked like a plucked chicken’s breast, complainingly shifted her luggage to make room. Then she sat down again and insulated herself unnecessarily against the surrounding humanity with a rug, which made Geoffrey hot even to look at. With a great deal of obscure mutual encouragement and admonition, such as ‘Up she goes’ and ‘Steady, now’, Geoffrey, Fielding, the fat man, and a young clergyman who occupied the remaining corner hoisted the net into position. The baby, hitherto quiescent, awoke and embarked upon a running commentary of snorts and shrieks; it grunted like the pig-baby in Alice, until they expected it to be metamorphosed before their eyes. The mother jogged it ruthlessly up and down, and glared malignantly at the progenitors of the disturbance. People searching for seats peered into the compartment and attempted to assess the number of people engaged in this hullabaloo. One went so far as to open the door and ask if there was any room, but he was ignored, and soon went away again.

‘Disgraceful!’ said the woman with the baby. She bumped it up and down even more furiously than before, and cooed at it, adding to its noises with her own.

The net was by now secured at either end, and more or less conveniently placed, except that anyone rising incautiously or coming into the compartment was liable to bang his head on it. Geoffrey profusely thanked his assistants, who sat down again looking hot but pleased. He turned back to transfer the remainder of his belongings from the seat on to the rack. They were now topped by a letter not his own, but plainly addressed to him. The paper and typing looked uncomfortably familiar. He opened it and read:

There’s still time to get off the train. We have our setbacks, but we can’t go on failing indefinitely.

Ignoring Fielding’s curious glance, he put it thoughtfully in his pocket and heaved the remainder of his things out of the way. In the confusion of a moment before, anyone in the compartment could have dropped that note, and for that matter – since the window was wide open – anyone could have flicked it in from outside. He tried to remember the dispositions of the various persons in the compartment, and failed. He sat down feeling somewhat alarmed.

‘Another?’ said Fielding; he raised his right eyebrow in elaborate query.

Geoffrey nodded dumbly and handed him the note.

He whistled with noisy astonishment as he read it. ‘But who—?’

Geoffrey shook his head, still refusing to utter a sound. He hoped to convey by this means his suspicion of one of the occupants of the compartment. Any open discussion of the matter might, he obscurely felt, convey information of value to the enemy. The others were eyeing unenthusiastically this gnomic interchange.

But Fielding was for the moment oblivious of such innuendoes.

‘Quick work,’ he said. ‘They must have had a second line of defence ready in case the business in the store failed. Simply a matter of phoning someone here while we were on our way. They’re certainly taking no chances.’

‘I wish you’d remember,’ said Geoffrey a trifle peevishly, ‘that I’m the object of all this. It’s no pleasure to me to have you sitting there gloating over the excellence of their arrangements.’

No notice was taken of this. ‘And that means,’ Fielding continued impassively, ‘that the typewriter they used is somewhere in this neighbourhood – damn it, no it doesn’t, though. The wording of that second note is so vague it could easily have been got ready beforehand.’ The failure of his calculation threw him into a profound despondency; he stared dejectedly at his feet.

Geoffrey meanwhile was carrying out an inventory of the other persons in the compartment. The man opposite, who had been so helpful over Fen’s butterfly-net, had a well-to-do professional air. Geoffrey was inclined to put him down as a doctor, or a prosperous broker. His face was amiable, with that underlying shyness and melancholy which seems always to be beneath the surface in fat men; he had sparse straight hair, pale grey eyes with heavy lids like thick shutters of flesh, and very long lashes, like a girl’s. The material of his suit was expensive, and it was competently tailored. He held a thick black book, one of the four volumes, Geoffrey observed with surprise, of Pareto’s monumental The Mind and Society. Did doctors or brokers read such things on railway journeys? Covertly, he regarded his vis-à-vis with renewed interest.

Next door was the woman with the baby. Repeated jogging had now shaken the infant into a state of bemused incomprehension, and it emitted only faint and isolated shrieks. By compensation, it had begun to dribble. Its mother, a small woman vaguely and unanalysably slatternly in appearance, periodically wiped a grubby handkerchief with great force and determination across its face, so that its head almost fell off backwards; while not occupied in this way, she gazed at her companions with great dislike. Probably, Geoffrey reflected, she could be omitted from the list of suspects. The same could not be said for the clergyman sitting in the corner on her right, however. It was true that he looked reedy, young, and ineffectual, but these were too much the characteristics of the stage curate not to be at once suspicious. He was glancing occasionally, with anxious inquiry, at the woman with the rug. She, meanwhile, was engaged in that unnerving examination of the other persons in the compartment which most people seem to regard as necessary at the beginning of a long railway journey. Eventually, feeling apparently that this had now been brought to the point where embarrassment was likely to become active discomfort, she said to the clergyman, looking sternly at a small wrist-watch:

‘What time do we get into Tolnbridge?’

This query aroused some interest in other quarters. Both Geoffrey and Fielding started slightly, with well-drilled uniformity, and shot swift glances at the speaker, while in the Pareto-addict opposite Geoffrey some stirrings of attention were also discernible. All things considered, it was not very surprising that someone else in the compartment should be going to Tolnbridge, even though compared with Taunton and Exeter it was an unimportant stop; but Geoffrey at all events was too alarmed and uneasy to make such a simple deduction.

The clergyman seemed at a loss for an answer. He looked helplessly about him and said:

‘I’m afraid I’m not sure, Mrs Garbin. I could perhaps find out—?’ He half-rose from his seat. The man opposite Geoffrey leaned forward.

‘Five-forty-three,’ he said with decision. ‘But I’m afraid we’re likely to lose time on the way.’ He took a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket. ‘We’re ten minutes late in starting already.’

The woman with the rug nodded briskly. ‘In wartime we must resign ourselves to that sort of thing,’ she said, her tone loaded with stoic resignation. ‘You are getting off there yourself?’ she asked after a moment.

The fat man bowed his head. The reluctant and self- conscious democracy of the railway compartment was set into creaking motion. ‘Have you far to go?’ he inquired of Geoffrey.

Geoffrey started. ‘I am going to Tolnbridge, too,’ he replied a trifle stiffly. ‘The trains are almost always late nowadays,’ he added, feeling his previous remark to be by itself an insufficient contribution to the general entertainment.

‘Inevitably,’ said the clergyman, contributing his mite. ‘We are fortunate in being able to travel at all.’ He turned to the woman with the baby. ‘Have you a long journey, madam? It must be very tiring travelling with a child.’

‘I’m going further west than the rest of you,’ said the mother. ‘Much further west,’ she added. Her tone expressed a determination to remain in her seat as far west as possible, even if the train should be driven over Land’s End and into the sea.

‘Such a good boy,’ said the clergyman, gazing at the child with distaste. It spat ferociously at him.

‘Now, Sally, you mustn’t do that to the gentleman,’ said the mother. She glowered at him with unconcealed malevolence. He smiled unhappily. The fat man returned to his book. Fielding sat morose and silent, scanning an evening paper.

It was at this moment, amidst a shrieking of whistles which advertised immediate departure, that the irruption occurred. A man appeared in the corridor outside, carrying a heavy portmanteau, and peered through the window, bobbing up and down like a marionette in order to see what lay within. He then thrust the door aside and stepped aggressively over the threshold. He wore a shiny black suit with a bedraggled carnation in the buttonhole, bright brown shoes, a pearl tie-pin, a dirty grey trilby hat, and a lemon-coloured handkerchief in his breast-pocket; his hands were nicotine-stained and his nails filthy; his complexion was sanguine, almost apoplectic, and he wiped his nose on the back of his hand as he trampled in over the clergyman’s feet, hauling his case like a reluctant dog after him. It swung forward and struck the woman with the rug a resounding blow on the knee.

‘No room!’ she said as if at a signal. A confused murmur of admonition and discouragement went up in support of this remark. The man stared aggrievedly about him.

‘Wadjer mean, no room?’ he said loudly. ‘Djer think I’m goin-ta stand aht in the bloody corridor the ’ole journey? Because if yer do, yer bloody well wrong, see?’ He warmed to his theme. ‘Just because yer travelling bloody first-clarse, yer needn’t think yer got a right to occupy the ’ole train, see? People like me aren’t goin’ ter stand the ’ole way just so you plutocrats can stretch yer legs in comfort, see?’ He became indignant. ‘I paid for a seat same as you ’ave, ’aven’t I? ’Ere’ – he shot out a finger towards the fat man, who jumped visibly with fright. ‘You put that there arm up, an’ we’ll all ’ave a chance ter sit down, see?’ The fat man hastily put the arm up, and the intruder, with expressions of noisy satisfaction, inserted himself into the gap thus created between the fat man and the mother and child.

‘You mind your language when there are ladies present!’ said the mother indignantly. The baby began to bellow again. ‘There – see what you’ve done to the child!’

The intruder ignored her. He produced a Mirror and Herald, and, after slapping the former down on his knee, opened the latter at full spread, so that his elbows waved within an inch of the noses of those on either side. The woman with the rug, after her first sortie, had recognized defeat in the monotonous stream of blasphemy and become silent. Geoffrey, Fielding, and the clergyman, afflicted by a bourgeois terror of offending this unruly manifestation of the lower classes, sat impotent and disapproving. Only the mother, who maintained her intransigence with scornful glances, and the fat man, whose position was more desperate, still showed resistance.