A Summer in the Twenties Read online

  ‘Good Lord.’

  ‘I don’t know. There’s something admirable about dying as you’ve lived. I hope I bring it off. Be that as it may, he left my trustees very little discretion to buy and sell, so that when I got my hands on things there was quite a bit to be done, and other things I wanted to do. I have my own purposes, you know. I’ve deliberately taken losses that must be making the old brute turn in his grave, but the result is I and my nominees have controlling interests in quite a number of very useful enterprises. I don’t actually sit on boards if I can help it, but I can make things happen the way I want.’

  ‘I see,’ said Tom.

  It was a little surprising to hear Bertie talking in this vein. Usually the most he would acknowledge about his own past was some harshly flippant reference to his parents’ divorce—once, even, a dismissive remark about his father’s subsequent suicide—but always as though the past was no more real than some novel—the latest D. H. Lawrence, say—which he had read in order to be in the swim but hadn’t much enjoyed. One might have thought that his grandfather, that ogrish miser and litigant, would have provided Bertie with a fund of freakish anecdotes, but apparently the old man was too closely involved with Bertie’s own wealth and ambitions to be exploited in such a fashion.

  ‘What’s more,’ he added, ‘I can find things out. You know that. When you were in that mess in Drewton Cutting . . .’

  Tom almost laughed. Bertie responded with an icy glare but replaced it almost at once with his most charming and self-mocking grin.

  ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘But my lines of communication are usually a cut above the Boy Scout movement. People really want to do me favours, and it doesn’t take them long to learn I like to know what’s going on. Hull, for instance—there’s something happening there, and this ties in.’

  He tapped the pamphlet with a pecking forefinger. His smile was thin and knowing. Tom made the expected questioning grunt.

  ‘Have you thought about Hull, Tom? Big timber trade. Main port for the Baltic. Ships in and out of Russia itself. If the Bolshies want to set up a bridgehead, apart from London, they could hardly do better.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure so. This rag confirms it.’

  ‘Hull might be only a staging-post. Suppose they printed it in Russia and smuggled it in. It looks somehow foreign to me.’

  ‘I’ll check that. But you’re wrong, Tom. I’ve heard enough about the Bolshies in Hull to know they’re more than a staging-post. They’re something really quite serious. I want you to find them for me.’

  ‘Oh, well . . .’

  ‘Do you care about England, Tom?’

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘You don’t want to see red revolution coming here, then?’

  ‘That’s not the point. What chance have I got of finding these blighters for you? You’ve just been telling me how good your sources of information are. Well, if you can’t do it, what hope have I got with no sources at all?’

  ‘A very good chance, Tom, because you’ve seen ’em. You’ve talked to one of ’em. My problem is this—there’s a barrier beyond which my probes can’t reach. I know there’s a Bolshie group in Hull not because anybody has seen them at work—that happens beyond the barrier. It’s the effects of the work which emerge on this side, such as this rag here, which allow us to deduce the existence of the group. But by a pure fluke you’ve got through, you’ve made contact on the other side . . .’

  ‘Look, even if I could find the chap I met I can’t simply say to him “Right oh, I’ll talk to you about boxing if you’ll talk to me about Bolshevism.”’

  Bertie sighed.

  ‘Of course you can’t. Let’s just think this out . . .’

  He rose and paced to and fro behind the desk, head bent, hands clasped behind his back, as if he had been the captain of a man-o’-war calculating the chances of some perilous engagement. Suddenly he swung and leaned eagerly forward, resting his knuckles on the desk.

  ‘I’ve got it,’ he said. ‘By Jove, you know, I think things might work out remarkably well! Even that business in the cutting—it’s going to be a godsend I didn’t take it any further. You go and find this chap and tell him you want to finish the fight with Donovan and he’s got to arrange it for you . . .’

  ‘Surely I’d go to Donovan for that.’

  ‘You’ve been to Donovan.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘You’ve tried that, I mean. When you made enquiries about him you were told he was in bed with flu the whole week of the strike. I happen to know that’s what you would be told if you did make enquiries.’

  Tom nodded. It struck him that he had never told anyone Donovan’s name. He guessed that Bertie, baulked of his plan to teach the strikers a lesson, had resorted to some indirect revenge—told the police something about the ambush perhaps and thus learnt that Donovan had equipped himself with an alibi. No doubt Bertie would not even perceive that this was a breach of their agreement in the cutting—his morality, as well as his ambitions, had a Napoleonic tinge.

  ‘So you’ve decided to approach things from the other end,’ said Bertie. ‘You’re looking for someone who can persuade Donovan to trust you, someone of his own kind. It shouldn’t be difficult.’

  ‘A needle in a haystack, I’d have thought.’

  ‘You’re wrong. The chap you met is a fanatic. He’ll be well known. You’ve only got to ask a dozen men, I bet you, before one of them will know who you’re talking about. And I tell you what—I’ll give you a start. Soon as you’re gone I’ll give Helen Tarrant a tinkle and ask her to get her chap Hutton out to talk to you.’

  ‘Who’s he?’

  ‘Wharf Manager. Very bright young man indeed. Going far. Knows the docks like the back of his hand. If she gets him to Brantingham tomorrow you could start next week.’

  ‘Fraid not.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I have to be at Sillerby next week. My brother is bringing his fiance to meet the family.’

  ‘You don’t say! Gerald? I thought . . .’

  Bertie grinned. His eyes sparkled, no longer the blazing glare of the autocrat but the flicker of social calculation.

  ‘Well, that’s news!’ he said. ‘What does Helen Tarrant think?’

  ‘It hasn’t been announced. In any case, it hardly concerns her as yet.’

  ‘You mean she isn’t aware that it might concern her. But it will, Tom. I know her pretty well, and I can tell you it will concern her very deeply. Well, well, well . . . but let’s get back to our muttons. You can’t manage next week, but you sound as if you didn’t want to take this on at all.’

  ‘I must admit I’m not that keen. It sounds a bit of a wild goose chase to me.’

  ‘It is very far from that, Tom. I assure you that it is of the utmost importance. These people are there. They are truly dangerous. If they can be found, they must. You have a very good chance of finding them. I should be extremely disappointed to see you turn it down.’

  Tom was surprised by the genuine appeal of Bertie’s speech. He hadn’t realised that he was capable of harnessing the apparently scattered energies of his personality and applying them with such effective pressure. For the first time that morning Tom considered the possibility that Bertie might actually be right about the Bolsheviks and Hull. If so, he was also right about Tom’s duty to try and make use of the scrap of knowledge that had come his way. Moreover Hull was a great deal nearer Brantitigham than was Sillerby. Bertie seemed to guess his thought.

  ‘Helen Tarrant will let you have a bed, of course,’ he said with an almost leering smile. ‘Look, I’m not asking you to spend all summer messing around in dockland. I’m asking you to give me a week—one week of genuine effort. In exchange for that I’ll do everything I can to smooth your path in other directions. Is your brother coming back to Sillerby?’

  ‘He may do.’

  ‘Well, remember what I was telling you earlier. I have quite a bit of pull here and there. If
you’re . . .’

  ‘I think I can manage a week.’

  ‘Good man. When?’

  ‘Um. Gerald’s coming next week, and my sister Nan the week after. That’s not so important, but I don’t see all that much of her.’

  ‘Monday fortnight, then?’

  ‘Right oh.’

  ‘Give me time to get a few things organised for you and see what I can gather about the Bradford end. I’ll set Dick onto that. I’ve got to go over to Paris that week, and I’ll be taking the chance to drop in at Hendaye for a few days. I want to be back for Woffles’ beano on the fourth. You coming to that?’

  ‘Indeed yes.’

  ‘See you there, then. Now let’s go and find out what mischief young Judy’s been up to. By the by, I see you got your First. Congratters and all that. No doubt you’re in the mood for a glass of bubbly.’

  ‘Always.’

  ‘Come on, then.’

  Bertie seemed to have relaxed completely into his normal manner. At the library door he paused and glanced sideways at Tom.

  ‘I’ve just had a thought,’ he whispered. ‘Suppose this chap swallows your story and actually fixes you up a fight with Donovan, what’ll you do?’

  ‘Fight him, of course. I’d like to.’

  ‘Good Lord.’

  They found Judy not in Tom’s imagined pose but sitting on the carpet with her legs tucked under her and talking to a red setter. She made it seem a quite unaffected thing to be conversing with a dog. The dog itself lay full length with its head on her lap and gazed up into her face with adoring incomprehension. Several feet away its large tail thumped rhythmically to and fro across the carpet. The room, though Bertie had less obvious use for it than he did for his library, seemed considerably more human. Somebody had arranged large displays of flowers in several places. The lilies filled the long room with a pungent, almost meaty odour. The chairs and sofas looked extremely comfortable.

  ‘Beastly sentimental bitch,’ said Bertie.

  For a moment Tom thought he detected the note he had heard earlier, when Bertie had complained of being humiliated in front of his own men. Not even a dog was permitted to show affection for anyone but its own master. But Bertie laughed with apparently real enjoyment when Judy looked up at him, clowning affront. One of the footmen ghosted into the room.

  ‘Bollinger, I think, John,’ said Bertie. ‘And some of her chocs for Duchess.’

  ‘Very good, sir.’

  9

  Hull, 23rd July, 1926

  AT THE LOWEST EBB HE COULD remember since the meaningless despairs of childhood, Tom stood in the darkness of the chapel porch and watched the men stream home from work. It had been a hot afternoon and the air was sour with the city-pervading reek from the Fish Dock, a quarter of a mile west. The chapel—a grimy brick barn—stood half way down one of the streets that ran in a monotonous grid through the area behind the main docks. The builders had crammed the site to an incredible degree with squat brick houses. Each street was in fact a street of lesser streets. Instead of the houses running in a single terrace along the pavements, they stood for the most part at right-angles to it, a block of a dozen houses facing a similar block across two gardens the size of a kitchen table and a narrow flagged path between. At the back of each block there was only the path, a yard-wide canyon, with the back of yet another block on its other side.

  The men seemed animated, even boisterous, perhaps because Friday was pay-day. Some of them bicycled but most walked in small knots, habitual partners for the journey home, like children loosed from school. Occasionally a man would break from his companions with a grunt of farewell and move off up one of the paths between the gardens and into the house behind it. As certain bicyclists came up the road their progress was marked by calls from the pedestrians, a greeting or perhaps a question. These were evidently popular or influential figures, for they seemed to ride past barely acknowledging the shouts, but pedalling stolidly on, often at little more than walking speed, as if taking part in a ritual procession which had to be performed with funereal dignity. At first Tom had been unable to understand any of the shouts, blurred with dialect and street-echoes, but by the time the current of men had dwindled to a few single pedestrians, hurrying now, he had heard one exchange so often that he knew what was being said. ‘Tha’ll be coming back for t’meeting?’ ‘Aye.’ ‘Don’t let tha woman talk thee out on it.’ From where he was lurking he could see the faces more clearly than he could hear the words. None of the several hundred men who had gone by had been among the four who had loaded the Bolshevik pamphlets onto his train in the goods sidings.

  Another blank day, the fifth of a blank week. Tom was oppressed not merely by failure, though this was tedious enough. He did not think it likely that either Bertie or Mrs. Tarrant would accept that he had genuinely tried, and so earned his release from any obligation to be incorporated among Bertie’s henchmen. In his own mind he had promised a week and was giving a week, but their minds were not his.

  The looming weekend offered no reprieve. No doubt the men, off work from Saturday noon, would be more accessible. He planned to join them at the football match, rub shoulders, try yet again to get into a conversation, but from his last five days’ experience he knew quite well he would get nowhere. And meanwhile Judy would be away from Brantingham, staying with cousins for a dance up near Northallerton before going on to Scotland. Woffles was to be one of that house-party.

  Tom found that he was shocked by spasms of jealousy, recurring like an intermittent toothache. Hitherto he had accepted that Judy’s ‘rules’ were simply her way of having her cake and eating it; though committed to him by events at Hendaye, she still wanted to relish the intricacies of a longer courtship. Now he was nagged by the memory of Janet Stott, waltzing in his arms at Trinity but glancing all the time around the floor to check on her ravished partner. ‘Is that Judy Tarrant? . . . She’s famous for this sort of thing.’ The willed impulse, disruptive as a motor accident, tearing lives apart. Had Hendaye after all been merely an extreme version of ‘this sort of thing’? Were Judy’s rules in fact an attempt to will the accident out of existence? Perhaps Woffles would take the chance at Northallerton to propose . . . Perhaps Judy . . . Tom was angry and ashamed with himself for entertaining what he had always imagined, considering it from the outside, to be a thoroughly mean emotion, but the ache would not go away.

  He was tempted to run, to go and hide his sorrows in the lair of home, but he knew that that would for once offer him little relief. Sillerby too had changed. Minnie Heusen and Gerald would not in fact be there this weekend. But although not one cup in the china cabinets, not one pillow-case in the linen-cupboards, was in anyway altered from what it always had been, the air of Sillerby had become mysteriously unfamiliar. A combination of hope and apprehension seemed to Tom to tinge the servants’ voices, the sound of Pennycuick’s mower, the unceasing leaden knock of the ram that drove the water from the bowling-green spring to the attic cistern. Could it be true that the mortar was crumbling less grimly from between the worn old bricks of the melon-ground, as if the forces of decay now despaired of bringing them down before the Heusen money had them re-pointed? Certainly Father had changed. At his last visit Tom had spent a whole day re-labelling the Hesperiidae, and Father had not once put his nose into the Collection Room; he had apparently spent the morning sorting out papers in his study and the afternoon walking round the farms with Gerald and Minnie. But most changed of all had been Tom. His future life, which a few months ago had seemed so fixed that it had the nature almost of an historical fact, apart from being in the future, now was dissolved—the decades of employing his intelligence and strength to keep Sillerby in being and the Hankey line flourishing within its walls, gone. He did not even know what would happen to the Collection. Would it go to a museum? Would the Heusen money run to employing a Keeper for it? The future of those dead butterflies, which all his life had seemed twined into his own fixed future, was now separate and just as vague. He was di
smal with the discovery that he did not much care.

  These separate discontents should all in their own ways have been endurable. He was, after all, full to the skin with the sense of his own being and relishing his glorious luck in love, quite enough to dispel the little imps of ennui and a week’s frustration. The trouble lay elsewhere. It was like a dank fog off the moors which had crept imperceptibly down, blotting out his homely landscape, chilling all his pleasant places. His failure consisted not in having failed Bertie or Mrs. Tarrant, or even himself, but something larger and vaguer. It really mattered that he should find the man he was looking for, mattered in the same way that it had mattered that Cyril and Gerald should have gone to France and died or been ruined there ten years ago. He believed this not because of Bertie’s rhetorical appeal, but because of what Mr. Hutton had said, and not said, in the smoking room at Brantingham, especially about a man called Ricardo.

  They had met on the afternoon of the visit to Holme on the Wold. The same drear rain dripped from the Wellingtonias and wiped the Humber estuary from the view. As Bertie had implied, Mrs. Tarrant’s Wharf Manager was surprisingly young, less than thirty, but pale-faced and not far from going bald. His dress was that of an office-worker in a west-end comedy, the collar a little too high and a little too tight, the dark cloth of his suit harsh and gracelessly cut, the black boots mirror-bright. The first two fingers of his left hand were orange with nicotine. All the same his personality, which ought to have been harassed, eager and inept, was quite the opposite. He was perfectly confident and, as far as the suit permitted, relaxed, and throughout the interview his pale eyes watched Tom as if judging his worth for quite other purposes.