HMS Marlborough Will Enter Harbour Read online

  I remember once, when I said something about it to you, you answered: ‘That’s only a tiny part of being a woman. You have to take it in your stride: sometimes it makes you furious, sometimes it’s a lovely tonic, and you’d feel furious if it didn’t happen. It’s been going on for so many thousands of years anyway that we must have a sort of inherited talent for dealing with it … But there are other things a hundred times more worrying, which seem to have been gradually pushed on to women: things like preserving self-control not only in yourself but in the person who may be trying to break it down. It’s unfair, really, that we should be expected to have enough self-control for two, and that chastity should be our responsibility, but it almost always is: given opportunity and a plain choice, few men will help you ...’

  ‘That’s a low estimate.’

  ‘But isn’t it true, sweet? Most men, if the opportunity is given them, will have at least one try, just to prove they’re grown-up … It’s something we have to be competent about, anyway – dealing with all comers, from the lamb to the wolf, and never hurting the one or flattering the other. And even that only touches the fringe of it: there’s something else far more important in womanhood – the fact of being, at the back of it all, the most vital element in nature, the matrix of life. That’s what never quite leaves you, if you are really aware of being a woman: the fact that you carry the touchstone of the whole design in your own body. It’s complex – and completely fascinating. I wouldn’t be a man for any money you like.’

  On this bright afternoon, while we walked about and people looked at you, I remembered that conversation and decided, once again, that you really knew far more of what it was all about than I did ...

  No one looked at me, because I was a soldier.

  A soldier … Airmen have the glamour, sailors make people smile: soldiers excite no reaction at all, save (sometimes) impatience or a faint derision. We know about it, and accept it as a natural outcome of recent history, but I think it is unfair. It sprang, inevitably from Dunkirk, and Singapore and Norway and Crete – all the places where British soldiers, matching flesh against steel, proved their humanity by ceasing a futile resistance. Does that sound like whining? Probably, coming from a soldier, it does; and yet the excuse is put forward to clear, not the Army, but the whole country that lies behind it, and that is where the unfairness comes in. To my mind, we – the soldiers – were made the scapegoats for the scored feelings of all Great Britain: the effect of those failures – the retreats, the surrenders, the basic flops – was so mortally felt by the British people that they tried to salve their pride in laughter, at the expense of the men who were immediately involved.

  Defeat on the battlefield, instead of being entered as a debit in the national ledger, was dismissed as a purely Service fiasco, only to be expected from pongoes with falsetto words of command and curly moustaches.

  That may sound over-subtle, but I think it is true. When people see a soldier they are reminded of their own shortcomings and failures, of errors of policy and lack of foresight: they would like to concentrate their attack on these, but the soldier is the handier target, and so they get him in their sights and start sniping. In some quarters, slow to react or unable to read headlines, that sniping has never ceased.

  We accept it, as I say … But the next time you see a soldier, and feel like shrugging your shoulders and muttering, ‘Dunkirk harrier’ or any other neat epithet, just remember that the weapons you gave him, to fight at Dunkirk and a lot of other places, were your blunder and your disgrace.

  All of which is a long way from that day of ours, and I suspect that it is only jealousy of your monopoly of the public regard which makes me mention it … When we had done our shopping it was time for tea: the effect of the whisky was ebbing rapidly, leaving behind it that residue of dry-mouthed yawns, which only an armchair and a soft drink can cure. These we found, in an unlikely-looking hotel where I had never been before, full of holy calm and the more captious sort of old lady: we sat in the lounge, feeling young and preoccupied with each other and tremendously superior to our surroundings. It seemed to us, for that short interlude, that we were the only people in the room who had ever been properly alive – the usual denial, by the young, that the old can ever have enjoyed themselves or found life exciting and hopeful and concentrated. We looked round us – knew you were doing it too – and wondered arrogantly why, after leading such wasted lives, these people could behave with such curious assurance. Good heavens, we must be the only couple with hangovers who ever had stepped inside the door … Without doubt, we ourselves would be regarded with the same good-natured contempt by the next generation: and without doubt we in our turn would be roused to laughter or a fuming impatience by young people who knew everything for the first time in history … That is a war which will never end, and both sides, slugging away manfully, extract the maximum of entertainment from it.

  As soon as we were on our way again, and strolling towards the hotel: ‘What shall I give you as a going-away present?’ you asked me. ‘I’ve quite a lot of money. What would you like, out of the whole of London?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I want to give you something.’

  ‘You’re doing that all the time.’

  ‘Something to take away with you, so that you can look at it and remember today. Do you want anything to wear? Something to keep you warm?’

  I laughed. ‘You’ll get no information from me that way. I’m not saying whether I’ll need to be kept warm or cool – or even whether I’ll be wearing clothes at all.’

  ‘Difficult … When will I know, darling?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Where you are, and how far away?’

  ‘I don’t know, sweet. Not very soon, I’m afraid. You mustn’t worry if there’s a bit of a gap before any letters arrive.’ That was the most I could say of a journey which I knew was going to take me half across the world and away from you for a minimum of two years. It was that desolate prospect which I did not know how to keep from coming between us, or rather from so affecting my manner and spirit that it would destroy the day altogether. This was our first real parting, and without being able to practise on something less ruthless and final I did not know how to deal with it. I wanted tremendously to share the whole thing with you, telling you all I knew and feared, as well as the credit side of it – the fact that the job was exceptionally worthwhile and might pay a notable dividend that would have been a relief of an obvious sort; but the blanket of absolute secrecy which had been placed over the near future made it impossible.

  I knew then that I would have to feel the crux of our parting quite privately, and somehow conceal the fact that the assignment I was going on meant extreme hazard in scarcely tolerable surroundings, and my conviction that the majority of my regiment would be slaughtered in the process.

  Of course, I knew also that by the morning you would have guessed most of it, though you might not tell me so and might not even refer to it again. Even at this stage of our marriage, we were too close to each other for you not to divine so strong a feeling in me. The thing would be like a sword lying between us all the time … And I am a bad actor, where the hiding of emotion is concerned. None worse, in fact.

  But that was still over the horizon … Your present to me turned out to be a pair of fur-lined bedroom slippers – or rather boots – of such elegance and splendour that they obviously had no idea there was a war on.

  5

  The play we had chosen to see, and for which the same hall porter had somehow managed to get us two perfect seats, was Congreve’s Love for Love. I sometimes wonder by what astonishing stroke of luck it happened that this admirable play, performed by a distinguished cast headed by John Gielgud, should have been available for us on just the night we needed it most. It was exactly what we wanted: a play of love, witty, lecherous, and delightful, which dealt with formal and civilized amours in a world which enjoyed them for their own sake and was neither jealous nor censorious of the
diversions of others. We needed and welcomed it for so many reasons, divers and cogent; for the wit it lavished on us, for its inherent promise that the springs of the mind and the heart would never be choked, for the plain sensual excitement which it induced, it is above all a play to be watched by lovers who can laugh together with tenderness and passion, who can mock their own fervour and still be consumed by it. It was, therefore, a play for us.

  Do you remember that scene where the wife and her lover (I am far from textbooks, and my memory for names is bad) talk softly together while the husband nods in his armchair, and then, after bundling him out of the way by the most transparent of stratagems, they take up a candle apiece and tiptoe off to bed? For some odd reason that seemed to be us, and we lived their exchanges vividly as we watched them: the man seeking her answer with a vigilant eagerness, the woman gently delaying him, the pair of them somehow agreed, even as they fenced, that the night before them was to be joyfully and tenderly shared. While they were playing that scene you held my hand tightly: when they tiptoed from the darkened stage you sighed: when the curtain came down you turned towards me with such candid desire in your eyes that I could have taken you in my arms there and then.

  ‘Oh, darling!’ you said. ‘This is lovely. This is just what we wanted.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How good they were together! They were telling each other all the time that it was all right, even when they seemed to be denying it. That is what love should be like.’

  ‘Of course, you and I are a little more respectable.’

  ‘Are we? Not in feeling, surely. I don’t care whether it’s a lover or a husband–’

  ‘I’m a husband,’ I interrupted.

  ‘But in a way it is like that for us, isn’t it?’ You were gravely serious now, though in your face lingered the loving concentration of a moment ago: the people moving round us as they relaxed for the interval were still not in our world at all. ‘We have the same sort of secret agreement, that certainty, all the time, that whatever we are saying or doing we shall be together and happy, a little later on, at the end of the day. That’s the best of marriage – of our sort of marriage, anyway: we can argue, we can be emotionally apart, but we know that in the end it will all be resolved and we will be close to each other again.’

  ‘That’s behind everything we do, now,’ I agreed. ‘There’s always that certainty, and we always have it to look forward to, even at the most unlikely times, even if we’re arguing like wild cats about the future of the universe.’

  ‘Even then ...’ You smiled. ‘All the books say it is bad to feel sure of each other, and especially bad to admit it, and all the books are wrong. Someone should rewrite them. It’s feeling sure – sure of a welcome, sure of love, sure of fun – that makes it so lovely.’

  ‘It should be less exciting.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘No. More. But that might be–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That could be just the honeymoon, couldn’t it?’

  ‘Is that what you feel?’

  Uncertain, I looked up at the balconies and the arching roof overhead, blurred with cigarette smoke. ‘Darling, I don’t know enough about it. Neither of us does, at this stage. It’s lovely now, because we don’t need any – any outside stimulus. We’re new to each other: we both like to be sure of something that we find so sweet.’

  After a moment you said: ‘How far are you looking ahead?’

  I took your hand again and squeezed it tightly. ‘Darling. I don’t know anything about it. I’m only guessing, and it may be bad guesswork.’

  ‘But you are optimistic?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I am. In fact I couldn’t be more so, and I really don’t know why I started arguing about it. I married you because–’ I stopped, and smiled, and corrected myself: ‘I mean I asked you to marry me because you were the only person I had ever met who seemed to promise not to grow less precious as time went by. And if you think that sounds too cold-blooded and calculating, there are a lot of other reasons, some of which can be put politely, others not.’

  You smiled, in turn, and looked round slowly at the packed rows of people, and back again to me.

  ‘You have my permission to become unprintable, if you feel like it.’

  A woman sitting in front of us turned round at that, and gave me a long, challenging stare, which I bore as best I could. It was clear that two acts of the play had not conditioned her either to Congreve’s language, or to his line of thought. I decided to stick to generalities.

  ‘I’ll go into that later,’ I said. ‘But–’

  You giggled suddenly, and when I realized why, I found myself blushing – something I had not done for a good many years. That was the first time I realized that you had what might be called a masculine side to your mind. It hadn’t occurred to me before. (But perhaps I have been wrong about women all the time.) I decided that I liked it: that is, as long as it was exhibited only to me.

  That ‘only to me’ reservation is a preposterous viewpoint, of course: a viewpoint so thoroughly male and illogical that it will not bear examination; but I think it is pretty well universal among people who surmount a certain dead-level of toughness and vulgarity. Almost all men enjoy sex jokes, provided they have a smattering of wit or incongruity to eke them out: they enjoy telling them (perhaps in a sterilized version) to women they know well; but they do not like women to take the lead in that respect. To most men, in fact, nothing is more embarrassing than for a woman to volunteer an indecent joke, as a matter of casual conversation, or to show herself ready to initiate that kind of session. Her ability to express herself, if necessary, as coarsely and succinctly as a man, is occasionally attractive: it can, at the right moment of exhilaration, be amusing; but she should await his lead all the time. It is rather like a man’s club, which admits women to an annexe, and enjoys having them there, but which steadfastly refuses them full membership. Granted, again, that is illogical and unfair: but it is true, and it does hold good, and any transgression stands out as a gauche and irretrievable blunder, unlikely to be forgotten.

  That didn’t refer to us, of course – another illogicality, this time home-made. If you had a coarse, or rather a sexually candid, side of your mind, that was fine, and you could go ahead and display it for me any time: I knew that you would keep it for me, as a secret only to be confided to someone you trusted utterly. It was, of course, exciting in a subtle way: above all, it was part of being in love and being, whenever we chose, one person instead of two.

  We were one person now, as the house lights darkened again, and our hands sought each other’s, and the players returned to offer us more riches, more delight.

  6

  For people like us there was only one thing to do after the curtain fell on that admirable play, and that was to have a drink at the Café Royal.

  The Café Royal … You know how I feel about that place: I think you have come to share the feeling. For me, it is London – London in a certain mood of talkative exhilaration, London as a focus of intelligence, London as a refuge for people in love. You have laughed at me before for what you think is an out-of-character ‘foreign’ streak in my makeup – as if I would look more natural to you if I walked up the Rue Royale exhibiting check plus fours and a smouldering briar; but certainly, long before I met you, Paris had given me an ineradicable liking for the life which centres round the café table.

  It is hard to define, that life, and it invites the charge of triviality, even of blatant idleness, when it is abused or misinterpreted; but, broadly, it propounds the idea that one can work hard and effectively, and still think that the best way of passing the time, the best introduction to or solace for that hard work, is to sit at a table at the Dôme or the Rotonde and reorganize the universe to one’s own exact taste. It is not waste of time, it is time itself come to full flower, time as an educator and a warm comfort. From it, I myself can draw every kind of feeling and every variety of entertainment. I like talking, I like
drinking, I like watching people, listening to them, falling silent, quarrelling about essentials, and agreeing on trivialities. All those things are part of living, the blessed leaven that makes the whole thing tolerable. All those things you can find over a café table, stimulated by alcohol, sweetened (if you are lucky) by the knowledge that at your side is love in its most companionable form, love awaiting its natural tide and not wasting the intervals in boredom, Pekinese dogs, or chocolate creams.

  I shall always think that men and women, when they are not in bed, should have their elbows on a marble-topped table, their eyes occupied sometimes with each other, sometimes with the passing scene, their voices mingling unhurriedly, and their hearts as close as the two wineglasses that stand between them. And if that is an escapist picture, let us all escape, and find it. It is preferable to almost every other twentieth-century method of employing the mind and the body, and it has ambition, greed, and the cruelty of man to man beaten into a cocked hat.

  The Café Royal has always been a trifle more respectable than either of the two Rive Gauche institutions I have mentioned, but still it has a lot of the same tradition, it had the right idea … The war has changed it, put the prices up, given it a touch of formality it never had in the late nineteen thirties, when hair was worn at the alert and uniforms were practically the mark of the beast; of its former habitués, most are in the Services and many must be dead; but it can still give a welcome of a particular sort to those who need it. That welcome we found ready for us, when we strolled in arm-in-arm from the darkened street: of all the endearing oddments, nothing had changed – the plush seats, the crowding mirrors, the intent, articulate people, the tall glasses of lager beer – they were all there for our reassurance, forming the background of our choice or the half-hour’s relaxed contentment we had come in search of.