Ashenden (25 page)

When Mrs. Carrington and Helga came back to the launch, Jimmy had hopes that the conversation might take a more frivolous turn. It didn’t. He had always understood that mathematics spoke only to those who were reluctant to communicate its mysteries to anyone else. It seemed he was wrong.

“I don’t understand how numbers can go on forever,” Maus was saying. “It does not make sense. Everything has a beginning and an end.”

“Ah, well, to imagine infinity,” said Koenig, his eyes fastening on Maus like a pair of black boot buttons, “you must imagine a grand hotel.”

“There is a grand hotel in Baden,” said Helga. “It is called Brenners and it’s on Schillerstrasse. We spent a fortnight there once.”

“It was very boring in Baden,” said Maus.

“Oh, I do agree,” said Jimmy. “Baden is lethally dull.”

“Never mind,” said Koenig. “Brenners will do for our grand hotel. Napoleon and Queen Victoria have stayed there, which means it must be very grand. So, it is the summer season and this grand hotel in Baden is full. All the rooms are occupied. Yet here comes a visitor to inquire at the reception desk.
Ping.
This visitor, Herr Braun, rings the bell and asks for a room. He has come for the treatments and perhaps a little gambling to while away the time between the treatments.” Helga leaned forward, her mouth open. “ ‘So sorry to disappoint, mein Herr,’ says the clerk on the desk, ‘but the hotel is fully occupied. There are no rooms available until next Tuesday.’ ‘But I must have a room!’ says Herr Braun. ‘I have come all the way from Berlin!’ The hotel clerk scratches his head.”

Koenig paused and scratched his head. Theatrical in the extreme, thought Jimmy.

“ ‘Ach,’ says the clerk”—Koenig raised his hands—”‘but there is something we might do. We can move Herr and Frau Klein from room one to room two, and Herr and Frau Buchwald from room two to room three, and the Frankel sisters from room three to room four.’ And so on.
Und so weiter.
And because this grand hotel in Baden is a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, our visitor, Herr Braun, moves into room one and everyone is happy, although naturally a little inconvenienced with the packing and unpacking. Although not too inconvenienced, because at a grand hotel there are many maids and porters to take care of such things. The paradox, which is Hilbert’s paradox, is that the grand hotel is always fully occupied but always has room for one more guest. That is infinity.”

“Bravo!” said Mrs. Carrington.

There was an intense look of concentration on Maus’s face, then a swift dawning of understanding, like light moving across water.

Koenig nodded. “You see it, don’t you?”

“I did. For a moment.” Maus flushed, her eyes shining.

“Well, I think it’s all utterly fanciful,” said Jimmy.

“Of course it is fanciful,” said Koenig, “that is the point. To explain such concepts one needs to be fanciful. Hilbert had a student once who quit his class to study poetry. ‘Good,’ said Hilbert. ‘He did not have enough imagination to become a mathematician.’ ”

It was the laughter that followed that did it, or possibly the four glasses of hock that Jimmy had drunk by that time. In any event, he found himself dominating the conversation at last, which he did by embarking on an uninterruptible Cook’s tour of places he had found most noteworthy abroad. Menton, Le Touquet, Lake Como. “Now, Sintra is a most pleasant place. I wintered there last year. Have you ever been to Sintra, Letitia?”

“No, but we went to Lisbon once.”

“Yes, Sintra,” he said. “I should love to show it to you. An enviable situation and quite a mild climate, considering. And, of course, one doesn’t get so many Jews, which is a distinct advantage.”

“Jews?” said Paul Lyell.

“Oh, they’ve quite overrun Biarritz. You know what a nuisance they are.” He flapped a hand. “All money with them and endless vulgarity. On the Continent, there’s scarcely a bank they don’t own. We shall all dance to their tune ere long, mark my words.”

And here the boating party fragmented, like shattered glass, thought Bradshaw, whose ear was attuned to such things. Koenig colored, and the German girls shrank into themselves with an emotion that was impossible to read. Mrs. Carrington turned her head and stared into the distance from under the brim of her hat.

“That’s a foul point of view,” said Paul Lyell. “And a remarkably ill-informed one.”

“Don’t trouble yourself,” said Koenig, muttering to his friend.

“What did I say?” said Jimmy.

“You were most rude,” said Paul Lyell in an even, dispassionate tone that conveyed more disgust than rage would have done. You could see how he might have stood up to his father in the matter of the medical training.

“Don’t,” said Koenig.

Jimmy, sufficiently drunk to be pleased with himself, smiled at Koenig. “Oh, present company excepted, of course.”

*  *  *

They were all quiet on the way back. Unspoken conversations charged the heavy air.

Whitchurch, Pangbourne. Under the circumstances, it was as well that the business of the locks served as a lengthy and regular distraction. Gates opened, gates closed. Lockkeepers: stern or cheery. Small dogs running along the towpath, barking. Red flowers in window boxes. Rushing weirs, gliding swans, fierce geese, scuttling coots and moorhens.

At Ashenden they moored at a splintery landing stage.

“Aren’t you coming, Letitia?” said Jimmy to Mrs. Carrington, as the others scrambled onto the bank.

She turned and gave him a cold look he would be in no danger of misinterpreting. “I’ll be along shortly.”

Bradshaw, who was just about to set off down a path bordered by the creamy froth of meadowsweet, noted this exchange with relief.

*  *  *

Water lapped the side of the boat, a soothing, repetitive sound. Mrs. Carrington took off her hat and breathed in the green smell of the river. “Oh, Jimmy was always spoiled,” she remembered her husband telling her, “coming so late after those girls. He hasn’t a single bone of responsibility in his entire body.” Responsibility, she thought, was not all Jimmy Henderson lacked. She shivered.

The boy left off fiddling with the engine and asked if she was cold, whether she would like a rug from one of the lockers? His coppery hair was alive with light, and she noticed how well made he was, how assured and competent. There were smuts on his face, streaks of ash, and she wanted to wet her handkerchief and wipe them off.

“No, thank you, Peter. I’m all right.”

Mallards came up to the side of the launch and made a nuisance of themselves. She found a roll in one of the hampers and fed it to them. Something about tearing the bread into crumbs and throwing it in the water, watching the ducks make their absurd fuss, lightened her mood a little.

“How long have you been working at the boatyard?” she said to the boy, who was leaning on the brass rail, staring over the water.

“A few years.”

“You must know the river well.”

“I should do,” he said, with a wry smile. “Never been anywhere else.”

A drake, with his bright green head, was darting about, scooping up the bread, while the females were circling and quacking near the bank.

“Look at him,” she said. “You’d think he’d give the ladies a chance.”

“Not likely,” he said.

To delay the moment when she would have to return, she asked him if his father was on the river too.

He shook his head. “I never knew him.”

“I am sorry.”

He shrugged. “You can’t miss what you haven’t had. My stepfather works at the biscuit factory and so does my mother. They used to be in service here”—he nodded at the riverbank—“up at the big house.”

“Here? At Ashenden?”

He nodded again. “My stepfather was an undergardener and my mother was a maid before she had me. Factory’s better, they say.”

“My mother was in service. It’s a hard life.”

He was surprised.

“You’re wondering how I got so posh.” Moving her vowels from east to west, from poor to rich, hadn’t been hard: she’d always been a good mimic, a quick study. Learning the rules, the rites, the codes, however, had been the work of years. “Well, this is what I used to sound like.” She cleared her throat, widened her mouth, and pointed to a cob grazing by the riverbank. “Dat bleedin’ ’orse ain’t worf ’arf a crahn if you arsk me.”

He laughed. “How do you do that?”

She was tempted to reply in his soft country burr but thought better of it. “I was on the stage before I married. You get an ear for
these things.” She gathered up her hat and her bag, along with a wrap that Helga had left behind. “You ever been to the theater?”

He shook his head.

“What do you do on your days off?”

“Tinker about with engines.”

“That sounds like a busman’s holiday to me.”

“Engines are interesting. I’m saving up for a garage.”

“Are you?” She considered a moment, opened her handbag, and handed him a banknote. “Good luck with it. And thank you for all your efforts today. Much appreciated.”

He gave her a sudden, transforming smile that warmed her heart to see. Then Letitia Carrington, who had once gone by the stage name of Letty Lee, and who had been born Hatty Cohen in Whitechapel, stepped off the boat.

*  *  *

Bradshaw’s comedy
The Boating Party
opened at the Adelphi the following spring to good notices and even better takings at the box office. Mrs. Carrington, who had been one of the play’s angels, and who was widely believed to be the model for Mrs. Hancock, the leading female role, could not have been more delighted at its success.

I
n some parts of the country near the south coast you can hear a dull murderous boom come over the Channel, an ominous blood pulse. Not here. Here a dog’s bark annoys the ordinary silence the way it has always done and will do again, a wood pigeon hidden in a beech tree utters its lilting, repetitive coo, a freshening wind shivers through the leaves and drops again to a hush. The plow turns over the earth to the jingle and creak of the horses’ harnesses and their heavy hooves thudding down the furrow; in a cobbled courtyard the bicycle bell of the delivery boy rings out.

But the house, which is not standing idly by, which is serving honor and saving it, encloses other sounds in a veil of discretion. Voices mutter private nonsense to themselves. Old music-hall songs bang out on an untuned piano. Shouts and cries rupture sleep, and horror is fought in a rustle of bedclothes and a pacing of floorboards.

*  *  *

Pale sun, as fragile as an egg, lay in lozenges of light across the desk, across his knees. Lieutenant Harrison put a cigarette between his lips and struck a match, holding one hand with the other to steady it. The match went out. The second time he managed to light the thing. Not bad. Some days it took five or six goes.

It was an odd little room, some sort of office downstairs in one
of the service wings, and looked out over the kitchen courtyard. If he wanted a view, almost any other window in the house would have given him one. But he didn’t want a view. He didn’t want any sort of prospect. This small, low-ceilinged room suited him and no one had turned him out of it yet. Well, if you knows of a better ’ole, go to it! as the men said.

In front of him on the scratched deal desk, table really: his tobacco tin, his cigarette papers, a box of matches, a Wedgwood ashtray filled with stubs, and a black notebook with mud on the cover. A letter. The morning’s paper. A packet wrapped in oilskin.
Robinson Crusoe,
Shelley’s
Prometheus Unbound,
and
Little Dorrit
—a small stack of books that he had raided from the library.

“Raid” was the right word, because in the beginning it had taken all his nerve to confront the fierce symmetries of the house. Everything lined up with everything else, placed you like a chess piece on a board. When they had first arrived, and were grouped in the hall with their stinking kit bags, the heavy wooden interior doors had been open, revealing stark views in every direction. Later he would learn how silkily and snugly they closed, but on that day they were flung back. You could see it all. In front of the house the land fell away and rose again to a gentle hill. He couldn’t work out where they had put the guns. He could hear them, but he didn’t know where they were.

So much exposure. He had wanted to sink to the ground and crawl. Even now he sometimes found himself hugging the walls or zigzagging across the floor. First lesson. Keep moving. Don’t give them a clear shot at you.

If he could have chosen a time to be in England, it wouldn’t have been late November, the skies gray, the ground soggy. They might as well have been in France. Somehow, when you were out there, all you remembered were long sunny summer days, not the fact that you were close enough to home to share the same weather.

They were a mixed lot. Mostly officers from the Sixth Battalion, Royal Berkshires, as he was, but there were a couple of NCOs, one from Hampshire, one from Essex, and a padre from London. Without
their uniforms and in the democracy of bad dreams, it was hard to tell the ranks apart.

They were always tired. Terror woke them at night and sleep ambushed them by day, delivered them onto the fire steps of their imaginations.

A hand on his shoulder. “Sir? Lieutenant Harrison?”

“What!” He jerked awake, panting.

“You were shouting.”

“Was I?” He caught his breath. “Sorry.”

Mullins, a short, barrel-chested man, said not to worry. He was a sergeant from one of the Hampshire regiments, about thirty-five, and on his first furlough home after nearly a year in the trenches. He wrote to his wife every morning after breakfast, the way some people brushed their teeth.

“Thought I’d better remind you that the photographer from the local paper’s coming this afternoon to take a few shots. In case you’d forgotten.”

He had forgotten. The photographer coming to take a few shots.

“You might want to spruce yourself up.”

“Thanks, Sergeant. When is the photographer coming?”

“Half two.”