Something Wholesale (7 page)

Some minutes would elapse before Lola was ready to appear in the showroom and when she did so she received a good scolding from Miss Stallybrass. So far as Miss Stallybrass was concerned it was only the shortage of labour, however unskilled, that kept Lola at Lane and Newby’s at all.

‘You’re in the wrong business,’ Mr Wilkins used to observe with relish on these occasions to no one in particular, expressionless behind his spectacles. ‘You’re wasting your energy putting them on at all. Huh, Huh, Huh!’

In those early days, whether by accident or design I was never wholly sure, I was treated to what were by no means fleeting glimpses of Lola’s thighs over which were stretched suspenders in shades which varied between puce and viridian according to the colour scheme she was adopting; delectable buttocks which the bright, frilly underpants she wore did little to conceal – underpants bought at a shop at Shaftesbury Avenue on which were embroidered the words ‘my defences are down’; and perhaps most disturbing of all, her breasts, fantastic, unnatural protuberances that were in fact natural but which seemed to be constantly pointed in my direction. Her skin was of such a ghastly transparency that when I just saw her take a bite from a bun stuffed with synthetic cream I half-expected to see the fragments in shadowy outline, travelling down her gullet to the unseen regions below. But in the weeks to come Lola’s digestive tract was one of the few parts of her anatomy that I was not given the opportunity to view at close quarters.

She even managed to impart a degree of significance to the eating of her revolting ‘elevenses’. Taking a bite at a banana, at that time an article of diet ‘in short supply’, she used to lean across the table towards me at a moment when the Stockroom was temporarily empty, wearing a tight white sweater that made me feel as if I was on the face of the Finsteraahorn and ask me in a voice in which even in my disturbed state I found it difficult to detect any passion, whether I wanted ‘a bit off the other end’.

I was more disturbed by Lola than I was at first prepared to admit, even to myself. The years I had spent in prison had been celibate ones; living on a diet of six hundred calories a day, except on the wonderful occasion when each of us had received two Red Cross Parcels at the same time, the lusts of the flesh were scarcely even a memory. Our dreams had been of great mounds of pudding; even the worst of us, rake-hells and near sexual maniacs, thought only of their mothers – and then only in the nicest possible way.
Lola was nothing like the widows amongst whom I had been suddenly pitch-forked and for whose protracted ministrations I had been ill-prepared. Now, eating four good meals a day, like some Desert Father of the Fifth Century fallen from his pillar I found myself in torment and without the machinery of whips and hair shirts with which those early sufferers had attempted to rid themselves of a complaint that is almost always incurable, except by death.

My parents had led me to believe, when they had carefully steered the conversation into these channels, that the temptations to which I would be subjected at Lane and Newby’s were similar to those experienced by doctors and could be resisted by something equivalent to the Hippocratic oath. ‘They’re a nice, sensible lot of girls with no nonsense about them,’ my mother said firmly on the day before my induction into the Stockroom. After my first encounter with Lola I came to the conclusion that either my mother had a different conception of nonsense to mine or else she had deliberately obliterated the image of Lola from her mind.

It was slight comfort to know that my father was also conscious of Lola. Every morning and afternoon when he was on the premises he used to pass through the more lowly parts of his little kingdom in order to satisfy himself that all was well. On one occasion he discovered her wearing nothing but a red underslip and red shoes, like a demon queen in pantomime who had just emerged from a trap-door in the floor-boards.

‘That’s a finely developed girl you have in your department,’ he said, looking at me quizzically, making me feel as if I had taken her on personally for immoral purposes – something that I had been longing to do for some time – and went on to tell me how, when he was a young man, he had been left alone on a sofa with something of a similar kind in the front parlour of a house in Battersea.

‘About four o’clock in the afternoon when we had the gas turned down the mother rushed in and began to tell me how happy she was that I was going to marry her daughter. I took one look at the mother – the husband hadn’t even the courage to appear, he was squinting through the back of the door between the hinges – and I noticed that she had a small black moustache. I looked at Sophie, that was the daughter’s name, and I saw that in a few years’ time she would have one too. I remember thinking it strange that I hadn’t noticed it before. So I picked up my hat and cane – always a good thing to have them handy,’ he added, parenthetically, ‘and said “Madam, I think you are misinformed” and left. But it was a close thing.’

‘I should take some exercise,’ he went on with seeming irrelevance. ‘A good long trot, then a rub down and a cold bath … Pity she’s got such a miserable voice. Sounds like two pennorth of peas.’

There was a moment of silence. ‘I remember the road well,’ he said, ‘It was called Sabine Road.’

For the first time in my life I followed his advice and took up cross-country running. To my surprise I discovered that I had an aptitude for this lunatic sport, but as a moral purifier it was useless. As I toiled through the mud and slush in Epping Forest Lola’s buttocks rose up before me through a haze of fatigue as just one more obstacle contrived by the organisers.

The wretched girl was everywhere; not only in the abundance of my imagination but in the flesh. She was even in the cellars, of course only by chance, when I went below to fetch up another supply of velour for Miss Webb, strategically situated in the narrowest part between the two main transepts, like a great sexual blockship. ‘I’ll breathe in to let you pass,’ she said, emitting an insane giggle. ‘You’ll have to breathe out,’ I said, idiotically. I was trembling like a leaf. ‘If you breathe in I’ll never get by.’

‘I get so mixed up I don’t know what I’m doing,’ Lola said, narrowing the gap. ‘Look, I’ve got an idea. You put your hand on my chest and I’ll breathe in and out and then you’ll know when you can get past won’t you?’

‘You know you’re driving me crazy,’ I said some minutes later. I wasn’t getting anywhere with the velour – or anything else. It was like handling a great warm blancmange. ‘Lola I must go to bed with you. Do you understand?’

‘Ooh,’ said Lola, ‘Aren’t you silly!’

It was not only Lola who was responsible for my physical discomfort. As a life-long sufferer from hay fever I soon discovered that I was violently allergic to wool. Hemmed in on every side by the stuff, which gave off clouds of toxic dust whenever it was disturbed, just like Mrs Smithers with the elevenses I wheezed my way up the staircase from the cellars loaded with velour. Sometimes I used to slip out of the front door, the bell announcing my departure to Miss Gatling who used to come out into the hall and say ‘’ERE! Where you going?’, and gulp in the air of the city, but this seemed stale and tainted after the sinister fragrance of the forests of Middle Europe. The bones of London had been laid bare and the dust from the open bomb sites rose on the autumn wind. It swirled in the streets, old and acrid. Gasping on the threshold of the place where I was to find my feet I wondered whether I would live long enough to do so.

But I was uprooted from Lane and Newby’s sooner than I expected. Ascending St James’s Street after a visit to my father’s tailor who had been blown up by a bomb when passing through the Burlington Arcade and was if anything in a worse state of nerves than I was – the lapels of the suit he had made me had an edge on them like a fine saw – I saw a well-remembered figure baying for a taxi on the steps of White’s Club.

I had been in the same prison camp as John de Bendern in Italy. He had been one of the first members of the Western Desert Force to be taken prisoner when his tank had had one of its tracks blown off in an encounter with the enemy and had gone round in gradually decreasing circles until it had stopped completely. He had been an admirable prisoner, at least so far as the Allies were concerned. Not for a moment had he allowed his hosts to interfere with his way of life, which was at all times wildly idiosyncratic. With other members of the club in exile he played baccarat in one of the cellars. Stakes were high at the big table and letter cards intended for communicating with next-of-kin were used as cheques. They were invariably cashed in London on settlement day. It was said that one squire from the Welsh Marches had to sell his family estate in order to meet debts incurred in the cellar. A South African who thought the whole thing was a joke had issued a letter card that had bounced. The rumour ran that he was refused admission to his club when he returned home after the war.

‘I’ve just come from Italy,’ said de Bendern, ceasing to emit the truly extraordinary noises with which he was trying to attract a taxi. ‘I’ve just seen Wanda. She wants to know when you’re coming.’

Wanda was a Slovene girl who had helped me to escape from the camp in which I was a prisoner, after the Italian Armistice in 1943. She had secreted me in the maternity wing of a small hospital in which I had been forced to take refuge with a broken ankle. During the weeks in which I had been hidden there she had visited me daily in order to give me lessons in Italian. This process involved a good deal of poring over textbooks with our heads close together and in spite of the oppressive chaperonage exercised by the nuns who were in charge of the place we had contrived to fall in love. When the Germans had finally discovered my whereabouts and had come to take me to Germany it was Wanda who had arranged
my escape in the middle of the night by the way of a drain pipe and who met me half a mile away in a motor car. As a result of her efforts on my behalf both she and her parents suffered great privation and her father had been taken to the Gestapo cellar in Parma which he had miraculously survived.

Our courtship, interrupted by my abrupt departure for Germany and another period of imprisonment, also survived and during the last weeks it had blossomed on paper notwithstanding the barriers of language. My Italian lessons had been cut short before I had done any written work and Wanda had very little English.

‘Come inside,’ said de Bendern. ‘There’s a fellow there I’ve never seen before. He’s got some extraordinary outfit. He needs people who know Italy. He’ll fix you up.’

Inside, just as in a play in which economy has to be exercised in the number of characters, was Johnny X, the young Captain I had last seen in the wood in Sussex who had been with me at Sandhurst, now metamorphosed into a full Colonel. The whole thing was settled at the bar.

‘It’s M.I.9,’ said the juvenile Colonel. ‘I can’t tell you any more about it here. You’ll have to go to our place in the country, to sign on.’ He gave me a chit for the War Office.

‘Shuttle car’s at four o’clock,’ said the elderly Major to whom I was finally presented. He invested me with an aura of secrecy which after some weeks of open-cast living in the Coat Stockroom I found gratifying.

‘Just sign this will you?’ I signed a document which threatened me with the most dreadful penalties if I breathed a word to a living soul about what I was to see and do. As I had no idea of what this was I was able to do so without compunction. ‘Plane tomorrow night from Blackbushe, I envy you chaps,’ he said wistfully.

The shooting brake into which I was bundled through a side door in the War Office had green paper pasted over the windows and the partition which divided the rear seats from the driver’s compartment. I sat in the green twilight. It was like being in my father’s skiff with the cover down. Behind me a moronic-looking soldier reclined on a pile of canvas sacks with lead seals on them. On the seat next to me was an even worse-looking specimen with Idle boots – Sergeant-Major Clegg would have made short work of him.

‘Hope the driver hasn’t got green paper on the windscreen as well,’ I said, trying to be affable. He looked at my civilian suit contemptuously. ‘Funny, har bloody har’ I heard him say to his loathsome companion.

After an interminable journey the man with the dirty boots began banging on the partition.

‘Go’er ’ave a leak.’

‘—!’ said the driver. ‘Cancher wait, we’re almost there.’

With a jerk he drew up at the side of the road. Through the open door I could see a signpost that read Beaconsfield 1¾. We were on the A40 to Oxford.

A few minutes later we arrived at the great house
^*
which was a repository of secrets of World War II. Secrets that had been acquired with great risk and sacrifice, then filed away and forgotten; secrets that by this time had worn pretty thin; secrets that had never been secrets at all. I was taken past a compound in which defeated German Generals, deprived even of the means of writing their memoirs for fear they might stab themselves, gazed at me disconsolately; along a path that wound through an orchard where the grass was waist-high, to a Nissen hut in an extremity of decay, on the door of which was a small plaque. The original inscription had been blotted out by a small piece of sticky
label on which some orderly with shaky handwriting had inscribed the words M.I.9.

All the way from London I had speculated on the nature of my future employment. Was I going to fight out a duel to the death with the last of the S.S. in some eyrie north of the Brenner or would it be a search for the treasure that Mussolini was reputed to have left by the roadside on his last journey to the borders of Switzerland?

I pushed open the door. The hut was full of officers, officers with whom I had shared rooms in hideously inconvenient prisons in Italy, officers I had known in the Desert, the same officers who had greeted me at the Repatriation Centre in Sussex. I was given a hilarious welcome.

Johnny X came in. ‘Glad you could come, Eric,’ he said. ‘Nice to have chaps one knows, especially in this kind of show.’

This was the moment. I braced myself. After all I really only wanted to see Wanda.

‘What is this M.I.9?’ I asked.

‘It’s been pretty secret up to now,’ said Johnny. ‘Actually all we’re going to do is go around the areas we each know best in Italy helping people who helped prisoners when they were escaping. People like us. That’s what you’re going to do. That’s what we’re all going to do. For the first time for years we shan’t be knocking things down.’

I flew to Naples; begged a jeep from a friend, one of the great freemasonry of prisoners, and in bitter cold drove northwards to the valley of the Po. In the little village where I had been a prisoner, a village that nestled around an ancient castle, I found Wanda and asked her to marry me.

Six months later we returned to England. Together we had undergone every sort of indignity before we had finally been
allowed to marry. Worst of all perhaps was the Wassermann test at which my fiancée took great umbrage, believing it to be a mortal insult levelled at her family. She came from the Karst, the windswept limestone country beyond Trieste where slights real or imagined are cherished forever.

‘It is not the custom in my country,’ she mumbled in her fractured English.

I could hardly blame her.

‘It’s to protect you as much as to protect me, I have to have it, too,’ I said to her.

‘I don’t want to be protected from you,’ she answered in a hollow voice, exactly like an early Garbo film.

With the aid of John de Bendern who by now was at the Embassy in Paris she travelled to England in comfort. Unfortunately de Bendern having initiated the arrangements for her journey went on holiday to the South of France leaving the Ambassador in charge of their completion. As a result I received a testy telegram on the eve of her departure. ‘Wagon-lit
must
be paid for in Sterling. Duff Cooper.’ The Ambassador showed a remarkable prescience. It was many years before the unfortunate occupants of the British Isles were able to do anything else.

Alone she had to make her first contact with my mother. I travelled by a leave train that meandered over half Europe in its journey to the Channel, finally fetching up, as only a military train could, in a siding at Woking.

Demobbed at last I walked through the main gate clutching a brown paper parcel. It contained an electric-blue striped suit on which the stripes were only a little out of true and a curious green hat. Wearing it I resembled an elderly pederast. The shirt, the celluloid collar stud and the shoes that were as malleable as a diver’s boots and some other items I had rejected.

On the advice of someone in the compartment I had given
one of the Staff-Sergeants a pound note. ‘They keep a few decent suits hidden,’ he said. ‘Some of them are made in Savile Row. Even the good tailors have to make them.’ Now I was thinking of asking for my money back.

‘OY!’ a voice shouted as I turned right outside the gate. A very ancient private soldier was following me with as much speed as his ancient limbs could muster. ‘Wanted. You’re wanted. Back in the Orderly Room.’

The clerk handed me a large official envelope. ‘Sign here,’ he said. To him I was Sir no more.

I slit the envelope. It contained a letter from Johnny X in Italy. All it said was ‘Congratulations – Good old Eric, late as usual!’ It was obvious that the letter had accompanied me to Woking on the train from Italy.

There was another envelope inside. It contained a single sheet of paper. At first from the letter-heading and the general lay-out I thought that it was concerned with some hitch in our Wassermann tests that had come to light too late.

‘Sir,’ it read:

I am directed to inform you that His Majesty the King has been graciously pleased to approve the award to you of the following decoration: M.C.

You should write as follows, quoting your full personal particulars, including your personal number to War Office, C2 (Investitures) Whitehall, S.W.1., forwarding an address to which you desire the decoration forwarded.

I am Sir,                          

Your Obedient Servant   

(There followed an indecipherable squiggle)

Director of Organisation

It began to rain. More in sorrow than in anger I picked up the packages containing my monstrous suit. The incident for which I was receiving this award had ended in failure. It would never appear in the history of any regiment unless cloaked in euphuism. Why, at this moment, nearly three years after it had happened, did I have to be given a decoration to remind me of the fact?

How different too was the manner of receiving it from my dreams of glory in the Chapel at Sandhurst on Sunday mornings when I used to sit at the foot of the marble pillars. In my dream I was to be decorated by Eddie the Adjutant, now a fighting General. (The King was unable to perform any further investitures. Even in 1940 it was said that his hand was becoming lifeless from incessant handshaking.) The Regiment – or was it a Division? – was drawn up in a hollow square. A difficult manoeuvre but we could do it. The trumpets sounded – not for the moment on the other side.

‘I remember you,’ Eddie said. ‘A Company. Well done!’

There was another fanfare of trumpets. This time a rather dry peck on both cheeks from General de Gaulle, now miraculously restored to good temper, taking this opportunity to confer on me the Croix de Guerre.

Now the reality. The arrival of an official envelope with its bleak intimation that I was to write to C2 (Investitures) forwarding an address to which I desired the decoration forwarded. Dammit, they couldn’t even be bothered to spell M.C. out! For this Sergeant-Major Clegg had screeched at us on the parade ground outside the Old Buildings. For this Eddie, the Adjutant had ordered a dog incarcerated in the guard room for being an idle dog. More in sorrow than in anger, for the second time I set off for the railway station and Lane and Newby Limited, Wholesale Costumiers and Mantle Manufacturers of 54, Great Marlborough Street, W.1.