part four

Nanny Defeated

I see an important decision made on a lake,

An illness, a beard, Arabia found in a bed,

Nanny defeated, Money.

w. h. auden

I

Steep roads, a tunnel through the downs are the approaches;

A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay;

The sea-front is almost elegant; all this show

Has, somewhere inland, a vague and dirty root:

Nothing is made in this town . . .

Next slide, please . . .

It is Mr Auden lecturing to the sixth-form: very intelligent, very clever, but one always feels that, at heart, he’s just an ordinary chap like the rest of us. Highbrow, you know, but human: he likes Byron and Beatrix Potter, and doesn’t mind roughing it when necessary – look at that trip of his to Iceland.

And filled with the tears of the beaten, or calm with fame,

The eyes of the returning thank the historical cliffs:

‘The heart has at last ceased to lie, the clock to accuse;

In the shadow under the yew, at the children’s party

Everything will be explained . . .’

Had the ‘heart ceased to lie’? I looked up at the ‘historical cliffs’: still honeycombed with their caves and tunnels and windowed ‘houses’, mysterious as ever; ‘somewhere inland’ was the ‘vague and dirty root’ – the subterranean town beneath the water-tower.

My family had left Sandgate, when my father retired in 1927, and gone to live at Blackheath, but my brother, after leaving the Army, had gone into the family business at Folkestone, and I often came down to stay with him. My life now, after the brief interlude of Oxford, was in London; Nanny was defeated; under the yew-tree everything had been explained; but nostalgia drew me back to this haunted coast, I would walk to the end of the Folkestone Leas and look down at our old house beneath the cliffs, now occupied by strangers. And I returned, again and again, with the old sense of crossing a frontier into an alien land, to Dover.

Dirty as ever, friendly and proletarian, with a faint aura of mysterious wickedness lingering about the Hippodrome – it had changed little in the intervening years. The ‘ruined pharos’, the Saxon church, the ‘almost-elegant’ sea-front, greeted me like the archetypal images of myth; I felt at home in this town.

On the cliff tops, the great grim barracks impended heavily upon the narrow streets; the trams still clattered and jangled, at this date, along their worn-out tracks (they were soon to be replaced, regrettably, by buses). Along Snargate Street, by the Grand Shaft, the little shops and cafés, fringing the docks, had an almost continental air:

Within these breakwaters English is spoken:

without

Is the immense, improbable atlas . . .

But Europe didn’t seem so ‘improbable’ after all, here among the Italian cafés, the tattooists’ shops, the pubs full of sailors; it might have been a small port anywhere in the world.

I was obsessed, at that time, by an esthétisme des ports: I loved the poetry of departures, my favourite poem was Mallarmé’s Brise marine:

Mais ô mon coeur, entends le chant des matelots!

I shared, too, belatedly and at second-hand, the circus-and-balmusette aestheticism of Cocteau, Satie and Apollinaire; I visited the Rue de Lappe, and Charlie Brown’s in the West India Dock Road; and I went, over and over again, to René Clair’s Sous les Toits de Paris . . .

I went, also, at long last, to the Dover Hippodrome, that mythical Temple of Shame in Snargate Street, haunted by the ghosts of Goneril and the girl-under-the-cliff. It was a bitter disappointment: blamelessly respectable, the haunt of Dover shopkeepers on Saturday nights – the petty-bourgeois ambience only enlivened by a few Wodehousian subalterns going gay in the bar. Where was the wickedness of yesteryear? The twice-nightly revues were third-rate: a lumpy and prudishly-attired chorus, a Scotch comedian, jokes about kippers – the world of Donald McGill’s postcards . . . Better value was the ‘Artists’ Bar’ at the back, which was open to the public; the chorus-girls came down between their turns to have a port-and-lemon. There was a public urinal under the stage: visiting this one night, my brother and I were startled by a sudden bang, a blaze of light overhead, and the sudden descent, almost on top of us, of an enormous Chinaman, in the full regalia of a mandarin . . . Aghast at this celestial visitation, we jumped aside just in time, and, feebly regaining our senses, found ourselves apologizing to Prince Sun Yat Sen, the illusionist, who was not unnaturally annoyed at being detected in his famous disappearing act.

My taste for ‘low-life’ drew me more than ever to Dover: I invested it, as usual, with more glamour than it really possessed. I liked the pubs full of sailors and soldiers –

Soldiers who swarm in the pubs in their pretty clothes,


As fresh and silly as girls from a high-class academy . . .

I felt, obscurely, that they were more ‘real’ than my own friends: I was, in fact, beginning to feel that inward pressure of the environment which sooner or later drives most adolescents into some form of escape or revolt. I was in a mood to be ‘converted’, but lacked the ability to be sufficiently serious for long enough at a time. Catholicism I found preposterous, and the opposed theology of Communism not only preposterous, but boring into the bargain; besides, I was too bad at maths ever to understand the Labour theory of value . . .

I was sustained by the ambition to write (on some far-distant day) a vast Proustian masterpiece. It was to cover my whole life and the lives of everybody I knew; nothing was to be left out – the most intimate bodily functions would be described, of course, in unprecedented detail; the book would be, among other things, a complete anatomy of the sexual life . . .

The trouble was, though, that I could never bring myself to begin writing the first chapter. The book remained a mere state of mind, an attitude to life, a defence-mechanism with which I could keep reality at bay . . . Walking the streets, drinking sherry at a party, trying to read Rimbaud on the lawn at Blackheath, I would experience a sudden breath-taking conviction of my mission: the details of my surroundings were suddenly bathed in a gilded, romantic haze: the sunlight glinting on a roof, a line of Rimbaud, a tree-top against the sky, some face at a party signalling back a mutual flash of desire across the crowded room . . . Everything, the whole of experience seemed absorbed in that single moment of vision. What did anything else matter? I had had my vision – so I assured myself, echoing Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. J’ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage . . . At parties, when I felt bored or neglected, I found it consoling to repeat to myself such reassuring phrases. I felt myself a kind of Faustus, intoxicated by my initiation into the ultimate mysteries. I possessed all the required formulae: all I had to do now was to put them into practice . . .

I suppose most of my friends felt much the same way: I know that in my own case it was an enormous and comprehensive gesture of overcompensation: it made up to me for me all my feelings of inferiority, all my amorous frustrations, the whole unformulated, complex unhappiness of adolescence. The magical vision spanned, like some rainbow-bridge, the appalling chasm between the Real and the Ideal: the fact that it was, like a rainbow, insubstantial, didn’t really matter – I was not, after all, in any particular hurry to cross it; not just yet.

At times, indeed, I would feel a little uneasy . . . There might come a period, I thought, when this vision of a future masterpiece would fail to satisfy me; I should have to begin the unthinkable task of actually writing it. The thought was frightening; for I had learnt, by this time, the primary lesson of adolescence: that one can, by too long anticipation, overdraw on one’s emotional capital . . . I had learnt the lesson; but, being a natural spendthrift, it was a long time before I began to profit by it.

The vows, the tears, the slight emotional signals

Are here eternal and unremarkable gestures,

Like ploughing or soldiers’ songs . . .

I listened to the soldiers singng in the pubs – the Prince Regent, the Robin Hood, the Invicta – and lived my Proustian novel. At Dover, more than anywhere, the past leapt at me with the authentic, sudden purity of the madeleine-dipped-in-tea . . . One day my brother and I were invited to lunch by some friends of his at the barracks: afterwards we walked down to the town by the Grand Shaft, that extraordinary staircase through the cliff which used to seem to me so mysterious. There wasn’t much mystery about it; but it was, I discovered, a monument – perhaps the most ponderous ever devised – to the caste-system. For there were two stairways: one for officers, another for NCOs and men. How much money and ingenuity, I thought, must have been expended, in order that a second-lieutenant should not pass a sergeant on the stairs.

One night my brother, my friend Eric and myself were sitting over drinks in the bar of the Grand Hotel; it was nearly closing time. Suddenly a large, burly man entered the bar: in mufti, but obviously an officer. He greeted my brother, who introduced us.

‘You remember Basil Medlicott, don’t you?’ he said.

I was tight enough, I suppose, for my id to elude the censor, for I replied:

‘Yes, I once used to keep you in a cage.’

It was the kind of private joke one enjoys making at a certain stage of intoxication. Basil looked not at all surprised.

‘Really?’ he said, fixing me with a pair of piercing black eyes. ‘I didn’t know I’d ever been kept by anybody – I’m delighted to hear it. I hope,’ he added, ‘the cage was a gilded one?’

Then he bought us all drinks: large ones. He exuded a rather alarming heartiness, calling us all ‘old boy’ and even (which pleased me by its period flavour) ‘old bean’. I was rather bored; looking at him, I tried to think myself back to the days when he had seemed a hero. There was nothing very heroic about him now; his age was hard to guess – he had that dateless look which some men acquire in middle age; he might have been anything between thirty-five and fifty. He still wore a dark cavalry-moustache; his greying hair was cropped like a convict’s; his clothes were just such as one would expect – an ancient but well-cut sports-coat, with leather patches on the sleeves, a paisley-patterned tie, a green pork-pie hat.

‘I remember you,’ he told me. ‘You said once you wanted to go to some show at the Pleasure Gardens – I’d promised myself I’d take you, but something or other happened . . .’

My heart missed a beat: Heaven, after all, had lain about me in my infancy, without my ever suspecting it . . .’

He asked us all to lunch in the Mess next day. On the way home, my brother talked ramblingly about him: ‘My oldest friend . . . I haven’t seen him for ages. He’s really a most remarkable person.’ I didn’t think he was remarkable and said so: my brother, however, insisted. Basil had once been an Army boxing champion; he had had a very important job in Intelligence, during the war; he had a brother – or a brother-in-law – in the House of Commons; he was very rich himself; and so on.

I retorted, finally, that all this didn’t really add up to anything very remarkable.

‘He seems just Wodehouse to me,’ said Eric.

‘He really is a most extraordinary person,’ my brother repeated.

I was to have, though I didn’t know it, ample opportunity to judge: but to this day I cannot quite decide whether my brother or myself was nearer the truth. Was Basil really an ‘extraordinary’ person, or was he just a bore?

II

When we arrived at the mess the next morning, Basil was as hearty and un-extraordinary as ever. But looking round the bookshelves in his room, while we drank sherry, I had my first surprise. There were all the things one would expect to find: regimental histories, text-books on infantry-training and so on; among them, however, I came upon A Shropshire Lad, a volume of Yeats and An Ideal Husband. These were promising, I thought, but noncommittal. A moment later, to my complete astonishment, I came on Swann’s Way.

This was too odd to pass without comment.

‘Do you read Proust?’ I asked him.

Basil looked bored.

‘He’s rather heavy-going, isn’t he?’ he replied, and changed the subject.

The remark was what one might have expected: but it still seemed to me none the less astonishing that he should even have heard of Proust, much less possessed him.

After lunch we returned to his rooms and he talked. It was my first experience of hearing Basil talk: I was to hear the performance repeated often enough in the future, but this first specimen must have been, I think, fairly representative. It did, at any rate, I am quite certain, fix for all time the precise attitude which I was always to assume when listening to him. I began by being respectfully attentive; gradually my attention wandered, though I retained my respectful air; soon I found even this becoming difficult. My eyes began to stray; I yawned; I tried to change the subject; finally, I surrendered, reassumed as best I could an expression of modified interest, and settled down to listen.

And still Basil went on talking.

He spoke slowly, in a manner which one might expect from a rather pompous professional writer: one was acutely aware of paragraphs and punctuation, and one could almost see, as he delivered himself of some ironic phrase, the inverted commas between which he carefully enclosed it . . . His talk was so entirely ‘out of character’ with his appearance that I didn’t know how to ‘take him’; he was by no means, as Eric had said, merely ‘Wode-house’; but I found it easier to say what he was not than to decide, precisely, in what his positive qualities consisted.

I found also, half an hour afterwards, that it was almost impossible to remember what he had been talking about. At a later date, by frequent repetition, I was to learn most of his customary topics by heart, and could predict almost exactly the words he would use; but on this first occasion my mind, when I tried to remember, was an almost complete blank. All I could recall was being treated at one point to a lengthy analysis of the ‘Protocols of Zion’, in the truth of which, I gathered, Basil more than half believed.

‘I think,’ said Eric, when we were alone, ‘the man’s a prolix bore.’

I felt inclined to agree; yet I couldn’t be quite sure . . . I had been bored, it was true, after the first ten minutes; but then that might have been my own fault. I was, I knew, too easily bored; the very act of listening to a sustained exposition made me yawn. I was quite prepared to believe that Basil’s talk had been, as my brother declared it was, ‘frightfully interesting’. I felt, somehow, that it ought to have been . . . I was slightly prejudiced in his favour: perhaps on account of those white flannel trousers, or by the fact that he had once, fifteen or sixteen years before, nearly taken me to a ‘show’.

A few days later we met Basil in Folkstone: he asked us to lunch at the Metropole, and afterwards we bathed at Seabrook.

I enjoyed the afternoon; Basil’s interminable talk seemed, on this occasion, less ponderous: perhaps he was feeling particularly light-hearted. I began to think that he was not a bore after all.

Even Eric had to admit that the afternoon had been amusing; he too perhaps wanted, as I did, to believe that Basil was something rather extraordinary; for only by so believing could we excuse ourselves for the time wasted in his company.

Eric and I had to return to London that evening; to our surprise, Basil offered to drive us up; we could hardly refuse without seeming boorish; and in the late afternoon we set off.

The drive was terrifying: Basil broke every rule of the road, and laughed heartlessly at our timidity. He boasted that he had never had an accident . . . Arrived in London, he insisted on giving us drinks at the Trocadero Long Bar. He had changed, before we started, into a suit – a rather surprising suit; it was smart, as I should have expected, but for Basil it seemed, somehow, the wrong kind of smartness. Tight-waisted, tight-wristed, it made him look like an actor; or would have done so, if it was possible for Basil to look like anything of the sort. He wore with it a very expensive tie and a black hat.

In the Long Bar he was immediately surrounded by a group of bronzed, hearty men of about his own age: it was quite a reunion— some of them, he said, he hadn’t seen for ten years. The Long Bar, in those days, was frequented incongruously by two distinct coteries: hearty Empire-builders back from Nigeria or the Malay States, and the younger, less-successful kind of actor. Genteel and faintly epicene, these latter watched speculatively our party from a discreet distance; I felt that I should probably prefer their company: Basil’s friends were quite overwhelmingly hearty.

Eric and I exchanged glances.

‘How the Empire bores me,’ he remarked sotto voce. I agreed; we decided to escape. But this proved not only difficult but finally impossible. We were led away, cordoned by the Empire-builders, to Oddenino’s, then to the Cavour. I had been introduced by Basil as the ‘young brother of his oldest friend’, and the rather tenuous relationship conferred upon me, apparently, a kind of honorary membership of this imperial fraternity. Indeed, when we went later to the Senior and afterwards to the In and Out, I began to feel quite imperial myself, and could almost fancy that I was sprouting a moustache.

Somewhere we must have had dinner, but where or with whom remained afterwards a blank. Later, we found ourselves in the Fitzroy, where Basil was a succès-fou; he was assumed (perhaps rightly), to be the richest person present, and he lived up nobly to this bubble-reputation, standing drinks all round and putting innumerable pennies in the mechanical piano.

We finished the evening at the Kinde Dragon, where Douglas Byng sang Sex-appeal Sarah and Rome was a riot in my time. The Empire-builders had left us by now; and after the cabaret, Basil began to talk. He talked and he talked: an interminable monologue which we were far too tired (and tight) to interrupt. We could only, helplessly, try to appear as though we were listening.

It was on this occasion that we first heard the story of Basil’s brother-in-law; it was long, complicated and almost incredibly tedious. Basil was involved, for some reason, in endless litigation with his relative about some putative misappropriation of property. Viewed through the distorting-mirror of Basil’s highly-prejudiced account of him, this brother-in-law appeared to be a monster of every conceivable villainy; there was no crime, no recondite vice even, which Basil didn’t sooner or later impute to him. He was guilty, it seemed, of embezzlement, house-breaking, arson, assaults upon minors, and (in his house in Half-Moon Street) of what Basil referred to, with an ironic relish, as ‘nameless orgies’.

‘Why are they nameless?’ Eric woke up sufficiently to inquire.

Obligingly, Basil proceeded to give them names: in detail and at length. The story went on and on; it became involved, obscurely, with Basil’s ‘Intelligence’ job in the Middle East . . .

At last we escaped; Eric and I were staying in Chelsea, and we walked back, exhausted, through the empty streets.

‘Quite fun, but oh, what a bore,’ Eric remarked.

It had been quite fun; I decided, rather dubiously, that I really had enjoyed the evening; but there had been about it, all the time, an uncomfortable sense of compulsion. It was as though we had been under orders to enjoy ourselves; and since Basil had done all the paying, we had had no alternative but to do so.

Thereafter I met Basil frequently: whenever he was in London he rang me up, and refused to take no for an answer. It was difficult, indeed, to say no to the offer of a good dinner and innumerable free drinks; I had about a pound a week of my own to spend on amusement, and it was worth my while, in the circumstances, to put up with a few hours of Basil’s conversation.

Or so it seemed; by the end of the evening I usually began to feel doubtful.

I soon discovered two more peculiarities of his temperament: he was fantastically snobbish, and had a passion for conspiracy.

I often played with the idea of doing a little unofficial research into Basil’s family-tree; but I lacked the energy for it. According to him, he was related to nearly all the leading families in the country: he would draw little diagrams on table-cloths to show us exactly why he was entitled to call himself a second-cousin twice removed of Lord So-and-So. Like many snobs, he affected a certain half-ironic disdain for his own distinguished connections.

‘Unfortunately, you see,’ he would say, the ironic inflections audibly underlined and italicized, ‘Unfortunately, I happen to be connected rather intimately with the Earl of Cliffhaven (on his mother’s side), so that I do feel it a certain affront to my family pride when I see his daughter disgustingly – in fact paralytically – drunk in a place which’ (it happened to be the Blue Lantern) ‘I can only describe as a House of Ill-fame.’

Basil’s taste for conspiracy was, I came to the conclusion, an occupational disease. ‘Intelligence’ had got under his skin: it was an incurable infection.

He found conspirators everywhere.

‘You see that man there?’ he would mutter, in the Long Bar, indicating discreetly some inoffensive person drinking Worthington at the counter. ‘You may not be aware of it, but he happens to be one of the most dangerous men in London. I know for a fact that he’s not only one of the Kremlin’s most highly-paid agents provocateurs, but that he’s also in the pay of three different armament firms. He has also, I may say –’ Basil added this casually, as though it were a mere fleabite ‘– he has also been convicted no less than four times’ – here Basil’s voice implied a whole compositor’s stock of inverted commas – ‘for the abominable crime of sodomy.’

Eric, who had been looking rather carefully at this monster of iniquity, suddenly burst out laughing:

‘Why, it’s Rupert Levin, who used to write leaderettes for the Star. He’s utterly dull and harmless, and lives at Brentwood.’

Basil was not in the least put out.

‘That,’ he said calmly, ‘is what you think.’

It was easy to dismiss Basil’s ‘inside knowledge’, as well as his county connections, as merely bogus. They had, often enough, it was true, a bogus air, and his heavily ironic mode of putting them across didn’t make them seem any more credible. I was prepared to write off most of his stories as so much blarney; but there remained a residue to which I had to give the benefit of the doubt . . .

He could, at times, be very circumstantial about his relationships with the aristocracy; and once or twice I happened to discover that the dark hints which he had dropped about such-and-such a person were substantially justified . . . It seemed probable that upon a slender basis of fact, he was building an immense superstructure of phantasy, in which, possibly, he partly believed himself. But it was impossible to tell, in any particular case, where fact ended and fiction began; and I don’t believe that Basil himself, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred could tell either.

I wasn’t interested in politics, and when Basil became political, I found it more difficult than usual to attend to his interminable monologues. His views on politics were, as one would have expected, coloured by his mania for conspiracy. He had a fund of disobliging stories about every single member of the Cabinet; half of them were in the pay of one foreign power or another; so-and-so’s recent departure on some industrial ‘Mission’ to Rumania was a mere cloak for private negotiations with a well-known international crook; Basil himself had first-hand information about somebody else’s visit to Kemal Ataturk . . .

‘Don’t look behind you,’ Basil would suddenly hiss, in tones which (to quote Firbank) would have piqued a stronger character than Mrs Lot’s, ‘don’t look now – but that man at the next table, I happen to know, has just arrived here from Berlin for the express purpose of negotiating with Sir Oswald Mosley . . .’

As to Basil’s own political views, it was easier to say what they were not than to make any more positive judgement. Indeed, this applied not only to Basil’s politics, but to his whole character. One could sum him up in negatives; but his positive qualities remained oddly unseizable. I had felt this at our first (adult) encounter; I continued to feel it for as long as I knew him.

As a soldier, he often declared, he had ‘no politics’; but this didn’t prevent him from talking about them. One gathered – in so far as one gathered anything definite at all – that he was anti-Socialist, anti-League of Nations and anti-Russian; he was also, by temperament, inclined to anti-Semitism. He would refer, with infinite relish, to some prominent Jew as ‘that ineffable Semite’, and he took a special pleasure in attributing to Jews all those ‘nameless’ vices of which, habitually, he accused everybody he didn’t like.

By implication, one gathered that he admired Mussolini and, even more so, Hitler, who had not yet, at that date, come to power . . . His admiration for Germany, indeed, was one of the few positive qualities about Basil which emerged. He knew Berlin well, and sometimes entertained us with his stories of its night-life.

‘Of course, in those days,’ he would add (and we gathered that he meant two or three years ago), ‘it was much more amusing. And moreover,’ he added, ‘I was rich beyond the dreams of avarice.’

This was one of his favourite phrases; he could never say of anybody that he was merely rich: it was always ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’ – with a long, ironic pause on ‘dreams’, accompanied by an equivocal, rather naughty twinkle of the eyes, as though these ‘dreams’ were fraught, for him, with the most unmentionable, the most ‘nameless’ of associations.

Basil often insisted that he was not rich nowadays. But he seemed to have plenty of money, and we assumed his ‘poverty’ to be merely relative. Occasionally he would declare that he was ‘reduced to the extremes of intelligence’, and would drink (and stand) nothing but halves of bitter; at other times, he would announce that he was rich (‘beyond the dreams’, etc.) and take us to the Carlton or the Berkeley.

I decided that Basil was a ‘character’, and as such worth cultivating: I had to excuse, in some way, my economic semi-dependence upon him. He bored me; but rather than sit at home, I would accept his hospitality and listen to his talk . . . Then, suddenly without warning, he disappeared; I didn’t see him for months.

‘What’s happened to that crashing bore with the moustache you used to go around with?’ people would ask.

I had to confess ignorance.

Then, one day, he turned up again in the Long Bar. I was with somebody else, and introduced him:

‘Captain Medlicott.’

‘Thank you for the courtesy-title,’ said Basil, ‘but in case you don’t know’ – he leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper – ‘in case you don’t know, I happen to have resigned my commission in His Majesty’s Army.’

Had Basil just succeeded in escaping from a penitentiary, he couldn’t have invested the circumstance with more sinister significance. Probably he had left the Army for the most ordinary reasons; but it would have been quite in keeping with Basil’s character to make a mystery of it.

‘One day,’ he promised, ‘I shall tell you the whole story.’

He never did; but one was encouraged to infer some vast and Machiavellian conspiracy.

Basil settled in London; and it soon became almost impossible to escape him. The only place I really felt safe was the Oxford and Cambridge Club, which was (according to his own account) one of the few clubs to which Basil didn’t belong; though it was noteworthy that he very seldom invited anybody to these clubs of his, except (and that only occasionally) to the In and Out . . . I didn’t, however, choose to slumber away my evenings among bishops and judges just for the sake of avoiding Basil. Hopefully, I would sally forth – to whatever bar or club I happened to be frequenting at the moment – and there, sure enough, I would find Basil.

It was my own fault, of course, for going to the sort of places I did – which happened to be the very places frequented by Basil. But there it was; Basil became a sort of inescapable fatality, an Ancient Mariner perpetually keeping me from the wedding feast.

He became, in fact, a nuisance. Over and over again I found myself missing some desirable introduction or rendezvous merely because I had reluctantly become involved, for the evening, with Basil. Sometimes I would be meeting so-and-so at some bar or other; our plans for the evening were made; we met; and then Basil would appear, stand us drinks, and (for this was what it amounted to) buy up our company for the rest of the evening.

He seemed to have few real friends: the bronzed, moustached hearties, when they occurred (and their appearances were irregular), were little more than drinking-partners. I discovered that Basil was extraordinarily lonely. He was a bachelor; and his contacts with his vaguely defined (if aristrocratic) family seemed few and far between. (I never, so long as I knew him, met a single one of Basil’s relations.)

He seemed, since he had left the Army, in some curious way diminished; he had lost some of his old confidence and panache; and the bitter-drinking occasions became more and more frequent . . . Ungratefully, when they occurred, I would make some flimsy excuse and leave him; Basil, I felt, was just bearable at Boulestin’s or the Kinde Dragon, but to have to endure his company undiluted, for a whole abstemious evening in some dull bar, was another matter altogether.

I continued, however, to meet him fairly regularly; I told myself that it was pity for his loneliness, but chiefly, I think, it was the mere inability to avoid him. Partly, also, it was a sense of guilt: on several occasions, he had made me small loans – a pound or two at a time: the whole amount wasn’t much more than five pounds. But five pounds for me was a big sum; I was chronically broke, and week after week I put off paying it back. Basil said nothing: but on our beer-drinking evenings, when he complained of his ‘indigence’, I felt a pin-pricking uneasiness, and hoped he had forgotten how much I owed him.

If leaving the Army had shortened the stature of Basil’s personality, it had also made him more difficult to explain. In the old days, when people asked who he was, one could say: ‘Oh, he’s just a queer Army officer,’ and leave it at that. But Basil, nowadays, though remaining impenetrably queer, was no longer an officer. I began to be somewhat embarrassed by his incongruity. He never seemed quite to fit in: among Army people he had the air of an actor playing (rather badly) a ‘military’ rôle; among real actors, or in Fitzrovia, his hearty, ‘Wodehouse’ side became overwhelmingly apparent. Was he, I wondered, aware of this? I could fancy, sometimes, that he rather enjoyed being incongruous; it gave him, perhaps, a spurious sense of his own importance.

Difficult to ‘explain’ to others, he remained, well though I now knew him, something of a mystery to myself. Was he, at bottom, just a ‘stupid’ soldier with intellectual pretensions? Or was he something more? I found him impossible to analyse; I liked to be able to ‘label’ people, and Basil, alone among my friends, obstinately refused to fit into any category.

Nor was the ‘mystery’ attaching to him confined, nowadays, to his personality: it extended to his background. He had lately, I gathered, acquired a peculiarly vague and intangible sort of ‘job’; but he never talked about it, and if directly questioned would become evasive. I never found out exactly what it was; perhaps I wasn’t sufficiently interested to make any very serious effort. I was snobbishly bored by people’s ‘jobs’ unless they happened to write, paint or compose; all the rest I lumped together as ‘business’ – including Basil’s.

On at least one occasion I actually went to his ‘office’: two rooms on the fourth floor in a street off Long Acre. The name of the firm was painted on the glass panel of the door; but for the life of me I can’t remember what it was. I have an impression that it was something very vague and comprehensive like ‘Pan-European Distributors Ltd’ or ‘International Exports Ltd’ . . . What Basil did there I had no idea; and cared less.

I found that an idea was growing up, among those of my friends who knew him, that Basil’s activities were in some way rather sinister. He began to be looked upon as a ‘Mystery Man’: perhaps he was engaged on some secret-service job, or perhaps he was himself what he was so fond of accusing other people of being: an ‘agent’ for some foreign power. Perhaps ‘Pan-European Distributors Ltd’ (or whatever it was called) was a mere cloak for some revolutionary organization . . .

The myth grew at last to fantastic proportions; the trouble was, everybody had a different version of it. People began to find Basil less boring; they would listen with increased attention when he hinted at conspiracies in high places. One version of the legend declared that Basil was no more than a plain, ordinary crook. I denied this, whenever possible; all the same, I was half-inclined to believe it myself. It was a kind of wishful thinking; I should have rather liked Basil to be a crook – or at any rate a ‘secret agent’; it would have been a further reason for cultivating him. I needed some such reason to explain my ‘friendship’ with him; moreover, I should have been quite pleased on my own account, for I still wanted, in my heart of hearts, to be able, as I had in childhood, to regard Basil as a ‘hero’.

II

For a long time I didn’t know where Basil lived. He would speak vaguely of his ‘digs’, but never mentioned the address. I quite imagined that he had, if not a house of his own, at least a luxurious flat. At last, one night when the bars and clubs had closed down and we hadn’t succeeded in being invited to (or gate-crashing) a late party, he invited me back to his ‘place’.

It proved to be a rather small bed-sitting-room in West Kensington.

Seeing my surprise, Basil launched himself into a long explanation: the room was just a pied-à-terre; soon he would take a proper flat. He was, he explained further, ‘ineffably indigent’ at the moment; soon, however, he would be ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’: proceedings against the mysterious brother-in-law were once again in full swing, and he expected soon, as he said, to be in a position to claim his ‘rightful patrimony’.

Meanwhile, his background seemed curiously incongruous. Basil was a big man, and the small room cramped him; it was almost, I felt, pathetic. On the shelves were the books I remembered from Dover – Company Training, A Shropshire Lad, Swann’s Way . . . Once he had revealed the secret of his ‘place’, he invited me back there frequently – usually in the small hours, after a party. There he would sit, wedged between the table and the wardrobe, drinking Pale Ale and playing the portable gramophone with a soft needle, and a dirty shirt stuffed into the horn. Mostly he played records of Douglas Byng or Ronald Frankau; but once surprised me by putting on L’Après-midi d’un Faune.

He was becoming, I thought, curiously subdued; he drank less, and even talked less; and though he wore the same suits – tight-waisted, rather ‘actor-ish’ – he began to look very slightly shabby. Sometimes he would be positively gloomy; and then, suddenly, he would resume all his old, bumptious gaiety.

Symptomatic of his return to cheerfulness was, as often as not, some new gloss upon the never-ending story of his Aunt Lizzie.

Basil’s Aunt Lizzie had long been a legend; she was, undoubtedly, Basil’s most successful ‘turn’. I always had a certain proprietary feeling about Basil, and I was pleased when, at a party, he showed up to advantage. Aunt Lizzie could always be relied on to raise a laugh, and whenever possible I would encourage him to relate her peculiar saga.

Whether Basil ever really had an Aunt Lizzie I don’t know; I am inclined to think she was the purest invention. Certainly even the least fantastic of Basil’s stories-about her must have been mythical. In his narration, he displayed considerable art: beginning with the fairly plausible and leading up gradually to the completely incredible. I would often watch him ‘doing’ his Aunt Lizzie turn for the benefit of some new acquaintance, or somebody, at least, who hadn’t heard it before. Basil proceeded cautiously, carefully observing his audience to see how much it could ‘take’: at the first signs of incredulity, he would soft-pedal his phantasy down to a more or less ‘realistic’ level; then, gradually, with the most casual manner in the world, and with much circumstantial detail, he would proceed to relate some new enormity more fabulous than any that had gone before . . .

Aunt Lizzie was for Basil a kind of busman’s holiday. She was a parody of all those other stories, only slightly less fantastic, which Basil related quite seriously, and expected people to believe. Perhaps he believed them himself; but Aunt Lizzie was a conscious outlet for his mythopoeic faculty: her exploits bubbled out of him in an inexhaustible stream: he scarcely ever repeated himself.

Aunt Lizzie, naturally, was ‘rich beyond the dreams of avarice’; her present age was ninety-two; in her young days she had been a member of the royal harem at Constantinople; later, in Edwardian times, she had been the mistress (‘but only for a week’) of a Very Important Person, from whom she had contracted what Basil referred to pompously as ‘a certain ignominious Neisserian infection’. She had afterwards been a leading suffragette, and had written to the Prime Minister a letter beginning ‘You abominable old bastard’; she had also chained herself to the Albert Memorial, and, when forcibly dislodged, had bitten a policeman in the neck. Having at last achieved her object, she stood for Parliament herself, and electrified her constituents by appearing at a meeting in a bathing-costume – in order, as she explained, to discourage prudishness among the working classes, and thereby to raise the falling birth-rate . . .

And so the story would go on: gathering momentum gradually until Basil approached the climax. The climax was always the same: Basil would pause, shake his head and say: ‘Yes, she’s an admirable woman: a dutiful wife, a valuable public servant an ornament to society. It’s unfortunate – most unfortunate – that she has just one failing . . .’

‘And what’s that?’ the audience would gasp.

Basil would pause again, a sinister glint coming into his eyes; then lean forward, and in sepulchral tones guaranteed to curdle the blood of his listeners, would mutter:

‘She devours her young.’

For some weeks Basil was away: part of the time, apparently, was spent in Berlin. When I saw him again, he seemed more than ever diminished; there was now a definitely seedy air about him, his drinking was reduced to a minimum, he fed at the cheapest restaurants. His tales of Aunt Lizzie became rarer and rarer and when he could be persuaded to give a new instalment, the portentous lady seemed, like her nephew, to have lost some of her vitality.

One night I persuaded Basil to come to a party to which I had been invited. The hostess was a woman called Renée – either I never knew, or have forgotten, her surname. She must have been well off; yet she tended to frequent Fitzrovia and the cheaper night-clubs, though there was nothing innately ‘Bohemian’ about her at all.

Her parties – staged in a large, rambling flat in Earls Court – enjoyed a certain temporary celebrity. Renée was anything but selective: she welcomed anybody, and provided her big, bleak rooms were crowded, she didn’t seem to mind in the least who filled them. There was always plenty to drink; she herself drank like a fish, and, but for a tendency to remove her clothes at unsuitable moments, held her liquor like a man.

Tonight’s party began badly: at midnight, the flat was still half-empty. The handful of ‘regulars’, whom one always found there, were ginning-up while the going was good. A gramophone rather depressingly discoursed songs by Yvonne Georges and Lucienne Boyer. Renée wandered round disconsolately, lamenting that she couldn’t think where all the boys had got to.

‘Eddie was bringing a whole crowd on from the Lantern,’ said somebody hopefully.

‘I saw Hew Dallas, and he promised to come along with Nigel.’

‘I know Bertie was coming –’

‘My dear, he was stinking – I saw him at the Fitzroy.’

‘Nina’s bound to turn up. She had some frightful BM creature in tow –’

‘Darling Nina, I think she’s heaven.’

‘How boring everyone is.’

Presently the rooms began to fill, but not, for the most part, with the people whom Renée had invited.

‘Beverley ’phoned me and said he was terribly sorry but he couldn’t make it.’

‘Eddie got involved with some negress . . .’

‘Derek and Douglas said they’d try and get round later –’

‘Elizabeth’s in bed with a guardsman – she rang up to tell me.’

A young man from the British Museum turned up with two inarticulate Burmese: one was called Ba Om, the other U Maw. A rather famous black crooner appeared, partly consoling Renée for the defection of other half-celebrities. People began to dance, and the party, after a poor beginning, began to get going.

I felt rather boringly sober for the first hour or so, and this made me critical; I stood near the door, feeling detached and Byronically superior, waiting for somebody amusing to turn up. As for Basil, he sat by himself on a sofa, sipping a small glass of beer, looking extremely bored and speaking to nobody. He aroused a certain amount of curiosity; there were whispered speculations in corners, hostile or hopeful according to the varying temperaments of the speakers:

‘Who’s that sinister creature on the sofa?’ ‘Who’s that cup of tea with the moustache?’ ‘My dear, yours rather than mine.’ ‘I was always eclectic’ . . .

The Fitzroy contingent arrived, noisy, thirsty and demonstrative, like a troupe of not-very-clever performing animals. They had roped in a very drunk Guards officer and a West African Negro, a law-student, both of whom proved extremely popular at first, though on more intimate acquaintance they turned out (so people said) to be somewhat less than adequate . . .

Posted near the bar, I helped myself to drink after drink and began to feel a warmer, more receptive mood stealing over me. I still felt detached, but my detachment was tinged with a vague, inclusive benevolence: I saw the dancing couples through a romantic haze. The whole party became an episode in my future magnum opus a chapter out of one of the later volumes, equivalent to Sodome et Gomorrhe in the Proustian canon . . . Once having invested the party with this specious glamour, I began, quietly, to enjoy myself; I saw myself as the detached, analytic observer, a merciless critic of society, a spectator of the Untergang des Abendlandes. The girls were all potential Albertines, the men Saint Loups . . . There was so-and-so, whom I wanted to meet; there was somebody else with whom (so I believed) I was in love: but I remained where I was, enjoying the sense of being a martyr to my art; to go and talk to people would break the spell . . . The truth was, of course, that I was far too timid: I needed a few more drinks before my societal instincts became operative.

I helped myself to more whisky.

After a time I noticed that Basil had disappeared. He couldn’t have gone home, for I had been standing near the door all the time, and must have seen him . . . The party was becoming perceptibly wilder. Couples began to detach themselves from the dancing crowd and retire to the bedrooms. Perhaps Basil had found a soul-mate, I thought; but it seemed highly improbable. Suddenly, in a lull between gramophone-records, there was an ear-splitting explosion. Everyone jumped; several screamed; Fitzrovia twittered.

The noise had come from one of the further rooms; suddenly apprehensive, I followed Renée down the corridor. I was convinced, quite unreasonably, that the noise had something to do with Basil . . . Renée flung open the door of a small bedroom: there, on the narrow bed, Basil lay with his body limp and distorted. His face was dead-white; a trickle of redness smeared his chin. One hand dangled over the side of the bed; and below the lifeless fingers, on the carpet, lay a small revolver.

For a moment Renée stood at the door, perfectly silent. Then she began to giggle. Horrified, I turned to her.

‘What –’ I began, and, to my complete astonishment, she burst out laughing. I felt suddenly sick: it was going to be no joke having a hysteric on my hands as well as a corpse . . .

Then I followed my hostess’s pointing finger. On the bedside table stood a bottle of red ink and a tin of talcum powder. A last-minute carelessness had ruined Basil’s gesture: for all his habitual mystery-mongering, he had proved, in practice, a bad criminal.

The revolver-shot, at any rate, had been perfectly genuine: he had fired it out of the window. His ‘act’ had not been planned in advance: he always, he told me, carried a revolver nowadays.

‘Frequenting as I do,’ he added, ‘the company of certain rather unscrupulous persons, I feel more than justified in so doing.’

Renée, fortunately, had been too tight to protest, with any force, against Basil’s attempt at Grand Guignol. The party continued much as before: I returned with Basil to his bed-sitting-room, and finished the night with Pale Ale, and Douglas Byng records on the muffled gramophone.

Basil seemed not in the least put-out at the failure of his gesture: probably he had not expected much from it, anyway. No doubt he realized, too, that had he shot himself in good earnest, scarcely anybody at Renée’s party would have cared a hoot – apart from the incidental inconvenience.

Basil once again disappeared for several weeks. And then, incredibly, I saw in The Times one morning the announcement of his engagement:

‘The enagement is announced between Captain Basil R. Medlicott, the Royal –shire Regiment, only son of the late Mr and Mrs Richard Medlicott, of Letcombe Regis, Berkshire, and Marjorie (“Micky”) Morrogh-Baker, eldest daughter of the late Colonel Edward Poulton-Entwhistle, CMG, BSO, JP, and of Mrs Edward Poulton-Entwhistle, of Greenways, Betchworth, Surrey.’

Had the Pope himself publicly relinquished the practice of celibacy, I couldn’t have been more astonished. Not the very faintest hint had Basil let fall about the approaching change in his life. I read the announcement over and over again, trying to persuade myself that it was another Basil Medlicott. But there were his initials, there was his regiment, in cold print.

I hoped, for his sake, that Mrs (‘Micky’) Morrogh-Baker was a wealthy widow; I had felt rather sorry, lately, for Basil’s increasing seediness, and I flatly disbelieved (as perhaps he himself did by now) in the ‘patrimony’ which he hoped to wrest from the iniquitous and orgiastic brother-in-law.

At last Basil turned up again. He had regained all his old bluff, soldierly confidence; he was wearing a new suit, and seemed to have plenty of money. His ‘Wodehouse’ side was uppermost: he called me ‘old boy’ and remained, till the end of the evening, breezily evasive about his marriage. Back in West Kensington, however, he became more confidential.

‘Micky,’ it seemed, was a delightful woman: he had known her for years, Dick Morrogh-Baker had been one of his brother officers. She was rich – ‘beyond the dreams of avarice,’ said Basil with an immense satisfaction. ‘A circumstance,’ he added with juicy relish, ‘which will no doubt provide a salutary shock for a certain intransigent and in every way regrettable relative of mine’ – by whom, of course, he meant his famous brother-in-law.

Yes, ‘Micky’ seemed in every way a desirable match. I was pleased that Basil had done so well for himself.

‘There’s just one circumstance, however, which I regard with some slight regret,’ Basil confessed, lowering his voice to the familiar conspiratorial tone.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, rather alarmed, and half-expecting to hear that his future wife ‘devoured her young’.

‘I’m extraordinarily fond of her,’ Basil went on, ‘but of course it is a circumstance for some regret – and one, moreover, which is At about this time I began to be convinced that I was suffering certain quarters – that the lady happens to be nearly twenty years my senior.’

IV

At about this time I began to be convinced that I was suffering from some obscure, insidious illness. It began with the vaguest of symptoms: a mere feeling of never being ‘quite well’. Minor upsets became magnified, for me, into threats of worse to follow. I had had a job in a publisher’s office, till recently, but had given it up. Increased leisure, gave me time to brood; I began to feel worse – with slight pains in the back and sides, headaches and a quickened pulse. My temperature in the evening went up to 99, sometimes higher. I couldn’t taste a cigarette properly-and I was ‘off my food’.

I sat in the garden at Blackheath feeling ill and frightened. The more anxious I became, the worse I felt: it was the usual vicious circle. I tried to write, but for almost the first time in my life I found myself incapable of putting pen to paper. My Proustian magnum opus seemed more remote than ever . . . Probably I should die, leaving it unwritten. Winter came, and my depression increased. Blackheath seemed shrouded, perpetually, in fog; it was bitterly cold; I longed with an obsessive passion for the sun. If only I could get abroad, to the South . . .

I went to the doctor; I went to several doctors: they all agreed that there was nothing much wrong, but that there was, indubitably, something not quite right. About what this ‘something’ was they seemed totally unable to agree . . . One put it down to the liver; another to a faulty appendix; yet another spoke darkly but inconclusively of Bacillus coli. (I thought of the ‘killitis’ of my childhood, and shivered: remembering the Toreador’s Song, the burst of sunlight after rain, the taste of albumen water.) None of my doctors advised any definite treatment: one recommended a light diet, the other told me to eat all I could; one forbade alcohol, another allowed it. I was advised to lead a strenuous life with plenty of exercise; to rest daily after lunch and go to bed early; to take calomel and mag. sulph.; to avoid all purgatives whatsoever.

This very vagueness on the doctors’ part fed my anxiety: I would have welcomed with relief a definite, uncompromising illness, however grave or unpleasant. But I continued merely to feel ‘not quite well’.

I remembered, with a sinking heart, the sinister, grown-up whispers of my childhood: ‘He’s not very strong . . . he needs a lot of rest . . .’ Was I really suffering from some deep constitutional weakness?

I was not. What I was suffering from, more than anything else, was retarded adolescence. I had failed to adapt myself to any settled way of life: I was unattached, I belonged nowhere. A succession of jobs – with booksellers or publishers – which I had obtained owing to prolonged parental pressure, had been the merest pretence: I only wanted to ‘write’. Now that I was at home, I was perfectly free to do so; but I wasn’t ‘well’ enough . . . Caught up in one vicious circle after another, I felt stealing upon me a kind of mental paralysis. I could analyse my state with a Proustian detachment; but I was incapable of doing anything about it.

Since about the age of seventeen I had regarded myself, with considerable satisfaction, as a sort of poète maudit; I was under a curse, I was an outcaste; only by subjecting myself to my fate could I hope ultimately to conquer. One day I would write a book: but this, I felt, could only be achieved by suffering. I duly suffered; though I preferred to do so, if possible, in ‘amusing’ surroundings . . .

I read biographies of Verlaine and Rimbaud with avidity. I should have liked to pack my bag and leave, that very day, for Abyssinia . . . But I couldn’t have raised the fare, anyway; besides, I didn’t feel ‘well’ enough . . . I contemplated a series of noble gestures: I would join the Army, become a tramp, a Communist, a farm-labourer . . . Needless to say, I did none of these things. Instead, I re-read Proust: feeling ill, and half-aware, all the time that my ‘illness’ was a mere alibi, a bolt-hole from a world where I was unhappy, badly adapted, frustrated.

Finally it was decided, by my long-suffering family, that I should go into the family business at Folkestone. It was hardly Abyssinia; but it did, for a time, jerk me out of my conviction that I was ‘ill’. I decided to turn hearty, bought a checked cloth cap, and even tried (unsuccessfully) to grow a moustache. I took up riding again; I went for long walks, dosed myself with hypophosphites, and read the Coles’s book on economics. After a few months of this hardening régime I really began to feel better. But the improvement in my health was accompanied by no corresponding increase in my business-ability. It was no good – I loathed ‘business’, and I always should. I was given the usual jobs appropriate to one ‘starting from the bottom’ – sorting invoices, entering up ledgers. I worked at first with an almost excessive conscientiousness; bored as I was, I felt obscurely that I was coming to grips with ‘reality’. Like Rimbaud, I had been cursed, ever since I ‘grew up’, with an obsessive desire ‘s’évader de la réalité’. Here, at any rate, surrounded by ledgers and the invoices of Messrs Brown, Gore & Welch, Messrs Bass, Ratcliffe and the rest, I felt, for a time, all the exhilaration of a psychological adventure: I had crossed the frontier, I was Beyond the Pleasure-Principle.

But I had taken, as it happened, a return-ticket . . .

I was not allowed, for long, to work undisturbed at my ledgers; I was encouraged to ‘have a look round’, go down to the cellars, ask questions; I was supposed, after all, to be ‘learning the business’. Initiative, ambition, ‘common sense’ – these were the qualities which I was expected to display; and they were, alas! the very qualities with which my fairy-godmother, at my christening, must have entirely forgotten to equip me . . .

I failed signally to develop these virtues; instead, when I began to feel better, I took to visiting Dover.

Nowadays, more than ever, Dover seemed an alien land, a town beyond the frontier. I was fixed, at last, it seemed, in a permanent ambience: the Edwardian pomposity of middle-class Folkstone. Dover provided an outlet: in the soldiers’ pubs, or down by the docks, I felt at home again. My craving for the sun persisted; and at Dover I could at least watch the afternoon boat