Chapter Twelve

The gap left by her absence was enormous. He had known her for three weeks and during that time the whole context of his life seemed to have changed, so that the future which had been first bright and then blank, now seemed to have meaning only if it included her. He had woken in the morning with the knowledge that he would see her at some time that day, hear her light voice, with a hint of self-mockery in it, arranging a meeting. It was apparent to him that he could not live without her, and that by some means he must make it possible for them to live together.

He attended the trial of the twenty people arrested at the Dance Rooms. The manager went to prison for three months, the drummer got six months for being in possession of dangerous drugs – he had a packet containing hemp in his jacket – and several other people got small fines. Roger Sennett, who pleaded guilty to attempting to resist arrest, was fined fifty pounds, a sentence which he received without a change of expression on his dark, heavy face.

On the following day he read in The Times, under the heading ‘Today’s Arrangements’: ‘Lord Moorhouse on “The Fellowship Circle and the Bond of Empire Unity,” at Propert Hall. 3 o’clock.’ He went after lunch to Propert Hall, a decaying piece of Victorian red brick just off the Gray’s Inn Road. There was an audience of about fifty people, some old and redly Blimpish, others young and with an eager scoutmasterly air. Two old ladies and a rather familiar-looking figure of military appearance whispered on the platform. A yellow-faced middle-aged man with a prominent Adam’s apple bobbed up and down urgently between platform and audience. Then Lord Moorhouse appeared.

It is often difficult to identify the reality of physical appearance with an original mental conception, and to Hunter, Lord Moorhouse came as a shock. He was not a modern Mr Barrett, large, fleshy and overbearing, but a mild, bright-eyed, birdlike, clean little old man, with very neat hands and feet. Could this be the man who had made what Anthea called a pass at her – a thing which she had never referred to again – and towards whom her feelings were so strangely ambivalent?

Introduced by the military figure, Brigadier Fanshawe, as a mastermind of industry, one of the most important cogs in the great wheel of Britain’s prosperity, Lord Moorhouse modestly insisted on his unimportance as an individual, and said that he came there to speak that day in his much more important capacity as Chairman of the Patriotic Fellowship Circle. In that capacity he wanted to tell them something about the vital link the Circle could be between…

Hunter put his head back and found his eyes closing. He was suddenly bored with the thing, and wondered what he had hoped to find out by coming there. For three-quarters of an hour he half-consciously listened to the bright bird voice mouthing platitudes, then to the baying of Brigadier Fanshawe. There was a paper collection, for which several fivers were offered with apparent spontaneity, and then a silver collection round the hall, made by the man with the Adam’s apple. Hunter dropped two shillings into the bag.

Afterwards he drank tea and ate Dundee cake and then, with the sense of an endless measure of time to kill, took a bus that dropped him near Cavendish Square, and walked through. When he was some twenty yards away from the steps, the door opened and two people came out. One was the man with the Adam’s apple. The other was Anthea. The man carried an umbrella with which he feebly tried to engage the attention of passing taxis. Anthea saw Hunter, must have seen him, on the pavement. It seemed to him that she hesitated, uncertain whether or not to greet him. Then the Adam’s apple man got a taxi and opened the door. She turned her back to Hunter, got into the taxi, and they drove away.