Chapter 2 Eccentricity
Eccentricity
“Did you serve?”
It was six years since the hostilities had ended and for most people who worked in the Festival Office, particularly the younger ones, of whom there were many, the war was a done thing, and so the casual question had startled Flynn this morning when he had been malingering at the tea trolley.
Given the mazy layout of the Festival Office in Savoy Court, it was easier for them to go and search for the tea trolley themselves than hope it would somehow find them.
Their office was in the basement and tended to be overlooked, and not just by the tea trolley.
“Serve?” Flynn repeated vaguely, his mind still on the tea and whether he should take a cup back for Evans, who often skipped elevenses. Evans’s habits tended to be modest, almost Lenten.
Flynn didn’t recognize his questioner. At a first, brief glance, all he caught was an austere profile.
He paid closer attention to the man’s expensively tailored three-piece suit and shoes that were polished to a military standard.
He looked the sort to have a batman, even in civilian life, although at the moment he was being attended to instead by the simpering tea lady, who was flattered by his commanding presence at her humble trolley.
The man’s sartorial style seemed out of place amongst the more raffish, modern looks sported by the young designers and architects who worked for the Festival.
They were bohemians, for the most part—beards and duffel coats and black polo necks for the men, and pencil skirts or dirndls and jaunty berets for the women.
The airy region of the empyreal realm itself was the first floor (known colloquially as “Upstairs” by the basement dwellers), from which the Festival ship was steered, and where the luminaries of the Presentation Panel met—the omnipotent gods who said yay or nay to everything that passed before them.
Flynn had the occasional sighting of them, planning and plotting at fever pitch.
The Festival was due to open in a handful of weeks and absolutely nothing looked as if it would be ready on time.
It wasn’t just that the exhibition site had been delayed (rain, mud, strikes, general animosity towards the project), but also that the design of every last ice-cream kiosk, attendant’s uniform and typeface had to be discussed and approved.
Flynn sometimes wondered about Gerald Barry’s ducks—had they been chosen yet?
“In the war,” the man elaborated, rather brusquely.
“Did you serve in the war? Were you in combat?” It seemed a rather personal question to ask a stranger over a tea trolley.
Was he a visitor, perhaps? They had a lot of visitors, all curious to know what was going on inside Savoy Court.
The office had for its close neighbours both the Savoy Theatre and the Savoy Hotel, an attractive location for those visitors.
If they had been in Ealing or Pinner, they would have been bothered by no one.
His inquisitor had unusually green eyes. Jade, Flynn thought, searching for the appropriate shade. “No, I didn’t serve,” he answered carefully.
“Ah,” the man said, raising an eyebrow—a small gesture that seemed to imply cowardice or incapacity on Flynn’s part. “They also serve who only stand and wait, eh?”
“Reserved occupation,” Flynn said. “On the Railway.” It was not entirely a lie. The capital letter was inaudible to his interlocutor and Flynn didn’t care to highlight it.
The man was not impressed, but Flynn was saved by the appearance of the Boy, who chided, “Now, now, Mr. Flynn, getting the teas is one of my jobs.” (It wasn’t really.) The Boy, who had a name—Terence, rarely used—had been purloined from the BBC, where Boys were abundant.
He was fourteen and full of appealing swagger.
He often adopted the manner of a motherly Cockney in a hammy play on the wireless.
It was a persona that must be based on his real-life mother, Flynn decided, as the Boy had no interest in plays.
Or books or poetry or art of any kind, even the cinema.
He was “sufficient unto himself,” Evans said.
The Boy’s mother, although none of them had met her, had a certain legendary status in the office—a cross between the Delphic oracle and Genghis Khan.
(According to the Boy, she had once put a man in hospital—method unspecified—for “looking the wrong way” at one of his sisters.)
Flynn’s interrogator retreated from the tea trolley and its ministrations. “What a handsome devil,” the tea lady sighed. “Those eyes.”
“Off you pop back to your office,” the Boy said to Flynn, “and I’ll see to your teas.
” He proceeded to clash cups and saucers and recklessly spoon sugar until the tea lady slapped his hand away and said, “There’ll be none left by the end of the week, if you go on like that.
” The Boy had no respect for rationing and balanced a generous allowance of biscuits in each saucer.
“You and Mr. Evans need feeding up,” he said.
The mother again, no doubt. “Cheeky little blighter,” the tea lady said.
Tea trolley and tea lady lumbered on their way and Flynn said to the Boy, “Do you know that man’s name? The one who was here just now?”
“Mr. Dangerfield,” the Boy said promptly. By the nature of his job (“general dogsbody”) he knew everyone in the building.
“Dangerfield?”
“He’s new,” the Boy expanded. “He’s an arse,” he added cheerfully.
“Come on, tea’s getting cold.” He insisted on carrying the tea, sloshing it in the saucers as he went so that the biscuits were soggy by the time the cup was on Flynn’s desk.
The Boy set off again to fetch “Mr. Badger” his tea.
“He’s not here,” Evans said. “He will be,” the Boy said.
“You can’t help but admire him,” Evans said as the Boy skipped out of the door. Evans seemed uncharacteristically cheerful, despite the sodden custard creams which, unusually, he had been looking forward to. “He has such joie de vivre.” Not something Evans could usually be accused of.
Apart from the Boy, who was constantly flitting about and had no desk to roost on—no fixed abode at all, in fact—there were three of them in the office: Flynn, Evans and Badger.
Badger’s real name was Alistair Badgley, but the soubriquet must have seemed inevitable from the day he stepped over the threshold of his prep-school nursery at the age of three.
Perhaps even before that, as no one called him Alistair, not even his mother.
He was the bonhomous clubbable sort, but was as tight-lipped about his own war as he was loyal to the Official Secrets Act, which he had signed long ago.
He came from money, in Norfolk, and there were titles close by in his hinterland (“the Badgleys of Badgley Hall,” like a children’s storybook).
He was rotund and affable, so perhaps his nickname was fitting, although Flynn and Evans were guessing at the affability or otherwise of badgers.
Unlike a badger, he dressed immaculately, sporting custom-made suits from Huntsman and handmade shoes from Lobb’s in St. James’s.
A gold fob chain was slung across his waistcoat, leading at the other end to a heavy pocket watch.
The watch had been handed down from his grandfather; the family crest was engraved on the back—two stags either side of a heraldic shield that bore the family maxim, Veritas et Fides.
Truth and Loyalty. The watch was much coveted by the Boy, although he couldn’t tell the time (Evans had tried and failed to teach him).
He was sometimes allowed to hold it, putting it to his ear like a seashell and listening in fascination to the steady tick of its heartbeat.
Evans had no nickname. He was not the type.
He was Welsh (Hywel), of a melancholy, even morbid disposition, and his surname was actually Evans-Jones.
The double-barrelled patronymic was not a sign of gentility (quite the opposite) but of his native country’s dearth of surnames.
In his own small village alone, there were seven Evans, and at some time in their history his forebears had appended the Jones so they could be more easily identified.
The Boy found it impossible to get his tongue around Evans’s full name.
It hardly mattered. This was not Wales. They had yet to come across another Evans in the Festival Office, and gradually they had all followed the Boy’s example and abandoned the Jones.
Before the war Evans had been a Methodist lay preacher, and he was still inclined to goodness, although his religion had been lost during the war on a merchantman in the Arctic convoys, somewhere in the Barents Sea between Hvalfjoreur and Arkhangelsk.
Evans had a wife and two daughters before the war, but now they lived in Bexhill and he lived in Bayswater.
The girls were in their early teens, and every few weeks he journeyed down to the coast and took them out for tea in a seafront café.
Afterwards they submitted to a listless walk along the shingle beach.
These daughters had no Welsh, a source of some bitterness to Evans, and yet he rarely, if ever, spoke the language himself, and any blasphemy that fell from his lips was entirely confined to the rugged Anglo-Saxon of the Merchant Navy.
Encouraged by their mother into disregarding him, the girls made no attempt to hide their boredom in his company.
Evans had once spent a week in an open lifeboat in the dark of a freezing Arctic winter, watching everyone around him die.
His lonely survival seemed to count for nothing with his family.
He had been to the end and somehow returned.
For some, there could be no real adjustment to that.