Chapter 3 Miss Ogilvie #2
“To talk about the bird boxes they put on the trees. The birds refuse to nest in them, apparently.” Seventy-nine mature trees had been imported on to the site.
“Why seventy-nine, not eighty?” Evans had asked.
The Festival was all about numbers. Nine hundred and sixty thousand bricks used in the construction.
Six thousand, six hundred tons of cement.
Two hundred and thirty standards of timber.
Three thousand, nine hundred and sixty tons of steel.
And so on, all feeding into Evans’s conviction that the Festival was an occult exercise in numerology, as was the Establishment in general.
The Royal Family themselves were all Freemasons, according to Evans, but then Evans was a dissenter, not to mention something of a paranoic.
—
“Starchy sort, isn’t she?” Badger said when Miss Ogilvie took her lunch hour. “Anyone want to come with me to Luigi’s?” Badger often ate in an Italian restaurant he favoured on the Strand. He called it a “caff,” as if that made him seem less of a Norfolk toff and more of a man of the people.
The offer was declined and the rest of them ate their sandwiches in the office, even the Boy, who usually roamed free at this hour of the day. They huddled furtively over their egg-and-cress and bloater paste to discuss the intruder in their lives.
“She’s very prim and proper,” the Boy said, almost admiringly. He turned to Evans and said, “Can I have a fag?”
“No. You’ve already pinched two off my desk this morning.
” Evans smoked Woodbines, “filthy things” in the Boy’s opinion, although that didn’t stop him pilfering them.
Not “stealing”—the word filled him with moral outrage.
Flynn kept a pack of Players in his desk drawer as a reserve for emergencies, and the Boy wouldn’t have dreamt of taking them.
Cigarettes left out in the open, however, were regarded as fair game.
Taking them was one of “The Rights of Man,” which was something he had heard Evans mention and which he had appropriated as his own philosophy (“The Rights of the Boy”).
There was clearly no room for another person in the office and yet within no time at all Miss Ogilvie had relieved Badger of his typewriter.
A one-fingered typist at best, he was happy to see it recruited by her.
She persuaded (or perhaps commanded) the commissionaires to find her a desk to put the typewriter on and to remove some of the “clutter,” as she termed it, shipping off most of the rejected Eccentricities to be dealt with by Major Trowbridge and Jeanette.
Badger refused to give up the rabbit and the Boy said that he intended to give the mechanical tortoise to Jeanette.
“In my—albeit limited—experience,” Evans advised, “women prefer to be courted with flowers.”
Denholm padded in and perched on the edge of Badger’s desk, so that the mechanical tortoise had to be rescued from his gammony buttocks by the Boy.
“How are you getting on with Miss Ogilvie?” Denholm said.
“She’s a hoot, isn’t she?” Before they could protest this description, Miss Ogilvie herself returned from lunch and hung up her hat and coat.
“Ah, Miss Ogilvie—how are you settling in?” Denholm asked.
“I was just about to tell the gang here about an idea I’ve had. ”
—
“A cake?”
“Not just any old cake. The ‘Festival Cake,’ ” Denholm said.
“There’s a women’s magazine that’s been giving away an embroidery pattern for a sampler or some such.
The Festival of Britain’s emblem in coloured wool.
Been a big success, I’m told. I thought that we could do the same thing with a cake recipe.
The popular press could carry it, as well as the magazines.
Housewives across the land could follow the recipe. Who doesn’t love cake?”
“Me,” Evans said.
“And street parties! Imagine the Festival Cake as the centrepiece of all those trestle tables. Jelly, bunting, people doing the hokey-pokey.”
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Evans muttered.
“Mr. Evans!” the Boy said, genuinely shocked by Evans’s departure from probity.
Both Evans and Flynn had learnt to swear excessively during the war, and both had worked hard to unlearn this skill in the peace.
Sometimes when they were alone together they released the torrents of blasphemy that had been damned up by decorum.
“And,” Denholm said, warming to the subject, “why not serve it in the cafés and restaurants on the exhibition site? There might even be a way of making money from it.” No one expected the Festival to make a profit from anything.
“Queen Victoria had her Victoria sponge cake and King George shall have his.”
“The George sponge?” the Boy puzzled.
“No, no, the Festival Cake. His Majesty could be served a slice after the opening ceremony.”
“I think he would love that,” Evans said.
“No need for sarcasm,” Denholm said.
“How are you going to choose this recipe?” Miss Ogilvie asked.
“A competition.”
“Open to everyone?”
“Well, no, I think we would be overwhelmed with entries. Look at the Poems.” He gave a little shudder.
“I was thinking professionals of some kind. Women. Like Marguerite Patten. She was very good in the war, wasn’t she?
Or, say, a home economist who works for Frigidaire or New World gas cookers.
In-store demonstrators. ‘Ideal Home Exhibition’ kind of thing, you know? ”
They all gazed at Denholm with interest. He seemed uncharacteristically knowledgeable on the subject.
“Talked to someone in John Lewis,” he said sheepishly.
“I have already set things in motion. A list of suitable women is being drawn up as we speak. I believe some of them are already busy practising their patriotic recipes.”
This discussion was put a stop to by the Boy announcing, “It’s three o’clock.
” The afternoon tea break in the office was a particularly sacred observance for the Boy (a credo inherited from his mother).
He would return from the trolley Upstairs with the tea things and hand round cups with the ritual solemnity of a geisha.
He might not have been able to read a clock, but his sense of the rhythms of the day was unerring.
How on earth had he managed at the BBC, where time was everything?
(“Just comes natural to me,” he shrugged. “Usually ’cos I’m hungry.”)
A plate of biscuits was handed round, and Miss Ogilvie unexpectedly sang—quite tunefully—“Everything stops for tea.” (“In my defence, I’m a church choir mistress.”)
“Oh, chocolate digestives—lovely,” Denholm said, annoying the Boy. (“He’s got his own biscuits, what does he want ours for?”) “Flynn?”
“Me? What? Cake isn’t really my bailiwick, Mr. Denholm.”
Denholm was steadfast. “I’m sure you will overcome every impediment that is put in your way,” he said, as though he were sending Flynn out on a mythic quest—finding a golden fleece or herding a field of hares rather than assembling a—
“Festival Cake competition sub-committee?”
“Exactly!”
“Let the best cake win,” Miss Ogilvie said. Flynn supposed she was being sarcastic, but she was hard to read. He suspected she would make a rather good poker player.
—
“Well, I’m off,” Badger said as the end of the day beckoned.
“Need to get to Herbert Liveries in Mortimer Street before they close. Offered to give the once-over to the uniforms for the Festival Hall staff. Apparently I’m known for my sartorial discernment.
Anyone care to accompany me? No point in asking you, Evans. ”
“Correct,” Evans said.
“I’ll come,” the Boy said.
“No, you won’t,” Evans said.
“Miss Ogilvie?”
“I am otherwise engaged, Mr. Badgley, but thank you for asking.”
“Flynn?”
“No, thanks.”
“Plans for this evening?” Badger asked pleasantly. Badger always had plans and found it strange that others didn’t.
“Not really.” In fact Flynn’s “plans” for the evening consisted of nothing more than getting behind his own front door and gratefully pouring the first whisky of the day. The second, actually, as he had woken up to one.
Flynn lived three floors up in Romilly Street, on the fringes of Soho.
Two (poorly) furnished rooms and a scullery with an Ascot water heater above the sink and a two-ring gas hob perched precariously on the wooden draining board.
A depressing gas fire in the sitting-room hearth hissed and spluttered but failed to heat the damp spring air.
Wealdstone with its many home comforts it was not.