They found a taxi in the King’s Road. Christina Alberta did not belong to the taxi-ing class, and she was impressed by a sudden realization that Lambone had all these thousands of taxi-cabs upon the streets alert to do his bidding. The taxi dropped them according to instructions at the foot of the Victoria Memorial which gesticulates in front of Buckingham Palace, and they stood side by side surveying that building. “It looks much as usual,” said Lambone.
“You didn’t expect him to bend it?” said Christina Alberta.
“If he made a disturbance they’ve cleared him up very completely. That flag I suppose means G. R. is at home.... I wonder—what do we do next?”
He was rather at a loss. The emotional atmosphere of this wide-open place was quite different from the emotional atmosphere of his flat or the Lonsdale Mews. In the flat and in the Mews the appeal had been for him to act; the appeal here was not to make himself conspicuous. He was a man of decorous instincts. A car passed, a beautiful, big, shining Napier, and he thought the occupants looked at him as though they recognized him. Lots of people knew him nowadays and might recognize him. In his flat, in the studio at Lonsdale Mews, he could foregather with Christina Alberta without compunction; but now, in this very conspicuous place, this most conspicuous place, he had a momentary realization that he and she didn’t exactly match, he with his finished effect of being a man about town, a large, distinguished, mature man about town, and she with her air of excessive youthfulness, her very short skirts and her hat, like the calyptra of a black mushroom, pulled over her bobbed hair. People might think them an incongruous couple. People might wonder what had brought them together and what he was up to with her.
“I suppose we ought to ask some one,” she said.
“Who?”
“Oh!—one of those sentinels.”
“May one speak to the sentinels at the gate? Frankly, I’m afraid of those tremendous chaps in the busbies. I’d as soon speak to the Horse Guard in Whitehall. He’d probably look right over our heads and say nothing. And we should just dither away from beneath him. I couldn’t stand that....”
“But what are we to do?”
“Nothing rash.”