Winston’s War
Michael Dobbs
From a bestselling novelist with an unrivalled insight into the workings of power comes a compelling new novel exploring Winston Churchill’s remarkable journey from the wilderness to No 10 Downing Street at the beginning of World War II.Saturday 1 October 1938. Two men meet. One is elderly, the other in his twenties. One will become the most revered man of his time, and the other known as the greatest of traitors.Winston Churchill met Guy Burgess at a moment when the world was about to explode. Now in is astonishing new novel, Michael Dobbs throws brilliant fresh light upon Churchill's relationship with the Soviet spy and the twenty months of conspiracy, chance and outright treachery that were to propel Churchill from outcast to messiah and change the course of history.
MICHAEL DOBBS
WINSTON’S WAR
Dedication (#u0225c12f-513c-5cbc-96f4-55f2f8de1f1c)
FOR SANDY AND EDNA SAUNDERS, AND EDNA DICKINSON.
Much loved aunts and uncle.
Epigraph (#u0225c12f-513c-5cbc-96f4-55f2f8de1f1c)
‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’
Neville Chamberlain, speaking about Czechoslovakia, hours before flying to Munich to negotiate the deal with Hitler that surrendered to Germany large parts of Czechoslovakia. The Czechs were not invited to the negotiations.
Contents
Cover (#u2a47262f-9b40-5b26-a20e-66db35697744)
Title Page (#ucde4f56c-4212-5f10-9dad-f30e6f4f5298)
Dedication (#u4655d4f7-998a-5677-8c75-11a0a5ed2920)
Epigraph (#u23aa36fe-0b61-526c-b6f9-10d692447934)
Part One: Blessed are the Peacemakers (#u5196fa96-2c2d-569d-976d-1a55dce2ee7f)
One (#ufce7e6ea-d1a2-5e5b-a20d-8e3e79a3338a)
Two (#u36ce3a20-0bba-5179-aaff-54e099f36f77)
Three (#u5896c882-aa21-5a8b-b300-f786deb39b17)
Four (#ue2d1a892-9595-58c3-b492-36f034e14236)
Five (#u54f23da8-7a81-52ab-8d6d-8b0c1f74f016)
Six (#u7bcf0760-f506-57c9-b8e7-c519a4a12317)
Seven (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Two: An End to Illusions (#litres_trial_promo)
Eight (#litres_trial_promo)
Nine (#litres_trial_promo)
Ten (#litres_trial_promo)
Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)
Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)
Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Part Three: The Limits of Loyalty (#litres_trial_promo)
Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)
Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)
Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Author’s Note (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
PART ONE Blessed are the Peacemakers (#ulink_ac8522ed-14b7-5817-8dc8-5b3465416f81)
ONE (#ulink_aa9b2cf7-6e96-56df-b2f2-4cc4cee49c25)
London, Saturday 1 October 1938.
A story has to start somewhere. Ours begins on a disgruntled day in autumn, in the unsuspecting year of 1938.
It could have begun a generation earlier, of course – in 1914, as the British Expeditionary Force whistled its way off to war with the Kaiser. Or 1918, when the few that were left dragged themselves back. There again, we could have started a century earlier when the hooves of the Emperor Napoleon’s cavalry turned the continent of Europe into a muddy dying place that stretched from the tumbling rivers and mountains of Spain to the gates of imperial Moscow. Extend the imagination just a little and we could go back – why, a thousand years, to that day on a hill overlooking the coast of Sussex when King Harold raised his eyes to view his enemy in full retreat, and got nothing but an arrow for his efforts – or another thousand years still, to the time of the great Julius and his invasion fleet as they landed a little further along the shore. We could go back to almost any day, in fact, and still it would be the same. Johnny Foreigner was a pain.
But this story starts on the Bayswater Road, and not with a King or an invading Emperor but an undersized figure named McFadden. He is a gentlemen’s barber, and a good one. One of the best, in fact. A man with a sharp eye for detail and a soft hand, a punctilious sort of fellow both by his nature and by his trade. Yet McFadden is late, which is unusual for him. And he shouldn’t be late, not today, for this is the day he has agreed to be married.
He has dressed as best he can in the circumstances, but it doesn’t quite work. The heavy wool jacket is meant for someone at least ten pounds lighter and the button at his belly keeps coming undone. The rose in his buttonhole also refuses to co-operate. It has slipped away from its pin and is threatening to jump. McFadden mutters a dark spell under his breath and makes running repairs, hastening on his way, which isn’t easy with his pronounced limp. We haven’t mentioned his limp, but he has something badly wrong with his hips, which are out of line, and when he hurries he has to swivel his entire body in order to propel his right leg forward. So McFadden never likes to hurry. This isn’t working out as he had hoped.
He had planned to make the journey by underground train from his home near the Piggeries in North Kensington to the register office at Caxton Hall, but when he turned up at the station he found nothing but an untidy notice pasted on the gates – ‘closed for urgent structural repairs’. A minor deception, so far as official pronouncements went. The whole of London knows the truth. The station roofs are being reinforced so they can be used as bomb shelters.
Ah, but there isn’t going to be any bombing.
They have the Prime Minister’s word on that. He has flown back from Munich just the day before to announce that he has brought with him ‘peace with honour, peace for our time’. Mac doesn’t believe him, of course. Another cholemi, goddamn lie. Ever since the mohel had turned him over on the kitchen table and assured him that it wouldn’t hurt, moments before cutting the end off his prick, he has known that the System always lies. (Not that he can remember anything about his circumcision, of course, but his elder brothers Yulek and Vovek never spared him the more gruesome details. He had screamed for hours afterwards.) Mac knows about lies. Lies have followed him like a shadow wherever he has gone and were usually there to greet him when he arrived – in Poland, in Germany, and particularly all those years in Russia. Now he is in England, and the only difference in Mac’s mind between Mr Neville Chamberlain and the psychopath Stalin is that the Englishman went to a proper school and has learned not to scratch his balls in public – although, come to think of it, Mac has never seen photographs of Stalin holding his own umbrella, there is that difference, too.
His leg is hurting like hell. It’s always giving him gyp – he can’t remember a time when the bloody thing wasn’t on fire – and the damper it gets the more it burns, deep inside, right to the marrow of the bone. So Mac decides to take a short cut across the park. Not one of his better decisions. The flat expanse of Hyde Park is usually serene and calm, but something has happened. Instead of green acres, Mac is greeted by a bubbling chaos of mud. Like Judgement Day. On all sides the earth has been torn open where workmen with pickaxes and mechanical shovels have hacked a chaotic maze of holes into the thick London clay. Trenches everywhere. ‘Air Raids – Public – For The Use Of’ – hah! These bloody holes can’t offer protection from the rain let alone from fat Goering’s bombs. They aren’t finished and already they’ve begun to fill with water, sullen and brown. Typical English idiocy. Treating war like a game of cricket. Something to be called off if it rains. Tzibeleh! They grow like onions, these English, with their heads stuck firmly in the earth.
The spoil from the newly dug graves is beginning to cling to Mac’s shoes and find its way onto the legs of his trousers, even though the trousers, like the jacket, are conspicuously short. That’s why they had been cheap, from the pawnbrokers on the Portobello. It’s his only suit. And the rose in its lapel is wobbling once more.
McFadden isn’t his real name, of course. Jewish boys born in Poland just before the turn of the century had names like Kleinman and Dubner and Goldberg. He’d been born in the small market town of Wadowice at the foot of the Carpathian mountains, in an airless upstairs room next to the women’s ritual bath-house and on a hot summer’s day that had hung heavy with the dust from the harvest. He was one of six children and had been nothing more obvious than a schoolboy who spent his spare evenings as a part-time tailor’s assistant, someone who was of no interest to anyone other than his parents, but that was before they had decided that they needed a new type of System in Europe and tore the old one apart. Mac had belonged to a small class of friends, eighteen in total, and every one of them had been swept up in the madness, conscripted, forced to fight for the Kaiser as part of Auffenberg’s Fourth Army. But the Fourth Army had lasted only weeks and Mac’s unit had been cut to pieces in front of the river town of Jaroslaw. Literally, cut to pieces. It was amazing how high a boy’s screams could rise more than a year after his voice had broken. But still Mac hadn’t escaped the System, for those few of his class who remained alive had been captured and questioned, then stood against a crumbling farmyard wall beside a filthy chicken coop and told they had a choice. The System was giving them a choice! Either they could fight for the Tsar or, if they preferred, they could be shot. Not much of a choice when you’re still a few months short of your seventeenth birthday. So for the remainder of that awful year they had fought for the Russians against their old German comrades until the Revolution had come to rescue them from the madness and at last Mac had been able to throw away his rifle. But by then only he and Moniek, the doctor’s son, were left. Still, they were alive, they felt special and they rejoiced. It was the last time Mac could remember being happy.
He had celebrated the peace along with all the other soldiers, until the Bolsheviks had discovered that he and Moniek weren’t Russian at all and so didn’t fit into the Brave New System and its world of miracles. They knew it was truly a world of miracles, not only because the guys with the boots and rifle butts told them so but because their rabbi had always taught them that miracles would be beyond their comprehension. And nothing made sense any more. It was important in this new world to be internationalists, they were told, but apparently it was more important still to be Russians. Which they weren’t. So the angels with the boots and the rifle butts placed them once more in the service of the System and sent them off to labour camps, the gulags – Kolyma, Knyazh-Pogost, Sretenka, Yertsovo, Pomozdino, Shchelya-Yur, Solikamsk. An endless world of little miracles, often at thirty degrees below, filled with angels who in the morning would scream instructions – ‘anyone unconscious come out now or be left behind to freeze!’ – and saints who refused to distinguish between the living and the dead. They were all expected to work. They were herded from camp to camp, crammed into a metal-sided Stolypin rail carriage with room for twelve but often stuffed with thirty or thirty-five for days and even weeks on end. Mac remembered one carriage so filled with prisoners that for three days his feet hadn’t touched the floor. He had remained suspended between earth and heaven, hovering on angel’s wings, fighting for every breath, until an inspection had allowed them to sort the dead from the slowly dying and lay them on the floor of the carriage so that those who were left could complete the journey standing on the bodies. Pleas to offload the corpses were received with nothing but a beating. The paperwork had said that the Stolypin had started its journey with so many bodies, so that’s how many it must finish with. The journey lasted fifteen days.
Another time he had been thrown into a carriage of women, mostly withered old veterans but one or two with flesh still clinging to their bodies and so closely crowded that he’d had a continuous if inevitably crude form of sex with one of the younger ones for the best part of a week. It was his first time. Oh, what a lot he owed to this new world of miracles.
And so it went on, and on, and on, half starved then half beaten to death until their existence had been entirely forgotten and their names and origins wiped from any record. Nothing but entries on a transit sheet. Then, around the year of 1920 – who could be sure, time meant nothing, only suffering and food had meaning – he and little Moniek had found themselves in the gulag by the sea. Camp No. 3, Fourth Compound, Solovetsky Islands. On the other side of the world above the Arctic Circle. Intended for three hundred but housing more than four and a half thousand. The camp had grown and grown – another miracle. Only the number of latrine buckets had remained the same.
And Mac remembers, relives it all, no matter how hard he tries to obliterate it from his mind.
Moniek has almost died of fever on the endless journey. Mac drags him semi-conscious and rambling from the prison ship that has taken them there from Archangel, but there is no respite. Within hours of arriving they are set to work on the new harbour. Moniek, feverish, rambling in his mind, has never seen the sea before. The gently swelling water seems to him to be the new world he has been dreaming of, peaceful, embracing, infinite. He gives a quiet hurrah of joy, then begins to stumble into the surf. He doesn’t seem to notice that it’s barely above freezing. Now he turns around, he’s looking back like a guilty child, but the guards are laughing and waving him on – fish bait, they shout, go drink the ocean dry – and ignore him as Moniek struggles away from the shoreline, until all that can be seen of him is the back of his dark head bobbing in the distant swell.
That’s when the guards decided to lay a few bets as to which of them could give little Moniek a proper parting. A difficult job in the swell, but the fifth bullet had taken off the top of Moniek’s head like a ripe gooseberry.
It’s strange what a persecuted mind will do, how it tries to protect itself. Mac would always remember Moniek, but when he had finally found his way out of the gulags and obtained passage on a ship bound for anywhere, he couldn’t remember his own name. It had gone. Somehow the System had swallowed it up, robbed him of his identity, left him as nothing more than a number. When the ship eventually docked at a place called Tilbury, the official of yet another mamzer System had demanded a name from him – didn’t seem to care which – so he had called himself McFadden, after the ship’s captain. A good, stout, non-Jewish name.
And it’s what he still calls himself all these years later. He has long ago learned that being Jewish in this world is an invitation to a beating, or worse – even here in London. It’s not so much that he has forgotten he is Jewish, simply that he’s put it behind him, like taking off an old coat. Things are so much easier that way.
Now there is to be a Mrs McFadden. She is a shiksa, not kosher, but pleasant enough, a widow several years older than he who has been left with her own modest ground-floor apartment in West Hampstead and a desire which borders on the desperate to be married once more. ‘It could be war at any moment,’ she says, ‘and by then it might be too late.’ She’s right. So Mac has agreed, not because he loves her but for no more solid reason than that he doesn’t want to disappoint her. Anyway, as she says, if war breaks out London will be bombed and gassed until nothing is left, so it doesn’t make any bloody difference.
But – miracle of miracles – there isn’t going to be a war!
Chamberlain has come back from his mission to Hitler waving a little bit of paper ‘which bears his name upon it as well as mine’ and which promises peace, all in exchange for a chunk of an unfamiliar, faraway land which belongs to someone else. The world has gone quite mad. They believe Hitler. But Mac knows better. He knows dictators, knows the System, knows that the only signature you can trust is the signature they put on a death warrant or transportation order. He sighs. His leg feels as if it’s burning to the bone and the mud beneath his feet is now clinging, treacherous. He stoops to grab a sheet of wind-thrown newspaper to wipe the mess from his shoes. The page carries a huge photograph of Chamberlain back from his dealings in Munich and standing triumphant alongside the King and Queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace. Everything is floodlit, like a huge stage, and the crowd below is almost hysterical with relief and gratitude. Mac scrapes the mud from his feet and wonders if they are celebrating in Prague, too.
But maybe they are right. Perhaps there isn’t going to be a war – in which case he and Mrs McFadden will most certainly repent their marital rashness at leisure. But his nose tells him that war can’t be far off, he can smell it, in which case – what’s the point? Of hurrying? Of marriage? Of anything?
In the corner of the park he can see the crew of an anti-aircraft gun at their training. They seem to be making a hash of it, judging by the exasperated voice of their instructor. It’s rumoured there are fewer than a hundred of these guns to defend the entire capital – no wonder they’re praying there isn’t going to be a war. But Mac has long since lost any belief in a god. The rain has started again and the mud is back on his shoes, the damp worming its way through the welts. He pushes his aching body forward once more, head bowed, like the slave he once was. As he does so the flower in his buttonhole finally makes its escape and drops back to earth. ‘Pshakrev!’ He curses and throws away the soiled newspaper in disgust.
Then he turns and retraces his footsteps back home.
Chartwell, Kent.
It was the season of decay and the leaves of the chestnuts that stood guarding the Weald of Kent were beginning to curl at the edges and turn brown. The young man had found the drive down from London exhilarating. His open-top MG had nearly eighty brake horsepower – not the biggest machine on the road, but he was able to stretch it on the empty weekend roads and he had topped eighty-five past Biggin Hill. The occasional shower of rain had only added to his pleasure, if not to his elegance, but he had never placed much store on elegance. Although he was a radio producer for the BBC he was more likely to give the impression of being a garage mechanic caught in the middle of an oil change, and if others occasionally looked at him askance it only served to add to the risks of life. He enjoyed taking risks. Or perhaps he had something inside him that required him to take risks, like others needed to take drink. Like the Great Man.
As he turned off the road into the short drive that led to the front of the house he found himself scratched by a sense of disappointment. He had imagined a residence that sang of the Great Man’s eminence and aristocratic origins, but all he found was a sombre Victorian frontage standing in shadow on the side of a hill, squeezed tight up against a bank of rhododendron bushes that, so long after their season of flowering, were dark and sullen. The front aspect of the house was mean and more than a little dull. He hated dullness. Christ, the Victorians had spawned so many great architects – Pugin, Barry, Sloane – but this one seemed to have failed his inspiration exams and been sent into exile in Kent. The BBC man pulled at the bell by the front door and was answered by a forlorn echo. He pulled again. Nothing. Perhaps the trip had been a waste of time. Distractedly he walked around the side of the house and only then did he begin to understand why the Great Man loved this spot so, for if England had a heart it was surely here. The views seemed to tug at the soul. The house was built into the side of the Weald and before him tumbled thousands of acres of trees over a countryside that was dressed in the green-gold colours of autumn, stretching away towards Crockham Hill and disappearing into the mists that clung to the south coast some thirty miles beyond. The ground fell away sharply from the back of the house, and below were stream-fed lakes on which swam black swans and where trout rose to ruffle the surface. There were also several outhouses, a substantial walled garden and cottages built of red brick. Beside one of these cottages he could see two figures at work – perhaps he hadn’t wasted his time after all. He began to make his way down the steep pathway, slippery in its covering of recent rain, and as he approached he could see that one of the men was a young worker. The other figure was disguised in a thick overcoat and hat, yet the curve of the back was unmistakable, as were the shoulders, hunched like a prizefighter’s. There was also a haze of cigar smoke.
‘Hello!’ the man from the BBC called from a distance.
Winston Spencer Churchill, a man who had filled the offices of Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and First Lord of the Admiralty and who had served his country as soldier, statesman and historian, turned from his labours. He had a trowel in one hand and a brick in the other. ‘What do you want?’ he demanded, with no pretence at goodwill. The mouth was clenched tightly around the cigar, giving his chin a stubborn look.
‘My name is Burgess, sir.’
‘So?’
‘I telephoned …’
The Great Man scowled, trying to recall. ‘You can see I’m busy,’ he snapped. ‘The world has decided to destroy itself, so I am building a wall.’
Burgess tried to follow the politician’s logic. Perhaps it was a symbolic act of defiance, or nothing more than an outstanding sulk. This wasn’t quite the greeting he had expected, or required. ‘Guy Burgess,’ the young man repeated. ‘From the BBC.’
Churchill’s eyes were swollen and sleepless, red with anxiety. They travelled across the unexpected visitor, taking in the unruly hair, the crumpled suit, the sorely bitten fingernails. ‘You don’t look much like the BBC.’
Burgess returned the stare. The old man was wearing an ancient and much-soiled overcoat whose middle button had been ripped away. His homburg looked as if it had just taken part in the Eton wall game and the boots were covered with splashes of cement. ‘You don’t look much like a great politician, either,’ he replied bluntly.
The cigar twisted between the lips as the Great Man sized up this impudent intruder. Then he threw the trowel to one side. ‘Perhaps we had better discuss our mutual lack of authenticity inside.’
Churchill led the way back up to the house, stomping impatiently but with remarkable vigour for a man of his age, his balding head bent forward like a battering ram. He threw off his outer garments to reveal a blue boiler suit which strained beneath the thickening waist, then led Burgess up to a study on the first floor. More architectural disappointment. The room was intended to be impressive with a vaulted timber ceiling in the manner of a mediaeval hall, but Burgess found it unconvincing. And isn’t that what they said about Churchill – pretentious, posturing, and unconvincing? Yet the windows offered still more magnificent views across the Weald. From here Churchill could see far beyond the gaze of almost any man in England. Some said that about him, too.
‘Whisky?’ Churchill didn’t wait for a reply before pouring.
Burgess glanced at his watch. It was barely eleven.
‘You wanted me to perform on some radio programme of yours, is that it?’ Churchill growled, splashing large amounts of soda into two crystal glasses.
‘Yes, sir. It’s called The Week in Westminster.’ Burgess was waved into one of the wing chairs near the fireplace. Logs were glowing in the grate.
‘Without fear of contradiction I can tell you, young man, there’s not the slightest damned point.’
‘Why?’
‘Because –’ Churchill refused to sit but paced impatiently on the other side of the fireplace, stabbing his cigar angrily in the younger man’s direction – ‘you represent the BBC and you have plotted and intrigued to keep me off the airwaves ever since I upset you over India and the Abdication …’
‘Not me, sir,’ Burgess protested, but the other man had no intention of pausing to take prisoners.
‘ … but most significantly because our Prime Minister …’ – the cigar was trembling, the voice seeming to prickle in despair – ‘I hesitate to speak so. The families of Mr Chamberlain and I go back a very long way in politics. His father Joseph was a great statesman, his brother Austen, too. Friends of my own father.’ The voice betrayed a sudden catch. Ah, the sins of the father … At Cambridge Burgess had been a brilliant historian and needed no reminding of Churchill’s extraordinary father, Lord Randolph – the most prodigious and enticing of men, widely favoured as the next Prime Minister, yet who had destroyed himself at the age of thirty-seven by storming out of the Cabinet and into the quicksand of exile, never being allowed to return. He had died suffocated by sorrows, although his doctors diagnosed syphilis. He was regarded as unsound. So was his son. It was an awesome and uncomfortable inheritance.
‘Our Prime Minister lays claim to leading the greatest empire on earth, Burgess, yet he has returned from his meeting with that odious Austrian upstart waving his umbrella and clutching in his hand an agreement that drenches this country in shame.’ As he slipped into the grip of his emotions the characteristic sibilance in Churchill’s voice – the result of a defect in his palate – became more pronounced. His words seemed to fly around the room in agitation looking for somewhere to perch. ‘I despair. I feel cast into darkness, yet there is nothing I can do. I am an old man.’
‘Not as old as Chamberlain.’ Burgess had meant to encourage, but already he was discovering how difficult it was to interrupt the Churchillian flow.
‘Hitler will give us war whether we want it or not. I have done all I can to warn of the perils, but no one listens. Look!’ He grabbed a pile of newspapers from his desk. ‘They call themselves a free press, but they haven’t a free thought amongst them. Chamberlain controls them, you know, all but writes the editorials for them.’ He threw the newspapers into the corner where they subsided like startled chickens. ‘What did The Times say this morning? I think I can recall them, words that burn into my heart. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come home adorned with nobler laurels than Mr Chamberlain from Munich yesterday…”.’ Churchill seemed incapable of continuing with the quotation, shaking his head. ‘He has sacrificed not only little Czechoslovakia, but also our honour.’
‘Hitler’s only got the German-speaking bits of Czechoslovakia.’
Churchill turned on Burgess with fury. ‘He has got everything he wanted. He demanded to feast upon a free and democratic country, and instead of resisting we have offered to carve it up for him course by course. Some today, the rest tomorrow. It won’t even give him indigestion. You know the Czechs had thirty divisions of fine fighting men? Thirty divisions – imagine! Protected behind great bastions of concrete and steel. Enough to give Hitler endless agonies, but instead of fighting they are reduced to raising their frontier posts and waving the Wehrmacht through. The Nazis have been able to occupy half of Czechoslovakia with nothing more threatening than a marching band.’
The cigar had gone out, exhausted, but Churchill seemed not to have noticed. He was standing by the window, looking out over his beloved countryside towards the Channel and the turbulent continent that lay beyond. ‘I love this spot. It was once so quiet, so peaceful here, Burgess, yet now there is nothing but the howling of wolves from every corner of Europe. They are growing louder, more insistent, yet there is nothing I can do about it. I am alone.’ The old man sank into silence, his body seeming to deflate as Burgess watched. The shoulders that had belonged to a prizefighter now seemed merely hunched and cowering before the blow that was to come.
‘Mr Churchill, you are not alone. There are many of us who share your fears.’
‘Are there? Are there truly?’ Churchill turned. ‘Not according to those harlots who infest Fleet Street.’ He lashed out with his foot at the pile of newspapers.
It was odd, Burgess thought, for a politician like Churchill who took the shilling of Fleet Street as regularly as anyone in the land to describe them as harlots. Odd, but not incorrect.
‘What can I do? I have no armies to command, no powers to turn against the enemy.’
‘You have a voice.’
‘One voice lost in the midst of the storm.’
‘When a man is drowning even one voice can represent hope. Encourage him not to give up, to continue the struggle. And you have the most eloquent voice of our time, Mr Churchill.’
‘No one listens.’ The head had dropped.
‘Fine,’ Burgess spat, ‘give up if you want to, but you may just as well fall in behind Chamberlain and start practising the bloody goose-step. That’s not good enough for me. I’m only twenty-seven and if there’s war then I’ll be one of the first sent out to get my bollocks shot away while the old men sit around their fires and pretend that this god-awful war was really someone else’s fault. Just like they did last time.’ He paused, not bothering to hide the contempt in his voice. ‘So how old are you, Mr Churchill?’
Churchill’s eyes were ablaze, ignited by the insolence. It took many moments of inner turmoil before he found himself able to reply. ‘I’m sixty-three, Mr Burgess. But my dear wife often remarks that I am remarkably immature for my age. Would you by any chance have time for lunch?’
They lunched in the dining room at the circular oak table. Churchill muttered apologies – his wife was away in France and there was only one house servant on duty; they would have to make do with cold cuts. They reinforced themselves with a second large whisky and a bottle of claret. Burgess found the atmosphere inside the house stretched, almost painfully quiet. The world outside was on the verge of Armageddon yet at Chartwell time seemed to be standing still. There was no insistent jangling of the telephone, no scribes rushing back and forth with messages and documents of state, no grand visitors at the door requesting an urgent audience, nothing but two lonely men, one old, the other young, both crumpled.
‘You see, Burgess, the greatest threats to our island have always arisen in Europe. Our Empire spans the globe, we have helped civilize half the world, yet every time we embark upon an adventure on the continent, instead of grasping glory we end up covered in regret.’ Churchill, who was carving, slapped a thick chunk of ham onto his guest’s plate. ‘At the time, of course, it always seems so different. Europe is like a fine broad stairway of hope, but after a bit the carpet comes to an end. A little further on we discover only flagstones, and a little further on still these break beneath our feet. Now they have crumbled completely and we are supported by nothing more substantial than Mr Chamberlain’s aspirations.’
‘But we have friends in Europe. Friends who still have great armies.’
‘Like the Poles? They have very fine cavalry, Burgess, and as you may know I have a particular love of cavalry. Why, I myself had a part in the last great cavalry charge ever made by the British Army. At Omdurman. Oh, that was a splendid piece. But there we faced an opponent armed with spears, not artillery and machine guns.’
‘I was thinking more of the French.’
‘You forget! The surrender at Munich was signed not only by Chamberlain but also by Daladier.’ He slurped vigorously at his glass of claret. Burgess followed him. It was a fine vintage, better than any Burgess could afford. A little of it dribbled from the glass onto the front of Churchill’s boiler suit, which Burgess noted bore the stains of similar encounters. Churchill was not elegant when he ate. There was too much energy bottled up within him, too much impatience to give much heed to manners. ‘The French have vast armies,’ he continued, ‘but that’s been true since the time of Napoleon, and yet they have gone down to one miserable defeat after another, as if the habit of losing has become an infection.’
‘Do you discount Russia?’
‘Ah, the Bolshevists! How I hate them. They are butchers.’ A forkful of ham waved in Burgess’s direction. ‘But I dare not discount them. They exist and by God they put the fear of damnation into all those around them, Hitler and his Huns, too. Stalin’s capacity for slaughter knows no bounds, but he’s been too busy slaughtering his own to have time or temper for turning against Berlin.’
‘They could never co-exist, Russia and the Fascists.’
‘Perhaps you are right. Maybe Russia is the answer, but if so it only shows us the terrible nature of the questions we are facing.’ Suddenly Churchill’s eyes darted across the table like arrows. ‘You one of those Communistic types, Burgess? I hear there’s a whole nest of ’em inside the BBC.’
‘At Cambridge, like so many others. There seemed no other choice if one wanted to stand up to Fascism. But that was a long time ago. People change. I seem to think you were still a member of the Liberal Party in those days.’
‘No. I had switched back to the Conservative cause by then. But I take your point.’
‘There is nothing worse than a fixed mind and closed eyes. While I was up at Trinity our esteemed Mr Chamberlain came as the guest of honour to our Founder’s Feast. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer then, of course, and we put on the full works – college silver, six courses, including the fatted calf. He was exceedingly reassuring. As the port circulated he told us that we need not worry, there was no hunger about, not even amongst the unemployed. Those were his exact words – not even amongst the unemployed. You’ll remember the times. Two million in the dole queues and hunger marches the length of the nation. Yet Chamberlain couldn’t see them. I almost threw up.’
‘Yet you didn’t. You look like a man with a strong stomach.’ Churchill almost smiled, recognizing a man whose capacity in those quarters might even be a match for his own.
‘No, I didn’t throw up. Instead I stood up. Started shouting. Called him an ignorant provincial ironmonger. The dining hall at Trinity has an amazing echo. Caused one hell of a scene.’
‘Ah, but now the crowd gathers to cheer him.’
‘Should’ve been a lynch mob!’
They had both consumed too much claret for subtle jibes and there was no hiding the vehemence of the younger man’s words. Churchill remained silent for a moment, staring intently, and Burgess thought he might have gone too far.
‘We have much in common, Burgess, you and I.’
When next the younger man spoke, his voice betrayed a tremble, not of sycophancy but of a passion that sprang from deep within. ‘I fear for my country, and I fear for the entire civilized world. There is nothing I wouldn’t do to stop the spread of Fascism. And with all my heart I can tell you, sir, that at a time such as this there is no one in whose company I would rather be.’
Churchill’s voice crumpled with emotion. ‘Then, as you say, I am not alone.’
He was up from the table now, a fresh cigar between his lips, and gazing out through the windows that stretched from floor to ceiling.
‘I had always thought I should retire here, Burgess. Spend my final days gazing out over these fields.’
‘I hope you shall. When the time comes.’
‘Whenever the time comes, I fear it will not be here.’ Churchill sounded as if he were saying goodbye to an old friend. ‘It seems that Clemmie and I shall have to leave.’
‘For safety?’ It didn’t take a military genius to recognize that Chartwell sat directly beneath the bombing path to London.
Churchill shook his head sadly. ‘It is one of the many ironies littering my life that it is the very lack of war that may force me to leave my home, Burgess. It’s no state secret that I have been neglecting my financial affairs in recent times – I have been devoting myself to politics, even though politics have so steadfastly declined to devote themselves to me. The vast majority of my income is generated by my writings, but the books and articles that should have been written have remained locked up in my mind.’
‘But you said the lack of war …’
‘A few months ago I was forced to place Chartwell up for sale. It almost broke my heart. I have created so much of it with my own bare hands, I love it without reservation. But as I despaired, another policy presented itself to me. If war were to break out in Europe, the value of everything in this corner of the world would be crushed, while investments in America would rise to ever greater heights. The New World refreshing the Old. It’s a policy that appeals to me; as you probably know my mother was American.’ Churchill’s mother, Jennie, had been a New Yorker who pursued life with a remarkable vitality that had encompassed three husbands and a multitude of more dubious liaisons. The first of her husbands had been Churchill’s father, who had been a classic example of ducal degeneracy, and they had both neglected their son as sorely as they neglected each other, yet Churchill clung to the wreckage of their reputations like a man adrift. He was at a side table now, pouring substantial cognacs. ‘So I took Chartwell off the market and, in the expectation of war, invested every penny I could raise in short-term stocks on Wall Street. I should by now be sitting on a small fortune.’
‘But Chamberlain comes crawling back from Munich …’
‘An umbrella torn to pieces by the storm. We seem destined to cross each other, Chamberlain and I. He beat me for the leadership of our party, then ignored my claim to office in his Government. He has tried to isolate me, now he may succeed in crushing me.’
‘Because there is to be no war.’
‘Not soon enough for my investments.’
‘What will you do?’
The lower lip jutted forward. ‘Comfort myself in the knowledge that he is wrong, and that in the end I shall be proven right. And hope I may still be alive when that happens. Try to find consolation in the thought that – in war – buildings such as this have a value no greater than the pile of rubble they leave behind.’ There was an unmistakable dampness in the pale blue eyes.
‘We can always rebuild bricks and mortar, Mr Churchill, but we can’t replace your stubbornness and your eloquence.’
‘Words, words, words – when we need armies. Weaponry!’
‘Mr Churchill, at the moment your eloquence may be the only weapons we’ve got. You have to go on.’
‘One man against the world?’ He shook his head. ‘Here I am, an old man, out of office for a decade.’
‘But with a pride in freedom and a belief in the majesty of a man’s right to choose that is the measure of any man I’ve ever met.’ Burgess began to beat his chest. ‘Mr Churchill, my passion is as deep as yours, but I don’t have your powers. No one does. You give up and you’ll leave our sky without its pole star. You must carry on. Your country expects it, demands it. And I know you will listen to them. The Churchills always have.’
The dampness in the old man’s eyes now bordered on tears and he turned to gaze out at his beloved Kent countryside. Burgess was at his side, pointing. ‘These fields, these blessed fields – a distant corner of the bloody German Reich? Never!’
The old man stood staring for a while, then turned slowly towards his companion. ‘It would seem that I cannot give up. You will not let me. And I have come too far to turn back. You are a persuasive man, Burgess – why, you remind me a lot of myself when I was young. Although I think I could afford rather better suits. So …’ – the eyes were alight once more – ‘I shall do as you insist. I shall continue to speak out. After all, I have nothing to lose. And, as you can see, I am too old to learn the goose-step!’ He dispatched the cognac in one draught. ‘But now I must sleep. I have slept very badly in recent days, and not at all last night.’ Churchill held the other man’s hand. ‘You found me at my lowest ebb, Burgess. I had descended into darkness. You have helped restore me. Words will never be able to embrace my gratitude.’ He was propelling Burgess rapidly in the direction of the door. ‘So much to do, so little time to do it. And for that I shall need my strength.’
When they reached the hallway Churchill suddenly stopped as though some important memory had tumbled into his mind. ‘Pray, sign the visitors’ book and wait here for a moment,’ he instructed, before scuttling off. He returned bearing another book. ‘I have been idle, but my son Randolph has not. He is about your age, Burgess, and has recently published a volume of my speeches, Arms and the Covenant. Here.’
He took the pen from Burgess’s hand and began to inscribe on the flyleaf of the book: ‘To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments.’ He dated the inscription, September 1938.
‘Read. Enjoy. And if ever you should need me, Burgess, send me this book. I shall remember our conversation, and the debt I owe you.’
They parted, the Great Man and the Arch-Manipulator. It was only later that Churchill read the message left by his guest in the visitors’ book.
‘From a fellow traveller, belligerent, bibulous – and broke.’
It was written on a page that, many years later, would be torn from the book and destroyed.
The weather forecast had been discouraging. It had also proved to be entirely accurate, and the young telephonist scurried to work trying her best to shield her new perm from the elements. She had accepted a date for the following day with a dark-eyed travelling glove salesman from Manchester named Norman, and although she knew their relationship could be measured in little more than moments and plumbed the depths of folly, still she wanted to look her best. She arrived in time before her duty started to repair the storm damage and smoke half a cigarette, carefully replacing the unused portion in its packet.
The exchange room where she worked was gloomy, the overhead lighting meagre and inadequate for its task. She settled onto her high-backed stool and confronted the array of switches that were set out with military precision on the board in front of her. At chin-level were posted the Instructions of the Day, printed on a small card. From all sides came the quiet female chatter of operators handling enquiries and connecting calls. It proved to be a busy night at the exchange with much of the country intent on sharing the hard-won pleasures of peace. She listened in on many of the trunk calls in order to ensure that the connection remained clear, at times feeling tempted to join in, to celebrate with them, even to tell them about her Norman. Thoughts of Norman made the night drag. His hands were elegant and remarkably soft, just like a glove salesman’s should be, and she wanted it to be tomorrow already.
When the call came up on her board, she knew precisely what to do. The Instructions about this number, Westerham 4433, were clear. She turned to attract the attention of her supervisor, who was sitting at her cubicle in the middle of the exchange floor and who responded with a nod. The supervisor, several years older than any other of the girls on the floor, inserted a plug in her own board and re-routed the call through the Observation Room.
The Observation Room was small, almost sepulchral, without the background chatter of the main exchange. In it sat another young female operator with headphones on, recording tape machine at the ready, and pencil in hand. As the call was connected she noted both the time and the number on her Observation Sheet, and as the voices poured out she began her task of taking down in shorthand every word of the conversation.
It wasn’t difficult to tell the difference between the two men’s voices. One was ordinary, just a voice in the babble.
The other was quite unmistakable. Sonorous. Distinctively sibilant.
She began scribbling till her fingers ached.
TWO (#ulink_c672201b-da8b-5ff8-a9d5-cfaf40691758)
Alfred Duff Cooper, PC, DSO, MP and many other bits and bobs, was a man of prodigious appetites. He couldn’t spend a week without women – many of them – including his beautiful and sophisticated wife, Diana. As a species he found them irritating, yet individually they were irresistible. Neither did he seem able to live without the encouragement of alcohol, although in this he was far from unique within the clubs and corridors of the powerful. He was also a man of considerable intellectual capacity, having written an acclaimed biography of Talleyrand and another of Field Marshal Haig even while he was undertaking his duties as a senior member of the Cabinet. But above all else his appetite was for politics, a game that had brought fame, high office and many beautiful women to his doorstep. Yet, for ‘Duffie’, politics were to prove the most faithless mistress of them all.
‘A trim and a shave, if you will, McFadden. And take your time. I have to look my best.’
‘An important engagement, sir?’
‘With the executioner’s axe.’
‘Certainly, sir,’ Mac replied, displaying as much emotion as if he had been asked to put out the empty milk bottles.
The politician had walked the fifteen minutes from his office in the Admiralty to Trumper’s, the finest gentlemen’s barbers in the country, which stood on Mayfair’s Curzon Street. It was a walk made by an extraordinarily large number of the grandest men in the land (although in the case of the Palace and Downing Street it was more usual for the barber to pack his small case of necessities and make a house call). McFadden was one of that handful of select barbers who served them. He had joined the firm years before through a combination of good fortune and his considerable ability. Everyone liked Mac because he was totally undemanding. Nobody needed to bother getting to know him. He arrived, he worked, he cleared up and he left. Now the First Lord of the Admiralty was reclining in his chair within a highly polished wood-panelled cubicle, one of many that stretched into the depths of the shop.
‘I’m sorry to hear you’re going to die, sir. Any particular reason?’ Mac enquired as he prepared the hot towels. The announcement of this great politician’s imminent demise had seemed to require some sort of response, but Mac was always careful not to appear too interested or to become emotional about any of his customers’ concerns. They came here to relax, to put aside the troubles of their day, and they found it much easier to accomplish this with someone like Mac who simply didn’t matter. It was bred into them, the tendency to display in front of a servant the range of thoughts and emotions you’d never dream of sharing with a friend or your wife. It also helped that Mac had a slight accent and a limp and appeared to be a little stupid and slow, not a complete man, conforming to a certain notion of the working man that made him the safe recipient of confidences, if not of the vote.
Duff Cooper closed his eyes and allowed a slow exhalation of breath. ‘I’m not dying literally, for God’s sake. It’s worse than that. This afternoon I have a very important speech to make to the House of Commons. My resignation speech.’
‘A sad day, sir.’ Mac slowed down his preparations for the shave. The client clearly wished to share a confidence with him, which he would find difficult through a swathe of hot towels.
‘God, but I’ve loved my job. I’ve sat in the Admiralty and sent the mightiest navy in the world to every corner of the globe. More power and privilege than most men could ever dream of. Yet by tonight I shall be an outcast, despised by people who yesterday hung on my every word and called me their friend. All because of …’
‘Lift the chin for me, will you, sir? Thank you. Because of what, sir?’
‘Damn it, McFadden! We won the bloody war. Never again, we said. Then Hitler comes along and starts building his squadrons of panzers and fighter planes – purely for defence, he assures everyone, and we believe him. Even when he marches into the Rhineland we believe him. Two years later he’s trampling all over bloody Austria, and now he’s ripping Czechoslovakia to pieces. And still our Prime Minister says he trusts him!’
His client was tense, his moustache a-bristle. Mac reclined the chair even more to help him relax.
‘Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr Chamberlain?’
Mac didn’t care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that’s why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. Yet there weren’t any simple ways open to him any more. The time had come when even barbers had to take sides.
‘I think Mr Chamberlain wears his hair too long,’ the barber replied softly.
‘God, but what would I do to get near him with a razor,’ the politician spat.
‘Doesn’t go with the image, it doesn’t. That hair – and the winged collar and tail coat. Out of date, if you ask me.’
‘A man out of time.’
‘Will any of your colleagues be joining you, sir?’ Mac made it sound like an invitation to sit down and dine. As he applied the first towel, the politician offered up a soft moan and for a moment Mac thought he had applied it too hot, but it soon became clear that the pain came from an entirely different source.
‘They promised, you know. Walter Elliot, and others. We’ll be there with you, they said, right at your side. Munich was one goose-step too far. But where are they now? Elliot waffles on about how he can be of more use working from inside the Government than being a leper on the back benches. Leper. That’s the term he used. The day before he was talking about honour, now it’s become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep drivelling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they’ll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ’s sake?’
Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.
‘I despair. What’s become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would’ve finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.’
Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. ‘Not to be repeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn’t really be telling you this but … Just between the two of us, eh?’
The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.
Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He’d been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings and by Bloody Chaos. He’d seen both imperialism and communism up close – too close – and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map – until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.
This one was scarcely better than the rest. He wanted war and he’d get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That’s what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier’s boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where – and why – it had ever been.
Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he’d burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn’t he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?
No, for the politician this was nothing more than a glory hunt, a game of ambitions and advancement, a game pursued from the day he had been shoved out of his nursery and sent to learn the rules of the sport on the playing fields of some English public school.
The shave and trim were finished, the moustache back in its proper place. The politician was ready to face the enemy. ‘Have a good day, sir,’ Mac said at the door, holding out his client’s freshly brushed hat.
The soon-to-be former great person barely heard. In his mind he was already on his feet making one of the most memorable resignation speeches of the age, a speech which might yet rock the Government, even bring its house down. He tried to ignore the worm that had been wriggling deep inside all morning and telling him that he should come to his senses, be realistic, understand that the most he could hope to achieve was to sway the House enough for the door to swing open and allow him back in.
‘I’ll be back,’ Cooper barked.
Mac declined to offer an opinion.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess woke badly. It was not a good place in which to wake badly. His apartment, in Chester Square near Victoria Station, was decorated with a deliberate taste for the grotesque – the carpet was red, the walls a murky white, the curtains and sheets beneath his heavy Italianate bed-head an uncertain blue, and everything covered with a film of nicotine. As he opened his eyes the colours and stale tobacco mounted a co-ordinated assault on him, and he groaned. His mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, and very soon he would be late. Again.
He slipped out of bed and stumbled to the window. On his way he knocked over a pile of books on which was balanced a glass of red wine. Fortunately the wine, like Burgess, had been almost completely consumed and the stain would be invisible amongst the rest. He threw open the window and lit a cigarette, coughing as a trickle of fresh air tried to penetrate the room. It was miserably squalid, but as he insisted on telling his friends, if this was squalor it was nothing compared to what you’d find in Guernica or some of the side streets of Moscow. So, you’ve been to Moscow, have you? they would invariably ask. How was it? Tough, uncompromising, intellectual, unsentimental, he would tell them. He would relate his encounter with a militiaman who had threatened to beat him up for walking on the grass, but that was only half the story. He’d been throwing up over a statue of Stalin at the time.
He flung the cigarette stub out of the window and hauled up a piece of dried fish that he kept dangling on a string from his windowsill, tearing off a piece before throwing the rest back out again. Breakfast on the run. But his mouth was so dry he couldn’t chew, not until he’d poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s and swilled it round the back of his gums.
‘To mastication,’ he murmured, raising his glass to the straw-stuffed Regency buck that stood by the wardrobe. It stared back at him in reproach, the glass eyes seeming to follow him around the room. Sometimes it seemed as if the whole world was after him, even the stuffed animals. The apartment was crammed with artefacts, from a frigate in a bottle to an old American harmonium that he occasionally played, nothing of any great value, all garbage really. One day he’d get rid of it, along with the rest of his ludicrous life. He rubbed whiskey with his finger round his teeth to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth. He always seemed to be drinking whiskey, more than he’d intended to, and more still to get rid of the hangover. He would chew garlic to get rid of the smell of whiskey, then drive ludicrously fast to see if he could get rid of all the things that bothered him. His friends said he’d kill himself eventually, and maybe they were right. It was amazing how many friends he had, all things considered.
It would be another one of those days. He would arrive late at Broadcasting House and they would shout at him, so he would shout back and yet again try to get them to use Churchill. He knew they would refuse, because they were under instructions from above. But in all the shouting about Churchill they would forget he looked like a tramp and had been late yet again. So he would have just one more drink to fortify himself and be on his way.
It was at that point that the eiderdown moved. It was piled high on one side of the bed, a tangle of old silk and cigarette burns, and out from beneath it protruded a calf, then a thigh, followed by the most gorgeous arse he’d seen since …? Since last night. Victoria Station, one of his habitual hunting grounds, where if ever he was stopped and questioned he could always argue that he was on his way home, just round the corner, officer. The arse moved. It belonged to a young bellboy from Claridge’s. He couldn’t remember his name. Which in the scramble last night hadn’t mattered a damn, but in the damp light of day seemed – well, unnecessarily rude. So Burgess decided he’d spend a little more time with his guest that morning, give himself the opportunity to find out the lad’s name. And if it made him still later at the BBC, what did it matter? The war would wait. That was official.
Brendan Bracken was one of those figures who could be described as many things, but mostly he was outrageous. He would also, soon, become one of the most powerful men in the country.
Bracken was a fantasist. He was also the Member of Parliament for North Paddington. He was Irish by birth but claimed to be an orphan from Australia where his parents had been killed in a bush fire. In fact, his father had been a stonemason and also a member of the Republican Brotherhood, an illegal Irish nationalist organization on whose behalf he would go round blowing up Anglo-Irish walls and buildings. The following day he would appear cheerfully on the doorstep and offer to repair them. Perhaps he passed on to his son the capacity for vivid imagination.
Bracken went through life lying about his origins, about his education – at times he would suggest he had gone to Oxford University – and even about his parentage. When he attached himself to Winston Churchill and worked his way up to become the elder man’s indispensable right arm, rumours began to circulate that he was Churchill’s illegitimate son. He did nothing to discourage these rumours, and perhaps even started them.
Bracken did more than invent the world around him, he invented many worlds and seemed to be able to move guilelessly from one to another. People knew it was largely nonsense, but the brashness and energy he devoted to his fantasies persuaded others to go along with them. It was so much easier than calling his bluff. By October 1938 he was thirty-seven years of age with a safe parliamentary seat and was being driven around in his own custom-built Bentley. Still he had trouble being taken seriously.
Yet he wanted so desperately to be taken seriously. Which was why, when he entered the Members’ Lobby beside the great oak doors leading to the chamber of the House of Commons and was greeted by Duff Cooper, he was deeply confused. For Duffie had been part of the team. Cooper had been Churchill’s drinking partner, dining companion and intimate colleague in the battle against Chamberlain and appeasement. It had been an awesome team, one of them inside the Cabinet, the other rampaging freely outside, but now it was all unravelling. Cooper, Churchill’s last great ally inside the corridors of power, was gone. Churchill was despondent. Whichever way Bracken looked at it and turned it over in his mind, Chamberlain had won.
‘Brendan,’ Cooper greeted him, taking him by the arm. ‘At last a friendly face. Beginning to feel about as popular as Dr Crippen standing here.’
‘Hello, Duffie. Glad I’ve been able to find you. Wanted you to know that we’re all behind you.’
‘Ah, words of comfort. Good, because that’s what I’d like. Would you come and sit beside me on the benches while I make my speech? You know, moral support. Someone to lean on when the old legs go a little wobbly.’
Instead of replying, Bracken produced a large handkerchief and with some care blew his nose. He was always complaining of sinus trouble. And it gave him time to manufacture his response.
‘Be honoured to, Duffie – but you know that’s not possible. Got to be on duty beside Winston.’
Churchill always took the same place on the green leather benches of the House, on the front row just a few feet along from where Government ministers themselves sat. Resignation speeches, by tradition, were made from farther back.
‘But surely on this one occasion …’ Cooper began to urge. A thread of steel had wrapped itself around his smile.
‘Duffie, you know what Winston’s like.’
‘My God, it’s like being abandoned on a desert island.’
Before he could continue his protest they were interrupted by a penetrating American voice with a distinctive Boston Irish twang.
‘Ah, the man of the moment. Not changed your mind, I hope.’
‘Your Excellency,’ Cooper responded, not even trying to contain his dislike. Joseph Kennedy, the United States Ambassador to the Court of St James’s, was one of the least diplomatic envoys ever provided by Washington. His admiration for the efficiency and ambition of the German Reich was as deep-rooted as the contempt he retained for the decaying, chaotic democracies of the Old World, and he took no trouble to hide either.
‘Brought along a couple of guests to see the performance. My son, Jack’ – he introduced a fresh-faced man in his early twenties, but looking younger – ‘and someone you may already know. Captain Charles Lindbergh.’ The aviator, the first man to fly the Atlantic alone and famed throughout the world, held out his hand.
‘I’m delighted you should think my performance worthy of such an audience, Joe. I’ll try not to disappoint.’
‘You already have, Duffie. If you’d had your way, you’d already be at war against Hitler. You might as well take a dip in a bath of acid.’
‘What did I tell you, Brendan. A veritable Dr Crippen.’
‘Look, ask Lindie here. He’s been telling me all about the Luftwaffe – and he knows, goddamn it. They can send up ten times the number of planes as you, the French and the Russians put together. His view is that in a shooting war London wouldn’t last a week – is that what you want?’
‘That’s what puzzles me, Joe. Here we are – according to you – totally without any option. And there was me thinking we’d won the last war.’
‘That’s where you Brits always get it wrong, Duffie. We won the last war. America bailed you out in ’17. Fifty thousand dead to prove it. Damned if we’re gonna do that again.’
‘We’d fight alone, if necessary.’
‘Fight! What the hell you got to fight with? Hitler’s got more planes, more tanks, more divisions, more everything.’ His finger was stabbing in the direction of Cooper’s waistcoat. ‘Hey, you know what happened to your English unemployment this month?’
Cooper, who wasn’t following the American’s train of thought, shook his head. ‘I’ve had other things on my mind …’
‘Through the goddamn roof. Again. Nearly two million. Your factories are closing down and producing nothing but cobwebs. Meanwhile the Fuehrer’s got his factories working to splitting point. Building the biggest army and air force this side of the Atlantic. Face it, Duffie, you guys’ve got about as much chance as a cock in a convent. What are you gonna do when the Wehrmacht comes marching down Whitehall? Throw cricket balls at ’em?’
A flush of anger had risen in Cooper’s cheeks. ‘And what will you do when he’s turned Europe into a dictatorship? When the world is dominated by Communism and Fascism? When America is cut off from its markets, without friends? When Hitler can hold you to ransom?’
Kennedy smiled coldly, not rising to the bait. He nodded towards the Chamber. ‘You’re gonna go in there and make a fool of yourself, Duffie.’
‘Stop pulling your punches, Joe.’
‘Hell, it’s not the time to pull punches with the situation in Europe.’
‘My point precisely.’
‘Then, as I said, it should be a fine performance. Damn fine. Gotta go claim our seats now. See you around.’ Then, in a final act of insult to the former First Lord, he turned to Bracken, who had remained silent throughout the exchange. ‘Nice talking with you, Mr Bracken. Come to dinner later in the week. I’ll give you a call.’
‘That would be splendid …’ Bracken replied, before realizing how insensitive he must have appeared to his parliamentary colleague. He turned to offer some words of remorse, but it was too late. He’d gone.
Duff Cooper had got it wrong. He wasn’t going to be alone on the benches. When he rose to make his resignation speech, the Government whips had ensured he was surrounded by a platoon of loyalists who saw it as their duty to make his moment in the parliamentary spotlight as uncomfortable as possible. By tradition resignation speeches are meant to be heard in silence and Hansard, the official record of parliamentary proceedings, is renowned for its inability to hear insults and inappropriate interruptions even if they ring round the ancient rafters. But The Times also published extensive verbatim extracts of parliamentary proceedings, and their report was unable to hide the crude treatment Cooper received at the hands of members of his own party.
They surrounded him, intimidated him, jeered and scoffed at him. Destroyed many friendships. Only when he mentioned the name of the Prime Minister did they cheer, then fell into sullen silence when he said that, no matter how he had tried, he couldn’t believe what the Prime Minister believed. ‘And so I can be of no assistance to him or his Government,’ Cooper continued, looking around him, eyes flooded with sorrow. ‘I should only be a hindrance.’ Growls of agreement began to rise about him like flood water. ‘It is much better that I should go.’ And Order Papers were waved like a breaking sea that threatened to wash him away. He stood in their midst like a rock, lonely, defiant, mouth dry as the abuse continued.
Yet gradually a hush fell. Perhaps his tormentors grew ashamed, or simply ran out of breath. In any event, Cooper’s dignity at last was allowed to shine through, without interruption.
‘I have forfeited a great deal. I have given up an office which I loved, work in which I was deeply interested and a staff of which any man might be proud. I have given up association in that work with my colleagues with whom I have maintained for many years the most harmonious relations, not only as colleagues but as friends. I have given up the privilege of serving as lieutenant to a leader whom I still regard with the deepest admiration and affection.’
He was looking directly at Chamberlain, who refused to return his stare.
‘I have ruined, perhaps, my political career. That is a little matter. I have retained something which is to me of greater value – I can still walk about the world with my head erect.’
Only then did he sit down. And still the Prime Minister would not look at him.
For a place of such eminence and influence, Downing Street was architecturally extraordinarily undistinguished. Even after the extensive renovations to Number Ten undertaken by Neville Chamberlain and his wife, required in part by the need to shore up floors that were sagging and in danger of collapse, much of the interior remained remarkably dark and cramped. A place of elves and goblins. Two of the most voracious of these goblins were Sir Horace Wilson and Sir Joseph Ball.
Wilson’s official title was the Government’s Chief Industrial Adviser, which did no justice to his real influence. In practice he was recognized as being Chamberlain’s most trusted assistant. He had accompanied the Prime Minister on all three of his flying visits to Hitler in the previous month and had even been despatched to talk with the German leader on his own. ‘He is the most remarkable man in England,’ Chamberlain had once told colleagues, ‘I couldn’t live a day without him.’ Wilson controlled most of the levers of Government. Meanwhile his close colleague Ball controlled the political machinery. He was the director of the Conservative Research Department, the policy-making body for the Tory Party, and was also the official in charge of publicity and propaganda at party headquarters. Ironically he had turned down Guy Burgess when Burgess had applied to become an employee of the Conservative Party after leaving Cambridge. He thought him too scruffy.
Wilson and Ball shared many things – a background in the secret services (both had been officers in MI5), virulent anti-Semitism, a passionate belief in the policy of appeasement, and above all a devotion to Neville Chamberlain that went far beyond any job description. They were formidable, and in some quarters were justifiably feared.
Now these two eminent servants of the people sat in Wilson’s office, a small room that ran off the Cabinet Room itself. It was already dark, the curtains drawn, the only light provided by two green-hooded lamps placed on desks by the tall windows, lending a conspiratorial atmosphere which both men enjoyed. Ball had just come off the phone from talking with one of the directors of the Yorkshire Post. Not for the first time they were discussing the predilections of the editor, Arthur Mann, a persistent man who seemed determined to be impressed by the resignation speech of Duff Cooper.
Phrases like ‘personal grudge’ and ‘loss of grip’ had littered Ball’s conversation, but he seemed to be making little headway. Mann was a notoriously stubborn anti-appeaser, the director had explained, and he wasn’t sure what anyone could do. ‘For heaven’s sake, Jamie, whose bloody newspaper is it? Why do you let him kick you around like that? For God’s sake, get a grip. No sane man wants to reconquer Berlin for the Jews.’ Ball mouthed the words slowly, hoping they might sink firmly into the other man’s mind. ‘This is a matter of survival. And not just the country’s survival, your survival as a newspaper, too. Look what’s happened to your damned advertising revenues. A summer of war scares and the bottom’s fallen out of your market. Down – what? Thirty per cent? Precisely. So long as you encourage cranks like Duff Cooper to go on whipping up war scares you can watch your profits shrivel like a baby in bath water. Nobody’s going to buy a bloody thing. Look at the economy in Germany – that’s the sort of thing we want here, not blood all over your balance sheet. You want war? ’Course not. But that’s exactly what you’ll get if you carry on crawling up the arse of Duff Cooper and his crowd.’ At last the argument seemed to have struck home, the director promised to see what he could do, and the conversation was resolved with promises of lunch.
It had been a profitable evening’s work. Other newspapers had been leant on, too. Ball scratched his stomach, contented. By morning Duff Cooper’s obituary would be suitably disfigured.
At that moment there came a knock on the door and a head appeared. It belonged to Geoffrey Dawson, the editor of The Times. As always in the dark corners of Chamberlain’s Whitehall, he was welcomed like a general returned to his camp. ‘Thought I might find you two old rogues here,’ he said. ‘Need to take your mind.’
‘And a glass of sherry, too, Geoffrey.’
The editor made himself comfortable in a cracked leather armchair by the fireplace, wriggling in order to reacquaint himself with an old friend. ‘Just taken tea with Edward at the Foreign Office.’ The ‘Edward’ in question was Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, and it was Dawson’s custom to meet with him on a frequent basis, particularly when preparing a trenchant editorial. They were long-standing personal friends, their lives intertwined. Both were Etonians and North Yorkshiremen, High Anglicans who worshipped and hunted foxes together.
‘He was helpful, I trust,’ Wilson prompted.
‘As always. Got a pocket full of editorials that’ll take me right up to the weekend. But that’s not what I’m concerned about. It’s my young pup of a parliamentary reporter, Anthony Winn. He’s written some god-awful eulogy about Duff Cooper’s resignation speech this afternoon, about its nobility, how it was a resounding parliamentary success, its barbs striking home. How it shamed the Government’s troops into silence, even. That sort of stuff.’
‘Then change it.’
‘Steady on, Joey. Editorials are one thing. Chopping a news reporter’s copy around is considerably more tricky. A little like kicking cradles. Not made any easier by the fact that, according to my sources, he’s got it absolutely bloody right.’
Wilson and Ball glanced at each other uneasily. ‘Right only on the day, perhaps. Not in the overall context,’ Wilson mused. ‘He had to go. Duffie is a man who lives his life on the very edge of disaster. Not a man of sound judgement, Geoffrey – why, just look at his women. Pulls them off the street. Some of them are foreign, with completely inappropriate contacts … I sometimes wonder whether his rather lurid liaisons haven’t weakened his mind.’
‘And The Times of all newspapers can’t go peddling Jew propaganda, Geoffrey,’ Ball added. ‘Heavens, it’s an organ of propriety and eminence. Of the Establishment, not the revolution. We all recognize your newspaper’s special position – just as we recognize your own personal contribution to it.’ Ah, the final twist. All three of them were acutely aware that Dawson was the only man in the room who hadn’t yet been handed his knighthood. It was occasionally the subject of uneasy banter between them, an honour pledged but a promise yet to be delivered. And while he waited, he would behave.
‘That’s why I needed your guiding hand. Is the Duff Cooper story so damned important? Worth the aggravation I’ll get if I play the heavy-handed censor and rewrite the damned copy?’
The expressions of the other two men eased. Ball’s feet swung up onto the desk. The eminent servants of the people smiled at their guest, and expressed their mind as one.
‘Oh, yes, Sir Geoffrey. Please!’
The editor of The Times did as he was told. Destroyed the copy as though he were laying siege to a mediaeval fortress. Then he reconstructed it. ‘Emotional gourmets had expected a tasty morsel in Mr Duff Cooper’s explanation of his resignation,’ he wrote, ‘but it proved to be rather unappetising. Speaking without a note, the former First Lord fired anti-aircraft guns rather than turret broadsides. The speech was cheered by the Opposition, but Mr Chamberlain disregarded it for the moment with only a pleasant word of respect.’
The copy still went out under the name of Anthony Winn, the paper’s parliamentary correspondent. The following morning he resigned. He would be one of the first to be killed on active service in the war that was to follow.
And so the House of Commons gathered to debate the Munich agreement. The arguments continued for four days – far longer than the resistance shown by Chamberlain at Munich. It was a debate awash with nobility and bitterness, defiance and servility, with servility by far the larger portion – although, of course, at Westminster it is never known as that, being dressed up in the corridors and tea-rooms under the guise of loyalty and team spirit. Play the game, old fellow! Chamberlain demanded loyalty and dominated his party – those men of mediocrity who gathered around him knew he had the offices of state at his disposal, along with the substantial salaries and residences those offices commanded. Duffie had thrown away his London home and five thousand pounds a year – a small fortune in an era when those who enlisted to die for their country still did so for ‘the King’s shilling’ plus a couple of coppers more a day. Anyway, an election was due at some point, perhaps soon, and disloyalty to the Great and Popular Leader was certain to be repaid in kind. Appeasement was inevitable, it was argued, and nowhere more vociferously than in the Smoking Room of the House of Commons, where MPs throughout the ages had gathered in pursuit of alcohol and the secret of everlasting electoral life.
‘What’s your poison, Ian? Gin? Tonic? Slice of the Sudetenland?’
‘Make it a whisky, Dickie, would you?’
‘Large whisky coming up.’
A pause for alcohol.
‘You ever been to Czechoslovakia, Ian?’
‘Not even sure I could find it on a map. Faraway places, and all that.’
‘What did Neville say the other night after he came back from Munich?’ Dickie imitated a tight, nasal accent. ‘“And now I recommend you to go home and sleep quietly in your beds.”’
‘Somebody’s bed, at least. Whose was it last week, Dickie?’
‘I adhere to a strict rule. In the six months before any election I deny myself the pleasure of sleeping with the wife of anyone with a vote in my constituency. Which includes my own wife, of course. Sort of self-discipline. Like training for a long-distance run.’
‘For God’s sake, don’t tell Central Office. It might become compulsory.’
‘It’s good politics. I work on the basis that I shall always get the women’s vote – so long as their husbands don’t find out.’
‘Better than leaving it dangling on the old barbed wire.’
‘Can’t stand all this bloody war-mongering, Ian. Any fool can go to war.’
‘Particularly an old fool like Winston.’
‘Been at it half his adult life. Look where it’s got him.’
Slightly more softly – ‘And if war is to be the question, how the hell can Bore-Belisha be the answer?’
Their attention was drawn across the cracked leather of the Smoking Room to where the portly and dark-featured figure of the Secretary of State for War, Leslie Hore-Belisha (or Bore-Belisha or Horab-Elisha, according to taste), was ordering a round of drinks.
‘Do they make kosher whisky, Ian?’
‘Judging by the amount he knocks back it’s a racing certainty.’
‘Fancies himself as a future Leader, you know.’
‘Elisha? Really? Not for me. Always thought it might be helpful if we found a Christian to lead us on the next Crusade.’
‘Precisely.’
‘He’s getting even fatter, you know. Strange for a man who proclaims his devotion to nothing but the public good.’
‘A genetic disposition to –’
‘Corpulence.’
‘I was thinking indulgence.’
‘Christ. Gas masks to the ready. Here comes St Harold.’
Harold Macmillan, the forty-four-year-old Conservative Member for Stockton, drifted in their direction. He was not often popular with his colleagues. Not only did he have a conscience, he would insist on sharing it.
‘Evening, Harold. Dickie here’s been telling us that he’s a reformed character. He’s given up sleeping with his constituents’ wives. Saving it all for the party in the run-up to an election. Suppose it means he’s going to be sleeping with our wives instead.’
Macmillan drifted by as silently as a wraith.
‘My God, you can be a brutal bugger at times, Ian.’
‘What the hell did I do?’
‘Don’t you know? Macmillan’s wife? And Bob Boothby, our esteemed colleague for East Aberdeenshire? Apparently he’s been chasing her furry friend for years – catching it, too. Open secret. Supposed to have fathered Harold’s youngest daughter.’
‘What? Cuckolded by one of his own colleagues? I’ve heard of keeping it in the family, but that one takes the biscuit. Why doesn’t he …?’
‘Divorce? Out of the question. Tied to her by the rope of old ambition. Harold’s reputation for sainthood would never stand a scandal.’
‘Ridiculous man. Won’t fight for his wife yet wants the rest of us to go to war over Czechoslovakia.’
‘He’ll never come to anything.’
Another drink. ‘Neville has got this one right, hasn’t he, Dickie?’
A pause. ‘He knows more about it than anyone else in the country. Got to trust him, I suppose.’
‘Young Adolf’s not all bad, you know, knocking heads together in Europe. A good thing, probably. Needed a bit of sorting out, if you ask me. Get them all into line, sort of thing.’
‘A united Europe?’
‘Going to be good for all of us in the long run. Look to the future, I say.’
‘We had to come to terms. It was inevitable.’
‘Inevitable. Yes. Bloody well put.’
‘What was Winston calling it in the Lobby? “A peace which passeth all understanding …” What d’you think he meant by that?’
‘I have long since ceased either to know or to care. Never been a party man, has Winston.’
‘Always takes matters too far.’
‘Anyway, soon over and out of this place. Any plans for the weekend?’
‘A little cubbing, we thought. Give the hounds a good run. And you?’
‘The wife’s still in France. So I thought – a touch of canvassing.’
‘Anyone in particular?’
‘There’s an English wife of an excessively busy foreign banker who’s asked me for a few lessons in patriotism.’
‘The nobility of sacrifice. For the cause.’
‘But not in my own constituency. You know my rules.’
‘Thank the Lord, Dickie. Everything back in its place.’
THREE (#ulink_80e58e20-6362-5eb8-b362-715940ee1608)
It was business as normal at the residence of the American Ambassador in Princes Gate. Not, of course, that business in the household of Joseph P. Kennedy resembled anything that in diplomatic circles would customarily be described as normal, but Kennedy was barely a diplomat. A man who had only just finished celebrating his fiftieth birthday, he was more at home in the clapboard tenements of Boston’s tough East Side where he was born than this gracious stucco-fronted mansion overlooking London’s Hyde Park, but although Kennedy was intensely protective of his Irish-American roots, they were never going to tie him down.
Kennedy was a man of passion and action, if, at times, remarkably little judgement. His approach to diplomacy in the stuffy Court of St James’s was often very similar to his approach to sex – he didn’t bother with the niceties of foreplay. He was a man always impatient, pushing and grasping. During an earlier life as a movie tycoon he had bedded Gloria Swanson, the most famous sex symbol in the world during the 1920s. She retained a vivid recollection of their encounter. Afterwards she told friends that Kennedy had appeared at her door and simply stared for a while, before letting forth a moan and throwing himself upon her. He was characteristically direct. She compared him to a roped horse, rough, arduous – and ultimately inadequate. ‘After a hasty climax, he lay beside me, stroking my hair,’ she recalled. ‘Apart from his guilty, passionate mutterings, he had still said nothing coherent.’
It was an approach the British Foreign Office would have recognized. Yet for all his lack of orthodoxy he had taken London by storm since his arrival earlier in the year. In a world of quiet fears and ever-lengthening shadows, an old world coming to its long drawn-out end, his brashness was a joy and his lack of respect for social cobwebs a source of endless entertainment. He called the Queen ‘a cute trick’ and dashed across the floor to dance with her, scattering courtiers and convention in his wake. His language was borrowed from the Boston stevedores of his youth. He had a natural flair for publicity but perhaps the strongest basis of his appeal was his nine children – ‘my nine hostages to fortune’, as he called them, ranging in age from Joe Junior and Jack in their twenties to the infant Edward. It was like 1917 all over again; the Americans had sent an entire army to the rescue. So the corridors at 9 Princes Gate were turned into a touch-football field, the marbled patio was transformed into a cycle track while the elevator became an integral part of a vast imaginary department store run by young Teddy. And if observers believed Kennedy was using his self-claimed status as ‘the Father of the Nation’ as a platform to challenge for the presidency in 1940, no one seemed to mind – except, perhaps, for President Franklin Roosevelt, who had sent him to London hoping never to hear of him again. It was one of the President’s classic misjudgements.
Yet, four days after the declaration of peace in our time, the residence was unusually quiet. There was no sound of children echoing around the hallways, no clatter of dropped bicycles bouncing off the marble, and even the Ambassador’s dinner guests were restrained. Churchill seemed burdened, while Brendan Bracken, seated next to Kennedy’s niece, appeared uncharacteristically tongue-tied. On the opposite side of the table to Churchill sat the aggressively isolationist correspondent of the Chicago Tribune, who was proving something of a disappointment since his mastery of the arts of aggression appeared to be entirely confined to his pen; he had done nothing more than mumble all evening and disappear into his glass. A Swedish businessman named Svensson was courteous but cautious, preferring to listen and prod rather than to preach himself, almost as if he was a little overawed by the company. Meanwhile the Duke of Gloucester at the far end of the table was on his usual form, anaesthetizing guests on every side. This was not the effect Kennedy required. He enjoyed confrontation, the clash of words and wills. The English were so bad at it, but the Irish of East Boston – ah, they were a different breed entirely.
‘Mr Ambassador, where are the little ones?’ Churchill’s head rose from his plate. Kennedy noticed he had dribbled gravy down his waistcoat, but the politician seemed either not to have noticed or not to care.
‘Sent most of them to Ireland last week. A chance to search for their roots.’
‘Ah.’ A pause. ‘I see.’ So the hostages to fortune had fled. Churchill returned his attentions to his plate, indicating a lack of desire to pursue the line of conversation.
‘You don’t approve, Winston?’
‘What? Of sending the little birds abroad at a time of crisis?’ He considered. ‘For men in public positions there are no easy choices.’
‘But you wouldn’t.’
‘There is a danger of sending out the wrong sort of signal.’
‘You’d keep your kids here, beneath the threat of bombs?’
‘There is another way of looking at it. The presence of our loved ones serves as a constant reminder of what we are fighting for. And perhaps a signal to the aggressor that we are confident of victory.’
‘But we Americans have no intention of fighting. And as for victory …’
‘You doubt our cause?’
‘I doubt your goddamned air defences.’ He attacked his pudding as though he were redrawing frontiers. ‘You know what I hear, Winston? Last week as you were all digging in around London and waiting for the Luftwaffe, you guys had less than a hundred anti-aircraft guns for the entire city.’
Churchill winced, which served only to encourage the other man.
‘Hey, but that’s only the headline. Of those hundred guns, less than half of ’em worked. Had the wrong size ammo, or the batteries were dead. And you know what I found when I chatted to the air-raid guys in the park?’
‘Why bother with conjecture when surely you are going to tell me?’
‘They didn’t have any steel helmets. After all these years of jawing about the bloody war, you think the guys in command might just’ve figured out that the troops needed some steel helmets? Just in case Hitler decided to start dropping things?’
Churchill seemed, like his city, to be all but defenceless. ‘I have long warned about the deficiencies of our ARP,’ was all he could muster.
On the other side of the table Kennedy’s niece whispered in her companion’s ear. ‘What’s ARP?’
The question caused Brendan Bracken to chew his lip, and not for the first time that evening. He was a man of extraordinary features, his vivid red hair cascading down his forehead like lava from an exploding volcano. He had a temperament to match, conducting his outpourings with a wild swinging of his arms. Yet this evening, in the presence of the Ambassador’s niece, he had become unusually subdued. Women – apart from his mother – had never played much of a role in his life, his singular energies having been devoted to making money and climbing the political ladder. And what did women matter in an English Establishment where rumours of homosexuality circulated as freely as the port? Yet Anna Maria Fitzgerald was different. Most other young women he found frivolous and teasing, viewing him either as a potential wealthy match or an object of sexual curiosity, or both, at which point he would hide behind his bottle-end spectacles and invent a new story about himself to suit the situation. But American girls – and Anna in particular – seemed so much more straightforward. He didn’t feel the need to put on an act, but since role-playing had been the habit of his adult life he found it difficult to know what to put in its place. So he grew tongue-tied. Now she was whispering in his ear, smelling fresh, not like a tart, with her fingers brushing the back of his hand.
‘ARP?’ she whispered again.
‘Um, Air-Raid Precautions,’ he explained. ‘You know, ducking bombs.’
‘Horrid!’ Her fingers remained briefly on the back of his hand. ‘I’ve only just arrived in London, to be a sort of assistant to Uncle Joe, and already they’re threatening to destroy it.’
‘I hope you’ll allow me to show you around. I know all the best air-raid shelters.’ It was a clumsy and unintended joke, reflecting his unease, but she laughed it off.
From the end of the table, her uncle finished off his apple pie and slice of American cheese, and decided it was time for the after-dinner entertainment. He had wanted to invite the German Ambassador, Dirksen, but he was engaged elsewhere, so had had to make do with his Spanish Fascist counterpart, the Duke of Alba, instead.
‘Tell me, Duke, some people argue democracy’s finished in Europe. What do you think?’
Instantly Churchill’s head came up. ‘Finished?’ he growled, cutting across the Spaniard.
Kennedy was already in his shirtsleeves; now he slipped off his braces. Time for a scrap. ‘What I mean is, the Brits and the French tried it after the last war, imposing democracy all across Europe, but look around you. It’s been shot to hell – or disappeared completely. Germany, Italy, Spain, Austria – now Czechoslovakia. It never even got started in Russia. And what’s left is so pathetically weak.’
‘Is that the language of the New Diplomacy?’
‘Come on, you’ve been saying yourself you should’ve picked Hitler’s pecker years ago.’
‘Democracy is like a great play. It lasts more than one act. You must be patient, Mr Ambassador.’
‘You mean, like those ARP guys still waiting for their helmets?’
A cheap debating point, or an intended slur? Churchill ignored it.
Kennedy prodded again. ‘But democracy can be a hard mistress, too, you know that, Winston, as well as anyone. And the Germans elected Herr Hitler. You can’t dismiss that fact.’
‘At which point he promptly dispensed with elections.’
‘He’s offered a referendum in the Sudetenland.’
‘Hah! A referendum simply to confirm that which has already been resolved. Thrust upon the poor Czechs. A peculiarly twisted notion of democracy.’
‘But I think you’re forgetting, Winston. British politicians like you and Mr Chamberlain got elected with a few thousand votes. Hitler got elected with millions. Makes Herr Hitler more legit than you, don’t it?’
‘Power is not seized through the ballot box, Mr Ambassador, it is shared. It comes from the people. It is a remarkably infested form of democracy which takes that power in order to enslave its own people.’
‘Aw, come on. You telling me it’s slavery? Slavery don’t get millions of people out on the streets waving banners and torches to give thanks that their country’s no longer starving. German governments used to be chaotic, criminally incompetent. You might have called that democracy, Winston, but to the Germans it was a dung heap. They were dying in the gutter. So Hitler’s replaced the bread lines with armies of workers building autobahns. Where the devil’s the harm in all that?’
‘One day, in a very few years, perhaps in a few months, we shall be confronted with demands that we should become part of a German-dominated Europe. There will be some who will say that would be efficient. Others already say it is … inevitable – a word I do not care for, one that has no place in the dictionaries of a democracy. They argue it will make us all the stronger, that we cannot remain an off-shore satellite of a strong and growing Europe. We shall be invited to surrender a little of our independence and liberty in order that we may enjoy the benefits of this stronger Europe. In a word, we shall be required to submit.’
Churchill was into his stride now. He had pushed his plate away from him, making room on the tablecloth as though preparing to draw out a plan of battle. ‘Soon we shall no longer be ruled from our Parliament but from abroad. Our rights will be restricted. Our economy will be controlled by others. We shall be told what we may produce, and what we may not. Then, a short step thereafter, we shall be told what we may say, and what we may not say. Already there are some who say that we cannot allow the system of government in Berlin to be criticized by ordinary, common English politicians. They claim we are Little Englanders, xenophobic, backward-looking. Already we are censored, sometimes directly by refusing to allow us access to the BBC, at other times indirectly through the influence of the Government’s friends in the press. Every organ of public opinion is being systematically doped or chloroformed into acquiescence and – step by step – we shall be conducted further along our journey until we find, like silent, mournful, abandoned, broken Czechoslovakia, that it is too late! And we can no longer turn back.’
‘Hell, that’s democracy for you. The people want to do a deal with Europe, so that’s what they get,’ Kennedy goaded. ‘You said it yourself, Winston, it’s the people who get to decide. And you saw how they greeted the Prime Minister. The man of the moment. Cheered him all night outside Downing Street.’
‘There was a crowd to cheer him in Munich, too.’
‘Doesn’t that make you think for one moment you may be wrong? There’ll also be a crowd in the House of Commons tomorrow, voting on his policy. You can’t deny he’s gonna win, and win big.’
‘He may win tomorrow. But I shall warn them! And perhaps the day will come when they will remember. Soon we shall discover that we have sustained a total and unmitigated defeat, without firing a single shot in our defence.’ He swept crumbs from the table in front of him like imaginary tank divisions.
‘Winston, you got whipped ’cos you got nothing to fight with. Face up to it, you’re gonna get whipped in any war. That’s why you had to run away.’
Two clenched fists banged down on the table, causing every piece of silver to jump. Churchill’s wine spilled over the rim of his glass. It spread on the cloth like a dark stain crossing the map of Middle Europe. ‘Hitler demanded to feast upon poor Czechoslovakia, and instead of resisting his demands we have been content to serve it to him course by course! At the pistol’s point he demanded one pound. When that was given, the pistol was produced again and he demanded two pounds. Finally, Mr Chamberlain waved his umbrella and consented to offer one pound seventeen shillings and sixpence and to make up the rest in promises of goodwill for the future. My country is shrivelled with shame.’ There were tears in the old man’s eyes. He rose in his seat. ‘I apologize. I am too passionate. But the Ambassador should not have spoken as he did. We have passed an awful milestone in our history, Europe is held at the pistol’s point, and the Western democracies have been found wanting. But this is not the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. The first sip, the foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless we, by a supreme recovery of will and vigour, dash it from the dictator’s hand!’
Silence gripped the entire gathering. It was theatre, of course; and Winston always overplayed his role. A candle guttered, dripping wax onto the table cloth where it piled up like a thousand sorrows. Churchill took several moments to recompose himself.
‘There is much to be done. And so little time.’ His eyes searched around the guests, defiant. ‘At Munich the Government had to choose between war and shame. They chose shame. I tell you, they shall get war, too.’ He nodded curtly in the direction of Kennedy, a gesture trembling on the brink of scorn. ‘Come, Mr Bracken. We must set ourselves to our duties.’
Before he knew what he was doing Bracken, too, was on his feet, muttering apologies to Anna and bidding a hurried farewell to the Ambassador, fuming that once again Churchill had taken him for granted. Dammit, he didn’t want to leave, not right now. Churchill always treated those around him as barely better than altar boys, waiting to serve him. They said that about Winston, that he was like Moses, except being more modest he made do with only one commandment: ‘Thou shall have no other god but me.’
‘Pity you have to run off so soon, Winston,’ Kennedy called after the retreating figures, twisting their pain. ‘Say hi to Neville for me. And come again. Come for Thanksgiving. That’s when we normally stuff turkeys.’
‘And don’t forget the air-raid shelters,’ Anna cried out, innocently unaware.
‘Hah! Or your steel helmets. If you can find any …’
Burgess knew it was going to be one of those days when he got drunk, very early, and did something completely appalling. Sometimes he couldn’t help it, he found himself driven, in much the same way that his heart was forced to beat and his lungs to inflate. A friend had once called it a form of madness but it was simply that he viewed the world with different eyes – eyes that were more open and saw more than mere convention and correctness required – which at this moment wasn’t difficult, since convention required the world to be more unseeing and unknowing than ever.
The point had been made most forcefully to him by the Controller of the BBC Radio Talks Department earlier that morning. Burgess had suspected there would be trouble, had even taken the precaution of arriving at Broadcasting House on time and so removing that bone of contention, but punctuality was never going to drain the ocean of irritation that was waiting for him, and neither was argument.
The issue had been Churchill. Burgess had argued quietly, then with growing force, that the inclusion of the elder statesman would add depth and popular appeal to the programme he was preparing on the security problems of the Mediterranean. Admittedly, it wasn’t the most grabbing of topics, but all the more reason to include Churchill. The Controller had simply said no, and returned to his copy of The Times, leaving Burgess standing in front of his desk like an errant schoolboy. He’d bitten his fingernail and stood his ground.
‘Why? Why – no?’
‘Executive decision, old chap,’ the Controller had responded, affecting boredom.
‘But help me. If my suggestion that Churchill be included is an embarrassment, tell me why, so I can understand and make sure I don’t make the same mistake again.’
The Controller had rustled his newspaper in irritation, but offered no response.
‘Is it because he’s an expert in foreign affairs?’
No reply.
‘Or perhaps that he’s one of the best-known historians of our age?’
The rustling grew more impatient.
‘I know. It’s because he has a lousy speaking voice.’
Nothing.
‘Or are you too pig-ignorant or simply too prejudiced to be able to put an explanation into words?’
‘Damn you, Burgess!’
‘Oh, I probably shall be, but I’ll not be the only one. Because you know what I’m thinking? That the reason you can’t tell me why Churchill has been banned is because you don’t know – or don’t want to know. Those that told you didn’t have the courtesy to trust you with an explanation. You’ve just been told to vaseline your arse and keep him off the air and that’s that. Just obeying orders, are we?’
‘Rot in hell! What do you know about such things?’
‘Enough to know that even you aren’t normally this much of a shit.’
‘Look, Guy – these are difficult times. Damned difficult. Sometimes we have to do things we don’t care for.’
‘So not your decision?’
‘Not exactly …’
‘How far up does this one go?’
‘Guy, this one comes from so high up you’d need an oxygen mask to survive.’
‘Know what I think?’
‘Face it, Guy, right now nobody gives a damn about what you or bloody Winston Churchill thinks.’
It was then that Burgess had thrown himself across the desk, his face only inches from the Controller’s. The Controller tried to pull away, partly in surprise but also in disgust. He could smell the raw garlic.
‘Seems to me it’s about time you queued up for your party cap-badge, isn’t it?’ Burgess spat.
The Controller was speechless, unable to breathe, assailed by insult and foulness.
‘Sieg-fucking-Heil!’ Burgess threw over his shoulder as he turned and stormed out of the door, kicking it so hard that a carpenter had to be summoned to repair the hinge.
That was why Burgess decided to get drunk. He’d get drunk, get obliterated, then he’d see what Chance threw his way. But as yet it was a little too early, even for him. He didn’t like to get drunk before noon. He briefly considered going to ease his frustrations in the underground lavatories at Piccadilly Circus, but they’d just stepped up the police patrol so there was no question of his being able to get away with it. Too risky, even for him. So instead he’ll kill some time. Get his hair cut. At Trumper’s.
Which was how he met McFadden.
‘You’ve got good thick hair, sir’ – although in truth it was already beginning to recede and looked as if something was nesting in it. ‘Nice curl. But you should get it cut more often.’
‘There are many things I should do more often,’ Burgess snapped.
‘How would you like it cut, sir?’
‘Preferably in silence.’
Burgess felt suddenly miserable. He’d been unjustifiably rude to the barber, which in itself was no great cause for regret. Burgess had a tongue honed on carborundum and his rudeness was legendary. But McFadden had simply soaked it up, dropped his eyes, shown not a flicker of emotion or resentment. As if he were used to the lash. Which cut through to a very different part of Burgess, for his was a complex soul. Yes, he could be cruel and could find enjoyment in it, particularly when drunk, but there were few men who were more affected by genuine distress. While inflicting wounds freely himself, he would in equal measure give up time, money and his inordinate energies to help heal wounds inflicted by others. And the whole pleasure about insulting people was that it should be deliberate and give him a sense of achievement and superiority, a sort of twisted intellectual game. Kicking a crippled barber was way below his usual standards.
He sat silently, guiltily, listening to the snipping of scissors. Then he became aware of a voice from the next booth, a deep, rumbling voice that evidently belonged to a banker in the City who was coming to the end of a troubled week. ‘I probably shouldn’t mention this, but …’ the financier began as, layer by layer, he discarded the burdens of his business, any one of which might have helped a sharp investor turn a substantial profit. But there was no danger, of course, because there was only a barber to overhear him, and other gentlemen.
Suddenly Burgess understood how much like a confessional these cubicles were, with their polished wood, the whispered tones and almost sepulchral atmosphere. You relaxed, closed your eyes, drifted. Yet when you looked up again the face staring back at you from the mirror would not be your own, not the youthful, virile self you knew so well and took for granted. What you saw instead, and more and more with every passing month, was the face of your long-dead father as though from another world, the spirit world. A world of different rules, where there were no secrets, where everything was shared. It sparked his curiosity.
Burgess stirred himself. ‘Sorry,’ he apologized to McFadden. ‘Bad day.’
‘That’s what we’re here to help with, sir,’ Mac responded, bringing out the words slowly in a voice that was evidently of foreign origin but not immediately traceable, one more accent in a city which in recent years had become flooded with refugees. ‘It is a privilege to be able to serve gentlemen such as yourself. This may be the only time in a hectic month you get to relax. A chance to put aside all those worries.’
‘People often shout at you?’
‘We have all sorts of busy gentlemen – businessmen, politicians. Sometimes they shout, sometimes it’s nothing but whispers. We don’t take offence. And neither do we take liberties, of course. We help them relax. Then we forget.’
‘You get politicians here?’
‘Had Mr Duff Cooper in here the other day, when he resigned. Not a surprise, it wasn’t, sir. He’d been complaining to me about the state of things for months. Rehearsed bits of his speech with me, so he did, while he was sitting in this chair. But you get all sides,’ Mac hastened to add, anxious not to offend. ‘Even the Prime Minister has to have his hair cut sometimes, sir. Foreign Secretary, too, and members of the Royal Family.’
‘They all have their stories.’
‘Indeed they do.’
‘And your story, McFadden. What’s that?’
‘My story, sir?’
‘Where d’you get the gammy leg?’
‘No story at all, really. A crushed pelvis. Unfortunate, but …’ He shrugged his shoulders.
‘An accident?’
Mac continued cutting, concentrating in silence as though he’d found a particularly stubborn tuft, shifting uncomfortably on his damaged leg. But the eyes told the story.
‘So, let me guess. If it wasn’t an accident you must have been attacked. Beaten up in some way. Maybe injured in the war?’
‘A little while after the war, sir.’
‘Where?’
Mac didn’t wish to appear impolite or evasive, but neither did he want to lay himself open. This wasn’t how the game was played. It was the customer who kvetched and prattled, and the barber who listened, not the other way round. Still, English gentlemen were so extraordinarily anxious about displaying their ignorance in front of the lower classes that Mac felt confident he knew how to put an end to the conversation. ‘Somewhere you’ll never have heard of, sir. Abroad. A little place called Solovetsky.’
‘Fuck,’ Burgess breathed slowly.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘The gulags.’
Mac started in alarm and dropped his scissors. ‘Please, sir.’ He glanced around nervously, as though afraid of eavesdroppers. ‘It is a thing I don’t care to talk about. And in an establishment such as this …’
‘You poor sod.’
Mac was flustered. He fumbled to retrieve his scissors from the floor and almost forgot to exchange them for a fresh pair from the antiseptic tray. He stared at Burgess, his face overflowing with pain and a defiance that even half a lifetime of subservience hadn’t been able to extinguish. Burgess stared straight back.
‘Don’t worry, McFadden, I’ve no wish to embarrass you. I’m sorry for your troubles.’
Mac saw something in Burgess’s eye – a flicker, a door that opened for only an instant and was quickly closed, yet in that moment Mac glimpsed another man’s suffering and perhaps even private terror. This man in his chair understood. Which was why, when Burgess suggested it, he agreed to do what no barber who knew his proper rank would dare do. He agreed to meet for a drink.
The entrance to Shepherd Market stood just across from Trumper’s. It was a maze of alleyways and small courtyards hidden in the heart of Mayfair. Here a hungry man could stumble upon a startling variety of pubs and restaurants, mostly of foreign origin, and if he stumbled on a little further he could find narrow staircases that led to rooms where he might satisfy many of his other cravings, too.
When Mac arrived Burgess was standing at the bar of the Grapes, as he had said he would be. He was smoking, cupping the cigarette in the palm of his hand, and drinking a large Irish whiskey. The barber levered himself up onto a bar stool. Mac was short, wiry, his shoulders unevenly sloped as though to compensate for his crooked leg, with a back that was already bent, perhaps through stooping over his customers. The greying hair was scraped neatly but thinly across the skull, the skin beneath his mouth was wrinkled, as though the chin had tried to withdraw and seek refuge from the blows. He was not yet forty but looked considerably older.
‘I thought maybe you wouldn’t come,’ Burgess offered, but didn’t extend a hand. The English never did.
‘I thought so too. Particularly when I saw you drinking in the saloon bar. Bit rich for me.’
‘It’s on me. What’s your poison?’
‘I’d be thankful for a pint of mild, Mr Burgess.’
Burgess noted the obsequious ‘sir’ had gone. This was a meeting of equals. Burgess took out a large roll of notes from his pocket and paid for a glass of flat brown liquid. ‘You couldn’t get that in the gulag, could you, McFadden?’
‘We got many things. Brutality and starvation mostly. But there was always plenty of work to fill idle moments.’ He drank deep, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. An old scar ran across the hand, dulled by time, and he had a crooked finger that had clearly been broken and badly set.
‘How did you end up in Solovetsky?’
‘Who can tell any more? Through a series of other camps, moved from one to another, forgotten about, rediscovered, moved on. I wasn’t a criminal, just unfortunate. That was the problem. You see, they’d completely forgotten why I was there, so they couldn’t release me, could they? Not without the proper paperwork. If they’d let me free and made a mistake, they would end up serving the sentence for me. Such things have to be handled correctly. So they kept me, just in case. The only reason I can recall Solovetsky above the many others is because of this.’ He indicated his leg.
‘How’d it happen?’
‘We were building a new dock. It was February, I think. Winter in the Arctic Circle. We hadn’t seen the sun for weeks. I was ordered to unload a wagon full of heavy timbers. In the dark and the cold, they fell on me.’
‘I thought you said it wasn’t an accident.’
Their eyes met once more, almost as combatants. ‘When it’s thirty degrees below, you’ve already worked nine hours without food, you can’t feel your feet or your hands and the entire pile of logs has frozen solid, you’ve been beaten twice by the guards that day because the work detail hasn’t completed its quota, and they threaten they’ll go on beating you until the timbers are unloaded – I don’t call that much of an accident. Do you, Mr Burgess?’
‘You must hate the Russians.’
‘Why should I? Most of my fellow prisoners were Russians.’
‘The Soviets, the guards, then.’
‘Not especially. They simply took over the camps that had been built by the Tsars and didn’t know any different. And it was a Soviet doctor who in the end saved my life. I was one of the lucky ones, Mr Burgess. At the start of the war I was one of many friends, yet today I am the only survivor. They all died, every one of them. That wasn’t the Bolsheviks’ fault. Except for little Moniek, perhaps.’
Burgess offered another drink but Mac was still less than halfway through his pint and declined. Burgess ordered another large Jameson’s. ‘So whose fault was it?’
‘The System.’
‘What system?’
‘Any System. Happens everywhere. Politicians and rulers who decide, who decree, and who leave ordinary folk like me to pay for their mistakes. At least one thing about the Russian Revolution, Mr Burgess, is that when they shot the Tsar at last they got someone to pay for their own mistakes. It’s progress of sorts, I suppose.’
It seemed an excellent time to start playing the game. ‘In a way that’s why I wanted to see you, McFadden. The System. To ask for your help. Do you know I work for the BBC?’
‘No, Mr Burgess, I didn’t. I know quite a lot about you, but not that.’
‘What the hell do you know about me?’
‘That your job involves a deal of writing – judging by the ink smudges on your fingers and the stain on your jacket pocket. It also involves you in a lot of stress – look at your fingernails. And I know you’re not married. Nor ever likely to be.’
‘What?’ Burgess muttered in some alarm.
‘An observant barber knows a very great deal about his clients. That collar of yours, for instance. Hasn’t ever been near a woman. And if the rest of your wardrobe is like that, you stand about as much chance of getting a woman as Stalin has of becoming Pope. You’re an intelligent man, you must see that, yet it doesn’t seem to worry you. So I conclude you’re not a ladies’ man at all.’
‘You think I’m trying to pick you up?’
Mac smiled gently. ‘No. With the sort of money you just pulled out of your pocket there’d be no need for you to bother with the likes of me. Anyhow, in my experience you gentlemen are perceptive types – is that the right word? You would know from the start that you were wasting your time. You and me, we worship in different churches. But I don’t rush to judgements, Mr Burgess, not at all. In the camps, you see, you learned to survive by any means that were necessary. Any means, Mr Burgess, whatever it took. You did, or you died. You understand me?’
‘I think so.’
‘Not places for moralizing, the camps. So I don’t moralize, not even about my customers.’ Mac was enjoying himself. He was in control, had the upper hand, so different from being on the end of a boot. That was why he’d agreed to a drink. He’d seen in Burgess someone who was suffering more than he was, and had come out of curiosity.
‘So we have established that you’re not after my body, Mr Burgess. Then what do you want?’
‘Proper bloody Sherlock Holmes, aren’t we?’ Burgess snapped, but smiling, offering a compliment and at last persuading his guest to accept another drink.
‘Understand, Mr Burgess, the best time to get to know a man is when you’re polishing his boots – or cutting his hair. That way you get to see all of him, from top to toe. Trouble with most English gentlemen – if I may venture an opinion, Mr Burgess? – is that they never take the time to get to know another man. It’s a class thing. An Englishman only ever looks up – and usually up someone else’s backside.’
‘You don’t like the English?’
‘A certain type of Englishman. I’ve got customers whose hair I’ve cut for years and still they have to ask my name every time they come in. You knew it – wanted to know it – right from the start. Doesn’t matter why, it was enough you took an interest, didn’t patronize me. So I thought I’d take an interest, too. How can I help?’
Burgess knocked back his refreshed drink in one draught. ‘Not sure you can, really, but … I work for the BBC. Political programmes. I like the job, it’s important – more important than ever right now – yet it’s like driving in a fog. The Government tells us next to nothing and what it does say is twisted like a corkscrew. Or it lies, promises peace in our time, yet we’re going to war whether we like it or not.’
The barber’s deep-set eyes held his own, steady, not agreeing, not dissenting either.
‘So I need to understand. If we’re going to war I want to know the bloody reason why. And as I was sitting in your chair it struck me – the people you see every day are the ones who make these decisions. And they talk to you. If you could help me understand what they’re thinking, what they’re planning, I’d be able to do my job a hell of a lot better.’
‘Mr Burgess, I cut the hair of politicians, Cabinet Ministers, all sorts of great men. They entrust me with their confidences because they think I’m slow and stupid and working-class and a little foreign, so they assume I couldn’t possibly understand. And you want me to pass those confidences on to you.’
Damn it, but this man knew what he was about. ‘I’m not asking you to divulge secrets or anything …’
‘I have secrets, Mr Burgess? If they tell me, a mere barber, how could they be secrets?’
‘I’m sorry, if you find this offensive I’ll go …’
Mac was sipping his beer, contemplating. Slowly, gulp by gulp, he drained his glass and gently replaced it on the polished counter. ‘Offensive? Mr Burgess, I don’t find you trying to do your job offensive. I find the gulags offensive, yet what’s going on in Europe right now is going to lead to far, far worse than the gulags. I find that offensive. There’s something else. Just this morning I was reading in the newspaper – it was left behind by a gentleman, he’d only been interested in Court Circular and the horseracing news. It was buried inside, a little report. Not of much consequence, apparently. About how in Vienna they were celebrating Mr Hitler’s victory in Czechoslovakia by rounding up Jews. They dragged entire families from their houses and made the old ladies sit up in the branches of trees like birds, all night long. It snows sometimes in Vienna at this time of year, Mr Burgess. And they lined up old men in front of their daughters in the street and shaved their private parts, saying it was a delousing programme. Humiliated them, not because they’d done anything wrong, but because of what they were. Then they were told they couldn’t go back to their houses, that their homes had been confiscated. If anyone objected, they were told they’d be sent to Dachau. Or worse. An interesting choice of phrase – Dachau or worse. What do you suppose they meant by that. Mr Burgess?’
‘Truly, I hate to think.’
‘But somebody has to think, Mr Burgess. And it’s as plain as a maggot in a slice of meat loaf that Mr Chamberlain’s not going to think about all that.’
‘You’re Jewish?’
McFadden shook his head, as though trying to shake off an annoying fly. ‘Doesn’t matter what I am. Or what you are.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We live in a complicated world. I don’t suppose that cash you’ve got in your pocket was given to you by the BBC to pay for your haircut, was it?’
Burgess covered his alarm with laughter – God, but this one was sharp. ‘Would you believe it if I said I lived off my mother’s immoral earnings?’
‘We are all held hostage by our past.’
‘You’d like payment?’
Mac slowly shook his head. ‘No. You can buy me a drink when it suits you, but I won’t help you for money. I’ll do it because if Mr Chamberlain gets this wrong, a lot of people are going to die. People like me and Moniek. Not people like Mr Chamberlain.’
‘Who is Moniek?’
‘It is no longer of importance.’
‘Have another drink.’
McFadden shook his head once more. ‘No, thank you. It’s been a difficult week and – like you – I am a single man. I feel I need a little distraction. While such things are still allowed, eh? If you don’t mind, I think I’ll take a walk around the Market. See what’s happening.’
‘I’ll be in touch, McFadden. Thanks,’ Burgess offered as the other man slipped off his bar stool and limped away. He turned at the door.
‘You know something, Mr Burgess, at this rate you’re going to end up the best-groomed bugger in Britain.’
That evening on his way home, McFadden stopped by the entrance to the synagogue at the top of Kensington Park Road. He hadn’t entered a synagogue since he was a teenager, but now he hesitated, troubled by memories of Moniek, things he had hidden away for so many years. He put his hand on the door. He seemed almost relieved when he found it locked.
Churchill spoke in the debate on Munich – or European Affairs, as it was called in Hansard. He talked of shame, of a total and unmitigated defeat, of gross neglect and deficiencies, of his country being weighed in the balance and found wanting. He spoke magnificently, a guiding star for the rebels. They were few in number, about thirty, but of considerable standing, men of stature – like the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, Duffie Cooper, Leo Amery, Bobbety Cranborne, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Roger Keyes, Macmillan, Boothby, Duncan Sandys, Harold Nicolson. As Nicolson recorded in his diary, ‘Our group decided that it is better for us all to abstain, than for some to abstain and some to vote against. We therefore sit in our seats, which must enrage the Government, since it is not our numbers that matter but our reputation.’
He was right. The Government was deeply enraged. Even as Chamberlain rose from his seat to acknowledge the wild acclamation from all sides, his mind was made up. The thirty or so rebels had become marked men, every one of them. The reputations which Nicolson talked of with such pride were about to be systematically besmirched.
FOUR (#ulink_f809d4e1-9bfa-5019-a0cd-c2f8e7b5256a)
Chamberlain. Chamberlain. Everywhere one went it was that name, Neville Chamberlain. No occasion seemed complete without his presence. His was the name on everyone’s lips. Hospital beds were being endowed in his name, the French had opened up a fund to provide him with ‘a corner of French soil’ in gratitude, while the photograph of him at the Palace adorned the mantelpieces of thousands of homes – The Times even offered copies to its readers as a souvenir Christmas card. So great had the public clamour grown that it was in danger of becoming compromising; Chamberlain felt compelled to issue a statement declining the Bishop of Coventry’s suggestion that a National Tribute Fund be set up in his honour. This was, after all, a democracy.
‘Has he arrived yet?’ There was no hint of impatience in the question posed by the Dowager Queen Mary – how could even the King’s mother be impatient with a man who was so busy saving the world? But they had missed him. They had gathered at Sandringham in the saloon, a fussy, crowded hall overburdened with family portraits, deer skulls and the paraphernalia of Victorians trying too hard to please. A large stuffed bear stood guard by the staircase. Queen Mary had settled into a chair by the fireplace, glass of sherry in hand, while two men stood by her side, waiting on her and in the process warming themselves by the roaring log fire. The first, Edward Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, was entirely at home in a royal household, for he occupied a position of personal privilege almost unique amongst politicians. He was an intimate friend of the King. They dined frequently and in private, and Halifax had been provided with a key to the gardens of Buckingham Palace so that he was able to walk through them every morning on his way to the Foreign Office. The King practised with his rifle in the gardens and would often waylay Halifax in order to share his views on matters of state, but most of all for the simple pleasure of his company. It could be lonely being an Emperor-King. George VI was relatively inexperienced, a monarch by mistake. He also suffered from a speech impediment so pronounced that his audience often couldn’t tell whether His Majesty had paused for thought or was simply stuck on a stutter. As a result, public appearances terrified him, and perhaps that was why he felt at ease in the company of Halifax, who also and so obviously carried with him the misfortunes of his narrow bloodline. The Viscount was exceptionally tall, dome-headed and gangling, slightly stooped, and born without a left hand. The sleeve on his Savile Row suit was filled with nothing more than a prosthesis, a rubber fist. ‘Armless Eddie’, as the wags called him. And, like the King, the Viscount also suffered from a tangling of the tongue – he was unable to pronounce his ‘r’s. So the two men walked, talked, stuttered and found support in each other’s company. Theirs had become an uncommon bond between uncommon men.
The other man warming himself by the fire was Joseph Kennedy. The Ambassador was, of course, as common as New England mud and had no right to feel at home in the inner sanctums of the British Royal Family, but he didn’t give a damn. Like a presumptuous wine he was le nouvel arrivé, acidic, impertinent but, in the view of Queen Mary, excellent value for money. He was irreverent, called her ‘Your Graciousness’, which brought her out in uncharacteristic smiles, and he shared many of her prejudices.
‘Is an American allowed to tell an English Queen she looks radiant tonight?’ Kennedy began.
‘I think on that matter we might stretch a point, don’t you think, Foreign Secretary?’
‘Undoubtedly, ma’am.’
A flunkey crept between them bearing a crystal decanter to refill Her Majesty’s glass. He was in full royal regalia, stockings, breeches, buckled shoes, ruffs. Kennedy wondered if there was any chance of his borrowing the outfit for Halloween.
‘You gentlemen enjoyed yourselves today, I trust.’
‘They flew low and slow. Just as I like ’em,’ replied the Ambassador who, for all his Wild West hokum, was a poor shot.
‘It has been a particularly happy day for us,’ Queen Mary announced, patting her thighs with pleasure. ‘While you gentlemen were out shooting for your supper I had tea with our nephew, Fritzi – Prince Friedrich of Prussia,’ the elderly dowager added for the American’s benefit. ‘Such a sweet boy. He brought me news and letters from Doorn.’
The American’s expression revealed a state of utter ignorance.
‘Doorn – in Holland,’ Halifax explained. ‘It’s where the Kaiser has his estates. He’s lived there in exile since the end of the war.’
‘He’s our cousin, you see, Ambassador. We were very close. You can imagine how difficult it’s been in recent days.’
Kennedy began to recall his State Department briefings. Family ties were important, sure, no argument from him on that score, but the bloodlines that bound the royal families of Germany and Britain together came close to a genetic noose. Britain had been ruled by Germans for the best part of two hundred years. Called themselves Hanoverians. Some had barely spoken English, all of them had married German wives. Even the dowager seated on the chair beside him was a princess of some place called Teck – and Hesse, and Wuerttemberg, too, come to that, and the exiled Kaiser – the war-mongering, bottom-pinching, mustachio-twirling Wilhelm – was a grandson of Victoria. The British Royal Family was almost Appalachian in its enthusiasm to disappear up its own roots.
‘It’s inconceivable, war once more. Between Britain and Germany. Cousin against cousin. Isn’t it, Ambassador?’ Queen Mary demanded.
‘Sure, totally inconceivable,’ he agreed – although such refined family sensitivities didn’t seem to have stopped them last time. When all was said and the dying done, the Great War had amounted to nothing more than one huge family sulk, King against Kaiser against Tsar – until the Americans arrived and banged their inbred heads together.
‘Think of the cost,’ she continued. ‘We couldn’t possibly afford it. And the Empire!’ For a moment it seemed as though she might swoon; red spots appeared upon her powdered cheeks. ‘It would spark unrest throughout the colonies, particularly in those awkward places like the Middle East and India.’ She turned on Halifax. ‘Edward, you know India, of course.’
Halifax stooped low, bowing his head in acknowledgement. He had been Viceroy of India until a few years previously.
‘They are … wonderful, yes, quite wonderful, the Indians,’ the dowager persisted. ‘But they do have a habit of taking advantage every time one’s back is turned.’
Her voice grew softer, more conspiratorial. ‘No, Herr Hitler may have his faults, but consider the alternative. Either Germany will dominate the continent, or it will fall to the Bolsheviks. And who would you prefer to take tea with, Ambassador? A German traditionalist who at least has the sense to do business with us, or a Bolshevik revolutionary who has one knife at your purse and the other at your throat?’
‘Foreign Secretary?’ Kennedy enquired, shuffling off the responsibility.
Halifax considered carefully. It was a complex question, one he had debated long and hard with his colleagues and his God. ‘I am no fan of Herr Hitler. He is a ferocious bully, a man with blood on his hands. And yet I see no reason why that blood should be British. On the other hand Bolshevism represents a threat to everything this country stands for.’ He began tapping the pocket of his dinner jacket with his prosthesis as if to check that his wallet hadn’t disappeared. ‘Look at the map, Ambassador. The most substantial obstacle standing in Stalin’s path is Germany. Without a strong Reich’ – the word emerged most wretchedly mangled – ‘there would be nothing to stop Stalin’s hordes sweeping through the continent until they stood at our own front door. Personally – and as an aristocrat I have to view such things personally – I take no pleasure in the prospect of being butchered simply because of what I was born. Begging your pardon, ma’am.’
Tiny shudders of sympathy ran through the Dowager Queen, causing the four strands of jewels in her necklace to sparkle. She had long been tormented by the fate of her cousin, the last Tsar, who had been murdered with his entire family in the cellar at Ekaterinburg, led down the steps, repeatedly shot, then finished off with bayonets. No, not a proper fate for a king. Her shuddering became more violent and she moved her hand to the folds of her throat.
Kennedy, meanwhile, was in excellent spirits. The seat of his trousers had been warmed thoroughly by the fire and the bourbon he was sipping was iced and excellent. It seemed an appropriate time for a little fun. ‘I agree with you, Foreign Secretary,’ Kennedy offered, picking up the thread of the conversation. ‘It’s a time when we all have to make choices. Tough choices.’ A malicious pause. ‘Pity no one seems to have told Mr Churchill that.’
The Queen reacted as though she had suddenly found a pin in the cushion of the chair. ‘That man!’ she gasped with an expression of pain.
Halifax began to clear his throat, loudly, diplomatically, trying to give the Queen the opportunity to withdraw, but she was in her own house and would have none of it. She was, after all, a woman who carried with her the reputation of being a notorious kleptomaniac, and hosts who invited her for dinner would instruct the servants to lock away the best silver in case she took a liking to a piece and stuffed it in her handbag. She was not a woman who had ever been unduly sensitive about other people’s feelings, and she had no intention of showing weakness now.
‘He crashes around like a bull who hasn’t been fed for a week,’ she persisted, treating herself to a huge sip of sherry. ‘Leaves wreckage everywhere he goes.’
‘Ma’am?’ Kennedy enquired, wanting more, bending low.
‘My apologies, Ambassador, but …’ For a moment it seemed she had shocked herself by her own indiscretion. Her face had gone pale beneath the powder, like snow-swept granite, and, taking Halifax’s hint, she looked for some means of escape. She peered blindly across the saloon. ‘Edward, who is that woman? The one dressed like a Parisian actress?’
‘Um, the lady by the staircase?’
‘The one whose necklace appears to be nudging her navel. They can’t be real, surely.’
‘The jewels, ma’am? Indeed they can. That is the wife of one of the King’s bankers.’
He offered the name and the Dowager Queen’s nostrils flared in distaste, as though someone had just thrown a horse-hair mattress on the fire. Not a guest who would have been invited in her day. This distraction wasn’t working. Anyway, she argued with herself, why should she be seeking distraction? She was old, and with age went all sorts of allowances to indulge her whims, to jump in puddles and rattle the railings and pinch the silver just as she wished. Her husband was dead, she was no longer on parade. Why should she hold back?
‘I had forgotten that you are so recently arrived in our country, Ambassador. But since you have expressed an interest in Mr Churchill, it would be rude of me not to advise you on the matter. You will soon get to know Mr Churchill’s record. An exceptional one, indeed.’ She paused for effect and for breath. ‘He has never been loyal to anyone other than himself. He changes parties and friendships whenever it suits him. None of our business, of course, but when he begins blundering into matters of the Crown, that is quite another thing. Oh, it pains me, Mr Kennedy, that my son Edward should have behaved so badly over the abdication. That was terrible enough for any family to bear. But Mr Churchill proved himself to be utterly outrageous. Talked of forming a King’s Party. Wanted Edward to stay on the throne and to turn the whole thing into a huge political row. Would have had That Woman as Queen!’
Her Royal Annoyance disappeared into her sherry, unable for the moment to continue, while Kennedy felt forced to stifle a smile in order to maintain the stern face of diplomacy. If only ‘That Woman’, Wallis Simpson, had been a sour-faced German dumpling, how much easier Edward’s path might have been …
The Queen’s head was up once more, her emotions on the flood. ‘Mr Winston Churchill’ – she was intent on putting him in his place – ‘Mr Winston Churchill has done more than any other commoner since Cromwell to bring our family to the brink of ruin. Why, he might as well be a Bolshevik!’
Halifax, anxious that the Queen Mother was diverting down avenues which might prove uncomfortable, picked up the explanation. ‘Winston has had many difficult times,’ he explained to Kennedy, ‘but the abdication row was the worst. He came back to the Commons after what might be termed, um … a considerable lunch, and would not go quietly. Insisted on rising to make a speech, to argue against the abdication. When the matter was already settled.’
The dowager muttered darkly. Kennedy thought he could make out the words ‘dog’ and ‘vomit’.
‘It was, um, an extraordinary scene. He was jeered from all sides, to the point where he could take it no longer. Forced to leave the Chamber. Flogged from his post. His reputation has never recovered. A sad end to a considerable career. Who knows what – um, in other circumstances – might have been?’
Kennedy had to work still harder to contain his amusement at Halifax’s soft twisting of the stiletto and the outpouring of tortured ‘r’s. His entertainment was interrupted by what seemed at first sight to be an ostrich, an apparition in feathers that began to bob slowly up and down. It proved to be one of the guests, the wife of a senior diplomat, who was curtseying – once, twice – trying to catch the Dowager Queen’s attention. The attempt failed miserably. The Queen stared unflinching with eyes that could pluck feathers at fifty paces. After all, this particular bird was one of that circle of society women who – like the banker’s wife – had taken her son, the once-innocent Edward, under their wings and into their beds, ensuring that the handsome young prince wanted for neither experience nor education. Trouble was, they had also left him with a taste for the exotic which, in Queen Mary’s view, had pushed him down the slippery sexual slope that had led to his ruin with That Woman. The Queen chose neither to forgive nor to forget, and the courtier moved on, distraught, flapping her freshly clipped wings.
Kennedy returned them to their conversation. ‘So you don’t think Mr Churchill has much of a political future?’
‘The best is past, and some time ago,’ Halifax muttered.
The royal whalebone rattled. ‘It is all theatre. He hasn’t a smudge of support.’
Kennedy loved this woman and it showed. Fiery, passionate, opinionated. Hell, if only they’d also given the Royal Family a brain, how different history might have been.
‘Ah, um, which brings me to another point, Ambassador,’ Halifax continued. ‘On which the Prime Minister and I would much appreciate your support.’
‘You want New York back?’
‘Not quite our architectural style any longer, I think. No, it’s Paramount, the um … picture company. They’ve put out a news film for the cinemas which is really – how can one put this? – not helpful. Goes on about what it calls the German diplomatic triumph and the sufferings in Czechoslovakia rather than um … the peace and security which the agreement has delivered to the whole of Europe. Censorship is out of the question, of course, I fully understand that, but I wondered – particularly with your background in Hollywood – could you have a word with Paramount? With the owners, perhaps? Encourage them to bring a little more balance to their productions?’
‘You mean twist a few arms. Break a few legs.’
‘I’m sure just a word in the right ear would be sufficient,’ Halifax insisted.
‘Hey, but half of Hollywood is run by the sons of Israel. Fiddling their own tune. What can you expect …?’
Their discussion was interrupted by a string quartet starting up. Something Middle European. Probably Bach. Coincidence, of course, but to the Queen it seemed like a heavenly fanfare, for at that moment the Prime Minister himself entered the room, dressed for dinner with his wife Anne on his arm.
‘Ah, Neville,’ the Dowager Queen fluttered, shaken from her sherry, ‘it’s Blessed Neville. At last! Now we can all rest in peace.’
Neville. Blessed Neville. The saintly Neville. Everywhere he goes his name is on their lips and he is acclaimed from all sides. Peace – and praise – in his time. A task completed, a world saved. And a point proved. How ironic it is that of all the generations of mighty Chamberlains, he should be the one to make his mark, and how grotesque that, after what has been said in his praise, he should still feel insecure. But Neville has been raised in the shadows, almost a political afterthought, the son of Joseph and half-brother of Austen, both more obviously eminent than he. And yet neither made it to 10 Downing Street. But he has. He may not have wits as quick or tongue so lyrical, but what he lacks in natural gifts he has made up for with persistence and hard work – some call it blind stubbornness, a determination that has left him grey and close to the edge of utter exhaustion. His body has arrived at the point where cold iron grips him inside at night, and still lingers there in the morning. He has needed every ounce of that stubbornness and self-belief to enable him to carry on, but carry on he must. The peace of Europe depends upon it. So does the good name of his family.
He is still feeling cold to his core as he drives – rather, is being driven – back from Sandringham House. The applause of the guests is ringing in his ears, the warmth of the King’s handshake still upon his palm, but by God it’s cold at night in these Fens. He wraps himself more tightly in the car blanket and tries to find comfort on the leather seats of the Austin. He wishes he could sleep, like his wife beside him, but sleep has learned to avoid him. It is dark outside, as it was when he flew back from Germany. He had never flown before but three times now he has made the trip, long and uncomfortable, like being thrown around in a tumbrel as it crosses uneven cobbles. But it has been worth the pain. As he flew back that last time along the Thames towards London, he realized he was following the path the bombers might take. And there below him, in all its electric splendour, had sat London and its millions of men, women and children – his own grandchild included, born just days before he left – waiting. Waiting for him, waiting for Hitler, waiting defenceless for whatever might be thrown against them. But now there isn’t going to be a war. And he hopes never to have to go up in an aeroplane again.
He knows there are those who mock him, but only the types who would have mocked Jesus himself. Behind his back they call him the Undertaker, the Coroner, but not to his face, not any more. Even Hitler had shouted and stormed at him, his spittle landing on Chamberlain’s cheek, and Horace Wilson had told him that during one of his private interviews in Berchtesgaden the Fuehrer had become so agitated that he had screamed and fallen to the floor in a fit. He is the commonest little dog, the German leader, no doubt of that, but if he is half-mad then there is also the other half, and at least he is a man of business. And he, Neville Chamberlain, has done business with him – ‘the first man in many years who has got any concessions out of me,’ as Hitler told him – and he has brought back a piece of paper bearing his signature on which the lives of hundreds of millions of Europeans depend. Herr Hitler has given his word.
The visits to Germany have had their lighter moments, of course. When he arrived in Munich and stepped down from the plane, an SS guard of honour had been waiting ready for inspection. With skulls and crossbones on their collars. What, he had wondered, did they signify? Anyway, as they came to attention he remembered that he had left his umbrella on the plane and kept the SS waiting while he retrieved it. The great German army – held up by an umbrella! And they accuse him of having no sense of humour.
He has achieved more than merely an absence of war, he has built the foundations for peace – a peace in which Britain will be at the heart of Europe, with real influence, helping shape its future rather than simply watching in impotence as a resurgent Germany grows increasingly dominant. “Proaching Cambridge, sir,’ the driver announces – God, miles still to go. His thoughts turn to his half-brother, Austen, and the Nobel Peace Prize he had been awarded for his efforts in bringing the nations of Europe together. And he wonders whether two brothers have ever separately won a Nobel Prize before. Not that he has been awarded the Peace Prize yet, of course, no point in jumping the guns (although he has, quite literally). But his brother had never had a poem dedicated to his honour by the Poet Laureate, John Masefield:
‘As Priam to Achilles for his son,
So you, into the night, divinely led,
To ask that young men’s bodies, not yet dead,
Be given from the battle not begun.’
‘What was that, darling?’ His wife, Anne, stirs, woken from her sleep.
‘Sorry, my dear. Must’ve been talking out loud. Rest a while longer. Still a way to go.’
And what had Queen Mary told him? Over dinner she took his hand – yes, actually touched him – and said she had received a letter from the Kaiser himself in which he had said – oh, the words burned bright – that he had ‘not the slightest doubt that Mr Chamberlain was inspired by heaven and guided by God’. It makes him feel unbearably humble. He is sixty-nine, rapidly wearing out, undeniably mortal, yet with the hand of a Queen on his sleeve and his God at his shoulder. Still some, even within his own party, deny him. What would they have him do, for pity’s sake? Cast humanity aside and launch upon another bloody war? What in heaven’s name would they have him fight with? A French air force without wings? A Russian army with no scruples? Those people, that rag-bag of political mongrels around Churchill – armchair terriers who have urged him to introduce conscription, not just of men but of capital, too. Suggested he should take over the banks and much of business. Control their profits. Insanity! Doing the Bolsheviks’ work for them. But what could he expect of Winston, waving around his whisky and soda, desperately trying to obliterate the memories of his own manifold failures as a military leader. They would carve Gallipoli upon Churchill’s gravestone, along with the names of the forty thousand British soldiers who were slaughtered there. Herr Hitler had called Churchill and the other warmongers ‘moerderen’ – murderers. He had a point.
The car is rolling down the A10 now, his thoughts rolling with it, past the acres of glasshouses that carpet the Lea Valley, approaching the outskirts of Cheshunt. The anger has warmed him inside but he remains exhausted almost to the point of despair. The driver slows to take a bend and through the darkness the Prime Minister can see the outline of a church, and a notice that announces it to be St Clement’s. Oranges and lemons, said the bells of St Clement’s … And St Martin’s, the Old Bailey, Shoreditch, Stepney, Old Bow. The candle is here to light him to bed. And here comes the chopper to chop off his head – chip, chop, chip, chop – the last man’s dead! In his tormented mind, Chamberlain has a vision. The heart of London has been ripped out by bombers, the church spires are burning like funeral pyres, and in their light he can see Winston Churchill, astride it all, holding the axe! Chip – chop – chip – chop. Oh, but this is no children’s game, there is no need for him to run away. Chip – chop – chip. He thinks he can hear the methodical rhythm of the axe as it falls, but it is only the beating of the car engine. His body aches, his mind is swimming with fatigue and a small tear begins to trace an uncertain path down his cheek. He wonders vaguely why he is crying, but arrives at no clear answer. He doesn’t make a habit of crying, can’t remember the last time he did so. Oh, yes, it was as a young child, when he refused to get out of the bath and his father had punished him …
He dwells on memories of yesterday, perhaps because he dare not dwell on tomorrow. Sometimes, at that vanishing point as wakefulness dips into sleep, Chamberlain has a vision that London is burning after all and he has got the whole thing wrong. The crowds are no longer cheering and both God and the Queen have turned their backs. But it is only a dream. As they pass Queen Eleanor’s memorial at Waltham Cross, finally he falls into a fitful sleep.
Late nights were spreading like a disease in Downing Street. They disrupted the process of calm thought and careful digestion. They were not to be encouraged.
‘I’ll follow you in a minute, my dear,’ Chamberlain promised as his wife set foot on the stairs. They both knew she would be asleep in her own room long before he made it up to the second floor. There came a point where the body was too exhausted to relax, and he had long since passed that point. He would need a drink and to pace a little before he could think of retiring, perhaps refresh himself from a few of the thousands of letters and telegrams waiting for him.
As he wandered in search of distraction through the darkened corridors, he discovered a chink of light shining from beneath the door of the anteroom next to the Cabinet Room. The elfin grove. Muffled laughter. He was drawn to it like a moth.
The merriment ceased as Horace Wilson and Joseph Ball looked up in concern. ‘Everything in order, Neville?’ Ball enquired. They were used to the tides of exhaustion that had swept across their master in recent weeks, but the face at the door was more lugubrious, the moustache more determinedly drooped, than ever.
‘Things in order? Perhaps you should tell me. You two always seem to know so much more about what’s going on than do I.’
The Prime Minister sank into a chair and held out his hand. It was immediately filled with a glass of white wine. Tired eyes lifted in silent thanks. So often he found there was no need to use words with these elves, they had an uncanny ability to understand his needs – and particularly Wilson, whom he had inherited from the previous administration of Baldwin. At times it seemed to be the finest part of his inheritance. Softly spoken, pale eyes, fastidious by habit, understated but extraordinarily determined. From the start Wilson and the new Prime Minister had been natural colleagues, one the Government’s Chief Industrial Adviser, the other a former Birmingham businessman, both seeing virtue in compromise and believing pragmatism to be a guiding principle. Politics were, after all, simply about business, a matter of making deals.
Ball was different. He was a man of fleshy indulgence, which showed beneath the waistcoats of his broad chalk-stripe suits. His fingers were thick, like sausages, and his face was round, an appearance exaggerated by the manner in which his dark hair was slicked close to his skull. His demeanour was often deliberately intimidating – he would take up his position behind his desk, staring inquisitorially through porthole spectacles like the barrister and spy master he once was, stirring only occasionally to wave away the cigarette smoke in which he was half-obscured. Unlike Wilson he was not in the least fastidious, being entirely open about his prejudices, which he promoted through his role as the mastermind of propaganda at Conservative Central Office, and also through a newspaper he published entitled Truth. Truth, for Ball, consisted of destroying the reputations of all opponents – among whom he numbered most Americans and all Jews – and he was liberal only in the means he employed to achieve his ends. He was extremely wealthy and had access to many sources of funds, using them not only to support his own publications but also to place spies inside the headquarters of the Labour Party and amongst opposition newspapers. He was widely loathed and almost universally feared.
Yet he was even closer to the Prime Minister than was Wilson. Ball and Chamberlain shared a passion for country pursuits and particularly fly-fishing that swept them off in each other’s company to the salmon rivers of Scotland at the slightest opportunity, sometimes with unseemly haste. It was widely rumoured that the dates of many parliamentary recesses were set around the fishing calendar. Somehow there always seemed to be time for a little fishing.
‘So, how is our ungrateful world?’ Chamberlain pressed as he sipped the wine. It surprised him. An excellent hock.
The elves looked at each other with an air of conspiratorial mischief. It was Ball who spoke.
‘This will pain you, Neville, I’m sure. But I fear Winston’s got himself into a spot of bother.’
‘Truly?’ A thick eyebrow arched in anticipation.
‘More than a spot. An entire bloody bog.’
‘Drink?’
‘Money.’
‘Will he never learn?’ A pause. The hock was tasting better by the mouthful. ‘How much?’
‘More than forty thousand.’
‘My God!’
‘Forty-three thousand, seven hundred and forty, to be precise. Due by Christmas.’
It was a fortune. More than four times the Prime Minister’s own generous salary.
‘But how?’
‘Been gambling on the New York stock exchange. Losing. Now the banks are calling in his loans.’
‘We have him,’ Wilson added softly, as though announcing the arrival of a tray of tea.
‘Bracken’s been trying to help, find an angel to save him. But the angels don’t seem keen on saving the soul of a man who wants a war that would ruin them.’
‘So what will he do?’
‘Sell what’s left of his shares. Put Chartwell on the market. Pay off his debts with the proceeds.’
‘Chartwell’s been a nest of vipers for too long,’ Wilson added. ‘Time it was cleared out.’
‘No, no …’ Chamberlain was shaking his head, his brow furrowed in concentration. ‘That would be wrong.’
‘Wrong? What’s wrong?’ Ball muttered, as though grappling with a new philosophical concept.
‘He loathes you, Neville,’ Wilson objected. ‘Leads the opposition on all fronts.’
‘And he’ll do so again, given half a chance,’ Ball emphasized.
‘Precisely,’ Chamberlain agreed, steepling his fingers as though in prayer, urging them on.
‘But these debts will crucify him.’
‘What is to be gained by seeing him crucified now?’
‘For the pleasure of it!’ Ball cried.
‘To clean up Westminster,’ Wilson suggested.
‘But he can do us no harm,’ Chamberlain persisted. ‘It would be like stepping on an ant.’
The two elves fell into silence. They hadn’t caught on, not yet, but they knew the Prime Minister tied a mean fly.
‘Winston doesn’t matter, not now, at least. He has lost, we have won. That’s the truth of the matter. And if at this moment he were to fall over the edge, no one would even hear the splash. And how should we gain any benefit from that? Those who stand against us would only regroup, find a new leader and we would have to start all over again. No, there’s a better way. Not today, perhaps, not this month but sometime soon, there will be another crisis. How much better it would be, when that time comes, that their leader is a man who is on the brink. Vulnerable. Unstable as always. Whom we control and with one small nudge can send spinning into the abyss – if that were to prove necessary.’ There was colour in his face again, a spirit that had revived. The tips of his fingers were beating time, pacing his thoughts.
‘By God,’ Wilson breathed. ‘But how?’
‘Bail him out. Extend just sufficient credit for him to survive, for now. Play him on the line. Until he’s exhausted and we can net him whenever we choose.’
‘But he must not realize …’
‘Of course not. Do we know his bankers?’
‘Most certainly.’
‘Are they … friends?’
Ball snorted, struggling with the concept that bankers might be blessed with feelings more complex than those of black widow spiders. ‘Much better than friends. They’re the party’s bankers.’
‘Then they will co-operate. Tell them we want to help a colleague – but quietly, anonymously, to save embarrassment. Underwrite his loan. Let Winston survive – for the moment.’
‘Goes against the bloody grain. When they’re hooked, pull ’em in, Neville, that’s what I say. Don’t let them slip the line.’
‘You and I are a little too skilful for that, I hope, Joe.’
‘You let that forty-pounder go last August.’
‘You know very well he tangled the line in the roots of a tree. Winston is considerably less agile and will have much less stamina for the fight. Don’t you agree, Horace?’
Wilson had been quiet. He was no angler. He was a negotiator, looking for advantage. ‘If we’ve won and there’s no real opposition, as you say, then strike now. Not just for Winston but the whole damned lot. You have the King beside you and the country behind you. Call an election!’
‘An election? But it’s not due for another two years.’
‘There may never be a better time.’
‘Joe?’
‘It would call Winston’s bluff. Maybe get him thrown out in Epping, if he continues to be disloyal. Think of that. What a sign that’d be to the rest of the buggers! And the opinion polls are putting you a mile ahead, Neville.’
‘Are they? Are they …?’ But Chamberlain was uneasy.
‘A referendum on the peace,’ Ball encouraged.
‘But profiting from Munich?’ He looked tired once more, his sentences growing clipped.
‘Why not make a little profit?’
‘I signed the agreement at Munich. Doesn’t mean to say I have to like it.’
‘Peace with honour, Neville.’
‘Silly phrase. Borrowed it from Disraeli – what he said when he came back from the Congress of Berlin. I shouldn’t have. Moment of weakness. Did what I had to do, but how can I take pride in it? I gave my word. To the Czechs. Then I broke it. Sacrificed them to save the world. Not much of a manifesto, that.’
His eyes were cast down in confession, and for a moment silence hung heavily in the room until Wilson spoke up. ‘We did what we had to do, Neville. And the world rejoices.’
Slowly the head came up. ‘A fine thought to take me to my bed.’ Chamberlain rose.
‘But does that mean forgive and forget, Neville? Let the bastards off?’ Ball called out, evidently exasperated, as Chamberlain made to leave the room.
‘I think that’s for their constituencies to decide. And the press.’ He was standing at the door, leaning on the jamb. The exhaustion had returned and he could fight it no longer. His face was the colour of old linen yet his deep-set eyes still burned with a remarkable defiance and were staring directly at Ball. ‘I suspect some of them are going to be given a pretty rough ride, don’t you, Joe?’
‘Damn right,’ Ball said.
The eyes flickered and went out. ‘And so to bed.’ It was then Chamberlain noticed that he still had his glass in his hand. He drained it before setting it aside. ‘Incidentally, an excellent hock. Far better than our usual fare.’
‘It’s a Hochheimer Königin Victoriaberg, from a vineyard once owned by Prince von Metternich. I thought it would be appropriate for you. Full of subtlety, nobility, audacity …’
‘And where did you get this liquid jewel?’
‘From Ribbentrop. He sent several cases back with us from Munich as a goodwill gift.’
‘Always the wine salesman … eh?’
Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German Foreign Minister, had until recently been his country’s Ambassador to London. He had been a natural choice for the post since he was a Nazi of long standing who knew the British capital well, having run a wine business there for many years and established a reputation as an excellent host. He had been – and in many eyes still was – the acceptable face of Hitlerism, and much of London society had beaten a path to the dining table of his embassy in Carlton House Terrace.
‘I was his landlord for a time, you know,’ Chamberlain muttered. ‘He rented my family house in Eaton Place. After I moved in here. Like clockwork with the rent. Always told me – raise glasses, not guns. Good man, good man …’ The rest was lost as he stumbled up the dark stairs of Downing Street.
FIVE (#ulink_0fac5325-5310-5dff-9be2-3320b6b9483f)
Guy Fawkes Night – 5 November 1938.
It was one of those nights that would change everything – although, of course, no one knew it at the time. And as was so often the case Max Aitken, the first Baron Beaverbrook, was to be its ringmaster.
They had gathered together at the summons of the mighty press baron to celebrate the torture and execution more than three centuries earlier of that quintessentially British traitor, Guy Fawkes, who had attempted to destroy the entire Houses of Parliament, King included, by stuffing a cellar full of gunpowder. He had been apprehended at the critical moment with candle in hand, and executed by having his entrails dragged from his still-living body, burnt in front of his face, then having his beating heart plucked out. Sadistic, mediaeval Europe – before the twentieth century turned torture into a modern science of factories and furnaces.
The weather had relented after weeks of skies filled with rain and Roman auguries. A full moon hung overhead, an ideal evening for the lighting of the traditional bonfire which had been constructed in the grounds of Beaverbrook’s country home at Cherkley. The garden and walkways had been turned into a fairy grotto by countless candles concealed in old tin cans, while Boy Scouts from the local troop were on hand to cook sausages and chicken legs over charcoal barbecues and to dispense mulled wine loaded with cinnamon and pepper. They had also erected tents and canvas awnings to provide shelter if the sky changed its mind and turned against them. Beaverbrook, ever the showman, had even instructed that chocolate eggs and sweets should be hidden around the grounds for the children. No one was to be left out of the fun. So to Checkley they had come, the good and the great, the famous and those still seeking fortune, more than two hundred of them wrapped in their furs and astrakhans and silk scarves and hand-warmers, giving thanks for the column inches they hoped they would receive from the Express and the Standard and putting aside how many of those past inches had been cruel and indecently unkind. Yet press barons have no monopoly on unkindness.
‘You are …’ – the Minister paused for thought, but already it was past thought, too late for anything other than gut emotion – ‘being ridiculous, woman. Hysterical. A disgrace to your sex.’
‘Only a man could be so stupid.’
‘Ask anyone. Neville is the greatest Englishman who ever lived.’
‘He makes me ashamed to be British.’
‘You dare talk of shame!’
‘Meaning?’
‘God’s sake, aren’t you tired of climbing into Winston’s bed?’
‘He might yet save us all.’
‘What? The man who’s killed off more careers than Caligula. Who’s filled the graveyards of Gallipoli.’
‘He’s a prophet –’
‘Nigger in a woodpile with a box of matches.’
‘… pointing to our mortal peril.’
‘All the more damned reason for doing a deal with Hitler, then.’
‘You’d deal with the Devil.’
‘I support my Prime Minister. Loyalty to my own. Something you wouldn’t recognize.’
‘I recognize naked cowardice.’
‘I resent that, madam. I oppose your silly war because it will destroy civilization.’
‘War against Hitler may be the only way to save civilization!’
‘Madness. Pure madness. Are you Jewish, or what?’
And all that from colleagues who sat on the same Conservative benches.
It had started with laughter and gaiety and one of Beaverbrook’s little jokes. (He had a notorious sense of humour – some argued that it had been developed to compensate for his notoriously absent sense of fidelity.) He had given specific instructions about the making of the guy that was to be burnt on the fire and it had arrived with some pomp, seated on an old wooden chair decorated with flowers from the hothouse and pushed in a wheelbarrow by a groundsman. The guy was large and overstuffed, as all good guys should be, bits of straw and paper sticking out from an old woollen three-piece suit that had been plundered from the back of a wardrobe for the occasion. Particular attention had been given to the face, which was round, bald, with a scowling expression and an open slit for a mouth. The arms were spread, as though making a speech. The guests who were crowding about Beaverbrook in the darkness applauded its entrance and drew closer to inspect.
‘So, whaddya think of the villain of the piece, Sam?’ The question was delivered in Beaverbrook’s characteristic style, with a broad Canadian accent and out of the corner of his mouth.
Sam Hoare, the Home Secretary and one of the four most powerful men in Government, studied it carefully, his wife by his side.
‘Guy Fawkes tried to blow up every politician in the land. No wonder they remember him, Max.’
Laughter rippled through the guests. They included diplomats and entertainers as well as politicians and press, all gathered around a charcoal brazier for comfort while they waited for the ceremonial lighting of the large bonfire.
‘Fawkes was a foreigner, of course. Spanish,’ someone added from the darkness.
‘Hey, ain’t nothing wrong with foreigners,’ Beaverbrook insisted in a theatrical hokey twang.
‘Just so long as we can ignore most of them, eh, Max,’ Hoare added.
‘But we can’t ignore them, Sam, that’s the whole point.’
The Home Secretary turned, a shade wearily. Even in the darkness he’d recognized the unmistakable trill of Katharine, the Duchess of Atholl and Member of Parliament for the seat of Kinross and West Perthshire. What was the point? He didn’t want any points, not now, he was trying to enjoy himself. For pity’s sake, they all had points, all passionately held and honed to a razor’s edge, but surely this wasn’t the time or the place. Not here. So the Duchess was a long-standing opponent of the Prime Minister and appeasement, they all knew that, an opponent so venomous she had earned herself the nickname of ‘Red Kitty’. She paraded her conscience everywhere, rehearsed her arguments a thousand times before breakfast and again over lunch until her intransigence had pushed her to the furthest limits of the party and, in truth, almost beyond. But Sam Hoare was a party man, loyalty first, and wasn’t going to allow her to forget it.
‘Kitty,’ he hailed his colleague, ‘didn’t see you there in the darkness. About time you came back into the light and enjoyed yourself with the rest of us, isn’t it?’
Kitty Atholl bristled. ‘Enjoyment? Is that what it’s supposed to be about, Sam? Is that why we gave Czechoslovakia away? For fun?’
‘Let’s not trespass on Max’s hospitality …’
‘Don’t mind me, Sam,’ the Beaver interjected. ‘Always encourage a healthy disagreement. Except amongst my employees, of course.’
And so it had begun. A discussion that became a debate that transformed into a character-ripping confrontation in the middle of a moonlit field and in a manner that had been matched across the land for weeks, and yet still showed no signs of exhausting itself. As they faced up to each other a squad of Boy Scouts ran around with jugs of mulled wine to top up the fuel tanks.
‘Hey, how about a toast to the guy?’
‘And death to Ribbentrop. May he die in pain.’
‘You callous witch.’
‘I’m not the one with my head buried in my red box desperately trying to ignore everything that’s happening in Europe.’
‘There you go again, fussing about Hitler. Fellow’s only digging over his own back yard.’
‘Digging graves.’
‘He’s cleaning up Germany, that’s all. He may be a dictator, but he’s also a bit of a Puritan. Like Cromwell.’
‘Cromwell didn’t slaughter Jews!’
‘For God’s sake, listening to you you’d think that pogroms started yesterday. It’s the history of Europe, woman, centuries old.’
‘Where’s your sense of justice, Sam?’
‘Kitty, we all have our consciences. But only you dine out on it.’
‘Put yours away in the closet, have you? All wrapped up in tissue paper?’
‘Any fool can go to war. And right now, only a fool would go to war.’
‘Conquest. Bloodshed. That’s what you’ll get with Hitler.’
‘Bugger it, Kitty, it’s how we won the Empire.’
‘And cowardice is how it’ll be thrown away!’
Gradually it had just become the two of them. Others fell by the wayside until it was just Sam Hoare and Red Kitty, and he had accused her of being weak-minded and a xenophobe and every other calumny that came to hand. It had gone too far. Neither could find the words to stop it and their host refused to intervene – hell, he was enjoying the game, every minute of it, one arm waving a huge cigar, the other arm linked through that of Joe Kennedy, another spectator who had stepped out of the fight several insults earlier. Beside them, out of the darkness, appeared the rotund form of Joseph Ball. Hoare saw him, and even though he was Home Secretary, feared him a little. It gave him his cue.
‘Loyalty. That’s what this is really all about,’ Hoare offered, trying to find a way out of the confrontation with a final jibe. ‘You go sleep with your strange friends but I’m a party man, Kitty. Always been a party man. And I’ll die a party man.’
Her lip twisted in mockery. ‘Dying for your principles, that I can understand, Sam. But to die for your party?’
She reached sharply towards him. He swayed back in apprehension, alarm flooding his eyes, afraid she was intent on slapping his face, but she did nothing more than grab the umbrella that was dangling over his arm. With her trophy she walked over to the stuffed guy, stared at it as though it might spring to life, then thrust the umbrella beneath its armpit and with a final glance of dark-eyed derision swept away into the night. Hoare was left standing on his own, suddenly isolated, feeling like an abandoned bicycle.
A gust of English embarrassment blew around the ankles of the onlookers until Beaverbrook was once again centre-stage, demanding their attention, strutting theatrically over to the guy as though on a tour of inspection. He was ridiculously small with a face that would not have been distinguished even on a gnome, but his money more than made up for it. A Napoleon in newsprint and an astrakhan collar. ‘So – what do we have here?’ he demanded. ‘Munich Man, eh? Not quite what I had in mind.’ He retrieved the umbrella and used it to prod the guy. ‘Whaddya think?’ he addressed the gathering. ‘Who is he? Had him made specially, so don’t disappoint me.’
‘A clue, Maxie darling, give us a clue,’ a giggling voice pleaded.
‘OK. So he’s a little like Guy Fawkes, maybe. Someone who tries to blow up everything in sight. Over-stuffed. Over-blown. Come on, any ideas?’
A brief silence from the crowd and then: ‘Mussolini. It’s got to be Mussolini!’
‘Signor Mussolini to you,’ Beaverbrook growled. ‘Hell, he hears that and he’ll confiscate my villa in Tuscany. No, not Pasta Man. Another guess.’
A woman’s voice: ‘With a stomach like that it’s got to be Hermann Goering.’
‘No, no, no. And if you’re listening up there, Hoyman’ – Beaverbrook swapped his Canadian brogue for a thick Brooklyn accent and raised his eyes to the dark skies – ‘we loves ya!’
Amidst the bubbling of laughter other names were thrown in – Hore-Belisha, Herbert Hoover, Generalissimo Franco, even Wallis Simpson (‘It’s got to be her with the mouth open like that …’) – but Beaverbrook continued stubbornly shaking his head until: ‘Give us another clue, Maxie. Don’t be such a tease.’
The diminutive press baron waved his hands for silence, the gleam of mischief in his eye. ‘One more clue, then,’ he conceded. Taking the large cigar from his own mouth, he inserted it into the slit in the face of the guy, where it remained gently smouldering. ‘I give you …’
‘Cigar Man. It’s Cigar Man! Oh, Maxie darling, you’re so wicked!’
They cheered Beaverbrook from all sides. Only one or two of those present drifted off into the night, declining to be carried along on the tide.
The smell of sausage and singeing onion that wafted on the breezes of that night had proved irresistible, and the canvas awning erected by the Boy Scouts as a hospitality area was crowded. Brendan Bracken had lingered on the edge for some time, fighting the urge to join their number. He was hungry but it was a question of image and image to Bracken was most of what he had. A workman could eat sausages in public, so could an earl or an actress, but an Irish impostor had to be careful of such glancing blows to his reputation. The English insisted that things be in their rightful place, and the place for a would-be statesman who wanted to be taken so terribly seriously was not on his own in a sausage queue. He imagined them all talking about him – but he always imagined people talking about him, dreamt of it, insisted on it, for to be ignored would be the biggest humiliation of all. But not about sausages. So he fought his hunger, feeling weaker with each passing minute, twisted inside by childhood memories of the kitchens of Tipperary until, despite his reservations, he could resist his cravings no longer. He grabbed a sausage and bun with all the fillings and wandered a little way from the other guests to enjoy in solitude the sensation of simply stuffing himself. That, he knew, was where the danger lay. These bangers-in-a-bun were impossible to eat delicately, you had to wolf them down before they turned on you and attacked, dripping grease and ghastliness everywhere. Bracken was notoriously fastidious, a desperate hypochondriac who took meticulous care over his appearance, washing his hands many times a day. This public encounter with a sausage was definitely a one-off, so he prepared himself. He found a spot where he could turn his back on the crowd, place his feet carefully in the sticky grass for security, lean gently forward and –
‘Why, is that Mr Bracken hiding over there?’
The sausage turned into a missile, disappearing into the night, leaving the bun limp in his hands and a trail of grease spreading across the front of his starched white shirt. His bow tie drooped in despair.
‘You told me you’d call, Mr Bracken,’ Anna Fitzgerald said accusingly, ignoring his plight – no, enjoying it! Bracken’s arms were spread in dismay, his hair tumbled over his forehead as though trying to get a look for itself at the devastation. ‘You offered to show me round London, but you never called,’ she continued.
‘I … I … I’ve …’ Words suddenly deserted him as he tried to comprehend the mess of slime that was creeping across his chest. His brain and his tongue, usually so sharp and active, had seemingly dived for cover. All he could do was to gaze at her through pebble-thick glasses with the expression of a chastened child.
‘You don’t like Americans?’
‘No, no, please …’
‘Married or something?’
‘No, of course not …’
‘You’ve got a jealous girlfriend?’
‘Nothing like that.’
Good, she’d got that sorted. She approached much closer; he noticed she had a small dog in tow, a russet-and-white King Charles spaniel trailing from a lead. ‘I know, you’re an important man. Very busy. Lots of distractions …’
She had taken the linen handkerchief from his top pocket and was beginning a clean-up operation on his shirt, gently wiping away the mess, taking control. ‘The truth is, Mr Bracken, you’re just a little clumsy. And rather shy.’
Anna Fitzgerald was petite, slim, almost boyish, dressed in a dark leather airman’s jacket that was a couple of sizes too large for her, and boots up to her knees. She was dressed so much more sensibly than he. The cold, damp grass beneath his feet was turning to mud and already laying siege to his hand-tooled leather town shoes, yet it no longer seemed to matter. She possessed the purest black hair he had ever seen. Her eyes danced and shimmered in the light of a thousand candles. She was different – so very different from other women he had ever met. It had taken her only a few moments to break down the defences of a lifetime and now no one else at this gathering seemed to matter. He wanted the grease stain to last for ever.
‘Busy – yes. I have been busy.’ At last he had regained some measure of composure, his brain in contact once more with his tongue. Other parts of his anatomy seemed to be gaining a life all their own, too. ‘Winston’s been making speeches, keeping me running around …’
‘So no time to show a dumb American around town.’
‘Well, it wasn’t just that – I mean, not that at all …’ Bracken began to stammer; bugger, he was making a mess of this. He was almost relieved when she was distracted by the spaniel – whose name turned out to be Chumpers. He had found something in the grass – Bracken’s sausage – and was giving it his undivided attention. ‘I was worried that your uncle the Ambassador, and Winston, they – how should I put this?’
‘Send smoke signals from opposite sides of the blanket?’
‘Exactly. Both very passionate people. I thought it might be difficult.’
‘You find passion difficult, Mr Bracken?’
‘I meant that it might be awkward – for you – if I were, you know, to invite you out. Mixing with the enemy.’
‘I’m not so sure about English girls but in Massachusetts they raise us with minds all of our own.’
‘Ah.’
‘So is it Mr Churchill who would object if you called me? He owns your social loyalties as well as your political loyalties?’
‘Of course not!’ he protested, before suddenly it dawned on him that this was probably a lie. ‘There was also the thought – well, I am considerably older than you. About fifteen years.’
‘Why, glory be, Mr Bracken, you are a very ol’-fashioned gen’leman,’ she whispered in a voice that reeked of Dixie and seduction on the verandah. She was mocking him, but gently. Her hand was back on his chest, adding improvements to the clean-up operation.
‘Not at all. It’s just that –’ He stopped. Came to a complete halt. No point in continuing. A flush had appeared upon his face that came close to matching the colour of his ridiculous hair and he had an expression that suggested he might be passing kidney stones. ‘I’m making a complete mess of this.’
‘For the first time this evening, Brendan, I’m inclined to agree with you. So let me simplify things for you. Would you like to see me again? Take me to dinner? Show me the sights of London? Play canasta, or whatever it is genteel English folk do?’
‘Of course I would.’
‘And you know how to use a phone?’
He began to laugh.
‘Hey, Brendan, looks like you’re in business.’
She held up his grubby handkerchief and dropped it into the palm of his outstretched hand. ‘Bombs away,’ she whispered. Then she walked off, dragging the reluctant Chumpers behind her.
It was a night not simply of entertainment but also of encounter and intrigue – just as Beaverbrook had required. He couldn’t plan such things, of course, but he understood human nature and knew that the inevitable outcome of mixing alcohol and ego was information. And in his world, information was power.
As he turned to mingle with other guests, he found himself pursued. A woman, tugging in agitation at his sleeve. Lady Maud Hoare, wife of Sir Sam.
‘Maxwell, dear Maxwell …’
Whoa, no one called him Maxwell. The girl was nervous.
‘I’m so sorry. I hope it didn’t cause a scene,’ Maud spluttered.
Of course it caused a scene. A splendid one. As Joe Kennedy had just remarked to him, good parties were like battles. They required casualties.
‘It’s just that Sam is so passionate,’ she continued. ‘You know that, being such good friends …’
Friends? Well, scarcely. Friendship wasn’t the sort of game played between politician and press man.
‘Like you, he’s so loyal to the cause.’
Ah, the cause. The great cause to which he had devoted so many of his front pages in recent weeks. The cause of winning! Winning was everything and Chamberlain had won, for the moment, at least. There was to be peace. It had to be so, the advertisers in the Express insisted on it. They wanted a world in which everyone had a little fun and spent a little money, not a world in which every last penny was buried in war bonds or pots at the end of the garden. So far Chamberlain had proved a good bet.
‘And Sam’s under such a lot of pressure …’
‘Pressure? What sort of pressure?’ Beaverbrook’s news instincts were suddenly alert. He laid a comforting hand on her sleeve.
‘He’d never complain, of course, not the type. But, oh, Maxwell, the poor man’s so torn.’
‘Torn?’
‘He’s a good man, a great man …’
Perhaps one day the main man, too. The man to take over the reins. Beaverbrook had a sharp eye for the runners and riders, and Slippery Sam was a man with prospects. In Beaverbrook’s judgement Hoare was a man to watch, a man to be – well, all right, to be friends with.
‘You know what it’s like, Maxwell, so many demands on your time, your energies, your … money.’
Ah, so there it is. The girl had shown her slip.
‘He’s not a man of inherited wealth like Neville or Edward Halifax. He can’t simply run off on grand lecture tours and sell himself like Winston does.’ She made it sound worse than pimping. ‘Sam has to struggle by on nothing more than his Cabinet salary. And it is a struggle, Maxwell.’
What – five thousand a year? A struggle for him, maybe, but a fortune for most.
‘You know Neville couldn’t have done what he’s done without Sam’s unfailing support – you know that, don’t you, Maxwell?’
‘Most certainly,’ he lied.
‘But it’s slowly wearing him down, and I’ve been crying myself to sleep worrying about him.’
‘We can’t have that, Maudy.’
‘Oh, at times I get quite desperate, watching him sacrifice himself. For others. Always for others.’ Her voice had fallen to a whisper, but it was soon to recover. ‘I scarcely know what to do. These are such terribly difficult times.’
How well she had rehearsed it. How easily the lip quivered, the manicured fingers clutched, how readily the nervous sentiments emerged and presented themselves in regimented line.
‘So I was wondering …’
Here it comes.
‘Maxwell, is there any way you can think of that might just – take the pressure off him? Allow him to get on with that great job of his?’
If you were a few years younger, maybe, Maudy, old dear, and not so hideously ugly …
‘I’m a woman, I barely understand these things, while you, Maxwell, are not only a friend but such a wise man.’
Oh, Maudy, you think flattery is the way past my defences? When I am surrounded every day by lapdogs whom I pay to fawn and fumble at every moment in my presence? But present me with a business proposition, that’s another matter entirely. Show me a man who is Home Secretary – one of the most powerful men in the land, the keeper of secrets, the charmer of snakes, the guardian of reputations high and low, a man who has a reasonable chance one day of being placed in charge of the entire crap game – show this man to me and place him in my debt. How much would that be worth? As a business proposition – and fuck the friendship?
‘Two thousand.’
‘I beg your pardon, Maxwell.’
‘Two thousand a year, Maud. Do you think that might help? We can’t have him being distracted, having to work through his worries.’
‘No, of course not, you’re so right.’
‘If I can help him, Maud, be a damned privilege. Ease those worries. Make sure my newspapers are behind him, too – hell, make sure Sam and I are working on the same team, for each other.’
‘And the cause.’ She was breathless now, red in cheek, like a young girl who had just been ravished and loved every second of it.
‘An entirely private matter, you understand. No one must know apart from you and me, Maud. And Sam, of course. Wouldn’t want the muck media to get hold of it.’
‘Of course, of course … I scarcely know what to say, Maxwell. “Thank you” sounds so inadequate.’
‘No, I thank you, Maud. Sam’s a great man. I’m glad to be of some service. Send him to me. We’ll sort out the details, man to man.’ Yes, send him on bended knee, Maudy, and get him used to the position.
Others were approaching. The moment was over, the business done. He had bought a Home Secretary for less than the price of his new car.
‘Be in touch, Maud.’
‘Oh, we shall, we shall,’ she breathed as she wafted into the night.
‘And who was that?’ his new companion enquired, staring after the retreating woman. His voice was deep, carefully modulated, like that of a bishop.
‘A Hoare,’ Beaverbrook muttered.
‘Oh.’
‘But a whore on my White List. For now.’
‘Ah.’ Tom Driberg sucked his teeth. A tall, dark-complexioned figure in his mid-thirties with receding hair that wrinkled in the manner of a studious maharajah, Driberg was one of the many paid by Beaverbrook to ‘fawn and fumble’. To the outside world he was known as William Hickey, the highest-paid gossip columnist in the country, and Driberg was very good at gossip – good at both recording and creating it – although the rules by which he was required to document the misadventures and general muck-ups of the society set were far tighter than those by which he himself chose to live. One of the strictest rules governing the way in which he worked was that he should never, never, antagonize his publisher, and the White List contained the names of Beaverbrook’s intimates who were deemed to be beyond bounds and who would never find their way into the William Hickey column without the copy first being scrutinized by the press lord himself. Gossip was a powerful political currency, and both Beaverbrook and Driberg were keepers of the keys.
‘Busy evening?’ Beaverbrook enquired, almost casually, reminding the other man that he was here to work.
‘A Minister who appears to be canvassing for the support of a young lady who – how can one put such things delicately? – won’t be old enough to vote for several years yet.’
‘Looking to the future, eh? Damn fine slogan.’
‘And an actress who has just spent the last twenty minutes rehearsing the role of Cleopatra in the back of her car. A magnificent performance, all moans and misted windows. I damned nearly froze waiting for her to take her bow. Then she steps out with her husband. It beggars belief.’
‘What is the world coming to?’
‘But the night is young.’
‘Yeah. Which reminds me. Keep your hands off the Boy Scouts. None of your nancy nonsense here. My house is off limits. Understand?’
‘I shall protect your honour down to my last item of underwear, Your Lordship.’
‘Fuck off.’
‘With the greatest pleasure.’
‘Oh, and look out for Duffie Cooper. He’s here tonight, I don’t suppose with his wife. He no longer makes the White List.’
‘Good. He was once very rude to me when I asked him about a certain Austrian lady with whom he was seen breakfasting on four consecutive days in Biarritz. It only goes to remind one, sir. Always be nice to them when you’re coming, because you’re bound to meet them again in the morning, that’s what I always say.’
‘You’re full of crap.’
And much, much more. Or would be later. He’d just met this amazing young producer from the BBC.
The climax of the night was drawing near. The guy had been sent in procession around the guests, still with the cigar in its mouth – someone had even sacrificed a homburg to complete the effect – and had now been wheeled to the base of the bonfire, where the groundsman and two young assistants used a ladder to place it at the very top of the pyre. Soon it would be ablaze.
‘Fine, fine party, Max.’ Joseph Ball congratulated his host and took his arm in a manner that gave clear signals to those around them that the two men intended to talk business – alone.
‘You’re not drinking that pond water, are you, Joey?’ Beaverbrook growled, examining Ball’s glass of mulled wine as though expecting to find tadpoles. ‘Here.’ He produced a large hip flask filled with an exceedingly fine single malt. In return, Ball offered him an Havana.
‘Max, old friend, the pleasure of your hospitality never dims. And quite a show you’ve put on for us this evening already.’
‘You mean Sam and Kitty? Sam’s a fine chap, damned fine chap, but Kitty …’
‘Yes, dear Kitty. Not a chap at all. Perhaps that’s the root of her problem. Frayed nerves. Mental feebleness. You know, women of a certain age. You saw her tonight: she’s lost control, a gnat’s wing away from hysterical. Apparently it runs in her family. They say there may be money troubles, too.’
‘That so? I’ll be damned.’ Beaverbrook reclaimed his flask and refreshed himself, all the while never taking his eyes from his guest. Ball was up to his old tricks, putting ferrets down holes and flushing out a few reputations. He’d turned ruination into an art form. ‘So what are you going to do, Joey? You’ve already taken the party whip from her, not much more to threaten her with, is there?’
‘Max, we’d never dream of threatening her. You know me better than that. But as for what others might do …’ – he paused to take a long pull at the cigar and fill the air around them with smoke and mystery – ‘I hear on the grapevine that her constituency party is positively rattling with resentment at her disloyalty. Applies to all the rebels, really. In the next couple of weeks most of them are going to come under a deal of pressure to start toeing the line, or else.’
‘Else what?’
‘There’s the whiff of an election in the air – next year, maybe. Time for the party to wipe its boots clean.’
‘Throw ’em out?’
‘Their constituencies might well decide they’d had enough.’
‘Bent over the old ballot box and buggered? I like it.’
‘Only one small problem …’
‘Tell your Uncle Max.’
‘The constituencies don’t know about this yet.’
‘You sly bastard.’ It was offered, and accepted, as a commendation.
‘Look, you remember that little group of letter-writers you set up at the time of the Abdication nonsense?’
‘The journalists I got to write poison-pen letters to the King’s bitch?’
‘Exactly. It never leaked.’
‘Was never going to leak. I told ’em if one whisper of that got out, none of ’em was ever going to work in Fleet Street again. It’s one of the benefits of being an authentic Canadian bastard like me – I get loyalty, Joey. I always get loyalty.’
‘So what I had in mind was this. Another loyal little group who’ll write letters to the main people in Kitty’s local association. You know, complaints about her unreliability, saying they’ll never vote Conservative again while she’s the candidate, time for the party to move on. Talk about her age, her feebleness, imply she’s been shagging Stalin. That sort of stuff. See if we can’t push her out before the voters do. Have a new candidate in place before the next election.’
‘Same thing for some of the others?’
‘All of the others, Max. Everyone who was against Neville over Munich. It’s not a time for half measures.’
Beaverbrook nodded in the direction of the guy. ‘Winston too?’
‘Everyone. Most will survive, of course, but it’ll shake them. Keep their heads down until after the election. Make them realize there’s no such thing as a free shot at Neville. But Kitty’s a special case, she’s too near the edge. One shove and she’ll be over. A few screams, the flapping of petticoats, a bit of blood. Something that will motivate the others.’
A broad smile almost cut Beaverbrook’s face in two. ‘You want things stirring up a little? My pleasure.’
‘I shall be in your debt.’
‘Hey, don’t you just love democracy?’
As they conferred, other guests kept their distance, the hunched shoulders and conspiratorial tones of the two serving as a warning unmistakable to any but the most insensitive – or young.
‘Let’s go, Maxie, we’re all waiting,’ a young woman called out, stamping her feet impatiently against the cold. ‘Time to set the night on fire.’
The base of the bonfire had been well soaked in paraffin and tar, and the groundsman was standing by with a burning torch.
‘Come on, darling Maxie,’ she complained again, tugging at the fox-fur stole around her neck. It looked new.
‘Time for some action,’ Beaverbrook muttered. He grabbed the torch, raised it high above his head to the applause of his guests, then thrust it deep into the innards of the bonfire. Soon the flames began to conquer the night and Cigar Man from his lofty throne began to cringe in the heat and turn black, squirming as the flames took hold until finally he slumped forward and disappeared in a storm of sparks. The young woman squealed with delight.
‘Bit young even by your standards, isn’t she, Max?’ Ball chided.
‘Hell, Joey, I’m simply growing nostalgic. I once knew her mother.’
Later that week, much of Europe burned, too.
It was called Kristallnacht – Crystal Night – named after the millions of shards of glass that were left shattered in the street after Jewish shops throughout Germany and Austria were ransacked. Businesses and homes were plundered, the synagogues put to the flame. Ninety-three Jews were killed that night. In the ensuing weeks thousands more were to take their own lives. It was to be but a small down-payment on what was to come.
SIX (#ulink_a83966d4-2b8e-5dfc-ac0a-e9d95adf934e)
The eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month. The moment when the guns had fallen silent on the Western Front and the slaughter had ceased, exactly twenty years before. Armistice Day. Bludgeoned by the ever-lengthening shadow of circumstance, the crowds had gathered in exceptional numbers around Lutyens’ stone Cenotaph in Whitehall to take part in the nation’s tribute to the dead. Nearly a million of them. Wasted in war. A war that some would have all over again.
It was a sunny day, mild for the time of year, and he had only to walk a few yards from Downing Street, but nevertheless the Prime Minister felt in need of his overcoat. He was feeling every one of his sixty-nine years. His physical resources were not what they once were. He found these ceremonies an ordeal, stirring emotions that he found hard to deal with, particularly the remembrance of his cousin, Norman, who had been killed in France. They had been devoted. Chamberlain had described Norman as ‘the most intimate friend I ever had’ and still grieved for him, most of all on days like this. Perhaps, too, there was that nagging memory inside Chamberlain that he hadn’t fought in that war, that even all those years ago he had already been too old. Past it. Unfit for Duty. Norman and the others paying a debt which he should have shared. Churchill had fought in the war, of course, seen action at the front and never ceased to remind people of the fact. The Warrior. Hero of the Boer War. And of the Great War. Almost as though Churchill were trying to torment him – no, nothing conditional about it, of course Churchill was trying to torment him. Trouble was, so often he succeeded.
They were all there, in formation around the white memorial of Portland stone, to his left the King and the other male members of the Royal Family, opposite him the Bishop of London, beside and behind him the other political leaders. And on all sides old soldiers, those who knew what it was like to bear the guilt of living while they watched their brothers die, all the time wondering why they had been spared the slaughter. There were young soldiers, too, who knew nothing of war – and who would never know, so long as he was Prime Minister.
At nights recently he had often woken, shivering with cold, feeling as though a cold grey hand were clawing at him deep inside. Sometimes he thought he was surrounded by ghosts. Men he had known, like Norman, and who had died, in his place. He heard their voices, whispering, but could never quite make out their words. They would not let him rest.
The band of the Brigade of Guards played their mournful music, then a lone piper took a single pace forward, pulling from his soul the notes of Purcell’s ‘Lament’. Chamberlain stood, head bowed. No other noise but the champing of a horse at its bit, the crowd fallen silent. At his right shoulder stood Edward Halifax, tall, gaunt, his large feet splayed out, towering above those around him, casting Chamberlain in shadow and making him feel almost insignificant. He felt the Foreign Secretary bend slightly, like a reed, and whisper in his ear.
‘Neville, did you see the papers this morning?’
‘The Jews?’ Chamberlain nodded his assent, still looking straight ahead.
The piper had finished and there was a short pause as the Bishop prepared to offer the prayers that led up to the two-minute silence. Soon they would be called upon to step forward and lay their wreaths of blood-poppies.
‘My God, but Hitler doesn’t make it easy for us, Edward.’
‘They’ll say it makes a mockery of our agreement with him.’
‘No! It mocks nothing. It illustrates the dangers. Makes our agreement all the more necessary.’ Chamberlain shivered in spite of the sun. ‘He gave me his word, Edward.’
‘Not on the Jews, he didn’t. We didn’t ask for it.’
‘Is there anything we can do?’
‘Do?’
‘Yes, get some balance back into the reporting, make it less lurid. Perhaps give the papers another story to get their teeth into.’
‘We’ve given them peace. What more can we do?’
‘We need a distraction.’
‘So, I suspect, do the Jews.’
‘I think Horace and Joe have something in mind. For distraction. Setting up a bit of a fox hunt.’ He seemed unwilling – or unable – to continue. He sighed, a long, pained rattle of breath. ‘Anyway, Christmas soon. Peace on earth …’
Chamberlain shivered once again; this time Halifax couldn’t fail to notice. It was almost time. As the clock of Big Ben began to strike the hour, the crash of artillery was heard from Horse Guards. Deep inside, Chamberlain cringed, wondering yet again how he would have withstood the deluge of death, had he fought.
It was after the ceremony had finished and they had marched stiffly behind the King back into the nearby Old Home Office Building that the conversation was resumed. They were drinking tea, warming themselves, relaxing after the parade. The King in particular seemed to find these official occasions a trial.
‘It went well?’ he asked. The words came at the stumble and in the form of a question. There had been no speech to make, nothing more to do than be a figurehead and set down a wreath of poppies, but still the King-Emperor needed reassurance.
‘Quite splendidly, sir,’ his Prime Minister replied.
‘Thank you, Mr Chamberlain.’ He was relaxing, feeling more at ease once he was inside and beyond the public gaze. And among friends. Halifax was his great companion and Chamberlain, too, had grown close. It had been exactly eighteen months since George had been crowned and had asked Chamberlain to assume the highest political office in the land; it had come to seem as if their destinies would be forever intertwined. That was why the King had invited his Prime Minister onto the floodlit balcony of Buckingham Palace immediately on his return from Munich. Some had said the gesture was unwise, even foolish, that it involved the Crown too deeply in politics and too closely with the fate of one Prime Minister, but the King had insisted. Appeasement was the right policy, it was the moral policy, the policy not only of God but also of his wife. He felt no need to compromise.
Around the room other men of matters were gathered, their voices low, respectful, except for one that was raised a shade too loudly, making his point vociferously, not in the manner of a gentle English stream but like a cascade of water running across the carpet. But then Leslie Hore-Belisha was scarcely – well, it wasn’t his fault, really, that he hadn’t been brought up in the manner of an English gentleman.
Words such as Berlin and Vienna reached out across the room, and the King stiffened within his uniform. ‘What is to be done about them, Prime Minister?’ he asked softly.
Chamberlain followed his gaze. ‘Ah, you mean the Jews, sir.’
‘What can we do? We’ve already given asylum to thousands. Now it threatens to turn into a flood.’
‘Halifax and I were just discussing the matter.’
‘I read the newspaper reports with distress, of course, but so often it seems as if these people don’t help themselves. Look at Palestine. We offer them seventy-five thousand places over the next five years, yet hordes of them try to pour in as illegal immigrants and cause chaos.’
‘Of course, sir, Palestine can’t be the answer. Too small. And too many Arabs. I’m afraid we were a little rash all those years ago to suggest that it might become a Jewish homeland.’
‘Wandering tribes, eh?’
‘The Foreign Secretary and I have been giving some consideration as to whether other parts of the Empire might be brought in to help.’
‘Other parts?’
‘Africa, perhaps. Tanganyika, sir,’ Halifax intervened, glad of an opportunity to participate. His height made it difficult to converse with the two considerably smaller men. He bent delicately, like a crane attempting to feed. ‘And perhaps British Guiana. It might be possible to make large tracts of virgin forest available for Jewish refugees to settle.’
‘At their expense, of course,’ Chamberlain added.
‘Wouldn’t it be possible simply to insist that they remain in their countries of origin? Prevent them from leaving in the first place?’ the King persisted. ‘After all, it’s not just the Jews from Germany trying to invade Palestine but those from places like Poland and Romania. There must be millions of them there. Surely it would be better for everyone if they simply stayed.’
‘Quite so,’ Chamberlain agreed. ‘But Herr Hitler isn’t helping, not with his latest nonsense.’
‘Damnable man, disrupts everything. But all this fuss. The press always sensationalize and exaggerate these things, don’t you think?’
‘Perhaps. My lieutenants are already pursuing the matter, phoning a few friendly editors, making sure they don’t … well, overdo it. Perhaps it will be better by tomorrow.’
‘And if any of them decides not to co-operate, you have our full permission to tell them that we won’t have it. Won’t have it, do you hear?’ The teacup rattled dangerously. ‘If those editors ever expect to come and kneel before me at the palace, they’d better mind their …’ – the King had intended to say ‘p’s and ‘q’s but the effect of authority was entirely spoiled by a thunderous stutter.
‘Distraction, that’s what we need, sir. The Foreign Secretary and I were just discussing it. We thought it might be helpful to give them something else to write about, sir. With your permission, I’d like to announce that Edward and I will be going to Rome to visit Signor Mussolini early next year. He’s been difficult, I know, invading Abyssinia and sending troops to Spain. But at Munich he was so helpful, so solid. If we show him the hand of friendship, I think we might get him to lean on Herr Hitler a little. Help tie up some of the loose ends of the peace.’
‘A little more of your personal diplomacy. Mr Chamberlain? Another diplomatic triumph?’
‘With the help of the Foreign Secretary, sir.’ Chamberlain shuffled. He wasn’t very good at playing the unassuming hero, least of all would anyone be convinced that he owed anything to the Foreign Office. He ran his own foreign policy, and so blatantly that the last Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, had felt forced to resign earlier that year.
‘And Ciano’s an excellent Foreign Minister, isn’t he, Edward?’ Halifax bowed in approval. ‘Not like that strange man Wibbentrop. You know, when he came to the Palace to present his credentials, he gave me one of those ridiculous straight-arm salutes and shouted “Heil Hitler”. Think of it. It was all I could do to stop myself returning the salute and shouting “Heil George”!’
They shared their amusement and drank their tea, while from outside came the muffled sounds of the last of the old soldiers marching past the Cenotaph and fading into the shadows. A final bark of instruction from an NCO and they were gone, taking their memories with them.
‘It’s no good shouting at the Germans,’ Chamberlain continued, ‘they simply shout back. So we think Herr Hitler needs a little encouragement, and the Italians could play a vital role in making sure he remains reasonable.’
‘Sound man, is he, Mussolini?’
‘A necessary man, at least.’
‘And the Italians have always been so much more sophisticated than Hitler’s type of German. Discussing diplomacy with Herr Hitler and his henchmen is like casting pearls before the swine. But the Italians – their art, their culture, their great history – that must make a difference.’
‘They’ve had a great empire.’
‘They understand the advantages of compromise.’
‘And so long as he doesn’t want to rebuild the entire Roman empire …’
‘Then let us toast him, this great Italian.’ The King raised his teacup, pinky on alert. ‘To Signor Mussolini.’
‘And to Italian culture.’
(The Times, Saturday 19 November 1938)
MICKEY MOUSE REPRIEVED
EXEMPT FROM ITALIAN BAN
From our own Correspondent.
ROME, November 18
The productions of Mr Walt Disney are to be exempted from a general decree of the Ministry of Popular Culture that everything of foreign inspiration is to disappear from juvenile periodicals in Italy by the end of the year.
The decree was prompted by the feeling that an excellent opportunity of inculcating Fascist ideals in the youthful Italian mind was being neglected by allowing pure fancy to run riot in the pictures and ‘comic strips’ of the coloured juvenile weeklies which are as common in Italy as in any other country. Publishers and editors were accordingly informed that these periodicals must in future be used to exalt the military and heroic virtues of the Italian race. The foreign stuff was to go.
But an exception has now been made in favour of Mr Walt Disney on account of the acknowledged artistic merit of his work…
Mac had just come out of the Odeon cinema in Notting Hill Gate. A Noël Coward comedy. He’d laughed and rocked until the tears poured down his face, the first time he’d laughed in ever so long. And he’d not cried since the camps. Good to forget your troubles, to have things touch you. He had stayed on to watch it all over again, hiding for a while in the toilets, dodging the beam of the usherette’s torch that swept like a searchlight across the rows of seats, happy to be lost in a world of make-believe. Anyway, it was warmer here than in his small flat. He was economizing, saving on coal, uncertain of what might lie ahead. He might laugh, but still he couldn’t trust. And he was beginning to feel the insidious dampness of an English autumn seeping into his bones, even though it was as warm as any summer’s day in the camp. He must be getting old.
When finally he left the cinema, he began walking up the hill in Ladbroke Grove towards the church that stood guard at the top. It was a clear night, bright moon, autumn breezes tugging the last of the leaves from the trees. Hard times to come. Barely a light to be seen, but for the moon that hung above St John’s, casting long shadows all around, stretching out, pursuing him, like his memories. He buried his hands in his thin overcoat, counting the few pennies of change in his pocket for comfort, and hurried on. He had a coat, and boots, money in his pocket, a bed to sleep on and coal in his scuttle, if he needed it. Why, he’d even treated himself to a chocolate ice at the cinema. A life of ease. But not at ease, never at ease. As he pushed on up the hill he found he was growing breathless – perhaps the unaccustomed laughter had been too much for him – and when he reached the purple-dark outlines of the church he sat down on the edge of a leaning gravestone to catch his wind. His breath was beginning to condense, like mists of ice powder that he remembered would settle round your beard and freeze your lips together, tearing the flesh if you tried to eat, if you had anything to eat. Then you could feel your eyeballs beginning to turn to frost so that they would not close, and your brain began to freeze so hard that you wondered if this was going to be the last moon you would ever see, but you knew that the ground was already too hard for them to bury you, so they would leave you under a thin scattering of rocks, for the foxes.
But this was England! Such things never happened here. The English wouldn’t allow it. Mr Chamberlain had promised. An Englishman’s promise. We could sleep soundly in our beds, burn our coal, enjoy our little luxuries of chocolate ice and cake, safe in the knowledge that we didn’t need to worry and that when we died of very old age they would bury us deep and the tears wouldn’t freeze even before they hit the ground. That’s how it would be, in England, at least. The Empire would insist on it.
He sat, desperately wanting the world to stand still, but even as he watched, the moon moved on. Dry leaves were caught by the gentle wind and scuttled in waves around his ankles, like the sound of sea breaking on shingle. As it had broken that day on the beach in Solovetsky.
Suddenly the tears were flowing again. He felt weak, and shamed by it, glad there was no one on the street to see him. But why did the opinion of others matter? His was a life alone, cut off from emotion, a life rebuilt only for himself – and why not, when there was no one else there for him? Not after little Moniek had gone. For half his time on this earth his only god had been survival. What happened in the rest of the world and to the rest of the world was for him a matter of complete inconsequence. Another man’s rations, his blanket, his work detail, sometimes even another man’s name, had on more than one occasion been the difference between death and tomorrow. It had all grown to be so simple, a world in which he would gladly exchange a man’s life for an hour of sunshine.
Yet now tears fell, uncontrollably. Tears for the life he had lost. And the lives that he knew would now be lost. The lives of those who had stared at him with those gaunt, awful eyes from the frames of the Pathé News film he had just seen, the fear in their faces made bright by the burning of the synagogues around them. He knew those faces, for he could see himself in every one. He wept, hoping the tears might douse the flames.
‘Another brandy, McCrieff.’ The proposal was placed with all the subtlety of a German ultimatum to a minor Middle-European enclave.
‘That’s most obliging of you. Just a wee one, if you insist, Sir Joseph. It’s been a splendid dinner.’
‘The first of many, we hope.’ Horace Wilson reappeared from behind the glow of his cigar.
‘That would indeed be pleasant. My club – the Caledonian – next time, if I may insist?’ An edge of uncertainty had slipped into the Scotsman’s voice – wouldn’t these great men find the Caledonian too gruesomely provincial for their tastes? He was uncertain of the tastes of fashionable Westminster; he felt the need to strengthen his hand. ‘Their kitchens may lack a little subtlety, of course, but the cellars are filled with some particularly fine single malts that I think might tempt you. Not that I’ve got anything against the French, you understand,’ he reassured them, draining his balloon, wishing alcohol hadn’t dulled his wits, ‘but I know where my loyalties lie.’
‘You fish, McCrieff?’
‘I could tie a fly before I could fasten my own shoelaces.’
‘Then I think we should arrange for you to join the Prime Minister and me when we next come up to the Dee. Probably at Easter. You could spare a day, could you?’
‘I’d be honoured, Sir Joseph, truly. But I’m aware that you’re all such busy men, I’d hate to think I might become a distraction.’
‘Ah, distractions, McCrieff, distractions. Life is so full of distractions. Wars, revolutions, scandal, strikes, floods – not to mention being forced to follow on behind the Australians. There are so many distractions in politics, so many things that are thrust upon you. Ah, but then there are the distractions you create.’
The Smoking Room of the Reform Club creaked with ancient red leather and history. It was a club created a century before for the singular purpose of celebrating emancipation. One Man, One Vote – or rather, one property, one vote, a twist of the rudder designed to steer a course between the distractions of revolution and repression that were bringing chaos to the rest of Europe.
‘But don’t you know, McCrieff, I’ve always regarded the greatest distraction in political life as being women. Don’t you agree, Horace?’
‘Women? Certainly. Did for Charles Stewart Parnell. Damn nearly did for Lloyd George, too. Should’ve done for him, if you ask my opinion.’
‘Might even do for this Government, if we let ’em.’
McCrieff’s brow puckered; he’d lost the thread. He readjusted his position in his armchair by the fire, sitting well back, listening to the leather creak, trying to convey to the others the illusion that he was entirely comfortable inside the maze of high politics. But women? Had Chamberlain got himself into difficulties on account of – no, ridiculous thought. Not Chamberlain, of all people. More likely the Archbishop than the Undertaker. Chamberlain just wasn’t the type. So where did women come into it?
‘Forgive me, gentlemen, but I’m not sure I entirely follow your –’
Ball cut him off ruthlessly. ‘What do you think of your local MP, McCrieff? The Duchess?’
McCrieff retreated from Ball’s stare and gazed into the fire. Their invitation had been so unexpected, so urgent in tone – was this what it was about? The Duchess of Atholl? And if so, which way did loyalty lean? Towards her? Or away? No matter how hard he stared he could find no answer in the fire, yet some edge in Ball’s tone told him that his answer mattered. He would have to tread with considerably more caution than he had dined. ‘As you are well aware, gentlemen, I am what I think it’s fair to describe as an influential member of the Kinross and West Perthshire constituency association. I also wish to become a Member of Parliament myself. I’m not sure it would be wise for me to go round criticizing those who I’d like to become my colleagues.’
‘You’d sit with Socialists?’
‘Of course not.’
‘But you’d sit with the Duchess? Support her causes?’
‘Well, she has a fair few of those, to be sure. Not all of them to my taste.’
‘Nor to the taste of others, McCrieff. Including the Prime Minister.’
‘Strange, so strange the causes she adopts,’ Wilson added. ‘Once heard her make a speech about female circumcision amongst the Kikuyu in Africa. Took up hours of parliamentary time on it, refused to give way. Quite extraordinary performance.’ He was shaking his head but not taking his eyes for a moment off McCrieff. ‘Not, of course, that as a civil servant I have any views on these matters, but personally and entirely privately …’
They were interrupted when a claret-coated club steward produced fresh drinks and fussed around the fire, stoking it back to life and propelling a curl of coal smoke into the room. McCrieff was glad of the opportunity to think. He was a laird, a Scottish farmer, not a fool. He had been invited to dine by two men who knew he had considerable influence in a constituency where the MP was one of the most troublesome members on the Government back benches. He’d guessed they wanted to talk about considerably more than fishing. He swirled the caramel liquor in his glass, where it formed a little whirlpool of alcohol. Suddenly it had all become mixed with intrigue. There was a danger he might get sucked down.
‘Yes, speaking personally, McCrieff,’ Ball picked up the conversation, ‘privately, just between the three of us – how do you feel about the Duchess?’
The revived firelight was reflecting from Ball’s circular spectacles. His eyes had become two blazing orbs, making it seem as though a soul-consuming fire were burning inside. This was a dangerous man.
‘Gentlemen,’ McCrieff began slowly, stepping out carefully as though walking barefoot through a field of broken glass, ‘one of you is the most powerful man in the party, the other the most significant man in Government next to the Prime Minister himself. And I am a man of some political ambition.’ He paused, holding in his hands both opportunity and extinction. Time to choose. ‘How would you like me to feel about the Duchess?’
The lights burned unusually late on the top floor of the Express building in Fleet Street. It was well past the dining hour. A group of five journalists, all men, mostly young, had already been closeted in the boardroom for three nights that week, and another night beckoned. The work was tiring and the banter with which they had begun had long since passed into a bleak determination to finish the job. They had been provided with all the tools – sheaves of writing paper, envelopes, twenty-seven separate lists of addresses. The lists had arrived by courier marked for the attention of the deputy editor, who had removed the covering letter and any trace of their origins.
They wrote. Some used typewriters, the others wrote by hand. A total of more than five hundred letters, many purportedly from ex-servicemen, intended for opinion-formers within the twenty-seven constituencies. As the week had passed, any sense of restraint had dimmed, their language had grown ever more colourful, the metaphors more alarming.
The Bolshies are regicides. Is that what you want? I would hazard the conjecture that the Germans, the most efficient fighting machine on this earth, would go through the rag-bag of Reds like a hot knife through butter. Take care you are not standing in the way when it happens!
It was the season for mud and muck, it was inevitable that some of it should spread out and stick. And so they toiled, disturbed by nothing more than the chiming of the clock, the drumming of typewriter keys, the scratching of nibs, the occasional flooding of a handkerchief – one of them had been dragged from his sick bed despite the protestations of his wife. Death and misery were much on his mind.
If you vote for the Duchess there will be war, and your sons will all be killed, like mine were in the last war, butchered by German steel. Can you bear that on your conscience?
There were alternative strategies in use. One of his colleagues preferred to inspire by adulation:
Mr Neville Chamberlain is a saint. He has saved us. There is war in China, in Abyssinia, in Spain. Hundreds of thousands have already died. If Britain goes to war, that will surely be our fate. Yet even though the Prime Minister is an elderly man he has thrown himself into his duties, flying three times to Germany though he had never before flown, hurled himself into the breach, unsparing of his time, uncaring of his health and safety. His one ambition has been PEACE. Peace for this time, peace for all time. He is surely amongst the great men of all time. That is why I will do anything to support him. I trust you will, too, by letting your MP know [underlined twice, in squiggly waves] of the strength of feeling of the ordinary people in this country.
He signed it Mrs Ada Boscombe.
It was ten minutes or more after the clock had marked nine when the doors of the lift opened. Two butlers emerged, dressed in tails and stiff wing collars, bearing substantial silver trays. On one was heaped a steaming tangle of brick-red lobsters, all claws and alarmed eyes, accompanied by a large dish of clear molten butter and surrounded by a plentiful garnish of sliced cucumber and tomato. The other tray bore three bottles of chilled Pol Roger champagne and five crystal glasses.
‘With the compliments of ‘is Lordship,’ the first butler informed them, placing his tray on the sideboard, producing knives, forks and linen napkins like a magician from deep pockets inside his jacket. ‘And ‘e says to make sure you bring the silver trays back.’
They had come, in unprecedented numbers. Every seat was occupied, every corner crowded. The Duchess had remarked on the numbers, and on the fact that many of the faces seemed unfamiliar to her, but her agent assured her that apart from a handful of journalists they were all paid-up members of the association. ‘The times are very political, Your Grace,’ he had explained. What he declined to tell her, and what she was never to know, was how many of those fresh faces had had their membership dues paid in the last few days by William McCrieff. As McCrieff had put it to him, many ordinary voters in the constituency had been galvanized by the events of recent weeks and he had persuaded them to join, urged on by great issues such as war and peace – and, the agent suspected, by an extra pound in their pockets for their trouble in attending a political meeting, not to mention the promise of free hospitality afterwards. Even if many of those gathered together had been members for no more than six days and some for no longer than six hours, there was nothing in the rules to prevent such a show of interest and enthusiasm. In any event it was bound to be a meeting of exceptional significance for it had been convened to decide whom they should choose as a candidate to fight the next election. And the agent, like so many members loyal to the causes of appeasement and a comfortable life, found the Duchess about as comfortable as an ice storm in August. She was always lecturing, hectoring. Not like McCrieff. His methods were different. A quiet word, a dram or two, and the business was done. A good party man, was McCrieff, unlike the Duchess. She not only had her own opinions – so many of them – but insisted on sharing them. A grave fault in a politician, the agent reckoned, perhaps a mortal one. Anyway, the chairman had just called the meeting to order; they were soon to find out.
They had been to see George Bernard Shaw’s Man and Superman at the Old Vic – a splendid performance, she’d thought, with Valerie Tudor and Anthony Quayle, but he found it a preposterous play, like most of the stuff the old man produced. All those Left-wing ideas tangled up in his bloody beard, which were then scraped off like yesterday’s lunch. He thought Quayle’s role as Tanner had been absurd, and played in the same manner – all this guff about woman being the pursuer and man the pursued. But Anna Maria had warmed to it, said it was splendid and up-to-date, seemed to enjoy wrapping herself in theatrical fantasy. So he indulged her, and for once bit his tongue.
He hadn’t wanted the evening to end – he thought about inviting her back for a drink at his home in Lord North Street, which was near at hand, but he didn’t know her well enough and was afraid it might sound predatory and she would say no. He didn’t know how to deal with rejection from women – his mother had always treated him as nothing better than an inconvenience, and after he had left the family home he had made it a rule in his carefully constructed life never to put himself into a position where rejection might be possible. Yet he did not want to simply say goodnight. So he had suggested that they not drive all the way home, but stop on the other side of the park from where they could walk the last stretch to her front door. She had accepted with a smile.
He had deliberately taken the long way round, leading her through Hyde Park until they had arrived at the Serpentine where the rowing boats were tied up in a miniature armada and little waves lapped at the edges of the ink-black pond. She looped her arm through his, clinging tighter than was strictly necessary. Perhaps he should have invited her back for a drink after all.
‘So do you think there will be war, Bendy?’ She had given him a nickname. He’d never had a nickname before.
‘Hope not,’ he replied, not wanting to alarm her.
‘But your Mr Churchill says he thinks there will be.’
And he found himself irritated. Churchill was his hero, his political master, yet Bracken was growing to resent the manner in which others treated him as little more than an adjunct to the elder statesman, and no one took him more for granted than the old man himself. ‘Don’t know what’s going on with Winston. Very peculiar,’ he muttered. ‘He – perhaps I shouldn’t be telling you this, but – well, he’s got money problems and asked me to help him. To see if I could find a backer, someone to provide him with a loan to get him through. So I’ve been running around all over London making enquiries and then, just yesterday, he tells me to stop. No explanation. No thanks. Just –’ He waved his hands in dismissal.
‘Great men are like that. Hope you won’t be like that when it’s your turn.’ She held him still tighter. ‘Uncle Joe’s like that. Bit like Mr Churchill, I suppose. Do you think he might ever become Prime Minister?’
So they walked, disturbing the sleeping ducks, exchanging confidences in a manner that was unusual for Bracken with a woman. Churchill’s money problems, Churchill’s ambitions, Churchill’s drunken son and his protective wife. Always Churchill. Anna sensed that Bracken didn’t care for Churchill’s wife and much preferred the company of his disreputable son. Bracken protested that Churchill still had plenty of time to become Prime Minister – why, Gladstone had been eighty, he insisted – but she thought he protested too vigorously on the matter, as if trying to shout down his own doubts.
And wasn’t it strange, he said, that the two of them should be walking arm in arm while their two masters were usually at each other’s throats.
‘Oh, you mustn’t mind Uncle Joe, he’s always mad at something. Always plotting, always a little angry. He doesn’t think much of the State Department – calls them a bunch of cookie-pushers – and gets quite furious about the White House. Think he’d like to be President himself, one day, just like Mr Churchill. They’re a lot alike in some ways.’
‘If we value our personal safety I suggest we don’t mention it to either of them.’
They stopped in the shadow of a tree, looking at the distant lights of Knightsbridge that sparkled off the water and seemed to find reflection in each other’s eyes.
‘Don’t worry about war, Anna,’ Bracken said, tried to reassure her, holding her shoulders, playing with the ends of her soft hair. ‘You Americans worry too much, you go funny at the very thought of war,’ he chided. ‘Why, just days ago, that fellow – you know, Orson Welles – makes a radio broadcast about “The War of the Worlds” and half the eastern seaboard of America goes into a panic because they think the Martians are attacking. You’re not very good at war.’
‘Didn’t do too badly in the last one,’ she reminded him softly. And she kissed him.
Almost before he knew it their bodies were pressing up against each other, their tongues searching, his fingers, too, through the buttons of her fur coat and on her breast, but she drew away. Suddenly he was gripped by shame. He heard his mother whispering in his ear, tormenting him, accusing him of being no better than a prowling dog, and he wanted to scream at himself for being such a fool. ‘I’m so sorry,’ he mumbled, preparing to flee, but she held him.
‘Bendy, no – it’s me that’s sorry. I’m so very fond of you,’ she whispered. ‘It’s just that – I’ve got too much Irish and Catholic in me, it makes me feel so, so – guilty. You wouldn’t understand.’
Understand? He could write the entire encyclopaedia. Of course he understood. Unlike hers, his Irish Catholic upbringing was entirely authentic. A mud-roofed hut in Tipperary rather than a New England mansion. With dirt floors instead of marble, and only one room. Lying awake, listening to his parents behind the curtain surrounding their bed, his father’s ferocious grunts, her pleas for him to be quieter, and more gentle. And always afterwards, while his father snored, his mother prayed, begged that she would have no more children and be released from the hell of her life. Guilt? His very existence was a matter of guilt, of sin, of suffering, and the lesson had been beaten into him every day at seminary school until he had run away from it at the age of fifteen. But it always came back to him, every time he heard a woman pray, or every time he thought of sex.
So, yes, Anna Maria, he knew all about guilt.
Which was why he didn’t want anything more to do with the Irish, why he’d tried by all sorts of invention to scrub any lingering bit of Irishness from his voice and his soul, one of the many reasons why he hated Bernard Shaw. Yet Anna Maria reminded him of Ireland every time he looked into her pale green eyes. He didn’t even like women – at least, not the hairy, scratchy, unpleasant women who were the sum total of his sexual experience, who smelt so strange and who demanded more money afterwards – yet he was already counting the moments before he could see this woman again. For Bracken, image was everything, yet here he was standing under a tree in a public park with a handful of nipple and a girl almost young enough to be his daughter. He’d never wanted to share his life with any woman, largely because his life was such a fabrication that it wouldn’t stand up to any sustained scrutiny, yet suddenly he was breaking every rule in his book.
That’s when he came to the conclusion he had fallen in love.
‘You’ve gone too far this time. Too wretchedly, damnably far!’
And they had thought they were bringing him the best news of the day.
As soon as they had knocked on the door of the Cabinet Room, Ball and Wilson sensed that their own feelings of elation were misplaced. ‘What do you want?’ Chamberlain had demanded imperiously, not taking his eyes from the letter he was writing.
Another of those endless missives to his sisters, they decided. He wrote to them in astonishing detail, not only of the facts of his Government but of his ambitions and aspirations, and also of his fears. For him these letters were a cleansing process, like the bleedings insisted upon by a mediaeval physician, except that in his letters he bled feelings and soul. Sometimes the sisters knew more than even Ball and Wilson, and always more than his wife.
‘News from the front, Neville,’ Ball exclaimed, moving into the room.
‘Which of the many fronts that seem to engage my attentions?’ the Prime Minister responded. He was always like this when he was tired: overbearing, sarcastic, short. They had learned to ignore it.
‘In their manifold and great mercy, our friends in the frozen north have decided not to retain the Duchess as their candidate at the next election,’ Ball continued.
Still Chamberlain did not look up. There were livid red spots high on his cheeks. He had just been told that the furniture he and his wife had ordered for the new residence at the top of Number Ten would not be arriving for another two months. Delay upon delay. The incompetence was scarcely believable. How was he supposed to secure the peace of Europe when he hadn’t got anywhere to store his clean shirts? He was going to visit Signor Mussolini, who normally appeared in public covered in gold braid. Would the British Prime Minister have to arrive looking like some agricultural worker? ‘If this is democracy, I sometimes wonder why we bother,’ he muttered.
‘Neville, this is a triumph of democracy,’ Ball protested.
‘What is?’
‘The damned Duchess. She’s out.’
At last he gave them his attention. ‘She’s out?’
‘Constituency’s disowned her.’
‘Ah, about time.’ He relaxed a little, leaning back in his chair. ‘And I suppose if I examined the matter closely I would find your fingerprints somewhere on the death warrant.’
‘The lightest of dabs, perhaps.’ And they almost tumbled over themselves in their enthusiasm to offer him the details. ‘Seems it was quite a lynch mob.’ – ‘She didn’t stand a chance.’ – ‘The motion was put to the meeting that they should seek a candidate who’d support your position on Europe.’ – ‘It was overwhelming.’ – ‘273 votes to 167.’ – ‘The agent says he’s never known such a turnout.’ There was laughter. ‘And the best bit’s yet to come. The poor Duchess was so distressed she’s resigned her seat. Flown off in a fit.’ – ‘Intends to stand as an Independent, would you believe?’ – ‘Yes, there’s going to be a by-election.’
‘What?’ Chamberlain sprang to his feet. The pen he was using clattered to the table, spraying the letter with wet slugs of ink. ‘What?’ he demanded again. His entire face had now coloured and his hand was clasping his temples. ‘How could you? You fools!’
‘Steady on, Neville.’ Both men turned momentarily to stone. Something had gone dramatically wrong, this wasn’t the script they had brought with them. ‘What’s the problem? She’s turned her back on the peace, now she’s turned her back on the party. She’s done for.’
‘But a by-election. Don’t you see what that means?’
Wilson and Ball looked at each other in bewilderment.
‘The voters will have to choose.’
‘Some choice,’ Ball snorted. ‘Between war and peace.’
‘Between her – and me.’ Chamberlain leaned for support on the white marble fireplace, both arms outstretched, gazing into the empty grate, as if faith itself were draining from him. ‘You’ve gone too far this time. Too wretchedly, damnably far!’
‘No,’ Wilson objected. ‘How?’
Chamberlain turned, his voice grown tight, enunciating every word with care. ‘But what if she wins?’
‘She can’t bloody win,’ Ball insisted. ‘She doesn’t have a friend who isn’t a Bolshie or can’t be made to look one.’
‘You’re almost as popular as God out there.’ Wilson waved a hand in the general direction of the windows.
‘The Lord giveth. And He taketh, Sir Horace.’ Chamberlain was breathing heavily, struggling to control his mood. ‘Something’s been going on – out there. I don’t know what, perhaps all this nonsense with the Jews, but it’s all wobbling.’ He picked up a cardboard folder that had lain beside his blotter and threw it down the table. ‘Hitler’s pogroms have made him look like a criminal. And us like conspirators and accomplices.’
‘You can’t possibly believe the stupid Duchess will win,’ Ball protested.
‘The News Chronicle has just got hold of an opinion poll that suggests she might.’
‘Those polls?’ Ball snorted. ‘It’s a bit of a rebound, nothing more. Like the bride coming back from her honeymoon to find a pile of washing.’ He chewed casually at a fingernail. ‘Anyway, I’ve already persuaded the News Chronicle to suppress most of it.’
Yet Chamberlain was in no way reassured. He began to stride impatiently around the long rectangular Cabinet table, leaning forward as though into a wind. ‘They don’t believe Herr Hitler. They don’t believe he has no more territorial ambitions. They don’t believe in Munich any more.’ He stopped, glaring at them, accusing. ‘Which means they don’t believe in me.’
Ball thumped the table so hard the silver and crystal inkwell jumped in its place. ‘You’re confusing the issue, Neville. We’ve never said they’ve got to like Hitler. I hate the bugger myself. Which makes what you’ve done with him all the more remarkable. You’ve extracted a more than reasonable deal from a totally unreasonable man. People understand that. You get the credit for it. And if he goes and tramples all over the agreement and half of bloody Europe, then everyone will know who’s to blame. We’re not dealing with issues of delicacy here, Neville, we’re dealing with the dregs of Europe. With Jews, with jumped-up little Austrian upstarts, with the decadent French who change their governments as often as they change their mistresses and with millions of bloody Bolshies who are sitting just across the border sharpening their knives and ready to slit the throats of everyone who’s not looking their way. Europe’s a mess. You can’t clean it up all on your own, but you have given them the chance to do it for themselves.’
‘Cleaning up? Is that what you call the things Hitler’s doing?’
‘It’s omelettes and eggs, and by the time the voters get round to wiping the last bit of grease from their plates they’ll be too busy rubbing their stomachs to worry about a few scraps on the kitchen floor. So Hitler’s breaking more than eggs, but the muckier it gets the more grateful people are going to be that you’ve kept this country out of it. Scotsmen don’t want to go to war with Germany all over again for the sake of Jews and Communists.’
‘The by-election isn’t a war with Herr Hitler, it’s a war between the Duchess and me. We’ll be fighting on her territory. And if I lose, my credibility will be ruined, not just at home but abroad. I would never be able to look Hitler or Mussolini in the eye again. It would be a disaster. All my efforts for peace would be lost and we’d end up embroiled in the most dreadful war mankind has ever known. It’s not just my record at stake, it’s the survival of civilization. Don’t you see? I must win that election.’
‘You will, Neville. And when you do, every other rebel in the party will be on their knees either begging your forgiveness or waiting for a bullet in the back of the head. The Duchess is doing us a favour.’
‘You can guarantee that?’
Ball looked slowly from the Prime Minister to his colleague, then for a moment examined a badly chewed fingernail. ‘Trust me. Your by-election is already in the bag.’
This was A Bad Thing and Churchill knew it. A Very Bad Thing. And like so much nowadays, he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Yet at first it had seemed to be such An Excellent Thing.
The manager of his bank had telephoned most unexpectedly, and after the initial pleasantries – more strained on Churchill’s part than was usual – came straight to the point. Had he found ‘alternative accommodation’ for the loan? Bloody fool. ‘Accommodation’? What was the man running, a bank or a bed-and-breakfast place? It wasn’t accommodation Churchill needed; his loan wasn’t asleep, all gently tucked up. It was very much awake, like an evil monkey, perched on his shoulder. Always there when he looked round. Staring, growing heavier. So, no, he hadn’t found anywhere else.
‘Then I may have some good news for you …’
The manager thought he could get his superiors at the bank to agree to renew the existing loan. ‘With the easing of the war threat, Mr Churchill, we are able to take a somewhat longer-term view of such matters. I’m sure you understand.’
Now he was convinced the manager was A Bloody Fool. The threat of war gone away? It hadn’t left, it had only become temporarily distracted while it stuck its knife and fork into Czechoslovakia. But what was Churchill to say? He held his tongue, he needed this man. The manager might yet prove to be a Useful Bloody Fool.
No guarantees, the manager had insisted, still only a proposal, but one he would be advocating to his colleagues with great force. And he was hopeful. An Ever Optimistic Useful Bloody Fool. So could Churchill make himself available to sign the relevant documents, perhaps the following week, in London. Not quite sure precisely when, and apologies for the inconvenience, but time was short and they would have to move extremely quickly to make the deadline, otherwise …
Yet that following week he was supposed to be travelling up to Scotland to make a speech on behalf of the Duchess of Atholl. The major speech of the campaign. The great by-election rally. Showing her electors and the entire world that she wasn’t alone.
But the bank manager was both insistent and inflexible. The documents were indispensable, the signatures vital, the deadline loomed and he was sorry but he couldn’t yet say precisely when next week. In spite of all Churchill’s pleadings he could find no alternative.
And now he had to tell her.
The phone clicked and cracked and at last he heard her voice. ‘Kitty, my darling Duchess, how are things on the battle front?’
But he was unable to listen to her answers. Then he explained that he could not make the meeting. He had to break his promise. He would send her messages to publish, he would shower her with words of support and deepest affection, but he could not come to the constituency.
‘Another one of the walking wounded not up to the long journey north,’ she muttered dispiritedly. Her opponent had already flooded the constituency with dozens of MPs and there were more to come in the last few days of the campaign – ‘my constituency’s beginning to look like the front hall of Conservative Central Office.’ Yet it seemed that her own supporters in the Conservative Party, few in number as they were, had encountered any number of impediments to helping her. That was the word she used – impediments. She clearly meant excuses.
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