‘Where would that be? Spain?’ Adrian asked.
‘Here, perhaps, under the copper beech, if it was allowed.’
Connie looked up in surprise. ‘I’m so glad you feel happy here,’ she said. ‘Of course, I think it’s the most beautiful place on earth and I always like people who share my opinion. But don’t let’s talk about death.’
‘No, you’re right, but I can’t help thinking of my friends and comrades in Spain – many of them at this moment dying in defence of Madrid. I feel I deserted them when the cause was lost. I don’t think I’ll be forgiven for that if there is an afterlife.’
Adrian reached over and squeezed her hand affectionately, thinking how sad it was that Verity had no place to call home. Mersham was the nearest – a place she had visited only half a dozen times, owned by people she hardly knew and, he suspected, who did not much care for her.
‘Where’s Frank?’ Verity asked, trying to snap out of her melancholy.
The Duke answered her. ‘He’s at Broadlands. He spends all his time there. He thinks the Mountbattens are – how did he put it, Connie? – “absolute humdingers”.’
‘You disapprove, Gerald?’ Edward inquired mildly.
‘He can do what he wants. If he prefers “humdingers” to old “fuddy-duddies” like us, who can blame him?’
‘It’s not that,’ Connie said. ‘It’s natural that he likes being with amusing young people. He’s mad about polo. It’s his new passion. Did you know, Ned?’
‘He’s mad about that Indian girl,’ the Duke muttered, petulantly.
‘Sunita?’
‘Yes. She and her brother play polo in India and they – and Lord Louis, of course – have started teaching Frank. Apparently, he’s a natural,’ Connie added proudly. ‘But then he’s good at all sports.’
‘The boy’s got a good eye,’ Edward agreed. ‘So, is he sleeping here?’
‘Yes, but that’s about all. He treats the place like a hotel. Mountbatten has lent him a motorbike and he drives back and forth at high speed,’ Connie answered. ‘I have told him to be careful but he doesn’t listen.’
‘Oh, I shouldn’t worry, Connie, my dear,’ Edward said comfortably. ‘Better than moping about here with nothing to do.’ He saw his brother bridle and tried to explain himself, making things worse if anything. ‘You know what I mean, Gerald. He’s got to be able to have a bit of fun.’
‘Yes,’ Connie backed him up. ‘He spent yesterday in London with a man called Rose – an American, I think Frank said – an art critic?’
‘It’s the first I’ve heard that Frank likes art,’ Verity said without thinking.
Edward scowled. ‘I met the man when we went to lunch at Broadlands. I can’t say I cared for him.’
‘Well, he didn’t get back here until the early hours so he must be having some fun,’ Connie said defiantly. ‘You know he’s hoping to join the Naval Reserve? Of course, you do. Wasn’t it your idea, Ned? Lord Louis has kindly arranged an interview for him. I wish he didn’t have to join anything but I think the navy’s safer than the army, don’t you?’ She had an idea that the next war would be like the last and, if her son could only be kept out of the trenches, he might survive. Edward was certainly not going to disabuse her. ‘Tell me, Mr Hassel, about the man – what was his name . . .?’
‘Peter Gray?’ Adrian prompted her.
‘Yes. The poor man! Does anyone know why he was in the grounds of Broadlands when he died?’
Leaving Adrian to talk to Connie, Edward suggested to Georg that he might care to take a stroll in the garden. ‘The Knot Garden is supposed to be the oldest in England,’ Edward informed him. ‘Basil, will you come too?’
Clearly, Georg had no idea what a Knot Garden was, or why he should be interested in it, but welcomed the chance of escaping from the Duke.
‘He’s not getting too much for you – the Duke?’ Edward asked when they were out of earshot.
Georg looked alarmed. ‘No, please, Lord Edward, I am most grateful to him – to your family – for giving me shelter.’ Seeing Edward’s face, Georg relaxed. ‘I am still worrying about my family, you understand? And I must find work. I do not like to live on charity. Mr Hassel has arranged for me to meet Mr Harcourt of the BBC World Service. There is some possibility I might . . . with my languages . . .’ He seemed unable to continue.
Edward was concerned. ‘What can we do about your parents? To get them out, I mean.’
‘I have asked the Duke if he would offer my father a job – anything – it does not matter. A gardener,’ he said looking about him. ‘With such an offer, he might be allowed to come to England. He has been released from prison. Did Verity tell you? There was no case against him but he is an embarrassment to the authorities. He is well known in Vienna and this, I hope, means he cannot be sent off to a camp as he would be if he did not have – how do you say it? – friends in high places. The trouble is my parents say they want to stay in Vienna.’
‘Stay? Don’t they realize the danger they are in?’
‘Of course, but they don’t want to leave their home. They say they’re too old to begin again in a new country.’
‘I understand that. Still, you must persuade them it is not too bad here.’
‘It’s not that, Lord Edward. My father has a high opinion of England and the English though he has never been here. It’s just that he wants to die in his own bed.’
‘If the Nazis allow him to. God! What a world we live in!’
Edward was silent for a moment, watching Basil race round the garden enjoying his freedom. He wondered what he would do if he was told he had to leave everything and go, penniless, into exile. At last he said, ‘What else worries you? I mean, that is enough but . . .’ He checked himself. How fatuous it was to ask a Jewish refugee what worried him.
‘This man at the Foreign Office you have so kindly arranged for me to see . . . will he understand how important my information is? He won’t try to brush me aside? I have not come empty-handed but I do not think Verity believes me. I have friends in Germany . . . scientists . . .’ He seemed to come to some sort of decision. ‘Lord Edward, can I tell you or is there someone . . . someone in your secret service I should talk to?’
‘Of course I can arrange for you to meet . . . someone in authority in our secret service.’ He was thinking of Guy Liddell. ‘But if you can tell me a little more about the nature of your information, I can judge who you ought to speak to.’
Georg looked at him gratefully. ‘I trust Miss Browne – Verity – with my life, you understand? But she is a journalist and I must be secret. Other lives than mine depend upon it.’
‘That sounds serious. I promise I will pass your message on to the right person and nobody else. You don’t have to worry on that score.’
Georg nodded and took a deep breath. ‘The simple fact is that you are going to lose the war. I have a friend . . .’
‘You are thinking of how we have allowed the Luftwaffe to grow so much stronger than our own air force?’
‘No, no. Worse than that. Much worse. My friend is a scientist and he is working on a bomb.’
‘A bomb?’
‘A very great bomb, using nuclear fission. Do you know what I mean, Lord Edward?’ Georg waved his hands in the air for emphasis.
‘I only know what I have read in the newspapers. I may be wrong but I understood there was no possibility of Hitler having such a weapon before 1950.’
‘That is not correct, I fear. I only wish it were so. My friend – a physicist at the Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Berlin – has been working on it since 1927.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘Stefan Meyer, the director of the Vienna laboratory, is an old friend of my father. Two of his team – both of whom I have met – Hans Pettersson and Gerhard Kirsch, have made considerable progress. They are building a secret reactor in Gottow, a village outside Berlin. . . Should I stop there? How much can I tell you . . .?’
Georg looked s
uddenly anxious, whether because he doubted Edward’s trustworthiness or because he did not know how much he would understand of what he was being told, Edward did not know.
‘You can tell me anything but perhaps it is better if you talk to a scientist who can evaluate . . .’
Georg nodded. ‘That would be good. You see my life is in danger.’
‘But you are safe in England.’
‘Not safe, not even in this Knot Garden,’ he said, smiling. He seemed to relax a little. ‘Let me tell you a little more in case . . . I’ll put it as simply as possible but it would ease my mind to have told someone. In Berlin, Professor Otto Hahn and his colleague, Fritz Strassmann, have discovered that it is possible to split the nuclei of uranium, the heaviest of all the elements. This releases energy on a scale far greater than the splitting of lithium nuclei. They call it fission.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Edward said helplessly. ‘I wish I knew more science. What is “fission”?’
‘I don’t understand it all either but in a chain reaction a neutron fired at a uranium nucleus would cause it to split, releasing energy and other neutrons. These neutrons would immediately hit each other, split and the process would continue many millions of times within a fraction of a second. The end result is an explosion far greater than you could possibly imagine . . . greater than all the explosions of the last war added together.’
Georg stopped and stared ahead of him, seeing nothing. The sheer dread in his eyes meant Edward did not doubt for one moment that what he was being told was the sober truth. Such a bomb would mean that in the next war no one would be spared – not the soldier in the front line, nor women and children going about their normal lives. He had a sudden vision of Mersham and everybody in it reduced to ashes in a split second. It made him feel physically sick. Could such evil ever be overcome?
‘At Cambridge, our people are also working on splitting the atom. Rutherford’s team . . . there’s been a lot about it in the press.’
‘Yes, but too slow – much too slow. They don’t believe this bomb can be made in our lifetime but they are wrong. It can be . . . it is being made.’ He clutched Edward’s arm.
‘What can be done?’ Edward asked, his voice thin and uncertain.
‘Probably nothing,’ Georg said brutally, ‘but there is a chance . . .’
‘A chance?’
‘A chance of getting hold of two of the Friedrich-Wilhelms team – Arno Brasch and Fritz Lange. They don’t like the Nazis and if their safety could be assured . . .’
‘How do you know so much?’ Edward said, suddenly suspicious. ‘This isn’t some sort of trap, is it?’
‘On my mother’s life it is not. When I knew I would have to escape from the Nazis, I went to see Professor Meyer. He has many English friends . . . He wanted me to warn you . . . to ask for help . . .’
On the Monday, the four of them – Edward, Verity, Georg and Adrian – returned to London. However, they had all been invited back to Mersham the following weekend. Adrian had demurred but Connie had been pressing and, since he knew Charlotte would want him out of the way while she finished her book, he accepted. He and Connie got on well together and she had suggested he might like to paint the castle or its grounds. Verity was relieved to have entertainment for Georg and accepted for both of them with alacrity.
6
Lord Louis made the announcement on the Tuesday, after the afternoon training session, and Sunita clapped her hands with glee. ‘I have arranged a practice match next Saturday against some of my Bluejackets. The only way you can improve now, Frank, is by playing polo properly. You’re better than I was when I began. You’ve got a good eye and you’re born to ride. For me it was hard work but worth the grind. It’s the best game in the world. It’s a bit early to be playing polo but the field’s in a good condition and we won’t push the ponies too hard. By May, when the season proper starts, you’ll be ready for it.’
Mountbatten was a good trainer. He was calm, never lost his temper but kept Frank at it until he dropped with fatigue. Harry told Frank that he could not be called a polo player until he could vault into the saddle but refused to show him how it was done. To Harry’s annoyance, Mountbatten had insisted that Ayesha make up the fourth in the Broadlands Fencibles, as he had named them, along with Frank, Sunita and himself. Harry was to hold himself in reserve.
Frank adored this new game. It helped that Sunita was such a good player and he wanted to be as good as she. She teased and flirted with him without ever saying anything which might make him think she was seriously interested in him. Frank got frustrated when he ran his pony up and down the field but never seemed to get near the ball. When he asked Mountbatten what he was doing wrong, he was told not to worry and that it would all suddenly come right – like learning to ride a bicycle.
‘I played my first game on the famous ground within the Maharaja’s palace in Batiala,’ Mountbatten recalled. ‘In the first half, I never got near the ball, let alone hit it. Then in the last chukka, to my intense surprise, I actually hit the ball three or four times. I have been dippy about it ever since.’
This had been during his first visit to India in 1921 as ADC to the Prince of Wales. Sunny’s father had introduced him to the game when they visited Batiala and it had quickly become a passion. The Prince had remarked much later that Mountbatten’s interest in India’s many problems was ‘confined to that part of the country bounded by the white boards of polo fields’. Mountbatten continued almost wistfully, ‘I remember so well my first visit to Batiala and your grandfather’s great kindness to us, Harry. We shot black buck from a Rolls-Royce, twisting and turning over impossible country at fifty miles an hour. I have no idea how the car survived but it’s why I have always bought Rolls-Royces.’
To Mountbatten’s great joy, he discovered, when courting Edwina, that she had fitted Broadlands out with a golf-course, three tennis courts, and, most important of all, a polo field. That was in addition to eight hundred acres of shooting and a stretch of the Test known as a fisherman’s paradise. For someone as sports mad as Mountbatten, it was everything he needed to be happy. His wife’s affairs were a small price to pay.
He was captain of the Bluejackets, the Royal Navy team, and had twice carried off the Inter-Regimental trophy. ‘I insist my team call to each other for passes using first names so, by the inflection of our voices, we can interpret what’s in the caller’s mind and act appropriately,’ he told his young players as they gulped down long glasses of lemonade between sessions. Mountbatten proudly showed Frank the polo stick he had invented with its oval-shaped head to give ‘loft and length’ and presented him with a copy of the book he had written, under the name of Marco, called simply Polo.
The invitation Frank brought back to Mersham for his parents to come to Broadlands to watch him play in his first polo match put the Duke in a difficult position. It was breakfast – the only meal at which Frank saw his parents as he spent most of every day at Broadlands. What possible excuse could the Duke make without giving mortal offence to his son, let alone Mountbatten? Connie said little but pointed out that they would not be going into the house.
Frank backed her up. ‘Come on, Pa, don’t be so stuffy. Lord Louis has been very good to me. After all, he’s arranged for me to go for an interview for the RNVR in London. With his backing, the navy’s bound to accept me! You’ve got to come! Anyway, it’ll be fun. There’ll be lots of people there. There will be smoked-salmon sandwiches and champagne in a marquee before the match and tea and cakes afterwards. There can’t be anything objection-able in that! And Lord Louis says you’re to bring everyone staying the weekend. I particularly want Uncle Ned and Verity to be there. They are coming back at the weekend, aren’t they? I say, what’s going on with those two? Are they getting married or . . .?’ he added as he forked sausages and fried eggs on to his plate from a silver chafing dish on the sideboard – all this exercise made him ravenous.
‘Don’t ask me,’ the Duke retorted. ‘We’d
be the last to know and, frankly, I don’t trust her . . . never have. Not since she came here pretending to be something she wasn’t.’
‘Oh, but that was ages ago,’ Frank protested. ‘I think she’s a very good egg and I just wish he’d pop the question.’
‘He has,’ Connie told him, ‘but she won’t accept him while she’s doing her reporting.’
‘I don’t approve of the way these young women pretend they’re as good as men and . . . ’
‘Gerald, please!’ Connie broke in. ‘Ned will marry who he likes and as long as she makes him happy . . .’
‘But will she? Can she?’ the Duke demanded. ‘The life she leads is coarsening . . . I’m sorry, Connie,’ he said, holding up his hand to stop her contradicting, ‘but it is. She’s not a . . . well, she’s not a lady . . . not as my father would have understood the word.’
‘Oh, bother all that,’ Frank said. ‘I think she’s got loads of pluck and she’s just the sort of woman Uncle Ned needs. He’ll not be bored with Verity. Still, I’m glad she seems to have broken with that German – what was his name? Von Trott. I thought she had really fallen for him when I saw them together at that cricket match.’
‘And now you’ve dropped that American woman,’ the Duke could not prevent himself asking, ‘when are you going to find a nice English girl and settle down, Frank?’
‘Gerald!’ Connie protested. ‘Frank’s a sensible boy.’ She put out her hand and stroked his cheek. ‘He’ll find the right girl but there’s no hurry.’
Frank kissed his mother’s hand and held it to his cheek. ‘What girl could ever live up to you?’ he said naively and she blushed with pleasure.
Frank’s enthusiasm and the trouble Mountbatten was taking with his son made it impossible for the Duke to hold out and, with much huffing and puffing, he agreed to be there on Saturday at one o’clock to see him play in his first polo match.
The Quality of Mercy Page 11