Second Violin

by John Lawton

  If they’d been alone, Alex knew, Wells would have come back at him with a lunchtime thesis as long as a French loaf. But with Daffy doubtless pinching him under the table, he deferred with uncharacteristic modesty and said, ‘And what’s next on Hitler’s list, Count?’

  ‘Need you ask? He means to take the Polish corridor, to reclaim Danzig and link up with the rump of East Prussia.’

  ‘What,’ said Macmillan, ‘about this proposal for an extraterritorial road?’

  ‘It is nonsense,’ von Schwerin replied. ‘There is no plan for a road of any kind. Hitler saying there is merely lulls the Poles into thinking he will negotiate. The truth is he will negotiate nothing.’

  ‘Surely,’ Cazalet said, ‘surely he realises that would mean war?’

  ‘War with whom?’

  It was pretty much the last retort any of them had expected of von Schwerin, and von Schwerin knew it. As Cazalet almost gasped for breath at the audacity of it, von Schwerin slowly turned his head to take in everyone in the room and be certain that his bluntness had hit home.

  ‘With us! With the British!’ Cazalet said too late.

  Von Schwerin could not be made to feel the urgency Cazalet had put into his words. But ‘we shall fight’ was becoming such a worn and shabby phrase. ‘We’, as von Schwerin had pointed out, had passed many stages at which it might have been deemed prudent or honourable to fight, and we hadn’t.

  ‘Mr Cazalet, I was with Hitler last autumn. I cannot remember who said what to provoke the remark, but I distinctly heard him say, “I saw the British at Munich . . . they are sheep.” Now, you are in the Reserve are you not?’

  ‘Yes, but how did you know that?’

  ‘I’m in the Abwehr – shall we say it’s my job to know? If I were you, Mr Cazalet, I’d dust off my khaki and get ready for war.’

  This stilled the table into silence for a few moments, and silence gave way if not to small talk then to smaller talk.

  Alex found he could see himself in the words of future diarists, the chronicles-to-come . . . half the men at table (and Daffy was the only woman) most certainly kept diaries. He knew Nicolson did, he knew Duff Cooper did and he’d be willing to bet Cazalet did. He doubted Churchill could find the time and equally doubted Wells would bother, but Wells and he were pretty well contemporaries . . . it was what the younger men wrote that momentarily flashed through his mind: ‘Lunch at Daffy’s . . . found myself sitting next to Alex Troy. My God, he’s looking old. And he’s not really on the ball any more. Didn’t seem to understand the German situation at all.’ So that was his fate . . . to be an entry in someone’s diary published twenty or thirty years hence. His father had ended up as a footnote or an index reference in lives of Tolstoy and Kropotkin. Tolstoy’s first biographers had provoked the old man to a restrained form of rage, and a flurry of letters dashed off to the literary editors of the national newspapers, some of which even printed them – in particular, the Observer had seemed delighted with his witless reworking of Twain’s ‘reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated’.

  ‘Do you keep a diary, Daffy?’

  ‘There are many ladies who would think that an impertinent question, Alex. But I am not one of them, and it so happens I do.’

  ‘Hmm . . . am I in it?’

  ‘Alex, darling, we’ve known each other twenty-five years or more. Of course you’re in it. And no one should be recording today’s little chat – not in their diaries and certainly not in their newspapers. Now, change the subject.’

  The woman had a point. How did men like von Schwerin get away with this in a nation where the disaffected could vanish overnight? Von Schwerin was by no means the first of Admiral Canaris’s casual envoys – unlike the others he seemed to be taken seriously. The risk was enormous. How would this man survive if a word of what he was saying leaked out? It was, it seemed, a remarkable act of trust in the British . . . the sceptical, unbelieving, hesitant, appeasing British.

  Cazalet returned to the subject with coffee. ‘What else might we do to prepare for war, Count. My khaki has been dusted off a while now.’

  Von Schwerin smiled at this, turned to Churchill, turned back to look at Cazalet.

  ‘Well . . . you might persuade the man on my right to rejoin the cabinet.’

  Churchill looked up, smiling modestly at the obvious truth in von Schwerin’s words.

  ‘Really, Count. Do you think I’m that frightening?’

  This brought smiles and laughter from everyone.

  ‘Well, you scare the hell out of me.’

  ‘This brought guffaws, table slapping mirth, that enabled Daffy to rise and end the meal on a high.

  Out in the street, Alex’s car waited, the chauffeur holding the back door open.

  ‘Are you and Winston going to the House?’ Alex asked Cazalet. ‘I’m driving right past.’

  ‘I am. And I’m sure Winston is. But I doubt he will consent to ride with me.’

  Alex looked back to the open doorway. Churchill was still deep in conversation with von Schwerin. Two men clutching hats and making wild gestures.

  ‘Then let us leave him to it.’

  Cazalet followed Alex into the back seat of the Rolls. When the door closed and the car moved off he said, ‘One cannot doubt the wisdom of Count von Schwerin’s remark . . .’

  ‘Even if it is merely an echo of the British popular press.’

  ‘Quite. And what neither the papers nor von Schwerin seem to grasp is the speed with which Winston makes enemies, and the tenacity with which he holds on to them.’

  ‘You?’

  ‘Oh Alex, it’s not just me. You saw Harold Macmillan in there. There’s a whole generation willing to sit at his feet and do his bidding . . . but if we deviate from his line . . . if we contest him on things that are minor in comparison to the prospect of war . . .’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Well . . . it doesn’t pay to have a good word for the Soviet Union.’

  ‘Not many of you have.’

  ‘And India. That’s why he cuts me, because I am in favour of India’s independence. And that is anathema to Winston. Yet, much as I endorse it and he opposes it, it is a mere inkblot on the greater picture. It should not divide us over Germany. But he lets it do just that. You know, I think that German came here with the notion that there is a Churchill faction. He may be right, but the chief obstacle to that faction cohering around Winston and acting as one and speaking with one voice is Winston himself. Take Austria, for example. I have first-hand knowledge. I was in Vienna only a few weeks after the Anschluss. I could have painted a vivid picture for him of what the Germans are doing there. He wouldn’t listen to a word I said.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘I lived a while in Vienna. For a while Vienna was home. I have not been there these thirty years. So tell me, how was Vienna? I’m listening even if Winston isn’t.’

  Cazalet sighed, ‘I suppose it all comes down to the looks on people’s faces. The middle-aged know they’re done for. No one over thirty-five smiles any more. The Jews know they’re done for, the aristocrats know they’re done for – I had at least half a dozen people begging me to get them jobs in England. A Jewish doctor wanted to be my gardener. A count von somewhere or other said he’d valet for me! Alex, Vienna was desperate.’

  Dropping Cazalet in Parliament Square, Alex found Vienna would not leave his thoughts. He could see streets of cobblestones and coffee houses. He could almost taste the coffee. And so he went in search of Vienna. To a meeting to which he had long been invited, and which for reasons he would surely be told later, he had as long put off.

  § 56

  The Rolls pulled up in front of a vast Edwardian villa, 20 Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, NW3 – almost walking distance from Alex’s own Hampstead house. He’d had opportunity, if not occasion, aplenty to walk over. He never had. But doubtless the man inside would be able to tell him why.

  The maid asked, ‘Who shall I say is ca
lling?’

  ‘Alex Troy.’

  There was a bustle from within as she announced his name, as though something had been knocked over. Then he bustled out into the lobby, stood before him, a tiny white-bearded man in a baggy cardigan, looking startled, as though awakened from an after-lunch nap, hastily putting on his round tortoiseshell spectacles, seizing Alex’s right hand in both of his.

  ‘Alex!’

  ‘Professor Freud.’

  ‘Ach . . . we are both too old for titles. Call me Sigmund. Come . . . come . . . everything is pretty much as it was.’

  And it was. Stepping into Freud’s library was to step back into the Vienna of forty years ago. A room heavy with the weight of a gilded age. The burden of dreams. The same paintings on the wall – the tell-tale Oedipus and the Sphinx – a portrait Alex had never asked about but which he assumed to represent Moses – the same books on the shelves: Goethe and the complete Shakespeare in individual German volumes.

  ‘Of course I could not leave with everything. But there is nothing like a putsch to make you have a purge.’

  Alex looked at the desk and the nest of tables crammed full of classical figurines. He remembered the day he’d asked Freud about collecting them. He’d never grace his own study with the word ‘collection’ – Alex didn’t collect he just hoarded – and Freud’s answer, that these figurines had only survived, and survived unchanging, because they’d been walled up in tombs for years. It was a metaphor for the unconscious – the unconscious scarcely changed because it was entombed.

  Freud led the way from the library to the consulting room at the back of the house. The couch was the same couch – the analysands’ couch from Berggasse, draped in a heavy, geometric-patterned red Persian rug. And at the end of the couch, out of sight of anyone reclining, the green velvet tub chair where Freud himself had sat – the disembodied voice.

  To have lain down, to have stretched out would have been bliss – bliss and a bridge too far. They took armchairs and faced each other. Equals.

  ‘Tell me,’ Freud began eagerly, ‘. . . tell me about London. I can get out so rarely these days. It is what it always was to me . . . a city I know through books. Tell me, what you have seen, what you have done lately.’

  ‘Well . . . today I breakfasted with my younger son, who has become, of all things, a policeman. You may imagine what qualms this caused me. However, they were long ago. I am reconciled. And I lunched with one of our London society hostesses of whom you have surely never heard – Daffy Carfax.’

  ‘Indeed . . . I have never heard of her.’

  ‘And among the guests was Wells.’

  ‘H.G.?’

  ‘Is there another?’

  ‘The young one, the one in America who convinced them only last year that we were being invaded by Mars.’

  ‘I must have slept through that one. No, it was H.G., the same old H.G. Wells who first brought me to England thirty years ago. Well, thirty all but a few weeks.’

  ‘Wells, Wells. What I wouldn’t give to get the bugger on that couch. And how was he?’

  ‘Full of doom and gloom. The fate of Homo sapiens . . . mankind is . . . what was his phrase . . . “at the end if its tether” . . . it’s time is over . . . we must now give way to other, if not actually superior, beings. It’s nothing more than a new variation on his old song. He predicts. He always has. It’s the trade he’s in. You know he actually called an anthology of his stuff Predictions and Prophecies . . . or perhaps it was the other way round? He predicts the worst most of the time and most of the time he’s wrong. But he’s onto his third reprint of his latest, so he’s happy. A quick survey of civilisation, a bit of a bash at the Jews . . .’

  ‘Anything new?’

  ‘No . . . same old stuff, even quotes that rather corny clerihew that goes “How odd of God to choose the Jews.” You have to say it properly. I can never quite get the rhythm.’

  ‘What’s a clerihew?’

  ‘Not really sure, but it’s something English. Something like a limerick that isn’t a limerick.’

  ‘And what does he have to say about Nazis?’

  ‘Oh he’s unequivocal about that. Hitler is a nutcase. And then he goes on to warn us about how focussed complete nutcases can be.’

  ‘Do you think he’s read any of my stuff . . . you know . . . Civilisation and its Discontents?’

  ‘I’d be quite prepared to bet he hasn’t.’

  ‘You know . . . I don’t have much more in me. I’ve almost finished a new book . . . quite possibly my last . . . it will be translated into English as soon as I do finish . . . Moses and Monotheism . . . I have put the book aside so many times these last few years . . . so many false starts.’

  ‘What’s it about?’ Alex asked in much the same tone of voice with which one asked of a Hollywood film ‘who’s in it?’

  ‘Moses.’

  ‘Yeees.’

  ‘And death.’

  ‘Moses’ death? How did he die?’

  ‘The Jews killed him.’

  ‘And . . .?’

  ‘And then they invented the faith to contain their guilt.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said Alex. ‘You’re going to upset a lot of people.’

  ‘I already have. I have received . . . what would you say? . . . overtures? Overtures urging me not to publish. A personal visit from Professor Yehuda. Letters to the press would not surprise me.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if I get anything.’

  ‘But it is . . . personal to me . . . a meditation on death, by one who feels its hand upon him.’

  ‘I feel death’s hand every day. And all I get asked about is sodding politics. Why does no one ask me about death?’

  ‘Everybody asks me about sex.’

  ‘I’ve done politics. I’ve done sex. Shall we now do death?’

  ‘I don’t see why not. Take the couch, Alex. Put your feet up. Politics, sex and death are the three most interesting things on earth. High time we tackled the last.’

  Alex sat tentatively on the couch, felt history under each buttock.

  ‘Please, please. I shall take my old seat too.’

  Alex swung his legs up onto the couch. Freud disappeared into the green chair behind him.

  ‘God – this takes me back. Vienna . . . 1908.’

  ‘1907.’

  ‘If you say so . . . now . . . where were we?’

  ‘We were dying,’ Freud replied.

  An hour or so later two men in their eighties shook hands on the threshhold.

  Freud said, over the handshake, ‘A favour if you would . . . please ask Wells to come and see me. I fear he needs my services more than you do.’

  § 57

  Daffy Carfax held luncheon in much the same way the football league played soccer. Tranmere Rovers v. Accrington Stanley – Accrington Stanley v. Tranmere Rovers . . . there would always be a return match. Alex was not in the least surprised when she phoned him up a couple of weeks later and told him she had ‘some really really interesting people you really really should meet’, and was surprised only at the extremity of Daffy’s choice. Left, Right he was used to, but it was rarely Alex sat down to break bread with someone he thought of as an outright fascist, and certainly rare this close to the inevitable war.

  He was not seated next to Daffy, he found himself next to the spare, wolfish figure of the Marquess of Fermanagh, an old-school Tory, thoroughly anti-Churchill, almost as thoroughly anti-Chamberlain, a man whose power to blackball had been formidable in its day but whose powers were now waning. He’d flirted with fascism – who hadn’t? the friends of Oswald Mosley were legion – had been briefly quite impressed by the young Mosley and now gave the impression of being impressed by no one. The seat on his other side was empty. Beyond that sat Humphrey Rogerson, a humpty-dumpty, right-wing economic theorist who opposed the theories of John Maynard Keynes with the simple idea that there was nothing one could do about economics therefore one should do nothing. The remarkable thing was that he earn
ed a living saying this at inordinate length. Next to him was one of the young turks of British politics, Geoffrey Trench MP – a man whose membership of the Conservative Party must have been baffling to many conservatives as he was an outspoken fascist. Alex occasionally wondered why they didn’t just boot him out, but he would in all probability merely stand again in his own seat and win and, of course, no one wanted to see a fascist elected to the House and thus legitimised. Trench was better for the Tories in their own margin – but it was, Alex thought, such a wide, such a loud margin. And beyond him, Arnold Palfrey-Greeve, leader writer on the Daily Mail, a man who had tried his utmost to rally the nation to the cause of British Fascism until Lord Rothermere had tired of all the street-fighting and finally relented on his headline of ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. A deeply unpleasant man, Alex thought, but . . . if asked by Rothermere, Palfrey-Greeve would write headlines calling for the appointment of a turnip as Minister of Transport.

  Given the nature of this motley, Alex could not have been more surprised when the vacant seat was taken by Daffy’s husband, Mungo. Mungo didn’t lunch.

  ‘You again?’ Mungo said jocularly.

  ‘The bad penny,’ Alex replied.

  Mungo leaned in confidentially ‘They’re all bad pennies, Alex. The old girl seems attracted by the odd buggers in life, but I’ll tell you . . . this lot take the biscuit.’

  Mungo slurped into his consommé. Alex looked around the table, heard Rogerson holding forth, saw Daffy smiling inanely as though she understood, and decided Mungo was right. Daffy collected oddities – and he was surely one himself – but this lot were the oddest of all.

  Alex had long thought it a mistake to dismiss fascism as merely rabble-rousing. That its practice degenerated so rapidly to mob violence and street-fighting was inherent, but its politics were as diverse as the people who supported them – most not for long – and as varied as the nations that spawned them in the wake of the Great War. For years it seemed Britain had been striving to evolve a fascism that was ‘British’, for almost as long the model had been Italian – far, far more people, looked to Mussolini as an exemplar than would ever look to Hitler – H.G. Wells had been an admirer for a while, so had Churchill. Then Franco had seemed to elicit an absurd level of British support from many respectable, intelligent people – Victor Cazalet was one – who had found something admirable in his blatantly anti-democratic usurpation of Spain. Of late the German model had prevailed, but then that had begun with mob violence and street-fighting. Along the way, Oswald Mosley had moved from Conservative to being loosely allied to the Liberals, to sitting in the house for Labour as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, and, in the end, to being the leader of the British Union of Fascists. Along that way – and this was easy to forget – he had uttered statements, written papers, on economic matters, that had been taken seriously, been respected and discussed as a means to ending mass unemployment and ultimately ignored. The problem with fascism, the scary thing about fascism, as Mosley’s career exmplified, was that it touched most other ideologies – sooner or later something in its ragbag ideology overlapped with what you believed yourself or what the party of your choice purported to believe.