Second Violin

by John Lawton

  Thank God, Alex thought, for the likes of Geoffrey Trench – a thirty-five-year-old demagogue with whom it was impossible to find a square inch of common ground. He was a successful young man – Eton and Oxford, elected to the House of Commons in a by-election before he was thirty – handsome, tall, letting a stubby moustache brutalise an otherwise pleasing face. And he was just what the occasion called for – the complete fascist bastard one could despise without conscience.

  ‘Can anyone still doubt,’ Trench was saying, ‘that the greatest conspiracy of modern times is the international movement – the rise and the spread of Communism? The international conspiracy between Russia and world Jewry to spread this despicable idea, this farcical pretence of a common humanity, across the world? What other race could do this? What other race is international? A country that harbours Jews nurtures the real Fifth Column, the only Fifth Column that matters. A race without nation, that feels loyalty to no nation. A race that knows only one loyalty – that of Jew to Jew, that of Jew to the Jewish idea – Communism!’

  They were on the meat course. Lamb, mint sauce, roast potatoes, a pleasing hint of rosemary, and a bellyfull of hatred.

  ‘Why, why would a man as obviously intelligent as Hitler root out from the population so many who might otherwise contribute their labour or their capital at a time of the rebuilding of Germany? Can we imagine that such a decision was taken lightly, was taken arbitrarily? Did he want half Europe howling at him over the Jews? Of course not. Hitler recognises the enemy within. And so must we. We must expose the conspiracy of organised Jewry. And first and foremost we must rid the Conservative Party of its pernicious influence.’

  Trench had stunned the table into silence. Not so much with what he was saying – for all Alex knew he might well be the only one who disagreed with young Trench – as the force with which he said it. Alex had thin tolerance for politicians who treated any gathering as an audience, made speeches rather than conversed. Daffy clearly had more, or she would not have invited the little prick, or any of the other little pricks who had failed at the simple task of gracing her table over the years, but she flashed her beaming smile at everyone only to find most eyes fixed downward. Alex had stopped eating, Mungo was picking at his lamb as though wondering what it was. Fermanagh, however, spoke.

  ‘All I can say, young man, is “words, words, words”.’

  ‘You have a plan for action?’

  It was a prick’s remark when uttered to any man who had seen combat in war – and Fermanagh was, famously in his day a veteran of the battle of Omdurman.

  ‘Fine,’ the old man said, ‘you want a plan of action, I’ll give you one.’

  Fermanagh pointed his fork straight at Trench’s chest.

  ‘Try this on for size. Others have tried this and failed, so here’s your chance. Get rid of the Minister of War. D’ye understand me? Get rid of the Minister of War! Get up on your hind legs in the House and call for Hore-Belisha to resign. He’s in the cabinet. He’s completely bloody useless in my opinion. And it so happens . . . he’s a Jew.’

  The last three words were uttered as though throwaway rather than the point of the argument. Fermanagh wasn’t even looking at Trench as he spoke them. The fork withdrew to the plate. The knife sliced up another mouthful of lamb. If Fermanagh thought he’d thrown down the gauntlet in such a way that Trench would have to commit himself to doing something, he was wrong. The challenge brought forth more words, words, words.

  ‘There is no place for the Jew in the Conservative Party, there is no place for the Jew in British politics . . . there is no place for the Jew in Britain. We must drive them from office, from power and ultimately we must drive them from Britain.’

  Mungo set down his knife and fork, turned to Alex, no longer the confidential half-whisper, but a voice that everyone in the room could hear.

  ‘Y’know, old boy, I seem to have lost me appetite. But, God help me, I just can’t eat and listen to a man talk such utter shite.’

  So saying, he rose from his seat. One hand seized Trench by his collar, the other twisted his right arm behind his back. Mungo then bellowed for a footman, steered his captive into the hallway and, as the footman pulled back the front door, placed one foot against his backside and booted him down the steps and into the street.

  Mungo looked back through the open doors into the dining room. His gaze fixed coolly on his wife.

  ‘Daphne, my dear, a word if you would be so kind.’

  ‘I . . . er . . . er . . . darling . . . my guests . . .’

  ‘Daphne!!!’

  Without a word she followed him into his study, the footman closed the doors behind her. Her guests looked at one another in a silence broken only by the roar of Mungo’s rage.

  ‘When will you ever learn that you cannot decide British Foreign Policy at the dining table?’

  ‘Mungo!’

  ‘No Daphne . . . for once just shut up and listen. I have put up for years with the idiots you amuse yourself with. But enough is enough. You cannot . . .’

  A door closed somewhere in the house and Mungo’s tirade was reduced to a distant murmur.

  Palfrey-Greeve threw down his napkin and got up to leave. Rogerson followed. Neither spoke. Left alone, Fermanagh looked at Alex and said, ‘Lamb’s too bloody good to waste. That Mungo’s trouble. I’d never let a little shit like Trench put me off me fodder.’

  Alex ate a mouthful and floated an idea: ‘Of course it may be that the Minister for War will resign, whether Trench calls for it or not.’

  ‘Then I set the little shit an easy enough task.’

  Fermanagh took a bite of lamb. A moment’s appreciative chewing, a small ripple of satisfaction spreading on his vulpine face.

  ‘Or did you really think we’d get ourselves into another German war with a Jew in charge of the army?’

  ‘I never know what you people think,’ Alex said. ‘And I have spent half a lifetime trying to fathom you. I come from a country that set the gold standard for anti-Semitism and still you people amaze me.’

  § 58

  On 23 August Germany and the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact. Alex did not save his leader for the Sunday edition, but published it the following day.

  The Post

  Thursday, 24 August 1939

  Surely you were expecting to hear from me today? Fear not, I shall be brief. This is hardly a time for lectures, it is a time for the licking of wounds.

  Our relationship with the Soviet Union has been troubled and tricky since the bloody birth of that vast nation some twenty-two years ago. Of late it has seemed to me to resemble an engagement between unlikely suitors in a Victorian music hall. ‘She wouldn’t say yes, she wouldn’t say no’, and which of us was left standing at the altar? No matter – that would be hindsight, the raking over of what cannot be mended.

  We are at war – it is simply that we do not know it. We have been at war since the first German plane dropped the first German bomb on Spain more than three years ago. It is a war in which we lack allies, a war in which our greatest potential ally has just signed a non-aggression pact with the enemy. And, inevitably, this has brought forth howling cries of anguish from those who have said all along that there was no deal to be done with the Godless Bolsheviks of Russia, that they too are the enemy. I will say now that the Nazi-Soviet Pact is an action which shocks me – I saw it coming – indeed, it seems to me to have been the writing on the wall since the day Mr Litvinov was relieved of his duties as Soviet Foreign Minister – and still it shocks me. But the Soviet Union is a nation only twenty-two years old. What is twenty-two years? It is youth, it is adolescence, it is mere infancy. I say to my readers now that this is far from final, and that this is not the action on which to judge a nation so newly born. It is a time for the licking of wounds, it is, to quote I forget whom – my children would know – a time of the breaking of nations.

  Alexei Troy

  § 59

  On odd days Alex still went into his of
fice. Often enough to demonstrate that he was still the boss. Never with any regularity or predictability. He was in his study in Church Row, standing by the desk, checking his pockets, patting himself down and muttering ‘glasses, watch, wallet . . .’ when the phone rang.

  ‘Alex, we must meet at once.’

  ‘Of course, Winston. I have a car outside right now, I could be with you in twenty minutes or so. Your flat or the Commons?’

  ‘Neither,’ Churchill said. ‘Meet me at Daffy’s.’

  He knew what this meant. It meant firstly that Churchill wanted neutral territory, which meant that either one of them, like would-be lovers on a blind date, could leave at will. And secondly that he wanted their meeting unobserved. There were always reporters at the House of Commons, and more often than not there’d be the odd one hanging about outside Churchill’s flat.

  As he stepped from the car in Chesham Place the door of the house two doors down opened, and its owner walked to the curb, glanced at his pocket watch, looked down the street in search of a cab, looked up at the summer sky, summer-struck for a moment, looked the other way down the street and finally caught sight of Alex looking at him.

  Alex had not set eyes on Lord Carsington in more than two years. Who had? He had shot his bolt with British Fascism in 1936. But that was what Carsington did. He left things. He had left the Liberal Party in 1920, the Conservative Party in 1929 and had drifted into Mosleyite politics. He had spoken outrageously and provocatively at BUF rallies, and suddenly, after the ‘Battle’ of Cable Street had all but withdrawn from public life. Silence, the odd letter to the newspapers notwithstanding, had not diminished his role as a bogeyman to the Left. Alex had attacked him in leaders. They had both risked being thrown out of the Savoy after a public row just before Christmas 1936. And now there was not a hint of acknowledgement in his face. Carsington was looking straight through him. Part of Alex – the journalist – wished he would come right up and speak – he had a ready question after all, ‘Why? Why would anyone withdraw from public life so completely at the age of fifty? What had happened?’ And part of him – the diplomat – wanted no conflict, wanted simply to keep the appointment with Churchill. That would be conflict enough.

  Carsington’s arm shot up, a cab cruised past Alex to stop outside number 426. Carsington climbed into the cab without looking back. Relieved, Alex pulled on the bell of Daffy’s house, only to find Churchill already at the door.

  ‘They’re all out,’ he said gruffly ‘Mungo’s out netting more bugs, and the servants have their half day. Daphne has left us to our own devices.’

  ‘Did you know Carsington lived only two doors along?’

  ‘I did. One cannot choose one’s neighbours. I had thought, however, that one could choose one’s friends.’

  Churchill had fired the opening salvo. He turned and led off into Daffy’s morning room. Back to the cold fireplace, he blazed.

  ‘What were you thinking of? What possessed you? What do you think Russia is up to?’

  Alex lowered himself into an armchair. Churchill could have a stand-up row if he liked, he was going to sit.

  ‘I am keeping an issue, an argument, alive. At a moment when there is a rush to judgement, I merely stated that it is too soon to judge.’

  ‘You are putting spokes in the wheel of history!’

  Alex had the feeling that Churchill had thought this phrase up well in advance, but answered in kind.

  ‘Then perhaps the wheel might roll at last. We do seem to have suffered years of inaction.’

  ‘The Nazis are the ones rolling. Rolling across half of Europe.’

  ‘And meanwhile we fall out amongst ourselves. We argue. We snipe at one another. The Rhineland is occupied, and we merely squabble, Germany re-arms and we bicker. Austria and Czechoslovakia tumble and we reject every overture the Russians make to us. What has happened in the last few years? What has happened as a result of our inaction, of our endless mistrust of one another? . . . Hitler has turned an opéra bouffe into a fighting machine. In 1933 he was stoppable, in 1936 he was stoppable. He might even have been stoppable in 1938. Now? God only knows how we shall stop him. What do I think Russia is up to? I think Stalin is buying time, with lies and dishonour and deceit he is buying time. He is supping with the longest spoon in history . . . but if it buys him time to restore the Red Army . . .?’

  ‘If? If? Alex, do you have an inkling as to the nature of the man we are discussing?’

  Now, he might just surprise Churchill.

  ‘I met Stalin. In the first young years of the century I met him several times. He was living in a doss-house just off the Mile End Road. But I don’t know the man, and anyone who says he does is, in the words of an English cliché, either a liar or a self-deluding fool.’

  Puffed up with his own rage, Churchill puffed still further, one final face-reddenning inflation of his righteousness.

  ‘Then hear this from this fool . . . re-arm or not re-arm, with the time he has bought he means to dismember Europe. Bugger the spoon, it’s about sharper cutlery than bloody spoons. Hitler will stick in the fork from one side and Stalin the knife from the other. And between them they will carve up Europe like Gilray’s pudding. That is the man you declared for in the Post this morning!’

  § 60

  Alex felt an unbearable sadness. A sense of ‘over’. It would be easy to head for home and lick his wounds. Instead he told the chauffeur to carry on to Fleet Street and decided to sit in his office for a while as he had intended – answer his mail in situ rather than wait for it to be sent up to Hampstead.

  It had been weeks since he had been there. His appearance put his staff into a flurry but he said, ‘Just bring me a pot of tea and the day’s post.’

  He was sitting at his desk, eyes closed, listening to the murmur of traffic in the street below, when his secretary set a tea tray and two letters before him.

  ‘My dear, is this all?’

  ‘I assume you meant the stuff with your name on it, boss, not the stuff that just says “editor”. That goes to Mr Glendinning as a matter of course.’

  ‘Of course. Just the letters addressed to me personally.’

  Only two. They wouldn’t occupy his mind for as many minutes. But if he’d asked for the letters to the editor there would be dozens if not hundreds, and Glendinning’s nose would be out of joint. He’d wished he could have handed over to Rod – but Rod had not wanted the job, and preferred to work on a memoir of his time in Germany.

  The letters were the same size. Each envelope smudgily typed with his title, name and the paper’s address. Two correspondents who had not noticed that he’d handed over the helm some time ago. He took one in each hand, weighing them up literally as well as figuratively. Did it matter a damn which he opened first?

  He took the one in his left hand.

  Sir,

  At a time when virulent Jew-baiting has become a continental sport can it be wise for anyone in this country to be publishing works that, however scholarly, carry in them the inherent possibility of nurturing the cause of Nazism and anti-Semitism? We refer to the impending publication of the book Moses and Monotheism by Prof. Sigmund Freud, the Austrian psychoanalyst, currently residing in London.

  We have the highest regard for Prof. Freud, as a doctor and as a Jew, but it cannot be wise to publish a study that strikes at the very foundations of the Jewish faith in an hour as dark as this. There may come a time for the publication of this book, but that time is not now, and we call upon His Majesty’s Government to use their powers to prevent publication.

  It was signed by every member of the Jewish Board of Deputies, and it was a stinker. Freud had warned him about this possibility. Alex needed it like he needed an extra belly button. He was contemplating phoning Freud when the telephone rang and his secretary said, ‘Are you taking calls, boss?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Denys Quilty at the Ministry of Information.’

  ‘Put him on.’

  The last Alex had h
eard of Quilty he had been at the Home Office. He thought the term Ministry of Information something of an oxymoron.

  ‘Alex?’

  ‘Denys . . . you are so lucky to find me here.’

  ‘Taking chances . . . I’d already tried you at home . . . it is sort of urgent.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Have you opened your post?’

  ‘I am doing so even now.’

  ‘You’ll find you have a letter that every editor of every major daily has received.’

  ‘I will?’

  ‘Signed by rabbis.’

  ‘Ah!’

  ‘You’ve read it?’

  ‘Seconds ago. I was wondering what to do with it.’

  ‘Don’t publish it. I’ve asked everyone not to publish in the national interest.’