‘Well, I don’t know any of her dope addict friends. But there is Dave Johnson, the Socialist Club secretary. He was pretty close to her. We’ll see him tonight.’
‘What’s happening tonight?’
‘You haven’t forgotten about the rally? I thought you said you were coming. Personally, I don’t want to go but I think I have to. I’m supposed to be helping.’
God knows why, he thought, but kept his expression carefully neutral. ‘Comrade Kholtov, you mean?’
‘Nancy would have been there,’ she said. ‘Some of her Bolshie friends are sure to be in evidence. Horace Dill, of course.’
‘God bless the preposterous old commie.’
‘You know he was close to Nancy? Took her side at the time of the three-in-a-bed scandal. Bit of a mentor, I’d say.’
He’d seen them chatting in the college courts but hadn’t really given it too much thought. There was never going to be anything untoward between them.
‘You never know, a few enemies could also be in evidence.’
He smiled. ‘I’ll be at your side. What’s the dress code?’
‘Ha ha. Oh, you are funny, Thomas Wilde.’ But Lydia wasn’t laughing. Just now she thought she would never laugh again.
*
Wrapped up in his trenchcoat, Wilde exulted as the Rudge purred beneath him along the Ely road. His coat buttoned, his leather flying cap buckled beneath his chin, his eyes protected by goggles and his hands deep inside thick gauntlet gloves, he twisted the throttle and felt a surge of speed. From Chesterton Lane he headed north and a little eastwards. St Wilfred’s Priory was fifteen minutes’ ride. The sky was darkening and the temperature was falling. He was wrapped up well and had a scarf tied around his lower face, but neither the trenchcoat nor any of the other layers could keep the wind out of his skin. Even for a man who had endured the rigours of north-eastern winters in the States and the unheated dormitories of an English public school, the Fens could be harsh and bitter.
There had been times since returning from the States that he had hankered after his old Harley Davidson 1200 SV. For a while he had even thought of paying to ship it over, but then he heard about the Rudge from Andy at the garage and decided to give her a go. ‘Hundred miles an hour guaranteed, Mr Wilde. Been winning races.’
So far, so good. Though it pained him to admit it, the English had the drop on the Yanks with this one. She was sleek and black with thin trims of gold paint, twin exhausts and plenty of chrome. She also had a pillion seat and was a hell of a sight more reliable than the Harley.
He considered the state of the roads. The tyres were new but fenland highways could become dangerous, with mud or ice or both: a week ago he nearly slid into an eight-foot deep dyke when he went out towards the Wash in search of pochard and Bewick swans. Birdwatching was his secret escape. He was no expert on ornithology, but every now and then he had an overwhelming desire to seek out some bleak landscape and lie amid the grass or the reeds and clasp binoculars to his eyes to watch the birds go about their business: searching for food, building nests, playing in the air. These were days when conscious thought vanished;, when his mind became clear and untrammelled.
The road ahead was almost empty and the landscape was desolate. Through the gloom, he spotted a Humber wrapped around a tree, the tracks of its tyres showing where it had skidded off the road through a mudslide. He pulled up, lifted the Rudge onto its stand and walked over to investigate. A pair of rooks lazily beat their wings and flew away from the dead rat on which they had been feeding. There was no sign of a driver or passengers. Nothing to be done, so he resumed his journey. After a couple of miles, he took a right and rode through an avenue of soaring elms, standing like ghostly sentries in their wintry nakedness, until he came to a gatehouse and a sign saying St Wilfred’s Priory.
The land here stood in marked contrast to the bleakness of the Ely road and most of the farm country around. He rode into parkland bound by forest, past a herd of grazing deer, along a straight driveway that led up to the ancient building. It had been one of the religious houses that had been turned into a private home for a favoured courtier of Henry VIII at the time of the Dissolution. The old building had clearly been changed a great deal over the years. Turrets and columns had been added, probably in the eighteenth century, giving it a pleasant Gothic appearance. The mellow stone walls and bays of mullioned and transomed windows could easily have graced the pages of a travel brochure advertising the joys of England’s countryside. So this was where Nancy Hereward had been brought up – here, boarding school, Girton and the master’s lodge. Most would say she had been lucky, for this was a fine English country house. Wilde wasn’t so sure. Houses like these held unspoken history and too many dark corners. It was what went on within the walls that made for a happy home. Or otherwise.
He parked the Rudge on the forecourt and switched off the engine. Cold rain was beginning to fall. He pulled up his spattered goggles and used his sleeve to wipe the the mud from his face.
A man in livery was approaching along the gravel driveway, across the frontage of the house: Wilde recognised the chauffeur he had seen outside Nancy’s house in Cambridge.
‘Who are you?’ the chauffeur demanded. ‘Delivery? Courier?’
‘My name’s Wilde. I’d like to speak to Sir Norman.’
The chauffeur peered through the smear of grime coating Wilde’s face. ‘You were in Cambridge outside Miss Hereward’s house. What do you want?’ The tone was unwelcoming.
‘Professor Thomas Wilde. Sir Norman knows me from college.’
‘He’s not available.’
‘Let him judge for himself.’
The chauffeur looked Wilde up and down, as though inspecting him for fleas. ‘Wait here.’
He opened the large front door, leaving Wilde standing on the stone step outside. From within, Wilde heard a muffled hum of voices and, in the gaudy glow of the electric lights, caught a glimpse of a familiar face crossing the hallway. Duncan Sawyer. And then he was gone. Wilde supposed Hereward’s close friends and relatives had arrived to offer condolences. He thought of his own wife’s death. Strange how short the condolences and remembrances were; the conversation inevitably veered back to the living.
He turned at the noise of tyres on gravel as a large sporting car drew into the driveway. It was a Maybach, luxurious, lipstick-red with whitewall tyres and an extravagant running board. Even in the dusk and rain, it gleamed. The driver climbed out, snapped open an umbrella and opened the passenger door. An enormous man with a short, neatly trimmed moustache, voluminous chins and a long fur coat stepped from the vehicle and ducked beneath the umbrella. His driver struggled to keep up as his master strode towards the porch.
The chauffeur was back at the door. He ignored Wilde and bowed to the newcomer. ‘My lord,’ he said as the man’s huge bulk swept past like an unstoppable force, entering the house as though it were his own.
Lord Slievedonard, the gold millionaire. Peter Slievedonard, who wanted to endow the college with a scholarship. Wilde had seen his pictures in the newspapers and on newsreels. He made his money from trading in gold and used a lot of his wealth to fund Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Wilde tried to follow him inside, but the chauffeur’s arm shot out and barred his way. ‘The answer’s no.’
‘What’s Slievedonard doing here?’
‘Good day, Professor Wilde. Use the telephone if you wish to make an appointment.’
Wilde removed the picture of Nancy from his coat pocket and handed it to the servant. ‘Well, at least give him this. With my compliments.’
CHAPTER 8
While Wilde rode out to the priory, Lydia walked the short distance to her little office in the attic space above a gentlemen’s outfitter in Bene’t Street. Her publishing company, LM Books, barely turned over enough to pay the rent, but she was determined to keep it going for as long as she could. She had already published more than twenty volumes of poetry and one day she hoped another publisher migh
t see fit to bring out her own work, if only she could find the words within her to write. She was huddled into her duffle coat, looking down at the pavement, avoiding the cheery Christmas faces. She didn’t want to see happiness: not today.
Settling herself at the long table, she worked all afternoon, peering at the proofs until her eyes were sore and her head ached.
The anthology she was editing reflected her dark mood. Death and horror in the mud of Flanders. She knew that many young people of her age, mid-twenties, gave barely a thought to the war. To them it was ancient history, the tragedy of a past generation, never to be repeated. She knew, too, that the survivors wouldn’t – or couldn’t – talk about it. They wouldn’t describe the ripping apart of human flesh, the effect of shrapnel on bone, the obscenity of blood spurting in fountains, the filth of choking to death on gas, the indescribable pain of lying alone in the mud with your guts spilled, waiting for death. They thought they were being brave, stoical, manly, by keeping silent. But their silence simply ensured it would all happen again.
The only people who told the truth were the poets.
She had been a poet, too. Now, she was no longer sure. Her pen scratched holes in paper and she stabbed nibs into the blotter until they broke, but nothing was fully formed any more. Perhaps the poetry was there, in her frustration. Her poems had always been physical things. Ecstasy, passion, skin against skin, the sweetness of a mouth on mouth, the pleasure that must be sought if peace was to conquer war.
Lydia took a swig from a half-empty bottle of beer and laid her head on her arms, her eyes closed. When, a while later, she heard the door opening, she did not look up.
‘Lydia.’
Slowly she raised her head. ‘Hello, Tom.’
‘Are you ready? We should be going.’
‘Give me a couple of minutes.’
She didn’t move. What was the point?
He picked up the dustcover of her anthology from the table and gazed at it.
‘What do you think?’ she said with an effort.
‘It’s good.’ The cover he was looking at showed a grainy image of a soldier charging with bayonet fixed, under the title Prime of Youth.
‘Good?’
‘Very good. Powerful. Poignant.’
‘I’ve put half my life into this.’
She looked exhausted. Today, he would definitely call her attire Bohemian rather than tattered. Her hair was tousled and loosely tied back. She wore corduroy trousers tied at her narrow waist with a boy’s snake-buckle belt, a voluminous Sea Island cotton shirt – open-necked with rolled-up sleeves and a threadbare collar that had once belonged to her father. A scruffy pullover hung over her shoulders. Her clothes were a reflection of her surroundings, which were an exotic shambles. This was the way she liked to dress and the way she liked to work. And this was the way he liked her.
Looking around the room, Wilde had no idea how she ever found anything in the clutter of books, papers and boxes. He smiled and shook his head. ‘Utter chaos, Miss Morris.’
‘Mind your own business, Professor Wilde.’
They had known each other for two years now, ever since he moved in next door, and they enjoyed each other’s company when their paths crossed. She knew some things about him, about the wife and baby he had lost in childbirth ten years ago, about his ambivalent feelings for Cambridge and the college, the fact that he had American nationality but an Irish mother. These were facts she had gleaned from Nancy, who had taken to him because her father hadn’t. Lydia liked Tom Wilde well enough, but that didn’t really explain why she had thought of him when the police insisted she call a friend to collect her. Was there really no one else in her life, or was it simply that he lived next door?
Wilde was wondering the same thing. She was the last person he would have expected to seek his help. Looking through Lydia’s bookcase very early on in their acquaintance he had seen the volume Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hillis. Leafing through it, he had come across a chapter headed Pleasures of a Single Bed. It had amused him as much as it annoyed him.
‘I’m not the marrying kind,’ she said.
‘You have a copy of Married Love,’ he had pointed out, as he moved along the shelf.
‘So do a million other women.’
‘So why not marriage?’
‘I wouldn’t be able to turn a blind eye to a man’s infidelities.’
‘And what if you were to marry a faithful man?’
‘What if I were to find a unicorn?’
Now he put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Have you finished?’ he said. ‘Shall we go? The rally, remember.’
‘Almost done. What happened at St Wilfred’s Priory?’
‘I didn’t see him. The chauffeur was playing the part of bodyguard and gatekeeper. Not at all friendly. But there was an interesting visitor – Lord Slievedonard, complete with fur coat, shiny red sports car and double chins like a bullfrog. He swept in just as I was being ejected.’
‘He’s rather large and imposing, isn’t he? Nancy always called him the Tyrannosaur.’
‘Ah yes, his politics. Very disagreeable.’
‘Pretty much the same as her father’s. Messrs Hitler and Mussolini have a lot to answer for.’
He looked down at her. Her eyes were bloodshot. Stray hairs crawled across her brow. She wasn’t as resilient as she liked to make out.
‘Nancy’s death has taken the ground from under me like a landslip,’ she whispered. ‘Every time I close my eyes, I see her body and that mass of blotches on her arm. I don’t think it will ever leave me.’
It was pointless to contradict her.
‘Come on,’ he said quietly. ‘Your Bolshie friends will want to see you before the meeting gets under way.’
*
Stanley Baldwin had not felt so energised in months. The sickness and lethargy of the summer was a thing of the past. As he was driven in the back of his official black Rolls Royce to Buckingham Palace he reflected that there was no better man for the painful task that lay ahead: the removal of a king from his throne.
Edward was waiting for him, smoking a cigarette as always. Baldwin lit up his pipe and together they produced a small cloud of tobacco fumes in the uncomfortable vastness of the state room. ‘I am afraid, Your Majesty,’ the prime minister said, ‘that the Dominions are as one in their opposition to your proposed marriage.’
Edward dropped his head and looked at his feet. For a moment Baldwin thought the little man was about to burst into tears.
‘Shall I pour you a brandy, sir?’
‘I never drink before seven, Mr Baldwin.’
‘No. Indeed not.’ Baldwin bowed his head. He could wait.
Edward raised his head. ‘Then I shall be forced to abdicate, is that what you are saying?’
‘You have a difficult choice, sir.’
‘Well, if that is what I have to do to marry the woman I love . . .’
Baldwin said nothing, merely sucked on his pipe. The silence echoed around the high ceilings. What Edward would never know was that Baldwin was lying. It was not true that the Dominions were united in their opposition to a morganatic marriage. Australia certainly was, but both Canada and New Zealand had thought it a rather good idea.
*
The street outside the church hall was packed with protesters, agitators and jeering onlookers. More than a hundred students and activists were facing each other down with shouts and brandished fists. They were split into their tribes, each tribe bearing its placard or banner of belonging: the red flag for the communists, the lightning flash and strong-arm salutes for a handful of Blackshirts, a red and black standard for the Anarcho-Syndicalists, hammer and sickle with the legend POUM for the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, Spain’s Trotskyites.
They hurled slogans through loudhailers. Like dogs at bay, they jostled, threatened, intimidated. Half a dozen uniformed police constables kept them apart. The protesters surged towards each other, but the police held them back with a good-hu
moured wave of the finger or a raised palm. The communists began to sing the ‘Internationale’. The Blackshirts responded with the ‘Horst Wessel’.
To the side, incongruously, a group of evangelist Christians knelt on the pavement and prayed loudly for world peace.
Wilde observed the strange stand-off for a few moments, then put an arm round Lydia’s shoulder. ‘Safe enough. Come on.’
She shrugged off his arm. ‘I’m not a bloody child, Tom.’ They pushed their way through into the hall, where the organisers were preparing the stage. Spotting them, Dave Johnson, the Socialist Club secretary, hurried over, his expression one of concern. He was a whippet-thin man of middle years with a patchy beard that did little to disguise the burn scars that disfigured the bottom half of his face. He clasped Lydia’s hands. ‘I’m so sorry. She was one of us. The best of us.’
Lydia nodded. Wilde could see that she was suddenly too choked to speak.
‘We’ll talk later,’ Johnson said. He stepped back and indicated the man who had followed him. ‘Let me introduce you to our guest, all the way from the frontline in Catalonia. Comrade Kholtov, this is Miss Morris. She produced the fliers for this evening’s event. Lydia, can I leave you with him? I’ve got to help with the door.’
Johnson nodded to Wilde, then made his way to the entrance. Wilde turned his attention to the Russian.
Though not tall, Yuri Kholtov had presence. He was heavy-set with a thick thatch of hair and Slavic cheekbones. Wilde estimated his age at a little over forty, so he would have been in his early twenties at the time of the October Revolution, when he became respected and feared as one of Stalin’s closest comrades-in-arms. In recent months he had been in Spain helping to organise the republican struggle against the nationalist rebels. As he was introduced to Lydia, Wilde noted his eyes: they had creases of humour, as did his mouth, but his smile was not convincing. This, Wilde knew from his friend Jim Vanderberg at the American embassy in London, was a man steeped in blood. He had warned Lydia, but she wouldn’t have it. ‘You say that about all of them, Tom. You swallow the anti-Soviet line like a bloody trout.’
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