Treason if You Lose

by Peter Rimmer

  Harry, chatting away to every new guest as they collected their drinks, annoyed her. Not once had he looked up from the damn punch bowl and smiled at her. No one was even looking at her anymore, standing alone at her own party, drink in hand wondering what the hell to do next.

  “Mrs Brigandshaw, there’s a fight going on in the nursery. It’s Frank. The other boy has a bloody nose and Frank still wants to punch him. Can you help?”

  “All right, Mary. I’ll be up in a moment. They won’t ring the gong for another twenty minutes. Don’t you think it’s going rather well?”

  “Down here it is, madam. Upstairs it’s hell.”

  “I’ll be right up. Do you have a boyfriend, Mary?”

  “Oh yes, madam. He’s lovely. Going in the army with my brother Jack.”

  “Just don’t have any children if you value your sanity.”

  “I’ll try not to, madam. Please hurry. I don’t know what to do.”

  Taking one swift look around her drawing room, Tina gritted her teeth and smiled. No one else took any notice. Going out the room and up the stairs she hated every one of the ancestors now staring at her. Mocking her: ‘You got what you wanted but what did you get?’

  Just before opening the nursery door where all the noise was coming from, Tina wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and walked into the mayhem, catching Frank with a backhander that knocked him sideways. To Tina’s surprise her son began to cry. In front of everyone.

  “Cry baby,” said the boy with the bloody nose, the blood dripping down his chin.

  Tina glared at him.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Paul Crookshank. He started it. He hit me first.”

  “All right, Paul. It’s all over. Frank! Come here. I want you two to shake hands.”

  “That hurt, Mum.”

  “It was meant to. Now shake hands. I don’t want another word out of either of you. Mary doesn’t have time to run up and down with you two fighting. You should want to be friends not enemies.”

  By the time Tina left the room to go downstairs she was feeling better. The back of her hand hurt where she had caught Frank on the side of his face while the boy was off balance. Then she heard someone, probably Harry, ringing the gong down in the hall at the bottom of the long flight of wide stairs. They were going in to supper.

  For a brief moment on her way down the carpeted stairs she was sure one of Harry’s ancestors was smiling at her from the wall, as if to say it had all happened before. Making a mental note to ask Harry which old woman was portrayed in the painting, she reached the bannister at the bottom of the stairs, picked up her feet and followed her guests into the Great Hall.

  “There you are, Tina,” said Harry smiling. “I was looking all over the place for you. Is everything all right?”

  “Everything is fine, Harry,” she said, taking the crook of his arm.

  “What have you done to your hand?”

  “I gave Frank a backhander. He’d bloodied the Crookshank boy’s nose.”

  “Must have been a good one. That’s going to bruise.”

  “It was. It felt good. I need to do that to Frank more often.”

  “All right up there now?”

  “I made them shake hands.”

  “Good for you. That’s the way to do it. What a swell evening. What are we going to do with Beth? She didn’t take the blindest notice of me when I tried to make her change that dress.”

  “Nothing, Harry. Nothing. I’m hungry.”

  “So am I. I’m going to miss you.”

  “You mean that don’t you?”

  “Of course I do. You’re my wife.”

  Following behind the couple, unknown to Harry, Mavis, with the gin beginning to swill in her head, entered the Great Hall side by side with Phil, both unaware of their eldest son’s bloody nose, both enjoying their brief freedom from the kids.

  “That’s the biggest Christmas tree I ever saw,” said Mavis. “Why’s it so warm in here? The roof goes on up into the cold darkness high above the arches. I’ve never seen arches in a room outside a church.”

  “Everyone look for their names on the table placings,” called Tina from inside the arched door, studded with iron, the archway rising ten feet above Phil’s head. “If you can’t find yourself come back to me. I’ve tried to put people with like interests close to each other. Part of the fun is finding where you sit. There are open bottles of wine on the table. Help yourselves. Harry says don’t be shy. We didn’t give you the traditional daggers to eat with. Far too messy. Find your place and sit tight. Everything will come to you.”

  “It’s medieval,” said Mavis.

  “It’s meant to be. In the old days when they’d eaten and drunk too much they passed out under the long table. Anthony says that table is so old they don’t know who built it inside the Great Hall. They must have cut the oak trees into some kind of shape and fitted the pieces in here. Ant says there are holes from the knots that show right through the wood. Parts of that table are three feet thick. Flat on top with just enough room to get your knees under the round bowl of the tree trunk.”

  “Medieval.”

  “That’s when it was made. Let’s start here and work our way round. You’re right. This old hall open to the rafters is as warm as toast. Who do you think we are sitting next to?”

  “The fairy lights go right up the tree. Look how the tinsel reflects the coloured lights. The coloured glass balls move round for some reason. Must have taken a week to decorate the tree. Where do you think they got it from?”

  “Out of the garden, Mave. Round the mausoleum there are cedar trees the height of the church spire that tower above the yew trees.”

  “How did they cut down the Christmas tree without smashing the lovely branches? Just look at all those open wine bottles down the centre of the table. How awful if one fell through a knot.”

  “The dogs are inside.”

  “Good. I’ll feed that Alsatian a bone. There must be places for forty people down each side of the table. Big, wooden platters at each place. How do you think they serve the food?”

  “On bigger platters. Carve the suckling pigs, the sides of beef by the looks of it from here, in the inglenooks onto big platters or troughs. Then two servants hoist them on their shoulders by the handles. Where the expression came from, ‘feeding at the trough’.”

  “Now you are pulling my leg.”

  “You just grab the meat from the trough and shove it on your plate.”

  “What about vegetables?”

  “Just mead and wine in Old England. Who wants Brussels sprouts?”

  “I think we get up and go to those side tables.”

  “Also possible, Mave. Here we are, Mrs Mavis Crookshank between Mr Phillip Crookshank and Mr John Woodall. You can ask him about his wife after the second bottle of wine. Look at Ant. Got one of the band girls on either side of him, now that’s nepotism.”

  “Phil, you’re tight from the Pimm’s.”

  “You made me drink the second cup to keep you company. I think we just sit down at our names, pour ourselves a glass of wine and wait to see what happens.”

  “I’ve never seen anything quite so splendid.”

  “I can’t pull you out a chair. Everyone sits on the same wooden benches. Can you climb over or shall I pick you up and plonk you down?”

  “I think a bit of the up and plonk is called for. Just be careful with me, Phil.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Perfect. Now I know where the heat’s coming from. There’s hot air going up my dress from the floor. The floor’s hot in places. I didn’t think those two fires at either end could cook all the meat and heat this cavern.”

  “Red or white, Mrs Crookshank?”

  “Red please, Mr Crookshank. There are no Christmas hats.”

  “Didn’t have them back when they built this table. Hello, John. We’ve got Mave in the middle. Plonk yourself down. Red or white?”

  “White to
start with. I’ll try the red with the beef. Have you ever before seen anything like this?”

  “Just what I was saying,” said Mave. “It’s a bit early, but happy Christmas.”

  “Happy Christmas, everyone,” they said in chorus.

  Part 4

  Knights of New – September to November 1940

  1

  Having secured a trust fund from Jacob Rosenzweig, Vida Wagner spent her days inwardly purring like a cat. She was rich for the rest of her life. Once a week she did her best to have sex with the ‘old goat’ as she thought of her ticket to riches. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t. The old man was seventy-two but even the trying seemed to make him happy for the rest of the week.

  “Just to have someone warm in bed with me is wonderful, Vida. Old men get lonely. You give me life again. Make what I do worthwhile instead of a constant pursuit of money I will never have time to spend. Friday, my lovely German darling, we are having a celebration. You can show everyone again your wonderful cooking. Holy Knight has been a spectacular success at the box office. Max Pearl and Gerry Hollingsworth are bringing girls. Robert St Clair, his wife Freya. Denzel Hurst the director is coming with his wife. Denzel also directed Keeper of the Legend. Glen Hamilton of the Denver Telegraph, he and his wife are visiting with Robert and Freya in New York, so coming too. None of the stars I am afraid. Genevieve and Gregory L’Amour are in California and don’t seem to like travelling anymore. It’s said Genevieve doesn’t socialise now there’s a real war going on the other side of the Atlantic. After Gregory’s debacle trying to join the RAF, he avoids the press. We are going to have another of your wonderful dinner parties everyone talks about for weeks afterwards, my clever darling. Oh, and you’d better phone Gillian Kannberg. She and her husband have been good to the film with publicity. Bruno’s writing another of his books so he says, won’t tell us who this one is about. I’ll ask Max on Friday.”

  When Jacob had gone off to work at his bank, Vida had smiled to herself, the purring gently soothing her body, bringing only nice thoughts to her mind. For five minutes of foreplay and not much else beyond throwing a dinner party once a month, her payment was splendidly out of all proportion. Her scheme worked out in Germany to change her life, purporting to be a Jewish victim of Hitler, had been more successful than her wildest dreams. One forged letter of introduction to the head of a New York bank and here she was, richer than anyone she had known before in her life. And the war was going Germany’s way with the whole of Europe under the German jackboot other than England, an England close to capitulation according to newspaper reports, making Vida mentally hug herself with excitement.

  She had made up her mind. When Germany won the war with American connivance through non-participation, she was going back to Berlin to flaunt her wealth. The besotted ‘old goat’, so happy to get his life back again, had not put one stipulation in the wording of the trust. She was free as a bird. Kurt, for forging her papers, would have his reward. Germany would dominate the world, Berlin its capital.

  From being a penniless thirty-two year old of Lebanese extraction, she would go home in triumph, a real German, the Wagner name she had used in her false papers to America, her real name for the rest of her life.

  “Amy, we’re throwing a dinner party on Friday. Make me a coffee.”

  “Yes, madam.”

  The purring went on. That was what she really liked. Respect. Being called madam by a scullery maid. No longer a nanny for Jewish families in England to order around.

  Then, while Amy was making her coffee, she went to the phone and called Gillian Kannberg to invite her to dinner. It was called the Battle of Britain by the paper she avidly read while waiting for the exchange to put through her call. The New York Post was all doom and gloom in its reports from London.

  “And they are losing it,” she read with satisfaction.

  “What are they losing, madam?” said Amy from the kitchen.

  “The war, Amy. Britain is losing the war.”

  “I read it was touch and go. Another paper said the RAF are shooting down five German planes for every one the Germans are bringing down. That the RAF pilots who bale out in time are back in the air the same day in a new aircraft the British factories are turning out.”

  “What do you know, Amy?”

  “Only what I read in the papers. My boyfriend says we Americans should go and help. That if we don’t, we’ll be next. He thinks the Japs are going to side with the Germans. That fighting a war on two fronts will leave us Americans in a right royal mess.”

  “The Japanese would never be so silly as to go to war with America. They have enough on their plate with their war against China. America and Germany have always been friends. Hurry up with my coffee.”

  “The coffee pot is just coming to the boil. I know you like it hot.”

  Only when Vida was halfway through the cup of coffee did she reflect on the irony of her situation. Only in New York did it pay to claim to be Jewish. Everywhere else, the Jews were trying to hide. Luckily Jacob went to shul at infrequent intervals, taking her when he went. Whether he believed the full extent of her story was a worrying question. Twice in shul, Vida had got the procedure wrong, explaining afterwards shul in Germany had been different, that ever since Hitler came to power her family had maintained a distance from their Jewish religion.

  ‘Men believe anything when it suits them,’ she thought, her lower lip twisting upwards. ‘It’s how they are made’.

  The call to Gillian Kannberg had been brief. In Vida’s opinion the woman was a social climber out of her depth. Every time Vida had seen Gillian with Bruno she understood; the girl had her husband under her thumb which, she smiled to herself, was all a woman required to be successful in life. They had the same thing in common, the two of them. They were both on the make. Both with men besotted by them.

  Later, Vida went for a walk in Central Park, opposite their apartment in Abercrombie Place. To pass the time she looked at people’s faces, many washed by the sun. None looked worried. None looked concerned. The war in Europe was nothing to do with them. Genevieve and Gregory L’Amour in Holy Knight were more real to them on the screen than the stories of war from Europe. Most New Yorkers she watched in the park were smiling. With the war effort in England frantically buying American goods, the depression was finally over. Good times were going to roll for everyone, the pursuit of money a pastime once again in vogue.

  Vida looked carefully at each of the faces passing her by. There were many with expressions she mostly understood, expressions each of them had cultivated to see them comfortably through their day. Inside each of the heads behind the faces, like inside her own head, was a squirrel’s nest of plans and expectations, all of them centred on themselves. Like Vida, all of them, she knew, were scheming something or other, the park and the trees only fleetingly noticed, each head an island unto itself. Only a squirrel not far up a tree, looking her square in the eye, knew what she was thinking.

  “Just as well I can’t ask you what everyone’s thinking,” she said to the squirrel as she picked up her stride in the sun, the leaves and trees suddenly real to her.

  A row about money began the moment Bruno Kannberg reached home from work. If he had had any money he would have gone to the small bar near the office to talk over the war with his fellow journalists, the war Arthur Bumley in London had said on the phone was reaching a critical point.

  “They’re hitting the radar stations, directly attacking Fighter Command at the airfields and command centres. They know where to attack. Another month, the RAF will be exhausted, not enough pilots left to fly. In Kent and Surrey the battle’s right over their heads. A monumental struggle. Churchill sent a squadron of Blenheims last night to bomb Berlin. To give the Germans a small taste of their own medicine. Bomber Command isn’t strong enough to take the war to Germany. They didn’t have adequate fighter escort. Tell your American friends to write in their papers we need some help.”

  “How long can th
e Luftwaffe take their casualties? Even when their pilots bale out they are out of the battle. Prisoners of war.”

  “We don’t know, Bruno. The fog of war. We don’t really know what’s happening in our own squadrons. Two chaps fire on the same Jerry and both claim the kill.”

  “Don’t we know our own casualties?”

  “That we do. The numbers are terrible.”

  “Is Tinus all right?”

  “How do I know? Tangmere’s taking the brunt of the fight with the rest of the stations near the south coast. They won’t tell us the truth. Propaganda on both sides.”

  “Won’t bombing Berlin make Hitler bomb London?”

  “I think that’s Churchill’s hope, God help us. Take the fight away from Fighter Command. Give them a chance to regroup. The pilots are on drugs to keep them awake. Some pilots are going up four times a day as the waves of German bombers come over. Thank God for radar. They don’t have to patrol, looking for the Germans. They can sit on the ground and wait to be scrambled by telephone from the command centres. They’re pulling squadrons down from Scotland, so we just heard. We’re out of reserves in the south.”

  “I’d better come home and join the army.”

  “Stay where you are. Do your job. You’ll do more good making the American public see sense. We’re fighting their war as much as ours, single-handed. No, not single-handed. Thank God again for the empire, for the Canadians, Australians, South Africans and New Zealanders. We’ve even got Rhodesians in the RAF and a squadron of Poles who escaped when Poland collapsed. Your old friend Harry Brigandshaw wants to get back in the air. They won’t let him. Say he’s too old. My guess is losing Harry would be bad for British morale with all the publicity if he crashed. When’s Gregory L’Amour coming over?”

  “Poor chap feels terrible. Max Pearl is not publishing a book of my magazine serial. Gregory pulled it. Are you all right, Mr Bumley?”

  “Found myself a girlfriend. Billy Glass at the Mail suggested it. We’re both in a rut… I’m all right.”