While England Sleeps

by David Leavitt

Rupert went white. “Mr. Hitler?”

  “Indeed. I felt he might appreciate knowing that in spite of what the press may claim, there are many of us here in England who recognize his capacities and understand that he alone can save his country.”

  “Of course I’ll be happy to read it for you, Lady Abernathy,” Rupert stammered. “Do you wish me to make substantive criticism or simply check the grammar?”

  “I am more concerned that the style be . . . flowing, shall we say? And you were always such a talented writer, Rupert. He should write novels,” she added to me.

  “How impressive it is, Lady Abernathy,” Rupert said, “that you consider it worth your valuable time to engage with the politics of the day.”

  “Thank you. However, in doing so I am merely carrying on in the tradition of the late Lord Abernathy. He was, as you know, an inveterate letter writer, and never one to shrink from an opinion because it was unpopular.”

  An awful silence ensued. The maid brought in the soup.

  “I suppose the war in Spain can only become worse,” I said.

  “I was just recalling, Lady Abernathy,” Rupert said, “the great pleasure I took at Lady Manley’s tea last week upon hearing your charming recollections of Deauville.”

  “Rupert, dear, your friend has no interest in tedious anecdotes of my youth.” She turned to me. “I have been keeping abreast of the situation in Spain and can only say my hopes are with the rebels. Why, just the other night at dinner I was discussing the matter with Herr—oh, I am so bad with names—the German ambassador, and we quite agreed, the rebels are the only hope for Spain.”

  “I’m afraid I’m of the opposite opinion,” I said. “The Republican government is an elected body.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure of meeting the German ambassador,” Rupert interjected, “although Mummy dined with his wife when she was in Dresden last year. She brought back the loveliest china—”

  “Mr. Botsford, you are young,” Lady Abernathy said, “and, if I might be so bold, susceptible to the worst sort of influences.”

  “I appreciate your frankness, Lady Abernathy,” I said. “If I may be so frank myself—”

  “By all means.”

  “The German ambassador is Hitler’s hack. I have lived in Germany, I have seen the blood that flows when the National Socialists—”

  “I have always felt politics to be beneath artists,” Rupert thrust in. “Artists must look beyond petty mortal conflict. It is what I so admire about Brian’s work—at least those snippets I was privileged to read during our years at Cambridge. There is a serenity of vision that seems to rise above the din of the contemporary.”

  “The German ambassador,” Lady Abernathy said, “is a gentleman in every way. Ah, I fear his government has been quite misrepresented in the popular press, which is not surprising, given the fact that the popular press is now almost entirely under Jewish control. It’s no wonder that young people see such a distorted picture. The Jews as a race, if I might quote Lord Abernathy—”

  My chair made screeching noises as I pushed it out from the table.

  “Excuse me, but under the circumstances, I must retire.”

  “Pardon me, Brian?”

  “Are you not feeling well?” Lady Abernathy asked.

  “I can only say that under the circumstances, I must retire.”

  “Brian—”

  I turned and walked up the stairs and into my bedroom, where I immediately started packing. Even though I felt calm, my pulse was racing. What would Nigel have counseled me to do? Storm away? Upend the table? “Lady Abernathy, if your hatred of foreigners is as boundless as that of your hero Mr. Hitler, then I am afraid, being half Polish myself, my continued presence at the table will upset your appetite, something I would never dream of doing.” Oh, but one never thought up such clever retorts until one had already left the table. L’esprit de l’escalier, the French call it. And how I wished I had walked away indignantly rather than fearfully!

  I had gathered together my clothes and books and was about to leave the room when I remembered the umbrella. Putting my things down for a moment, I wrote Rupert a check for a hundred pounds (Aunt Constance’s gift had been forty), left it on the edge of the bed where he had perched, then fled downstairs and out the servants’ door.

  It was drizzling out. I caught a taxi to the underground, then the District Line to Richmond. I had twenty-two pounds to my name.

  In the morning I told Nanny the story of the umbrella. “What I don’t understand,” I concluded, “is why someone would loan out a hundred-pound umbrella in the first place.”

  “It seems obvious to me,” Nanny said. “He was trying to impress you.”

  “Impress me? I don’t care about umbrellas! For me, umbrellas only exist when it rains!”

  “Apparently they mean more than that to him,” Nanny said.

  “Apparently so,” I said, and thought of Forster, Howards End, literature’s cache of fatal umbrellas.

  “Well, it doesn’t matter,” I concluded. “It’s lost. The umbrella’s lost. Just another object in a history of lost objects. I shall never speak of it again.”

  But I was wrong.

  That afternoon I went out to look for cheap rooms, and by the next morning had installed myself in a bed-sitter in Earl’s Court that had for the past twenty-seven years been the domain of one Muriel White, a stenographer. It had a coin-operated gas fire and a lavatory the flushes of which sounded like the coughing fits of a dying emphysemic. And here I settled—jobless, rent paid to the end of the month—and tried to decide what to do next.

  Every day I listened to the wireless. The situation in Germany grew worse every day; every day, it seemed, Hitler made more advances, the noose tightened around the necks of the Jews. Meanwhile the European nations had signed a nonintervention treaty in regard to Spain, which the Germans and Russians appeared to be blatantly defying. Curse Eden! Curse England for her cowardice!

  I made halfhearted attempts to work on my novel, but in light of present events—in light of hideous Lady Abernathy’s opinions—it seemed a useless endeavor. Once, it had been enough to explore the delicate shadings of a conversation, the etiquette according to which an old woman poured out tea, the thoughts of a young boy as he descended in a lift toward the underground platforms. Now, however, history was pressing down from all sides, and sensibility seemed more than insufficient: it seemed criminal. Soldiers, not writers, determined the fate of the world.

  An envelope arrived one afternoon in the post, forwarded from Richmond. It contained the check I’d written to Rupert, uncashed. No note. Rupert, I was beginning to suspect, wasn’t nearly so fragile as his teacups. So now I had one hundred and seventeen pounds to my name. Enough for a few months, at most.

  Nigel’s essay on left-handed pianism was published in The Gramophone and hailed as a masterpiece.

  Around that time rumors started circulating among my friends in London and Cambridge about a fellow called Desmond Leacock, the heir apparent to the publishing firm of Leacock and Strauss. He had taken a double first at Oxford and wore on his face a look of tortured regret, which only added to his attractiveness. Leacock had always had an air about him of heroic predestination, so it was no surprise to any of us when one day he decamped to Spain and joined up with the Republican forces. Conflicting reports about his progress through Catalonia and Aragon came through the mail and the telephone: Monday he was dead, Tuesday he had lost a leg, Wednesday he had led his troops to victory, Thursday he had deserted. What finally evaporated these rumors was his physical return to London, bruised and half starved but with all his limbs intact. He was to give a talk about his experiences in the war in a basement in Chelsea.

  Political speeches, like sermons, can be a call to arms if one is there to hear them. In novels they have the effect of glue poured directly onto the page. Therefore I am going to ask you to take it on faith that Desmond Leacock’s speech that evening stirred the heart of my generation and that we left
it convinced that only by shoring up Spain against the Fascist threat might we prevent Hitler from taking power in Germany.

  In short, knowing nothing about battle, knowing only that I could not afford to keep paying rent on my rooms for much longer, that the prospect of returning to Richmond was unbearable and that Nigel, my closest friend, had turned against me, I decided to go to war.

  My first step was to attend an Aid to Spain meeting in another basement, this time in Earl’s Court.

  My life changed irrevocably that night, though not in any of the ways I expected.

  Chapter Two

  I come from an unusually mixed-up family. My father was a doctor, scion of several generations of doctors who ran the local surgery in a village called Elmsford, near Rye. Very E. F. Benson, his childhood, filled with sandwich cake and antiques, summer people and oddball year-round residents who were forever showing up at the surgery with imaginary liver ailments. He studied medicine in London, where Mother was born. Her mother came from Belgrave Square but defied the wishes of her family by marrying a Pole named Tadeusz Bortciewicz. My great-grandparents summarily disowned her. Grandfather died only a few years later, and Grandmother—now penniless—had to go begging to her relations in order to survive, with the result that Mother and Constance grew up dependent on officious aunts before whom they were expected to perform acts of obeisance. She and Father married for love, which was rare in those days. Of course Father would have preferred to move back to Elmsford and take over the family surgery, but Mother would have gone mad in Elmsford. So they settled in Richmond, which was London, really, but had a villagey air. They were good parents. The worst thing they ever did to us was die.

  Various orators, at their funerals, praised my parents’ tolerance and gentility. But though they cared about the fate of the world, they were by no means radicals. Indeed, if there is Communism in my blood, it is probably attributable to Grandfather Bortciewicz, who was a talented oboist. I doubt I got it from Elmsford, where the word “Communist” had to be whispered. I certainly didn’t get it from Belgrave Square.

  Those years between the wars were full of meetings that took place in basements. The rooms blur in my memory; all of them had mildewed walls and a few bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling, which gave them a dim, ecclesiastical glow. Chairs had been set up, but no one was sitting in them. Instead schools of young men and women flocked and gathered. Most of them had tiny standard-order Oxbridge glasses perched on their noses, and some of them were friends of mine: Anne Cheney, Emma Leland and her fiancé, Tim Sprigg, whom I knew to be a fruit. Then there were the genuine workers, their faces grimy from factories. Among their number I often recognized the driver of a bus I used to take regularly with my mother from Richmond into the West End. Once I smiled and raised a hand in what I hoped would be a comradely and affectionate gesture, but he turned away, embarrassed; even in this Communist haven, an irrevocable gulf of class separated us.

  That night in Earl’s Court, a heavyset young man with bright blond hair took to the podium and called the meeting to order. He looked familiar to me, though at first I couldn’t place him. Of course! He was John Northrop, with whom I’d gone to school. We had even wanked together once! (As I recalled, his cock was enormous.) Having identified himself as the chairman of the local Communist cell, he gave us first an update on the situation in Aragon, then a history of the long and fractious relationship between the Castilians, in Madrid, and the Catalans, in Barcelona. Apparently there existed between these two groups an intense, deeply buried animosity. Language was at its core; Spain as a country, it seemed, existed only as the result of wars, its borders a testament to battles lost or won, depending on whom you asked. Within its technical frontiers, in the meantime, discrete localities, clinging fiercely to their own tongues and cultures, continued to play out these antique resentments, in the process creating a current of antagonism that undercut the Republican front in ways too baroque for non-Mediterraneans to understand. This idea fascinated me. In my own imagination Spain existed so vividly as an idea—fan dances, castanets—that I had trouble accepting the fact of its national arbitrariness. In truth, however, most countries come into being solely as the result of war. Island nations such as my own are the exception.

  In the Pyrenees, Northrop told us, was a tiny bubble of Spain preserved whole a few miles inside the body of France. This cartographical aberration had come about as the result of a treaty written sometime in the fifteenth century. And it had lasted.

  With a piece of chalk, Northrop mapped the war’s complex political geography. I had trouble keeping track of all the acronyms but was able to grasp that blankets were needed most desperately; also, ambulance drivers, medics, medical supplies; above all, soldiers, men willing to risk their lives defending the Spanish workers against the brutalities of the Fascists and Falangists. He called for volunteers. Emma Leland announced cheerfully that she would drive down in her little roadster and do whatever she could, an offer Northrop greeted with a benign smile and thanked her for, which was really the only way to deal with Emma. If I am to trust histories of the period more than my own memory, the rousing calls to action made at that meeting must have moved us to tears. What lingers, however, is the hollowed-out voice of Emma Leland offering to “pop down” to Barcelona as if Barcelona were the local farmers’ market.

  The meeting broke up. The would-be soldiers gathered in a corner to find out what to do next. Meanwhile a group of Oxbridge types mulled, drinking tea out of paper cups and discussing various rumors from the Continent. Someone said Franco had been shot, someone else insisted that this was unsubstantiated rot. A vulgar joke was made about the Foreign Secretary.

  I noticed an attractive boy of nineteen or so standing alone at a slight distance from the chatting crowd. He was wearing a cap, a worn sweater and a jacket with patches on the elbows, and had propped against his leg a ravaged leather satchel, which looked as if it had been carrying his books since childhood. In his hands he held a paper cup of tea, which he periodically tasted, found too hot and blew on. His hair was dark blond, shaggy and haphazardly cut, and he had a bracingly clean face and green eyes, which according to Mediterraneans are supposed to connote treachery. Near him the crowd buzzed, a young woman threw back her head and laughed, Emma Leland started telling the same story about Daisy Parker’s wedding that Rupert had told to relieve the tension of the lost umbrella. Everyone had gone to school with someone’s brother or known each other up at Cambridge. These were serious young leftist intellectuals, many of them Communists devoted to the idea of a classless society, but they were also upper class and English and so almost unconsciously sought out others of their kind and mixed with them, while the working-class youth stood alone just outside the perimeter of this charmed circle, listening hungrily, coming as close as he dared, barred from entry by an invisible boundary of accent.

  White teeth shone, witticisms flew amid the dark mutterings of war. I was gazing at the young man, thinking about the leanness of his legs, when he accidentally caught my stare. Our eyes met, and then, furiously, he turned away from me and took too large a swallow of his tea, scalding his tongue so that the tea ran down his chin and splashed onto his fingers. With his fist he wiped his chin. Then he brushed his wet fingers against his trousers, leaving a smear. I felt that rare shock of mutual desire and got an erection, and I could tell from the way he was rearranging his legs that he had got one too.

  I wandered over to near where he was standing. I felt him sensing my presence and stiffening in response to it, even though he did not look at me. Soon we were more or less side by side against the wall, both looking straight ahead. I swung my leg out, and our pants brushed. He pulled away as if he’d got a shock. Then he let his leg slide back to where it had been, so that it rubbed slightly against mine. When I turned he was staring at the crowd, his face flushed.

  “Not the best tea, is it?” I said.

  “I’ve had better.”

  He kept his eyes nervously averted and
did not look at me.

  “My name is Brian,” I said. “Brian Botsford.”

  “Edward,” he said, then—as an afterthought—added his last name. “Phelan.”

  His hands were large and callused, his handshake rough.

  “Do you live in Earl’s Court?”

  “No, I live with my mum and dad near Upney. I work over at Earl’s Court station, though. The underground station.”

  “Really,” I said. “Are you a driver?”

  “Ticket collector.”

  “That’s very interesting. You see, I’m a writer, and I’m writing a novel—”

  “I like to read novels. I like to read what’s that fellow’s name who wrote the novels about the center of the earth.”

  “Jules Verne.”

  “That’s him.”

  “Well, by coincidence my novel’s got a character who’s quite keen on the London underground.”

  “Has it now? I tell you, you do see it all, in the station. You see every walk of life and type of person. I could tell you stories.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  We had sat down. His leg was shaking uncontrollably, like a dog’s when you scratch its stomach. “Do you live nearby?” he asked.

  “Not too far.”

  “Alone?”

  “Yes.” (And how delicious it was to live alone!)

  In a single swallow he finished his tea before thrusting the empty cup onto a table. Then he turned and for the first time looked me square in the eye.

  “Would you like to have a walk?” he asked. “It’s a warm evening.”

  “That would be lovely,” I said. “I’ll just say goodbye to my friends.”

  Emma embraced me. “Brian, you old rotter, you’ve hardly said hello and already you’re leaving.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve got to,” I said. “I’m late for dinner.”

  “ ’E ’s a busy little bee, in’t he?” Emma said.

  “Yes, I suppose I am. Well, goodbye.” And I beat a hasty retreat.