No More Dying

by David Roberts

  His eyes were moist and she remembered his infectious sympathy for whomever he was addressing and the delightful ragù he made of English and Italian. She tapped him on the wrist and told him he was being silly but her sparkling eyes told another story. He was not handsome in a conventional way – he was rather plump and no taller than she – but he had that indefinable ‘something’ which made him attractive to women.

  ‘Did I hear you were getting married to that man of yours, Lord Edward Corinth?’ David spoke his name with barely concealed contempt.

  ‘You are fidanzata – betrothed, cara? I am stravolto – how do you say? – distraught. You ought to have asked my permission and I would not have given it.’ Fernando clutched her hand and, for a moment, she thought he was going down on one knee. ‘Tristezza, tristezza,’ he intoned. ‘My heart breaks.’

  ‘Please, Fernando! You’re embarrassing me,’ Verity protested, trying to disengage herself. ‘Did I not hear that you were married with a child?’

  ‘Si, Basilio. Two years old and the apple of his mother’s eye.’ He looked at her from underneath long eyelashes and whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, a few words of Dante, ‘“Amor mi mosse, che mi fa parlare”’ – ‘As love has willed, so have I spoken.’

  George Castle hurriedly brought the meeting to order. He had a way of referring to members of the group as brothers rather than comrades that Verity liked but of which she was sure David disapproved. He spoke warmly of Fernando and then, with head bowed, recalled the fall of Barcelona in January and dramatically held up an enlarged photograph which had recently appeared in Our Fight, the International Brigade’s weekly paper, of refugees laden with belongings heading towards the French border and the refugee camps in the Pyrénées Orientales. It was a portrait of abject misery – innocent civilians driven from their homes by a terror they did not begin to understand. Although this was a scene with which she was all too familiar, it still made Verity choke with emotion.

  A phrase from a song the men used to chant before going up to the line came to her. It compared love of the Republic with the love of a woman – ‘Mi corazón estaba helado, y ardía’ – ‘My heart was frozen and it burned.’

  Castle was repeating like a mantra, ‘Bombs on Barcelona today, bombs on London tomorrow.’ Verity’s eyes pricked as she recognized the photograph he held up like a religious icon as being by her friend, André Kavan. They had been together at the bombing of Guernica when his girlfriend Gerda Meyer had been killed at her side.

  Then Fernando stood up. He threw off any hint of the comic Italian and spoke with impressive authority of Fascist Italy – its brutality and venality. He could not deny that Mussolini was popular with the majority and that the opposition was fragmented, riven by political rivalry and infiltrated by the OVRA, the secret police. He turned to the plight of the Jews. In 1932, Mussolini had publicly spoken out against German anti-Semitism and many Jews had sought refuge in Italy from Nazi persecution. However, in July 1938, Mussolini had published his Manifesto on Race which prohibited Italians from marrying Jews, forbade Jews from entering the country and ordered the expulsion of those already in Italy.

  As Verity watched Fernando tell of the desperate struggle to fight back against an authoritarian government which had been in power since 1922, she was reminded – no doubt blasphemously – of Christ preaching to the disciples. There were not enough chairs to go round so the younger comrades lay or squatted on the floor. Every face was concentrated on the Italian.

  He had fought the good fight. He had been jailed in Milan, shot at in Turin, beaten up in Rome. He had started and distributed an anti-Fascist newspaper which had survived for three issues. He spoke modestly and with humour, but the ever-present danger in which he lived and worked was apparent to all his listeners. Verity could almost hear everyone in the room ask themselves if they would have the courage to do the same should England ever become a Fascist state.

  He poured scorn on Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax who had visited Mussolini in January believing, wrongly, that the Italian dictator could influence Hitler, seeming not to realize that Hitler despised and ignored his partner in crime. As Mussolini complained, ‘Every time Hitler occupies a country he sends me a message.’

  The meeting broke up soon after Fernando had finished speaking, as though discussion of mundane party matters was inappropriate. Castle thanked him for providing ‘leadership in our great fight’ and went on to say that membership of the Communist Party in London had risen from 4,562 in April 1938 to 7,084, and the Young Communist League had more than trebled its membership to 8,000. He added that London sales of the Daily Worker had increased from an average of 27,000 to 51,000 on weekdays, and to 72,000 on Saturdays. He hoped they would reach 100,000 before the end of the year.

  Fernando was spending the night with the Castles before going on a tour of cities in England and Scotland to address meetings and ask for financial and moral support. Unwilling to let Verity go, he suggested walking round to the Kardomah in the Tottenham Court Road for coffee.

  ‘I have so much to say to you, cara mia. I want to hear how you are. You must tell me about your English lord. He must be a good man if you love him but has not David told you that you are betraying your class and the Party? But when the heart speaks, we must answer, non è vero?’

  He had said what she knew everyone was thinking but so teasingly that she could not be angry. She blushed, however, and replied – hoping to annoy him – ‘Yes, let’s all go round to the Kardomah.’

  Fernando scowled, as she had guessed he would.

  ‘You youngsters go,’ Castle said. ‘Harold and I have some business to sort out and we need a bit of peace and quiet. David will shepherd you.’

  The fog was very bad and they struggled to find their way across Fitzroy Street and into the Tottenham Court Road. ‘Nacht und Nebel, as the Germans say,’ David coughed, wrapping his scarf round his mouth as they narrowly avoided being run down by a bus.

  The glow through the Kardomah’s art deco windows guided them to a haven of warmth and steam-cleaned air. A man brushed past her, a woollen scarf wrapped about his neck and a hat pulled down over his face. He was clutching a little girl dressed in a thin-looking blue coat with a tam-o’-shanter on her head and Verity thought how wrong it was that the child should be out in such weather. Then she remembered the hundreds – possibly thousands – of children who, in this prosperous country, lived on the streets or in cellars – mere holes in the ground – cold and hungry, and once again she felt the fire of indignation which had led her to join the Communist Party. They breathed in the heady aroma of coffee beans. The gurgles and hiss from the shiny stainless steel coffee machines lifted their spirits as they took off their coats and pulled two tables together, greeting the waiters like old friends. Fernando passed round a packet of Nazionali and was amused when Verity said she had given up smoking.

  After they had ordered, the conversation turned naturally to the recent demonstrations by the unemployed. The National Unemployed Workers Union had organized two highly successful ‘actions’ at Christmas. In one, two hundred people lay down in Oxford Street, disrupting the traffic and making the point to shoppers that in many industrial towns children would be receiving few, if any, presents. And, on New Year’s Eve, another group of unemployed carried a coffin into Trafalgar Square bearing the message ‘Unemployment – No Appeasement’. Then, just a week earlier, Danny O’Rourke had been one of the hundred who had gone to the Ritz Hotel to order tea and cause chaos in what was, to many of them, a symbol of the social divide. The newspapers had devoted many pages and photographs to the protests so the Communist Party, which had been behind the demonstrations and claimed to represent the unemployed more effectively than the Labour Party, boasted of a splendid victory.

  Verity noted that very little was said about the Munich Agreement, which the Prime Minister had signed three months earlier. Hitler had already broken the solemn promises he had made to respect Czechoslovakia’s
independence, and Chamberlain’s desperate but successful attempt to stave off war had divided the country. He was said to have received forty thousand messages of congratulation for bringing home ‘peace with honour’ but there were many, like Verity, who saw it as a humiliating defeat and a betrayal which in the end would have to be paid for. However, it could not be denied that it was pleasant still to be able to walk around London in safety. It had been drummed into everyone that there was no defence against the bomber and that the Luftwaffe would reduce London to rubble the moment war broke out.

  Verity asked David what he thought of the Munich Agreement but he refused to be drawn except to say that the Soviet Union had sent part of its air force to its borders in order to protect the Czechs if asked to do so.

  Fernando was affectionate but, to her relief, did not renew his protestation of undying love. She enjoyed flirting but was now focused on her impending marriage. She and Edward had officially announced their engagement to unsurprised friends and family at Christmas, which they had spent at Mersham Castle. Edward’s brother, the Duke of Mersham, disliked Verity. He did his best to hide his distaste for the marriage but the Duchess had been warm in her welcome, telling Verity how glad she was to have her as a sister-in-law.

  ‘I truly believe no other woman could make Ned happy,’ Connie had said when she had got Verity alone in her boudoir. ‘There will be people who will do their best to be unpleasant to you because you are different from the kind of woman they expected him to marry but you must take no notice. His closest friends and even my husband understand that he is a remarkable man and that he needs a remarkable woman by his side.’

  Verity’s eyes had filled with tears and she had been unable to respond except by embracing her.

  Edward’s nephew, Frank, was also engaged – to a delight ful Indian girl, Sunita, the daughter of a friend of his, the Maharaja of Batiala. The wedding would be a grand affair but Verity and Edward were determined that their unlikely conjunction should be the quietest celebration possible. They had decided on a registry office in London a few days before Frank and Sunita were married in Winchester Cathedral so that, with any luck, no one would notice. Sunita, brought up a Hindu, had decided to convert to Christianity, much to the Duke’s relief. There was to be a grand party at Mersham, of course, mainly for Frank and Sunita, but to which Edward and Verity would also invite their friends.

  The Christmas celebrations had been heartfelt but subdued as everyone present knew that this would be the last before the European war they had been anticipating for so long. On New Year’s Eve they had raised their glasses, but their toast to 1939 had been muted. Verity had seen Connie look at her son with fear and longing. He had been accepted by the Royal Navy and was to begin training in earnest the following week. Where would he be, she must be wondering, a year from now?

  Fortunately, there were still a hundred or more refugee children at the castle, waiting to be allocated places with English families, and they needed feeding and entertaining. Many of them were missing their parents and had to be reassured and comforted. Even though Jewish children could not be expected to celebrate the birth of Christ, they could at least give thanks for their preservation and pray for those they had left behind. Their presence gave meaning to what otherwise might have been a hollow festival.

  But who, if any, of her friends would she invite to her wedding? Verity looked round the little group of Communists, their faces pink in the warmth of the Kardomah. She had a sudden vision of her fellow Party workers turning up at Mersham Castle and being scandalized by its magnificence. She knew that, because of her love for Edward, she was going against her most deeply held principles and breaking faith with everything the Party stood for. She did not believe in marriage as an institution but she was getting married. She believed in destroying the class system, which she held to be divisive and absurd, yet she was marrying the younger son of a duke. How could she have known that love would make a nonsense of everything in which she thought she believed?

  Fernando had transferred his attention to Alice Paling. She clearly worshipped him and Verity suppressed a twinge of jealousy as she watched him take her hand and whisper something in her ear. Then she caught sight of Leonard Baskin wearing the unmistakable look of a rejected lover and wondered if Fernando knew or cared how many hearts he broke.

  Fernando saw her looking at him and, almost shyly she thought, came over and sat beside her.

  ‘You’re not a Catholic, are you?’ Verity asked. ‘I mean, I know you’re a Communist but aren’t all Italians Catholic?’

  ‘I was brought up a Catholic, of course, but I no longer go to mass.’

  ‘Because the Catholic Church supports Franco in Spain?’

  ‘Yes, although many poor priests in Spain and in Italy side with the people. But I say e ce freghiamo! To hell with the lot of them! I mean the bosses.’ He became conspiratorial. ‘Cardinals, generals, Party bosses – what is there to choose between them? They use us, suck us dry and then, when we have nothing more to offer, throw us aside.’

  ‘David would say you are cynical.’

  ‘I know what I’m talking about.’ Fernando shrugged. ‘If I was made to choose between black and red, I would of course choose red. I have chosen red. But it’s not the colour of the man that matters – not the colore but the valore, so to speak.’ He chuckled. ‘In these days, we need men of courage – courage to tell the truth. Prejudice, bigotry, cruelty, I despise. Pride, independence, common sense, an honest heart and, yes, courage, I admire.’

  Verity was impressed. ‘How often do you find what you admire?’

  ‘More often than you might think among ordinary people who know that to stand up to evil means putting themselves and their families in danger.’ He looked gloomy and depressed.

  She was distracted by David who had come up behind her, perhaps curious to know what she and Fernando were talking about so earnestly. Doing his best to be offensive, he asked what she hoped to gain by marrying Edward. He had always hated him, though he would have denied that it was jealousy. She replied sharply that she did not expect to gain anything. ‘I don’t suppose you can understand,’ she added with all the indignation of the guilty, ‘but if you love someone, you don’t make a list of what you expect to lose and what you expect to gain.’

  She was quite pleased with her answer despite having an uncomfortable feeling that she had once made just such a list. David was a Party man through and through and, though he might enjoy sex, he could never contemplate marriage. The Bolsheviks despised family life. For the selfless revolutionary, nothing should be private – everything was political. Individualism had to be eradicated. David lived for his work and dispensed with anything which might get in the way of it or make demands on his time or emotions. Verity guessed that he considered love to be a bourgeois luxury.

  ‘I’ve got a little job for you,’ he said with a thin smile. ‘If you have time before your wedding, of course.’

  ‘A job . . .?’ Verity echoed uncertainly.

  ‘Don’t worry – nothing too difficult. I just want you to get to know the American Ambassador.’

  ‘Joseph Kennedy? Why . . .? How could I possibly do that?’

  ‘Your friend Kay Stammers teaches his children tennis. Ask her to introduce you.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that yet. As you know, Mr Kennedy is an admirer of Herr Hitler and will do his utmost to stop Britain declaring war on Germany. If he is unsuccessful, he will do everything possible to prevent President Roosevelt from bringing America in on our side. It is our patriotic duty to do what we can to make him change his mind. It would be useful for the Party to have someone in his inner circle who can report on his thinking and how far Roosevelt is under his influence.’

  Verity looked at him suspiciously. She had never thought of David as a patriot though she acknowledged that, in theory at least, there ought to be no conflict between loyalty to the Party and to one’s country. As a Communist, she
abhorred the political system and wanted to change it to make England a better place in which to live. But still . . . where exactly did David’s loyalties lie?

  As though he had read her mind, David, who was always quick to lecture her, continued, ‘You recall what Georgi Dimitrov said at the Seventh Comintern Congress in 1935? “We Communists are the irreconcilable opponents of bourgeois nationalism in all its forms but we are not supporters of national nihilism. The task of educating the workers in the spirit of proletarian internationalism is one of the Communist Party’s fundamental tasks but that does not permit the Communist Party member to sneer at the national sentiments of the mass of working people.”’

  As far as Verity could understand, this seemed to mean that national sentiment could be encouraged as long as it was directed at the bourgeoisie but was to be condemned as soon as it conflicted with the interests of the Communist movement or of the Soviet Union.

  ‘Even if I were introduced to Mr Kennedy,’ she objected, ‘is he likely to take any notice of a not very important journalist and a Communist at that?’

  ‘Not likely, no, but we may have something to give him – a message, perhaps – and it would be useful to have someone who can meet him socially without attracting attention.’

  Verity looked doubtful. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said slowly. ‘As it happens, I can ask someone to introduce me, apart from Kay. Harold Laski is one of my father’s oldest friends and, for some odd reason, Kennedy chose to send his eldest boys, Joe Jr and Jack, to be educated by him at the LSE. I gather their father – rather unexpectedly – had the imagination to want them to hear the other side of the argument.’