by Ken Follett
Daisy felt herself blush. She hated snobbery and often accused others of it, especially in Buffalo. She thought she was totally innocent of such unworthy attitudes. ‘I’ve got off on the wrong foot with you, haven’t I?’ she said as the dance came to an end.
‘Not really,’ he said. ‘You think it’s dull to talk about Fascism, yet you take a German refugee into your home and even invite her to travel to England with you. You think housemaids have no right to be friends with undergraduates, yet you pay for Ruby to see the dentist. I don’t suppose I’ll meet another girl half as intriguing as you tonight.’
‘I’ll take that as a compliment.’
‘Here comes your Fascist friend, Boy Fitzherbert. Do you want me to scare him off?’ Daisy sensed that Lloyd would relish the chance of a quarrel with Boy.
‘Certainly not!’ she said, and turned to smile at Boy.
Boy nodded curtly to Lloyd. ‘Evening, Williams.’
‘Good evening,’ said Lloyd. ‘I was disappointed that your Fascists marched along Hills Road last Saturday.’
‘Ah, yes,’ Boy said. ‘They got a bit over-enthusiastic.’
‘It surprised me, when you had given your word that they would not.’ Daisy saw that Lloyd was angry about this, underneath his mask of cool courtesy.
Boy refused to take it seriously. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said lightly. He turned to Daisy. ‘Come and see the library,’ he said to her. ‘It’s by Christopher Wren.’
‘With pleasure!’ Daisy said. She waved goodbye to Lloyd and let Boy take her arm. Lloyd looked disappointed to see her go, which pleased her.
On the west side of the quadrangle a passage led to a courtyard with a single elegant building at the far end. Daisy admired the cloisters on the ground floor. Boy explained that the books were on the upper floor, because the River Cam was liable to flood. ‘Let’s go and look at the river,’ he said. ‘It’s pretty at night.’
Daisy was twenty years old and, though she was inexperienced, she knew that Boy did not really care for gazing on rivers at night. But she wondered, after his reaction to seeing her in men’s clothing, whether he might really prefer boys to girls. She guessed she was about to find out.
‘Do you actually know the King?’ she asked as he led her across a second courtyard.
‘Yes. He’s more my father’s friend, obviously, but he comes to our house sometimes. And he’s jolly keen on some of my political ideas, I can tell you.’
‘I’d love to meet him.’ She was sounding naive, she knew, but this was her chance and she was not going to miss it.
They passed through a gateway and emerged on to a smooth lawn sloping down to a narrow walled-in river. ‘This area is called the Backs,’ Boy said. ‘Most of the older colleges own the fields on the other side of the water.’ He put his arm around her waist as they approached a little bridge. His hand moved up, as if accidentally, until his forefinger lay along the underside of her breast.
At the far end of the little bridge two college servants in uniform stood guard, presumably to repel gatecrashers. One of the men murmured: ‘Good evening, Viscount Aberowen,’ and the other smothered a grin. Boy responded with a barely perceptible nod. Daisy wondered how many other girls he had led across this bridge.
She knew Boy had a motive for giving her this tour and, sure enough, he stopped in the darkness and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘I say, you looked jolly fetching in that outfit at dinner.’ His voice was throaty with excitement.
‘I’m glad you thought so.’ She knew the kiss was coming, and she felt aroused at the prospect, but she was not quite ready. She put a hand on his shirt front, palm flat, holding him at a distance. ‘I really want to be presented at the royal court,’ she said. ‘Is it difficult to arrange?’
‘Not difficult at all,’ he said. ‘Not for my family, at least. And not for someone as pretty as you.’ He dipped his head eagerly towards hers.
She leaned away. ‘Would you do that for me? Will you fix it for me to be presented?’
‘Of course.’
She moved in closer, and felt the erection bulging at the front of his trousers. No, she thought, he doesn’t prefer boys. ‘Promise?’ she said.
‘I promise,’ he said breathlessly.
‘Thank you,’ she said, then she let him kiss her.
(iii)
The little house in Wellington Row, Aberowen, South Wales, was crowded at one o’clock on Saturday afternoon. Lloyd’s grandfather sat at the kitchen table looking proud. On one side he had his son, Billy Williams, a coal miner who had become Member of Parliament for Aberowen. On the other was his grandson, Lloyd, the Cambridge University student. Absent was his daughter, also a Member of Parliament. It was the Williams dynasty. No one here would ever say that – the notion of a dynasty was undemocratic, and these people believed in democracy the way the Pope believed in God – but, just the same, Lloyd suspected Granda was thinking it.
Also at the table was Uncle Billy’s lifelong friend and agent, Tom Griffiths. Lloyd was honoured to sit with such men. Granda was a veteran of the miners’ union; Uncle Billy had been court-martialled in 1919 for revealing Britain’s secret war against the Bolsheviks; Tom had fought alongside Billy at the Battle of the Somme. This was more impressive than dining with royalty.
Lloyd’s grandmother, Cara Williams, had served them stewed beef with home-made bread, and now they sat drinking tea and smoking. Friends and neighbours had come in, as they always did when Billy was here, and half a dozen of them stood leaning against the walls, smoking pipes and hand-rolled cigarettes, filling the little kitchen with the smell of men and tobacco.
Billy had the short stature and broad shoulders of many miners but, unlike the others, he was well dressed, in a navy-blue suit with a clean white shirt and a red tie. Lloyd noticed that they all used his first name often, as if to emphasize that he was one of them, empowered by their votes. They called Lloyd ‘boyo’, making it clear that they were not over-impressed by a university student. But they addressed Granda as Mr Williams: he was the one they truly respected.
Through the open back door Lloyd could see the slag heap from the mine, an ever-growing mountain which had now reached the lane behind the house.
Lloyd was spending the summer vacation as a low-paid organizer at a camp for unemployed colliers. Their project was to refurbish the Miners’ Institute Library. Lloyd found the physical work of sanding and painting and building shelves a refreshing change from reading Schiller in German and Molière in French. He enjoyed the banter among the men: he had inherited from his mother a love of the Welsh sense of humour.
It was great, but it was not fighting Fascism. He winced every time he remembered how he had skulked in the Baptist chapel while Boy Fitzherbert and the other bullies chanted in the street and threw stones through the window. He wished he had gone outside and punched someone. It might have been stupid but he would have felt better. He thought about it every night before falling asleep.
He also thought about Daisy Peshkov in a pink silk jacket with puffed sleeves.
He had seen Daisy a second time in May Week. He had gone to a recital in the chapel of King’s College, because the student in the room next to his at Emmanuel was playing the cello; and Daisy had been in the audience with the Westhamptons. She had been wearing a straw hat with a turned-up brim that made her look like a naughty schoolgirl. He had sought her out afterwards, and asked her questions about America, where he had never been. He wanted to know about President Roosevelt’s administration, and whether it had any lessons to teach Britain, but all Daisy talked about was tennis parties and polo matches and yacht clubs. Despite that, he had been captivated by her all over again. He liked her gay chatter all the more because it was punctuated, now and again, by unexpected darts of sarcastic wit. He had said: ‘I don’t want to keep you from your friends – I just wanted to ask about the New Deal’, and she had replied: ‘Oh, boy, you really know how to flatter a girl.’ But then, as they parted, she had said: ‘Call m
e when you come to London – Mayfair two four three four.’
Today he had come to his grandparents’ house for the midday meal, on his way to the railway station. He had a few days off from the work camp, and he was taking the train to London for a short break. He was vaguely hoping he might run into Daisy, as if London were a little town like Aberowen.
At the camp he was in charge of political education, and he told his grandfather he had organized a series of lectures by left-wing dons from Cambridge. ‘I tell them it’s their chance to get out of the ivory tower and meet the working class, and they find it hard to refuse me.’
Granda’s pale-blue eyes looked down his long, sharp nose. ‘I hope our lads teach them a thing or two about the real world.’
Lloyd pointed to Tom Griffiths’s son, standing in the open back door and listening. At sixteen, Lenny already had the characteristic Griffiths shadow of a black beard that never went away even when his cheeks were freshly shaved. ‘Lenny had an argument with a Marxist lecturer.’
‘Good for you, Len,’ said Granda. Marxism was popular in South Wales, which was sometimes jokingly called Little Moscow, but Granda had always been fiercely anti-Communist.
Lloyd said: ‘Tell Granda what you said, Lenny.’
Lenny grinned and said: ‘In 1872 the anarchist leader Mikhail Bakunin warned Karl Marx that Communists in power would be as oppressive as the aristocracy they replaced. After what has happened in Russia, can you honestly say Bakunin was wrong?’
Granda clapped his hands. A good debating point had always been relished around his kitchen table.
Lloyd’s grandmother poured him a fresh cup of tea. Cara Williams was grey, lined and bent, like all the women of her age in Aberowen. She asked Lloyd: ‘Are you courting yet, my lovely?’
The men grinned and winked.
Lloyd blushed. ‘Too busy studying, Grandmam.’ But an image of Daisy Peshkov came into his mind, together with the phone number: Mayfair two four three four.
His grandmother said: ‘Who’s this Ruby Carter, then?’
The men laughed, and Uncle Billy said: ‘Caught out, boyo!’
Lloyd’s mother had obviously been talking. ‘Ruby is membership officer of my local Labour Party in Cambridge, that’s all,’ Lloyd protested.
Billy said sarcastically: ‘Oh, aye, very convincing’, and the men laughed again.
‘You wouldn’t want me to go out with Ruby, Grandmam,’ Lloyd said. ‘You’d think she wears her clothes too tight.’
‘She doesn’t sound very suitable,’ Cara said. ‘You’re a university man, now. You must set your sights higher.’
She was just as snobbish as Daisy, Lloyd perceived. ‘There’s nothing wrong with Ruby Carter,’ he said. ‘But I’m not in love with her.’
‘You must marry an educated woman, a schoolteacher or a trained nurse.’
The trouble was that she was right. Lloyd liked Ruby, but he would never love her. She was pretty enough, and intelligent, too, and Lloyd was as vulnerable as the next man to a curvy figure, but still he knew she was not right for him. Worse, Grandmam had put her wrinkled old finger precisely on the reason: Ruby’s outlook was restricted, her horizons narrow. She was not exciting. Not like Daisy.
‘That’s enough women’s chatter,’ Granda said. ‘Billy, tell us the news from Spain.’
‘It’s bad,’ said Billy.
All Europe was watching Spain. The left-wing government elected last February had suffered an attempted military coup backed by Fascists and conservatives. The rebel general, Franco, had won support from the Catholic Church. The news had struck the rest of the continent like an earthquake. After Germany and Italy, would Spain, too, fall under the curse of Fascism?
‘The revolt was botched, as you probably know, and it almost failed,’ Billy went on. ‘But Hitler and Mussolini came to the rescue, and saved the insurrection by airlifting thousands of rebel troops from north Africa as reinforcements.’
Lenny put in: ‘And the unions saved the government!’
‘That’s true,’ Billy said. ‘The government was slow to react, but the trade unions led the way in organizing workers and arming them with weapons they had seized from military arsenals, ships, gun shops, and anywhere else they could find them.’
Granda said: ‘At least someone is fighting back. Until now the Fascists have had it all their own way. In the Rhineland and Abyssinia, they just walked in and took what they wanted. Thank God for the Spanish people, I say. They’ve got the guts to say no.’
There was a murmur of agreement from the men around the walls.
Lloyd again recalled that Saturday afternoon in Cambridge. He, too, had let the Fascists have it all their own way. He seethed with frustration.
‘But can they win?’ said Granda. ‘Weapons seem to be the issue now, isn’t it?’
‘Aye,’ said Billy. ‘The Germans and the Italians are supplying the rebels with guns and ammunition, as well as fighter planes and pilots. But no one is helping the elected Spanish government.’
‘And why the bloody hell not?’ said Lenny angrily.
Cara looked up from the cooking range. Her dark Mediterranean eyes flashed disapproval, and Lloyd thought he glimpsed the beautiful girl she had once been. ‘None of that language in my kitchen!’ she said.
‘Sorry, Mrs Williams.’
‘I can tell you the inside story,’ Billy said, and the men went quiet, listening. ‘The French Prime Minister, Leon Blum – a socialist, as you know – was all set to help. He’s already got one Fascist neighbour, Germany, and the last thing he wants is a Fascist regime on his southern border too. Sending arms to the Spanish government would enrage the French right wing, and French Catholic socialists too, but Blum could withstand that, especially if he had British support and could say that arming the government was an international initiative.’
Granda said: ‘So what went wrong?’
‘Our government talked him out of it. Blum came to London and our Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, told him we would not support him.’
Granda was angered. ‘Why does he need support? How can a socialist prime minister let himself be bullied by the conservative government of another country?’
‘Because there’s a danger of a military coup in France, too,’ said Billy. ‘The press there is rabidly right wing, and they’re whipping their own Fascists into a frenzy. Blum can fight them off with British support – but perhaps not without.’
‘So it’s our Conservative government being soft on Fascism again!’
‘All those Tories have investments in Spain – wine, textiles, coal, steel – and they’re afraid the left-wing government will expropriate them.’
‘What about America? They believe in democracy. Surely they’ll sell guns to Spain?’
‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But there’s a well-financed Catholic lobby, led by a millionaire called Joseph Kennedy, opposing any help to the Spanish government. And a Democratic president needs Catholic support. Roosevelt won’t do anything to jeopardize his New Deal.’
‘Well, there’s something we can do,’ said Lenny Griffiths, and a look of adolescent defiance came over his face.
‘What’s that, Len boy?’ said Billy.
‘We can go to Spain and fight.’
His father said: ‘Don’t talk daft, Lenny.’
‘Lots of people are talking about going, all over the world, even in America. They want to form volunteer units to fight alongside the regular army.’
Lloyd sat upright. ‘Do they?’ This was the first he had heard of it. ‘How do you know?’
‘I read about it in the Daily Herald.’
Lloyd was electrified. Volunteers going to Spain to fight the Fascists!
Tom Griffiths said to Lenny: ‘Well, you’re not going, and that’s that.’
Billy said: ‘Remember those boys who lied about their age to fight in the Great War? Thousands of them.’
‘And totally useless, most of them,’ Tom said. ‘I recall that kid
who cried before the Somme. What was his name, Billy?’
‘Owen Bevin. He ran away, didn’t he?’
‘Aye – to a firing squad. The bastards shot him for desertion. Fifteen, he was, poor little tyke.’
Lenny said: ‘I’m sixteen.’
‘Aye,’ said his father. ‘Big difference, that.’
Granda said: ‘Lloyd here is going to miss the train to London in about ten minutes.’
Lloyd had been so struck by Lenny’s revelation that he had not kept an eye on the clock. He jumped up, kissed his grandmother, and picked up his small suitcase.
Lenny said: ‘I’ll walk with you to the station.’
Lloyd said his goodbyes and hurried down the hill. Lenny said nothing, seeming preoccupied. Lloyd was glad not to have to talk: his mind was in turmoil.
The train was in. Lloyd bought a third-class ticket to London. As he was about to board, Lenny said: ‘Tell me, now, Lloyd, how do you get a passport?’
‘You’re serious about going to Spain, aren’t you?’
‘Come on, man, don’t muck about, I want to know.’
The whistle blew. Lloyd climbed aboard, closed the door, and let down the window. ‘You go to the Post Office and ask for a form,’ he said.
Lenny said despondently: ‘If I went to the Aberowen post office and asked for a passport form, my mother would hear of it about thirty seconds later.’
‘Then go to Cardiff,’ said Lloyd; and the train pulled away.
He settled in his seat and took from his pocket a copy of Le Rouge et le Noir by Stendhal in French. He stared at the page without taking anything in. He could think of only one idea: going to Spain.
He knew he should be scared, but all he felt was excitement at the prospect of fighting – really fighting, not just holding meetings – against the kind of men who had set the dogs on Jörg. No doubt fear would come later. Before a boxing match he was not scared in the dressing room. But when he entered the ring and saw the man who wanted to beat him unconscious, looked at the muscular shoulders and the hard fists and the vicious face, then his mouth went dry and his heart pounded and he had to suppress the impulse to turn and run away.