Dangerous Sea

by David Roberts

  ‘I didn’t know they allowed Communists in the United States.’ Verity remarked.

  ‘I have a pamphlet here somewhere on the history of the Party in the States,’ Kidd said, opening a desk drawer stuffed with leaflets. ‘It’s very different from ours. The Party spent many years trying to establish separate unions and organizations but, in the last year or two under the leadership of Earl Browder, a magnificent man – from Kansas I believe – the CPUSA has changed tack. The new directives from Moscow mean we co-operate with any group opposed to Fascism. In the States, Party workers have joined the CIO, the Committee for Industrial Organization, whose president is John Lewis, young Sam’s boss. Ah, this is what I was looking for.’ Kidd produced a small stapled pamphlet from a cardboard file. ‘This will tell you all about it. But don’t spend too much time trying to meet Party members. As I say, your task is to develop relationships with the union bosses. For the most part, they are as capitalist as their employers but, in their struggle for workers’ rights, they are our allies. Our enemy’s enemy is our friend. You understand?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  Kidd opened the pamphlet and began to read. ‘“The IWW” – that’s the Industrial Workers of the World,’ he explained, ‘the Communist Party in industry, you might say – “was founded with a statement that the working class and the employing class have nothing in common. Instead of the old slogan: a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s toil, the IWW says abolish the wage system. An injury to the members of one industry is an injury to the whole working class and has to be met with strikes and sabotage.” ’ He pushed his glasses up his nose and looked sternly at Verity. ‘That is what we believe even if for the moment we have to compromise. Never forget it.’

  Verity left Kidd’s office – a modest affair over a garage next to a church in Bermondsey – confused but excited. Her restless spirit was stimulated by the promise of a new world to explore. She decided she would drop in on her friend Edward Corinth and show off a little. It did not strike her as odd that she chose to talk over her orders with a member of the despised ‘upper class’ rather than another Party member.

  ‘Miss Browne, my lord.’

  ‘I do wish you would sound a little less funereal, Fenton. Miss Browne would be very hurt if she could hear you.’

  ‘I did hear him,’ Verity said, sweeping into the bedroom uninvited and kissing Edward on the cheek. She turned to Edward’s valet. ‘I sometimes think you don’t trust me, Fenton.’

  ‘Madam!’ The rebuke, if on the chilly side, was not totally humourless. He didn’t trust her as far as he could throw her which, since she was small and very thin, was a considerable distance.

  ‘I know, Fenton,’ Verity sighed theatrically. ‘You are being protective, but surely you can’t blame me just because, whenever Lord Edward comes to any event in which I have a starring role, he always gets himself a bloody nose?’

  She was referring to the Cable Street riots and a lecture she had given in the East End the previous autumn which had ended in fisticuffs. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘I bring you tidings of great joy. I am leaving the country. I shall trouble you no more. I am off to the United States of America – on the Queen Mary, no less.’ With a sweep of her hand, very much in the Isadora Duncan mode of expression, she swung her arm sideways, knocking a china ornament off the mantelpiece. ‘Oops, sorry,’ she said, bending to pick the pieces up off the floor.

  ‘Please, miss, let me do that,’ Fenton said, with an implied sigh of forbearance. ‘I shall return shortly with a dustpan and brush.’

  Verity looked around her and noted the suitcases open on the bed and on the floor beside it.

  ‘But you, too, look as though you are about to take a trip. Are you off to Mersham?’

  ‘A little further actually. Please put down my hairbrush. It’s a particular phobia of mine not to allow anyone to touch my hairbrush. And that goes for my shaving tackle too,’ Edward added, deftly removing the razor from Verity’s outstretched hand.

  ‘Oh, that’s what it is, is it? I thought it had to be the exhibit marked C – the murder weapon.’

  ‘Please, Verity, I’ve got a lot to do before I leave. I really don’t have time for idle chatter. I have to be at Southampton not later than one pip emma tomorrow and I’ve only just started to get everything together.’

  ‘Well! That’s a coincidence. I too have to be in Southampton tomorrow. I suppose there’s no possibility we are going to be shipmates?’

  ‘God forbid!’ Edward said, putting his hand to his forehead in imitation of Sir Donald Wolfit playing Macbeth. ‘But here’s a coincidence,’ he continued with heavy irony. ‘As you have guessed, I also have a passage booked aboard the Queen Mary. We are, in short, to be tossing in the same barque for four, or possibly five, days. Let Joy be unconfined. I had counted on a few days’ repose to get me in a fit state to cope with the mind-numbing energy of New York but, what matter . . .? To be with you . . . Just joking,’ he added, fending off a cushion. ‘Come over here and let me kiss you properly. Quick, before Fenton gets back.’

  She offered him her cheek. ‘I’m certainly not kissing you if you’re going to be patronizing.’

  ‘Sorry, V. But why are you going? I must say, it’s quite funny! We both suddenly decide to go to America and end up on the Queen Mary together. We’ll probably be in next-door cabins. No, wait! I will be in First Class and you will be with the Ellis Island immigrants, I assume.’

  ‘You assume wrong. We newspaper men – and women – travel in style.’

  ‘So, on the spur of the moment, you decide to go to America? Why, for goodness sake? Oughtn’t you to be in Spain? I thought there must be one continent at least which is free of the mayhem you seem to bring to the places you visit.’

  ‘I’m not a tourist. I’m a newspaper correspondent,’ Verity said grandly. ‘So I go where the news is and, if mayhem is your word for news, then you are quite correct. But seriously, are you emigrating, or what? No, I’ve got it! You’re after that girl again, aren’t you? What a lark!’

  ‘If you mean Miss Pageant . . .?’

  ‘Yes, Amy.’

  Amy Pageant was Lord Weaver’s daughter and was now a star on Broadway. Edward and she had had a brief affair and Verity had always been jealous of her, even though she had no right to be.

  ‘As a matter of fact, I am accompanying Lord Benyon who is travelling to the United States to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University and give several important lectures,’ Edward said pompously.

  ‘I see. And what precisely is your function? To carry the bags? I never heard you were an economist.’

  ‘I am going as his personal assistant to smooth his way so he can concentrate on the important things.’

  ‘I shall enjoy meeting him again. A very nice man, I thought. I was so sorry about Inna. Is he very unhappy?’

  ‘He’s one of those people who bury their unhappiness in work. But you still haven’t told me your reason for being on the Queen Mary.’

  ‘I am going to report on the workers’ struggle. Our comrades in arms – how the ordinary American combats the tyranny of capitalism. Hard-hitting stuff.’

  ‘That’s for the Daily Worker, I imagine. What does Joe Weaver want you to do? If I remember correctly, the Gazette already has a correspondent in America.’

  ‘The paper does have a Washington correspondent and, of course, takes stories from Reuters and other news agencies but Joe thought a series of articles on how the ordinary American lives and works would be interesting. The idea being that what the Americans do today, we do next year.’

  ‘I see. Well, there we are then. We travel together. I look forward to it. Now, leave me to get on with my packing.’

  ‘I don’t know about travelling together, exactly,’ Verity said casually. ‘I am travelling with a chap called Sam Forrest. He’s John L. Lewis’s assistant. Have you heard of him?’

  Edward was immediately on his guard.

  ‘He’s an America
n politician, isn’t he?’

  ‘He’s head of the mineworkers’ union.’

  ‘He’s not a “Comrade”?’

  ‘No, he believes that reform within the constitution is the only way to avoid revolution. Roosevelt likes him – well, respects him anyway.’

  ‘I look forward to meeting Mr Forrest,’ Edward said courteously.

  Verity was suspicious. ‘I don’t trust you when you’re being reasonable. I hope you won’t try and patronize him like you do me.’

  ‘Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi finem di dederint, Leuconoë, nec Babylonios temptaris numeros. I don’t know why but old Horace has been rather in my mind.’

  ‘There you are! That’s just what I mean. You know I have no Latin. It wasn’t thought suitable for gels to be taught Latin in the schools I attended. Anyway, wasn’t Horace the one who liked little boys?’

  ‘It’s not my fault you weren’t educated. The poet says, “You don’t inquire – it’s forbidden to know – what our end will be – whether this winter will be our last.” Something like that . . . Oh, and “Don’t play about with foreign affairs.” ’

  ‘I can’t think why they teach that stuff at Eton. It should be abolished. I don’t trust your translation, anyway. I’m sure there was something about Babylonians in there.’

  There was a silence as Fenton returned to the room and began sweeping up the remains of the china ornament.

  ‘I’m sorry, V, I’m forgetting my manners. Have some coffee or something. I can’t give you lunch, I’m afraid, I’ve got to go to the bank and so on and arrange some things for Frank.’

  ‘For Frank?’

  ‘Yes, he’s coming too – to carry the bags as you put it. But don’t tell him I said that,’ he added hastily.

  ‘Oh, that’s good.’

  There was another, somewhat awkward, silence. Edward’s nephew Frank, the future Duke of Mersham, had not endeared himself to his parents by running away from school to join the International Brigade. The Duke had blamed Verity for turning him into a Communist and precipitating his flight to Spain. This was not entirely fair. It was true that Frank had been very taken with Verity and impressed by her commitment to the Party, and she had thoroughly enjoyed seeing a sprig of the aristocracy abandon his class prejudices and side with ‘the people’. It helped that he was good-looking and half in love with her. However, she claimed she had never encouraged him, except by example, to go to Spain. If there was anyone to blame it was a young Eton master by the name of John Devon in whose company Frank had gone to war.

  Verity had told the Duchess she would bring Frank home and, with Edward, she had done what she had promised. The two of them had travelled to Spain and tracked him down to a particularly nasty spot on the front line in the ever-moving battle for Madrid. The task of getting him back to England was made easier when his commanding officer had been informed that he was only seventeen. Frank had claimed to be twenty. He was immediately ordered out and had no option but to obey. He had spent the journey home in a deep sulk and had remained mutinous back in the bosom of his family. He understood why his uncle should wish to drag him home and listened guiltily as he lectured him on the distress he was causing his parents. However, he found it difficult to forgive Verity for what he saw as her betrayal. How could she of all people not approve of his leaving school to fight for the Republic?

  The long and short of it was that Frank had arrived at Mersham Castle a week after Christmas and proceeded to make everyone’s life a misery. If there was anywhere more pleasant to be imprisoned than Mersham, Edward could not imagine it, so he was not too sorry for his nephew. Bored and sulky, Frank had cheeked his father and reduced his mother to tears on more than one occasion. He had taken to hunting three days a week, choosing to jump the highest fences and run the greatest risks. His recklessness paid off. He was thrown quite badly, concussing himself briefly, and felt in some obscure way that he had made a point.

  He still absolutely refused to go back to Eton and, though the Duke could get him into his old college at Cambridge easily enough, it was evident the boy needed to do something first to clear his head of what his father called ‘this Communist nonsense’. There had been some talk of his going to the Cape or Kenya but Edward was against it. He had a feeling that, in his present mood, Frank could easily fall into bad company and turn into one of the lost souls who made their own and other people’s lives a misery in the ill-named Happy Valley. Benyon’s offer to take him to America came at just the right moment. He would have some sort of a job to keep him busy and he had more than once said how much he wanted to go to the United States, ‘where people are valued for what they are, not for where they were born’, he would add with bitterness.

  The problem, as Edward saw it, was how to get Frank to go willingly. It was important for his self-respect not to be shipped off to the States like the naughty schoolboy he was. Edward suspected that, if his father or mother informed him of what had been arranged, he would rebel. It was better they said nothing other than that Lord Benyon had expressed a desire to meet him and he was to present himself at the Athenaeum the next day for an interview about a possible job.

  Frank took the bait, intrigued that anyone should want to offer him employment but determined not to allow himself to be treated like a child. As Edward had anticipated, the two of them liked each other at first sight. It did not matter that Benyon was a middle-aged academic economist and Frank a schoolboy on the cusp of manhood who had been to the wars and returned with his tail between his legs. What mattered was they were both natural rebels. The Duke’s son wanted an end to the class system and to help usher in a Communist utopia. The economist liked nothing so much as to ruffle the feathers of politicians, diplomats and businessmen. Benyon displayed like campaign medals the press reports of his spats with Montagu Norman, the Governor of the Bank of England and the most powerful man in the financial world, not excepting the Chancellor of the Exchequer with whom he had also had very public differences of opinion. It was good, too, that there was so little time to think about it. The Queen Mary sailed on the Saturday. Benyon made his offer on the Thursday and Frank accepted on the spot.

  ‘That reminds me. How’s the book going?’ Edward inquired.

  Victor Gollancz had just published Verity’s account of her time as a foreign correspondent in Spain and in particular the siege of Toledo. Government forces had been routed by Franco’s Moorish troops and a savage massacre followed. The book was called Searchlight on Spain and had borne the imprint of the Left Book Club.

  ‘Too early to say,’ Verity said, affecting nonchalance. She was actually consumed with excitement and it required a great effort of will not to telephone the publisher on a daily basis to find out how many copies had been sold.

  ‘You got my letter? I thought it was very good. Very vivid and, as far as I could judge, accurate.’

  Edward’s praise meant more to Verity than she would ever have admitted and she had bought an album in which to keep his letter and others of a similar nature – though as yet she had not received any. Edward had been in Spain at the outbreak of the civil war and his was an opinion she valued.

  ‘You really think so?’ she was unable to prevent herself asking.

  ‘I really think so. Now please, V, leave me. We’ll meet at Philippi.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Philippi – Julius Caesar . . . God help us, woman! Shakespeare.’

  Verity had, she supposed, studied Shakespeare at some of the many schools she had briefly attended, but had no memory of this play.

  ‘I can’t think how you missed it. It’s the classic account of how a Fascist tyrant is killed by a group of conspirators who themselves become tyrants.’

  ‘Of course I’ve read it,’ she lied, ‘I just didn’t recognize the quote, that’s all. Stop being superior. I hate people who are always quoting things.’

  ‘We shall meet on Southampton Dock,’ Edward elaborated. ‘Now please leave me.’

>   ‘Well, we will, dash it!’ she riposted. She had meant to say something witty or even biting, but it would have to do. Damn him!

  While Frank had been meeting Lord Benyon, Edward had been closeted with Major Ferguson in his dreary little cupboard of an office above a public house off Trafalgar Square. He was going through the reports British agents had sent detailing possible threats to Benyon.

  When he had finished, Edward stood up and stretched himself. ‘It doesn’t amount to much, does it? It’s all very vague. An overheard conversation, a copy of a letter recovered from a waste-paper basket, a hint from an official in the Reichsbank . . .’

  ‘No, it doesn’t,’ Ferguson agreed. ‘It’s one of the reasons Lord Benyon refused to have full police security. He thinks we are exaggerating the threat, and perhaps we are, but it is my duty to take no risks. I don’t want it said that I didn’t do all I could to protect him. As you know, the man is important enough but his mission makes him very important.’

  ‘And the moment Benyon is on American soil I can regard my duty as completed?’

  ‘Yes. You will be met by FBI agent Henry Fawcett who will accompany Lord Benyon throughout his stay. Then, if it is convenient, you will return with Lord Benyon on the Queen Mary on March the eighteenth. By that time, he will have succeeded or failed in his mission so he will be in less danger but we musn’t take anything for granted. Do you think you can keep him safe for four or, at the worst, five days?’

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘By the way, our chap in New York is Bill Stephenson – a Canadian. Officially, he’s Head of British Passport Control in the United States. He has an office in Rockefeller Center. Here’s his number, but only telephone him in an emergency. He likes to keep a low profile, you understand. He’s one of the best.’

  ‘I see. Your man, Tom Barrett, is staying with Lord Benyon the whole time . . . as his valet?’ Edward had been introduced to Barrett the previous day and had liked the look of him. He was a twenty-seven-year-old Welshman possessed of attractive hazel eyes and a wide smile which revealed good teeth. He had played rugby for Wales and looked as though he would be a useful man to have by you in a scrap.