As Winston had prophesied, shortly after their engagement the pair – independently of each other – said that they did not now consider falling in love over the coming months an unrealistic possibility.
To encourage these feelings, Winston suggested that they take a final family holiday together – some time to enjoy each other’s company, a trip through the Netherlands, part of France, and most importantly Germany – the Rhineland, Hesse, Bavaria. They didn’t have to stick together at all times – a few days as a family, then one of them might go elsewhere, friends would join them, then he and Clementine and little Mary would be alone again, then they would all gather round the table together – just as each of them wished, all circling around each other: a vacation, in short. A vacation, as if they had nothing to do.
At that time, Winston really did have nothing to do – apart from his work as an MP in the Lower House, where he was one of the most prolific speech-makers; and apart from writing regular columns for The Strand Magazine, the Sunday Pictorial, the Daily Mail, The Times, the Saturday Review, Answer, The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday Chronical, Sunday Dispatch, The Sunday Times, the Evening Standard, the News of the World, the Jewish Chronicle, the Daily Telegraph and a series of other English and American newspapers and magazines, sometimes two, sometimes three or four articles per week (an MP’s salary could be described as symbolic, and not even just measured against the Churchills’ lifestyle. Winston had lost a significant part of his fortune in the Wall Street Crash, but wasn’t willing to make even the slightest cutback in his and his family’s lifestyle, so he had come to rely on his income as a columnist – a “paid hack”, as he said self-deprecatingly, though he also said it with pride, probably knowing that his articles earned him more than double the prime minister’s salary); and apart from completing an apprenticeship as a bricklayer and, together with his master Harry Whitbread, building a sixty-five-foot-long wall, a guest annex, a swimming pool and a pond, raising ides and two black swans in the last of these, and planting a rose garden around it, not inferior in terms of exclusivity to His Majesty’s rose garden; and apart from “Marycot”, the brick playhouse with a fireplace and a miniature kitchen range that he had built for his youngest daughter Mary without any help. Apart from all that, he really did have nothing to do. He was on the outside. The power was inside.
He had bidden it farewell.
One morning – “in the best possible mood, a glance at the sun, a mighty sneeze, a Romeo y Julieta lit, the match extinguished between thumb and forefinger, thumb and forefinger licked, straw hat on, his trouser legs rolled up” – he “marched” (a little lopsidedly, limping as a result of the New York accident) across the damp spring grass to the elm with the split trunk, set up his easel and his little painting table and stayed there, painting, right into the evening. David Inches, the butler – “my man” – brought dinner out to him, and refilled the ice in the champagne bucket now and again. Churchill painted the landscape, which ended in a low hill not far off to the west, and from this viewpoint consisted only of grass. He painted the sky above it, and a strip of oilseed rape on the horizon. He used thinner brushes than usual; he didn’t want to finish for a long time. That day, he said, savouring the memory thirty years later, he felt like a young painter trying out oils and canvas for the first time. He forgot everything around him. He forgot himself. He forgot the landscape, too. The landscape revealed to him its true being, which was hidden not beneath its surface, but in his own heart. His own heart, he realised that day, was where Plato’s realm of ideas lay. Finally a friend’s prophesy had come true: one day he would understand that in his heart he was a painter, and on that day he would sit down at his easel to paint, just to paint, and not to distract himself.
The picture Churchill painted during those days in early March really does differ from his others; at first glance it looks like an abstract painting. Unusually for a landscape, it is painted in portrait format, and consists of three horizontal strips of colour, the middle one significantly thinner than those above and below it. There is nothing in the colours to suggest the natural quality of a landscape. Walker Pfannholz, an expert at Sotheby’s and curator of the first Churchill retrospective (which wasn’t until 1987!) describes the picture in his foreword to the catalogue as Churchill’s best, better than the artist himself believed, and reminiscent of Mark Rothko’s colour field painting, which was only developed twenty years later.
As he was painting, a worried Clementine tiptoed up to him several times. He didn’t talk when he was painting; you could watch him, if you liked, but there was nothing to hear. She studied his face. In the evenings after dinner, he made fun of the power that was playing the fool in nearby London and in the wider world, describing what he would do with Ghandi, if he had his way. There was something to hear there. Even if recently he had started holding back, not dipping his spoon so deep into history and drawing comparisons, for example, with the notorious Tipu Sultan, the eighteenth-century ruler of the Mogul Empire in Southern India, who had liked to feed citizens of the British Empire to his pet tiger. He would usually have held forth on this subject for hours, describing unimaginable cruelties, and then adding in a stage whisper that in person, this nightmarish oriental despot had been as virtuous as an angel and as peaceful as a plant – just like Mr Ghandi.
In her biography of Clementine (Clementine Churchill, London 1979), Mary Soames writes that Winston’s inhuman level of activity was a “heavy burden” for her mother. Listening to his undoubtedly blessed monologues, in which he was undoubtedly able to incorporate the spirits of all times into a single flowing argument, deflecting or avoiding his moods, which undoubtedly had something of the genius about them, bracing herself against his depressive silences, stoically weathering his fits of rage – in short, watching this undoubtedly great life was no less difficult than living it, because there was no second life – her own – alongside it. Clementine was used to reading her husband’s caprices, even when they remained “under the skin”. And she could also see his quiet despair. The colour of his face revealed a great deal. Naturally pale people have a broader palette than those with greater pigmentation. Winston’s skin was a translucent film through which the translation of excitement into blood-flow was immediately visible. And he didn’t turn a uniform red; it was always patchy. That wasn’t attractive, but it was informative, if you knew how to read his face. A reddening of the throat that gradually spread upwards, colouring his cheeks but not the area around his nose and mouth, indicated anger. When his ears were glowing but the rest of his face remained unremarkable, it was impatience; there usually followed a contemptuous remark that would silence the person who had annoyed him for the next hour. If the skin around his eyes was a deathly grey, the interpreter knew her husband was offended. A moist forehead with a bluish pallor meant exhaustion, which, while it didn’t stem the flow of speech, did churn it up, so that the speaker sometimes lost himself in conditional and consecutive clauses and never found his way back to the main part of the sentence. A noticeable reddening of the lips hinted that his mood was on the point of improving, and a jolly evening lay ahead, with interludes of silliness and more alcohol than usual. She paid attention to the rhythm and the syntactical patterns of his speech, to the idiosyncratic hums and haws, which were the most reliable indicator of whether her husband was comfortable in his own skin. Gestures and facial expressions also revealed a great deal. How he walked. The angle of his neck. How much he stooped. Whether he lifted his feet enough to avoid shuffling, or if he shuffled. How shiny or dull his fingernails were. Whether the belt of his dressing gown was wound or knotted, or if the ends dragged on the floor. Clementine had accustomed herself to checking every one of these indicators at every hour of the day and night and, if necessary, taking precautions.
22
On the other hand, if the face that was so prone to blotchiness and colouration remained uniformly white for a prolonged period, it could mean that the dog had broken out of his kennel.
> Clementine hid behind the elm with the split trunk and studied her husband. And for the first time, she didn’t know how to read the signs. Experience told her that steady movements, without a recognisable rhythm, could also hint at a depressive mood. Winston was painting, and whistling softly to himself. Impossible: there was nothing he detested more than whistling. He was in a good mood, there was no doubt about that. She asked David Inches for his opinion. The butler, who was the second-best reader of these clues on the estate, confirmed her impression: “I’ve never seen him in a better mood,” he said. And then he added: “But perhaps ‘good’ isn’t precisely it, M’lady. Even-tempered, I think, is the right expression.”
But Winston’s face was uniformly white, and his movements were steady. And his smile was a faraway smile.
She searched the house, checking that the guns were where they should be. She found her husband’s gun loaded. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. She unloaded it and hid the bullets. The .32 Webley Scott revolver and the .45 Colt were in their cases, and there was nothing to suggest that anyone had touched them since her last inspection. She set her alarm clock for four in the morning; that was the time Winston went to bed. She visited him in his bedroom, lay down beside him, stroked his hairless belly, which was even broader when he was lying down, and lifted one side of his eye mask to see if he was asleep. He said nothing; merely wound a lock of her hair around his forefinger. She laid her ear on his chest. Listened. She had read that depressive or comatose people had a heartbeat like a metronome. Winston’s heartbeat was regular, peaceful, and sometimes irregular. The next day she took out the medicine chest. Found nothing unusual. As she had expected. When they were young, they had often talked about suicide, in a matter-of-fact tone, as if suicide was an ethnological phenomenon, only to be observed in a particular race to which they did not belong. And they had pondered how, if they did belong to this race, they would go about it. Clementine preferred the bloodier options, while Winston favoured poison. In death, she told him, she wouldn’t care about aesthetics and discretion. “Well, I do,” he replied. She didn’t believe him. She found the fact that he was lying to her alarming. Winston would shoot himself. He wouldn’t even consider anything else. She told herself she should be shocked by such thoughts. But she wasn’t shocked.
The next evening Robert J.G. Boothby and Brendan Bracken came to visit. They were both part of his regular audience. Winston called them friends. Clementine called them his regular audience – partly with the aim of detracting from their intimidating individuality. Bracken, for instance, was cultivating a hairstyle you could see from the moon. They were among the few people who had not turned away from the former Chancellor of the Exchequer after he had been forced into a corner by Stanley Baldwin. Boothby and Bracken saw Winston as the leader of the Conservative Party, whether he was officially in charge of it or not.
They stayed until long after midnight, eating the crab mayonnaise that Sir Abe Bailey had brought back from South Africa and the goose liver pâté that one of Clementine’s cousins had brought back from France, drinking champagne and scotch, and listening to Winston hold forth on photography – which he did in an unusually quiet voice, leaving space for questions, leaving space for himself to think. He said that photography always reaches us in the past tense, and that makes it the saddest of all the arts: it speaks of a moment that will never return. “Painting says: it is; photography says: it was”. Photography, he said, was leading painting into a crisis, just as film had done to theatre, and talking pictures to silent film. Nor was literature immune to such a crisis, he said, for who could guarantee that one day humanity wouldn’t turn away from the written and back to the spoken word – what were a few thousand years of writing against hundreds of thousands of years when people would gather round to sit and listen to a man if he was eloquent enough. Everything was subject to change: every art, every office, politics, life, emotions, passions. No moment ever returned.
“I know it’s a rather banal insight. But thinking it is different from understanding it. I only understood it when I thought about photography as I was painting.”
This was all very, very sad. But then again it wasn’t. Doing the same thing over and over again – that would be true madness.
As Clementine was seeing the guests to their car, where their chauffeur was asleep, Boothby said: “He’s happy. Am I correct?”
Clementine nodded.
“So that’s what he looks like when he’s happy. It’s a sight that takes some getting used to. Happy or contented?”
What was the difference, Clementine asked.
“I’ve never seen him in such a good mood,” Boothby marvelled.
“Is that the right expression? One can say that. Can’t one?”
“Inches thinks he’s even-tempered. I’d say he’s right. That’s better than ‘in a good mood’. It lasts longer.”
“And I thought politics was as addictive as opium.”
“That only applies to someone who devotes his life to it,” Bracken informed him, before asking Clementine: “What’s he doing with himself?”
“He’s painting.”
“I thought that was dangerous.”
“The pictures are different from what he used to paint. And he whistles while he paints.”
“He whistles? Good Lord! What’s he whistling?”
“Tiptoe through the Tulips. He hums and whistles it. First one, then the other.”
“Where does he know it from?”
“Sarah sings it to him.”
A great worry weighed on Clementine.
23
The first of two extant letters from Churchill to Chaplin dates from this period. Churchill alludes to the worry that was weighing on him, and gives the impression that of all his cares, the one that weighed heaviest was not, as all the biographies claim, concern about his loss of power in the House of Commons and the Conservative Party, or the fear that he might have reached the end of his political career and would die of boredom. Nor was it, as Clementine thought when she wrote to her sister-in-law Gwendoline of “our first concern” (my emphasis), anxiety about their son Randolph. And it wasn’t the marriage on which Diana was embarking, with a man she didn’t love – didn’t even know. He was most worried about his daughter Sarah. Other sources confirm this impression. He told Brendan Bracken several times that “my mother’s blood flows in Sarah’s veins”. Bracken knew what Winston meant by that. He mentioned it in a letter to a friend, and evidently the friend also knew what was meant by it. “Poor Sarah,” the friend wrote back. “Poor Winston, poor Clementine!”
Sarah was now eighteen years old and, in her father’s view, much too interested in men; Bracken describes her in his typically blunt manner as “man-mad”. She was not beautiful in a conventional sense, her face was too narrow, her hair too flaming, her teeth a little too long, too white – but even as a young woman she exuded a sexual desire and a sexual allure that made men flock around her at any gathering, and she wasn’t afraid to show her feelings. In this, she was like her grandmother, Jennie.
Winston’s mother, Jeanette “Jennie” Churchill, née Jerome, was the daughter of an American businessman and speculator, and one of the most beautiful women of her day. She and her husband had not been a good match, people said after his premature death: heartfelt passion had met with an overly cool, calculating head. Arthur James Balfour (prime minister from 1902 to 1905) characterised the couple in a similar way: “Lord Randolph was a fanatic, and Jennie a romantic. His passion burned up love; hers burned up reason.” As a widow, Jennie led a promiscuous life, conducting countless affairs with men including King Edward VII, King Milan of Serbia, and the Austrian diplomat Count Charles Kinsky. The Imperial Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the most faithful of faithful husbands, met her in Bad Kissingen and fell so deeply in love with Jennie, who was forty years his junior, that he left in a mad rush before he did “something he might regret”, as he confided to his biographer Lothar Bucher. The write
r and politician Lord D’Abernon, one of the most influential European statesmen of the inter-war years, raved about her. “More of the panther than the woman in her look,” he said, “but with a cultivated intelligence unknown to the jungle.” Prominent men were not her only conquests; there was no element of snobbery in her sexual desire. By her own reckoning, she had more than two hundred lovers. After the death of Winston’s father she married twice more; her last husband was twenty-five years younger than she was, and five years younger than her son Winston. She was sixty-six.
Winston was far from prudish; in aristocratic circles it was not customary to link sexuality and morality too closely. He admired his mother, writing to her at the age of twenty-four: “There is no doubt that the two of us, you and I, are thoughtless in the same way – spendthrift and extravagant.” By the latter he meant: without “an over-developed sense of morality”. He wanted to be like his father, and he wanted to be like his mother. But, as he concluded mournfully, he lacked all the necessary qualities to be like his father, and he lacked “the insatiable joy in life” to be like his mother, as he put it in one of his autobiographical columns (which, like a dozen other similar texts, he never published). The notorious vitality of the “Renaissance man” was not joy in life, but, as he writes in the same place, a “discipline against death”. The truth was: sexuality repulsed him – though not in a bourgeois, moralistic sense. He even tolerated braggarts, though he himself had an almost monk-like existence. He remembered his mother as a driven woman; the “insatiable joy” he spoke of was a euphemism. He knew she was unhappy; she suffered from her desires as from an addiction. And he also knew that she had considered taking her own life no less often than he had.
When he first employed his very private private secretary, William Knott, he told him: “I weep a terrible great deal. You will have to get used to it.” When he thought about his father, he often started to cry – and when he thought about his mother, he always did.
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