Pantheon

by Sam Bourne

  ‘Good God,’ the Master said into the telephone.

  ‘That’s right. I suspect Sir Herbert would be rather less persuadable. These Whitehall mandarins tend towards the sceptical, don’t they, Master? Professional requirement, you could say.’

  ‘You wouldn’t dare.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I? I thought you just said I was crazy. No telling what a crazy man might do. Besides, it would be very easy. Sir Herbert’s ministry is just down the road these days, isn’t it? I’m surprised you haven’t run into him at high table.’

  ‘He wouldn’t credit a word that came out of your mouth.’

  ‘Maybe not. But the suspicion would linger, wouldn’t it? Sir Herbert might eventually ask his daughter if there was any truth in what that lunatic Zennor had suggested. And, as we know, the girl is talking.’

  ‘This is blackmail of the crudest kind, James.’

  ‘You can call it what you like. Now, why not get Forsyth to fetch you a pencil and paper?’ James spelled out his demands slowly, as if Bernard Grey were a junior secretary, pad perched on her knee. He wanted a berth on the SS Santa Clara, which Hunter had just told him was due to leave Liverpool in the coming week, a US visa and a visiting research fellowship, with suitable accommodation, at Yale University. ‘None of that should give you too much trouble,’ James had added breezily. ‘And if it does, you can always give the chancellor of Oxford University a call: he used to be the foreign secretary, after all.’

  Any delay on any of his demands and the letters James had already written and stamped would be on their way to Mrs Grey and Sir Herbert in the next post. ‘And don’t try pulling strings with the Liverpool constabulary to get me arrested: I’ve left word with my new friends here at the port to post those letters for me if I don’t come back and collect them.’ That last threat was a pure lie, but the white-haired social reformer and distinguished scholar had not risked proving it.

  The calculus of interest, Harry used to call it. ‘Almost mathematical. You can work it out like an equation.’ That’s what James had done, reasoning that Bernard Grey would soon see that acceding to James’s demands was actually in his own best interests. Given what James knew, wasn’t it obvious that the Master would want him out of the way?

  Chapter Thirteen

  On board the SS Santa Clara, somewhere in the North Atlantic. One week later

  All around him, people were vomiting. Some were puking directly over the rail and into the ocean; others, apparently paralyzed by the horror of the experience, simply emptied their guts where they stood, three, four or five times.

  James stood a distance away, wearing an expression that, had anyone noticed it, would have appeared unnervingly serene. He was so relieved to be on this ship, he could not care less about a swell so big it was sending waves over the ship, crashing onto this deck and several below. This sea, no matter how rough, was preferable to dry land because it could do for him what static, stationary terra firma could not: take him closer to America and to Florence.

  During that brief sojourn in Liverpool he wrote to Florence several times a day, writing and rewriting, eventually settling on a bland few lines that scarcely expressed a fraction of what he was feeling, before addressing the air-mailed letters with a simple, hopeful ‘care of Yale University’. Now, on the Santa Clara, he carried on the habit, thinking of his wife and child in every minute of every hour. During the long, uneventful hours of smooth passage, during the meandering conversations with the enemy aliens on board, the Germans and Italians, some of whom had been resident in Britain for decades, set now for deportation to Canada — including one watery-eyed old man originally from Frankfurt who made a point of saluting when referring to ‘King George’ — when the sun came up in the morning and when he finally pulled the covers over him in the darkness of his tiny bunk, from the start of the day to its end, he thought of his new, small family and how he had come to lose them.

  The long, empty hours allowed him to go over and over the strange sequence of events that had begun with him sculling on the Thames one bright July morning and had him sailing across the Atlantic less than a week later. He examined in minute detail those last twenty-four hours in Oxford, concluding that little of it had been accidental. Grey had admitted that Florence’s departure had been a team effort, that the Greys and their unnamed co-conspirators had worked together to ensure she would get away safely. It followed, then, that little or nothing about that day was as it had first seemed. He reconsidered it all in the light of Grey’s confession. That morning visit from Virginia Grey and her kind-hearted suggestion that he visit the Bodleian Library? Surely a delaying tactic, designed to gobble up crucial hours when he might otherwise have been en route to Liverpool. Similar logic surely explained why someone — Rosemary Hyde perhaps? — had intercepted and moved the postcard from his letter box to his college pigeon-hole, thereby keeping James in the dark just long enough to deny him the chance to catch Florence and Harry before they set sail. (He wondered why Rosemary had not simply stolen the card altogether: perhaps some curious sense of honour prevented her, or whoever it was, depriving a man of a farewell message from his wife.) How elaborate had this strategy of delay become? He half-suspected the half-blind Magnus Hook had staged their little collision on Parks Road on purpose.

  When he was not replaying the immediate past he was flagellating himself with the possible future. What if he had got out just in time, abandoning England days or weeks before a German invasion? It was a contemptible act, he told himself, an act of desertion if not outright treachery. He had taken up arms to defend Spain, for heaven’s sake, and yet had not been prepared to stand and fight for his own country. He had deserted England in its direst hour. He was a rat jumping off a sinking ship and he hated himself for it. Who cares if he had not passed the army’s bloody medical? There would have been something he could do. What if Nazi troops tried to march on London, the way Franco’s men had sought to break into Madrid? James could have acted as a trainer, teaching the Local Defence Volunteers how to do what he, Harry Knox and the XII Internationals had done on the Madrid university campus. There might be battles to defend the coast, shootouts on Southwold Beach, trench warfare in Eastbourne — and he could have helped. So what if a piece of paper classified him as a D1? He would have been able to hold a gun and shoot, more effectively than most of the codgers in the LDV anyway. Better than Bernard bloody Grey at any rate. The British resistance would need every man they could get, especially those with fighting experience. And he would be far away, safely across the Atlantic thinking only of himself.

  And yet he had not hesitated to board the Santa Clara. His prime mission was to find Florence and Harry. It didn’t feel like a selfish act, even though his own need to see them again was overwhelming. It also felt like a duty, a sacred obligation. He loved his country and was ready to make any sacrifice for it. But he felt exactly the same way about his family. Even though both had rejected him.

  He turned such thoughts over in his mind for hours at a stretch. Some, especially among the crew, lamented the tedium but James had no such complaint. One gift of a Quaker childhood: a high boredom threshold. Besides, on at least one occasion during that ten-day voyage, there was a moment of high drama.

  One came after the Santa Clara had been at sea for a little over four days. They had already bade farewell to their warship escort and were now officially unprotected and on their own. The powers that be had decided that, at this distance, they were beyond the reach of the long arm of the enemy. A crewman who had become something of a pal to James — a Pole called Andrzej, early twenties and a fanatical anti-communist — had already tipped him the wink that something was up, that there had been an outbreak of alarmed activity on the bridge. He spoke to James as a fellow soldier, once he had heard about his combat experience in Spain, granting him a respect which surprised James. He had assumed that Andrzej would regard him as a dirty communist for having taken up arms against Franco. But, as he slowly understood, there is a bond t
hat unites men who have seen war and which separates them from those that have not. Far from providing James with any smug satisfaction, it reminded him that in the current, essential conflict he was a mere spectator.

  Thanks to Andrzej’s tip-off, James was not surprised when he heard the order ring out over the ship’s address system, instructing everyone on board either to go down below or to remain stationary on deck. There was to be no visible movement.

  Despite the order, James stayed close to Andrzej, watching as he removed the cover from the fixed gun on the starboard side of the ship. There was a great hush, as if the whole ship were watching and waiting, and then the grinding, wheezing sound of the boilers cranked up to maximum effort, so that the ship might forge ahead at speed. Still, Andrzej kept his hands on that gun. James was carrying his lifejacket but, unlike the handful of other passengers who remained frozen still on deck rather than risk movement by going down into the ship, bravado prevented him putting it on. All they could do was wait, hoping that somehow the bridge had been mistaken, that there were no enemy subs in this area, that the threat, if it had existed, had passed.

  And then, at great speed, there was a foaming, hissing sound below. James leaned over the railing just in time to see a torpedo passing, just yards astern of the ship. Seconds later, there came another of these ‘tin fish’, this one passing within six feet of the hull, certainly no more.

  There was a massive jolt, the ship lurching to one side — but it had not been hit. Andrzej explained that they had been saved by the torpedo having turned upright, rather than horizontal, at the last moment. James imagined such a feat, like a circus seal standing on its hind paws, and gave thanks for such good luck. His gratitude, he realized once he felt it, was not that his own life had been saved — but that the life of Florence’s husband and Harry’s father had been spared. Did that make any sense? It did to him.

  Suddenly, hands on the lower decks were hurling white canisters overboard, which exploded with a judder that made the spine shake, as if the liner had just hit a rock. ‘Depth charges,’ Andrzej explained.

  The Pole waited a little longer, concluding that the U-boat was ‘too chicken’ to surface, doubtless because the Germans wrongly believed the Santa Clara was still under armed escort. He replaced the gun cover and went to check down below. James looked at his hands and saw that his fist was still balled around the lifejacket he had been holding since the order had first come across the ship’s address system. His knuckles were white. As he relaxed his fingers, he saw his palm was shiny with sweat, the strap of the jacket where he had clutched it drenched.

  Two more days passed before they saw icebergs, the first glimpse of something solid after nearly a week at sea. James imagined how Harry — who had surely passed through this same stretch of water a few days earlier — had reacted on seeing these majestic, almost mythical structures: mountains of glistening white ice, the brilliance of the white rendered dazzling by the bright sunshine. Some had broken up, their fragments, mammoth in themselves, taking on all kinds of shapes in the imagination. He pictured Florence pointing at these very shards, comparing that one to a shark, the other to a submarine and that one there to a fairytale castle. In the hour after he first saw them, James opened up his notebook and wrote a poem for his son: ‘The Iceberg Dragon’. He doubted it was much good as literature. But he liked imagining the moment he would read it to Harry, picturing the boy laughing at the story of the hapless seagull who had landed on what it thought was ice only to find himself lost in the fiery mouth of a dragon.

  They had been at sea eight long days when they first saw land ahead, passing eventually through the straits of Belle Isle and then along the coasts of Labrador and Newfoundland. The St Lawrence estuary was gorgeous, as stunning as any of the Highland lochs: tall mountains, broken up by the occasional clearing on the wooded slopes, containing a small settlement of twenty or so wooden huts or white cottages, with a church spire towering above them.

  It was beautiful but James Zennor had no time for beauty. As the ship finally came to dock in Quebec, ten days after it had grunted and groaned its way out of the mouth of the Mersey, he was impatient to set his foot on the North American continent and begin the final stage of his journey. Only the Canadian border with the United States and the train journey south to New Haven stood in his way now. Soon he would walk into Yale and be reunited with his wife and child.

  Chapter Fourteen

  London

  She had turned her back on him now, the clear signal that at last she was sated. He looked closely at her skin, paler than he was used to in the American girls he had had. Not that she was a girl; twenty years too late for that. Lady was not quite right either, though that would be the word most would use for the wife of an eminent Tory MP. But during the last hour and a half she had behaved like the most outlandish whore.

  Taylor Hastings let his eye rest on a dark spot beneath her right shoulder blade. What was that? A birthmark? A mole? A beauty spot? It was far from the only one. In fact, now that he looked closely, there were little imperfections all over. The skin on her arms was not taut; the traces of past pregnancies were visible on her hips and thighs. Very different to the young flesh he was used to. And yet he didn’t mind. The opposite: her age excited him, somehow confirming with every caress that he was sleeping with another man’s wife.

  She was breathing heavily now, falling into a deep, exhausted sleep. She had tired his body, as always, but she had not been able to still his mind. The dinner had ended more than three hours ago but the thrill of it remained fresh.

  Back in the States they always liked to talk about big names and he had grown up among plenty of them at St Albans and Princeton. But no names as big as this. He smiled at the thought of who had steered the evening’s conversation, acting as informal chairman: only the fifth Duke of Wellington! How do you like that, Pa? That beats the Deputy Undersecretary of State for Near-East Paperclips?

  He had sat next to a Lord Redesdale, father of the famous Mitford girls. ‘You ought to meet my daughter,’ he had said to Taylor within minutes of shaking hands. ‘Not Decca, she’s mad of course. Red as a bullfighter’s cape. But Diana. She’s sound.’

  He had counted several other lords — though, he had learned tonight, you were meant to call them ‘peers’. There was a Galloway and an Agnew, though he suspected one of them was a ‘sir’. Or rather a knight.

  Who cared if it was confusing? It was magnificent. Such lustre gathered in one room: newspaper writers and publishers of pamphlets trading ideas with aristocrats and eminent industrialists. This, Taylor reflected, must be how a London salon in the eighteenth century would have been: men of stature seated around a fine polished table, the room heavy with wealth and pedigree.

  But not, Taylor Hastings noticed, confidence. Anna’s husband, Reginald Rawls Murray, member of parliament for some far-off part of Scotland and animating genius behind the Right Club, was energetic in his efforts to lift the spirits, but the faces gathered around him remained stubbornly sombre.

  ‘Churchill has us on the run,’ was a remark offered more than once. The arrival of the new prime minister and the departure of Chamberlain, humiliated over the failure in Norway, represented a grievous, perhaps terminal blow to their cause: the campaign for what they called ‘an honourable, negotiated peace’. Now the nation’s leading warmonger was in Downing Street, seizing on Hitler’s march through the Low Countries and recent conquest of France as proof positive of what he had said all along: that Germany was intent on global domination and could not be appeased, only defeated.

  But Churchill’s threat was much more direct than that. He had wasted no time in rounding up and jailing suspected Nazi sympathizers under the dreaded Defence Regulation 18B, a move which had badly depleted the ranks of the Right Club. Around the table tonight were those whose status and rank made them harder fish to catch or who had been careful to present themselves as ‘anti-war’ rather than ‘pro-Hitler’. But tonight, in private and among
friends, there had been no such need to conceal their true views.

  Murray had set the tone early enough when, in a bid to lighten the mood, he had asked the assembled to join him in a chorus of the country’s much-loved, if unofficial, national anthem. He began humming the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, but then, when it came time to sing, he bade the table hush while he could present his new, alternative lyric: ‘ Land of dope and Jewry Land that once was free All the Jew boys praise thee Whilst they plunder thee.’

  There had been a roar of approval and a banging on the table, spreading a wide smile across Murray’s face. Encouraged, he went on: ‘ Land of Jewish finance Fooled by Jewish lies In press and books and movies While our birthright dies.’

  That, though, was one of the few moments of good cheer. The consensus that night held that the Jews had won yet again, dragging the country into war — and that to suggest seeking peace while Churchill was hailing the country’s ‘finest hour’ and speaking of a ‘Battle of Britain’ was doomed, if not suicidal. The phoney war was over; the real war was on in earnest. To stand against it now was to be branded a traitor.

  All of which contributed to a gloomy mood in the Russian Tea Room. Murray was the only man present who remained both jolly and overt in the expression of his views, confident both that the room contained only those who could be trusted and that the privilege of his seat in parliament would protect him from the loathsome Regulation 18B.

  The rest threw out various general observations of disgust and despair. ‘For years, all that we value has been in peril,’ said one man with a title, who might have been an earl or a viscount, a word which Taylor remembered came with a silent ‘s’, but whose suit looked surprisingly shabby. He rattled off the list: the Empire, Christian beliefs, England as the land of freeborn Englishmen and of freeborn Englishmen alone. ‘All of that has long been under threat — from the Bolsheviks, from foreigners, from the masters of international finance.’ The last phrase delivered with a knowing look. ‘But this war will destroy it, once and for all.’