by D. J. Taylor
Not wishing to intrude upon Your Majesty’s valuable time …
Wanting to suggest that if Your Majesty will submit the matter to his kind consideration …
Sometimes the King wonders how the people who write these things actually envisage him. Christ’s representative on earth? A benign but somewhat distant uncle? A managing director? It is difficult to tell.
The wind bangs against the windows, which rattle in their frames. At Osborne, on the Isle of Wight, there was a particular window in which his great-grandmother used to sit to command a view of the terrace. He can still summon up her image—a kind of compound of widow’s weeds, black bombazine, that curiously indignant face—but it is all nearly forty years ago and there are other faces come to superimpose themselves.
His correspondents—those respectful housewives, those retired majors of infantry, those dotty vicars, those unemployed men from Salford—are writing to him about the war. A few of the letters are openly pro-German. They remind him of his ancestral ties and the Bolshevik menace. Others wonder why England should be involving herself in a foreign quarrel. There are people who want him to take a lead—a word from Your Majesty would, I am convinced, snuff out this unhappy conflagration, a brigadier has written in green-ink letters half an inch high on the headed paper of the Harrogate Conservative Club. On impulse he takes down a copy of the Army List from the shelf above his desk and riffles through it, but there is no sign of the Harrogate brigadier. Not all the people who petition him, alas, are authentic. Sometimes the ingratiating town clerk and the aspiring Lord Lieutenant can be traced back to mental institutions and reformatory common rooms. It is all very odd.
Just now there is a rustle of movement at the room’s further end: not made by the wind, this time, but by Mr Nichols readjusting his trouser-leg with one hand as the other sets down a teacup. The King is not quite sure what he thinks of Mr Nichols, whose fourth or even fifth visit this is. He is a tallish, cherubic, and impossibly juvenile-looking man of forty who writes sprightly newspaper articles and books about his country garden and at one point—so the people who assemble these budgets of intelligence assure him—used to contribute to Cochran’s revues. Other details have been vouchsafed about Mr Nichols’s private life, none of them exactly creditable. These, curiously enough, the King thinks he can imagine for himself.
He has a memory of Mr Nichols in his salad days, staying with his comptroller, Sir Sidney Greville, a gracious old bachelor with a weakness for pretty young men, and having to be kept out of sight whenever Queen Mary came to call. In fact, the King is relaxed about homosexuals. It takes all sorts. Wallis was always amused by them. Besides, theatrical people—artists, writers—are known to be that way inclined. His father, on the other hand, would not have given Mr Nichols the time of day.
‘May I pour you a cup of tea, sir?’ Mr Nichols asks, with the immense, self-conscious solicitude that is his signature mark, but the King shakes his head. He is still thinking about Hitler, Kristallnacht, the quarter of a million marching men practising their manoeuvres beyond the French frontier. There are people known to him—people at whose houses he has been entertained—who regard Hitler as an instrument of destiny, the saviour of Europe.
The newsreel films that come back from Nuremberg and other ceremonies always strike him as triumphalist and un-English, though admirable in their discipline and fervour. He has dined several times with Herr von Ribbentrop, now returned to Berlin, and found him conceited. Hitler he thinks slightly mad, obsessed, an ex-corporal with a grievance, but such people are all the rage these days. Mussolini, the Italian, is an hysteric. Stalin he can never forgive for Grand Duchess Olga, Grand Duchess Tatiana, Grand Duchess Marie, and Grand Duchess Anastasia—four little girls in muslin dresses and white bonnets who came to Barton the year before his grandfather died, only to be shot by the Bolsheviks in 1917.
On the drawing-room wall at Fort Belvedere there is a photograph of the two families together on the terrace. The Tsar sits next to grandpapa. His father has his arm around Grand Duchess Marie’s slender waist. The girls called him ‘Cousin David.’ One does not forget such things.
‘Then of course there was Hartnell’s party, sir, at which I believe you were present,’ Nichols suggests. They are talking, or rather Nichols is talking, about the entertainments of the 1920s: parties in Sussex orchards and discarded champagne corks bobbing gently downstream. Just now people seem to be very interested in the ’20s. The vastness of the gulf between Norman Hartnell’s parties and Mussolini does not seem to have occurred to them.
But the past is a bran tub, he thinks, filled with nothing but bran. Half the royal families in Europe are living in bed-sitting rooms in Biarritz and Menton. There is no going back. Grand Duchess Olga and her sisters had long, untethered hair that hung down the seams of their muslin frocks. Even here everything is quietly stagnating, or rolling away like the champagne corks to the distant sea. His mother is at Badminton, quartered on the Duke of Beaufort. There are tales of her going out to tea in the neighbourhood and demanding to be given antiques that take her fancy. Bertie, Elizabeth, and the girls are at Sandringham: he has seen none of them for months.
‘No,’ he says suddenly—it is the first time he has opened his mouth for five minutes—‘I don’t think I was ever at one of Hartnell’s parties,’ and Mr Nichols bobs his neatly brilliantined head.
‘I have no doubt, sir, that you have a better memory than I,’ he gamely concedes. Mr Nichols is very punctilious about his ‘sirs’ and ‘Your Majestys.’ The newspaper columns he writes are full of deferential accounts of the duchesses he has danced with and the celebrated people he has encountered at dinner.
In his time the King has met any number of literary men. Once when he was on a tour of the West Country they sent him to see Thomas Hardy. It was not a success. Hardy’s small-talk was limited. He spent most of his time upsetting and then rearranging the fire-irons. The King wonders if there is anything that connects Mr Nichols, in his natty three-piece suit, with a Charvet handkerchief rising from its breast-pocket, to the little bald man by his frugal hearth, and thinks that probably there is not. But then people, he assumes, are all too ready to confound the expectations one has of them, or there would not be ex-corporals in the Chancelleries of Europe. It is all very strange.
The wind is dying down again now. The creaks from the window-frames have become less ominous. Outside in the Mall the plane trees quiver, as if gripped by an electrical current. Mr Nichols is drinking his tea, casting appreciative little glances around the room as he does so. His delight in the honour being done to him is almost tangible. People’s reactions to the fact of the royal presence differ enormously, the King has found. Some are abased, others beatific. A few carry their refusal to be impressed to immoderate lengths. Women are the worst. In America the senators’ wives say extraordinary things, the confusions of their inner lives laid bare in a sentence or two.
Mr Nichols, he sees, is admiring the framed photographs in which the room abounds. Some of these are family portraits going back to the age of crinolines and side-whiskers—there is a terrific one of his great-grandfather ponderously astride a donkey—but one or two of them are representations of himself brought back from foreign trips: as ‘Chief Morning Star’ in a Red Indian feather-bonnet in Calgary; inspecting the Buddha’s tooth at Kandy. There was a time in his life when he did nothing except tour foreign countries. He has difficulty remembering in what year and to what effect.
Mr Nichols has given up on the ’20s, Norman Hartnell’s parties, treasure-hunts, and fêtes champêtres, and begun to talk about Captain Ramsay. The King knows about Captain Ramsay. He has met him at garden parties and read of his doings in The Times, and thinks him slightly unbalanced. Most of these people are: Mosley in his ridiculous high-necked sweaters; Admiral Domvile with his portrait of the Führer on the mantelpiece next to his daughter’s riding trophies. There is a strain of fanaticism in upper-class
English life that never quite goes away. The letters he receives confirm this.
The world is in the grip of a Zionist conspiracy. The Aryan race is threatened. There are Jews, Freemasons, and Bolsheviks working in harness to defraud the Briton of his birthright. The King, who is a Freemason himself, does not seriously believe any of this, but he can see why certain people might do so. As for the war, to which Captain Ramsay and his friends are so strenuously opposed, he thinks they have a point.
None of this, though, solves the problem of what to do with Mr Nichols, in his natty dove-grey suit, cup of tea now balanced by his elbow, who clearly sees himself as an emissary between the forces of reason and their Godhead, a forger of alliances between like-minded people whom only an absurd series of protocols keeps apart.
Just now Mr Nichols is talking about an attaché at the German Embassy in Dublin, and certain pieces of intelligence that may or may not be conveyed through him; but this is dangerous territory, and both of them know it. ‘Mr Nichols,’ he begins to say, ‘I really cannot …’
And Mr Nichols stops, almost in mid-sentence, with the ghost of a smile dodging around the corners of his mouth, as if to say that he knows, understands, sympathises, assumes that what the King sincerely believes cannot be decently uttered. The King’s private secretary has his doubts about Mr Nichols, whom he believes to be a demoralising influence, but in the matter of private invitations a king may do as he pleases.
Perhaps, Mr Nichols now proposes, the wave of his hand partly obscuring the picture of Chief Morning Star in his headdress, he would like to meet Captain Ramsay? But the King shakes his head. The problem of kingship, he thinks, is that your neutrality, in theory impregnable, is in practice liable to endless compromise. It is one of the things—the only thing—that Wallis never understood. He can see her now, demanding why, if he is a king and an emperor, he should be compelled to dine with the Duke and Duchess of Westminster rather than the people he really wants to see.
The ‘unsoliciteds’ are still strewn all over his desk. He wonders how many of them are from fifth columnists. There is a woman in Northumberland who writes to him every week alleging that all the newspaper proprietors in England are Jews. What do you do with such people? And what do you do with Captain Ramsay and his kind?
For some reason he thinks of Hardy again, rattling his fire-irons. One of the questions he had asked at Max Gate, intended to settle an argument with his mother, was whether Hardy had written Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But it is possible to envy Hardy, who died before the age of dictators, lofted flags, marching men, and Lebensraum, and whose books—he has looked into them since—are not about the neuroses of the modern world but the amours of peasants and elemental tragedies.
‘Nichols,’ he says unexpectedly—they have left off the Dublin embassy and are talking about the proposed peace petition, a subject in which he thinks he can at least take an unpartisan interest—‘did you ever meet Hardy?’
And Mr Nichols looks, for the first time in their dealings, faintly surprised, and says that no, he never did, but keeps the gleam of enquiry in his eye so that the King is compelled to recount the story of his trip to Dorchester and the conversation about Tess.
‘Rather an odd chap,’ he says, and Mr Nichols smiles, back on more familiar territory—the plain man discountenanced in the presence of art—and says that literary people very often are odd, buttressing this statement with anecdotes about Shaw, Wells, and Edith Sitwell, each of whom he has apparently met and sparred with. There is no end to Mr Nichols’s repertoire. He has met everyone—President Coolidge, Dame Melba, Noël Coward—and has a story about each of them.
The wind is dying away now. There are equerries at the door, the sound of movement in the corridor. He suspects that Mr Nichols would like an invitation to luncheon, but Mr Nichols will be disappointed. He wonders for a moment what Mr Nichols’s motives are in all this. Is he one of those courtiers manqués, who get a kick out of the whole royal apparatus, its grave-faced attendants, its damask draperies, its bizarre embodiments of the myth of Albion? Or is he simply a patriotic citizen doing his best in difficult circumstances?
As with all human motivation, it is difficult to tell. There were people who thought Wallis was a gold-digging Yankee seductress. They were, of course, wrong, but he can see why they might have thought it so. Mr Nichols is looking at him expectantly, like a dog who refuses to believe its afternoon walk is at an end, and that no further sticks will be thrown. The King can see no attraction in the life he leads, but no doubt Mr Nichols regards it differently.
The really dreadful thing about the past, he thinks, is that it can never be subdued. The patterns it makes are quite unforeseeable. The little Russian girls spoke English, but of an impossibly arch and archaic kind, as if it had been translated from the French by a Victorian governess. Their servants were extraordinary—old babushkas, fled from the story books. He can see Grand Duchess Marie’s hair escaping down the back of her neck as she sits in the crook of his father’s arm, as if she stands in the room before him now.
Mr Nichols, hat in hand, is getting up to leave. And then a thought occurs to him, so that the spectre of the Russian royal family on the terrace at Barton momentarily recedes and he is left with this impossibly juvenile-looking middle-aged man genuflecting on his carpet. ‘Mr Nichols,’ he says, and Mr Nichols waits, looking so thoroughly poised and affairé that it is rather comical to behold, ‘Mr Nichols, there is one task with which you might be able to help me.’
And Mr Nichols listens, fascinated, while a swarm of footmen buzzes into the room to abstract its tea-things and rearrange its furniture, while outside the wind falls away to nothing, the grey clouds gather, and the plane trees in the Mall stand motionless in the bleak, early December light.
Chapter 9
Bishop’s Park
In this part of London the gardens had not been dug up for vegetables, and the view from the upper storeys of the houses that adjoined the park was the same as it had always been. Standing at one of these high windows you could see canopies of evergreens, a children’s playground, picturesque lozenges of bright green grass, a line of elms flanking the tow-path: none of them precisely demarcated—at one point the grass ran as far as the water’s edge—but giving the impression of order, design, meaning wrought out of herbaceous chaos that might otherwise have risen up and blocked the thoroughfare to Putney Bridge.
Further off, beyond the evergreens, lay the Bishop’s Palace and its walled garden, where Cynthia remembered being taken as a child for picnics. There was nothing reassuring about this familiarity. People already talked about ‘before the war’ as if the phrase was a guillotine, severing at a stroke any connection that the past might have with the present. This gave even quite recent stretches of time an oddly phantasmal quality, the memory of it not rendered more precious but somehow soured.
In the distance, cut off by lumps of foliage or intrusions of the tide wall, the river lay quiet under weak, late-November sun. Like practically everything else in London it seemed diminished, ground-down and languid. On the Surrey side, sometimes blocked off by the Port of London Authority barges, more often than not open to view, rose much else that was recognisable: Star and Garter Mansions; the Harrods repository; the curve of the Thames as it went down to Barnes and Richmond. Again, there was no satisfaction to be got from these landmarks. In some ways an unknown landscape would have been better: less oppressive; less weighed down with personal baggage; much less frightening.
Tyler Kent’s flat was high up in a mansion block at the road’s easternmost end. The immediate view was of a rectangle of burnt-cinder tennis courts—out of commission now, with the nets folded in neat piles under tarpaulins—so that by late afternoon a vast pool of blackness seemed to extend in all directions beyond the window. Like the Duration office, it had the disadvantage of never catching the light, so that, even at midday, with the blinds drawn back and the lamps on, the
re was a sense that the people who wandered through its half-dozen rooms were faintly subterranean, struggling to find an exit route that would lead them back towards the sun, while other creatures, less keen on escape, toiled menacingly in their wake.
A previous tenant had had it refurbished in a vaguely modernist way with white-painted circular tables and chairs with supports made out of metal tubing. To this Tyler Kent had added such refinements as a life-sized American eagle, moulded in brass, that sat on a plinth inside the front door, framed maps of Montana and Wyoming showing the progress of the Indian wars, and a portrait of Babe Ruth. Otherwise, nothing in the decor offered any clue to his personality, unless it was that the whole scheme, with its clanging juxtapositions and its discordant notes, was supposed to reflect the coming together of two worlds that his presence in London might have been thought to symbolise.
Privately, Cynthia reckoned that this sort of calculation was slightly beyond him. Apart from this it was quite a nice place to spend time, convenient for bus and underground routes, and with several radiators.
Three months into the conflict, the newspapers had started to run surveys under the heading what has the war done to you? The people who responded to them wrote of the inconveniences of the blackout, of the privations of food rationing, of the grave uncertainties that lay ahead, of personal lives in which what had once been vague plans had been turned into hard and fast reality. Cynthia would have answered, truthfully, that the war had brought her into contact with people like Tyler Kent, a kind of person of whom she had no previous experience, and the inconsistencies of whose outlook on the world she found entirely baffling. Mrs Kirkpatrick would have looked Tyler Kent up and down, asked him a question or two about origins, antecedents, and acquaintance, and found him wanting. Possibly this was part of his attraction.