by D. J. Taylor
Cynthia is untroubled by this detachment. She likes Simon, the silent RAMC captain, and she is prepared to put up with Theresa Sinclair-Haddon who, she is pretty sure, pinched a gold-tipped fountain pen from her bag in 1935, long before the era of Chamberlain, before lofted torches in market squares and marching men.
Lucy is talking about Roger, whose studiousness, not to mention his military responsibilities, is apparently a trial to her. ‘He started talking to me the other day about Maimonides. Whoever’s heard of Maimonides?’
‘Now, I’ve heard of Maimonides,’ Tyler Kent says, looking up from the menu card, but somehow this intervention, however theoretically reasonable, is not what the company wants. They want an atmosphere of good fellowship, in which alien boarders can be repelled, and philosophy is the smile on a dog.
It is about half-past seven: early for Soho. There are anti-aircraft guns a mile away in Hyde Park and ambulances rushing down Shaftesbury Avenue. The restaurant turns out to be one of those in which chorus girls and nightclub hostesses come to recruit themselves before the real fun of the evening kicks in. There are six or seven of them eating frugal suppers at a long table by the window. In the half-light their faces are like death’s-heads.
Tyler Kent’s expression, as he puts down the menu card, suggests that a mistake has been made. For once the complex intelligence network that sustains his life has let him down. ‘Odd kind of things they have to eat here,’ he says.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Simon returns. There is a faint suspicion that he has not taken to Tyler Kent. ‘All looks fairly decent to me.’ His face is so finely chiselled that it looks almost greenish in the candlelight, like decaying limestone.
‘Ah,’ Tyler Kent says, ‘the time-honoured spectacle of the Englishman not caring what he eats.’
‘Welsh, actually,’ Simon says, and indeed there is a faint Cambrian lilt somewhere behind the solid Home Counties vowels. They order grilled sardines on toast, which everyone seems to think is amusing and provokes Theresa into a reminiscence of the fish they had for lunch at Kensington.
‘Now in America,’ Tyler Kent says, ‘we don’t have this all-consuming interest in what people did at their schools. Of course there’s that Class of ’29 stuff, but I guess nostalgia for your schooldays is an English thing.’
‘I think it’s a question of heritage,’ Simon says, with just a faint implication that this is a benefit that Tyler Kent, for all his black Oxfords and his natty tie-pin, does not possess.
‘Ah, dear old heritage,’ Tyler Kent says mock-seigneurially, and Cynthia divines not only that the two men dislike each other but that her sympathies are with Simon, the feigned innocuousness of whose steely resolve appeals to her. She wonders, not for the first time in her life, whether she has made a terrible mistake with Tyler Kent and in nailing her colours to one mast she has forgotten the comforting solidity of another. ‘Heritage,’ Tyler Kent says again. ‘Queen Mary’s coach and the dear old Beefeaters.’
‘And the dear old Atlantic Ocean,’ Simon says, with outright satirical intent, ‘keeping the dear old barbarians at bay.’
Seeing that no further entertainment can be got out of the Kensington day school, its staff, cloakrooms, and fish luncheons, Theresa Sinclair-Haddon settles down to eat her sardines. She looks faintly disappointed, as if this reunion of old friends, with its lavish mythologisings, has not quite lived up to her expectations. Lucy is half-asleep.
‘Now, about heritage …’ Tyler Kent says, returning fire. And Cynthia, fork in hand—the sardines are the size of dace, soused in Worcestershire sauce and quite horrible—thinks that all this—Tyler Kent, Belgravia flat-shares, late nights in Bishop’s Park, compromise and drift—cannot, realistically, go on. Outside there are more ambulances tearing down Shaftesbury Avenue. The showgirls and the nightclub hostesses are squabbling over their bills. Behind the restaurant’s battened-down shutters, searching and incorrigible, the wind lifts.
Chapter 13
A Departure from the Script
In his study at Windsor, head down over the mahogany desk, with its profusion of paperweights, its framed portraits of Wallis by Beaton and Madame Yevonde and its pile of unread documents, the King is thinking of Hitler.
There is nothing so very unusual in this. All over Europe, he supposes, people are thinking about the ex-corporal with the toothbrush moustache, with varying degrees of affection, alarm, and contempt. For his own part, the King believes that not enough is made of the Führer’s mystical side—the mad, starry look in his eyes, the sense of utter detachment from the world around him.
There are Christmas cards on the mantelpiece, drawn up between the fronds of festive evergreens sent down from Balmoral, and the King stares at them for a moment. But the fir-trimmings and the inscriptions of seasonal goodwill are a poor substitute for the enigma that is Herr Schicklgruber, to give him his correct name, about which the newspapers have been appropriately satirical.
He remembers the little Russian girls again at Barton: Grand Duchess Tatiana, Grand Duchess Anastasia, Grand Duchess Marie, and Grand Duchess Olga, with their serious expressions and their muslin flounces. There is something that connects the little man from Berlin and these long-lost children—some monstrous and indefinable tide sweeping across the old world of his youth and laying it waste.
For several days running he has woken just before dawn with the memory of that day oppressing him. Every last detail is there: his father and the Tsar, as alike as Tweedledum and Tweedledee; the ladies ghost-like behind their veils; himself sweating in his midshipman’s gear. It was thirty years ago and as bright as yesterday.
Hitler himself is known to be fixated on the British Royal Family.
Von Ribbentrop, before his departure, used to convey the most unctuous expressions of his regard: birthday greetings; gifts (of varying degrees of appropriateness); invitations. Curiously, there is further evidence of this in a letter that fell out of the morning’s post and which lies now on the table top next to the portraits of Wallis and a paperweight which, if shaken, encourages snow to whirl around a representation of Westminster Abbey. The letter is from Prince William of Celle, a distant relation, but not so distant that a photograph of him could not be turned up in one of the family albums.
The King has not kept up with the Celles, who have fallen on hard times. Prince William’s mother, the old duchess, is thought to be inhabiting a bed-sitting room at Biarritz. Nevertheless Prince William is cheerful, or affects to be. The family estates are mostly gone, and his sisters married to businessmen, but the Nazi Government, he maintains, is ‘not hostile to people of our kind.’ The King wonders exactly what is meant by this. Are the people of Prince William’s kind the people of his kind? After all, he is a King and an Emperor, and his relative—they are second cousins, he calculates, once removed—is a dispossessed Palatine prince. It is difficult to tell just what thread may now connect them.
Prince William, with his Christmas greetings and his hopes for the coming year, believes that the war is a mistake, and that the whole thing could be brought to a satisfactory end if ‘men of sense’ were brought around a table to debate it. Again, the King wonders what exactly is meant by this. Who, when it comes to it, are men of sense? He suspects, without being in the least able to confirm the hunch, that he is being got at, and that Prince William, in expressing this pious desire for reconciliation, took notes from someone in Berlin. He will have to show the letter to Hardinge.
Meanwhile, there are more pressing problems than disingenuous letters from Prince William of Celle, a man whom the King believes he last met in 1913. Out in the corridor and the large room behind it there are footsteps manoeuvring and the sound of raised voices. Footmen have been roaming the passageways with trays of teacups for the past couple of hours. Mr Wood, the impresario of these performances, is in his element. In half an hour it will be time to proceed to the microphone and address his subjects, or ra
ther that proportion of them which has access to a radio, or that proportion which can be bothered to switch it on. The Corporation is always very bullish about the audience for royal addresses. On the other hand, there are thought to be streets in northern cities where not a single person listens in.
As with Hitler, and his distressed German relatives, the King is not sure what to think about radio broadcasts. His father regarded them as vulgar but necessary, the monarchy projecting itself to the modern world, a flaring advertisement for the merits of tradition, sentiment, and duty. His stammering brother Bertie is, he knows, ready to faint with horror should a microphone be put in front of his mouth. The King, when speaking, is conscious not of the words he delivers but the voice delivering them: wiv; deloightful; as vulgar to him as the medium was to his father.
For some reason the room seems smaller the longer he sits in it. Christmas cards; paperweights; Wallis’s portrait—all of them seem to be crowding in on him, diminishing him in size as they grow larger. He wonders what Wallis would have made of all this. Sometimes she was fascinated by the protocols of the life he lived; at other times merely bored. He woke up the other morning trying to remember the last words she ever spoke to him. He has a feeling they were ‘I’m not having that bitch Lady Carpenter to dinner.’
Hitler. Prince William of Celle. Lady Carpenter. The tide will wash them all away, just as it washed Grand Duchess Olga and her sisters. It will even wash away Hitler, who may be said to be responsible for it, or at any rate its willing accessory.
Out in the corridor all the appurtenances of a royal broadcast are in place: Mr Wood and his technicians; Hardinge and his vigilant eye. There is only one absentee, and that is Mr Nichols, who, despite the most dignified representations, has been kept away. The King thinks he has had enough of Mr Nichols. Also there is the danger that his presence at the proceedings may offer some hint of the deception that is about to be practised. The King has considered the implications of what he has decided to do and is not much troubled by them. Surely, in the last resort, short of handing over his domains to an enemy, a king may say what he likes? Hardinge, he knows, will be furious. But he thinks he can put up with Hardinge. It is all horribly serious and yet, in the end, rather a lark, like the practical jokes they used to play on the new recruits at Dartmouth, the up-ended hammocks and the soapy cups of tea.
As for the deceiving of Mr Hardinge, there is no great mystery to it. A typed copy of the script has been circulated to interested parties: the Cabinet Secretary; the Prime Minister; Mr Wood at Broadcasting House. Hardinge’s copy, with a few punctilious annotations, lies on the desk before the microphone at which he will speak. When he sits down he will discreetly replace it with a second version concealed in the pocket of his jacket. It is as simple as that. As for what may happen afterwards, who cares?
One question interests him, though, and that is for whose benefit this gesture is being made. Prince William of Celle, who is not the first distantly connected German aristocrat to write to him stressing the value of ancestral ties? The authors of the unsoliciteds, who continue to petition him from their country rectories, their grimy terraced houses and their bijou suburban retreats? Himself, even? The King is not sure about this. The tide is sweeping us all away, he thinks. The old order is disappearing. Who knows how best to resist it?
For some reason he remembers that immeasurably tedious afternoon spent in the house outside Dorchester. What would Hardy have made of this? The King has an idea that he would not have noticed it, or would have ignored it (which is not the same thing). But this is not something you can do in 1939, not anymore. We are all in it, he thinks, Hitler and Prince William of Celle and Lady Carpenter, up to our necks.
He can feel the piece of paper in his inner pocket, subtly distorting the line of the suit. Mr Nichols’s assiduousness in the writing of the speech has been extraordinary. There have been moments when the thing has bored him, when the magnitude of the scheme he has embarked on rather scares him with its immensity, but always Mr Nichols has seen him through. There is a footman beckoning from the doorway. Mr Wood lurks behind him: half-deferential; half-triumphant. His father swore by Mr Wood’s expertise, while regretting the necessity for it, just as he regretted the Labour Party and democratic movements in the Dominions. Mr Wood; George Lansbury; Gandhi. Ultimately they were all the same to him.
As he strides along the corridor, men in morning suits snap to attention. Momentarily his reflection stares back at him from a mirror: butter-coloured hair going brindled; quizzical expression. There is apparently a man who does impressions of him on the stage of variety halls. The King has seen a photograph, and is not convinced.
‘A minute, sir,’ somebody says as he reaches the desk. Hardinge is somewhere in the corner of the room, whispering to an underling, Adam’s apple jerking up and down as he speaks. The papers are there in front of him and he spreads them in a fan, draws in his breath and slowly lets it out. ‘Thirty seconds, sir,’ says another man. A part of him—the part that has grown tired of Mr Nichols, subterfuge, the slow crawl of pen over paper—is urging that the whole thing be given up while there is still time. He picks up the first of the sheets of paper and clears his throat.
The end of a year is naturally a time for reflection on the events which have taken place in the previous twelve months. But it is also a time to look forward to the year which will follow. These necessities are especially important to us at a time such as this, when our nation—the country that each of us knows and loves—is beset by such grave dangers, and by such an unprecedented threat to all the things that we hold dear.
I speak to you not only as a King but as a veteran of the last war, one who remembers the unimaginable horrors of the conflict in Flanders that claimed so many lives, snuffed out so many bright and blameless futures, and indeed has spent a great part of his time campaigning that such a conflagration should not be repeated. It is my earnest wish, and I think the wish of every civilised person, in this great Empire of ours and beyond it, that this should be so.
Yet now, despite all our best efforts, despite the urgent solicitations of our leaders, we are at war, with all the consequences for our national destiny, our identity and well-being that this implies …
Hardinge, the King sees, is looking at him keenly. He has not yet diverted in any key regard from the original.
War’s privations, of course, are twofold. They affect not only the men who forsake home and hearth, and not only the family and friends they leave behind. For every soldier doing his duty in far-flung corners of the world there are a dozen other people intimately connected to him—his wife, his sons, his daughters, his mother, his father—fearful for his safety, anxious that he may return to join them once more with his duty done. In this conflict, as in the last, I have been heartened by the messages of support I have received from around the world and also by the splendid efforts of our Dominions to raise men and munitions to sustain a struggle in which, above all, it is vital to preserve our identity, our sense of who we are …
Hardinge is staring openly at him now: the copy of the text he was attempting to follow has fallen from his hand.
But if this is a time of war, then it is also a time to remember what we have forfeited by going to war. ‘Blessed are the peacemakers,’ Scripture says. But how does one obtain peace, when it is not there? And how does one guarantee that, if it returns, it may be preserved? This, we are told, is a war to defend the interests of those who cannot defend themselves. But might not those interests be better defended by war’s cessation?
These are not questions for me to answer. They are for governments, for the democratically elected representatives of free nations to consider. But I put it to you that they should be considered, that the duties which lie before us may not be as straightforward as they seem to be …
All over England these words are heard and considered. Cynthia and Tyler Kent hear them in the bar of The Bell at Ast
on Clinton, where they are festively but, if truth be known, not very happily recruiting themselves.
Desmond and Mrs Gurvitz hear them in the lounge of Claridge’s Hotel, where they have just eaten a solitary Christmas dinner amid gangs of aristocratic old ladies in paper hats.
Peter Wildgoose hears them over brandy cocktails with three or four gentlemen friends at somebody’s flat in Chester Square.
Anthea hears them standing stark naked halfway between the kitchen and the bedroom of her maisonette, with a Bath Oliver biscuit in one hand, while a man’s voice asks what the matter is.
Beverley Nichols hears them at a snug little theatrical party in Earls Court, next to a mantelpiece full of portrait photographs signed by their subjects, ‘Ivor’ and ‘Noël’ and ‘Gertie.’
Lucy and her squadron leader hear them issuing from an ancient crystal set in North Yorkshire with a view of snow-covered dales beyond the window.
Captain Ramsay and his wife hear them in a baronial pile somewhere in Peeblesshire, staring at each other under the points of an antique candelabra.
Each in their various ways registers some element of shock, surprise, disquiet, or disapproval.
‘Heavens,’ Mrs Gurvitz says, ‘I daresay the fat will be in the fire now.’
‘Sheer defeatism,’ Peter Wildgoose tells the epicene young man sitting next to him.
‘There’s something so deliciously grave about Royalty, don’t you think?’ Beverley Nichols’s companion coyly declares.
Tyler Kent smiles, the jaunty smile of a race-goer whose horse, backed at long odds, moves inexorably towards the finishing post as more fancied names labour grimly in its wake.
Cynthia, who has had rather too much to drink and has spent part of the morning in tears, stares at the faces of the people in the bar, which are pitched at various points between exaltation and despair, and wonders what will happen to them all, and to her, and to everyone.