by D. J. Taylor
‘Who was that?’
‘Captain Ramsay. They put him in Brixton, of course, but that doesn’t prevent him from tabling questions in the House. And apparently he tabled one yesterday wondering whether it mightn’t be a good idea to reintroduce the Statute of Jewry.’
‘I don’t think I even remember what the Statute of Jewry is.’
‘It was passed by Edward I in 1290. And then repealed sometime in Queen Victoria’s reign. Among other provisions, it obliges any Jew over the age of seven to wear a yellow star on his hat.’
The corridor, with its flapping noticeboards, was mysteriously free of people. What looked like a line of stepping stones before them on the polished wood turned out to be a succession of dropped pieces of paper. Cynthia could not tell if Peter Wildgoose was genuinely pleased to see her or simply relieved to find an antidote to the overpowering gloom of the committee rooms. But for the moment she was merely content to bask in his presence.
‘Do you know,’ he said suddenly, ‘when we were all in Bloomsbury together, I used to find the atmosphere horribly lax? Like a kind of permanent art school. Not that I ever attended an art school. But then, coming to Whitehall, one finds the protocols simply absurd. All those generals who insist on being called “sir” rather than “general” and all those earnest discussions about who the senior man present is.’
The mention of ‘us’ all being in Bloomsbury ‘together’ was painfully elegiac.
‘What happened to everybody?’ she asked. ‘I mean, I know about Lucy.’
‘Well now,’ Peter Wildgoose said, ‘I think they all keep afloat. The last I heard of Anthea she’d left the Secret Services and was going to marry an Air Vice-Marshal. A rather déclassé one, I grant you, with distinct literary leanings, but an Air Vice-Marshal all the same. No difficulty about the senior man present there, I should say.’
‘And what about Des?’
‘Des?’ Peter Wildgoose laughed again, even more loudly than he had done in the committee room. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard about him. Des is in the RAF.’
She had a sudden vision of Desmond sitting in an armchair outside a Nissen hut, with a crowd of fighter pilots as they awaited the siren’s call.
‘What? Flying a plane?’
‘The last I heard he’d just finished basic training in Blackpool and was about to be sent off somewhere like Newry to guard the Irish border. Which between you and me means stopping black-marketeers trying to smuggle petrol over it. No, Des volunteered for the infantry. Well, the RAF equivalent. He said that whatever happened to him it would be better than writing press releases at Bomber Command, which is where most of his friends ended up. Of course,’ Peter Wildgoose said, with a rather startling gravity, ‘it’s all my fault.’
‘Why is it your fault?’
‘I could just have decided not to close the magazine. But you see I thought Des had behaved so desperately badly that he really ought to be taught a lesson. I’d spent my life avoiding having to teach Des a lesson, and I thought it would be a sign of moral weakness if I didn’t go through with it. And then after I’d sacked him, I decided the magazine wasn’t worth running anymore. So it was all my fault. On the other hand, I think Des would probably have volunteered for the RAF anyway. He said he did it out of sheer guilt.’
Somehow the subject of Desmond’s guilt—and whatever it was that he felt guilty about—was too big to be gone into here on the grey steps of a Whitehall staircase. So she contented herself with asking, ‘But what will he do in Newry? When he’s not guarding the border, I mean?’
‘Oh, Des has his resources,’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘I expect he’ll have them all subscribing to New Writing and getting up highbrow discussion groups.’
Coming out into the Westminster streets, they found that the early morning rain had disappeared and the sun was shining. This had the odd effect of magnifying everything, so that the gas masks hanging from the shoulders of the passers-by looked like enormous artificial proboscises in some avant-garde dramatic production. There were army lorries going by; WAAFs on bicycles; smoke rising desultorily over the South London sprawl.
‘I don’t really know anywhere round here,’ Peter Wildgoose said apologetically. ‘Perhaps we’d better find a Lyons. They say the raspberry jam in the doughnuts is made of turnips these days, but frankly the experience will do me good.’
They found a Lyons on the corner of Victoria Street, which was full of people from the abbey and girls who worked at the Army & Navy Stores. Outside there were boys from Westminster School lounging past, their caps set firmly on the backs of their heads. Cynthia gazed at them incuriously. This was another effect of the war, she thought: that you lost your interest in people; that the maintenance of the space around you—what you did for a living, your day-to-day acquaintance—was quite enough to be going on with.
Though he had ventured into the Lyons with the tentative air of a jungle explorer, hot in pursuit of some benighted Amazonian tribe but fearful of their turning nasty, Peter Wildgoose was wholly at ease amid this landscape of burnished chrome and black-clad waitresses, and ordered an anchovy paste sandwich with the most natural air in the world. But there was a quizzical look on his face, which suggested that he wanted information which Cynthia might not very easily yield up.
‘How are your parents? Are they back in England now?’
How were her parents, Cynthia wondered. This was a difficult question to answer. Just at the moment they were staying in Southwold, where Mr Kirkpatrick was described as ‘poorly,’ another code word of Mrs Kirkpatrick’s somewhere on the scale between being very mildly unwell and deliberately malingering.
‘Yes. They came back at the end of last year. They said Portugal had been rather a mistake. They’re staying with my aunt in Suffolk.’
‘And what did they make of … ?’ Even Peter Wildgoose could not find a form of words for the enormities of the previous spring. ‘What did they make of it all?’
This, too, was not an easy question to answer. What had her parents made of it all? Certainly they had been acquainted with the essential facts. But the full extent of what had happened at Ashburton Grange had been difficult to convey to them. It had been even more difficult to work out exactly what they thought about it.
‘They were very shocked. But Mummy said that Mr Bannister had always had a very volatile personality. I think they thought that after Henry died he’d become slightly unhinged.’
The tea in the cup an inch or two from her hand was a kind of ochre colour, but she was glad to be drinking it here in the chromium-furnished lotus-land of Peter Wildgoose’s smile.
‘What about you?’ Peter Wildgoose said. ‘What did you make of it all?’
The medium-term past had resolved itself in Cynthia’s mind into a series of brightly coloured tableaux: Tyler Kent’s flat in Bishop’s Park, with Captain Ramsay’s bald head bent over the desk; Sylvester Del Mar’s chalk-white face as they carried him out of the Bloomsbury washroom; the water jug cracking against the parlourmaid’s skull; Mr Bannister moving nimbly up the hill.
‘I don’t know. It was all rather terrifying. And yet somehow not, like a kind of play-acting, with saying things for effect. And then, when they were being deadly serious, not being able to take them seriously. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Well, one or two people took it very seriously indeed. Your Mr Kent’s in Wandsworth, just now. And there were half a dozen army officers got court-martialled.’
Cynthia thought about Tyler Kent, which was something she had not managed to do for a week or more. The memory of him, while still striking, was curiously diffuse. She could imagine the individual parts of him and the world in which he moved—the natty waistcoats and the bronze eagle—but the jigsaw they made up was shattered beyond repair. She said, ‘What do you think will happen now? About the war, I mean?’
‘It depends how Hitler does aga
inst the Russians. I should imagine it will go on for simply ages. What one wants, of course, is a long-term berth. How did you come to be taking the minutes for General Chesterton’s committee?’
‘It was Lucy’s idea. She knew someone in the ministry. We’re still sharing a flat,’ Cynthia explained. ‘Even though she’s married. She says she can’t stand married quarters, and then her husband’s away so much.’
‘Well, I have to go to the Middle East next month. All to do with the margarine. And other things. I’m allowed to take a secretary with me. Do you think you could bear to leave General Chesterton? It’ll probably be either Cairo or Beirut. Too early to tell which, I’m afraid.’
Cynthia knew that back in the Duration days she would instantly have said yes to this. But the last eighteen months had taught her the value of circumspection. She said: ‘That’s terribly kind of you, Peter. I shall have to think it over and let you know.’ All the same, she knew, knew as certainly as she had ever known anything, that she would go with him.
A bit later the waitress came with the bill and Peter Wildgoose paid it with a five-pound note, which caused rather a stir at the till. Afterwards they walked out into Victoria Street. Here the sunlight was still cascading across the pavement, but the Westminster schoolboys had all gone back to their desks.
High above them a line of birds went east in sharp, dramatic flight, and she stared at them, thinking of Cairo and Beirut, and destinies as yet unknown—minarets and muezzin bells, dust and olive groves, all the scattered paraphernalia of Araby—and then, by degrees, of the paintings of Claude Lorrain, in which she had always yearned to wander, passing mysteriously through their solitary glades and deep, romantic chasms, past their bevies of attendant nymphs and classical figures, both real and imagined, and on, to antique groves yet more sequestered, remote and silent in the Attic dawn, with no one to watch her but herself.
Author’s Note
This is a novel. At the same time it contains at least half a dozen genuine historical personalities. Leaving aside King Edward VIII (1894–1973), later the Duke of Windsor, Captain Archibald Maule Ramsay (1894–1955), Conservative MP for Peebles and South Midlothian between 1931 and 1945, Tyler Kent (1911–88), a cipher clerk at the American Embassy, and Beverley Nichols (1898–1983), a prolific author, journalist and librettist, are all real people. Several other well-known figures of the period, from John Betjeman to the Sinhalese poet J. M. Tambimuttu, subsequently editor of Editions Poetry London, make fleeting appearances in the text. This raises an interesting procedural and, ultimately, moral question. Is it fair to put figures from history deviously on show in a work of fiction, set in an imaginary time, and attribute to them views which there is no way of knowing that they would have held?
The answer is that although the King, Ramsay, and Nichols are shown, directly and indirectly, as being part of a pacifist conspiracy to derail the war, none of them is, historically speaking, being traduced. Plenty of contemporary observers were worried by what they imagined to be the Duke of Windsor’s pro-Nazi sympathies. During the period September 1939 to May 1940, prior to his internment in Brixton, Captain Ramsay was the guiding force of a clandestine organisation known as the ‘Right Club,’ dedicated to ending hostilities with Germany by way of a negotiated peace. The names of the club’s members were recorded in a leather-bound volume, embossed with the letters ‘PJ’ (i.e., ‘Perish Judah’), and its supporters included such veterans of the pre-war pro-Hitler groups as Admiral Barry Domvile and ‘Commandant’ Mary Allen. Tyler Kent, interned initially at Wandsworth, then at Camp Hill Prison on the Isle of Wright despite the fact of his US citizenship, did indeed abstract copies of presidential telegrams in the manner described here. Beverley Nichols, though not involved with the Right Club, was an ardent pre-war pacifist and a stalwart of Anglo-German fellowship societies. We do not know that they would have behaved in this way, had the political landscape of the period 1939–40 been a little different, but it seems entirely plausible that they might have done.
I should like to acknowledge the influence of Philip Ziegler, King Edward VIII: The Official Biography (1990), Richard Griffiths, Patriotism Perverted: Captain Ramsay, the Right Club and Anti-semitism in England 1939–1940 (1998), and Bryan Connon, Beverley Nichols: A Biography (1991) which, additionally, contains many extracts from Nichols’s diaries. For John Amery, who was executed for treason in 1946, see David Faber, Speaking for England (2005). ‘Duration’ was the name chosen by Evelyn Waugh for a periodical which he intended to found at the beginning of the war, only for the scheme to be abandoned when his friend Cyril Connolly got in first with Horizon. The latter’s history, from which I have borrowed one or two details, is recorded in Michael Shelden, Friends of Promise: Cyril Connolly and the World of Horizon (1989) and Jeremy Lewis, Cyril Connolly: A Biography (1997).
My warmest thanks, as ever, to my editor, Juliet Brooke.
D.J.T.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 2013 by D. J. Taylor
Interior design by Maria Fernandez
ISBN 978-1-4804-4735-6
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