The Intrigues of Jennie Lee

by Alex Rosenberg

  After a few moments, discretion drove Jennie to the other side of the street. It would never do to be seen if the Chancellor of the Exchequer arrived at his digs trailing newspaper reporters. Facing his door, with her back against the railings of the garden in the open square, Jennie began to wait. This is no good. She sought a gate in the wrought iron fence, and, entering the green space, she found a bench with a good view of Frank’s door. There was enough foliage to hide her from the pavement and the street. She wondered if she could smoke without arousing the attentions of a policeman. It’s the middle of the day. Bobbies aren’t expecting floosies to ply their trade here and now. She lit up a fag and then sat, for almost an hour, in the sharp cold of the early spring day, until a cab finally drew up and a very tired-looking Frank alighted. He was carrying nothing but a trench coat, no red boxes, no dispatch case, not even a hat. He was still fumbling for his latchkey as she mounted the three steps to where he stood at his door. Jennie beamed with relief at finally seeing him, eager to share the excitement, enthusiasm that the morning’s news had kindled in her. But, as he turned to face her, his wan smile offered no match for her mood. Frank sighed, slumped into her arms, holding on to her in a manner that signalled fatigue, regret and anxiety. What’s gone wrong? Jennie asked herself the questions as her own warm emotions quickly subsided. She followed him inside saying nothing.

  Frank made to hang his trench coat on one of the hooks at the door. When it fell to the ground, he merely looked down with indifference, making no gesture towards retrieving it. Instead, he shuffled into the lounge and sat heavily in an armchair. Jennie picked up the coat, hung it securely. She looked back at the door, noticing several days post below the letterbox. It was evident Frank had not been in the flat for some time.

  Before she could say anything, he looked up at Jennie, and made an offhand gesture.

  “Well, I’m out...and not a moment too soon.” There was no real sound of relief in his tone.

  Jennie was certain she’d misheard. “What do you mean, you’re out? Out of what? What’s happened, Frank?”

  “Out of government. I’ve resigned as Chancellor.”

  There was a silence between them as Jennie absorbed the meaning of his words. She fell to her knees before him.

  “But why...why now, just when everything is finally moving in the right direction?” She looked up at his face, willing him to share her optimism.

  “No, Jennie. They’re not. Not so far as I can see. Things are moving in dangerous directions. Directions I can’t support.”

  “I don’t follow, Frank. You were in the House yesterday. The party is completely behind Mosley. Recessing the House is a brilliant coup.” She stopped. “Isn’t it?” Had she missed something? He was silent and Jennie was becoming impatient. “Wasn’t it?”

  Frank exhaled, as though he’d been waiting for a chance to speak. “It was a coup, I’ll give him that. Everyone knows how the opposition would try to slow things down.”

  Jennie nodded. “I saw some Tories cheering the PM...Boothby, MacMillan. And the way the house turned on Churchill. It was grand.”

  Momentarily enjoying the feeling her recollection had stoked, Jennie sought Frank’s face. Did he share it? Evidently not. She mulled his grudging agreement.

  “If you approved, why ever did you resign, Frank?”

  “It wasn’t the recess. The cabinet could have governed at least for a while without having to meet parliament every day. The recess would have given us all time to get on with our jobs. But that’s not why Mosley did it.” He paused. “And it’s not why I resigned.”

  Jennie could scarcely keep a moderate tone. “So, why then?”

  “Mosley wants to rule alone, or near enough. Told the cabinet he’s got the King’s approval to establish a small inner group, four or five ministers, like Lloyd George’s war cabinet in 1916. It’s to be prime minister, chancellor of the exchequer, minister of works, minister of war, first lord of the admiralty, minister of labour.”

  “But that’s fine, Frank.” She brightened. “You’ll be in the thick of it.”

  There was exasperation in his voice. “Didn’t you listen, Jennie? I resigned!”

  “Surely it’s not to late. You can tell him you changed your mind.”

  “Don’t you understand? I won’t be party to it.”

  “To what?” She did not hide the belligerence.

  “The unravelling of democracy. Centralised power answerable to no one.” His voice rose. “Look, Jennie, it’s not even the innocent delusion that a government can control an economy. It’s dictatorship he wants, like in Italy or Russia.”

  “That’s rubbish.” Jennie had finally had enough of Frank’s doubts, cautions...his middle-aged moderation. She rose and stood before him. She thought for a moment about Mosley’s speeches during the campaign, the one’s he’d fobbed off as mere posturing. She had to banish her anxiety. Otherwise nothing would ever really change.

  “Frank, it’s not going to be Stalin or Musso. It’s to be a war cabinet, as you said, just like Lloyd George’s in the Great War.”

  “It’ll be Mosley, three toadies and Bevin.”

  Jennie misheard. “Aneurin? That’s wonderful but—”

  Frank interrupted with exasperation. “No, not Aneurin Bevan. No. Ernest Bevin,” he emphasised the ‘in’. “Goddamn head of the Transport Union. Right-wing bastard—against the general strike, anti-Semitic to the bone, hates parliament...” His voice dropped off.

  “It doesn’t matter, Frank. We’ve got to”—she paused—“got to see it through. We’ve done too much to turn away now.”

  What Jennie was saying to herself silently was I’ve done too much...risked too much to give up now, to turn back.

  “It’s not a good enough reason to quit, Frank. It’s not practical politics.”

  She wanted him to argue. She needed him to treat her like an equal as he always had, to take their politics seriously, and really understand one another. But it was obvious he wasn’t going to. Not this time. He wasn’t even answering her. Why not?

  “Is there something else, something you’re not telling me, something...personal?”

  She wanted to add something personal again? But somehow knew she shouldn’t.

  Frank was about to speak. Then decided not to. He merely shook his head slowly. It seemed to Jennie he had nothing to say, he wouldn’t argue, he couldn’t, wouldn’t defend what he had done. It was a Frank she’d never known. Defeated, perhaps even frightened?

  Now Jennie realised that since they’d walked through the door into the flat, neither of them had reached out for the other. It was as though suddenly they’d found themselves on opposite banks of a river flowing too fast to ford. She gulped, knowing what it meant. For all the disagreements of their life together over almost three years, it had never come to this. She began sternly to address herself. Jennie, you can’t let politics do this. You love this man. Then another voice in her head answered back. Yes, but he’s giving up. And he won’t tell me why. I can’t make him tell me. I won’t make him tell me. Neither of them had ever forced the other to do or say anything. Both had kept secrets. Neither had pried. It had never been like that. Jennie was not going to start now—wheedling, imploring, threatening. She waited, certain, convinced that the love between them would force his real reasons into the open between them. She thought of all her own silences, secrets, reservations, ones she’d kept to protect Frank. No, not only to protect him, but to keep her own freedom.

  It came to her with a rush. He wants to break with you Jennie, or perhaps you to break with him. Why? He hasn’t changed his mind, his feelings, certainly not about you, you can feel them still. So, why?

  She spoke the word, “Why?”

  There was no answer from Frank across the space that separated them. Perhaps a slight shrug, almost imperceptible, perhaps involuntary—a silent sob suppressed? But he only stood, stoical, resigned, not from a job, but to a fate, like a stranded mountaineer, all hope of rescue
surrendered.

  “I see.” It was all she said. The only response was a wan smile.

  Mournful, subdued, Jennie turned, looked round for her bag and coat. Then, realising she hadn’t removed her coat, plucked up her bag, turned and walked quietly to the door. She took one more last look round and walked out.

  Chapter Thirty

  The break with Frank was as much what pushed Jennie through the gates of the Inns of Court as the suspension of parliamentary sittings. Even as she walked slowly away from Frank’s flat, she began contemplating the vast potentially empty space of hours, minutes and days that she faced. A desert landscape of inactivity was not something Jennie could cope with. She needed to be doing, accomplishing, participating in events. If it wasn’t government, or even the sham of participation in the ineffectual debates the House afforded, it had to be something. She had hoped to spend the summer in Russia with Frank, and then lecture in the States during the normal parliamentary recess in the fall. But that was not to be. She couldn’t go with Frank, and the lecture-booking firms wouldn’t offer her a tour with no new material to deliver.

  So, Jennie told Charlie Trevelyan that she would take up his offer to read for the bar. She had studied Scottish law at university. At 29 she was not too old to start again. Indeed, she thought herself a better student now, a little more patient, a little more thorough. She needed to make a good fist of it. Begin as you mean to go on, Jennie told herself that first day she entered the precincts of the Middle Temple. It had been a long, damp and cold walk from Russell Square. Jennie had used the time to steel herself to this task.

  Passing a dozen newsagents, she would not let herself buy a newspaper, despite the headlines on the hoardings, “PM’s New Charges” bold across the newsprint. She wouldn’t look! She had to focus on immediate matters, lest she find herself thinking of Frank, or Tom Mosley, what Nye might be doing back in Wales or whether she should be in Glasgow protecting her parliamentary seat. Reading the papers, in the days immediately after breaking with Frank, she found some political vindication. Most of what Mosley was doing seemed right to her. But then, some of what he began saying was strange, worrying, even slightly un-British. He’d refused to cut unemployment benefits, began a vast scheme for road building, ordered the Treasury to freeze assets that might flee, forced unions and companies to bring their disputes to government for settlement. But then, in military uniform, all his Great War medals gleaming, Mosley had spoken before the British Legion. No prime minister had ever kitted himself out this way before, not even in wartime. After reviving the worst of his campaign rhetoric, he had announced that, hereafter, Great War veterans and their families would have the first claim on benefits. Those who had not served, those who had profited without serving, and finally “people foreign to our culture”—unnamed but unambiguous in his reference—and those in the thrall of such people would not be allowed to profit from the recovery his government was affecting. Just words, Jennie thought when she read them. And indeed there were no policies behind them, at least so far.

  As she passed more and more newsstands on her way down the Holborn, the hoardings vied for her attention. Finally, she picked up a Daily Herald, the Labour paper and began to read.

  Prime Minister’s Charges

  In a speech before the Trades Union Council, Sir Oswald Mosley accused an unholy alliance of Bolsheviks and Financiers of seeking to destroy the economic recovery that his government has begun to achieve. Sir Oswald asserted that Jewish banking houses, seeking revenge for Britain’s abolition of the gold standard, were working together with the Jewish leadership of the Soviet Union attempting to foment labour unrest in the United Kingdom. When he held aloft copies of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and The Communist Manifesto, the Prime Minister was joined at the lectern by Mr Ernest Bevin, who now combines the posts of Minister of Labour and Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  As Jennie scanned the rest of the Herald’s front page, there was no hint of dissent reported. Still standing at the kiosk, she spread the paper open and turned to the Leaders. There, at the top, was an editorial approving Mosley’s remarks, and even noting their similarity to statements by the German Chancellor, Herr Hitler.

  You can’t read this, Jennie. It’s not going to help you and there’s nothing you can do about it. She had to keep away from the papers if she was not to go mad. Throwing the newsprint into a bin, she walked down the Strand towards Middle Temple with the best resolve.

  * * *

  In retrospect, it was never clear to Jennie whether her education as a barrister could really have succeeded. Was it overtaken by events, or were the traditions of the Inns of Court just too fustian for her to bear? She didn’t last as a student more than a few months, let alone the three years required. It wasn’t so much the arcana, or the gowns and wigs, still less the exams, which, in fact, would satisfy Jennie’s competitive instincts. As she had joked to Charlie Trevelyan, it was the required dinners that slowly broke Jennie’s spirit. After just a term of boring evening meals, sitting at the women’s table at the Middle Temple, Jennie had just about enough.

  A dozen dinners in all, she would have to face, over several terms, gowned and formally dressed, presence required before grace, and remaining even after the post-meal grace had been intoned. That first term, gliding across the perfectly kept lawn golden in evening twilight, entering the timbered hall, she had studied the ruddy faces of the rather beefy leaders of the bar. Jennie would involuntarily shudder, thinking about the misery on the London streets surrounding the closed off quadrangle of the Middle Temple. Frowned upon by hundreds of portraits of dead judges, serried in ranks against the wainscoted wall, Jennie would come upon the same three women pupils, fated to share her “mess.” They were segregated at a lady’s table and subjected to a sort of Coventry by the rest of the students and the pupil masters, who watched over punctilious observance of ritual—remember, no shaking of hands, bowing only—that had nothing to do with advocacy before the bar.

  It was all going to be too much to bear, and when, on the night of her third required Middle Temple dinner, the message from the Duchess of York came, Jennie did not hesitate to change her plan.

  She hadn’t heard from Elizabeth once since the election of ’32, a year and a half before. And she was rather glad of it. The liaison was too dangerous to both of them. But then, the envelope had come, to her pigeonhole in the Middle Temple students’ post boxes. Someone at the palace had been keeping tabs on her. But, evidently, precautions had been taken. The heavy linen envelope with the royal crest embossed at the top had been stuffed into a large buff envelope suitable to a legal brief. It carried neither postage stamps nor franking. So, it had to have been hand delivered, Jennie realised as she withdrew it. Standing among the milling bar pupils, she pulled the linen envelope out and immediately recognised the handwriting of the word scrawled and underlined across the cream-coloured paper: Confidential. Jennie looked up. It was the unmistakable hand of Elizabeth, Duchess of York. There were a dozen men, only men, within a few feet. She couldn’t read the note then and there. Pushing it back into the larger envelope, Jennie thought for a moment and then turned in the direction of the women’s public toilets. There were none at the Middle Temple for female students. It was a journey of several minutes.

  Closing and locking the stall door behind her, Jennie dropped her case and opened the envelope again.

  Dear Jennie,

  This is my second note. Perhaps my first did not reach you. It’s urgent we meet. I have something important to give you. I will have my car driven by your flat on Guilford Street at 7:00 next Wednesday, 22 June. Turn your lights and pull your window blinds down if you are home and can receive me privately.

  Elizabeth

  Jennie had to think. The Duchess hadn’t really thought things through. Would her lamp lights be bright enough to be noticed on an early spring evening? The sun would still be high in the sky at that time. Were there even blinds on Jennie’s front windows? She’d literall
y never noticed. It was Tuesday, so she’d have an evening to experiment. But the next day, the day Elizabeth had demanded they meet, that Wednesday, was an obligatory dinner at the Middle Temple. I’ll just have to miss it, she thought with a smile.

  Every light and lamp was on in Jennie’s first floor flat on Guilford Street and the shades—yes, there were some on the front windows—were down. In fact, a discerning observer might have made out the shadow of Jennie’s profile against one of them as she waited for the Duchess to arrive. A few minutes after seven, it was quiet enough for Jennie to hear the Daimler pull up. One heavy limousine door closed, another closed, and the car pulled away into the evening traffic.

  Jennie rushed out of her flat, descended the stairs and threw open the front door to find Elizabeth Bowes-Lyons searching among the doorbell labels for the name ‘Lee.’

  She was dressed in a dark suit and had a cloche hat pulled down on her head. Besides her handbag, the Duchess was carrying what looked like a finely worked portfolio case.

  “Thank Goodness, Jennie.” She breathed a sigh as she swept through the doorway. “I didn’t want to stand out there a moment longer than I had to. Can’t be spotted, don’t you know.”

  “Are you in danger?” Jennie’s question was issued in a tone of gentle mockery.

  The Duchess didn’t notice the jibe. “Might be.” She moved hastily into the hall. “Cloak and dagger stuff, really.”

  Jennie led the way up the stairs and closed the door behind them, threw the bolt in a gesture of complicity, and then leaned against it. Her friend began to look round. Is she sizing up my digs or looking for someone to take her hat and gloves? Jennie suppressed the catty thought and waited. Her guest turned round and dropped her bag on a side table. Then, Elizabeth marched back to the door, put out both her hands and grasped Jennie’s arms.