A slight young woman with her hair in a page-boy cut under a little hat sat on James’s right. She turned towards him, and he saw that her face was neat and her eyes deep. ‘So much for history,’ she whispered. She had an American voice.
‘It’s often an anti-climax, isn’t it,’ he returned.
They watched the scene, like bidders at a cattle auction, leaning forward on the rail. Her excellent hands were touching, as if she were thinking about praying. Appropriately there was a call for prayers below and James stood awkwardly, his head half-inclined. From the corner of his eye he could see her shoulder and slender arm. The prayers were brief and through the ensuing ritual of the opening business he returned his gaze to Churchill.
The new Prime Minister was preparing himself very concisely, an actor about to make the début he had so long awaited. He appeared to be crouched, hunched, so that his blue bow tie with the white spots was trapped under his jowl. His face swelled over his collar and set into a strangely calm frown. James could imagine him in boyhood, podgy, pink, unpopular, solitary, composing secret plays and dramas in which he was ever the hero and always had the best lines.
Churchill appeared to take no interest in what was going on in the Chamber, or what the Speaker was intoning. He dropped a sheet of his notes on to the floor and took an age to pick it up. When he eventually straightened up he glanced about him as if to see if people were still watching. They were. Now he retreated even lower into his body, as if preparing to make his emergence all the larger. But then, when the great moment came, he merely stood up like any other man stands up. All around was tension and a thick silence.
He patted himself across the chest as if to impart comfort and encouragement. The hands then dropped to the stoutish stomach and he felt and tapped that also before transferring the hands to the outside of his trouser pockets where he patted again. The sharp chink of small change sounded throughout the Chamber.
‘Mr Speaker . . .’
In only a few sentences he had them. He had thrown the spell of words like a net about them, for it was in words that his magic lay. He had no gestures of note, no charm, hardly a range of voice. It was laboured, even studied; a growl, a grunt, an elongation of syllables and phrases, and a careful lisp. But the words were everything.
‘I would say to the House, as I said to those who have joined this Government, I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.’
A man in the public gallery, on the far side of the American girl, was breathing heavily, as though through asthma, and it seemed to James that it could be heard everywhere. He glanced around at the man, a sallow, knife-like face, with tears running down the thin cheeks. The young woman now turned briefly towards James and he saw that her eyes were glistening. ‘So much for history,’ she whispered again.
Churchill had not changed. He had not grown bigger with the speech, he still peered through his thick-rimmed glasses at the paper in his hands. His brow and balding head gleamed. He had apparently made no mistakes. The nation was ready and grateful for someone who apparently made no mistakes. There had been too many.
They left the gallery and filed down the curling stone steps. James was to wait for Philip Benson outside the doors to the Chamber. He smiled at the girl who had been his neighbour. ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘I hope you enjoyed the performance.’
‘I certainly did. It was some show.’ She smiled before turning away.
All about James the crowded voices were busy but hushed. Benson emerged eventually and took him by the arm. They said nothing until they were out in the light air of the May evening. ‘It’s Whit Monday,’ said Benson, sniffing about him. ‘The day when we all used to trek off to the seaside. Well, perhaps we will again one day.’ He glanced at James with a smiling triumph. ‘Bloody wonderful, didn’t you think?’
James nodded. ‘Where has he been all these years?’
‘Waiting for this moment, I imagine,’ said Benson. They were walking towards Parliament Square. ‘I’ve never heard anything like it. Nor has anyone else. Not for a long time. Even his enemies – and he’s got a few, and always will – must admit that.’ He laughed briefly. ‘Talk about cometh the hour, cometh the man.’
They sat on a seat in the square facing the buildings of Parliament. Big Ben moved towards six o’clock. After glancing each way James said: ‘And what part have I been chosen to play in this drama?’
‘A supporting role, you could call it,’ smiled Benson. ‘The Old Man has asked for you specially, Churchill I mean. He knows all about you and the others who kicked up such a furore over Norway and he wants you to have a position where you have the responsibility of spotting that sort of balls-up from afar. So that action can be taken before it’s too late. He also has some idea of having a cadre of officers based in London who would get about the country, listening, asking questions, getting the feel of the troops, and the civvies for that matter too. He says he wants to know what people think. He wants to spot where the seams are weak before the sack bursts.’
‘It sounds like a strange job. I’m a soldier. It sounds more like something for a civil servant.’ He waved his hand around at the grey Whitehall walls.
‘Not at all. It needs to be a serving officer. People won’t talk to civil servants, not if they can help it. You’ll be promoted to major.’ He paused. ‘Anyway, you don’t have any choice. Churchill said he wants you, so he gets you. Let’s go and have a drink on it.’
In the greying light James walked up the canyon of Whitehall. There was little traffic and birds sang on the buildings. Battle-dressed sentries stood outside the Horse Guards and the War Office and the Admiralty. When they stamped to attention and set off on their directed few yards of march, their boots echoed clearly among the walls. He had telephoned Millie. She said that they had heard about Churchill’s speech on the wireless and everybody felt much better now. James had smiled. There was nothing like telling people the worst possible tidings.
At the Trafalgar Square end of Whitehall there were more people. Sandbags had been solicitously stacked around Landseer’s sturdy lions at the foot of Nelson’s Column, so that they might be protected from bombs. The bronze nose of each lion projected from the sandbags as if sniffing the air and expecting the worst. Lovers walked in the square as they had always done in the evenings, most of the young men in uniform. Grey, puffy pigeons strutted about like small Nazis and the millions of starlings shrieked in the eves and gutters of Northumberland Avenue and the Strand.
He would need to live in London for most of the time now. Millie would stay down at Binford and he would see her whenever he could. There were numerous houses and flats to let; row upon row of them in Kensington and Belgravia, Benson had told him caustically.
James walked up the Haymarket and into the West End. A group of unemployed miners sang shiftlessly in the gutter to a cinema queue who stared stonily ahead, each one at the neck in front. They were waiting to see Gone With the Wind. There were a few widely dispersed coins in the flat cap the miners had placed on the pavement. Young men, idle, furtive, dead-eyed, hung around the portals to amusement arcades where others fired air rifles at cut-out German soldiers.
A group of girls, white-legged, lips like goldfish, screamed obscenities and coughed over cigarettes as they taunted three young Norwegian sailors who stood mystified. ‘You wanna learn some proper fucking English, mate!’ howled one. ‘Don’ ’ee?’ she demanded of a companion bursting flabbily from her dress. James closed his eyes and hurried his stride. The tarts, he realized, were immutable. In three months’ time they might well be hanging about German stormtroopers. He went back to Trafalgar Square and through the carved tunnel of Admiralty Arch into St James’s Park again. A brace of anti-aircraft guns squatted on the widest area, protecting Buckingham Palace. Their crews were sitting on the grass under the deepening sky, their steel helmets scattered about them like big mushrooms. On the lake the incongruous pelicans swam reflectively. People walked their dogs beside the flowerbeds. Somehow
the British could not accept that things could change very swiftly and never again be the same.
He turned into Belgravia and saw what Benson had meant. All along the elegantly curved crescents the boards of estate agents stood out like flags. ‘House for Sale’, ‘Apartments to Let’, ‘For sale . . .’, ‘For sale . . .’, ‘For sale . . .’, ‘Desirable property . . .’, ‘Safe basement flat . . .’ Perhaps it had not seemed safe enough. Where were they now, these people? Residents, possibly, of the advertised Sanctuary Hotels in locations that were recommended as ‘invisible from the air’. Were they among those, the rich, the writers, the rattled, who had fled, with their dogs, their valuables and cash, to America or the vast fastness of Canada? Or perhaps they were merely away, serving their country.
On the corner was a silent public house, a fashionable place once, now having the jaded air of a vault. He went in. There were only three other customers, two men in civilian clothes who emptied their glasses and went out almost as soon as he entered, and a sad-faced, elderly woman in a red coat, who sat with a glass of sipped Guinness in front of her. The landlord was leaning forward studying the Evening News spread over the polished wooden bar. James asked for a Scotch and soda. ‘You’ve gained a customer and lost two others,’ he observed.
The landlord, a heavy-browed and moustached man, glanced sideways as if he had not noticed. ‘Off on their business, I expect, sir. Dealing, you know, stuff you can’t get these days. They’ve got it cushy, believe me. The war’s done them no bad turn. Get you anything, Scotch, butter, salmon, lengths of suiting, coffin handles, anything in short supply.’ He handed the drink across and took the one shilling and threepence. ‘They didn’t like the look of your uniform, I expect, sir, you being an officer, being connected with the proper war.’
‘I thought everybody was connected with it,’ observed James. ‘Whether they liked it or not.’ The lady in the crimson coat raised her Guinness and smiled faintly as though supporting the statement.
‘Well, you wouldn’t know it,’ said the landlord heavily. ‘Some will be sorry when it’s all over. Making a fortune.’ He tapped the evening paper in front of him. There was a photograph of Winston Churchill and the words ‘Blood, Toil, Tears and Sweat’ across the headline in large type. ‘Blood, toil, tears and sweat he wants,’ he said.
‘You can’t get any of them out of a stone,’ sighed the grey woman. She put her glass to her mouth as if she had nothing more to add, or was embarrassed by breaking into the conversation.
‘Your customers seem to have deserted you,’ mentioned James.
‘Gone with the wind-up, sir,’ agreed the landlord, grinning over his joke. ‘Scuttled off like crabs, some of them, because they reckoned London’s all set to be flattened. You never saw so many furniture vans in your life. Talk about refugees.’
‘And some,’ said the lady stoutly, ‘like Mr Perkins, went off to fight.’ She looked flustered but determined. ‘That was my employer, you see. He was one of the first to go. Naval officer. Fine man Mr Perkins and a very fair man, believe me. And Mrs Perkins is nursing somewhere in France. She went as soon as he got drowned.’
‘Oh, he’s dead,’ said James. ‘I see.’
‘One of the first to go,’ she confirmed. ‘Off Scotland, so I understand. The water must be very cold up there.’
‘Yes. I’m sorry,’ said James conventionally. ‘Very sad.’
The lady stifled a sniffle. ‘Yes, it was,’ she said. ‘Mrs Perkins was ever so upset, believe me, sir.’ She rubbed her hands across her eyes, reddening them, finished her Guinness with a surprising gulp and, wishing them good night, went out.
‘She’s a dear old dear,’ sighed the landlord. ‘Lost without them. She just lives in the flat, looking after the cat. It’s one of those up for sale or rent. Just along the crescent here. Like to glance at the paper, sir?’
James thanked him and the man handed it across and went into the room behind the bar. James sat by the window, the daylight diminishing, and read the speech he had heard Churchill make that afternoon. The words, even flattened by print, were still resounding. ‘I have nothing to offer . . .’ That rumbling voice, the hunched shoulders, the belligerent jaw, the round pale hand across the chest.
Alongside the main report was an observer’s view of the scene that day in the House of Commons. He read it casually but then with a sharper interest. ‘An American Sees History’ was the headline and below it the impressions gained that day by a woman journalist from Washington. ‘I sat, not with the professional press,’ she had written, ‘but in the visitors’ gallery. The view was very different from there.’ With growing astonishment and some concern he began to read about himself, the young British officer who had listened so fiercely, leaning forward, his fists clenched on the polished wood. He was a little shocked, then relieved that there was no mention of his regiment or rank, or anything he had said. He would need to be more astute.
She was, the newspaper said, Joanne Schorner, a special correspondent of the Washington Post.
The landlord reappeared, came round the bar with a bucket of sand and a stirrup pump and placed them in a corner beneath a potted plant. Then he went back and returned with a bucket of water.
‘Can never be too sure,’ he said. ‘Put them out every night, I do. During the day I keep them in the back because there’s always some smart alec making remarks about the water looking better than the beer and suchlike. It’s just on the news that we’ve bombed Germany. That’s put the cat among the pigeons. They’re not going to take that without having a go at us.’
James had another Scotch and bought the landlord a drink. ‘The old lady,’ he inquired. ‘Is that flat very large? I suppose it would be.’
The landlord didn’t think so. ‘Commander and Mrs Perkins had a place in the country somewhere, Warwickshire I think, and they only used the flat when they came to London. It’s only, let me see, five doors along, towards St George’s Hospital, turn left when you go out the door.’
The man went out again and returned with a steel helmet. ‘Mustn’t forget that,’ he said, putting it on the handle of the stirrup pump.
‘Not everybody takes the war seriously,’ commented James.
‘Well, I do,’ affirmed the man. ‘It’s got to be serious, hasn’t it? Oh, right, it’s all been quiet up to now – like the Americans call it – the phoney war. Well, I’ve got a feeling that it won’t be for much longer. The bombers will be here, mark my words, just like they’ve been over Rotterdam.’
‘It’s going to come as a hell of a shock,’ predicted James. ‘God, I walked through the West End this evening. Tarts and louts and singing miners.’
The landlord shrugged. ‘Well, the miners can’t help it. It’s mad when you think of it, though. Here we are desperate, bloody desperate, and yet there’s more than a million unemployed. It don’t make sense, do it? As for the tarts and the louts, well, they’ll always be there. Even if it’s all perishing rubble, they’ll still be hanging around.’
James left the pub and turned left, walking along the bow of the street. He counted five and saw that the Adam building had been divided into four apartments. A board in the railed front area pronounced they were to let. He noted the name of the estate agent. There was a light in the side window of the lower flat. Obviously the lady kept to the proper servants’ quarters. There was a black and white cat sitting patiently on the doorstep waiting to be let in. He stepped forward, half meaning to ring the bell. Perhaps she would let him see the number of rooms. But he decided against it and instead bent down and tickled the cat. He wondered if it went with the flat.
On the morning of Tuesday, 14 May, James waited in a ground-floor ante-room at the War Office, a place echoing like a sepulchre, with much of the windows blanked by sandbags. Sunlight came in a solid bar through the regular unbagged spaces, lighting up the millions of dust specks that floated in the room like parachutists. He stood playing a boyish game of picking them off as they fell, but there were thousands mo
re than he could account for. They kept falling, falling. There were half a dozen bleak chairs around the walls but he was the only one waiting. The reading matter on the table consisted of some back numbers of the magazine called War Illustrated, its cover printed in gauche black, red and white. He picked up the top copy. Its cover was a photograph showing cheerful British soldiers with their ungainly kit disembarking from a ship, giving the eternal thumbs-up sign to the camera. The headline proclaimed: ‘Tommies Land in France on Their Way to Victory.’ It was dated 12 April.
He turned the pages. Nazi Germany, revealed the magazine, was a beaten enemy. ‘We echo the words of Mr Chamberlain,’ it went on. ‘Hitler has missed the bus.’ There was a picture on another page showing a long-nosed soldier wearing a fez and holding a camel. Above it the words: ‘Egypt May Well be Proud of Her Camel Corps.’
Ruefully he continued leafing through the pathetically exuberant pages, studying at the end a full-page portrait, bemedalled and becrossed, of King Leopold of the Belgians, a gallant son of a gallant father, who, it forecast, would never bow to the Germans. Philip Benson came in.
‘So sorry to keep you, James,’ he said. He glanced at the magazine and read the words over the front cover picture. ‘All our yesterdays,’ he said grimly.
‘A month ago,’ nodded James.
The Dearest and the Best Page 12
