The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  Holbrook, who was only twenty-three but a former tank commander, showed no fear. He merely leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘I was just wondering what you were doing up there at all hours, keeping us awake until three in the morning with your constant typing. We can hear every bloody tap! So I decided to find out.’

  ‘Did you just?’

  ‘Yes, and now I know. A lot of gloomy drivel about the future. Who do you think will ever want to read such depressing rubbish?’

  ‘You’d be surprised.’

  ‘It’s a bunch of anti-Soviet propaganda, nothing more,’ Holbrook said. He reached over and picked up the papers, shuffling through them. He held up a typed sheet and began reading, imitating his host’s voice, each sentence drawn out, with long wheezes in between. It was clearly something he had practised. ‘“The citizens of 1980 no longer expected comfort, leisure or freedom,”’ he read. ‘“Cut off from foreign contacts and from knowledge of the past, they had no standards of comparison, and the poverty and harshness of their lives appeared to them as something natural and unalterable. Efficiency, even the type of efficiency that produces good roads and germ-free milk, had ceased to be necessary. Nothing in Oceania was efficient except the Thought Police.” You’re a reactionary, Orwell. You call yourself a socialist, but you write what the Tories want to read.’

  ‘You didn’t recognise anything of the Soviet Union in there?’

  ‘Actually, I thought it sounded more like this place. The disgusting food your sister cooks. The way she treats Susan like some sort of slave. The constant mess. It seems everything you touch, Orwell, immediately disintegrates. Is there anything in this dump that works?’

  ‘Only the Thought Police, it seems.’

  ‘Do you really think you’re important enough to be spied on? You know what, I might just pay Pollitt a visit after all. I’ll tell him you’re nothing more than a mouldering old crank.’

  ‘As I suspected. Off you go, report to your masters.’

  ‘I noticed you’ve got some sexual hang-ups too. All those prostitutes and Asian brothels and cutting some girl’s throat at the moment of climax. Very interesting.’

  ‘You can clear off. The ferry’s that way,’ he said, jerking his thumb to the south.

  Holbrook got up and moved towards the stairs. ‘I was told you were a great writer, Orwell, and a genuine left-winger. It’s rubbish. You offer no hope to anyone whatsoever. None!’

  ‘Not to the likes of you.’

  Later, he watched as Holbrook – and Susan too – walked down the goat track towards Ardlussa, carrying their suitcases. Beside him Ricky, being restrained by Avril, cried out, ‘Susie, Susie,’ as if somehow aware that this was the last he would see of his nanny.

  2

  Barnhill, Jura, April 1947. Animal Farm had succeeded beyond everyone’s hopes, and he could feel Fred Warburg’s impatience for a follow-up radiating all the way from London. He somehow had to hold him at bay – to write under such pressure was intolerable. He stared at the letter he was writing his publisher. Finishing the rough draft … breaking its back … hoping to finish in early 1948, barring illness … he too had begun to resort to imprecisions. The truth was his lungs had worsened over the winter; what he needed more than anything, if he was going to finish the book, was for his health to hold.

  He had spent the winter and early spring in London, expecting to find it rejuvenated after its second summer of peace, but the buildings were unrepaired, the trains still packed and the food as spare and revolting as ever. Even bread, which had remained white and unrationed throughout the war, had become dark-coloured and required coupons to obtain – all to help feed starving Germany, which overnight had become Britain’s ally. With coal in short supply, he had been forced to break up old furniture and even Ricky’s wooden toys to use as firewood. Heating water for washing had been out of the question, and he recalled with particular displeasure peeling off sticky socks and underwear to be replaced with others slightly less adhesive. Only the absence of rocket bombs and the blackout reminded him that the war was actually over.

  Compared to the sun-touched country people on his island, Londoners were dark and ill-favoured, short and sickly. The heroes of the war had vanished, replaced by a race of beetles scurrying around under the sideboard, competing for crumbs. Churchill, Cripps, the airmen who had nightly flown to Berlin, those who had kept watch for fires, even the women who had made the thing-ummybobs – all had lost the war’s nobility but not its privations. The war-winning statesmen had become statistic-generating bureaucrats; the aircrew were now factory hands; the firemen now clerks; the Stakhanovite women of the aircraft industries, now widowed kitchen drudges with hungry, screaming children and dust in the creases of their skin. Winston, Julia, O’Brien, Mr Charrington, Parsons and the workers at the ministries, even the proles in their pubs – all now entered his mind like ghosts emerging from the smoking ruins of the London left behind by the failed revolution and the war.

  Being in London had brought back something else: the dream. Working on the novel in the horror of the city had been impossible; instead his mind sought out the origins of his nocturnal vision. He began writing about his days at preparatory school.

  His mind had started doing this sort of thing regularly of late. The older a man got, he found, the greater the proportion of time he spent living in the past. For hours on end, sitting at his desk, pen in hand, he found himself walking through the world of his childhood. It was a period he couldn’t think about without a certain feeling of terror – of the sort a goldfish might feel if flung into a tank of pike. He remembered from prep the inedible food, the forbidden books which he and Connolly had somehow managed to smuggle into their dorms, the fearsome beatings and forced confessions of misbehaviour, but mostly the constant feeling of being under surveillance. He had associated this with those giant posters of Kitchener, whose eyes and finger appeared to follow you in every direction. It had given him a feeling of being imprisoned; of being denied happiness; of feeling that no matter how hard he wanted something, it would always be snatched away at the last moment.

  *

  Eton College Chapel, June 1918. ‘Abbey, N.R., Lieutenant, Grenadier Guards, killed France, 12th April. Acland-Troyte, H.L., Lieutenant-Colonel, Devonshire Regiment, killed Mesopotamia, 17th April. Arnott, J., Military Cross, Captain 15th Hussars, killed France, 30th March …’ The list, which the provost, M.R. James, was sombrely reading, seemed interminable.

  ‘Lascelles, G.E., Second Lieutenant, Rifle Brigade, killed France, 28th March.’

  A murmur went through the packed stalls. Cyril Connolly nudged him and said in a low voice, ‘Lascelles – he was in Sixth last year. Fine oar.’

  He hazily pictured Lascelles’ face, but the memory faded as fast as it had appeared.

  The war! He thought of the parade ground last week, packed with a thousand inattentive pupils and masters. After nearly four years, the Eton Rifles had turned into a ragged affair, it having become fashionable to treat all things military as a bore and to put in the minimum effort. Some of the more advanced thinkers of the senior elections had taken to booing lowly whenever the chaplain, wearing khaki and army boots under his cassock, invoked God to urge them to greater exertions on the range. The war had already been won, several times over – they had been told variations of this regularly since 1914.

  But that day something had changed. The commanding officer of the Officers’ Training Corps, a small, greying man of indeterminate age, flourished a piece of paper and read out General Haig’s Special Order of the Day: ‘With our backs to the wall and believing in the justice of our cause, each one of us must fight it out to the end.’ A wave of understanding rippled through the ranks: Britain was in danger of losing. There was a straightening of backs and weapons. Even among the worst slackers, he sensed a transformation, an instant removal of doubt. Even he, the most notorious rejecter of orthodoxy, felt it.

  Just before, he and the others had thought that the
war was futile, that conscripted eighteen-year-old Germans were just cannon-fodder like themselves, and that they, the young, were being hurled into a giant pit by stupid old men for no good reason. Yet now he found it impossible to resist the same nationalistic fever that infected the others. His secret loathing of ‘them’ – the dim-witted, the unthinking, the schoolmasters and even the King himself – was, he found, suddenly turned onto Krupps, U-boats, Hindenburg, Ludendorff and the Kaiser. He felt a sudden impulse to pick up his rifle and smash its butt into the nearest enemy, and knew with a certainty that should a German soldier suddenly walk into the school, that is what he would do. Hate, he realised, is one of the hardest of all emotions to resist, especially when in a crowd. A spontaneous rendition of ‘God Save the King’ rang out and, unconsciously, he’d joined in, singing at the top of his voice.

  He dragged himself back to today’s chapel service. The list of names finally ended.

  Old James seemed on the verge of tears. ‘Boys, those fifty-four boys whose names I have just read out, who have fallen in just the last term, take to more than one thousand the number of Etonians lost in the service of the King since August 1914.’ James closed his book and nodded to Bobbie Longden, the most admired boy of their election, who marched up and replaced him at the pulpit.

  Longden’s loud voice boomed through the chapel: ‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow …’

  Another elegy, he thought, barely listening. Clichéd rubbish.

  A few moments later, Longden’s voice became savage. ‘We are the dead.’

  Blair snapped to, as if violently kicked. A tremor ran through his bowels. A similar sensation struck the pews of teenagers, the oldest of whom were seventeen and just months from becoming infantry subalterns or airmen. They were corpses waiting to be sent to the grave.

  For effect, he suspected, the rebellious Longden paused and repeated the line.

  We are the dead. Short days ago

  We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,

  Loved and were loved, and now we lie

  In Flanders fields.

  One by one the war would consume them. As they filed out past the roll of honour, one of the college workmen was already adding the new names to the wall.

  ‘This war’s never going to end, is it?’ said Connolly. ‘It will be our turn soon. We are the dead.’

  ‘We’re not dead yet,’ he replied.

  *

  Something distracted him out of the corner of his eye, ending his reverie: a large brown rat. It must have crept in while he had been motionless, gazing out the window towards the sunny field and the calm sea. With the coming of spring they had multiplied like bacilli in a dish; the farmhouse was crawling with the filthy brutes. He had seen them devouring a dead stag on the path down to the beach and was revolted. Another time he saw a buzzard carrying one off in its claws. Now they were laying siege to Barnhill, drawn by the calving livestock and the food he had stockpiled. He could corner and beat the house’s many mice to death quite easily, but these monsters were too big and too numerous.

  He tried to keep perfectly still, looking for something to throw. He inched his hand towards a glass paperweight on his desk, then flung it, but the creature was too fast, slipping through a gap in the wainscoting, and the missile bounced harmlessly off the wall and rolled under the bed.

  He completed his letter to Warburg, slid it into an envelope and took it downstairs to the pile in the hallway. Avril was in the kitchen, reading the local newspaper. Along with Richard, they were alone now, apart from holidaying visitors.

  ‘Eric,’ his sister said, ‘apparently there’s a plague of rats on all the islands hereabouts. Something to do with the dead cattle and the bad spring keeping the hunting birds down.’

  ‘No surprise there. The swine are everywhere, even upstairs.’

  She flinched. ‘Not in the bedrooms?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  ‘It says the medical bods are telling parents to be wary of leaving babies and young children unattended,’ she continued. ‘Two children at Ardlussa have been bitten on their faces while sleeping in their prams.’ She looked up from the paper. ‘Can you believe it?’

  ‘Oh, yes. In Spain I saw one chew the leather off a man’s boot while he was sleeping.’

  ‘Ooh! It gives me the shivers.’

  ‘Rats took over the hostel where I lived in the war. You’d get up for breakfast and the kitchen would be swarming with them, licking the unwashed bowls and cutlery. Revolting.’

  She threw the paper down. ‘The bedrooms! We have to do something to protect Ricky.’

  He took what remained of the morning off from writing and set to work. Determining the rats’ many routes into the house from their droppings, he blocked up holes and set a number of traps along the run they had established into the larder. He set a number more in the byre. The ancient traps, which he had discovered on a shelf in the barn, were a slightly sinister-looking French type: flat-bottomed cylindrical cages, shaped like hourglasses. They were divided into two chambers, the second of which was entered through a funnel-like opening, ingeniously designed to spring shut once the doomed creature was inside.

  The next morning, he entered the byre to the sound of high-pitched squeals and the rattling of metal. One of the disgusting creatures was leaping about in a state of frenzy in its cage. He pictured the floor of the barn crawling with them in the middle of the night, like a moving carpet, and the vision caused him to shudder. It was a massive specimen – one of the largest he had ever seen – and it stood against the wire of its prison and eyed him, baring its teeth in a show of defiance. It seemed to be trying to claw its way towards him through the ancient, rusted wire, alternately scratching and biting the thin iron bars. He had no doubt that, if freed, the creature would attack.

  Grimacing, he lifted the cage by its handle, and, holding it as far from his own body as possible, carried it to a barrel of water and dropped it in. The creature thrashed about but the commotion soon stopped. He raised the cage and the drowned body floated to the surface, belly-up, with bloated fleas swimming away from it. He walked outside, clicked the lever that opened the rear of the cage and threw the carcass onto the waiting bonfire heap.

  3

  August 1947. The warm air of high summer was wafting through the farmhouse, filling it with holiday optimism and dosing his lungs with what seemed a life-giving force. Even his violent morning coughing fits had stopped. In the previous weeks more guests had arrived, including several children, and they had spilled out into a large army-surplus tent he had rigged up on the lawn. He had joined them occasionally on picnics and fishing expeditions by the beach at Glengarrisdale and Loch nan Eilean, but the book had taken on a new urgency, and for days on end the only evidence of his existence had been the thumping of his typewriter keys and his infrequent appearances at mealtimes. Here on the island, in the midst of that glorious season, he felt a sense of security from his illness, a feeling that his life could go on forever, that his lungs would continue to work as long as there was air to fill them.

  As he worked, he became aware of a slackness in his prose; often, reading over what he had just written, he winced at the superfluous clauses and even whole passages. But these could be tightened up later, like the rigging wires on an aeroplane, and weren’t the problem. What concerned him was fulfilling the image of the story he had first held some four years before. What he wanted to get across was how present-day politics made life feel: how it changed the sensation of a razor blade on your skin, the meaning of a knock on the door, your capacity for love and loyalty. The ideologists and the managerialists couldn’t tell you those things, especially the last. Love and loyalty could never be understood through statistics, only through experience. The doomed love affair would explain everything; he had to get it right.

  He tossed aside the pages he had read and braced himself to start again. Sonia: if only she’d kept her word and come to the island, escaping with him even for a short while. He’d written
to her time and again, but it was no use. No one could push her from any path she had chosen. At first he had resented her independence, but now he could see its sense. She was loyal, not necessarily to others, but to the conception of life she’d developed for herself. She didn’t challenge the system but instead flouted its conventions covertly, sexually. It was this determination to live as one chose, he now realised, that was the very basis of freedom.

  *

  Cyril Connolly’s flat, Bedford Square, December 1945. His first thought was that she might be a spy. At the very least, she might be a low-level informer of some sort, swapping gossip with the Soviet ambassador for a meal at some swanky restaurant.

  ‘George, old thing,’ said Connolly, handing him a drink made with some vile gin he had found on the black market, ‘I can see you’ve noticed our Venus.’

  She was Sonia Brownell – known as ‘the Euston Road Venus’ or ‘Buttocks Brownell’, depending on whether or not people liked her, and many did not. The nicknames came from her time as an artists’ model, when she’d posed nude for a variety of painters, with whom she had sometimes conducted affairs if she considered them famous enough.

  ‘Impossible not to,’ he replied.

  She was a tall, fair-haired girl, with a full figure and a graceful way of holding her cocktail. She had a correct posture and a face with aquiline features, which he suspected fronted a mind not wholly noble, although this was something that did not concern him greatly.

  ‘Well, she simply adores famous authors. Even living ones. And is very nice to them.’

  He could see her looking over, giving him an up-and-down sidelong glance that was thrilling, but also slightly terrifying. Her beauty and reputation induced in him a nervousness, a sort of black terror that at the ultimate moment, should it ever arrive, he might not be able to perform. After all, she could have anyone, and frequently did, if the rumours were to be believed. She was looking again in his direction, flicking her golden locks like a Hollywood actress. Connolly summoned her with a waggle of his finger and she came mincing over, pausing instantaneously, he noticed, to catch her own perfect reflection in an ornamental mirror.