The Last Man in Europe

by Dennis Glover

  ‘George, this is Sonia, my editorial assistant. She’s responsible for the mechanics of the journal – everything from retyping manuscripts to checking proofs and occasionally wrestling with the authorities to procure more paper. Physical wrestling, I mean.’

  ‘Not in the Greek fashion,’ she replied. ‘At Horizon we leave that sort of thing to Cyril. He was good at it at school, I hear. You were there with him, weren’t you?’

  ‘We also studied the goings on of the inhabitants of Lesbos,’ Connolly added, before Orwell could answer. Obviously, she had refused to sleep with him.

  He shook her hand. ‘Enchanté.’ Her grasp lingered, just long enough to convey interest. While she was close, he noticed her expensive-smelling scent, unusual among women in left-wing circles. ‘Do you write too, in addition to doing all Cyril’s other jobs for him?’

  ‘Oh, no. I leave the writing to Cyril. Have to let him do something. But I know what I like in writers.’

  ‘She certainly does, George. Best judge of an author’s quality in our office, apart from my girl Lys, of course.’ Connolly excused himself to attend to his other guests.

  Now here, he thought, was the sort of girl he had always wanted to sleep with.

  *

  The only question was how. As a widower for barely half a year, anything too public would have been social folly, so they met again, secretly, in little-known restaurants, far from the gossipy circles of Soho and Fitzrovia. Four, five, six – maybe seven – times they met before she agreed to go back to his flat.

  He made love to her in a rush, like a fumbling schoolboy or someone far too familiar with prostitutes, and they lay in bed smoking. He watched her taking in the room – with its grubby walls, the slatternly armchair by the fireplace and even the antique bed with its ragged blankets and coverless bolster – noticing how she seemed to shrink back into her own skin to minimise her contact with her surroundings.

  ‘Tell me, you’ve done this before, haven’t you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Many times.’

  ‘Dozens?’

  ‘Perhaps scores.’

  ‘I’m glad.’

  ‘There’s a change,’ she smiled. ‘Most men think I’m wicked.’

  ‘I like people who violate conventions, especially the marriage convention.’

  ‘That’s me, then.’

  ‘You know that my wife died earlier this year?’

  ‘Yes, Cyril told me. Terribly sad, especially with the little boy and everything. What’s his name?’

  ‘Richard. We had a ruddy marriage, you know. From about 1940 she became rather withdrawn. Her brother died, you see. Dunkirk. She never quite got over it. Became somewhat frigid. But she was a good old stick, I suppose.’

  He noticed the faint look of shock on her face.

  ‘It’s like living in a prison, being in a marriage like that,’ he said.

  ‘I imagine so.’

  ‘When she died I was upset, but I’ll admit there were times in our marriage when I secretly hoped she were dead. You know, that a bomb would drop on her while I was out of the house, or a ship she was on would be torpedoed. It’s the sort of thing you immediately disown, of course, totally unworthy, disgraceful in fact, but there you have it. But by the time of her death I loved her again.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’d been through so much, you see. We’d planned to escape together. From London and this vile life.’

  ‘All that sounds achingly average,’ she said, trying to lighten the mood. ‘I expect every married person feels that way at times.’

  ‘If I married again, I would never expect my wife to be completely faithful. I wasn’t to Eileen, nor she to me.’

  ‘I suppose that’s just being realistic.’

  ‘No, I’m not referring to realism. I believe there’s a natural human longing for freedom, and there’s too much constraint in marriage. Marriages should be open, to some extent anyway, if they are to be happy.’

  ‘Like the anarchists’ marriages in Spain?’ The topic had fascinated and scandalised London a decade earlier.

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  ‘Then why marry at all?’

  He could tell she didn’t like where the conversation was heading. Had Koestler’s sister-in-law, Celia Paget, told her how he’d proposed to her and others?

  ‘There’s something unnatural about living alone, I suppose,’ he went on. ‘The idea of absolute loyalty to another person, not sexually but emotionally, rather than to the state or a party or an ideology, is the foundation of freedom in my view. If the state can’t tell you whom to love, its power isn’t absolute, is it? The first thing an omnipotent dictator would do is ban the orgasm, followed by marriage and parenthood; perhaps even stop people living together. I expect that, under torture, the first thing they’d do is get you to denounce your wife. They routinely get children to denounce their parents. Makes you think.’

  ‘I suppose so. But surely people still love each other in Russia. You can’t suppress such things completely.’

  ‘Tell me, would you consider marrying someone like me, under those sorts of terms?’

  ‘I could never be in a loveless marriage, just for sake of convenience,’ she replied immediately. ‘I’d rather wait.’

  Clearly, he realised, men asked her this all the time.

  *

  His mind returned to the task at hand. He’d conceived of the affair with Julia long before he had met Sonia, but there was something about her that suited Winston: an unwillingness to think too far beyond the present, an obstinacy and a crude defiance that was liberating but must eventually lead to pain, misery and downfall, but never surrender. The romance now took shape on the page. He threw himself into the task with an energy that he suspected he was stealing from some future time, like a hungry farmer eating his seeds. It was only when Winston and Julia were arrested that he took a holiday.

  *

  Glengarrisdale Bay, 19 August. The western side of the island was the freest place in Britain – a haven saturated by soft sunlight, bounded by the sea and the hills and the blue sky, safer even than Barnhill from the commissars and the managers with their snoops and atom bombs. Even in Airstrip One, he reckoned, the Thought Police wouldn’t have bothered putting hidden cameras or microphones somewhere so remote.

  He had brought Avril and Ricky and his late sister Marjorie’s children – Lucy, Henry and Jane – for two nights’ camping. They slept in an abandoned hut, and spent the days swimming and hiking and fishing. He felt he had escaped, and – perhaps more completely than at any other moment of his adulthood – that he was living inside his dream. He wanted to stay like this forever, spinning out a present that had no future, drawing strength from the air and the sun and the land to continue writing his books as long as he could.

  The boat journey back to Barnhill was proceeding smoothly. Avril and Jane had decided to hike, leaving the four of them to take in the majestic views of Mull and Scarba.

  ‘Look what the girls are missing out on,’ he shouted over the noise of the outboard engine and the water smoothly splitting from the prow. They were all insanely happy. He felt invincible.

  As they rounded the point to enter the sound near Corryvreckan, they hit a swell. He decided to power through it. After all, the engine was driving strongly and the boat was well caulked. He had checked the tidal charts and there was nothing to worry about – the whirlpool wouldn’t be a problem for hours yet. Just then the boat dropped alarmingly, and at the bottom of the swell they were hit with a violent spray. Water sloshed over the gunwales and the boat dipped again. Ricky squeezed Lucy tighter and put his fingers in his mouth.

  ‘I’m taking her around,’ he said. But before he could turn, they clipped the edge of one of the whirlpools and the boat started to spin. The engine wrenched off its mount and plummeted down, still revving furiously.

  ‘Henry, take the oars,’ he said calmly. ‘I’ll handle the tiller.’

  They steadied the boat, which w
as running straight on with the current, but he could see more swirling whitewater to the east. ‘The island – make for the island,’ he shouted. It was no more than a rocky outcrop a hundred yards or so long, but it lay between them and another whirlpool, which could be yet more turbulent, and was their only chance.

  Jinking up and down, they reached the rocks, but the waves, rising and falling twelve or so feet, made getting out of the boat almost impossible. Henry readied himself to leap, hoping to pull the boat safely to shore by the rope, but just as he leapt, holding onto the painter, the boat overturned. They were all dunked and as they came to the surface, Lucy lost her grip on Ricky, who disappeared under the vessel. She screamed. Orwell dived down and plucked the boy from the boiling waters under the upturned hull. Then he followed the others in a struggle to the shore, the jagged rocks making the going painful. Sopping wet, scratched and grazed, they scrambled to the high point of the tiny islet, which was home to thousands of nesting birds.

  It was three hours before a lobster boat happened by and they caught its attention. One by one they were dragged by rope to safety, he with Ricky on his back, and deposited on dry land for a long walk home, barefoot. Their boots had gone under with their blankets and other supplies.

  Days later, his temperature increased and he was confined to indoors.

  *

  Barnhill, October. ‘What about Driberg? A communist, surely?’

  Behind the easel, his old friend Rees was shaking his head. Rees, who had sunk money into Barnhill in the hope of turning it into a going concern, had become a frequent visitor, using it as a base for his new career as a landscape painter. ‘No.’

  ‘An underground party member; has to be. Also homose—’ He stopped in deference to Rees.

  ‘No. Not a party member. My close friends would know about him. Trust me.’

  Orwell crossed out the asterisk next to Driberg’s name in the small notebook on his lap. He was sitting up in bed, having been stuck there for a few weeks. ‘Priestley?’

  Rees shook his head. ‘Too English, surely.’

  ‘I’ve heard he gets Moscow gold. He’s certainly richer than most artists and writers.’

  ‘If that were the case, I’d be a commo, which I’m not.’

  ‘Not convinced. I’m keeping the asterisk against him. How about Michael Redgrave? The actor chap.’

  ‘Scraping the bottom there, George. Fellow traveller at the very outside.’

  ‘Smollett? Ah! I’m keeping him no matter what you say, Rees. He’s the swine at the MOI who blackballed Animal Farm. Just a matter of time before he’s exposed.’ He tossed the notebook onto the bed and picked up the packet of mail Rees had brought. There was yet another letter from Warburg; he put it aside and opened one from his accountant.

  Rees leant back and surveyed his picture, which was nearly done. He was portraying the scene after Van Gogh’s room in the yellow house: bare and sloping floorboards, a threadbare rug, a simple wooden chair, and an austere metal-framed cot that resembled a camp bed. He was trying to capture the griminess of the walls, yellowed by Orwell’s incessant smoking and the fumes given off by the paraffin heater, which now had to be on, the summer having completely vanished.

  ‘I’m wealthy,’ Orwell said, wheezing, waving the opened letter at Rees. ‘The Yanks are buying Animal Farm.’ He stared at the accounts disbelievingly. Earnings for the year past: £7826 8s 7d. It wasn’t that long ago he was scraping by on two hundred a year. Even as a civil servant at the BBC, with Eileen working, they had lived on barely a tenth of that. But stuck in bed on this remote island, where there was nothing to buy, and with Britain still in the grip of rationing in any case, the money was like so much fairy gold. ‘I’d trade it all for a steady thousand a year and no filthy journalism to worry about.’

  ‘True indeed.’

  Orwell looked at the boots beside his bed. They were the only pair he had left now, after the boating accident; they were five years old and falling to pieces. He saw Rees looking at them too. ‘I’ve asked Warburg to buy me a new pair; at least my American dollars will come in handy for something. It seems shameful, really, to deal on the free market like this when half the country is almost barefoot and everyone is scraping together clothing coupons, but there it is.’ He stared at the letter from Warburg and held it up, contemplating whether or not to open it. ‘From my publisher, again.’

  ‘Ah! So how is progress with the novel, then?’

  ‘I’ve got the main character Winston in the basement of the Ministry of Love now, poor sod, and I’m going to give him hell.’

  ‘Ministry of Love – doesn’t sound all that bad.’

  ‘Huh! It’s not what you think. It’s the place where all love and all hope gets cut out of you.’

  ‘So nearly done, then?’

  ‘By the end of October, I hope. At least that’s what I’ve told Warburg. Still very much a first draft, I think, and it usually takes me a good half a year to bash a rough cut like this into something worth publishing. It’s a beastly mess.’

  *

  November. The pain that was twisting through the left side of his torso was so terrible it woke him up, drenched and gasping for breath, like a whale breaching the surface from five hundred fathoms down. He rolled onto his back and tried to fill his lungs with air. Shallower breaths, deepening them gradually – that usually did the job in the morning. This time, though, it didn’t work. Pain like the thrust of a bayonet continued with each breath for some minutes. He could get his lungs about two-thirds full before it returned, but that was all. It was terrifying, like drowning on dry land.

  Every morning since his dunking by the whirlpool it had been the same. And every morning he repeated his mental trick, eventually kidding himself that he’d torn a muscle in his chest while rowing or digging for peat. Yesterday he had overexerted himself again, pruning the fruit trees in front of the farmhouse, taking advantage of the clear weather, although it had been dreadfully cold. This, he figured, is what getting old is like – a continual narrowing of one’s physical possibilities, each constriction becoming the new normal measure of health, then narrowing once again until … well, nothing.

  The pain had ripped him from a dream. The Golden Country had been replaced by variations on a nightmare. This time he had been walking through a pitch-dark room to face a wall of blackness, behind which there was something too terrible to contemplate. He knew what lay beyond: the infinite itself. But he wouldn’t allow his mind to interrogate it further.

  He was only middle-aged, yet the blackness was already entering his life. It was like having an assassin on his trail. As well as being chronically short of breath, he had started losing weight. Most annoyingly of all, the pain was making it harder to write. At present it was almost impossible. Just sitting up and using a pen felt like lifting a dumbbell. He consoled himself with the idea that thinking about the novel was akin to actually writing it, but he knew he had to get well enough if he was ever to manage a second draft.

  The bones were all there. Winston had committed thought-crimes, begun his doomed love affair with Julia, joined the Brotherhood, discovered the true manner of the Revolution’s betrayal and the Party’s manipulation of thought, language and history, then endured the horror of the Ministry of Love. It was an obvious parody of Stalinism and of Burnham’s power worship, but such was the insanity of the world around him, he could imagine people taking it literally. It struck him that parody could easily descend into comedy, and while he wasn’t against the book being funny, too much would rob it of the horror he wanted to convey. He had drawn a world of political horror, but now realised you couldn’t fully convey horror in a line-sketch. Horror lay in the shadows, and if Winston’s thought-crimes meant death, in the rewrite he had to make the reader understand what living in that shadow of death was really like.

  He had just a few hundred words of the first draft to go, after which he would rest, before getting back to London for the winter. Once there he could see a decent spec
ialist – that chap Morland, perhaps, who had worked on D.H. Lawrence, and about whom everyone spoke so highly.

  He took his breakfast in bed – porridge and tea as usual, followed by a cigarette – dressed himself with discomfort, and went to his desk. He’d write until lunch, after which, if he was feeling better, there were the eggs to collect, the paraffin and Calor gas levels to check, and work to begin on a new greenhouse for the tomatoes.

  He wrote on. Winston, now a tortured shade, was in the Chestnut Tree Café, listening to the telescreen, awaiting his final trial and the inevitable bullet. He might just finish it in the next few days, he thought. He came to the end of the page and turned to another. Just then, the movement of his arm sent a fearful sharp pain scything across his chest, causing him to double over in agony. He wheezed, trying to fill his lungs with air, but the exertion began an uncontrollable cough, which continued for a full minute, each contraction of his lungs bringing the feeling of being kicked viciously in the ribs.

  When at last it had stopped, he could hear someone, probably Rees, running up the stairs. Sweating and shaking slightly, he opened his eyes to see the page before him sprayed with red ink. The splotches grew as the ink was absorbed by the miserable postwar stock. He presumed that in the panic of the coughing fit he must have broken one of his pens, and noticed that his right hand was also splashed with the stuff; it was surprisingly warm. As he stared, a large drop of the dark red liquid fell from his face onto the page. He had the taste of blood in his mouth.

  *

  The chest specialist from Glasgow could hardly be asked to make the last seven miles of the journey to the cold and uncomfortable farmhouse, the goat track being almost impassable to vehicles due to the onset of the winter rains. The Fletchers had therefore prepared a room for Orwell at their house, where the examination had taken place. The hosts were having tea with Rees when the diagnosis was delivered, although not to Orwell, who was still in bed, nearby. Normally, with such dire news, the specialist would tell the patient first, but they had to know – for their own safety.