Winter of the World (Century Trilogy 2)

by Ken Follett

  There were a lot of homosexual men at Cambridge University, Lloyd knew, but it startled him to hear her mention the subject. Ruby was famously blunt, but this was shocking, even from her. He had no idea how to respond, so he said nothing.

  Ruby said: ‘You’re not one of them, are you?’

  ‘No! Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘No need to be insulted. You’re handsome enough for a pansy, except for that squashed nose.’

  He laughed. ‘That’s what they call a backhanded compliment.’

  ‘You are, though. You look like Douglas Fairbanks Junior.’

  ‘Well, thanks, but I’m not a pansy.’

  ‘Have you got a girlfriend?’

  This was becoming embarrassing. ‘No, not at the moment.’ He made a show of checking his watch and looking for the train.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I just haven’t met Miss Right.’

  ‘Oh, thank you very much, I’m sure.’

  He looked at her. She was only half joking. He felt mortified that she had taken his remark personally. ‘I didn’t mean . . .’

  ‘Yes, you did. But never mind. Here’s the train.’

  The locomotive drew into the station and came to a halt in a cloud of steam. The doors opened and passengers stepped out on to the platform: students in tweed jackets, farmers’ wives going shopping, working men in flat caps. Lloyd scanned the crowd for his mother. ‘She’ll be in a third-class carriage,’ he said. ‘Matter of principle.’

  Ruby said: ‘Would you come to my twenty-first birthday party?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘My friend’s got a little flat in Market Street, and a deaf landlady.’

  Lloyd was not comfortable about this invitation, and hesitated over his reply; then his mother appeared, as pretty as a songbird in a red summer coat and a jaunty little hat. She hugged and kissed him. ‘You look very well, my lovely,’ she said. ‘But I must buy you a new suit for next term.’

  ‘This one is fine, Mam.’ He had a scholarship that paid his university fees and basic living expenses, but it did not run to suits. When he had started at Cambridge his mother had dipped into her savings and bought him a tweed suit for daytime and an evening suit for formal dinners. He had worn the tweed every day for two years, and it showed. He was particular about his appearance, and made sure that he always had a clean white shirt, a perfectly knotted tie, and a folded white handkerchief in his breast pocket: there had to be a dandy somewhere in his ancestry. The suit was carefully pressed, but it was beginning to look shabby, and in truth he longed for a new one, but he did not want his mother to spend her savings.

  ‘We’ll see,’ she said. She turned to Ruby, smiled warmly, and held out her hand. ‘I’m Eth Leckwith,’ she said with the easy grace of a visiting duchess.

  ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Ruby Carter.’

  ‘Are you a student, too, Ruby?’

  ‘No, I’m a maid at Chimbleigh, a big country house.’ Ruby looked a bit ashamed as she made this confession. ‘It’s five miles out of town, but I can usually borrow a bike.’

  ‘Fancy that!’ said Ethel. ‘When I was your age, I was a maid at a country house in Wales.’

  Ruby was amazed. ‘You, a housemaid? And now you’re a Member of Parliament!’

  ‘That’s what democracy means.’

  Lloyd said: ‘Ruby and I organized today’s meeting together.’

  His mother said: ‘And how is it going?’

  ‘Sold out. In fact, we had to move to a bigger hall.’

  ‘I told you it would work.’

  The meeting had been Ethel’s idea. Ruby Carter and many others in the Labour Party had wanted to mount a protest demonstration, marching through the town. Lloyd had agreed at first. ‘Fascism must be publicly opposed at every opportunity,’ he had said.

  Ethel had counselled otherwise. ‘If we march and shout slogans, we look just like them,’ she had said. ‘Show that we’re different. Hold a quiet, intelligent meeting to discuss the reality of Fascism.’ Lloyd had been dubious. ‘I’ll come and speak, if you like,’ she had said.

  Lloyd had put that to the Cambridge party. There had been a lively discussion, with Ruby leading the opposition to Ethel’s plan; but in the end the prospect of having an MP and famous feminist to speak had clinched it.

  Lloyd was still not sure that it had been the right decision. He recalled Maud von Ulrich in Berlin saying: ‘We must not meet violence with violence.’ That had been the policy of the German Social Democratic Party. For the von Ulrich family, and for Germany, the policy had been a catastrophe.

  They walked out through the yellow-brick Romanesque arches of the station and hurried along leafy Station Road, a street of smug middle-class houses made of the same yellow brick. Ethel put her arm through Lloyd’s. ‘How’s my little undergraduate, then?’ she said.

  He smiled at the word ‘little’. He was four inches taller than her, and muscular because of his training with the university boxing team: he could have picked her up with one hand. She was bursting with pride, he knew. Few things in life had pleased her as much as his coming to this place. That was probably why she wanted to buy him suits.

  ‘I love it here, you know that,’ he said. ‘I’ll love it more when it’s full of working-class boys.’

  ‘And girls,’ Ruby put in.

  They turned into Hills Road, the main thoroughfare leading to the town centre. Since the coming of the railway, the town had expanded south towards the station, and churches had been built along Hills Road to serve the new suburb. Their destination was a Baptist chapel whose left-wing pastor had agreed to loan it free of charge.

  ‘I made a bargain with the Fascists,’ Lloyd said. ‘I said we’d refrain from marching if they would promise to do the same.’

  ‘I’m surprised they agreed,’ said Ethel. ‘Fascists love marching.’

  ‘They were reluctant. But I told the university authorities and the police what I was proposing, and the Fascists pretty much had to go along with it.’

  ‘That was clever.’

  ‘But Mam, guess who is their local leader? Viscount Aberowen, otherwise known as Boy Fitzherbert, the son of your former employer Earl Fitzherbert!’ Boy was twenty-one, the same age as Lloyd. He was at Trinity, the aristocratic college.

  ‘What? My God!’

  She seemed more shaken than he had expected, and he glanced at her. She had gone pale. ‘Are you shocked?’

  ‘Yes!’ She seemed to recover her composure. ‘His father is a junior minister in the Foreign Office.’ The government was a Conservative-dominated coalition. ‘Fitz must be embarrassed.’

  ‘Most Conservatives are soft on Fascism, I imagine. They see little wrong with killing Communists and persecuting Jews.’

  ‘Some of them, perhaps, but you exaggerate.’ She gave Lloyd a sideways look. ‘So you went to see Boy?’

  ‘Yes.’ Lloyd thought this seemed to have special significance for Ethel, but he could not imagine why. ‘I thought him perfectly frightful. In his room at Trinity he had a whole case of Scotch – twelve bottles!’

  ‘You met him once before – do you remember?’

  ‘No, when was that?’

  ‘You were nine years old. I took you to the Palace of Westminster, shortly after I was elected. We met Fitz and Boy on the stairs.’

  Lloyd did vaguely remember. Then, as now, the incident seemed to be mysteriously important to his mother. ‘That was him? How funny.’

  Ruby put in: ‘I know him. He’s a pig. He paws maids.’

  Lloyd was shocked, but his mother seemed unsurprised. ‘Very unpleasant, but it happens all the time.’ Her grim acceptance made it more horrifying to him.

  They reached the chapel and went in through the back door. There, in a kind of vestry, was Robert von Ulrich, looking startlingly British in a bold green-and-brown check suit and a striped tie. He stood up and Ethel hugged him. In faultless English, Robert said: ‘My dear Ethel, what a perfectly charming hat.’

>   Lloyd introduced his mother to the local Labour Party women, who were preparing urns of tea and plates of biscuits to be served after the meeting. Having heard Ethel complain, many times, that people who organized political events seemed to think that an MP never needed to go to the toilet, he said: ‘Ruby, before we start, would you show my mother where the ladies’ facilities are?’ The two women went off.

  Lloyd sat down next to Robert and said conversationally: ‘How’s business?’

  Robert was now the proprietor of a restaurant much favoured by the homosexuals about whom Ruby had been complaining. Somehow he had known that Cambridge in the 1930s was congenial to such men, just as Berlin had been in the 1920s. His new place had the same name as the old, Bistro Robert. ‘Business is good,’ he answered. A shadow crossed his face, a brief but intense look of real fear. ‘This time, I hope I can keep what I’ve built up.’

  ‘We’re doing our best to fight off the Fascists, and meetings such as this are the way to do it,’ Lloyd said. ‘Your talk will be a big help – it will open people’s eyes.’ Robert was going to speak about his personal experience of life under Fascism. ‘A lot of them say it couldn’t happen here, but they’re wrong.’

  Robert nodded grim agreement. ‘Fascism is a lie, but an alluring one.’

  Lloyd’s visit to Berlin three years ago was vivid in his mind. ‘I often wonder what happened to the old Bistro Robert,’ he said.

  ‘I had a letter from a friend,’ Robert said in a voice full of sadness. ‘None of the old crowd go there any more. The Macke brothers auctioned off the wine cellar. Now the clientele is mostly middle-ranking cops and bureaucrats.’ He looked even more pained as he added: ‘They no longer use tablecloths.’ He changed the subject abruptly. ‘Do you want to go to the Trinity Ball?’

  Most of the colleges held summer dances to celebrate the end of exams. The balls, plus associated parties and picnics, constituted May Week, which illogically took place in June. The Trinity Ball was famously lavish. ‘I’d love to go, but I can’t afford it,’ Lloyd said. ‘Tickets are two guineas, aren’t they?’

  ‘I’ve been given one. But you can have it. Several hundred drunk students dancing to a jazz band is actually my idea of hell.’

  Lloyd was tempted. ‘But I haven’t got a tailcoat.’ College balls required white-tie-and-tails.

  ‘Borrow mine. It’ll be too big at the waist, but we’re the same height.’

  ‘Then I will. Thank you!’

  Ruby reappeared. ‘Your mother is wonderful,’ she said to Lloyd. ‘I never knew she used to be a maid!’

  Robert said: ‘I have known Ethel for more than twenty years. She is truly extraordinary.’

  ‘I can see why you haven’t met Miss Right,’ Ruby said to Lloyd. ‘You’re looking for someone like her, and there aren’t many.’

  ‘You’re right about the last part, anyway,’ Lloyd said. ‘There’s no one like her.’

  Ruby winced, as if in pain.

  Lloyd said: ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘Toothache.’

  ‘You must go to the dentist.’

  She looked at him as if he had said something stupid, and he realized that on a housemaid’s wage she could not afford to pay a dentist. He felt foolish.

  He went to the door and peeped through to the main hall. Like many nonconformist churches, this was a plain, rectangular room with walls painted white. It was a warm day, and the clear-glass windows were open. The rows of chairs were full and the audience was waiting expectantly.

  When Ethel reappeared, Lloyd said: ‘If it’s all right with everyone, I’ll open the meeting. Then Robert will tell his personal story, and my mother will draw out the political lessons.’

  They all agreed.

  ‘Ruby, will you keep an eye on the Fascists? Let me know if anything happens.’

  Ethel frowned. ‘Is that really necessary?’

  ‘We probably shouldn’t trust them to keep their promise.’

  Ruby said: ‘They’re meeting a quarter of a mile up the road. I don’t mind running in and out.’

  She left by the back door, and Lloyd led the others into the church. There was no stage, but a table and three chairs stood at the near end, with a lectern to one side. As Ethel and Robert took their seats, Lloyd went to the lectern. There was a brief round of subdued applause.

  ‘Fascism is on the march,’ Lloyd began. ‘And it is dangerously attractive. It gives false hope to the unemployed. It wears a spurious patriotism, as the Fascists themselves wear imitation military uniforms.’

  The British government was keen to appease Fascist regimes, to Lloyd’s dismay. It was a coalition dominated by Conservatives, with a few Liberals and a sprinkling of renegade Labour ministers who had split with their party. Only a few days after it was re-elected last November, the Foreign Secretary had proposed to yield much of Abyssinia to the conquering Italians and their Fascist leader, Benito Mussolini.

  Worse still, Germany was rearming and aggressive. Just a couple of months ago, Hitler had violated the Versailles Treaty by sending troops into the demilitarized Rhineland – and Lloyd had been horrified to see that no country had been willing to stop him.

  Any hope he had that Fascism might be a temporary aberration had now vanished. Lloyd believed that democratic countries such as France and Britain must get ready to fight. But he did not say so in his speech today, for his mother and most of the Labour Party opposed a build-up in British armaments and hoped that the League of Nations would be able to deal with the dictators. They wanted at all costs to avoid repeating the dreadful slaughter of the Great War. Lloyd sympathized with that hope, but feared it was not realistic.

  He was preparing himself for war. He had been an officer cadet at school and, when he came up to Cambridge, he had joined the Officer Training Corps – the only working-class boy and certainly the only Labour Party member to do so.

  He sat down to muted applause. He was a clear and logical speaker, but he did not have his mother’s ability to touch hearts – not yet, anyway.

  Robert stepped to the lectern. ‘I am Austrian,’ he said. ‘In the war I was wounded, captured by the Russians, and sent to a prison camp in Siberia. After the Bolsheviks made peace with the Central Powers, the guards opened the gates and told us we were free to go. Getting home was our problem, not theirs. It is a long way from Siberia to Austria – more than three thousand miles. There was no bus, so I walked.’

  Surprised laughter rippled around the room, with a few appreciative handclaps. Robert had already charmed them, Lloyd saw.

  Ruby came up to him, looking annoyed, and spoke in his ear. ‘The Fascists just went by. Boy Fitzherbert was driving Mosley to the railway station, and a bunch of hotheads in black shirts were running after the car, cheering.’

  Lloyd frowned. ‘They promised they wouldn’t march. I suppose they’ll say that running behind a car doesn’t count.’

  ‘What’s the difference, I’d like to know?’

  ‘Any violence?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Keep a lookout.’

  Ruby retired. Lloyd was bothered. The Fascists had certainly broken the spirit of the agreement, if not the letter. They had appeared on the street in their uniforms – and there had been no counter-demonstration. The socialists were here, inside the church, invisible. All there was to show for their stand was a banner outside the church saying The Truth about Fascism in large red letters.

  Robert was saying: ‘I am pleased to be here, honoured to have been invited to address you, and delighted to see several patrons of Bistro Robert in the audience. However, I must warn you that the story I have to tell is most unpleasant, and indeed gruesome.’

  He related how he and Jörg had been arrested after refusing to sell the Berlin restaurant to a Nazi. He described Jörg as his chef and longtime business partner, saying nothing of their sexual relationship, though the more knowing people in the church probably guessed.

  The audience became very quiet as he began to describe
events in the concentration camp. Lloyd heard gasps of horror when he got to the part where the starving dogs appeared. Robert described the torture of Jörg in a low, clear voice that carried across the room. By the time he came to Jörg’s death, several people were weeping.

  Lloyd himself relived the cruelty and anguish of those moments, and he was possessed by rage against such fools as Boy Fitzherbert, whose infatuation with marching songs and smart uniforms threatened to bring the same torment to England.

  Robert sat down and Ethel went to the lectern. As she began to speak, Ruby reappeared, looking furious. ‘I told you this wouldn’t work!’ she hissed in Lloyd’s ear. ‘Mosley has gone, but the boys are singing “Rule Britannia” outside the station.’

  That certainly was a breach of the agreement, Lloyd thought angrily. Boy had broken his promise. So much for the word of an English gentleman.

  Ethel was explaining how Fascism offered false solutions, simplistically blaming groups such as Jews and Communists for complex problems such as unemployment and crime. She made merciless fun of the concept of the triumph of the will, likening the Führer and the Duce to playground bullies. They claimed popular support, but banned all opposition.

  Lloyd realized that when the Fascists returned from the railway station to the centre of town they would have to pass this church. He began to listen to the sounds coming through the open windows. He could hear cars and lorries growling along Hills Road, punctuated now and again by the trill of a bicycle bell or the cry of a child. He thought he heard a distant shout, and it sounded ominously like the noise made by rowdy boys young enough still to be proud of their new, deep voices. He tensed, straining to hear, and there were more shouts. The Fascists were marching.

  Ethel raised her own voice as the bellowing outside got louder. She argued that working people of all kinds needed to band together in trade unions and the Labour Party to build a fairer society step by democratic step, not through the kind of violent upheaval that had gone so badly wrong in Communist Russia and Nazi Germany.

  Ruby re-entered. ‘They’re marching up Hills Road now,’ she said in a low, urgent murmur. ‘We have to go out there and confront them!’