Sweet Poison

by David Roberts

  ‘There, my darling, that was lovely but we really must get dressed now. The gong will be going any minute,’ she said.

  Larmore disentangled himself from his wife – his shirt and collar now creased and soiled beyond rescue – and in the process almost fell off the bed. He felt rather foolish. Why did he give way whenever he felt the urge? He ought to control himself. He was exasperated with himself, which made him annoyed with his wife. What had she meant: ‘lovely’? Was that what it had been – ‘lovely’? He had a feeling he was being mothered and he did not like it. He was now quite determined that he would not be going to Bognor with his wife and children.

  ‘So why did you say we would come, Cecil, if you hate it so much?’

  Honoria Haycraft looked at her husband with a real desire to hear what his answer would be. He was such an honest man; so uninterested in mixing with ‘society’. He had often talked angrily of the charity balls and dinners the rich gave to show, as he said sarcastically, ‘they cared’ about unemployed miners, the homeless, the half-starved: ‘They stuff their faces with smoked salmon and caviare and think that in some way they’re being Christian when really, of course, they are enjoying having a good time with others of their own class and feeling virtuous into the bargain. We talk about having our cake and eating it but I always think it’s a bit much when the cake is taken from the hands of the starving.’

  The Bishop’s wife would remonstrate with him and he would eventually admit that there were some rich people genuinely concerned to do something for England’s great underclass, whose desperate poverty had been exacerbated by the economic ‘depression’. He knew the Duke, for one, to be a good man with a strong sense of purpose and responsibility, but he had so often fulminated against the class system which he regarded as unchristian that it was natural his wife should be surprised to find herself at Mersham Castle, the guest of a duke. Yet many of his fellow bishops, and even the Archbishop of Canterbury, had no difficulty in accepting the idea that it was by God’s will the duke was in his castle and the poor man at his gate. There was even a hymn about it. He, on the contrary, believed that if he were a Christian he must also be a socialist committed to reforming society and distributing wealth more equitably. It was surely outrageous that 80 per cent of the country’s wealth was owned by just 12 per cent of the population. The Bishop was also a pacifist. He believed that wars were fought to benefit the few – the warmongers and the arms dealers – and was convinced that evil could only be defeated by prayer and peaceful resistance. He was a leading figure in a new movement which he hoped would attract support from members of all the political parties: he intended to lead a call for all men of good will to pledge themselves publicly to peace. To pursue his aims he was prepared to go into the lion’s den and this was why he had had no hesitation in accepting the invitation to Mersham.

  ‘I decided to accept the Duke’s invitation, Honoria,’ the Bishop said a little stiffly in answer to his wife, ‘because first of all, I believe him to be a genuinely good man trying to do his best to alleviate the conditions of the poor but more importantly because I share his concern that, if we are not careful, we will be dragged into another war with Germany. I intend to enlist him in my Peace Pledge campaign.’ He shuddered. ‘I promised myself in 1918 that I would do everything I could to prevent such another disaster as almost destroyed this country.’

  He saw his wife smiling. ‘I know I cannot do much,’ he said defensively, ‘but that does not excuse me from doing what little I can do. If we all put in our mite, who knows but the balance will be weighted towards peace.’

  ‘I wasn’t laughing at you, Cecil,’ she said. ‘I was just loving you for your Jack-and-the-Beanstalk determination. Giant killer!’ Honoria, who had been married to her husband for almost thirty years, kissed him with real feeling. She knew that for all his occasional pomposities and little hypocrisies he was one of the only truly good men she had ever met and that to be married to him was the chief blessing of her life.

  ‘In any case,’ the Bishop went on, ‘I wanted to meet General Craig. I have it in mind that he is an ogre; that he sent so many young men to their deaths during the war because he was mad or vicious, but I feel it is unjust of me to condemn him without hearing his side of the argument. The new German representative is also, the Duke informed me, coming here to dine tonight and I particularly welcome the chance of telling him that there are many people in Britain today who sympathize with his countrymen’s just demands. I am convinced that only if Germany is a full and active member of the League of Nations can we achieve a lasting peace.’

  ‘Oh Cecil darling,’ said his wife, alarmed, putting both her hands in his, ‘please don’t get into any political arguments. You know how bitter they can get and how embarrassing they can be for those of us who don’t feel as strongly as you do.’

  ‘Well, you should do – feel strongly, I mean,’ said the Bishop vehemently. ‘What is a little embarrassment against peace or war?’ Then more gently, squeezing his wife’s hands, he said, ‘Think of our Harry. What is he now? Thirteen? Are we to sit back and see him sacrificed as our fathers’ generation sacrificed their sons? It is unthinkable!’

  ‘But, my love –’

  ‘Don’t fret, my darling,’ said the Bishop, seeing his wife was really upset. ‘I mean to listen patiently, not to lecture. If you hear me begin to sermonize you have my full permission to rebuke me.’

  ‘Look here, Duke,’ Lord Weaver was saying, ‘we share a common aim, to prevent another European war.’ His Canadian twang was a little more evident than usual. He held out his glass and the Duke splashed soda on to whisky. Whenever the Duke wanted to flatter a man into thinking he was of special importance he took him, not into one of the castle’s grand public rooms, but into the gunroom. Connie had a little boudoir, or sewing-room as she liked to call it, not that much sewing was ever done there, where she would charm her female guests into believing they were very special to her, but to be alone with the Duke in the gunroom, his holy of holies, was a compliment very few men could resist.

  Although the Duke called it his gunroom it was more properly a rod and line room. There were guns in cases and some lethal-looking seventeenth-century blunderbusses over the mantelpiece but its walls were covered in fishing rods. There were over a hundred on display in racks and two very ancient rods, alleged to have been used by Izaac Walton himself, in glass display cases. There were no moth-eaten stags’ heads staring gloomily from the walls – the Duke had had all these cleared away when he inherited the title and the castle – but there were some magnificent salmon stuffed and mounted, with brass plates below them giving their origin and the history of their capture. The Duke, Weaver knew, had fished all over the world – from barbel in the Zambezi to salmon in Iceland – and Weaver was beginning to think that behind that rather stupid-looking face and the bluff ‘good-fellow’ air of the country gentleman there might be a true fisher of men. Certainly, he was not the fool his enemies were content to label him.

  ‘I believe we need to give the German people a chance to find their rightful place at the world’s conference tables and encourage them to play their part in the League of Nations,’ Weaver was saying, rolling his glass between his hands which he did when he was speaking sincerely.

  ‘Yes,’ the Duke said eagerly. ‘I don’t pretend to like this Hitler fellow but we have to deal with the realities and he has the support of the businessmen, “the captains of industry” as your newspapers call them. They believe he is the only man capable of bringing Germany out of recession and into stable, ordered . . . well, not democracy perhaps as we understand it, but at least something like it. Bismarck took Prussia away from parliamentary democracy toward a militaristic society and we know what that led to. That’s why we must – we have a duty to – help Germany accept that she is part of the European balance of power.’

  Weaver sipped at his whisky and watched the Duke pacing impatiently round the room quite unlike his normal placid self. ‘Do y
ou know anything about this Baron Helmut von Friedberg? I don’t know much about his background. He’s the new – what? – under-secretary at the German embassy here?’

  ‘He’s a sort of cousin of mine,’ replied the Duke. ‘My great-uncle married the daughter of Moritz August von Friedberg, a German princeling and a friend of Bismarck’s. This chap, though I have never met him before, is their grandson or great-grandson, I’m not sure which to be honest, and therefore a cousin. But the important thing is that he has direct access to Hitler. Larmore tells me that Hitler does not trust the people at the embassy here and Friedberg has authority to . . . well, to bypass the officials and report back to Hitler direct.’

  ‘Hmmf,’ said Weaver. ‘Very interesting. He may be very useful to us in getting through to Herr Hitler that we in England wish him well in what he is trying to do in Germany and he does not have to be quite so brutal about it. On the other hand, it makes it very difficult for the Foreign Office. Are they to continue going through the normal diplomatic channels or is that a complete waste of time? This man Friedberg may be all right but the calibre of some of these Nazi new boys swaggering about the world is nothing to write home about, or at least not if you want to write good news.’

  ‘I’m just as worried as you, Joe, about these Nazis but we have to pull their teeth before they can bite by taking away their just cause of complaint – ridiculous demands from France for reparations and so on.’

  ‘What of Larmore?’ Weaver said. ‘My information is he has some sort of relationship with Friedberg and I gather Baldwin’s going to bring him into the cabinet – a new position – military supplies, armaments, that sort of thing. I hear little good of him. He’s a womanizer for one thing. If we wanted, the New Gazette could blow his career to smithereens.’

  ‘He’s not a gentleman,’ agreed the Duke, sighing, ‘but we have to deal with all sorts nowadays.’ Then, thinking Weaver might wonder if he was included among ‘all sorts’, he hurriedly changed the subject. ‘Friedberg should be here in about an hour. He’s staying with the Lachberrys at Norham, so you can see he is moving in the highest circles. I gather the Prince of Wales has taken to him. I’m surprised you did not meet him at the Brownlows’. Anyway, I’m determined to make this evening a success. It’s important.’

  ‘When is your brother expected?’

  The Duke looked at his gold hunter and said, ‘Edward? Why, damn it, he ought to be here now.’ He rang the bell. When the butler appeared he said, ‘Bates, is there any news of Lord Edward?’

  ‘No, your Grace.’

  ‘Where can the boy have got to?’ said the Duke to Weaver. ‘It is most annoying. We cannot wait dinner for him for ever.’

  ‘I expect he’ll turn up before long,’ said Weaver easily. ‘He’s probably had a puncture or something.’

  ‘Bates, when Lord Edward does arrive tell him not to dress for dinner but to join us immediately will you?’

  ‘Very good, your Grace,’ said Bates, retreating.

  ‘Oh, Bates, inform her Grace that we will not wait dinner for Lord Edward and say that Lord Weaver and I will be in the drawing-room in half an hour.’

  When the butler had left the room the Duke said, ‘Damn the boy. I wanted him to be here to talk to that stepdaughter of yours. Connie was particularly anxious she had someone of more or less her age to amuse her. Connie said she would be bored to death by all of us old men and no doubt she’s right. She says the young man she had counted on to come – Lomax his name is, I believe – bowed out at the last minute. Really, the young men can’t be relied upon. If I had been invited to dine . . . oh well, anyway, it can’t be helped. I just hope Ned hasn’t had an accident. He races around in sports cars and even flies aeroplanes – I’m only surprised he hasn’t broken his neck already.’

  Weaver’s brow was furrowed. ‘I say, Duke, as we are alone can I bring you up to date on that matter I had occasion to talk to you about a few weeks ago?’ He leant forward confidentially and the Duke could see the bald patch on the top of his head and was reminded of Friar Tuck.

  ‘Of course,’ said the Duke. ‘Is there something . . . ?’

  ‘I thought you would like to know that the “blackmail” . . . well, it has turned out all right in the end – better than all right, in fact – except for one thing.’

  ‘What’s that?’ said the Duke.

  Lord Weaver bent even closer to the Duke as though he feared someone might be listening at the door and began to explain himself. The Duke was at first intrigued and then disbelieving.

  ‘It’s like something out of Shakespeare,’ he said at last.

  2

  Saturday Evening

  Under other circumstances Edward might have enjoyed his ride. It was peaceful enough lying back against the hay. In the warmth of the summer evening it gave off a sweet smell which reminded him of harvest days in boyhood on Home Farm when he was no different from anyone else, sweating beside lads his own age helping build a haystack or watching unnoticed as the men tinkered with the new threshing machine which was more temperamental even than the farm manager. It was already eight thirty but it was still light. Gradually the frustration he felt at having his plans scuppered by his own folly began to leave him until he was able to contemplate with something approaching equanimity the frosty reception he would receive from the Duke when he finally did arrive at Mersham Castle. He laughed to himself. Here he was sitting beside his agricultural friend behind two handsome carthorses who did not seem to have taken against him for his stupid attempt on the land speed record. Indeed, as Edward stood at the horses’ heads before getting up beside the wagoner he was almost certain he detected a satiric glint in the eyes of Myrtle, the left-hand horse. After all, the wagon might roll along the dusty Roman road at three miles an hour but at least it moved, unlike the Lagonda, looking slightly ridiculous in the embrace of a dry ditch.

  He quoted to himself as much as he remembered of Lorenzo and Jessica’s rhapsody to love on a summer’s night in The Merchant of Venice. ‘In such a night as this, when the sweet wind did gently kiss the trees and they did make no noise, in such a night Troilus methinks mounted the Troyan walls and sighed his soul toward the Grecian tents, where Cressid lay that night. In such a night . . .’ How did it go? ‘In such a night, did Thisbe fearfully o’ertrip the dew and saw the lion’s shadow ere himself, and ran dismayed away.’

  It rather pleased him that he could remember so much. ‘The Troyan walls,’ he mused. They would have been real battlements complete with curtain walls, parapets, corbels, watch towers, bartizans and all the rest of it. Mersham had nothing so warlike. Who of her people would consider withstanding the will of the Virgin Queen, unless it be some rugged Irish kerns who knew no better. Mersham, whose every cubit he knew as well as the palm of his right hand, he loved more than he knew. It was his enchanted childhood playground until he went to school and even then there were long holidays in which to reacquaint himself with each dusty corner. In childhood his rooms – the nursery and his old nanny’s rooms – were at the top of the house with only the servants’ rooms above them. In winter they could be very cold – the only heating was supplied by inadequate grates. Edward’s father had not approved of mollycoddling his children so he had not permitted fires to be lit in the castle between Easter and October. How Nanny had prayed for late Easters as though God might alter the church calendar for her. During the war, the Duke, grieving for his son, took a masochistic pleasure in making himself – and therefore his family – as uncomfortable as possible in solidarity with the soldiers at the front. The old Duke had never been interested in what he ate and by 1915 the food served in the castle was so inadequate the local doctor had been moved to protest that the Duke was endangering his child’s health. Thereafter, Edward had been allowed unlimited milk and vegetables but meat was only served on Saturdays and cold on Sundays.

  But for all this Edward looked back to those days as a blessed period in his life and when he was in Africa trying to sleep in blist
ering heat, worried by mosquitoes and sweating pints into the single sheet that covered him, he would summon up images of those winter nights at Mersham when the frost on the inside of the windows was as thick as his fingernail.

  Behind Edward a mountain of hay threatened a golden avalanche as the cart bumped over each rut in the road and dived into every pot-hole. He pulled at a straw and sucked it pensively. The old carter had said that the nearest public house was four miles back the way he had come and from there he could telephone Mersham for assistance. At this rate it would be an hour before they reached it. He began to wonder if he would even get to the castle that night. Edward and his mercifully unloquacious companion had been trundling over the landscape for three-quarters of an hour without seeing a single soul let alone a motor car when a hooting noise penetrated the creaking and rumbling that gave evidence that the haywain was actually in motion. There was no way of discovering what this hooting signified without bringing the wagon to a halt, which took a full four minutes to achieve. Edward clambered down into the road, his damaged knee making him wince, to see what the matter was.