by Jo Walton
I left Mollie at the theater at half-past five in order to be dressed and ready for the reception at seven. I didn’t go back to Devlin’s for once; he’d agreed I could dress at my own flat. I had a bath, with rose petals in the water—the last of Antony’s roses. I enjoyed the luxury of soaking with them. Then I was worried that I’d have unsettled my hair, but they’d clearly put enough of the marcel stuff on to lacquer it to my head; hardly a hair had loosened.
Mrs. Tring was there when I came out of the bathroom. She came out of the kitchen when she saw me, a dishcloth in her hand. “I hope you don’t want dinner,” she said. “It’s chops, and chops don’t stretch.”
“I remember when you stretched one chop into a meal for four,” I said.
“That was a chop and some bacon, and pies take time, in case you didn’t know.”
I laughed. “I don’t want dinner anyway, there’s bound to be food at this stupid reception I’m going to.”
“Is that why you’ve done that to your hair?”
“No, that’s for the part. It’s supposed to look like Mollie’s. You’ll see when you see us together, or at the worst at the dress rehearsal.”
“Not a bit like Mollie’s if you ask me. And she has those streaks in it. Be going gray soon enough, I said to her, no need to bring it on sooner. Wigs were good enough in my day, or finding someone who has gray hair natural.”
“Will you help me on with my dress now?” I asked. “After I’ve done my face that is.”
“I’ll do your face too if you like,” she said, going back into the kitchen and coming out empty-handed. “You never remember how light you have to keep it when it’s not for the stage. How do you want it? Debutante?”
I sat down in front of the mirror in my bedroom, still wrapped in my towel, and she stood behind me. It was like every dressing room we’d ever been in. “Not debutante,” I said to her reflection. “As if I was going to be on a magazine cover over the title ‘Glamorous Viola Lark Stars in Hamlet This Month at the Siddons.’ ”
“You should be so lucky,” Mrs. Tring said, and in about ten minutes transformed my face into exactly what I’d wanted. I looked ten years younger. “For the part, we’ll have you paler, but for this ball you’d do better with some color.” She dabbed low down on my cheeks, and then higher, bringing out the angles. “What are you wearing?”
“My act one dress,” I said. She’d seen it already on the bed, not to mention at the theater when we did the dress parade on Saturday.
She pursed her lips. “Well, that’ll certainly show. Touch of violet on your lids then, bring out the blue.” I obediently shut my eyes. “And since your ears are showing, how about those pearl drops your auntie the Marchioness gave you?”
“She’s my mother’s cousin, not my aunt,” I said, as Mrs. Tring clipped them on. They hurt, and I knew the pressure would be agonizing by the end of the evening. “Dress,” I said, looking critically at my face.
“Perfume first,” Mrs. Tring reminded me. “Then I must get back to my chops, Mollie will be home soon and expecting dinner ready.”
The reception started at seven, so I timed my arrival for half-past. The German Embassy was in Carlton House Terrace, by Pall Mall. It’s strange how many Londons there are and how they overlap in some places but not at all in others. There’s the debutante London, which is mostly Mayfair and Knightsbridge, in which the embassies and Pall Mall are included. Then there’s theater London, which overlaps at the West End, but only there, and which includes bedsits and fix-ups in Muswell Hill and Clapham that I once hadn’t known existed. There’s financial London, around St. Paul’s and the City. There’s the London of the swarming poor, still almost Dickensian. All of these pass each other in some streets, rub shoulders in others, and leave certain areas untouched. I had lived for a year in debutante London, intriguing for invitations to parties only to pronounce them awful squeezes once I was there. Now I lived in theater London and Pall Mall was so firmly set within debutante London I hadn’t been near it for years.
When the taxi drew up at the Embassy I was surprised. The outside looked like a pair of restrained Regency frontages, hung about with swastika flags and guarded by storm troopers, but much less intimidating than I had been expecting. Inside was completely different. Clearly the entire building had been made over by some mad devotee of monumental Bauhaus. I gave my name at the door, and yielded up my invitation. A storm trooper searched my bag, finding nothing but makeup, a hairbrush, and a little purse with taxi money. He was polite but thorough. There would have been no smuggling a bomb in here.
After that I was taken up a line of heel-clicking, saluting, hand-kissing Germans until I finally reached the pinnacle at the top of the stairs and was introduced to Herr Hitler himself. He had very intense blue eyes that seemed almost mesmeric. I had seen hundreds of photographs of him, of course, but none of them captured that charismatic quality he had in person. He didn’t have the arrogance of most of the Germans I had met, Captain Keiler quite definitely included. He had a kind of humility that was quite charming. I instinctively liked him.
He didn’t speak English, but Herr Schnell stood next to him ready to translate. “The Fuhrer says, another of the beautiful Larkin sisters,” he said. “But he wants to know, why do you call yourself Lark?”
“Because I am an actress,” I said, and Schnell translated.
“What is a lark?” Hitler asked and Schnell passed the question on to me.
“A bird,” I said.
Schnell frowned. “What bird?”
“I don’t know the German name, but in French it is alouetta.”
He translated this. “Why is it that in England all the pretty girls learn French and not German?” was the response to this.
“When I was young they learned French, but they learn German these days,” I said. This wasn’t entirely true. It’s true that they learn German now, but my own French was pretty minimal, barely enough for shopping. I only knew a lark was alouetta because of the song, which Pappa used to sing. I think he’d learned it in the trenches.
“You are still young,” the Fuhrer said, gallantly. “I look forward to seeing you act.”
“Even though you won’t understand a word of it?” I asked.
“I know the play. And besides, Shakespeare transcends language.” While Schnell translated this, the Fuhrer took up position as if cradling a skull, and said, quite distinctly in English, “Alas, poor Yorick.”
“I hope you enjoy it,” I said.
“We will speak again at the theater afterwards,” the Fuhrer said, and as he translated this Herr Schnell signaled to me to pass on.
That’s all the conversation I ever had with Adolf Hitler, Fuhrer of Europe, and it really couldn’t have been more trivial.
I went on, down a flight of stairs. At the bottom was Pip, acting hostess. Her hair was marcel waved like mine, but with gray streaks like Mollie’s, only in her case they were natural. She was wearing a floating apricot dress in several layers. “My God, Fats, you do look different,” she greeted me.
“It’s my act one costume for Hamlet,” I said.
She laughed. “Well drift on. I’ll come and find you in a bit. I have to do my hostess duties for a little while yet.”
“Don’t you find it a terrible bore?”
“Not in the least. The Fuhrer isn’t married you know, so Magda Goebbels and I take it in turns to do the formal entertaining for him. But he moves us around all the time, it’s his incentive system, and I’ve been stuck in Prague for the last year.”
“Siddy tells me you’re practically the queen of Czechoslovakia,” I said.
“Well, being first alone in Prague is nothing like as good as sharing first place in Berlin. Or London, for that matter. I’m hoping to use this trip to get Heinie back to Berlin in the next rotation.” Pip smiled at a stranger coming down the stairs. “Go on. I’m dying to have a proper chinnie with you, but I can’t now. I’ll find you in the crush as soon as I’m free.”
“You look most striking, Miss Lark,” he said.
“It’s my costume from act one,” I said. I could see I was going to be saying it a lot.
“How original of you,” he said.
“Well, when it comes to it, I’d much rather be here in costume as an actor than as a poor relation in a three-year-old dress,” I confided.
He smiled. I saw that he was drunk already. “Ah, but we’re all poor relations here, all of us English. Don’t you feel it? The real centers of culture and economics are on the Continent, and we know it. The Empire’s a fading dream, it has been all this century. The countries of the future are Germany and Russia, where they’re prepared to try new things. We only copy them.”
“America?” I asked, to be perverse.
“If they could ever pull themselves out of their series of depressions they might make something of themselves,” he said. “But no, it’s the countries of the Continent we need to look to, the Reich and the Soviets. They’re the ones we have to choose to steer our star.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” I said, and carefully didn’t ask him which of those two titans he favored. If he was Siddy’s little man at the FO, then it would be Russia. I didn’t care and I didn’t want to know. To my astonishment, I caught sight of Dodo by the buffet, swathed in beige lace and looking like a hippo. “Excuse me, I must go and talk to my sister,” I said.
“She’s dancing,” the FO man said.
“My other sister,” I said, confusing him utterly.
I loaded a plate with lobster mayonnaise and vol-au-vents. There was sauerkraut, but nobody seemed to be taking it. Dodo saw me and grinned and we ducked into a corner with our loaded plates. “What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“Well, I thought I was here to talk to Pip, but it seems that actually some German scientists want desperately to talk to Walter about atoms. Heinie kept on about it at dinner. They want us to go to Germany and for Walter to work on atoms for them. You know I don’t understand his work, though I was frightfully proud when he made that discovery and got all the attention.”
“Are you going to go?” I asked.
“Walter’s been stalling so far,” she said. “I think he’d like to, really, to have the funding for research Heinie was promising. But we have to think about whether it’s the best thing for the children. I suppose I can paint anywhere, it might even be good for my painting to see new places, but I am so very fond of the English landscape. I think I might feel exiled from my roots if I lived there and tried to paint it. I never really enjoy holidays abroad. Then I’d be near Pip, of course, but so far away from all the rest of you—and I don’t think I’d fit into society in the Reich, I don’t fancy queening it the way Pip does, I’m more of a home and children kind. Of course, that’s what they’re supposed to be for isn’t it, kinder and kush and all that, but then there’s the painting. And another thing, I don’t speak German and I’ve always been hopeless with foreign languages.”
“Don’t go,” I said. “I’d miss you terribly, and it’s clear you don’t want to.”
“I don’t, but it might be such a chance for Walter,” she said, looking fretful. “Oh do come and talk to him, Fats, you’ve always been cleverer than me.”
“What has cleverness got to do with anything? Your instincts are telling you not to go, and if you say that to Walter he can weigh that for himself.”
“Walter doesn’t count much on instincts,” she said, sadly, and dropped a large blob of lobster mayonnaise right onto the bodice of her beige lace dress.
24
Lord Scott isn’t someone we can just arrest,” Carmichael said, as they drove back to the Yard.
“He’s one of Churchill’s lot, isn’t he?” Royston asked. “Gah, they’re all as bad as each other.”
“He’s certainly not one of the Farthing Set. We’ll need to get warrants, and whether the Chief will give them to us on a servant’s word . . .” Carmichael sighed.
“You believed him though, didn’t you, sir?” Royston stopped at a red light and Carmichael felt the pressure of the sergeant’s earnest gaze.
“Yes, I believed him, for what that’s worth. There wasn’t any malice in the way he named names, and he confirmed Nash. I said Lieutenant and he came right back with Bob. If he’d been making them up he’d have had more on the mysterious Sir Aloysius.”
“Oh, don’t you know him?” The light changed and Royston drove off. “Unless there’s more than one Irish Sir Aloysius, which I suppose there might be. I was thinking he must be Sir Aloysius Farrell, George Cross, the Hero of Calais.”
“The name does ring a vague bell,” Carmichael said. “Was he the young officer who got the Guards out at the last minute?”
“That’s the one. He was all over the papers at the time.”
“But why the devil would someone like that be involved in this conspiracy?”
“Why would Lord Scott? Or Marshall and Nash for that matter? Or Gilmore? They want to get power for themselves by killing Mr. Normanby. Exactly the same as the Farthing thing but the other way around. That’s why I said they’re one as bad as the other.”
They inched their way in silence for a while through the early evening traffic; black taxis, red buses, cars of all descriptions. “I’ll ask for reports on all of them tonight, but it’ll be too late to get warrants until tomorrow, and I’ll have to see the Chief,” Carmichael said. “You have any idea about the girl, Siddy?”
“Sorry, sir,” Royston said. “Funny name for a girl. If we can’t find her any other way we could check all the birth records for girls called Sydney for about the right dates. Can’t be many.”
“I don’t envy the constable who gets that job. But it’s more likely a nickname. Or Sydney could be her surname.”
“Or Siddons, like the theater,” Royston put in.
“If we get Sir Aloysius, he’ll probably lead us to her. She probably isn’t important anyway.”
They drew up at the Yard. “Park the car and get off home, I’ll see you here bright and early tomorrow,” Carmichael said, getting out.
Stebbings was still at the desk. “Hello, sergeant, is the Chief still here?”
“Just gone off, sir,” Stebbings said.
“Well, I need a number of things.” Stebbings took up a pencil and waited. “I need to know where Mrs. Louise Green is. She was arrested Friday, booked at Hampstead under the Defence of the Realm Act. Then I want urgent reports on Lord Scott, his secretary Mr. Nesbitt, Sir Aloysius Farrell, and any other Irish Sir Aloysiuses there may be. Next, I want an appointment with the Chief first thing in the morning, on a matter of warrants for arrests for the Gilmore bomb.”
“Yes, sir,” Stebbings said. “We should have all of that for you by the morning, sir.”
Carmichael turned and left, feeling curiously deflated. Jack would be waiting for him, he thought as he headed towards Holborn tube station, and he could make him happy for once by being home on time and taking him out for dinner.
Tuesday morning at eight-thirty, Carmichael was back at the Yard. “Reports are on your desk, and you have an appointment with the Chief at nine,” Sergeant Stebbings said.
“Thank you, sergeant.”
Stebbings didn’t respond.
Lord Scott’s report reminded Carmichael very much of the ones he’d been sent at Farthing. Scott was an aristocrat and a politician. Philip
John Scott, born in 1889 with a silver spoon in his mouth at Coltham Court, eldest son of the previous Lord Scott and his wife Honoria Mary. Educated Harrow and Oxford, fought and was wounded in the Great War, married in 1921 to Pamela Dixon, of the American millionaire Dixons. One son, Benjamin Charles, born 1923; two daughters, Diana Honoria, born 1925, and Susan Pamela, born 1927. Pamela died in the Blitz, Lord Scott never remarried. He had sat in the House of Lords for the last thirty years, meddling in the country’s affairs. He had held minor office under Baldwin, again under Chamberlain, and had risen to the heights of being briefly minister for munitions under Churchill during the war. Since then, he had remained a Churchillian, hostile to the Farthing Peace. He had been Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster under Eden, which could mean anything or nothing, and held no current post.
He turned to Sir Aloysius Farrell, expecting more of the same. It began similarly. Sir Aloysius was born in 1914, the son of an Irish baronet and his wife Agnes. His father had died in 1916 on the Somme, so he had inherited the title very early. Unlike Lord Scott, there had been no money—the report didn’t outright say as much, but Carmichael could tell from the name of the school young Sir Aloysius had attended. If they could have afforded it, he’d have been at Harrow, Eton, Winchester, Rugby, or perhaps Stonyhurst if they were Catholics. Instead he went to somewhere called St. Michael’s in Bournemouth. It wasn’t even one of the second-tier public schools. Carmichael had been to a school like that himself, a minor school that aspired.
Sir Aloysius had left school as soon as he could, and who could blame him, in 1930. He had gone straight into the Army and spent three years as a lieutenant. Then he had come to the end of his term of enlistment in 1933 and left. He was next heard of in court in Ireland being reprimanded in an IRA case, in 1935. Then, in the summer of 1939, he was arrested in London with a bomb in his possession, clearly part of the IRA bombing campaign of that summer. He had been offered the choice of prison or returning to the Army, and he had naturally chosen the Army. This led him to Calais as part of a sacrifice Churchill was making, landing a battalion in Calais to distract Hitler from the evacuation of Dunkirk. Against all odds, when all his superior officers had been killed, Sir Aloysius had managed to rally the remnants of the battalion and get them out of Calais and back to England on a half-sinking French cruiser he had commandeered. He remained in the Army until the end of the war, and then disappeared as far as the record went—no more arrests, no marriage, no visible career. His mother had died in 1944. His residence was listed as Arranish Hall, Ulster.
