The Fatal Gift

by Alec Waugh

  ‘I am to speak,’ he said, ‘of our national image in the Arab world. May I ask you to consider the nature of that image.’

  He started on a historical survey of Britain’s involvement in the Middle East starting with Kitchener of Khartoum. ‘Oh,’ I thought, ‘Oh, he’s on the wrong tack here. They won’t want to be read a lecture.

  I looked away from Raymond, turning to the faces that were turned to him. Was there a puzzled expression in them ? There was still a welcoming, a well-wishing feeling, but was not there also an air of awkwardness? He was hitting the wrong note. I wondered why. Was he as a new boy showing a lack of deference? Was he missing the atmosphere of his audience ? It might well be, since it was the first time that he had spoken here. Or was he missing the political atmosphere of the moment? England was in a difficult mood. The country had embarked on a military operation and then been criticised, had been more than criticised, had been called to order by the United Nations. The country had been humiliated by John Foster Dulles. No one knew where we stood. Had we as a nation made a colossal blunder? Was the House feeling that there were certain things that it did not want to have said now and here, and in this way. The sense of embarrassment increased. Was Raymond aware of it ? He did not seem to be. He went on and on. His speech was much too long. He was not asking a question, he was delivering an address. In a way it was a good speech. It was well phrased. He spoke, if not with fervour, at least with feeling. He was obviously sincere. This added to the embarrassment. He was thoroughly enjoying himself, and he was, there was never at any moment any doubt of that, a thoroughly nice person. Everyone was liking him. It was for his sake that they were ill at ease. ‘Will he never stop,’ I thought. ‘What am I going to say tonight at dinner?’

  He did not stop: he went on and on. He repeated himself. He became autobiographical. He told how his travels, particularly his travels in the USA during the depression, had convinced him that the world was afflicted by a faulty distribution of the world’s resources. It was a digression that had no bearing on the question that he had posed, but he appeared to be at the mercy of a resolve to get everything off his chest. He had told me that he had wanted to present, to introduce himself to his fellow peers, and he was indulging in a complete apologia. He had been so long in the background, so long in the wings, that now he was on the stage he had to deliver himself completely.

  He went on and on. He appeared to be utterly at his ease, to be having the time of his life. He was quite unconscious of the mounting temper of the house; the atmosphere of irritation, almost of indignation at having such a performance inflicted on it. Looking down from the gallery, I was acutely conscious of the glances that members were exchanging, of the whispers, the turned heads as though counsel was being taken as to the correct procedure. Somehow this had to stop, had to be stopped. But how?

  On and on he went. He must have been speaking for half an hour. On and on and on. And then, suddenly, without warning, without premeditated planning, the end came. He was warming to what would in any other speech have been a peroration, but in this looked likely to be only the winding up of one more digression. He was back now on to the operations in the canal.

  ‘In this current campaign,’ he said, and his voice took on a fuller, rounder tone, ‘we have abandoned a friendship, a trust that has been built up over fifty years by honourable men, by men of honour, at the cost of blood, at the cost of lives; abandoned it for what, for a flimsy pretext, a device that deceived no one, abandoned it for whom? The French and the Israelis. What a choice, what a preference; this picture, then on that.’ He paused. He looked round him, his face wore a triumphant look. ‘The French and the Israelis. I have nothing to say against our new-found allies, but …’ Again he paused. With his voice fuller, rounder, he delivered himself of the eight words that were to become a cliché, ‘The Arabs, my Lords, after all, are gentlemen.’

  As I heard those eight words, I gasped. Heavens, I thought, what has he said, what has he done? There was a moment’s silence, then from the Opposition benches came a single laugh: or rather a guffaw. The outcome of nervousness, of embarrassment, an equivalent of the little laugh that the Chinese give when they are made to feel ill-at-ease.

  On Raymond it had the effect of the sudden slap or dash of cold water that a doctor will administer to a patient on the edge of hysteria. It brought him out of his trance, recalled him to his senses. He looked round him helplessly. He tried to continue his speech, but he had lost the thread of his ideas. ‘I must apologise,’ he began, then stopped. He could not think what to say. It was more than anything a need to put him out of his misery that made one of the senior members of the assembly avail himself of the House’s traditional weapon of defence. Rising to his feet, he said, ‘I move that the Noble Lord be no more heard.’

  Raymond looked round him again, helplessly. Then sat down. A minute later he stood up, walked towards the woolsack, bowed to the empty throne, then left the hall. The House continued with its business.

  I waited for a moment or two, then went out. I wondered if I should find him waiting for me in the cloakroom. I did not. I asked the attendant if he had gone out. The attendant shook his head. I decided not to wait. We had our date that evening, in four hours’ time. If he wanted to call it off, he would assume that I was in the Athenaeum.

  He rang me there at five. ‘I gave you a fine piece of copy, didn’t I?’ he said.

  His voice was light and cheerful. I did not know how to answer that. He did not expect an answer. He went straight on. ‘Perhaps Pratt’s isn’t such a good idea after all, this evening. Some of the people who were in the House this afternoon might be there. I don’t want to embarrass them. They’ll probably want to talk about it. Let’s go to the Jardin.’

  ‘That’ll be fine.’

  In the autumn of 1927 Noel Coward put on a play, Sirocco, with Ivor Novello and Frances Doble in the leads, that on the first night was booed and yelled at. There was pandemonium in the house, with Hugh Walpole standing up in the stalls, shouting ‘un-English, un-English,’ and the gallery and pit shrieking ‘Author, author, come out you Coward, come out and face us.’ That first night is part of the history of the stage. In his autobiography Noel Coward said that during the next few days he made a particular point of going to restaurants like the Ivy which were frequented by the stage, to prove that he could carry off a failure with panache. Raymond was avoiding Pratt’s, not because he was afraid of showing himself in public after a humiliation, but because he thought his presence would embarrass his fellow members. The two situations demanded different techniques. Each took the course that was right for him.

  In the Athenaeum drawing room I wondered what I should say to him. I need not have. He was already in the Jardin when I arrived, a half bottle of champagne was cooling in a steaming bucket. ‘We’ll treat this as an aperitif,’ he said. ‘I’m having oysters, which I can’t get in Dominica. I remember that you can’t take them, so I’ve ordered you smoked salmon. Is that all right?’

  ‘Smoked salmon’s fine.’

  ‘And then a grouse ?’

  ‘That’s better still.’

  ‘And a sound red burgundy. They’ve got a Corton ’49, a ChateĊu Grancey.’

  ‘This is going to be a memorable meal.’

  ‘That’s what I need after an afternoon like that, yes,’ he said. ‘I certainly gave you a fine piece of copy. I’ve made enquiries. It’s years since a peer has been called to order.’

  ‘When was the last time?’

  ‘In the middle of the war.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘An eccentric peer was speaking about Hitler, said he was really a pretty good chap, only we had used him wrong. It wasn’t the time for that kind of speech. I suppose that that was what was wrong with mine today. The wrong time for it. Did you feel I was hitting the wrong notes ?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘No, that’s the curious thing. I thought it was going very well.’

  �
�It was a very good speech, very well phrased, I mean. It was very well delivered. But …’ I paused: how was I to put it ? ‘The country’s in a funny mood. It’s been humiliated. It doesn’t want to have salt rubbed into the wounds—not by its friends at least.’

  ‘Where did I start going wrong?’

  ‘With the bit about T. E. Lawrence.’

  ‘Ah, I see.’ He frowned. ‘Do you think I’ve been out of the country so much, so long that I’ve lost touch with it?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that; at the same time,’ I gave him an example, ‘there was an American who’d been writing a soap opera for radio for fifteen years. He took a house in the South of France. He didn’t see why he couldn’t write his opera as easily there as he had in Connecticut. The thing, so he thought, was automatic. He loved life in the South of France. His soap opera came out as easily as ever, but within six months his sponsors found that he wasn’t gripping his audience as he had. He had lost contact with his audience. He needed to see every day in the streets, the supermarkets, at the post office, the men and women and the children who were switching on to him every weekday afternoon at half past five. He gave up his house in Grasse, he went back to Connecticut. The soap opera got back onto its old tracks; the sponsors were delighted. Yet he himself can’t see what was wrong with the stuff he wrote in the South of France. It seemed all right to him. Is that pertinent?’

  ‘I suppose it is. His eye was out. That’s what it amounts to, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And mine is too ?’

  ‘It looked like it, this afternoon.’

  ‘And that’s what’s rather frightening. One’s eye’s out when one thinks it’s in. It’s a lesson that I’ve got to learn.’

  He changed the subject. He asked me about myself. For the year or so before he came back for his father’s funeral, our respective visits to London had not coincided. But he was soon back onto his own problems. ‘Did you hear the six o’clock news?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I wonder if I was on it. I’ve been besieged by telephone calls. There was only one reporter there. The Daily Mail scooped it. Is the Express mad! They want me to go on television.’

  ‘Are you going to ?’

  ‘I might as well. What have I got to lose?’

  ‘I’m glad you’re taking it as a joke.’

  ‘How else can I take it?’

  ‘Some men wouldn’t.’

  ‘When you are faced with an ultimatum you have to do your thinking quickly.’

  ‘How do you make it out to be an ultimatum?’

  ‘What else is it? My eye is out when I think it’s in. There are only two courses; stay here till my eye is in, or get right out and stay out.’

  ‘You’ve decided to stay here?’

  ‘On the contrary, I’ve decided to get out: get out and stay out.’

  There was a challenge in his eyes. I did not take it up. I waited for him to explain. ‘When we lunched two weeks ago,’ he said, ‘I was in confusion. I didn’t want to turn Eileen out of Charminster. I wanted Charminster to go on being a home for Timothy Alexander: I didn’t want to live in Charminster by myself. Yet if I was going to make a life for myself in England, I had to make Charminster my base. I was on a spot. Today’s fiasco has let me off that spot. I know exactly what I’ve got to do—make Charminster over to my son. It’ll save him a lot in death duties when the reckoning comes. It’ll ensure his coming back to England. He says he’s English, that his life is in England, but the whole situation might seem very different if he met an attractive girl out there. I’m quite likely to last another twenty years. Twenty years is a long time when you’re only twenty. The sooner he comes back the better; let him strengthen his roots here: avoid my mistakes. There are two types of Englishman, the type who is fretted and confined by an island life, who goes abroad: and the type who stays behind, whose character grows stronger with his insularity. One type built the empire; the other type administered it. You yourself are the type that goes away. I’ve become that type, though I don’t believe that nature meant me to be: perhaps a great many of the old Empire builders weren’t meant to either, circumstances forced them … Botany Bay, you know … Anyhow, I don’t want circumstances to force Timothy Alexander out of the groove that’s natural to him. Let him come back here as soon as possible, and start right in on an English life based on Charminster.’

  ‘While you go back to Dominica?’

  ‘Why not? I’ve roots there and I love the place. It makes sense, doesn’t it ?’

  ‘It seems to, but …’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘That evening in Villefranche, when I suggested Dominica, how litde I guessed, how little any of us could have guessed that it would turn out this way.’

  ‘It’s not a bad way.’

  I supposed it wasn’t. We had all been so certain that a great future lay ahead for Raymond, and after all what he had achieved in his sidetracked way was far from negligible. An MC in the war; an estate in an island that needed the belief in it of men like himself, and a son who would carry on the family tradition. He was the ninth holder of the title. His eight ancestors would accept him with pride as one of them, and yet, and yet …

  Next morning the Daily Mail ran the story across two columns. The evening papers starred it. Both the Spectator and the New Statesman had it in their notes-of-the-week columns. Time took it up. Within a week the phrase ‘The Arabs, my Lords, after all, are gentlemen’ had passed into the language along with such accepted clichés as ‘many of my best friends are queer’.

  Then the story broke that Raymond was making over Charminster to his son. That, in view of his current publicity, rated a TV interview. ‘Has this decision of yours been at all influenced by the scene in the House of Lords the other day?’ He smiled. ‘Yes and no,’ he said, ‘or rather I should say it confirmed me in my suspicion that I had been out of the country too much to fit into public life. I’ve lost touch. During the war, I was in the Middle East five years. Everyone who served in the Middle East found it difficult to adjust himself to the changed conditions here. The England to which the demobilised soldier returned in 1945 was very different from the country he had left in 1940. Because I had my estate in Dominica, to which I returned the moment I was out of uniform, I never made that adjustment. I had suspected that I was out of touch, I was convinced of it the other day. The responsibility, the obligations and I will say at the same time the rewards that accompany Charminster are far better in my son’s hands than in mine.’

  He spoke lightly, graciously, without rancour or self-pity. He appeared thoroughly satisfied with the way everything had turned out. He must have made a very agreeable impression on the viewers.

  ‘Does this mean,’ he was asked, ‘that you are saying goodbye to England?’

  ‘Heavens, no. I’ve far too many good friends here. Besides, I need to go to Kew Gardens fairly often for advice about my garden.’

  Before he left, he gave a small masculine dinner party at the Café Royal. There were a dozen of us, five of whom had been at that Oxford party to which Evelyn had brought Judy. It was a sentimental but not a wistful occasion. He seemed so thoroughly contented with it all. ‘This isn’t a leave-taking,’ he said. ‘I’ll be over every year, and I’m expecting you to visit me.’

  The last thing he said to me was, ‘I’ll be expecting you. If not this January then the next.’

  ‘I’ll take you up on that,’ I said. And I thought I would. For the six previous years I had been going out most winters. But a change had come in the pattern of my routine. During those six winters I had been acquiring the material for a West Indian novel; with the novel written, I needed fresh material. I looked for it in the Far East, in Thailand and Malaysia.

  I did my best to keep in touch with Raymond, but I always seemed to be missing him when he came to London. We exchanged letters once or twice a year. I paid visits to Charminster. I saw Eileen at London wine-tastings. Timothy Alexander was
now a member of MCC and we watched the test matches from the top gallery at Lord’s.

  He was now a man. Without having his father’s striking good looks he had developed into a very handsome creature. He had a gracious manner. He was popular with women; his photograph appeared regularly in the illustrated society weeklies, and his name in the gossip columns. Born in Berkshire, he was scoring enough runs in second class county cricket to make his friends wonder why he did not take out a qualification for a first class county. He shook his head. ‘First class cricket is a game for professionals.’ And in that he was probably right. He had a seat in Lloyd’s and was associated with a large firm of insurance brokers. I have the vaguest idea of what people ‘in the City’ do, but whatever it was he did he seemed to be doing it successfully. Eileen had no worries on that account. ‘He’s sensible,’ she said. ‘He’s not extravagant. He’s adventurous, but he doesn’t gamble.’

  ‘What about his girl friends?’

  ‘Plenty of them.’

  ‘Anyone in particular?’

  ‘Not as far as I can judge, but I suppose when the time comes, it’ll be the very last one we expected.’

  In the early autumn of that year, he invited me to lunch. There’s someone I want you to meet,’ he said.

  ‘Is this the one?’ I wondered.

  ‘No,’ I was to decide as I came into the Savoy Grill, a few minutes late, to find him sitting beside the blackest female I have ever seen in a London restaurant. ‘No, this is not the one.’ In the thirties some men used to wear very dark blue dinner jackets which at night looked blacker than black, they argued. That was how black she was—blue-black. She was small and trim. Her teeth were very white. Her hair, dragged back from her forehead, was held in place at the crown by an ivory and enamel comb: large thin gold circlets hung from her ears. It was hard to tell her age. She seemed very young. She was wearing a light yellow blouse, loose-sleeved, buttoning at the wrists: its collar was a scarf that tied in a wide knot. The light yellow and the black were an effective combination. She wore no jewellery. I am a little deaf and I did not catch her surname when he introduced her. Her Christian name was Ada.