by Allan Massie
‘But Rupert said to me once: “Where were you on Kristallnacht?” And he went on quickly, in case I should answer him. “That night,” he said, “I saw a middle-aged Jewish gentleman and his wife, baited by stormtroopers. They made him remove his trousers and even his underpants. Then one of them stripped his wife, slowly, ceremoniously. When the husband protested and struggled, they slashed him across the genitals with a cane. He screamed and they laughed, and, as for me, I fled, into a black alley where I vomited among dustbins. And I looked up at the flames of synagogues and Jewish businesses licking the sky, and around me at the black blind alley, and it was as if all the German people had been driven into that stinking cul-de-sac. That was where Hitler had led us, lured us or driven us, to a place from which even the rats had fled.”
‘That’s what he said, my friend. Those were his exact words, graven on my heart. All I had done myself on Kristallnacht was break a few windows, but I felt ashamed. And Rupert said, “I swore that night it was my life against his. I’m risking my life in telling you this, Bubi, but it may save your soul.” Well, my friend, I believe it did. There are some – my poor dear wife for instance – who would assert that I have none to save, that I’m irredeemably corrupted, but at least I’ve never failed to recognise evil since those conversations with Rupert. That was what was wrong with your father, he said. “Lucien has never felt the attraction of evil,” he said, “for, you see, Bubi, the horrible thing is that I knew that night that for a moment I wanted to join in. But Lucien thinks this is a war like those of history: a war between States, a war of the Powers; he doesn’t realise that it’s the infernal powers we are combating.”’
He was wrong, of course. My father was not ignorant of evil. His dreams showed me that. He was aware of the element of sadism in him, and frightened of it. It’s why he stuck so resolutely to his desk and writing table.
‘I’m hungry,’ the Baron said, and enquired of the waiter if he could bring some smoked-salmon sandwiches. ‘Scotch salmon, to go with the Scotch whisky …
‘Rupert was wounded,’ the Baron said. ‘His departure left a hole in my life. I set myself, like Svejk, simply to survive. I said to myself, “Any boy who has survived on the streets of Berlin during the Depression can’t let himself be wiped out by a Russian bullet.” So I took care to keep clear, and I came through. When news reached us of the bomb plot in July ’44, I knew Rupert had had it. It was terrible, I can’t say more than that. I deserted later, Germany was full of deserters, people like me who in their hearts now said to Hitler and the Nazis, “Well, stuff you.” We lived any old how, thieving, scavenging, looting; working the black market. It was, I realise now, the beginning of the economic miracle, for in that terrible last winter of the war we were learning to say not only “stuff the Nazis” but “stuff ideology”. I survived, as you see. Naturally I turned to the Americans. They were, I at once saw, my sort of people. I was useful to them, they scratched my back in turn. I took my opportunities, and here I am, eating smoked-salmon sandwiches.
‘So, that’s my story. But bear with me a little longer.’
I sat watching him, nursing my glass of whisky, divided between the desire to walk out and leave him to his certainty that all’s well that ends well, and a wish to get drunk. But I would do neither. There was a strength in this big bold man with his dyed blond hair and his pale fleshy hands and his knowledge that you can come through if only you don’t believe and never doubt. We had much in common, a certain disdain, a warm distrust of big words; and yet I was like a parody of him. He wiped his lips with the napkin, poured us each more whisky, took out a maroon leather cigar-case and clipped the end off another Romeo y Julietta. When he had lit it, he removed the band and slipped it, like a ring, over his little finger, smiling as it split.
‘I used to be able to do that,’ he said, ‘without breaking it. But in those days I could hardly even afford cigars. Now that I smoke seven or eight a day, the band breaks every time. Vanity of vanities, eh, my friend …
‘But we’ve come through nevertheless,’ he said. ‘All our life has been distorted by wars: the First War, which, on account of vanity, idleness and stupidity, tore apart what my poor dear wife calls Old Europe, and the Second in which whole legions of madmen made the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse look like broken-down hacks. Yet at last Europe sees the signs set fair again. We have arrived, somehow or other, at a point when war seems impossible, and a new generation has not even any memory of it. The next century will be as if this crazy twentieth century had never happened. It’s enough to make you believe in God. You and I have lived without hope, getting by, scornful, determined only not to be fooled by ideology. You’re a rich man and so am I, and my energies have been devoted to seeing that people believe in nothing and so have nothing to fear. And thanks to us, and tens of thousands like us, there are good times just around the corner. It’s a truly belle époque that’s in store for the young. Even the Russians have at last got a glimpse of sanity. For the first time in my life it’s good for humankind to be alive. I only wish I was still young.
‘But that’s only Europe,’ he continued. ‘You said to me, my friend, that you live in Switzerland because no country on earth is less like South Africa, and I applaud your good sense. But I have interests in South Africa: a newspaper, a string of magazines. I go out for a month every winter, to escape the fogs and look after my affairs there. Now, wherever I go, I take an interest in my young journalists. I dote on them actually, they’re my family, you see, they’re like my children. So I try, when I can, to see something of them. Now there’s a young fellow, name of Niels Nielsen – Danish father and a Scots mother – on one of my papers, that I have had my eye on. I invited him to dinner, and he asked if he could bring his girl along. Well, naturally, yes. She was your daughter. It’s an uncommon name, of course, and I was moved to think of her as a link between me and Rupert and Lucien, a new link, new-forged. And I liked her. She’s attractive, intelligent, and more than that; she’s vital. You mustn’t think that my association with photo-girls has made me indifferent to true quality. I liked her, and envied her Niels; but as the evening wore on, and her first suspicion wore off, I became perturbed. I was hearing music I had forgotten. I was hearing Rupert again. Do you know what I mean? The perilous strains of idealism …’
For a moment I was revolted. His pale fleshy paw seemed to hover over the chessboard of our lives, ready perhaps to sacrifice Sarah to protect his precious Niels.
Then he pressed his hand on mine instead.
‘Believe me, my friend, I have your daughter’s interest at heart.’
He sat back, the cigar squeezed into the corner of his mouth. There was no one else in the bar. The waiter flicked crumbs off a vacated table, and went and stood in the doorway, looking out; it had started to rain and the sky over the lake was heavy as the past.
‘I once did something I’ve never understood,’ he said. ‘About thirty years ago, when I was first rich. I used money and influence and a bit of bullying, a whiff of blackmail, to get a copy of the print of those films Hitler gloated over. You know the ones I mean. I watched Rupert die. It was horrible. Yet I watched it again and again, and I thought of the Führer’s pasty face lighting up as he watched it. I was ashamed of watching and yet I did it again and again, like a parson in a porn shop. Finally I destroyed my print; it was like burning banknotes. The one good feeling I got from the whole business.’
‘I understand you,’ I said. ‘But though Botha and the Nats are vile, they’re not Hitler and his gang.’
‘Get her out,’ he said. ‘Tell her to make love to young Niels, have his babies. Tell her your father’s story. Tell her how we can never judge what’s right, and how our best intentions are corrupted. Tell her what Europe suffered for ideas. Don’t you think we might have got where we are quicker without them?’
He came close to convincing me, came so close because I wanted to be convinced, because I sought justification for quietism. But there is no such thin
g as absolute justification in this life. Besides, the story of Rupert and Lucien points in different directions, doesn’t it, even though both failed. Even though both failed, Rupert in a sense triumphed: the Baron is the consequence of his victory. He was fashioned by Rupert’s death.
My sleep is broken, and last night I thought not of the Baron, serene in indifference, or of his poor crazy wife, but of a funeral I attended in England, in Hampshire, ten years ago. It was Jamie Fernie’s, and I had learned of it by chance at the bar of my club; and I went, I suppose, to help bury my youth. It was a sad occasion, as it must always be when you wrap up a wasted life. He had attempted much, succeeded in nothing, consoled himself with that mocker of consolation, the bottle.
It was a raw November afternoon. A rain so thin as to be almost indistinguishable from mist lay like wet fur along the line of the yew trees. There were only about twenty of us in the little country churchyard. Cranmer’s words fell soft as the drifting beech leaves. The church (mostly Early English) testified to the comforting continuity of island life. It had been too much for Jamie though.
At first I thought I recognised nobody. There was an old man who might have been his father, for even in antiquity he retained a military bearing. Then, as the coffin was lowered into the quiet earth, a Rolls-Royce drew up at the gate of the churchyard, a thin man, wearing a dark coat with an astrakhan collar, and carrying a wreath, emerged, and, without looking left or right, pranced up the path before weaving his way through the gravestones towards us. He moved with the self-conscious gallantry of an ageing dancer, and I saw that it was Eddie Scrope-Smith.
He detached me quickly from the reception, held in a gloomy library which had the air of having been unoccupied for years, and ushered me to the Rolls.
‘I wasn’t going to come. I thought I really couldn’t bear it. And now I’ve found you again. Virtue is rewarded.’
He told the chauffeur to drive on.
‘It’s not my car,’ he giggled, ‘it belongs to the studios.
‘Do you know,’ he said, ‘all the way down, I’ve been thinking of that ghastly dinner-party at his parents’ house in Paris. Do you remember? In a curious way, Jamie was never the same again, after that holiday. He spoke up for you that evening, he never spoke up satisfactorily for himself.’
Thinking of Eddie now, it seems to me that our friendship resembles that between my father and Marcel Pougier. Like Pougier, Eddie has the fundamental toughness of the Ishmael; he has accepted that he is, in important ways, an outcast. It may seem absurd now to say this, and there are many who would say that, far from being a liability, homosexuality is an asset in his world. Nevertheless it still takes courage and shamelessness to be as blatant as Eddie, to address chauffeurs as darling, for example. And this was even more true when he was young. Perhaps that’s wrong: homosexual style has changed after all, and Eddie must seem as out of place in the self-conscious tough gay world as he used to do in a straight milieu. Looking back at the three of us who boarded the Golden Arrow, who would have guessed, I thought that afternoon, that Eddie would be the successful survivor; that he would see Jamie buried, and me … As I am. And, in the same way, Marcel Pougier came through. He outlived and surmounted his wartime disgrace. His collaboration was in fact excused on account of that film of David and Jonathan which was held to celebrate, in the most subtle fashion, the moral supremacy of the Resistance. Art saved him.
‘Do you remember that extraordinary woman?’ Eddie said. ‘The one who got drunk and defended your father against that awful Torrance?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Mathilde something, she had a wonderful beak of a nose.’
Mathilde was dead too. Drink and drugs had done for her, like poor Jamie. And disappointment, the third ‘d’. She had died forgotten and ignored. I don’t know how I had heard of it, or when; but sometime in the early seventies I got a letter from an American girl, a poet herself, who had discovered Mathilde’s work, learned of her association with L’Echo de l’Avenir, and, with the extraordinary persistence of Americans, tracked me down. She proposed to write a memoir of her, attached to a critical study: could I help with any information, documents? It was shocking that such a rare talent should be neglected. I didn’t reply.
‘Curiously, I met Torrance later,’ Eddie said. ‘What a shit.’
Mathilde had chosen obscurity. Let her rest there, I thought. Torrance and Marcel Pougier had been creatures of the limelight. But with a difference. Both had lived by the Will, but Torrance had been in thrall to his ego. It had consumed him; he had worn out such esteem as he had ever won. Pougier, though also self-centred, had nevertheless subjected himself to the demands of art. That was how he had suppressed his personality. It comes to me now that, of all my father’s circle, he was the only success: because he made things, and, in making them, forgot himself, escaped himself, if only temporarily. When he died half Paris (as they say) turned out for his funeral. His songs are still sung, and his best films continually revived. His name is often bracketed with René Clair’s. I suppose he belongs to the same rose period.
‘You don’t look well,’ Eddie said. ‘I should say you’re drinking too much, you silly old thing.’
He spread a rug over our knees.
‘I’ve kept my eye on you, you know,’ he said. ‘I’m a loyal old thing, for all my faults. Don’t drive so fast, dearie,’ he told the chauffeur. ‘A Rolls should move with a certain majesty.’
The untroubled South of England swept past us. Such a neat country of fenced gardens and carports, dahlias and chrysanthemums, of shopping-centres and shopping-trolleys and women pushing what I think are called baby-buggies, of trim industrial units with full carparks. Such a safe country of television, Nescafé and fridge-freezers, of fitted carpets and squares of close-cut lawn, a country where people no longer feel the need to go to church or political meetings, a country criss-crossed by untapped telephone wires, a country all over which sodium street-lamps were coming on in the crepuscular damp.
‘Poor Jamie,’ Eddie said, ‘he hated everything ordinary. It was his little rebellion, and in the end a very little one. He found everything dull, and it made him dull too in the end. I hadn’t seen him for years. He was no fun, you see.’
We edged into London. He suggested we have dinner together. I accepted, only demurring at the early hour.
‘We’ll go to my flat then, and have a drinkie first.’
It was a block behind Harrods. We took the lift to the fourth floor. The second Rachmaninov piano concerto was playing on the gramophone. We shed our overcoats. Eddie rubbed his hands and led me into the drawing room. It ran the whole width of the flat, and there were tall windows looking out on the wet street and the heavy building opposite. A policeman passed by, his helmet glistening. Eddie drew dark-cherry velvet curtains. I admired a Matthew Smith still-life of melons and figs which hung over the chimneypiece. The room was very warm. The music stopped. A Malay boy, wearing only a pair of black swimming-trunks, came in. Eddie kissed him on the cheek.
‘I was doing my exercises,’ he said.
The upper part of his body glistened with sweat.
‘Get us some champagne, lovey, then have a shower and we’ll all go out to dinner.’
‘Isn’t he lovely?’ Eddie said. ‘We’ve been together two years. I’ve never been happier.’
He opened the champagne. I heard doors closing in the flat beyond. Eddie removed his jacket, kicked off his shoes and stretched out on the sofa. He fixed a fat cigarette in a long amber holder.
‘Where’s the dressing-gown?’ I said. ‘Who do you think you are, Noël Coward?’
‘I’m every bit as good as Noël, in my own line.’ He smiled. ‘But it’s the French Noël I wanted to speak to you of. Did you know Marcel Pougier?’
‘No.’
‘But he was a great friend of your father’s.’
‘I still didn’t know him.’
‘Pity, such a dear. Doesn’t matter though. I produced one o
f his films, his last one. You did know I was a producer now, didn’t you, that I’ve given up directing? And I got to know him well. I didn’t at first know he was a chum of your father, but you know, in some mysterious subterranean manner, that dinner-party, of which we spoke, stayed with me. I was curious about the sort of man who could rouse such passion, such dislike and such loving admiration. And one day, when I was dining with Marcel at Paillard’s, we saw a wizened old brute at the next table. I didn’t recognise him. “That’s the nastiest man in Paris,” Marcel said. Natch, I was curious. “What’s his name?” I asked. It was Philippe Torrance. His nose was diseased, syph, I should think. “Well,” I said, “he doesn’t look nice.” “He’s even nastier than he looks,” Marcel said. “He was a protégé of my dearest friend, Lucien de Balafré, and he ruined him, and has blackguarded his reputation ever since. What do you say to that?”’
‘The last part’s true. I don’t know how Torrance could be said to have “ruined” Lucien.’
‘Marcel said he had, I don’t know more than that. Marcel was devoted to your father’s memory. He wanted to make a film about him.’
For the next ten minutes Eddie expatiated on the proposed film. It wasn’t really about my father. It was about the relationship which Marcel supposed had existed between Lucien and Rupert. He had got everything wrong, as people of his type are inclined to. He was all the more wrong because he started with what was probably the truth: that Lucien’s love for Rupert was rooted in physical attraction. But surely Marcel Pougier should have known – and indeed Eddie also – that that exhausts itself? The intention was to present their love as a fusion of the Romantic and Classical; it would have ignored, at least from Eddie’s account, what seem to me to have been the questions that troubled both: how do you confront evil? How do you accommodate things as they are to the way you would like them to be? That’s to say, it dodged the whole problem of patriotism.
