by Allan Massie
At the next table four businessmen, buttoned into dark suits, were discussing money over coffee and chocolate cake.
‘On the other hand I can’t claim to belong here like these gentlemen,’ I said, ‘and, like you, I have no country except in memory.’
He began to set up the pieces.
‘Let us have another game,’ he said, ‘while we enjoy our cigars. There’s neither guilt nor fear in chess.’
He smiled.
‘You asked about the free Ukraine. Not long ago I was approached by some young men who wished me to lend my name to an enterprise in that connection. I have, you see, despite everything, a certain reputation still in some quarters. I listened to their argument, and I admit I felt a tremor of excitement. But do you know what I said? “Thank you, gentlemen, but I would rather play chess.” They thought I had gone soft, that I was a renegade. I could see that. But I know these people now, because I was such myself. I know how noble ideals bring misery to the poor and weak. It’s your move,’ he said.
I hesitated.
‘No,’ he said, ‘my daughter won’t be pleased to smell the smoke, even of this excellent cigar. She’s afraid of cancer, you see. Even in Switzerland, my friend, people must find something to fear – cancer, bankruptcy, the dark, it doesn’t matter.’
I advanced a pawn to K4.
‘Let me bring a knight into play,’ he said. ‘These days I am too timid in my use of that daring piece.’
It was snowing as I walked back to my hotel. The flakes fell as they did in childhood, changing the world. In the night and for a few hours of the early morning the city would be another place.
At the hotel desk, I asked if there was a telex for me.
‘From Africa,’ I said, as if the information might make it more likely to materialise.
The clerk shook his head.
‘No, sir,’ he said, ‘there is nothing new, even from Africa.’
A QUESTION OF LOYALTIES
Allan Johnstone Massie was born in Singapore in 1938, brought up in Aberdeenshire and educated at Drumtochty Castle, at Glenalmond and then at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read History ‘not very industriously’. He was a schoolmaster at Drumtochty Castle in Scotland for ten years and then taught English as a foreign language for three years in Rome. Since the middle 1970s he has worked as a journalist and author. His first novel, Change and Decay in All Around I See, was published in 1978. In the years since then he has written seventeen novels including a historical series set in ancient Rome: Augustus (1986), Tiberius (1990), Caesar (1993) and Antony (1997). These widely successful works have been translated into fourteen languages. His novel The Ragged Lion (1994) was on the life of Sir Walter Scott, while King David (1995) took its subject from the Old Testament. Massie’s non-fiction work includes The Caesars (1983) on the twelve emperors of ancient Rome, Byron’s Travels (1988), and Glasgow: Portraits of a City (1989). He has written critical biographies of Muriel Spark (1979) and Colette (1986).
Massie’s second novel, The Last Peacock (1980), won the Frederick Niven Award in 1981, The Death of Men (1981) won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award, and A Question of Loyalties (1989) won the Saltire Society / Scotsman Book of the Year Award. A Question of Loyalties (to be published in France in 2003) belongs to what the author has described as ‘a loose trilogy of novels dealing with the European crisis of the mid-twentieth century’, the others being The Sins of the Father (1991) and Shadows of Empire (1997). These books have been widely praised for their engagement with the sometimes still-unresolved issues of morality and culpability in the Second World War.
Allan Massie was a Creative Writing fellow at Edinburgh University from 1982–84 and at the Universities of Glasgow and Strathclyde from 1985–86. He was editor of The New Edinburgh Review from 1982–84, and has worked as a television critic (Fraser of Allander award for Critic of the Year, 1982), and a sports columnist. He has also been the principal fiction reviewer for The Scotsman for over twenty-five years, and a columnist and reviewer for the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He and his wife Alison have three children, now grown up, and live in the Socttish Borders with ‘a number of spaniels’.
Alan Taylor is Associate Editor and Literary Editor of The Sunday Herald. He was formerly Deputy Editor and Managing Editor of The Scotsman. With his wife Irene, he co-edited The Assassin’s Cloak: An Anthology of the World’s Greatest Diarists. In 1994, he was a Booker prize judge. He is half of the Scottish team on Radio Four’s Round Britain Quiz.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Any novel written from more than the author’s immediate experience is likely to owe much to his reading. My debts in this respect are too numerous to list here, but I would like to acknowledge my especial indebtedness to the writings of Herbert R. Lottman and Richard Cobb.
Copyright
First published as a Canongate Classic in 2002
by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE
First published in 1989 by Hutchinson,
an imprint of Century Hutchinson Ltd
This digital edition first published in 2009
by Canongate Books Ltd
Copyright © Allan Massie, 1989
Introduction copyright © Alan Taylor, 2002
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
The characters and situations in this book are
entirely imaginary and bear no relation to any
real person or actual happenings
The publishers gratefully acknowledge general
subsidy from the Scottish Arts Council towards
the Canongate Classics series and a specific grant
towards the publication of this title
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on
request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 84767 492 0
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