by John Masters
The Woman said, ‘No. Dinner’ll be in half an hour.’
Betty stripped off her gloves slowly, and sat down at the deal table. She said, ‘I got a cable from John this afternoon. Stella’s pregnant, and happy. He means, she’s not taking drugs any more.’
Fletcher said, ‘Good.’
She said, ‘What have you been doing all day?’
‘Sitting and thinking,’ he said. ‘Sometimes just sitting … and I finished the last of two poems for the third collection.’
‘Oh, wonderful!’ She jumped up and flung her arms round his neck.
Holding her loosely, he said, ‘And I’ve decided what I’m going to do next – a long, long poem, about the new England … about what’s happened to people here, through the war, both those who went over and those who stayed at home … about women and children as well as men … all of us.’
‘A new Dynasts,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘Some of the critics are comparing you to Hardy … but with Shelley’s lyricism instead of Hardy’s pessimism … and Whitman’s energy … Wonderful! So we’ll live happily ever after in the Cottage, me creating aircraft that can land on seacraft … and you creating great poetry.’
‘And we’ll both be ourselves, with it all,’ he said.
Guy Rowland said, ‘Frank Stratton was hoping to come over with us, but some disaster befell the plumbing at the Hall and he had to stay … We’ll be ready for the first of our people before Christmas … the whole building won’t be ready, of course – that’ll take another six or eight months – but we felt it was important to get something started … to have something we can show prospective friends, and patrons …’
‘What are you going to call the blokes you look after, and help?’ Stan Robinson said, quaffing some stout from his heavy glass tankard, and setting it down again on the kitchen table.
Guy laughed – ‘We don’t know yet. Inmates isn’t the answer, is it? Clients? Patients? Foundationers might be right … because it can mean anything, and it doesn’t have any pejorative or charitable connotation. Frank Stratton likes Foundationers …’
Two young women came in, one fairly tall and extremely beautiful, the other rather heavy, and pregnant, but with a pleasant smile and an obvious comfortable contentment in her manner. Florinda Rowland, the beautiful one, said, ‘Were you talking about Frank? Why does he have to keep that damned Victoria in the basement at the Hall?’
Robinson looked alarmed – ‘Victoria? He’s got a lady …?’
‘A racing motor cycle,’ Florinda said briefly. ‘He tunes it up in his spare time, and then untunes it … takes it to pieces, then puts it together again … goes vroom vroom at all hours of the day and night.’
‘It’s his workshop,’ Guy said. ‘His tools and machines and gauges are there. And the Foundationers will love it. They’ll want him to break the world speed record just as much as he does.’
‘When’s he going to have a shot at it?’
‘As soon as the weather warms up. The bike’ll go faster in warm weather than cold, he says … And Brooklands will be open again.’
Guy said, ‘Anne is pregnant, he told me.’
Virginia said, ‘Thank heavens for that. That means they’re really together again, everything forgiven and forgotten.’
‘It can’t be forgotten,’ Stan said. ‘Not a thing like that, by a man like Frank Stratton. But if he says he has forgiven, he really has.’
Florinda said, ‘Any stout for me, Stan?’
‘Of course, madam … Florinda … I have to be so careful with the boys’ parents that it slips out sometimes … sir, madam, my lord …’
He opened another bottle of milk stout and poured for Florinda. Virginia, standing in the doorway, wiping her hands absently on her apron, watched over them benignly. Her brother Guy said, ‘So – are you going to spend the rest of your life here, Stan?’
Robinson said, ‘We’ve been thinking, since you said you could find something for us at the Foundation.’
‘You have a lot to give,’ Guy said. ‘We wouldn’t be just helping you out of charity.’
Stan said, ‘I know. There’s more in my head than gun drill on an 18-pounder … But we like it here. The people have been good to us. The pay’s not great but with my pension and disability it’s enough. If any of our kids have brains, they can get scholarships to good schools. And, you know what’ – he leaned forward – ‘I’ve got my eye on the Clerk of the Works’ job. Mr Babcock has to retire in six years. Before then I’m going to learn his job inside out, and I’ll ask for it. And I’ll get it.’
Guy nodded. The Clerk of the Works was in charge of all the maintenance of the school, repairs to buildings, plumbing, electricity, roads, gardens, playing fields. It was a good job for Stan. But it was also clear that Virginia did not want to move back into the upper-class society she had left in 1914. Some people had energetically moved upwards in the turmoil of the war; Virginia had moved steadily and comfortably down; and she meant to stay where she was.
He said to her, ‘When’s the baby due?’
‘April … If it’s the 23rd, your birthday, can we call it Guy?’
‘Please, no. Too many Guys piling up. Call it George … It’s St George’s Day,’ Guy said. ‘Well, let’s go for a walk on Caesar’s Camp … all of us.’
‘Who’s going to look after Katy?’ Virginia cried.
‘We’ll take her with us … on our backs, in a pram, whatever … wake her up and dress her.’
‘But it looks as if it might snow!’
‘All the more reason to get out. Come on!’
The Countess of Swanwick, looking out of the window into Cornwall Gardens, thought, London’s so drab these days. The little park was full of dead leaves because the house owners round the Gardens couldn’t afford to pay a full-time gardener to keep the place in order. The road was lined with cars, standing against the kerb on both sides, cluttering up the neat Georgian line of the houses. Before the war there would have been nothing, for the carriages and the few cars would have been out of sight in the mews behind. But the mews were rapidly being converted into flats, or small houses; and everyone seemed to have a car, with no place to put it except in the street. The streets were made for vehicles to move through, she thought, not stand on … The pavements were usually dirty, with dogs doing their business where they shouldn’t be allowed to … And the new owners or tenants of these once grand houses apparently could not afford to keep them up. Paint was peeling here, the plaster over there, a window broken somewhere else. The air was thick with beastly petrol fumes … which nowadays mixed with the smoke from the coal fires to make a London Particular even worse than it had been in the old days, and heaven knew it had been bad enough then. Why, she remembered coming home from a winter ball in ’79, just before she married Roger, when the coachman had driven into the Serpentine, thinking he was still in Knightsbridge!
She sighed – it wasn’t all bad. The poor were getting better food; young women didn’t have to go into service and suffer as housemaids under tyrannical middle-class mistresses – they could be secretaries, factory workers, so many things. England was almost bankrupt, but people were still having babies, and those babies, when they grew up, would be English men and women. They’d deal with what they found … grow flowers, make gardens, sail the seas, fly the skies … Times had changed, and would change more. Change with them, or die. The diplodocus had had to learn that; and now, the aristocracy of the country.
The shot was from upstairs; she stiffened, but did not move. Roger would never learn, or change. After a time she turned and walked out of the room, up one flight of stairs and entered the earl’s big study and library. He was crumpled over his desk, the service revolver on the carpet, a smell of cordite in the air. Blood and bone and brains spattered the books in front of him, but she had expected that … had been expecting it for months, she admitted to herself now. She looked down at him, whom she had loved, up to the end. She had married him for better or for worse; an
d remembered what he was when she became his wife, and countess.
She wondered what straw, exactly, led him to pull the trigger. Barbara’s marrying the roughrider sergeant? Helen’s illegitimate child by Boy Rowland? Having to sell Walstone Park to Hoggin? Seeing Hoggin become Lord Walstone, a peer of the United Kingdom? … Hoggin! The general state of the country – strikes, lockouts, unrest? ‘God bless the squire and his relations, and keep us in our proper stations’… no more of that now! Failing to make a go of it as Master of the North Weald Hounds? That was a severe blow. Helen, marrying David Toledano, next week? Probably that, she thought. Everything together, of course, but that, cutting the deepest.
She went out into the hall, and telephoned the police to tell them that the 9th Earl of Swanwick had committed suicide. No, he had not left any note.
Daily Telegraph, Saturday, December 20, 1919
ATTEMPT TO MURDER THE VICEROY OF IRELAND
BOMBS AND SHOTS
The long record of murder and outrage in Ireland culminated yesterday in an attempt to assassinate Viscount French, the Lord Lieutenant.
Mr Macpherson, the Chief Secretary, informed the House of Commons of the leading facts concerning this dastardly crime. They are as follows:
At one o’clock, between Ashtown Station and the Ashtown Park gate of the Phoenix Park, four bombs or hand grenades were thrown from behind the hedge. The military guard fired upon the murderers, one of whom was on the road. He was shot dead … His Excellency escaped uninjured …
FUSILLADE FROM THICKET
From Our Own Correspondent, Dublin, Friday Night. Every loyal man in Ireland will offer his most hearty congratulations to Field-Marshal Viscount French on his escape from assassination at the hands of an armed band … The attempt … has aroused the utmost indignation amongst all loyal citizens … His worst enemy could not with truth impute to him unkindness or the slightest shade of harshness; he endeavoured to be firm, the country needed, nay, demanded, firmness, but he tempered firmness always with as much mercy as the spirit of sound justice might permit. All honest-minded Irishmen know well that the conspiracy of which today’s attempt is but one evidence is too deep-rooted, too malign, to yield immediately to any treatment but one of stern repression …
‘An outrage, indeed,’ Father Caffin said slowly. ‘And the perpetrator will be Michael Collins. He’s a law unto himself, that man. He knows what he wants and how to get it, which gives him the strength of ten.’
‘But where will we go from here?’ Guy said. ‘What is to happen to Ireland? More murders, counter-murders, counter-counter-murders?’
They were eating breakfast in the great dining-room of Scarrow Hall, the three of them lost in its vastness, for the first Foundationers were arriving later this day.
The priest said, ‘Things have gone very far, but the outcome still depends, in the long run, on England … They say that Mr Lloyd George is going to make an important speech in the next day or two, about Ireland. If he can jerk himself out of the past … the mud of the past, that we are all mired in, English and Irish, Catholic and Protestant alike … then there is yet hope.’
‘I wish I could believe you,’ Florinda said. ‘But how can anyone deal with a man like you say Collins is?’
‘By isolating him, my dear,’ Father Caffin said eagerly. ‘Do you not see that the Volunteers – Collins’s men – are a minority? Do you not read the condemnations of the bishops, of the Cardinal himself, at every new assassination of a policeman, an official? And what is the invariable answer from Dublin Castle?’ He paused while Lucas, wearing an incongruous blue suit, with a white shirt, stiff collar, and black bow tie, brought in a fresh pot of coffee and refilled all their cups. Then the priest continued, ‘Stern repression! Abolish the Dail Eireann. Abolish the Sinn Fein party … why, Mr Griffith said, that is to proclaim the Irish nation an illegal assembly! Instead, England must give … then Collins will not be able to make Irishmen believe that his way – of assassination and guerrilla war – is the only way to get what all Irishmen want.’
‘But Collins must realise that,’ Guy said. ‘So he will go on ordering murders, so that leniency, compromise … political advance, is made practically impossible for any British Government to grant.’
‘That’s quite right,’ Father Caffin said. ‘And that’s why David Lloyd George is the only man who can do it. He won the war. His power is still almost without limit. No one else could survive without the Carsons and F. E. Smiths … but he could. They could destroy another Prime Minister – but Lloyd George could destroy them, and save us from this impasse.’
‘Let’s hope he does,’ Florinda said.
The priest said, ‘Let us pray that he does … But I confess to grave misgivings, indeed … The British Government is now calling for Englishmen to enlist in the Royal Irish Constabulary. The RIC has always been a hundred per cent Irish. Englishmen won’t understand the people, or the land, or the background. And the people won’t feel at all as badly about some English mercenary’s being murdered as if it’s an Irish Catholic neighbour with seven children … And it means two things – that a lot of police must be resigning from the Constabulary as a consequence of Collins’s campaign of terror …and that the RIC is also being expanded, and that can only be to enforce more repressive measures. Unless Lloyd George produces the miracle that only he can, I see a black time ahead … two, three years. I see civil war. There are strains inside the IRA, between those who want a Republic and nothing else – those who will be content with Dominion status … those who must have a unified Ireland, and those who believe it is impossible, or undesirable. Collins has enemies, and soon they’ll be using the same methods against him that he’s using against the British. Perhaps a new and better Ireland will be born of it, in the end, than could be created even by Lloyd George … but bloodstains take a long time to be washed out of one’s soul, especially in Ireland.’
Chapter 34
Kent: Christmas, 1919
The little group waited in the doorway, watching. A long table ran down one side of the great room, under the tall windows, its surface littered with cardboard boxes, full of stiff red cloth, boxes of pins, scissors, pots of glue, small coils of thin wire, green tape. The people working at the table were all men. Some of them were seated on chairs in the normal way; others could not be, as they had no legs, and these were not in chairs but on padded boards set at the right height for them to work at the table. Several of the men could sit properly but worked with difficulty, for some had only one arm, and some were blind. They were making poppies, of cloth and wire, to be sold next Armistice Day for the benefit of the Foundation.
A blinded man had been appointed telephone exchange operator, for Willum Gorse had another job. He had a wheelchair now, and he had been practising making the artificial poppies for two weeks, and had shown such surprising aptitude that Guy and Florinda had appointed him head of that section. He had always been a little ‘simple’, but that seemed to have vanished with his new authority. He wheeled himself rapidly up and down the table, commenting – ‘More tape round the wire there, Tomkins … ’Ere, them scissors, Johnson, you cut like this to make the petals, see? Not like this, what you’ve been doing … Put a piece of ordinary white cloth on the poppy, Ruttledge. If you can’t see, you ’ave to make sure everything’s just in the same place, reds here, whites here, wire here. Smithy, you see that it’s all set out right for him, when you start for the day …’
From downstairs the roar of a motor-cycle engine, muffled by distance and the thickness of the floors, walls, and carpets, seemed to indicate that some chained beast was snarling out its fury at its captivity. On the floor above someone was playing a piano, and a male choir was singing with it, in harmony, stopping, starting again to the orders of a sharp, determined female voice. Outside the windows a light sleet was whistling across the lawns that swept down to the Scarrow and the boathouse, with its punts, canoes, and rowing boats.
In the doorway Sir Guy Rowland said,
‘This poppy making, and the accountancy class you’ve already seen, are mostly ways to pass the time for these fellows, until we find out, or ferret out, their more creative instincts. Some will never progress, probably, which is all right, too, as long as they’re happy and feel they’re doing something constructive, and not just being the objects of charity. You’re going to be seeing and feeling a very different atmosphere here once everyone’s found their feet … and perhaps their wings.’
Lord Walstone, at his side, said, ‘Are these the worst blokes – the worst wounded, you’ll be getting?’
Guy shook his head, “Fraid-not. Some of the really bad casualties are still in hospitals … and some will never leave them. But we’ll be getting men with no limbs at all … no faces … some purely mental, psychical wrecks … We don’t really know yet whether we can manage them, at the same time as the physical wrecks, but we think – the Governors and I – that they suffered together, and they’ll recover together, if they can recover at all.’
Lady Walstone said shyly, ‘So, really, it’s the war that holds all these men together … even you.’
Guy said simply, ‘Yes.’ He led forward and approached the table, stopping by the third man – ‘How’s it going, Day?’
‘My fingers is still like ruddy thumbs, sir,’ the man said. ‘Couldn’t you get a girl to take over for me?’
Guy laughed and moved on, the others following. ‘All right, Clarke? Gaines, hey, you’re cutting those petals too big.’ He turned to the Walstones – ‘Gaines lost his eyes at Jutland.’
Ruth Walstone said, ‘When I had pink eye as a girl, Mr Gaines, I had some pattern cutting that I really wanted to get done. I measured the distances with the fingers of the other hand and cut along them …’
Gaines laughed ruefully, and said, ‘I was trying that, mum, and near cut my finger off.’ He held up a finger and they saw a bandage on it – ‘I’ll learn in time. My PO always did say my head worked slower than frozen treacle …’
