Abdication: A Novel

by Juliet Nicolson

  “There was a mark on the belt that I discovered to be the symbol for Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirt party and I think her mother might be a Mosley follower,” May explained.

  She was about to describe Mrs. Cage’s badly disguised excitement at the Blackshirt leader’s visit to Cuckmere but stopped herself. She was sworn to secrecy, of course, but she also knew that Sarah would have been horrified. The Greenfelds would not begin to understand the reason for Mosley’s visit to Cuckmere. Sir Philip would not have tolerated such a guest under his own roof were it not to discuss a matter of national importance: the king’s relationship with a married woman. May wondered what Sarah, a Jewish woman, would make of Mosley and felt dreadfully ashamed of the physical attraction she had felt for a man whose actions threatened the very London family with whom she spent her time. Racial and religious prejudice was not something of which May was ignorant. In Barbados, and outside their own plantation, there had been some notorious racists among the white community and the experience in Oxford’s town hall was still vivid in her mind. She remembered the angry wife of the Cowley motorcar worker, she remembered the noise of the clashing steel chairs and she remembered the blood that had oozed from the cuts on the face of Julian’s friend. And then she thought again of the tall dark figure that had crossed the stone floor at Cuckmere and vanished upstairs with Lady Joan. And she remembered the sight of Mrs. Cage carrying the tray with its vase of delicate flowers. The current of anti-Semitism was running fast even through May’s small world. May said nothing.

  But as if she was reading May’s mind Sarah brought the very subject up herself. “I don’t expect you have come across the rumours while you have been down in Sussex,” she began, “but Nat has been reading reports in the newspaper and talking to several tailors he works with and the word is that Mosley is planning a march through the East End any day now.”

  Sarah returned her hand to rest on the swell of her stomach.

  “If he comes I would like to be here with you,” May said.

  “Oh good. Mum will be pleased. She says she is not worried but I know she is.” And with that Sarah and May moved back to the subject of motherhood and on to Lady Joan.

  “She looks so old now,” May said. “Her hair is completely white and her skin is almost transparent.”

  May and Sarah both struggled to imagine what it felt like to have more of one’s life behind one than in front, reaching a level of such closeness between them that May at last felt ready to talk to Sarah about her confused feelings for Julian.

  At that moment Sam came flying in through the pub door. “I came straight home as soon as the ship docked.” His were eyes shining and he was so out of breath that he was close to unintelligible. “I’ve been looking for you two everywhere.”

  “Oh, Sam, I am so happy you are here. When did you get back from the ship? Come and tell us everything.”

  “I wanted to see you right away, of course. I had a wonderful time. There were some lads from Mum’s part of Scotland. They are really looking forward to meeting you, May. And we swam every day, and olives are my new favourite food. Oh and the king is cracky on someone! An American. She’s a friend of Miss Nettlefold.”

  May looked at Sam, suddenly appalled.

  “Shush, Sam. Keep your voice down. Have you already been to Oak Street?” she asked him quickly.

  “Oh yes! Of course! I was looking for you.”

  “And did you speak to Rachel at all?”

  “Well, I sort of mentioned it, but only briefly,” Sam half apologised, sensing his sister’s caution. “She was really surprised! Actually a lot more surprised I might say than you seem to be,” he added a little reproachfully.

  “Oh, Sam! What have you done? I must go and talk to Rachel at once.” May said, pausing to kiss a rather confused Sarah before dashing out of the pub without even stopping to put on her jacket. If Rachel knew the secret of the king’s love life, then the whole street would be buzzing with the news.

  May was still talking to Rachel and Sarah, who had followed her home from the pub, when Nat returned unexpectedly at lunchtime. She was still doing her best to convince them that Sam was confused about the identity of the woman who had caught the king’s eye on board the Nahlin. May had it on impeccable authority from Miss Nettlefold, she assured them, that the king had been flirting with a member of the Greek royal family. Sam’s imagination must have been running away with itself. What would the king be doing with a married American lady? May did all she could to make the idea sound absurd. No. The king must have been giving the glad eye to a Greek princess. All those royals ended up marrying each other, didn’t they?

  Rachel had humphed a bit and went to put the kettle on. “Strange things happen in love and war, May, I’m telling you,” was all she said, filling the kettle, scepticism evident in every line of her face.

  Nat too had some urgent news. The voice at the end of workshop telephone that morning had been posher than any of those belonging to Nat’s regulars.

  “So sorry to disturb you, Mr. Castor,” the man had said. “That is Mr. Castor, isn’t it? Oh good, good. Glad to reach you. Would you very kindly pass on a message to May?”

  The man, Mr. Richardson, Julian Richardson, was in London for the day visiting his mother and wondered if he might call round to see May later that afternoon? Nat, who, together with his wife and mother-in-law, had an inkling of May’s romantic notions from the blush that crept over her whenever she mentioned Mr. Rupert’s university friend, had just avoided sewing his thumb to a buttonhole before throwing the jacket he was stitching aside and racing home to find May.

  Three hours later, back in the pub for the second time that day, May was sitting enthralled at Julian’s tales of Berlin. Lottie’s name had not been mentioned. What was quite apparent was Julian’s ambivalence about the appeal of the German people. On the plus side, the country was so well organised, Julian enthused. There was so little unemployment. Everything in Germany worked. There had been some extraordinary parties.

  “Despite not being much of a party person myself, even I confess to having enjoyed some of those Berlin balls,” he told her, lighting a cigarette.

  The grandeur and opulence of Berlin had been astonishing. Comparisons had been made with events staged by Nero and Louis VIX. There had been music and dancing and fabulous ballets performed under the light of the moon. There had been caviar and oysters, oceans of champagne and evanescent galaxies of fireworks. Footmen dressed in pink uniforms copied from those worn in the eighteenth century and bearing miniature torches had greeted guests at a banquet at the opera house to which Julian had been invited at the last minute through the exemplary connections of Chips Channon. Julian felt horribly out of place at a table decorated with water lilies, watching obscure members of European royalty mingle with German officers of state as Chips pointed out remote foreign cousins of the British royal family, all descended from old Queen Victoria.

  May barely touched her drink as she listened to Julian’s story, inhaling the smell of his cigarette, happier as well as more anxious than she had been at any time since he had left to go to Berlin. She did not know what had happened between him and Lottie in Germany. But she was prepared to wait. At that moment sitting alone with Julian in the pub was all she wanted to think about.

  He described how the power-aspirant British had been anxious for their moment with Herr Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister about to take up residence in London’s German embassy.

  “Chips thinks that Ribbentrop’s elegant and charming manner is something of a façade and that there is steel under all that suavity,” Julian told May with the air of a privileged insider. He described how one afternoon with a little time to kill, he had explored parts of the city on his own. Something prevented Julian from mentioning how Lottie had been more than willing to stay behind in the hotel with Rupert and how she had announced they were both keen to try the hotel’s special German beer. Lottie had been ill-tempered throughout the holiday, and on one
occasion had suggested that Julian might be happier driving around the lanes of Sussex. Her tone had been unequivocally sarcastic. Instead, Julian continued by describing for May how many of the shop fronts had been boarded up and doors had been covered in graffiti. The paint-daubed phrases were often beyond Julian’s knowledge of German, but sometimes a door bore the one word “Jude” meaning “Jew” or just two letters, an image that recurred again and again throughout the Jewish back streets.

  “I was told that P. J. stands for ‘Perish the Jews,’” he explained to May, shaking his head in disbelief.

  “How truly dreadful,” May said, with an involuntary shiver, “that so much prejudice could be conveyed in just two letters.”

  Eventually Julian had become lost in a maze of streets and after asking for directions in hesitant German, had found himself standing among a small crowd of curious onlookers gathered directly opposite Hitler’s house in the Wilhelmstrasse. The house was surrounded by several men in the ubiquitous uniform of black breeches. They all stood to attention as the sound of hooting horns preceded four black cars that drew up simultaneously outside the house. The small figure who emerged from the middle car disappeared inside the house quickly but not before Julian had managed to get a good look at him.

  The Olympic Games themselves had been an event Julian would never forget. The opening ceremony had taken place in front of a capacity crowd of a hundred thousand spectators, assembled under heavy-clouded skies. A new spectacle that year, in the form of a flaming torch brought in relay all the way from Mount Olympus in Greece, had been carried into the stadium in the hand of a tall German athlete. The flame had burned continuously throughout its twelve-day journey. Thirty thousand members of the Hitler Youth and the German Girls were crammed into the stadium. The scene resembled the biggest military tattoo the world had ever seen. At the moment Hitler took his place in the stand, thousands of spectators cheered their ear-splitting acknowledgement of his presence. Right hands were raised in salute towards the diminutive figure in brown uniform as they shouted in unison two words: “Heil Hitler.” Julian had felt as if he was witnessing the Second Coming of the Saviour of the world.

  However, a man not only of a different nationality but a different colour had stolen the Olympic show and confirmed Julian’s horror at the intensity of Nazi Germany’s racism. Jesse Owens, or “Ovens” as the Germans pronounced his name, was a black American from Alabama, whose limbs covered the ground at lightning speed. The grandson of a slave, his skin clashing with the Aryan paleness of the German competitors, Owens won a sensational four gold medals in the sprint and long jump. The word was that Hitler had hidden his fury at the result by rationalising Owens’s triumph. Athletes with monkey-like features owed the strength of their limbs to their tree-leaping antecedents, Hitler had declared to the press.

  Julian stubbed the cigarette out with a vehemence that made May jump. “You have no idea how happy I am to be home again,” he said reaching for her hand.

  “And you have no idea how happy I am that you have come back,” May replied cautiously as she allowed him to stroke each of her fingers in turn.

  For a moment they looked at each other, both unsure where the conversation was going next.

  “Will you tell me all your news, then? What’s been happening at Cuckmere?” he asked, gently releasing her hand and reaching again for his packet of cigarettes. “Any news of Joan? And how is Florence?”

  “I haven’t seen as much of Lady Joan now that she is staying in the hospital for tests. But whenever Mrs. Cage and Cooky and Mr. Hooch and I visit her we still try everything we can think of that might wake her,” May said. “We have played music to her, shown her photographs, read to her, sang to her, whispered to her, even, in occasional moments of exasperation, shouted at her.”

  “Does anyone think she will recover?” Julian asked looking truly saddened.

  “The doctor thinks she may spend years in a coma. I hope she doesn’t know enough to feel lonely. Her sister came down to Cuckmere but left without even going to the hospital to see her.”

  “Her sister?” Julian asked, surprised. “You mean Myrtle? The avid reader of Time and Tide, otherwise know as the Sapphic Graphic?”

  May could not help laughing. “Yes, how do you know?”

  “Joan told me all about her. I once met the magazine’s editor, Lady Rhondda. She had ditched her living arrangements with a perfectly good husband for a strapping young woman.”

  “Well, maybe Lady Myrtle was inspired by Lady Rhondda,” May said, still laughing. “I would say that Vera is certainly on the strapping side.”

  “Vera? Where does she come into it? And tell me about Florence? Did you manage to ask her about the belt?” Julian asked.

  He wanted to hear everything, as May had hoped he would. So she told him how the day after Lady Myrtle’s disappearance she had suggested they celebrate Florence’s return from Pagham by baking a cake with raspberries from the Cuckmere fruit cages. To begin with, Florence had been subdued, still stuck in that strange mood in which she had left for her holiday, but with the promise of a bike ride and a swim in the river she had gradually recovered her good humour. The belt had been nowhere to be seen. They had not been able to find Vera anywhere in the garden to ask if they could go into the locked cages. In fact, no one had seen the gardener for days but she was a free spirit and the Cuckmere community was used to her disappearing at the drop of a hat. A knock on the open front door of her cottage remained unanswered.

  “I wasn’t that keen to go in,” May explained to Julian, “but Florence said we must if we were to be given the key.”

  “I think you enjoy being wrapped round little fingers,” Julian said. He had pushed his white-blond hair right off his face, taken off his glasses and was grinning at her.

  May hesitated, feeling the beginnings of a blush just beneath the collar of her shirt. “Oh well, you know, I’d do anything for some people. Well certainly for Florence.”

  Vera Borchby must have left her door open by mistake. She had certainly not been expecting visitors and did not notice May and Florence standing in her sitting room. Her uninvited callers could tell that one of the two figures on the sofa was definitely Vera by the laced-up gardening boots that were sticking up in the air. The jaunty chords of an Irving Berlin song floated from the wireless in a corner of the room but they failed to drown out the grunting noises coming directly from the sofa. May had grabbed Florence’s hand and pulled her outside.

  There had been loud protests followed by hundreds of questions. And finally, after buying an ice cream from the man who travelled round villages with an icy box attached to the front of his bicycle, Florence promised she would not say a word about Lady Myrtle hugging Miss Borchby upside down and about the two women being what May described rather desperately as “convivial.” As Florence had assured May so many times before, Florence was good at keeping secrets.

  “And what happened to Myrtle afterwards?” Julian asked, eager to hear the conclusion.

  “She left the next day. None of us saw her again, except Mr. Hooch, who took her to the station. But I am afraid we could not help discussing it. Cooky was impressively knowledgeable about ‘them that swing the other way.’ She told us about a woman called Hall-something, I think, who wrote a book about it not long ago.”

  “Quite a disappointing book in that way,” Cooky had remarked with rare knowledge of the printed word. “A friend of mine even asked the bookshop for her money back. I expect there are dozens of women at it behind closed doors,” she surmised with a pronounced pout of her lips and a quick whip round their overdry surfaces with her tongue.

  Mr. Hooch had been less outraged although equally captivated by speculation over the goings-on in the gardener’s cottage.

  “Whoever would have guessed it?” he said to May, with the jolly twinkle he reserved exclusively for her. “Nothing more than a couple of girl pansies, aren’t they? Right in the middle of our village! I say! But no harm done, eh?” he
chuckled. “It’s the aftereffects of that bloody war again, excuse my language. Not enough of us decent men left to go round are there? Does funny things to women, war does.”

  May was coming to the end of her story. “When Sir Philip came back from Chequers he gathered us all (except Vera, of course) in the drawing room and asked us to keep the incident to ourselves, and to realise what a blessing it was that Lady Joan knew nothing about it. He asked me privately to mark ‘return to sender’ on all the envelopes that came addressed to him in green ink and give them back to the postman. He had a word with Vera too. The beauty of the garden is what persuaded him not to sack her, although he was very keen to stress to all of us that she had not done anything wrong. She even offered to find a good home for that poor canary. And Mr. Hooch is more pleased than anyone that Vera is staying because he says she grows the best lettuces in Sussex.”

  May was reluctant to finish her account of the recent weeks at Cuckmere. As long as she kept talking, she told herself, there would be no chance for Julian to tell her how happy he had been with Lottie in Berlin. She watched his tweedy back as he waited at the bar for Danny to refill their beer glasses.

  “I’ve got some good news to tell you,” he said at last, putting his glass down on the table with a flourish. “I have decided to train for the law and become a barrister. An excellent crammer has offered me a place to study for the Bar exams starting in September. And, even better, I have been accepted as a student at the Middle Temple. And the best thing of all is that now that I have escaped from the manicured clutches of Lottie I will have all the time in the world to concentrate on the bar exams.”