Mr. American

by George MacDonald Fraser

  'I'm no judge, but I don't think it was a masterpiece, exactly,' confessed Mr Franklin. 'But surely that's not the point - '

  'I knew it!' said the General. 'A piece of glorified wallpaper! None of these modern bastards can paint. Not like Wollen - ever see his "Last Stand of the Forty-fourth at Gandamack"? That's painting, if you like. Not that it looked a dam' bit like the real thing - I saw the real thing, back in '42, so I should know. But it was a decentish picture. Turner, too - he could paint ... "The Fighting Temeraire" going up the Thames to the knackers, eh? That sunset! And the whole sky and river bathed in white fire with the shadows creeping, and the smoky little tug pulling the old fighting giant to her last berth, and the bells ringing for the last time - ' he hunched forward over the table, and to Mr Franklin's alarm began to croak:

  Now the sunset breezes shiver,

  And she's fading down the river,

  But in England's song forever,

  She's the Fighting Temeraire.

  'That's the way we all go - the old hulks!' The General tugged angrily at his moustache. 'You can ruin yourself being battered and chased and shot at half your life, and fighting like hell on behalf of a lot of damned lick-spittles who infest cesspits like the Athenaeum Club where they put too much damned salt in the damned consomme and try to poison people with curried turtle soup that would make a Bengali privy cleaner sick - not that I ever fought except when I couldn't avoid it, but any man's a bloody fool who does otherwise - and what d'you get for it at the end of the day?' His voice was rising steadily, and his eye was glaring horribly. 'I'll tell you what you get - a set of tinware and a few meaningless titles and a pension that won't keep your blasted dog in bones, and your niece, a lady of quality, expressing her proper contempt for a worthless travesty of a picture by some mountebank whom you wouldn't pay to distemper a kitchen ceiling, may be haled into a police court, subjected to the degradation of a public trial - '

  Mr Franklin felt his sleeve gently tugged, and a steward's voice hissed discreetly into his ear: 'Would you mind asking your guest to lower his voice a trifle, sir? I'm rather afraid he may disturb the members.' He scuttled quickly away, and Mr Franklin turned back desperately to try to stem the tide.

  'I've a damned good mind,' blared the General, 'to take my VC and all the rest of my ferblanterie, and throw 'em over Buckingham Palace gate! Show my contempt for what society has come to! In my youth, if a lady of quality had expressed her opinion - as she has a perfect right to do - d'you think she'd have been dragged before a magistrate? Certainly not! She'd have been sent down to the country for a rest, her father would have bought the damned painting, her brother would have horse-whipped the artist, and that'd have been that! But this blasted Liberal lot have ruined our way of life completely. I foresaw it - I told that ass Gladstone as much, in the lavatory of this very club - no, it wasn't, either, it was the Reform, I remember. Good billiard table they have in the Reform - slept on it on Mafeking night. Better club than this,, too - ' he glared round the dining-room. 'They don't have a chef at the Reform who served his apprenticeship in some confounded Siberian salt-mine!' His voice dropped suddenly to a normal conversational tone. 'Shall we go to the smoking-room, my boy? I fancy a soothing glass of port, I think.'

  Mr Franklin was only too glad to make his escape. He preceded the General, aware of the indignant stares directed at them from the tables, but when they got outside Sir Harry laid a hand on his arm.

  'Forgive me, Franklin. I can't resist the temptation to stir those damned monkeys up - and believe it or not, I may have done our little girl a spot of good.' He winked; so Beelzebub might have winked at Lucifer. 'Fine set of snobs we have here, and Tories, and so-called authorities who hate modern art. Think I'm joking? Not I, my son. And I learned a thing or two from our Russian friends - confuse, alarm, bewilder. If you haven't got a good case, it's worth more than a dishonest juryman. Come on.'

  Mr Franklin, feeling not a little confused, alarmed, and bewildered himself, settled his guest in a distant corner of the drawing-room, and prayed there would be no further outbursts. But to his astonishment the General had turned into a model guest, and a most entertaining one. He talked at large about the American West, of which he obviously had an exhaustive knowledge, described his part in the Battle of Little Big Horn in graphic detail, and threw in an entertaining memoir of President Lincoln for good measure.

  'Good lawyer. Damned good lawyer. Rather have him in my corner than Carson or Smith or any of 'em-pity his people emigrated. He'd have been the best Lord Chief Justice, or Lord Chancellor, this country ever saw. Strange, ain't it, that some remote ancestor may have first seen the light in our Courts of Justice? Oh, yes - the name Lincoln, you know - well, it's possible his people came from Lincoln, but just as likely one of 'em was a foundling. They used to abandon unwanted infants in the Inns of Court, Lincoln's and Gray's. So half the folk you meet called Gray or Lincoln are liable to be the descendants of those foundlings. Temple, too. I told Abe about that, and he just said he was glad his ancestors had chosen such a respectable place to be abandoned in, when you thought of the spots they might have lit on. He was a decent fellow - far too decent for politics. He wouldn't have lasted, you know, after the war. Men like him never do; people decide they're too clever, and besides, they feel obliged to 'em, and no electorate likes that. No, you'd have got rid of him, if Booth hadn't.'

  It was nearly midnight when they left the club, and Mr Franklin dropped the General at his house in Berkeley Square. The old man sat in silence for a moment before descending, and said:

  'Have to keep Button out of jail somehow. Not easy, because if they turn her loose the little shrew's just liable to set fire to Lloyd George, or break a stained-glass window, in order to martyr herself properly. Unless Holloway's taught her a lesson already. I don't know.' He turned his livid face on Mr Franklin. 'If it comes to a trial, you'll give your evidence - intelligently, I've no doubt. In the meantime I'll see what I can do. I thank you for the dinner - it wasn't your fault. I'd apologise for shaming you in the Athenaeum, but the sooner you're out of that awful hole, the better. If they turf you out, come to me, I'll put you up for a decent place - Madame Desiree's, off the Haymarket, or a Chinese establishment I know down in Pennyfields.' He chuckled hoarsely and climbed stiffly out, and Mr Franklin watched the stalwart figure march slowly and carefully across the pavement. He waited until the door had been opened, heard the General say: 'Hollo, Shadwell, her ladyship still awake? No? Well, why don't you and I go out and pick up a couple of girls and have a bath in Trafalgar Square fountain? No? You've no spunk, Shadwell - all right, malted milk and brandy, as usual ...'

  Mr Franklin shook his head ruefully, and directed the taxi to Wilton Crescent.

  21

  In June the builders' strike which had begun in January became a national lock-out, London theatregoers had the choice of Chaliapin in Boris Godunov, John MacCormack in Rigoletto, or Massine and Fokine in the Russian ballet, Britain beat the United States at polo (an event which brought Mr Franklin nostalgic memories of his first rail journey in England), fighting took place in Vera Cruz, the Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria prepared to make a visit to Sarajevo, Mrs Mark Franklin's portrait by Lavery was greatly admired in a showing of that eminent artist's work at the Grosvenor Gallery, a new French government was formed, and Britain and Germany reached an agreement on the Bagdad Railway question. Other notable events of the month were the opening of a new revue, Pip, Squeak!, starring Miss Priscilla Delys, whose story blazoned across the popular press had inspired an opportunist impresario to strike while her celebrity was hot, and the trial of Lady Helen Cessford, of Cessford Castle, Northumberland, and Curzon Street, and Millicent Shore, of Alma Street, Highgate, before a judge and jury. The charges were of malicious damage and assault with a deadly weapon (against the prisoner Shore), and aiding and abetting the malicious damage and common assault (against the prisoner Cessford). The trial was necessary because while both defendants admitted the malicio
us damage charges, both pleaded not guilty to the assaults.

  It was not an event to which Mr Franklin found himself looking forward with any pleasure at all. When, at the committal proceedings (in which he had not been required to appear), the defendants had entered their pleas and reserved their defences, the police had taken a statement from him and warned him to hold himself in readiness as a witness for the prosecution. He was going to have to testify against Lady Helen, which was bad enough; what might have made it infinitely worse was a deliberate and diabolically cunning attempt by General Sir Harry Flashman to compromise Mr Franklin's standing as a witness. He had sent round a note to Wilton Crescent inviting the American to lunch at the Oriental Club (one of the institutions at which, presumably, he remained a member in good standing). Mr Franklin had been on the point of accepting when he had received an agitated telephone call from his solicitor commanding him in no uncertain terms to stay away from the lunch engagement and, as he valued his reputation, the General himself.

  It transpired that Sir Harry, labouring with the assistance of a disreputable private detective on his great-niece's behalf, had tracked down a witness to the Royal Academy outrage who was, it appeared, prepared to give evidence favourable to the accused. So far so good, but he had then conceived the notion of taking the witness to lunch, and inviting Mr Franklin also, to talk the affair over in a friendly manner. He had known perfectly well that such a meeting of opposing witnesses with a relative of the accused presiding, could not fail to discredit the testimony of both, when it became known - as of course it would. Sir Harry could be relied on to see to that. Fortunately the private detective took fright, and spoke to the defence's solicitor, who lost no time in getting in touch with the firm who advised Mr Franklin. A scandal was averted, and Sir Harry, taxed with his behaviour by indignant lawyers-principally his own, a sorely-tried and ready-witted practitioner in Wine Office Court - claimed total innocence of any attempt to pervert the course of justice. On being assured that he might easily have been prosecuted for conspiracy, the old soldier had remarked scornfully: 'Let 'em try to put a ninety-two-year-old hero of Balaclava in the Scrubs if they dare. There'd be a revolution.' And there that particular aspect of the case had rested, with not a few sighs of relief.

  It remained that Mr Franklin would have to testify, and quite apart from the distaste which he felt for the task, he was also uncomfortably aware that it must emerge that he had been at the Royal Academy in company with Pip, who would also be appearing as a witness. And while there was, on the face of it, nothing untoward about their visiting an art gallery together, he knew from bitter experience what the sharp tongues of Belgravia and Mayfair could be relied on to make of it. If Pip had been from his own social class, no one would have given it a thought; his own wife was constantly being attended by young males of the smart set in which she moved, with probably no more than the normal malicious sniping which was the common currency of that society. But Pip was a well-known star of vulgar revue and musical comedy, as well as an artist's model, and Mr Franklin was bound to concede that her appearance and style were not immediately suggestive of chastity and a high moral tone. The fact that their relationship was innocent, and that Pip had strict views on the sanctity of the marriage tie, would be accepted by nobody within sneering distance of Eaton Place; they would place only one construction on the association of a respectable married resident of Wilton Crescent (whose wife, my dear, is seldom seen in his company in Society) with a spectacularly earthy blonde who exhibited herself indecorously on the stage and even more indecorously in the artist's studio.

  Where Peggy was concerned his unease was not that she would believe the sly tattling of her cronies, whose minds she knew as well as he did, but that she might be wounded by it, and pardonably annoyed with him for having exposed her to it. And if he pointed out to her gently that she was constantly in the company of young men of her own circle, she could reasonably reply that there was a difference between that and her being seen, say, in the company of a muscular young professional pugilist at Premierland - or, for that matter, at the Royal Academy where he had posed for a nude study of Hercules. Mr Franklin realised that he had been indiscreet, not to say downright oblivious ... and yet it had happened so gradually and innocently that only now was he aware of the possible implications. Well, the gossips would make of it what they wanted, and there was no help for it.

  Peggy had come back from Cornwall as outwardly calm and amiable as when she left; the artificial surface normality of their relationship continued, and although she had read of the Royal Academy affair, her only remark on learning that he had been involved as an eye-witness and would have to give evidence, was: 'Bad luck that you happened to be there - anything to do with courts is a crashing bore, isn't it? This Cessford woman must be a lunatic.' He had reminded her that he had met Lady Helen at Sandringham four years before, and that she had slapped his face even earlier outside the Waldorf Hotel; Peggy, without looking up from her paper, had simply observed: 'That's the trouble nowadays; society's full of cranks. You meet some apparently normal person at a tea dance and the next thing you know they're waving a banner in Trafalgar Square or going into a convent. Hilda Tredenham's brother is working on the railway somewhere, and has actually become a trade union delegate, and the Fleming boy - you remember, we met him at the Conroys, last Christmas? Well, he's joined the Foreign Legion.'

  Time was, Mr Franklin reflected, that Peggy would have demanded full details of the Royal Academy fracas, with a minute recapitulation of his Waldorf encounter with Lady Helen, and a rehearsal of everything he recollected about her at Sandringham, down to such details as her clothing, conversation, and what she ate at breakfast. Things had changed; she now seemed politely indifferent, and infinitely more concerned with her own personal affairs, even when they were together. For a moment he wondered if it was worth making the effort, to try to break through the invisible barrier, to dismiss the whole Arthur business as of no account, and re-establish that happy intimacy of minds that they had known before the gradual drifting apart, before Arthur and his damned silly political plots - but he knew that Peggy would not welcome it, that she preferred things as they were, and that the preference was based on her genuine indifference to him - and that in turn was an inevitable result of the disparity in their ages, and so on, and so on through the thoughts that he had rehearsed a thousand times before.

  Nothing more was said of the impending trial until the night before it took place, when it happened that he and Peggy were making one of their rare excursions out together. The occasion was the Anglo-American Peace Ball at the Albert Hall; not only was it one of the highlights of the season, which Peggy would have attended anyway, but it was sponsored by the United States Embassy, and Mr Franklin, as an American of some slight standing in the West End community, felt he could hardly avoid it. On their drive to the Albert Hall he made some remark about his attendance in court the following morning, and Peggy, glancing out at the passing traffic as their car sped down the Mall, inquired idly:

  'Do you think they'll get away with it?'

  He looked at her in some surprise. 'Who? Lady Helen Cessford and the other one? They can't get away with damaging the picture - they've admitted it.'

  'No - the other charges. She hit you with her umbrella, didn't she? I must say she seems to be an extremely violent woman. And someone was telling me that this girl who tried to stop the suffragette with the hatchet was jolly lucky not to be badly injured.'

  'I'll be surprised if they can make it stick,' said Mr Franklin. 'The women weren't there to commit assaults - I daresay in the dust-up you could say that anything like a push or a blow could constitute an assault. But they weren't trying to injure anyone.'

  `But Helen Cessford did hit you?'

  'Hardly. She tried to, but I caught her parasol, and she let it go.'

  'You do live, don't you? She didn't try to hit you at Sandringham, I suppose?' There was the ghost of a smile on Peggy's lips.


  'She wasn't being a suffragette at Sandringham.'