‘Locked herself away in her room. Says she has a headache.’ They both knew that wasn’t true. ‘She’s leaving the comedian. Wants a divorce.’
‘I know.’
‘Why can’t…?’ Churchill trailed off, knowing the futility of his protest.
‘Is it Gil Winant?’
‘No!’ Churchill said, but too quickly. Beaverbrook would know, Max always knew! ‘I don’t think so,’ Churchill continued, knowing absolute denial was futile. ‘I think she is simply desperately unhappy. I feel so wretched for her.’
‘Not your fault.’
‘Oh, but somehow I always feel it is.’
And, in a way, it was. He had set an Olympian example for his daughters that no other man could match. It had gone a long way to ruining his son, too, but there was little point in telling him so. Deep down, he already knew it.
They walked in silence for a while, Churchill striking forward with the gold-topped cane that had been given to him as a wedding present by the late King Edward. He was wearing one of his romper suits, a rich, vivid purple that clashed dramatically with the wood around them, and a broad-brimmed soft hat to keep the sun from his eyes.
‘You’ve upset the War Office, Max.’
‘Good.’
‘Yes, you’re probably right.’
‘You’ve made me Minister for Supply. So, dammit, I want to supply,’ he growled. ‘But most of those guys don’t know their bollocks from their backsides. Keep complaining that we haven’t sent them the right colour tent pegs or haven’t recycled their envelopes, or some such bloody nonsense.’
‘But did you really have to write to the War Secretary offering to supply string for his bows and arrows?’
‘Hell, I even said I’d send him flints from my own backyard at Cherkley in case he wanted to get his flintlocks ready. What’s the problem? Did I use the wrong form or something?’
He was going to get nowhere with Max on this one. Beaverbrook was irascible, irrepressible, irreverent, and at the moment irreplaceable. And he knew it. Supplies to the factories, supplies to the army, supplies from America, supplies to Russia, they all came under his remit and he used it to push his way ruthlessly around Whitehall. ‘I’m just your delivery boy, Winston,’ he had joked when appointed. ‘My bike is always at your service.’ Which is why Churchill had told him to get on it and go to Moscow.
‘Keep them in the war, Max,’ he had said. ‘Give them whatever it takes. Help them. But don’t bleed us dry in the process.’
Yet Beaverbrook, as always, had followed his own instructions. In preparation for his trip he had tried to bully the Chiefs of Staff into giving up all sorts of vital supplies so that he could promise them to Stalin; it had led to endless rows, with Churchill stuck in the middle.
Typically, as soon as the Chiefs turned hostile, Beaverbrook raised the stakes. He proposed an immediate raid on the mainland of France, using tanks, in the knowledge that it was what Churchill and the Russians also wanted, and in the certainty that the Chiefs would object yet again. And he would go on raising issues, wearing the bastards down, argument by argument; they couldn’t carry on objecting to everything. Easier to give in to Max right at the start, everyone knew that.
‘I need more, Winston,’ Beaverbrook barked gruffly, bustling along beside Churchill.
‘That’s what Maisky said. I told him to bugger off.’
‘You can’t send me to Moscow empty-handed.’
‘And neither can I strip the entire British Army naked in order to satisfy your enthusiasm for Comrade Stalin.’
‘You wanna help him or not?’
‘Of course I do but…There are limits, Max.’ Churchill knew it was a wasted argument; Max Beaverbrook had no understanding of limits. They were a lot alike. That was why they had been friends for so long, and why Churchill could never fully trust him.
‘For Pete’s sake, Winston, if you’re determined to send me to Moscow with nothing, then I will have nothing to give ‘em. Dammit, doesn’t seem much point my going. Send Eden instead. He can talk them into stupefaction; maybe they’ll never notice he’s brought bugger all but words.’
‘No, Max.’
‘I tell you honestly, Winston, maybe I’ve been around too long. I’m not getting any younger. My eyes are going, my bloody asthma cripples me. Perhaps it’s time I found something a little less adventurous to do.’
God, not that again. Another of Max’s temperamental threats to resign. One day he would go too far.
‘Like what, Max?’ Churchill asked wearily, playing along. ‘What do you have in mind?’
‘Ambassador to Washington. You know Edward Halifax is about as useless as yesterday’s newspaper. He’s not one of us. But I know everyone there. It’d be a great way to wrap up my career. So let’s make it Washington. Not Moscow. I’m getting too old to be sent sledging through a Russian winter.’
Perhaps he meant it. But Churchill doubted it. Max was, after all, five years younger than him. He still had ambition. That was why, along with his new job at Supply, he’d insisted on moving into Downing Street. At Number Twelve, just two doors down. He was camping on the doorstep.
Churchill knew that events were slipping out of his control—even here, at home. Everyone getting a touch too uppity. Not just those plodders in Parliament like Hore-Belisha but also the fornicators in Fleet Street. Always carping, finding fault. The Daily Mail reshuffled his Cabinet for him almost every week, and The Times had just had a spasm of ill temper and pronounced that he should be preparing for his successor! Max would have read it and laughed—knowing Max, he might even have written it.
They trudged on through the woods until they came to a glade. Sunlight dappled across the clearing. In the middle had once stood a huge, overpowering tree, but now it had been reduced to nothing but a rotting, moss-covered stump. Churchill poked the tip of his cane into the bowels of the stump; it splintered and fell apart at their feet.
‘As all great things eventually do,’ he whispered. Beaverbrook ignored it.
‘So, do I get the job?’
‘What?’ Churchill said, startled, dragged back from his thoughts.
‘Ambassador. Do I get to be Ambassador?’
It was a game. Beaverbrook didn’t want it, but he wanted to be offered it. He was like a boy in a sweet shop, damn him. But what did it matter? In a few weeks the whole world might have turned on its head. Hitler might have him shot.
‘Yes, if you want, Max. After Moscow. Do the job there and the post in Washington might make a lot of sense.’
Beaverbrook nodded in silent contentment.
‘So you go to Moscow, Max. Pay the Soviets whatever they need to continue the fight, like the bloody-handed mercenaries they are, because their fight is our fight, too. I hate what Russia represents, its system of malevolence and murder, and I detest its leader above all. But I need him. So we must pass a sponge across the past and promise them treasures and arms in abundance. Stalin will be duly ungrateful for what he is about to receive, even while our own sailors die in large numbers trying to deliver it.’
He started slashing at a huge fern with his cane.
‘And when he complains about a second front, remind him that there might even now be a second front, in his own backyard, if Japan hadn’t been left so short of raw materials by our sanctions. Tell him we shall tighten the blockade on the Japanese, screw it so tight that their babies will scream with hunger and their war machine will be starved until it is driven ever further south, towards the oilfields and rubber plantations of our own Empire. And remind him that with every step the Japanese take away from the borders of Russia, they march closer to their war with us.’
The fern lay in pieces at his feet.
‘Tell him all that, Max. Give him what he wants. Just make sure you leave us with enough to give ourselves a chance of surviving, there’s a good chap.’
The maid Héloise had a weekend off. It was inconvenient, but she hadn’t spent a weekend away from Chequers since her
arrival, and it seemed only fair. She had a cousin who was passing through London, she told Mrs Landemare, and he might have news from home.
Soon after she arrived in the capital, she could be seen perched on a park bench by the Serpentine in Hyde Park, throwing crumbs to the ducks. A man came to sit at the opposite end of the bench, but he was not her cousin. He was the same young Japanese she had bumped into on her last trip. They appeared to ignore each other; he read a newspaper while she concentrated on the insistent ducks.
Within a few minutes she had exhausted her supply of bread. She shook out the last remnants of crumbs from the paper bag in which they had been carried, then screwed it up and placed it on the bench beside her. She stood, brushed down the front of her coat and left. A few seconds afterwards, the Japanese gentleman disappeared in the opposite direction. The paper bag was nowhere to be seen.
The temperature had dropped sharply with the setting of the sun. The clear skies that had brought warmth and pleasure during the afternoon now threatened an early frost. Chequers was always a cold house, its bricks imbued with chill and its mullioned windows and ancient doors never a good fit in their frames. Churchill put his head around the office next to the front door in which the secretaries sat, to discover them rubbing their hands for warmth.
At times he could be unutterably rude and impatient with his staff but on other occasions also innately kind, and, for the moment, the welfare of his helper-women became his greatest priority—or was it merely a quest to find distraction, something other than the war to focus on? In any event, he became determined that their comfort should be taken care of.
‘You shall have fire!’ he declared. He poked his head into the hallway and bellowed: ‘Sawyers!’
But Sawyers was nowhere to be found. And the maid had a day off, while Mrs Landemare was sweating over dinner, so Churchill decided there was only one thing for it. He got down on his knees before the grate, screwed up large twists of paper, covered them with kindling and began hurling matches into the middle of it all. Soon smoke began curling its way up the chimney.
It was while he was leaning in triumph on one of the desks that his eye encountered a piece of paper that, in ordinary circumstances, would probably never have come to him. A civil servant would have intercepted it and decided it was not of sufficient significance or interest to engage the Prime Minister’s mind. It was nothing more than a note reporting that the factories of the United States were producing a record number of cars and refrigerators.
More cars, more refrigerators. Suddenly the smile was gone, the rage was upon him. ‘Do they expect to choke the damned Fuehrer on ice cream?’ he roared at the hapless secretaries before storming out.
It was a mood he carried with him to the dinner table. He showed no indication of joining in the discussions of his guests. His head was down, he was slurping, picking up food in his fingers, spilling his wine in impatience, paying others no heed. They carried on without him. He seemed to have time only for Nelson the cat, who sat on his lap throughout the meal and was paid for his loyalty with a puddle of cream that Churchill poured onto the polished table top beside him.
His performance was not so exceptional, little more than the exhibitionism of age and authority covered in a generous smearing of exhaustion. His humour had been blowing as unpredictably as the winds of autumn, and they no longer knew what to expect. They were finishing off the last of the summer pudding when someone mentioned the stories that were emerging of wholesale executions in Czechoslovakia, and the new Nazi edict that all Jews should be marked by wearing the yellow Star of David on their clothes.
‘You feel so helpless,’ Winant ventured, ‘watching this all from a distance.’
Suddenly Churchill’s fists pounded on the table for attention.
‘Then how long will it be, pray, before Americans stop feeling so bloody helpless, cease watching from a great distance and get stuck in?’
‘Ladies,’ Clementine instructed, demurely but firmly. As one, they rose and followed her off to the Long Gallery for coffee. Nelson had also deserted his post.
‘Winston,’ Winant eventually responded, in a tone that implied his total lack of eagerness to get involved in a shoot-out.
‘Don’t “Winston” me, Mr Ambassador. We’ve danced around this one too long. I apologize for asking a diplomat a straight question, but there it is. How long will it be?’ His tone was curt, the formality suggested he had put aside their friendship in order to pursue the matter.
At the far end of the table, Winant’s shoulders sagged. ‘Prime Minister,’ he said, reluctantly taking up the challenge as the other guests sat back in their chairs to give them a clear line of fire. ‘I wish I could tell you. But what with the state of public opinion…’
‘Yes, I understand the President likes to keep his ear to the ground.’
‘He does.’
‘Bloody undignified, arse in the air. Ripe for kicking.’ Churchill threw back the last of his claret and reached for his glass of brandy.
‘As you well know, the opposition to war amongst the public remains intense and inside the Senate is extreme. Some believe that what the President has already done is unconstitutional.’
‘Reminds me of a heretic worrying about whether the knots of his bindings are comfortable while the flames are about to scorch his nuts.’
‘You can’t ignore public opinion, not in a democracy. And it’s all very well going on about the United States’ refusal to fight the war, but what about the British?’
‘What about the British?’
Winant loosened his bow tie, feeling constricted, unhappy at the direction this was taking. ‘The way many Americans see it,’ he replied slowly, ‘is that ever since the British Army got pushed out of Norway and France you’ve shown a distinct reluctance to get stuck back in. You fight the Germans at a distance—in the air, on the sea, in the Middle East. But not where it is truly going to matter, on the mainland of Europe. Even the Russians are saying so.’
‘Don’t quote me bloody Marx and Stalin!’
‘I could quote you a dozen US Senators. You have no troops on mainland Europe, so why should we?’
‘We are in this war, up to the hilt and to the death! You’ve walked around the streets of London, of Coventry, of Liverpool, of Portsmouth’—he was pounding the table with every name—‘of Bristol, of Birmingham, of Cardiff, of Plymouth. You have seen us crawling out of our basements and bunkers, brushing the debris from our eyes and wondering which of our loved ones survived the night. We are in this war, every man, woman and child of us. But America? Are you in, or out? Are you Spectator, Umpire or Player?’
‘For my own part, Winston, you know that I would have us with you tomorrow but—’
Churchill rode roughshod over his attempt at pacification. ‘The President told me to my face that he would find a pretext, some provocation that would justify you coming into this war. Your ships get attacked and sunk with devastating regularity, yet—’
‘The Greer? Well, she was scarcely an innocent bystander, Winston. She pursued the U-boat for four hours in the middle of a hostile engagement. That’s why some are saying the President’s already gone too far, and most others agree that the German provocation hasn’t gone far enough.’
‘Provocation?’ Churchill exploded. ‘What more do you need? Hitler has murdered half a dozen countries for far less. You are blind, blind.’ The fists came crashing down upon the table once more. ‘Can you not see what he’s about? “One by one”: that’s his plan, that is the guiding rule, and with it he’s already enslaved a vast proportion of the world.’
Winant tried to respond but Churchill held up his hand.
‘I warned, I warned so many times. But no one would listen. They all stood idly by while Germany rearmed. Austria was occupied. Czechoslovakia subjugated. Poland crushed. The Low Countries and the Scandinavian countries wiped from the map. France humiliated. Even this year, I pleaded with the Balkan countries to stand together and save themsel
ves from the ruin by which they are now engulfed. But, one by one, they were undermined and overwhelmed. Never has the career of pillage and plunder been made more smooth. And now he inflicts his slaughter upon the peoples of Russia, after which it will be our turn in this country. And then what, Ambassador?’ With a sweep of his arms he pushed away all the cutlery and glasses on the table in front of him, leaving nothing but chaos. A glass of old wine had toppled, spilling its dregs across the table top; he ignored it. ‘When all the rest of the world has been reduced to a featureless swamp of untold suffering, that Devil’s butcher will call you Americans to order. Oh, I do not doubt that you will give a good account of yourselves. You will exchange vacillating pacifism for the brightest jingoism and you will bring all your might to bear. You will promise to defend your independence to the death, and Hitler will do his best to grant you that wish. But even if you were able to withstand the onslaught, what then? What would there be left in your world apart from the piteous cries of ghosts? You will look back and beat your breasts and proclaim that you should have seen sooner, moved faster, listened more carefully, understood that lonely little Britannia was fighting for your cause and the cause of all free men. But don’t you dare say you were never warned.’ His finger was jabbing down the table at the American. “‘One by one!” “One by one!” History will never forgive you if you allow that monster to become master of our world!’
Sawyers was at his side, making a hash of refilling his balloon of cognac, deliberately distracting him. ‘Sorry, zur.’
‘Bugger off, Sawyers!’ the old man snapped. ‘I’ve got business to attend to.’
The servant, having watched the performance from the wings, had wondered whether Churchill was ill or too far in alcohol, but one look at his steady and voracious eyes told him otherwise. He could not save Churchill from himself and there was no point in trying. With the briefest nod of his head, Sawyers withdrew.
‘I went to meet your President wanting war, Gil. But instead I got an Atlantic Charter that talks about some far-off and fanciful peace your country would like to impose upon the world, even though you will not fight for it. So I ask you to understand my sense of overpowering disappointment, to indulge my suggestions that the position of the Americanus Ostrichissimus is undignified and wholly immoral, and I ask you—as a friend—to forgive anything I have said that has gone beyond the immoderation that should be permitted between us. But I tell you this, Gil.’ Churchill pushed himself to his feet, staring down towards the American. ‘Your country will enter this war. You will have no choice in the matter, for if you do not decide for war, then there will be others who will make that decision for you. You will not be permitted to stand aside.’