The Villa Golitsyn

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why Byron?’

  ‘Rich, emotional, unhappy, an exile …’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Not that I can think of.’

  ‘You don’t know, do you Simon?’

  ‘Know what?’

  He looked away. ‘Never mind. Look, this is the easiest way out. Climb up onto the mausoleum of the famille Lorenzotto – mafiosi, I should think – then jump onto the wall and down onto the roof of the guardian’s car. Charlie, did you hear? Good. Follow me.’ And once again, as at school, they followed their leader.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  Willy was calm for a day or two after his conversation with Herzen at his grave, and Simon took advantage of this lull to sit in the garden of the Villa Golitsyn and read some of the books from the shelves in the house.

  The Ludleys’ library was not large. It contained Herzen, of course, as well as Goethe, Schiller, Flaubert, Sterne, and more modern writers like Scott Fitzgerald and Thomas Mann. There was also a group of history books which Willy appeared to have brought with him from Cambridge; as well as the Michelin Guides and paperback thrillers. But Simon was not looking for books to entertain him. He hoped rather to find further evidence among these different books of Willy’s interests and convictions at the time of the Djakarta leak. He had admitted in the cemetery that Marxism would have been useful in Indonesia, but that did not mean that he himself had played a treacherous role to help bring about a Communist revolution.

  There were, for example, no works by either Marx or Lenin in Willy’s library, so Simon took down the three further volumes of Herzen’s memoirs, and also two well-worn copies of books by E. H. Carr, the historian of the Soviet Union who had been Regius Professor of History and a Fellow of Trinity College at the time when Willy was studying there. With these books under his arm he went out into the garden and sat under a palm tree in the warm autumn sunshine.

  Simon looked first at Herzen’s memoirs. The prose was rich and generous. In Simon’s mind it matched the clear, warm air of the morning; the scent in the garden of roses and gardenias. He enjoyed the writing but kept his distance from the ebullient, un-English author. He observed the high-flown ideals and passionate convictions of the Russian with the detachment of a scientist studying an exotic flower. It was relevant to the subject of his study – Willy Ludley – that a man like Herzen, in the 1840s, could remove his loyalties from monarch and nation and reattach them to the higher ideals of socialism and revolution. Certainly Herzen had never sacrificed a friend as Willy seemed to have sacrificed Churton, but he was seen as a traitor by the Russian government at the time. He had done what he could for revolutionaries all over Europe – for Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Italians and particularly for the Poles when they rose against the Russians in 1863. It was plausible to suggest, Simon said to himself, that Willy had seen parallels between the 1860s in Europe and the 1960s in Asia, with the Americans in the role of the Tsarist Russians and the Asian Communists as the Poles.

  He turned next to the books by E. H. Carr and saw at once that it was Carr who had led Willy to Herzen. His first book, The Romantic Exiles, was largely an account of Herzen’s life. The others were more academic treatises on history, and in reading them Simon felt more at ease. He had left the company of a Russian romantic, and was now with an English civil servant. There was a commonsensical tone to Carr’s writing. The prose was elegant but dry; the reasoning matter-of-fact. It seemed at first sight unlikely that anything at all revolutionary could be gleaned from his work, but then Simon noticed that a collection of his essays, published in 1951, was called The New Society, and that despite the care taken by the author to hide his prejudices, he too like Herzen believed in progress:

  If, however, I were asked to define the content of progress, I should fall back on the well worn word ‘freedom’; and if I were asked to define the goal towards which we shall seek to move at the present time, I should say ‘freedom for all’, or ‘freedom for many’, in contrast with the ‘freedom for some’ which has been the great achievement of the recent past.

  Well trained in the minutiae of ministerial statements and departmental memoranda, Simon noted Carr’s use of the word ‘shall’ rather than ‘should’ – the admonition disguised as a prediction; and also the assumption of a consensus in another passage to cover up the missing link in a chain of reasoning:

  In the twentieth century hardly anyone openly contests any longer the two propositions that freedom means freedom for all and therefore equality, and that freedom, if it means anything at all, must include freedom from want.

  Later the historian of the Soviet Union committed himself still further:

  The price of liberty is the restriction of liberty. The price of some liberty for all is the restriction of the greater liberty of some.

  The words might have been written by Stalin himself.

  There then followed an indictment of the British bourgeoisie, more withering than that of many a committed revolutionary because of its calm and reasonable tone:

  The vast majority of the ruling groups in Great Britain, in every branch of the national life, still belong, either by birth or adoption, to the class which was the main beneficiary of British prosperity and power before 1914, and are therefore under the impression of a steep decline not only in British power and prosperity as a whole but, within the country, in the power and prosperity of the class to which they belong … It is on any reckoning extraordinarily difficult for groups or individuals who have enjoyed prosperity under a certain dispensation, and learned to regard the beliefs on which that dispensation rested as eternally valid, to re-adapt themselves to a world in which that dispensation has passed away for ever and its beliefs are shown to be no more than a reflexion and expression of the interests that upheld it.

  And yet, said Carr:

  No inherent reason exists why we in this country should succumb to the same experience … if existing ruling groups can be adapted to the revolutionary changes through which we are passing, or be replaced by other groups …

  Simon sat back in his chair. Helen came out and asked him if he wanted to go with Charlie and Willy to Cap Ferrat. He shook his head. His mind was not in the South of France but in Cambridge in 1961. What impression would these words of Carr’s have made on Willy if, beneath the tomfoolery of his flamboyant, debauched life, there had been a leader looking for a cause? He had loathed his father, and all his father stood for – the Empire and the ancien régime – but more than anyone else he was himself one of those ‘who still belong by birth or adoption to the class which was the main beneficiary of British prosperity and power …’ He belonged to it, but he abjured it, and here was Edward Hallett Carr, the greatest historian of his university, promising him that he could adapt to ‘the revolutionary changes’ through which they were passing and work for the ‘freedom of all’.

  But how? Simon returned to Carr – to The New Society. Was he, in 1951, advocating no more than a vote for the British Labour Party? No. It was a revolution he talked of, not reform; and not a small, parochial national or even European revolution such as that which took place in France in 1789.

  The French revolution was, in spite of its national origin and title, a European event in an age when Europe still dominated the world. The revolution of today is still more certainly a world event, and its future does not turn on the destiny of a single country … We see its workings everywhere today, sometimes in sharp and rugged outline, sometimes dimly and half-hidden beneath an apparently unruffled surface, in Europe, in Asia (perhaps at this moment most of all in Asia), in Africa, in the Americas. We cannot escape it: we can only seek to understand and to meet it.

  Simon closed his eyes. The sun was now behind the olive tree, and the slight breeze from the sea moved the branches back and forth so that a speckled light fell on his lids. He appeared for a moment to be dozing, but beneath the closed eyes his mind was quite awake, thinking not of the book which lay open
on his knee, nor of Herzen’s memoirs, but of a children’s story he had read many years ago where the son and daughter of a famous explorer, seeing that there was no part of the world left to discover, decide to go to the moon.

  Had that been the case with Willy? The son and grandson of imperial Englishmen, had he seen that the Empire was finished and looked for a new cause? He was not drawn to the speculations of Marx or Lenin, but found in his professor of history at Cambridge someone entirely reasonable and matter-of-fact who taught that history does have a meaning, that it moves in a certain direction, there is such a thing as progress. ‘Freedom for some’ was the last port of call; ‘Freedom for many’ is the next one; and the ‘many’ to be given this freedom are not so much the European working class as the peasant masses of Asia.

  Carr had offered Willy not only a cause, but a role in this ‘world event’, this ‘revolution of today’. It might be ‘extraordinarily difficult for individuals who have enjoyed prosperity under a certain dispensation’ – and Willy was certainly one of these – ‘to readapt themselves to a world in which that dispensation had passed away forever’, but he offered the possibility to the heroic individual: ‘existing ruling groups can be adapted to the revolutionary changes’.

  Simon remained with his eyes closed. Why do men act? For need. From habit. From conviction. No need, no habit, could have led Willy to help the Indonesian Communists, but here certainly was a conviction which made it not only possible but likely. He had arrived in Djakarta with the belief that if his life was to have any meaning – if he was to play a part in the times in which he lived – it must be to assist the progressive forces in Asia. His nation, the old colonial power, had created a neocolonial, pseudo-nation in the Federation of Malaysia, but it was Indonesia, and the Communists within Indonesia, who were fighting for the ‘freedom for many’. They needed a dramatic victory against the British forces in Borneo. Willy, staying with Churton, saw his chance. He had photographed the map and given a print to Aidit.

  Then came the abortive coup. He might have realized at the time that his disloyalty to the Crown might be uncovered, but he did not run because only a coward would run. He did withdraw, disillusioned, perhaps, by the failure of the Communist conspiracy, or disgusted by the slaughter which followed. Thereafter he had lived in exile with remorse growing and gnawing like a tapeworm in his entrails.

  TWO

  A voice spoke close to him. He opened his eyes, blinked, and saw Priss holding a tray. ‘Am I disturbing you,’ she asked, ‘or would you like some tea?’

  Simon sat up. ‘Perfect timing,’ he said.

  She put the tray on the white table and sat down on one of the wicker chairs. ‘You’ve been reading some very serious books,’ she said, pouring tea into an elegant china cup from the silver pot.

  ‘It’s interesting stuff,’ said Simon closing his book and putting it down on the gravel by his chair.

  ‘I’ve read Herzen,’ said Priss. ‘It’s more or less obligatory if you’re living with Willy; but I’ve never read any of those other books. I think Willy brought them with him from Cambridge.’

  ‘He was obviously interested in history.’

  ‘Yes. He got a First.’

  ‘Didn’t you go to university?’

  She shook her head. ‘In my day, girls weren’t brought up to take an interest in things like that.’

  ‘Didn’t you study anything?’

  ‘Yes. Art. I used to paint.’

  ‘No longer?’

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘No. I took it terribly seriously at the time but when, well, when I got married I dropped it.’

  ‘Perhaps you should take it up again?’

  ‘I wasn’t much good, and out here everything’s been done by Renoir and Matisse.’

  ‘You must get a little bored.’

  ‘I don’t really because I have to look after Will. But he does.’

  ‘Does he read?’

  ‘Only detective stories.’

  ‘Not history?’

  ‘No.’ She hesitated, then added: ‘He sometimes reads the Bible.’

  ‘Why the Bible? He isn’t religious, is he?’

  ‘No, not really. In fact not at all. But he says that since the Bible has formed the moral conscience of the Western world, one ought at least to know what it says.’

  ‘But he doesn’t believe in it?’

  ‘No.’ She spoke with a slight falter in her voice.

  ‘Nor do you.’

  ‘No.’ She said this with more conviction.

  ‘What do you believe in?’

  She looked nonplussed. ‘Must one believe in something?’

  ‘Not necessarily.’

  ‘I believe in Will, I suppose.’

  ‘And that’s enough?’ Simon refilled his cup with tea to cover the abruptness of his questions; but out of the corner of his eye he saw that what he had asked made Priss look vulnerable and almost sad.

  ‘It’s difficult to believe in someone who no longer believes in himself,’ she said. ‘And then, well, it’s difficult growing older without friends – I mean girlfriends, really – women of the same age. One can’t compare notes. One can’t know whether the feelings one has, or feelings one has lost, are experiences particular to oneself, or just part of the whole process of growing older.’

  ‘You aren’t so old,’ said Simon.

  ‘I know. I keep reminding myself that I’ve got half my life to go. But what’s gone before – and I don’t know, perhaps this is being indiscreet, or disloyal to Will – but I can’t pretend that I feel the same kind of love for Will as I once did.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  She blushed. ‘Well, passion, I suppose. Physical passion.’

  ‘That side of things is bound to change.’

  ‘But is it? I mean, did it with you?’

  Simon considered the question. He tried to remember what he had felt for his wife before the bitterness which had followed her love affair with the geologist. They had certainly made love, but more perhaps to satisfy a need than to express an emotion. ‘I don’t think it went altogether,’ he said, ‘but what was left didn’t stand up to her feelings for the other man.’

  ‘I’m afraid of that happening to me,’ said Priss – and she glanced at Simon and then looked away with the apparent confusion of a much younger girl.

  Simon swallowed a mouthful of tepid tea. What she had said, and the manner in which she had said it, seemed so clearly an indication that he could be the object of this further affection that now was clearly the moment to declare himself, to take her hand or grasp her body, as he had wanted to over the Scrabble board. But again he sat as if paralysed. It was not just the thought that Priss was Willy’s wife which inhibited him: it was also that the way in which she was behaving – the girlish blushes and oblique glances – was totally inconsistent with his early perception of her forthright character. From the very first moment when he had met her, he had noticed the way in which she had sized up the newcomers, and the invitation she now seemed to extend to him seemed only half sincere. He therefore said nothing, and did nothing, and after a moment of embarrassed silence Priss said: ‘Of course it won’t happen. I mean fundamentally I love Will. I can’t imagine being with anyone else.’ Then she added, as if to punish Simon for spurning her. ‘Anyway, there isn’t much chance of meeting an irresistible lover here in Nice.’

  The others returned soon after six. Priss was in the big old-fashioned kitchen preparing supper: Simon was on his knees at the fireplace, blowing at twigs with which he was trying to light a fire.

  ‘What? A fire, Milson?’ Willy shouted at him. ‘You are a sissy these days.’

  ‘Priss’s idea, not mine,’ said Simon.

  ‘We’ve been swimming,’ said Helen.

  ‘And talking to the famous,’ said Charlie. He laughed and Helen laughed too.

  ‘You should have seen Willy,’ she said, talking to Simon but looking with great fondness towards the sideboard where Willy w
as pulling the cork from a bottle of wine. ‘He went up to this English tourist who must have been a ticket inspector or something like that and asked him for his autograph. The man wrote down Fred Bloggs, or whatever his name was, and Willy got into a rage and shouted at him and said he was an imposter.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He pretended he thought he was David Niven.’

  ‘But he wasn’t?’

  ‘No, he didn’t look anything like him.’

  ‘I think I was muddling him up with Rex Harrison,’ said Willy from across the room. ‘They both live on Cap Ferrat.’

  ‘He didn’t look like Rex Harrison either,’ said Charlie.

  ‘Nothing like him,’ said Helen with another squeal of laughter.

  ‘We also went to the Villa Ephrussi,’ said Charlie.

  ‘And there Willy was even worse,’ said Helen with wide, shining eyes. ‘He kept interrupting the guide. “Non, madame, vous avez tort.” In the end they threw us out.’

  ‘I hate all that reverent attention for a lot of junk,’ said Willy, coming towards them with glasses of wine.

  ‘It was terribly funny,’ said Helen, sinking down into the sofa with a sigh of contentment.

  ‘And what have you been up to?’ Willy asked Simon with an expression of mild mockery in his eyes.

  ‘Reading your old school books.’

  ‘Which ones?’

  ‘Herzen, of course, and then Carr.’

  ‘From cover to cover?’

  ‘No, just dipping here and there.’

  ‘It’s a long time since I read Carr,’ said Willy, sitting down in an armchair next to the fire.

  ‘But you read him at Cambridge?’

  ‘Oh yes. I went to his lectures. They had a great effect on me.’

  ‘Your reputation, when I went up, was for debauchery rather than learning.’

  Willy smiled. ‘I lived on two levels: the flippant where I drank a lot and had endless friends, and a more serious level where I was alone.’

  ‘Why did you never let others see your serious side?’