A Train of Powder (39 page)

These people could not imagine what happened to their son. He cared, they thought, for nothing but his home. He had, they say, no friends, and took no interest in politics. They had been quite unprepared for his arrest. He had told them he was going out to dinner with a friend and had said to his mother, “Oh, Mum, this is a tin-pot place we live in. I’ve been to the Railway Hotel and they don’t do a dinner at night, and I’ve been to the Spotted Horse and they don’t do a dinner at night, and I’ll have to take this chap right over the other side of the High Street to the Star and Garter, because they do a dinner every night.” She had asked him if he would not bring his friend home after dinner and play records to him, and he had answered that he thought his friend would have to go straight home. But when the police brought her son into the sitting room that evening she thought that he had dined with two friends instead of one, and that they had come back to listen to the records, and she rose and held out her hand to them. It made her angry to remember that. She was not the kind of woman who would forgive policemen for arresting her son just because they were only doing their duty.

The whole thing started, they said, in Russia, with the miserable time he had had in the Embassy at Moscow. No, he didn’t like the life there. He didn’t like the life there at all. Mr. Marshall compressed his lips, shut his eyes, wagged his head, implying many things. Mrs. Marshall, her great chocolate-coloured eyes full of tears, nodded in confirmation. It was not the sort of thing that their son was accustomed to. There were continual parties. Cocktail parties. The sharp sound of the words, flung out after a preparatory pause, recalled that there had been an age long ago when a cocktail was considered an immoral drink, as different from sherry as concubinage is from marriage, and a cocktail party meant an assembly of people who had abandoned normal restraints. A change in custom in one group may take a very long time to become known among other groups. There was indeed no reason why a household like this, which either drank beer or, more probably, only soft drinks, should ever have learned that cocktails had long since become respectable, and that cocktail parties had for many people moved up to the position formerly occupied by tea parties, of social functions too stereotyped to be anything else but tedious.

But although there was plainly some illusion here, there was as plainly some truth. All exiled communities drink too much. We all know the prisoner’s plea that getting drunk was the quickest way out of the grimness of Manchester. But it is also, as many a man found in Germany, the quickest way back to hideous and beloved Manchester out of the beautiful and abhorred alien corn. Yet most witnesses agreed that the drinking in Moscow was on a modest scale, far below army of occupation standards, and was constantly checked by the authorities. Still, it was probably enough to shock the child of this innocent household, which took its pleasure rug-making.

Drinking parties, said Mr. Marshall angrily; and his wife sighed that the boy had been forced to go to them, had been bullied into going to them. Thus did they see the efforts which had been made to render their son’s exile tolerable and to keep him out of a certain mousetrap. There was also, Mr. Marshall continued, the social difficulty. All the time he had felt that he was a misfit and that the other people at the Embassy looked down on him because they had all been at public schools and he had only been at a secondary school. The father did not seem to have heard that the majority of the other employees at the Embassy would have been at just the same sort of school as his son, and looked vague when it was put to him. It appeared possible that there had not been very much talk between this boy and his parents. This man and woman with their active hands had made this small, bright, warm, crowded cave in the darkness of London; and the boy had sat in the cave, enjoying the sharp, quick tongue of his father and the comfort of his mother, listening to his tinkling records and making his silk mats, and speaking of little things such as the failure of the Railway Hotel to do a dinner at night.

The father hurried on, trying to build up a personality for his son which the strangers would recognize as guiltless and precious. It was in Russia, he was sure, that the mischief had started. Not that the boy had become a Communist out there. For he had no interest in politics. But the jealousy had started, the jealousy which had made certain people determined to get him into trouble. Oh, anybody could see what it all meant. For of course the Russians had come to notice that the boy was not like the rest of the pack at the Embassy. The Russians aren’t stupid, they would get on to a thing like that, it would stick out a mile in their eyes. So when they realized he was different they gave him all sorts of special privileges, showed their appreciation in all sorts of little ways. One thing was that they arranged for him to pay a visit to the Kremlin. Well, it was not everybody who got that attention, so of course the people above him were jealous. His son had known that, and had even realized that they had gone so far as to have him followed, and had just laughed at it all. That showed that there had been no harm in his friendship with Kuznetsov. He had gone on seeing him long after he had known they were watching him.

But of course young William was innocent. Mr. Marshall knew that for certain. He had gone to see him in prison, and had found him in hospital, and he had stood beside him and asked, “Son, have you been doing anything you shouldn’t have done?” Now, he and his son were friends, real friends, and the lad was always straight with him. If he had been guilty he would just have told him right out, “Dad, I’ve had it.” The father imitated how his son would have looked up at him and humorously shaken his head as he said it. But he had not used those words. He had said, “Well, Dad, it all depends on what they make of it.” Mr. and Mrs. Marshall agreed with each other that that made it quite clear that the boy had done nothing.

These people had been thinking of their son’s arrest, and of nothing else whatsoever, for nearly three weeks. It was hard to accompany them into the twilit world where their fears and hopes were kneading their memories of what the boy had told them into new shapes, which they trusted would be amulets to keep away misfortune. With surprising abruptness Mr. Marshall announced that his son was sexually normal. He had, indeed, been very much in love with a girl and had hoped to marry her. But recently he had told her that that could never be. This was because he had by then been to Moscow. There he had seen how international affairs were handled. Mr. Marshall shrugged his shoulders contemptuously to convey the horrid substance of his son’s knowledge. Even to those who are most repelled by many Foreign Office policies this condemnation seemed too sweeping.

Of course, Mr. Marshall continued, we were bound to have a war, the way they were muddling things. Then the atom bomb would go off; and there was no sense in bringing children into the world just for that. Anyway, till then he would have nothing to offer his wife except life in an Embassy. And the boy knew what that was. Not fit for a decent girl. The degradation of a diplomatic environment was mentioned after the atom bomb, and it was clear that that order was adopted for the sake of keeping the worst to the last, of avoiding an anticlimax. Even to those who are most fatigued by the drinking of exiled communities it seemed that he was not being quite just. Had he been speaking of a young woman who had been kidnapped to Chinatown and infected with the opium habit, and for these and other reasons might as well be dead, his tone would not have been different, and it would greatly have astonished Sir David and Lady Kelly.

For a moment it seemed desirable that they should be in this room. Surely they would by their presence have dispelled this bad dream of a debauched coterie which had humbled the Marshalls’ son and ruined him for childish motives. Sir David would have given them wise and drastic advice on the course that would best serve the boy’s interests; Lady Kelly would have understood that the couple’s pride in the framed panel of embroidered butterflies and their passion for rug-making established them as distant kin to the builders of the Russian churches and the Turkish mosques which her taste and technical skill had commemorated. Their acute minds would have circled the house and the cloud of imagination on their faces would have thickened, and they would have perfectly understood the situation. Yet the Marshalls had, of course, no particular desire at that moment to be understood. What they wanted was to get their son out of prison.

From the doorway they said again that their son took no interest in politics. Outside, the summer dusk had lifted in that last moment of false daylight which comes before the dark falls, and there was a staring whiteness in the sky. It could be seen that the Marshalls lived in the kind of street which is in our age a conduit of political danger. It was eighty years since the English passed their first great Education Act. Practically everybody in the street was the child of parents who had some schooling, and was himself easily literate. People who could not learn at school or forget what they learned there do not succeed in living in this decent and orderly street of little houses, they lived in still smaller houses. But if they learned much more than was taught at school, if they went on to the universities, or if they were clever in industry or commerce, they were apt to move away into larger houses. Those that remained here were sensitive to print, they were within the radius over which complicated ideas broadcast themselves. Some considered these ideas with deliberation and good sense, some ignored them, some embraced them too eagerly and insisted that they be immediately applied. Round the corner from the Marshalls there lived a man who was coughing out his life and gave such moments as he could wrest from tubercular death to the service of the British Fascist party as it has survived the war, addled and minuscule. He read the wrong books and did not quite understand what he was reading. This happens in such little streets as these, all over Europe, and it is apt to lead to one form of totalitarianism or another.

The trial took place on July 9 and 10, and it was not one of those which takes place in a self-engendered theatrical glow. There were not many people in court and few of them were notable, save the Earl of Athlone and his wife, Princess Alice. The Earl is the brother of our Queen Mary, and resembles her in at least one endearing respect. Their aged and massive bodies are like weathered towers in which there lives a child who has not yet outgrown its wonder of the world, who, being well brought up, does not pry, but could not open its eyes a speck wider. It happened that at the time of the Abdication, the Crystal Palace, our vast Victorian fun fair, burned down, and for all that Queen Mary was heartbroken she would let nothing do her out of a good fire, and officials had to conduct her on a thorough tour of the smoking ruins. The same interest in the spectacular had brought the Earl to this trial. He and Princess Alice, a slender white-haired lady noted for her amiability, leaned forward in their seats, fascinated by this young man, who was a new kind of fire, who could by treason burn and make ruins. But so obviously had poor William Martin Marshall neither heat nor light, so obviously was poor Tom acold, that the royal pair lost their awed horror, visibly relaxed, and sent out to him rays of grieved benevolence, as if he had been a cripple in some hospital.

He did indeed draw the eye. Three among the several counts of the indictments charged him with violating the Official Secrets Act by communicating to Pavel Kuznetsov information about the British Diplomatic Wireless Service, which was calculated to be or might be directly or indirectly useful to an enemy, at interviews which all took place in public. But it seemed impossible that he could ever have been a spy, that any foreign power could have considered him for one second as a possible informer. He had the most fatal disqualification for cloak-and-dagger work. He had a distinctive appearance which made him recognizable instantly and from a great distance. Not only was he very tall, and thin to a point that roused concern for his health, he had sloping shoulders, sloping as steeply as the shoulders of any Gainsborough beauty, at an angle not often seen in the male physique. He had a long neck, and a very pale face which was long and thin and had a peculiarity of moulding which did not amount to a deformity but was very noticeable. There is an area beside the ear, below the cheekbone and above the jaw, just over the parotid gland, which in thin people is always flat or concave. In him it bulged in a slight protuberance which was faintly pitted in the centre. He was neither repulsive nor ridiculous; he was simply a magnet for the sight and memory, like an albino or a person with an unusual shade of red hair.

2

At the trial of William Martin Marshall, telegraphist in the British Diplomatic Wireless Service, his family showed that he was very valuable to them. Mr. Marshall was dressed with the dreadful neatness which distinguishes the male relatives of accused persons, which reveals how the morning broke for them, how they came out of sleep in a small room and slowly realized that this was the day, and got up and splashed punctiliously in the hand basin, and brushed their hair and knotted their ties anxiously before the small mirror, scraping together the best of themselves as a sign to the judge that the whole thing is a mistake, the wrong family has come into court, that all its members, without a single exception, even the apparent one in the dock, belong to that section of the community which cannot in any circumstances be justly sent to prison. He looked angry and his lips were compressed. It was a great hardship to him that he could not use his special talent in the service of his son and talk the case out of court. Throughout the trial his lips were constantly moving.

His wife was as carefully arrayed, but she was refusing to behave well, she was openly showing her distress. This was not because she lacked self-control but because she was the sort of woman who refuses to knuckle down to men. Nobody was going to find her admitting that there was anything in the male claim to have devised a machine called the law which automatically produced justice, because she knew that justice cannot be done unless the truth is first established, and she knew further that truth is made up of minute fragments which it is hard enough to piece together as a whole, even though one gossips all day, and which could roll away and scatter in the corners if they were brought into open court. Though she was punctiliously neat she had come bareheaded into the Old Bailey, which was a breach of convention but aesthetically proper; she and Hecuba and Andromache would not wear hats. The peculiarity by which her strong hair was dark at the scalp and white at the ends, where she curled it about her temple and ears and the nape of her neck, was very noticeable. She looked like an illustration to some legend telling of a vigorous woman on which some unseen power, winter or death or extreme grief, suddenly laid its hand.