The Untouchable (41 page)

In those years Vivienne and I did not see much of each other. With money left her by her father she had bought a small house in Mayfair, where she led what to me was a mysterious but seemingly contented life. There was a nanny for the children, and a maid for her. She had her friends, and, I imagine, her lovers; we did not speak of such things. She accepted my sexual defection without comment; I think she found it amusing. We treated each other courteously, with cool regard, and always a certain cautiousness. Our exchanges were not so much conversations as a kind of brittle raillery, like fencing matches between two fond but wary friends. As the years went on her melancholy deepened; she nursed it like a cancer. We each had our losses. She grieved a long time for her father, in her shrouded way; I had not realised how close they had been, and was obscurely shocked. Her mother died, too, after years of spectral communication with the departed Big Beaver. And poor Freddie died. He survived six months in that so-called Home and then quietly succumbed to some kind of pulmonary infection—it was never made clear what exactly it was that had killed him. “Och, it was the heart that broke,” Andy Wilson said to me at the funeral. “He was pining, like an old dog that you’d send away from his
own place.” And he gave me a slyly venomous glance. Hettie that day was more dazed than ever. At the graveside she plucked at my sleeve agitatedly and said in a hoarse stage-whisper, “But we’ve done all this
already!
” She thought it was my father’s funeral we were attending. That winter she fell one morning on the icy front step of St. Nicholas’s and broke her hip. From the hospital she was moved directly to a nursing home, where, to everyone’s surprise and no little dismay, including, I suspect, her own, she lived for another five years, confused, sometimes troublesome, lost in the far past of her childhood. When she died at last, I entrusted a local agent with the sale of the house; there are things even a heart as hard as mine cannot endure. On the afternoon of the auction I read in a biography of Blake the poet’s own account of how he had walked out of his cottage on his first morning in sweet Felpham and heard the ploughman’s boy say to the ploughman,
Father, the Gate is Open,
and I felt that somehow my own father was sending me a message, though what its import might be, I could not tell.

Boy and I went on a pub crawl the day the news came of Hitler’s death. It was May Day. We started at the Gryphon and staggered on to the Reform, with an interlude at a public lavatory in Hyde Park, the big one near Speakers Corner, which was to be a favourite hunting ground of mine in later years. That first time I was too timid, despite the many gins I had already drunk, to do anything but watch the furtive comings and goings. I kept a lookout while Boy and a burly young Guardsman with red hair and extraordinarily pretty ears made noisy and, by the sound of it, not very satisfactory love in one of the stalls. While I was standing guard, an emaciated individual in a mac and a derby came in and cocked an eye in the direction of the ill-fitting door from behind which could be clearly heard, amid groans and stifled cries, the dead-fish slap of Boy’s stout thighs against the red-haired young man’s buttocks. I thought the fellow must be a detective, and my heart set up that curious, light, tripping measure which in the years ahead I would come to know so well in such circumstances, the source of which was a mixture of fear, wild hilarity and a wholly wanton exultation. The loiterer
proved not to be a copper, however, and, after glancing once more wistfully towards the stall door and then, despondently, at me—he knew me for a beginner, I’m sure—he buttoned up his flies and ducked out into the night. (By the way, I greatly deplored, towards the end of the good old 1950s, the universal adoption of the zip-fastened fly; true, the zip greatly enhances access, especially if one is in the throes of
amor tremens
, but I used to love to see that delicate tweaking action of the hand as it undid the always slightly awkward buttons, the thumb and index finger busy as mice while what the Americans delightfully call the pinkie held itself aloof, conjuring for a delicious, absurd moment an agitated society matron reaching tremulously for her teacup.)

I woke next morning on the sofa in Poland Street, crapulous and, as always after a night out with Boy, filled with a smouldering, objectless anxiety. The telephone was harshing beside my ear. It was Billy Mytchett, with an urgent summons. He would not say what the matter was, but he sounded excited. When I came into his office he stood up and trotted around from his side of the desk and shook my hand vehemently, making little huffing noises and looking past my shoulder in a sort of agitated daze. He was by now Controller of the Department. He was still an ass.

“It’s the Palace,” he said, in a fraught whisper. “They—he—
he
wants you to come round at once.”

“Oh, is that all,” I said, picking a loose thread from my cuff; it struck me how much I should miss being in uniform. I thought of mentioning to Billy that the Queen was a relative, but thought I might have done so already, and did not wish to seem to be harping on the connection. “It’s probably about those damn drawings at Windsor that I’m still supposed to be cataloguing for him.”

Billy shook his head; excitable, hirsute and ingratiatingly eager, he always reminded me of a dog, though I could never decide which breed, exactly.

“No no,” he said, “no—he wants you to go on some kind of mission for him.” He opened his eyes wide. “Very delicate, he says.”

“To where?”

“Germany, old chap—bloody Bavaria. What about that, eh?”

A Department car, with chauffeur, was assigned to take me to the Palace, an indication in itself, in those days of severe petrol rationing, of how impressed Billy was by this royal summons. My driver brought us in by the Horse Guards gate, where a rather brutish but good-looking sentry in full fig, busby and all, sneered at my pass and motioned us on. All this seemed peculiarly familiar, and presently I realised why: I was remembering the day more than a decade before when I had been driven into the Kremlin yard on my way, so I thought, to meet the Father of the People. The anterooms of power are all alike. Not, mind you, that the Palace had much power left, though HM still retained—or believed he did, anyway—considerably more clout than his daughter Mrs. W. has today. He is not highly regarded, I know, but in my opinion he was one of the shrewder of the latter-day monarchs.

“It will be the devil of a thing,” he said, “if these Labour chaps get in, as looks increasingly likely.” We were in one of the great, glacial reception rooms which are a depressing feature of that depressing palace. He was standing at the window, hands clasped at his back, frowning out over the Palace Gardens awash with watery sunlight. In a vast fireplace a tiny coal fire was burning, and there was a vase of wilted daffodils on the mantelpiece. He looked back at me over his shoulder. “What do you think, Maskell?—you’re a sound Tory, aren’t you?”

I was seated, in exquisite discomfort, on a delicate gilt Louis Quinze chair, with my legs crossed and hands resting one upon the other on my knee, looking rather prissy, I suspected, though I could not think how better to comport myself in the circumstances: tiny chair, freezing limbs, propinquity of the sovereign. HM was in his we-don’t-stand-on-ceremony-here mood, which I always found hard to endure.

“I think I’m more of a Whig than a Tory, sir,” I said. His left eyebrow shot up, and I added: “A loyal one, of course.”

He turned back to the window with a deeper frown; this was not, I told myself gloomily, an auspicious start to the audience.

“Of course, the country’s lost the run of itself,” he said testily; his stammer was hardly noticeable when he was exercised like this. “How would it not, after what we have had to endure in these last five years? Mind you, I often think it’s not the war itself but its consequences that have had the most profound effects. Women in the factories, for instance. Oh, I’ve seen them, in their trousers, smoking cigarettes and giving cheek. I said from the start no good would come of it—and now look where we are!”

He fell into a brooding silence. I waited, breathing shallowly from the top of my lungs. He was wearing an impeccably cut three-piece suit of smooth tweed, with a regimental tie; such ease, such negligent grace, even in a bad mood—you really cannot beat royalty for poise in adversity. He was fifty, but looked older. His heart even then must have been beginning to fail.

“Mr. Attlee,” I said with judicious care, “seems a reasonable man.”

He shrugged.

“Oh, Attlee’s all right; I can work with Attlee. But the ones around him …!” He gave himself an angry shake, then sighed, and turned and walked to the fireplace and leaned an elbow on the mantelpiece and looked resignedly at a far corner of the ceiling. “Well, we shall have to work with all of them, shan’t we. We wouldn’t want to hand them an excuse to abolish the monarchy.” He lowered his eyes abruptly from the ceiling and gave me a merry stare. “Or would we? What says the loyal Whig?”

“I hardly think, sir,” I said, “that Clem Attlee, or for that matter anyone in his party, would attempt, or even wish, to abolish the throne.”

“Who knows, who knows? Anything is possible in the future—and they
are
the future.”

“For a time, perhaps,” I said. “The life of a government is short; the throne endures.” Really, the thought of the moderate Left in power for any appreciable interval made me shudder inwardly. Hot, hangover breath rasped in my gullet like a flare from a furnace. “People are realistic; they will not be fooled by promises of jam for all, especially when even the bread has not yet materialised.”

He chuckled wanly.

“Very good, that,” he said. “Very droll.”

His gaze drifted ceilingwards again; he was in danger of becoming bored. I sat more purposefully upright.

“The Controller, sir, Commander Mytchett, mentioned something about Germany …?”

“Yes, yes, quite.” He seized a second gilt chair and set it down in front of me and sat, elbows on knees and hands clasped before him, and looked at me earnestly. “I want to ask you a favour, Victor. I want you to go to Bavaria, to Regensburg—do you know the place?—and fetch back some papers that a cousin of ours is holding for us. Willi—that’s our cousin—is a kind of self-appointed family archivist. We had all got rather into the habit— a bad habit, I dare say—of giving him … documents, and so on, for safe keeping, and then of course the war came and there was no way of retrieving them, even if Willi would have been prepared to release them: he’s a bit of a terror, is old Willi, when it comes to his precious archive.” He paused, in difficulty, it seemed, and sat motionless for a long moment with his head bowed, frowning at his hands. He had never before addressed me by my Christian name (and was never to do so again, by the way). I was pleased, of course, and flattered, I think I may even have blushed a bit, not unbecomingly, I hope, but I was shocked, too, and not a little put out. As I think I have remarked already, I am a staunch Royalist, as all good Marxists are at heart, and I did not like to hear a king … well,
lowering
himself in this way. Those papers, I thought, must be very delicate indeed. HM was still frowning stolidly at his linked fingers. “I remember when you were out at Windsor,” he said, “working on those drawings of ours—by the way, have you finished that catalogue yet?”

“No, sir. It’s time-consuming work. And there was the war…”

“Oh lord yes, yes, I understand. I was just enquiring, you know. Just… enquiring.” Abruptly he stood up, almost flinging himself from the chair, which tottered briefly on its graceful little legs. He began pacing up and down before me, softly punching a fist into the palm of his hand. A king in a dither is a memorable spectacle. “These, ah, documents,” he said. “There
are letters from my great-grandmother to her daughter Friederike, and some from my mother to her German cousins. Just family papers, you understand, but not the kind of thing we would wish to see falling into the hands of some American newspaper fellow, shall we say, who wouldn’t be bound to silence by English law. Apparently the American army has taken over Schloss Altberg and turned it into some sort of recreation centre for their troops; I hope Willi had the sense to lock away the family jewels—and as to how he’s managing his mother in the circumstances, one hardly likes to think. You’ll meet her, the Countess, no doubt.” He gave the ghost of a shudder, and sucked in his breath sharply, as at the memory of something sore. “A formidable person.”

I watched him pacing, and pondered the interesting possibilities of this errand I was to be sent on. I know I shouldn’t have, but I could not resist pressing a little, ever so gently, on what was obviously a bruised and tender area.

“I think it would be best, sir,” I said slowly, in a tone of obsequious solicitude, “if I were to know in some more detail which are the papers that the Palace is most anxious to retrieve. I have found, in the field”—I liked that touch—“that the more information one has, the more likely one is to bring off successfully the task in hand.”

He heaved a heavy sigh, and stopped pacing and sat himself down unhappily on a sofa opposite the fireplace, pressing the knuckle of an index finger to his thought-tightened lips and looking off towards the windows. A fine profile, if rather weak. I wondered if he had any queer leanings—I haven’t known a royal yet who did not. I was thinking especially of those summer camps for working class lads of which he was so enthusiastic a supporter. I noticed he was wearing thick woollen socks, which looked as if they might have been hand-knitted, not very skilfully; perhaps one of the princesses had made them for him—the elder, I thought, for somehow I could not picture the younger one busy with needles and pattern book. Now he sighed again, more heavily still.

“Every family has its difficulties,” he said, “its black sheep, and whatnot. My brother…” Yet another sigh; yes, I had rather
thought his brother would make an appearance before too long. “My brother behaved very foolishly in the years before the war. He was terribly put out, you know, by the … the abdication, and all that; felt the family, and the country, had let him down. I suppose he wanted revenge, poor chap. Those meetings with Hitler—very foolish, very foolish. And it was Willi, you see, our cousin Willi, a much cleverer man than poor Edward, who was the intermediary between the Nazi leaders and my brother and his … his wife.”