Winston’s War (33 page)

Soon Churchill stood with a glass in hand, leaning against the fireplace, surveying the scene while the rest sat around like a crew before its captain.

“I miss your columns in the
Standard
, Mr. Churchill,” Burgess began.

“So do I, so do my readers. But most of all they are missed by my bankers.” The words came more slowly and with greater sibilance than usual. “Bugger Max.”

“Never thought he'd turn out to be an arch-appeaser.”

“He's not. He's an arch-opportunist, nothing more. A wolf in a Canadian winter looking for his next supper. He'll come round, when the winds have changed, bearing his checkbook and wanting to make up again. And we always do.”

“So you're not writing at the moment.”

“Oh, but indeed I am. A vast enterprise. A history of the English-speaking peoples.” The brandy glass performed a wide circle in the air and he seemed about to embark on an enthusiastic sales pitch, but suddenly his brow clouded. “Sadly I seem stuck in the Middle Ages.”

“The years of invasion and conquest from across the Channel.”

“Ah, you are an historian!”

“Always wanted to finish off the life of Salisbury that his daughter Lady Gwendolen began. I've been in touch with the family. Perhaps one day…”

“A fine ambition. And a fine life.” The chin was up, the eyes fixed on a more colorful world. Behind him the army of stiff white invitation cards that crowded the mantelpiece seemed to stand to attention. “I was first elected to Parliament when Salisbury was Prime Minister. The year before the Queen died. We were still doing battle with those devilish Boers. Nineteen hundred…”

The old man was off. Bracken and Boothby, used to the late-night soliloquies and outpourings of nostalgia, settled down with their drinks for the duration, but Burgess couldn't resist the challenge. “And within five minutes of getting elected you'd deserted him and joined the Liberals.”

“Steady on,” Bracken intervened.

“But he is right, Brendan. I jumped ship. Some men change their principles for the sake of their party. I found it more convenient to change my party for the sake of my principles.” He held out his empty glass. Wearily Bracken rose and attended to it. “Ah, but they were tempestuous times and the Tory ship had no idea in which direction to sail, whether to run before the wind or to turn and fight its way through the gathering storm. So—I ratted.”

“And now you've re-ratted.”

The old man chuckled. “No one can accuse me of having a closed mind, Mr. Burgess.”

“Mr. Churchill, I suspect you are something of a bandit.”

“Indeed I am! We Anglo-Saxons are by our nature bandits and pirates. An island needs stormy seas and a race of adventurers for its protection.”

“Ah, but those stormy seas won't stop the Hun.”

“The French will,” Bracken intervened, eager to reinsert himself into the conversation. In the other chair, Boothby had fallen asleep and was gently snoring.

“The French?” Burgess rounded on Bracken, his tone impatient and dismissive. “You can't be serious. The French won't fight!”

“Nonsense. They're our allies,” Bracken snorted, repaying the belligerence.

“They'll hide behind the Maginot Line and hunt nothing but truffles. The smell of rotting fungi's hardly likely to scare off bloody Hitler.”

“The French alliance is fundamental to—” Bracken began, but Churchill cut across him, spurred by Burgess's thought.

“I wonder. I do so wonder,” the old man chanted, leaning with both hands on the fireplace and looking into a grate of gray ashes. “They have the largest armies in the world. They also have their Maginot Line, the mightiest defensive line Europe has ever known. But whom does it protect? Not poor Czechoslovakia. Nor Albania. Neither will it defend Poland nor any part of the Balkans. I hate to think of it, but what Mr. Burgess says has the unhappy ring of truth. The French have been fooled by their own defenses. They may shout defiance from behind their fortress walls but unless they can be persuaded to advance beyond those walls and hunt down the Hun, then the Line will protect no one but the Nazis as they fall upon their neighbors in the east. Oh, it has become a cruel deceit. I fear the Maginot Line will not stop this war. On the contrary, perhaps it makes war all the more likely and on a much more vast scale.” He turned to face them, his face grown somber. “So what is to save us, gentlemen?”

Burgess took a huge sip of whiskey, then another, before muttering: “Russia.”

Bracken sprang to his feet, like a fisherman striking at a pike, except the drink had made him unsteady and it appeared for a moment as though he were slipping on a muddy bank. “Russia? Are you mad? Bolsheviks riding to the rescue of Christianity? What planet were you born on? They want nothing but to sweep us into the sea.”

“Moscow's nearly two thousand miles from London, Mr. Bracken, they're not in any position to sweep us into the sea.
But the Wehrmacht is camped barely two hundred miles from the Russian frontier with only the potato fields of Poland in between. Don't you think the Russians might just have other things on their mind than picking the pockets of a few wobbling English aristocrats?”

“Mr. Burgess, explain yourself!” Churchill commanded sharply.

Oh fuck, the drink had driven him over the top. Beneath the glass that lay in his lap, Burgess squeezed his own balls. Hard. Anything to stop his tongue running away with his sense. He didn't like Bracken—a mutual and instant antipathy, perhaps a recognition that they were both fantasists and adventurers—and he had allowed his alcohol-sodden temper to get the better of him. He had loitered outside in the freezing cold for more than an hour waiting for Churchill, wanting to get to him, yet now that he was inside his parlor he was about to get himself thrown out. He squeezed again until the pain had given his brain a thorough shaking. He took a deep breath.

“You said it yourself, Mr. Churchill. In the book you gave me…” Book, what book? Bracken looked between the two in alarm, like a Menshevik who had missed out on a conspiracy—“Russia is an Ishmael amongst the nations, you said. Yet you also said she is one of the most titanic factors in the economy and in the diplomacy of the world. That's the word you used. Titanic. You painted a lurid picture—I can almost remember your words.
Russia, with her enormous, rapidly increasing armaments, with her tremendous development of poison gas, airplanes, tanks, and every kind of forbidden fruit; Russia, with her limitless manpower and her corrosive hatreds which weigh heavily upon the whole line of countries, some small, others considerable, from the Baltic to the Black Sea, all situated adjacent to Russian territory…”

“Your memory is excellent.”

“And your geography's bollocks!” Bracken protested, determined to fight his corner against this usurper. “Poland's one
of those adjacent countries that come under the Russian hammer—and we've just agreed to guarantee the bloody place.”

Burgess was shaking. “And when Herr Bloody Shitler invades Poland—as he undoubtedly will—he'll find himself staring down the spout of all those Russian barrels. Given half a word of encouragement, Russia could be our most awesome ally!”

“Russia—an ally? Not even Stalin trusts the bloody Russians!”

“You don't even trust your own Prime Minister—”

“Gentlemen!” Churchill barked, bringing them both to order. “What has trust got to do with it? The basis of diplomacy isn't trust, otherwise we wouldn't put the Foreign Office in charge of it. No one trusts the Foreign Office, not even the pigeons. No, what matters is need. And I fear we may need Stalin's cohorts more than I would wish. Never turn your back on a Cossack—yet that is what Hitler must do if he is to throw the full might of his armies against us in the west.”

“But you're the most notorious bloody anti-Bolshevik in the business, Winston,” Bracken protested, his pebble glasses misted with emotion. “The most destructive and degrading tyranny in history, you called it.” Fuck and damnation, if Burgess could quote Churchill back at him, Bracken wasn't going to be left out of the game. “Why, when you were at the War Office you sent thirty thousand British soldiers into Soviet Russia to strangle the little bastard at birth.”

“And I failed! It turned out to be some bastard. Some birth. And where I failed, do you really think an upstart Austrian corporal can succeed?”

“You'd have us side with murderers?”

“If it would save my own grandmother from being skinned alive—of course! I was in the Smoking Room the other day and Maisky, the Soviet Ambassador, fell upon me with all manner of encouragement and friendship.”

“Untrustworthy little shit—”

“But a useful untrustworthy little shit, Brendan. When he as good as promised me lifelong brotherhood, I replied to him thus.” The glass waved in the air, conjuring up the memory of the occasion. “Mr. Maisky, I said, let me be frank. I do not like you. Least of all do I like your Government. But I recognize you—as a fact. And I recognize the uncomfortable fact that I may need you—we may need each other—if Hitlerism is not to snuff out the candle of liberty in every corner of Europe.”

“And what did the useful and untrustworthy little shit reply?”

“He laughed. Then he clapped me on the back and invited me to dinner.”

“Sometimes, Winston, I think you'd dine with the Devil.”

“I dine with the American Ambassador, so I'm scarcely in a position to claim moral superiority.”

“Bob!” Bracken turned on Boothby, his sharp tone rousing the other man from his slumber. “What do you think of
the Russians?”

The Member for East Aberdeenshire raised a heavy head. “Russians?” he growled in the melodious timbre that, before it had broken and sunk beyond bass, had won him a choral scholarship at Eton. He shifted in his seat. His dark suit was dirty, his collar soft and crumpled, his stomach already over-large and seemingly held in by an enormous watch chain. He looked a lot like a waiter in a restaurant that had been living off a long-discarded reputation. “Russians?” he repeated, trying to reassemble the various pieces of his mind. “What've they done now?”

“Nothing, Bob, we want to know what you think of them?”

“Bastards buy lots of Aberdeen herring. Splendid chaps.” With that, his head dropped once more and he was instantly unconscious.

Bracken cleared his throat, not wanting to catch the glint of triumph he suspected he would find in Burgess's eye. He'd lost this one. It was time to retreat. “ It's late, Winston, and Bob
needs his bed. I think we'd better go.”

Churchill threw away the stub of his Havana to join the ashes in the grate. “Fly away to your nests, if you must. Rest yourselves for the fight ahead.”

Bracken shook Boothby's shoulder and Burgess stood, too, but made no move to depart. “Mr. Churchill, I was wondering—may I have a word? In private?”

“No, no, Burgess, it's very late and Mr. Churchill has a full diary in the morning,” Bracken complained, but already the old man was waving him towards the door.

“You young politicians never have enough time, but for historians like Mr. Burgess and myself, time is all but immeasurable. Let yourself out, Brendan, dear boy, while Mr. Burgess and I settle down for a nightcap.”

Churchill poured the drinks. Huge goblets of cognac. “You drink cognac?”

“I prefer Irish whiskey.”

“Then you and Brendan have more in common than I had thought.”

“He doesn't like me.”

“Oh, he'll like you well enough, Mr. Burgess, when I tell him to. He'll even like your ideas about Russia in the morning, although he'll offer you no credit for them and attribute every detail to himself.” The door downstairs slammed; they were alone. “He is my parliamentary Puck—a mischievous and at times misguided sprite but, in the end, faithful.”

Churchill handed across the heavy glass. “Learn to enjoy cognac, Mr. Burgess. It's like a good woman. Warm it between your hands and coddle it, don't assault it.”

Burgess took the goblet and wondered what it was like to lay hands upon a woman. Would he—could he—even in the service of his cause or his country? He prayed he'd never have to find out. He'd stick to Jameson's.

Burgess had already begun to realize that Churchill's
relationship with alcohol was entirely different to his own. Burgess drank because he needed to. It was the only way he'd found to drown out the screams of terror that welled up inside him every time he tried to stop and sleep, and could smell his soul scorching. But Churchill had other needs, drank to sustain his thoughts and his unquenchable energy. Alcohol was his fuel, like a racing car required gas or a bonfire wood. He ran on the stuff.

“So,” Churchill began after he had spent some time lighting a new cigar, “you wanted a word. You are a modest man,
Mr. Burgess, for I normally insist on several, and charge for every thousand.”

“It's kind of you. I may be making a fool of myself…”

“I am a politician,” Churchill growled. “Folly is my second cousin.”

“Then let me be blunt. War is coming—agreed?”

“Indubitably.”

“And when it does every money-man will join in a stampede for the hills?”

“The Appalachians, I suspect, where they will camp and make occasional visits to New York.”

“They like to travel light. And I've been wondering—after what you told me at Chartwell—whether they'll bother carrying your debts with them.”

Churchill looked at the younger man with curious, cautionary eyes. It was one thing for him in a fit of depression to share his woes, quite another for those woes to be brought back to him. “I had hoped, Mr. Burgess, that I would be able to finish my history of the English-speaking peoples before war came and so relieve the situation, but…”

“You can't write as quickly as the Wehrmacht marches.”

“Quite so. Hitler's ambitions grow even faster than my needs.”

“I'm an adviser to the Rothschild family—went to Cambridge with the son—the mother seems to think I have a grasp of
international affairs. Anyway, I help keep her investments from being squashed under the tank tracks. Haven't mentioned a word of your situation to them but…I'm sure, if they heard you were in need, the Rothschilds and some of their friends would be happy to help.”