Abdication: A Novel (20 page)

“I think the women appreciated us coming,” she said, “though I certainly never considered slumming as my vocation. Nasty dirty work. Smelly too!”

“Slumming?”

“Yes, slumming. That’s what we called it. Good description, don’t you think?”

Appalled as Julian was by the memory of the smug superiority of his mother’s tone of voice, a tiny suspicion that he might be about to
embark on a variation of the same sort of behaviour occurred to him. He dismissed the thought. The visit to Wigan was surely to be one of genuine information gathering, not the action of a self-satisfied hypocrite like his mother. He had Sir Philip to thank for making the trip possible.

“Excellent idea, my dear chap. I would like to hear your report. And what a good opportunity to give Rupert’s car its inaugural outing,” Sir Philip had said with a smile at once regretful and grateful.

The pale blue Talbot had been bought by Rupert’s parents for his birthday nearly a year ago and was still sitting in the Cuckmere garage. Rupert had not yet got round to learning to drive it.

“I will ask Hooch to give the engine a once-over and it will suit the two of you beautifully.”

Entrusting May with the new car was the Blunts’ way of expressing how fond of her they had all become. Julian had seen the sympathy that the whole family felt for their young employee with the loss of her mother, and at a time when she and her brother were so far away from their remaining parent. Every one of them, even Bettina and Rupert, had been kindness itself to May. And Joan had put her own grief to one side and concentrated on looking after this motherless young woman.

Julian’s response to May was becoming complicated. He had a tendency to vacillate over his friendships with women, enjoying the challenge of netting a woman and once netted, dropping her. And although this pattern of behaviour shamed him, he had unquestionably been playing with the emotions of the young chauffeuse. May’s huge eyes and unusual olive-toned skin intrigued him; but he was forever reminding himself that everything pointed against pursuing these thoughts further. Firstly there was a professional boundary to respect regarding her employment with the Blunts. Neither Sir Philip nor Lady Joan had actually said anything to caution him about becoming over-friendly with their driver, but Julian did not want to put them
in a position where they felt they should comment. Secondly, while Julian had no pretensions to being socially superior to May, given his own parents’ modest start in life, there was no denying his educational advantages. And finally there was the existence, even obstacle, of his steady girlfriend Charlotte. No. There was no question about it. May was hopelessly unsuitable as a romantic proposition. And yet. Despite her sweetness and willingness she sometimes demonstrated a steely confidence in her own opinions that made him like her all the more. She had certainly made him question his glib assumption that the visit to Wigan would deliver the experience and information he sought. Observing her capability at the wheel of Rupert’s spanking motor, her forehead creased in concentration, it had struck him that “deft” was the best possible word to describe her. But deft as she may have been, he could not stop thinking how nice it would be to kiss her.

When Julian had planned the journey around the mining towns between Liverpool and Manchester he had not anticipated that the local mayoral entourage would be in town for a football match and staying in the only halfway decent hotel in Wigan. “Mayoral influence was too big for its boots,” he had spluttered to the receptionist when told that the two single rooms he had reserved were no longer available. It had been getting late and he was on the point of panic when May said she didn’t mind, just for one night, where they ended up.

Relieved by her lack of fuss, Julian had taken May for a pint in the pub to work out what they should do next. They had fallen into a conversation with a man who was sitting at a table sticky with beer rings near the bar. With his short hair, small moustache and direct-gazing eyes, he appeared to be ten years or so older than Julian but looked quite different from any of the other careworn men in the pub. He introduced himself. His name was Peter Grimshaw. He was a professor of social history at London University and they soon discovered that he
had read all the same books as Julian. The conversation went straight to politics. Peter told them he had come up to the North a couple of months earlier with a writer friend, Eric Blair, who was researching a book of his own about poverty in the North and had spent a despairing if illuminating (if that was the word) time down the mines. When Eric returned to London Peter had stayed on, gathering information for a paper he planned to deliver to his colleagues and students and eventually to write up and publish.

When Julian explained their predicament about where to stay the night, Peter offered to take them back to his own lodgings.

“Matter of fact, Eric and I both stayed there. They aren’t up to much but the landlady seems to enjoy cramming as many people as possible into her house so maybe she can sort something out for you two, just for a night.”

After an uncomfortable night, Julian had woken up to feel Peter’s toes nudging his shoulders beneath the filthy blanket. At least the warmth of another human body was some comfort in the freezing air and he hoped the combination of his shirt and the threadbare coverlet on the landlady’s daughters’ bed would provide something of the same for May. She had not balked when the woman showed her the downstairs room that passed for accommodation. In better days the room must have served as a parlour because a piano was wedged up against a wall, its shape just visible beneath sheets of old newspaper. As luck would have it, the landlady explained, her daughters were away on a visit to some cousins in the countryside.

“Mind you,” the woman had cautioned, “it’s just for one night. You, young man, can go top to toe with Pete. If my girls pedal hard they will be back by tomorrow nightfall and I want you both gone by then.”

Julian had assured the landlady, Peter, and in particular May, that they would both be gone first thing in the morning. He and May had
planned to spend a few more days in Wigan and he wanted those precious days to unfold in lodgings more suitable for them both. Soon he would have to return to Oxford for his last summer term. He was not looking forward to the prospect of such finality. The weeks would be dominated by exams and by his own pressure on himself to excel. He felt unnerved by the uncertainties involved in leaving a town where he enjoyed an unprecedented sense of belonging. Although the undergraduate content changed so frequently, Oxford had bestowed on Julian and on almost every member of its shifting student body an easy and privileged connection to the place. He felt apprehensive at the thought of leaving the familiar little doors set within the large wooden entrace gates of the colleges, the innumerable grassy quadrangles, the layers of bicycles, leaning one against the other at the entrance to the courtyard of the Bodleian library and the billowing black gowns, which when swollen by a sudden belch of wind gave the wearer his wizard-like silhouette.

Despite the stability of his surroundings, Julian’s undergraduate mind was in a constant whirl. He was unable to work out exactly what he thought, what he felt, what he believed in, or even, latterly, whom he loved. First there was his degree. He had originally thought himself suited to the combined disciplines of philosophy, politics and economics. But latterly he had begun to question whether he was taking his studies seriously
enough
. He had an uneasy feeling that he was spreading himself thinly and not mastering the depth of any of them. That term T. S. Eliot had come to read some of his poems to the English Club. A little stunned to realise he had been sitting in the same room as a literary genius, Julian had later wondered whether he might find the greater truths of life in literature instead.

He was also troubled by the world’s political polarity. Fascism was penetrating not only the furthest corners of Germany but was now flooding into the rest of Europe, enveloping countries as fast as a street
becomes submerged beneath a burst water main. Maybe communism offered the only viable line of defence.

He could not understand the obduracy of the privileged classes with whom he mixed in refusing to acknowledge the reality of the German threat. The idea promoted especially by the prime minister and by Chancellor Neville Chamberlain of appeasing Hitler’s Germany, a country still highly angered by the viciousness of the punishment it had received at the end of the Great War, seemed shortsighted and frankly unrealistic. And judging by that terrible exchange at the Bryanston Court dinner, the new king seemed as complicit in screening out the truth as the rest of them. Indeed, Julian had heard during the occasional private asides at Cuckmere with Evangeline that senior members of the Nazi Party were sometimes invited to cocktails at Wallis’s flat, when the king also happened to be present.

Evangeline had formed a breathy habit of whispering nuggets of sensitive information in his ear while begging Julian to keep these confidences to himself. And while recoiling at the manner in which he acquired it, and annoyed that whenever he was alone in the library Evangeline would invariably appear, Julian remained fascinated by the information she passed on to him. Tucking herself close to him on the sofa, the not unpleasant smell of chocolate suddenly released into the air, she would lay her hand on his knee before hissing, “Glad to find a moment when we can be alone. I have something to tell you.”

The detailed gossip that she delivered about life at Fort Belvedere, even down to the menus, interested him less than her inadvertent revelations about the hypocrisy of the king. The impression that he gave to the majority of the British people of minding more about their welfare than he did about his own was a falsehood that enraged Julian. The king appeared to care about one thing only, and she was not even British. Voltaire’s two-hundred-year-old assessment of Louis
XV that kings always deceive their peoples described Britain’s new monarch perfectly, he thought.

Socialism was the dominant aphrodisiac in Julian’s life, he concluded as he shifted his weight on the dirty Wigan mattress. Friendships with men, women, and even potential lovers, especially Lottie, took second place. At times he questioned whether he had ever properly loved anyone at all. Last week he had endured yet another uncomfortable lunch at his mother’s London flat. The reheated beef stew and a spoonful of tepid lumpy mashed potatoes made him swear for the thousandth time that he would never repeat the experience. The absurd grandeur of Mrs. Richardson’s dining table with its white lace cloth, thick linen napkins and ebony blackamoors holding little saucers of salt aloft clashed with the standard of the food placed upon it. Yesterday, Julian had noted the absence of the usual jellied potted meat with relief. Going on past practice he had expected his mother to offer him a slice of what was almost certainly cat food, in her predictable attempts at economising for her son’s visits.

“A little pâté, darling?” she would enquire as they sat down to the hideous meal, a lit cigarette in the holder that was as familiar to her mouth as cheddar to a mousetrap.

The atmosphere in the sitting room was, if anything, worse than the dining room. The affectations of his mother’s crocheted antimacassar on the back of the armchair; her Du Maurier in its little holder, which she puffed at distastefully, as if blowing into some sort of respiratory device; and her anti-Semitic, class-obsessing topics of conversation all coalesced to make Julian feel like screaming.

The phrase “airs above her station” was one he had occasionally heard Cooky utter under her breath when Mrs. Cage had left the room. The same phrase might have been invented for his mother, who had inherited her few fancy possessions from a distant cousin who had lived his life as an heirless bachelor.

The conversation between Julian and his mother rarely deviated from three topics: how she never saw enough of her only son, how difficult it was to make ends meet, and the royal family. Extinguishing her cigarette before immediately lighting another, Mrs. Richardson would mention the same long-dead cousin who had worked briefly as junior equerry for the last king, the connection apparently giving her licence to make judgements as if she were an intimate of the ruling family.

“I do think it is a pity that the king must wait so long for the actual coronation. He must feel quite in limbo. I am convinced he is dying to walk around with that crown on his head!” she had observed last week.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mother,” Julian snapped but on she went, lighting another cigarette and positioning it securely in the dainty holder.

“You may think I am ridiculous but someone in my position has a good idea of how he must feel.”

And with that she got up to fetch an ashtray, a mist of Chanel No. 5 following her into the kitchen, the Duchess of York’s favourite scent so her cousin had once divulged in the strictest of confidence. Julian remained at the table, trying not to react to his mother’s habit of walking away whenever she heard something she did not like but knew to be true. Even if Philip had not asked him to keep the account of Mrs. Simpson’s dinner to himself, Julian would never have given his mother the satisfaction of hearing it. His mother’s irritability was based partly on her suspicion that Julian concealed from her the details of a life that she would have given her eyeteeth to hear about.

Julian never spoke to Mrs. Richardson about his father either. When the irascible but heroic country doctor had married the prettiest and most spoiled girl in the North Yorkshire village where he had grown up, it had been a surprise to everyone who knew him. Dr. Richardson’s bride, one Margaret Cottesley, only wanted one thing in life, and that was “position” (still her favourite word) and she was prepared to marry
whoever came along, irrespective of age, looks and character in order to get it. For the one and only time in her life, Miss Cottesley had applied the powers of female seduction to her target and won. The truth was she had never loved her husband, although she kept that information to herself.