The Shameful Suicide of Winston Churchill (16 page)

Harry Stark left St Bride’s churchyard by the alleyway that led down past the ancient Olde Bell public house, grateful for the falling dusk to conceal the tears that to his irritation uncontrollably welled in his eyes.

He walked out onto New Bridge Street almost bundling into a man with a foul-smelling cigarette hanging out of his mouth leaving a phone box.

‘Sorry guv,’ the cigarette-smoking man said, before
apparently
remembering he had another call to make.

It was only then that Stark remembered Lavery. He turned left and left again into Fleet Street and saw his sergeant still pacing up and down outside the other end of the L-shaped alley. He started when he spotted Stark approaching from a different direction as if he thought his boss was playing tricks on him, and bustled up: ‘How’d it go, boss?’

Stark pulled up his coat collar as if against the rain, but in reality to stop Lavery noticing the lines on his face. He did his best to shrug dismissively.

‘He’s taken it bad. Obviously. Whether it gets you and me anywhere for the moment, I’m not sure. Anyhow, I’m beat for today. See you tomorrow, Dick.’

Lavery looked fazed a moment and Stark realised his
sergeant
had been expecting they’d talk things over with a beer or two in The Olde Bell. He put on a smile and said, ‘Have one for me, mate. Bit wrecked after today. I need some fresh air. Catch up tomorrow, eh? Oh, and don’t worry if I’m a bit late.’

Stark didn’t really notice his sergeant’s reaction, or whether or not he made for The Olde Bell, though knowing Lavery he couldn’t imagine anything else. He needed a drink all right. But not here. Not in this company. He needed air. It took one hell of a deep breath to accept that everything he had ever believed might have been a lie. And if that was true of his own family, how much more might it be true of the world at large? He was going to find out. Maybe.

‘Can you come back?’ the canon had said. ‘Tomorrow, very early in the morning. Around dawn. There will be others here. There will be a small congregation.’

‘For a religious service?’ Stark wondered if the man was inviting him to some sort of requiem for his late lover.

The canon gave the ghost of a smile: ‘Not exactly. But then again, the Good Book does say, “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I”.’ Stark had heard the quotation before. He had never been sure what it meant. He was even less sure now.

He knew one thing. He had found his – rather the
American’s
– ‘Underground’. A blind and bitter old man and a grieving homosexual cleric. It was not exactly the stuff of revolution. Stark had no idea how much, if any, belief he could place in the American’s optimism about the ‘wind of change’ wafting in from Moscow, whether or not there really was a growing readiness – in the Kremlin if not yet the Mansion House – to face up to communism’s economic failures and casual cruelties. You didn’t change a way of life overnight. Even if his father had embraced some sort of alternative, where had it got him?

But that was also the problem: if it really had got him a bullet in the back of the head, his son wanted to know. More than that, he wanted it exposed. He wanted other people
to know. The people who venerated the old man’s memory. Most of all, Harry Stark wanted his mother and sister to know. Even if the truth hurt, it was always better to know it. Wasn’t it? He thought about the argument in the pub the other night. The American film about Churchill. The Churchill drawings – no stencils, that’s what they were – in the dead man’s pocket, on Bankside power station. On the Wall itself. Was that about the same thing: truth and lies. Mistakes and mythology? His head hurt.

He looked at his watch and took stock of where he was. He had walked miles without noticing it, on autopilot. At least it was an autopilot that still had a compass. He was south of the river. Almost home. How much had his mother known? Everything? Nothing? Or something in between. He had no idea. Would the truth – whatever it was – be too little too late or too much too soon? Either way he would be back at St Bride’s before dawn. He had told them he was indeed his father’s son. He had told them they could trust him. And could they? And could he trust them?

He was still trying to configure the questions, never mind find answers, when out of nowhere a figure appeared in front of him, blocking his way. A tall figure, looming over him. And laughing.

‘How’s it going, Harry?’

The shock on Stark’s face only added to the obvious delight on that of Benjamin T. Fairweather at turning the tables so neatly as he stepped out of the same doorway from which Stark had ambushed him barely twenty-four hours earlier

Never in his life had Harry Stark been so suddenly seized by two conflicting impulses. The first – and strongest – was to smash his fist into the American’s face; the second, which occurred virtually simultaneously, was to hug him.

Instead he stood back and took him in with his eyes. He was older than Stark had thought, tall and well built despite a certain ungainliness, as if he had been an American
football
player and never quite got used to walking without the helmet and body armour. The smile on his face was trying hard to exude friendliness and not just the smugness that clearly his little prank of hiding in the doorway had inspired. But if Stark was any judge, the warmth in his eyes was genuine. He was wearing the thick-framed
spectacles
from the photograph in his press card. He held out his hand. Stark took it. As he had noticed before, the squeeze was firm, manly but not aggressive.

It was a strange world, Stark thought; this awkward big Bostonian had been his own unwanted messenger from the gods, an archangel out of nowhere who had delivered a world-altering revelation. The last thing he wanted to feel towards him was gratitude. Nor could he afford to alienate him. Without Ben Fairweather he might have gone on living with a legend that was rapidly turning into a lie.

‘Sorry I startled you. My turn to play Injun Ambush, I guess. I’ve brought you this,’ Fairweather said. ‘I thought you might need a bit more convincing that I wasn’t just making things up.’

Stark began slowly to shake his head. He wasn’t going to be strung along, as if the American alone had pirate gold in his pocket with which he could drip-feed him. Stark had seen the hoard and the curse that lay on it. He stood there in stony silence, while the American delved into his jacket pocket and once again produced the expensive wallet, with yet another newspaper cutting. Or rather another photocopy. He unfolded it and handed it to Stark, who glanced down at it, then took it for a brief moment and handed it back.

It was from the
Telegraph
, marked ‘final West London edition’, the same date as the piece the American had shown him from the
New York Times
, the same subject. From what Stark could tell the two pieces might as well have been written by the same reporter – so much for the vaunted variety to be found in the so-called ‘free’ media. There were a few minor differences in wording, but the story was the same: the alleged execution by the Department of Social Security of a ‘rogue’ major in the Metropolitan People’s Police. A Major by the name of John Stark.

‘It just occurred to me,’ the American said, ‘that the record might not be complete over here.’

Stark handed the piece of paper back to him with a
grudging
admission: ‘It wasn’t.’

‘I thought not.’

‘So, here we are then.’

‘Where?’

‘Here. We’re still here. Both of us. Me more than you.’

‘It doesn’t have to be that way.’

‘Doesn’t it? I rather think it does. What do you want me to say? Thank you? For fucking up my world?’

‘You know, Harry, if there’s a God in heaven and perhaps more importantly, a new mood in the Kremlin, and you’re the man I think you are, well, then we’ll carry this off.’

Those were big ‘ifs’, Stark thought. Even if he had any idea what it was they might ‘carry off’. Or whether he wanted to.

‘Don’t think you can do this alone, Harry. I’m here to help you. It makes sense for both of us. I’ve moved over here, this side of the Wall. I checked into the Savoy for a few days. Here are the numbers.’

He wrote on a card and handed it across. Stark took it, saw the embossed
New York Times
crest, the name Benjamin T.
Fairweather, and a list of telephone and fax numbers. Across them the American had scrawled another, the number for The Savoy Hotel, and ‘Room 405’.

Stark looked at him sceptically but slipped the card into his inside jacket pocket. The American held out his hand. Stark looked down at it for a second, then walked off.

‘Harry?’

He turned.

‘Fucking up your world wasn’t my intention, you know.’

Stark gave him a lopsided grin.

‘No?’

‘No. The world happened to be fucked up. I just made you look at it. Shake?’

Stark met Fairweather in the eye and for a moment what he saw there was a genuine desire to please, to be liked. He took two steps towards him and stretched out his own hand. The American took it and squeezed it with a grip that was only slightly too strong, and said: ‘Keep me in the loop, Harry. This means a lot to me.’

‘It means a lot to me too.’

‘I hate him.’

‘No, you don’t.’

‘Yes, I do. I hate him and everything he stands for. I hate the whole fucking sanctimonious set-up.’

‘You don’t mean that. Not really.’

A pause. A sulk. Kate Stark bit her lower lip and pouted. The two of them were standing on a street corner in
Ber-mondsey
, shivering. There was a cold wind blowing in from the Thames.

‘How would you know? You don’t have to live with him.’

A moment of hesitation. As if it were something Lizzie Goldsmith had actually thought about.

‘No. I don’t.’

‘Or her. Or the fucking framed photographs. The medals wrapped in tissue paper. The middle-aged prats who smile at me in the street, who pop round to pay their respects to “Widow Stark” and treat me like some twelve-year-old kid and still cop a feel of my arse on the way out.’

‘Now, that I do understand.’

‘And I bet you don’t like it either.’

‘It comes with the territory, darling, and believe me that’s something that isn’t going to change overnight.’

‘It’s not fair.’

‘The world isn’t fair. That’s what it’s all about: us, them; men, women; communism, capitalism. In the end
everything’s
a trade-off. One man’s freedom ends where another’s begins.’

‘Or woman’s.’

‘Yeah. Right. In theory.’

‘You don’t believe that. In women’s equality?’

‘Of course I believe in it. I just don’t see it happening any time soon. Remember, we were the first to declare it. Over here. On our side of the Wall. And what good did that do? Ever seen a woman in the Mansion House? Or the Kremlin, come to that.’

‘Yeah, but that’s what you’d expect. They put it into
practice
first, though, didn’t they? Over there, in Britain, or whatever they call it, I mean, they’ve had a woman prime minister.’

‘And a fat lot of good she did. Spent half her time up Ronnie Reagan’s arse and the rest giving reactionary speeches about the supposed benefits to civilisation of the British empire, about her devotion to her “oppressed fellow subjects” – that’s you and me, kid, and by the way don’t you love that “subjects” word, as if anybody anywhere still owed jackshit loyalty to some old gaggle of German aristocrats wasting away their days on the Bahamas?’

‘That’s not what I mean.’

‘It’s not what I mean either. But it’s what it is. It’s what happened. You might not want to live with the status quo, but you at least have to start by acknowledging it.’

‘It doesn’t mean you have to stick up for my stupid brother who’s spent half a lifetime at least trying to live up to the legend of a father who died when he was barely out of his teens.’

‘He was your father too.’

‘Yeah, but I never knew him, did I? I’m just told to worship the graven images.’

‘I know. It can’t be easy.’

‘It’s not. That’s why I’m doing what I’m doing.’

‘And you’re doing a good job. A great job. You know, you could end up making the difference.’

‘I could?’

‘You could.’

‘He had a Yank in the other night.’

‘Did he now?’

‘Me mum couldn’t believe it. Thought he’d turned traitor. Consorting with the enemy an’ all that.’

‘I can imagine. What’d you do?’

‘Me? I wasn’t there. I suppose I’d have thought he’d nicked him. Probably was something like that in the end. Mum said he’d taken him back to the frontier. At midnight like. Some visa thing, probably.’

‘Probably.’

‘Don’t explain why he brought him home in the first place though, does it?’

‘No, it doesn’t.’

‘I sort of wish I’d got in earlier. I mean, it’s just that … I’ve never met one, like. A real live American.’

‘I have. Believe me, kid. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. Ask my gran.’

‘Yeah, I did. She’s been helping me. With my project. For the parade.’

‘You’re going ahead with that? With all it entails?’

‘I am. And nothing anyone could say will stop me.’

‘I know. I wish I could think of something that would. But I can’t. And even if I could, I’m not sure I’d want to.’

‘Thanks, that means a lot.’

‘Good luck. You’ll need it.’

Harry Stark breathed a sigh of relief when he saw Lizzie behind the bar. She smiled and nodded to indicate she would be right with him. Harry held up his hand as if holding a pint glass and she smiled again to show that she understood what was required was a pint of the usual.

The usual customers were at the bar, in their usual places. And from what Harry could hear their conversation hadn’t moved on from the last time he was here, and with no Del in sight this time to shut them up.

‘It can hardly be a coincidence, can it? The Yanks bring out a film trying to change history, trying to make old Winnie the Pooh smell of roses. And then somebody goes and paints a picture of him on Bankside!’

So it had got out. How could it not have? Was there anyone who didn’t watch the BBC for the news? Even in the upper echelons of the Socialist Labour Party itself, Harry wondered. After all, if they didn’t watch ‘the other side’, how would they know what to censor out, the old popular saw went.

He found himself trying to recollect what if anything his father had said about Churchill. He always said he had no time for the ‘Tories’, but did he ever mention Churchill
specifically
? Stark couldn’t remember him doing so. But then he wouldn’t have done, would he? In those days particularly it was a name used to frighten children. The ‘recent past’ was something best not talked about. Even now, it was hard enough: you could see it in old people’s faces. Old faces with
ancient worry lines etched into them. Best to let the past take care of itself. Thinking too hard gave you headaches. Sometimes literally.

It didn’t appear to be stopping young Ken Atkinson who seemed to have taken the new whispered message of
glasnost
from Moscow more literally than anyone else Stark had come across, at least on this side of the channel.

‘All I know,’ he was saying, ‘is that it’s a new take on the story. Artistic licence maybe, and maybe there is politics in it, but it makes for a good finale. After all, they never did find the remains, did they? Not for sure.’

‘Pah, humbug.’ Davy Hindsmith had obviously not changed his point of view either. ‘Revisionism. That’s what it is. They try to make out he didn’t kill himself at all, show him sitting down writing a last will and testament handing over the “mantle of civilisation” to the Yanks, all that guff about “Greece to Rome” and the “destiny of the
English-speaking
peoples”, an’ then going out and taking on a Stalin tank single-handed, crushed beneath the treads – as you might be, mind – with just ’is fingers clutching a smoking gun at the end. Balderdash, the lot of it!’

‘A powerful image, though, you have to admit.’

‘Powerful propaganda, I’ll admit that,’ said Hindsmith, his voice rising, ‘powerful and bloody dangerous.’

It was, Stark admitted too, a potent image. The only thing he couldn’t see was the point of it. Particularly now, with a new leadership in the Kremlin, all the talk was of a return to the age of détente, a thaw in the cold war. Surely this was not time to raise the ghosts of old ogres, let alone attempt to cast them in a new, more favourable light.

It turned out Hindsmith had an answer to that too:

‘You know why they’re doing it too, don’t you. All this
bloody nonsense coming out of Moscow about
glasnost
and so forth. It’s a sign of weakness, that’s what it is. At least that’s as sure as hell what the Americans’ll see it as. Open the door a chink and they’ll blow it off its hinges. You can bet your bottom Yankee dollar they’ll be encouraging all sorts of trouble in Warsaw, Prague and Paris, and this is their attempt to do it here. Get people over here to see Churchill as some sort of betrayed hero. Next thing you know they’ll be claiming they “won the cold war”. That’s what
glasnost
’ll get you.’

Stark decided he was best out of it. He lifted his pint and moved to one of the corner seats in the snug bar, the little alcove for regular quiet drinkers. It was empty but that was what he wanted. Under the circumstances, the words ‘Mind if I join you?’ were the last he wanted to hear, until he looked up from his pint and realised it was Lizzie who was speaking:

‘Del’s come in. Shut that lot at the bar up again. Said I could go early. And I thought you might be in need of a bit of company. You’re not half looking under the weather.’

‘Am I?’ he hadn’t meant to smile, but it was amazing how she provoked the reaction. ‘Sorry, I don’t mean to.’ She sat down beside him, plonking a large gin and tonic alongside his pint.

‘Don’t be sorry. I just meant you look like you’ve got the weight of the world on your shoulders.’

‘Do I? Sorry.’

‘Tut, tut, sorry again. Is it work?’

‘Hmm? I suppose. Sometimes one thing leads to another. As if a case has come looking for you. You have to get to the bottom of it. No matter how deep you have to dig.’

‘Can you talk about it? I mean, only if it would help.’

‘You heard about the body? The one found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge.’

Lizzie froze. ‘Yes. Of course. It was on the BBC. Nearly had his head cut off. You want to stay out of things like that.’ Stark gave her a sideways look. ‘No, I don’t suppose you can, can you. Not in your job. Have you got a lead of some sort? Do you know who did it?’

‘You could say that.’

‘Really? You’re getting close?’ There was an edge to her voice that caused Stark to wonder, just for a second, if she might care for him.

‘You might say that. Then again, you might not want to. Not in public anyhow.’

‘You’re not suggesting …’

‘I’m not suggesting anything at the minute. Anyway I’ve got other stuff on my mind.’

‘Another case?’

Stark gave a bitter little laugh. ‘You might say that too. More like a cold case.’ He paused for a moment, and then said: ‘How well did you know your father? Really, I mean.’

‘You don’t know?’

‘What?’

Lizzie took a deep breath. By the time she finished
speaking
, in a low, muttered voice, her eyes scarcely looking up from the table, Stark learned Lizzie Goldsmith had been fourteen before she discovered that the father she idolised dealt in drugs and pimped prostitutes for the Soviet base down at Woolwich. She only found out when he
propositioned
one of her schoolmates. She had made a scene and the old man had hit her, hit her little sister, little more than a toddler at the time and stomped out, never to be seen again. Her mother had never forgiven her.

‘Anyhow,’ she said. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s my gran who’s the real hero in our house, holds the family together. Always has done.’

Stark gave her a questioning look. Her face brightened.

‘A tough nut, the old lady. Came over here as a little kid way back in the thirties, from the Ukraine. Jewish, see. Like me. Married a local boy. No shortage of eligible Jewish lads in the old East End. Done well for herself, she did. Fluent Russian, German, English. Got a job in the war office.
Secretarial
just, but to the higher-ups. But that’s another story.’

‘Not like the one they were on about?’ said Stark with a wry laugh, almost dismissively waving a hand at the gaggle at the bar.

‘Sort of,’ she said with a strange, lopsided smile. ‘
Nothing’s
exactly what you read in the history books, is it?’

‘You can say that again.’ Without meaning it, and with a flood of unanticipated relief, it flooded out of him. Only leaving out the details about St Bride’s, Harry Stark gushed out the story of how he had come to doubt the legend of his own father’s lifetime.

‘The thing is,’ he said at last, ‘I don’t even know if it’s true. Or how I’d tell my mother if it is. Or Kate. She hardly talks to me as it is these days. I have no idea how she’d react if she were told the father she never knew was an imposter involved with some shady underground?’

Lizzie was silent for a minute and then said. ‘You never know, she might not think that was all that bad.’

‘You think so?’ Stark smiled and looked back at her. ‘What I want to do,’ he said, staring at the backs of his hands laid flat on the table between their drinks, as if they belonged to somebody else, ‘is to make a difference.’

‘Sure, Harry, don’t we all? Don’t we all?’ She put her hand
on one of his, her long fingers cold from the ice in her gin and tonic glass, and Stark let them rest there, afraid to say anything that might cause her to move them. But in the end, of course, she did.

He lifted his beer and raised his glass to her, and she raised hers to him, and they clinked them and Stark said, ‘I’ll drink to that,’ all too conscious of the stupid grin on his face.

‘To what?’ she said.

‘To not doing something silly,’ he said, and they caught one another’s eye and both burst into laughter at the
unacknowledged
innuendo.

Some time and several drinks later, it might have been an hour, or maybe less, but it was certainly gone 11 p.m. and Del had rung the bell and called closing time and was noisily putting upturned seats on tables in the public bar, Stark and Lizzie left the snug almost surreptitiously, but not before the landlord could eye their unsteady gait and open the door for them with a good-humoured ‘Mind how you go,’ before going back to his die-hards at the bar with a markedly less gentle, ‘Let’s have your glasses now. It’s long gone time.’

Arm-in-arm, supporting each other, the inebriation
providing
the perfect excuse for physical contact, they
stumbled
steadily to the end of the street. That was where their ways parted. Stark stopped first, bringing Lizzie up short with an amused, ‘Whoops!’ She put her hand to her chest as if to relieve a moment of indigestion. Stark put his arm around her to steady her and silently cursed the English Democratic Republic’s accommodation crisis.

If he’d had a flat of his own he might have asked her back, but there’d be his mother who’d fuss like an old hen if he brought a ‘young lady’ home, and then be censorious afterwards when she found out it was just some common
barmaid. Anyway, what was he thinking? She had just been nice to him, nothing more. It was time to say goodnight, or he thought it was until Lizzie turned to him, smiled that smile and, lurching with a giggle against the wall, said softly, ‘C’mon then, Harry, you’d better walk me home.’

He did. Down dark, dirty, blissfully empty streets, towards the river and the ancient warehouses that nestled in the shadow of Tower Bridge.

In the distance the neon radiance from Westminster cast its artificial glow into the night sky obliterating everything else, but above their heads the weak glimmer from
Ber-mondsey’s
under-powered streetlights allowed them still to glimpse, if not the stars, at least two glittering pinpoints, Jupiter and Venus. Stark put his arm around her and held her close. She giggled and laid her head against his shoulder.

‘This is it, Harry. This is where I live.’

He looked up. Devon Mansions was one of the old
nineteenth
-century blocks erected by wealthy philanthropists to house London’s poor, six stories high in crumbling yellow London brick. More than a few had survived the bombs and bullets to become models for the ‘new’ socialist housing that in most cases had still to be built.

She pulled him into a doorway. ‘I’m on the third floor,’ she said, and Stark’s heart raced.

She put her arms around his head, and slid her tongue between his teeth. She pulled him towards her and he felt her soft breasts press against him and the urgency in her kiss as she ran her fingers through hair that he suddenly wished he had washed that morning. He breathed deep, inhaling her perfume, and his: gin and beer and an acrid forenote of pungent sweat. He thought he had never smelled anything more arousing in his life. And his body testified to
it. He let his hands run down her back, clutching her taut buttocks through the cheap raincoat and pulling her hard against him. She moaned softly, sank her teeth into the lobe of his ear and then pulled back and said: ‘You can’t come up.’

Stark felt the words land on him like a lead weight in his pocket.

‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ she whispered. ‘But we have the world’s nosiest communal caretaker. It’s not just the party he reports to, but every twisted-tongued old gossip for miles around. And anyway, you forget – I have a little sister too.’

He nodded, groaning inwardly, and fighting the
hormones
that were forcing their attention on him physically.

‘And I have to be up before dawn.’

‘Hmm, an early riser, eh. So I see.’ She put a hand down and felt him through the front of his trousers, licked her lips and kissed him gently on the mouth. Stark moaned aloud.

‘Who knows, eh? Another time.’

‘Sure,’ said Stark. ‘Another time.’

‘I didn’t intend this, Harry. But I don’t regret it either.’

‘Nor do I.’

She kissed him again, and turned into the dark outside stairwell. ‘Good night, Harry Stark,’ she called softly from the darkness. ‘Look after yourself. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

She might as well have told him not to fly.