Winston’s War (4 page)

When they reached the hallway Churchill suddenly stopped as though some important memory had tumbled into his mind. “Pray, sign the visitors' book and wait here for a moment,” he instructed, before scuttling off. He returned bearing another book. “I have been idle, but my son Randolph has not. He is about your age, Burgess, and has recently published a volume of my speeches.
Arms and the Covenant
. Here.”

He took the pen from Burgess's hand and began to inscribe on the flyleaf of the book: “
To Guy Burgess, from Winston S. Churchill, to confirm his admirable sentiments.”
He dated the inscription, September 1938.

“Read. Enjoy. And if ever you should need me, Burgess, send me this book. I shall remember our conversation, and the debt I owe you.”

They parted, the Great Man and the Arch-Manipulator. It was only later that Churchill read the message left by his guest in the visitors' book.

“
From a fellow traveler, belligerent, bibulous—and broke.
”

It was written on a page that, many years later, would be torn from the book and destroyed.

The weather forecast had been discouraging. It had also proved to be entirely accurate, and the young telephonist scurried to work trying her best to shield her new perm from the elements. She had accepted a date for the following day with a dark-eyed traveling glove salesman from Manchester named Norman, and although she knew their relationship could be measured in little more than moments and plumbed the depths of folly, still she wanted to look her best. She arrived in time before her duty started to repair the storm damage and smoke half a cigarette, carefully replacing the unused portion in its packet.

The exchange room where she worked was gloomy, the overhead lighting meager and inadequate for its task. She settled onto her high-backed stool and confronted the array of switches that were set out with military precision on the board in front of her. At chin-level were posted the Instructions of the Day, printed on a small card. From all sides came the quiet female chatter of operators handling inquiries and connecting calls. It proved to be a busy night at the exchange with much of the country intent on sharing the hard-won pleasures of peace.

She listened in on many of the trunk calls in order to ensure that the connection remained clear, at times feeling tempted to join in, to celebrate with them, even to tell them about her Norman. Thoughts of Norman made the night drag. His hands were elegant and remarkably soft, just like a glove salesman's should be, and she wanted it to be tomorrow already.

When the call came up on her board, she knew precisely what to do. The Instructions about this number, Westerham 4433, were clear. She turned to attract the attention of her supervisor, who was sitting at her cubicle in the middle of the exchange floor and who responded with a nod. The supervisor, several years older than any other of the girls on the floor, inserted a plug in her own board and re-routed the call through the Observation Room.

The Observation Room was small, almost sepulchral, without the background chatter of the main exchange. In it sat another young female operator with headphones on, recording tape machine at the ready, and pencil in hand. As the call was connected she noted both the time and the number on her Observation Sheet, and as the voices poured out she began her task of taking down in shorthand every word of the conversation.

It wasn't difficult to tell the difference between the two men's voices. One was ordinary, just a voice in the babble.

The other was quite unmistakable. Sonorous. Distinctively sibilant.

She began scribbling till her fingers ached.

A
lfred Duff Cooper, PC, DSO, MP, and many other bits and bobs, was a man of prodigious appetites. He couldn't spend a week without women—many of them—including his beautiful and sophisticated wife, Diana. As a species he found them irritating, yet individually they were irresistible. Neither did he seem able to live without the encouragement of alcohol, although in this he was far from unique within the clubs and corridors of the powerful. He was also a man of considerable intellectual capacity, having written an acclaimed biography of Talleyrand and another of Field Marshal Haig even while he was undertaking his duties as a senior member of the Cabinet. But above all else his appetite was for politics, a game that had brought fame, high office, and many beautiful women to his doorstep. Yet, for “Duffie,” politics were to prove the most faithless mistress of them all.

“A trim and a shave, if you will, McFadden. And take your time. I have to look my best.”

“An important engagement, sir?”

“With the executioner's axe.”

“Certainly, sir,” Mac replied, displaying as much emotion as if he had been asked to put out the empty milk bottles.

The politician had walked the fifteen minutes from his office in the Admiralty to Trumper's, the finest gentlemen's barbers in the country, which stood on Mayfair's Curzon Street. It was a walk made by an extraordinarily large number of the grandest men in the land (although in the case of the Palace and Downing Street it was more usual for the barber to pack his small case of necessities and make a house call). McFadden was one of that handful of select barbers who served them. He had joined the firm years before through a combination of good fortune and his considerable ability. Everyone liked Mac because he was totally undemanding. Nobody needed to bother getting to know him. He arrived, he worked, he cleared up, and he left. Now the First Lord of the Admiralty was reclining in his chair within a highly polished wood-paneled cubicle, one of many that stretched into the depths of the shop.

“I'm sorry to hear you're going to die, sir. Any particular reason?” Mac inquired as he prepared the hot towels. The announcement of this great politician's imminent demise had seemed to require some sort of response, but Mac was always careful not to appear too interested or to become emotional about any of his customers' concerns. They came here to relax, to put aside the troubles of their day, and they found it much easier to accomplish this with someone like Mac who simply didn't matter. It was bred into them, the tendency to display in front of a servant the range of thoughts and emotions you'd never dream of sharing with a friend or your wife. It also helped that Mac had a slight accent and a limp and appeared to be a little stupid and slow, not a complete man, conforming to a certain notion of the working man that made him the safe recipient of confidences, if not of the vote.

Duff Cooper closed his eyes and allowed a slow exhalation of breath. “I'm not dying literally, for God's sake. It's worse than that. This afternoon I have a very important speech to make to the House of Commons. My resignation speech.”

“A sad day, sir.” Mac slowed down his preparations for the shave. The client clearly wished to share a confidence with him, which he would find difficult through a swathe of hot towels.

“God, but I've loved my job. I've sat in the Admiralty and sent the mightiest navy in the world to every corner of the globe. More power and privilege than most men could ever dream of. Yet by tonight I shall be an outcast, despised by people who yesterday hung on my every word and called me their friend. All because of…”

“Lift the chin for me, will you, sir? Thank you. Because of what, sir?”

“Damn it, McFadden! We won the bloody war. Never again, we said. Then Hitler comes along and starts building his squadrons of panzers and fighter planes—purely for defense, he assures everyone, and we believe him. Even when he marches into the Rhineland we believe him. Two years later he's trampling all over bloody Austria, and now he's ripping Czechoslovakia to pieces. And still our Prime Minister says he trusts him!”

His client was tense, his moustache a-bristle. Mac reclined the chair even more to help him relax.

“Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr. Chamberlain?”

Mac didn't care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that's why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. Yet there weren't any simple ways open to him any more. The time had come when even barbers had to take sides.

“I think Mr. Chamberlain wears his hair too long,” the barber replied softly.

“God, but what would I do to get near him with a razor,” the politician spat.

“Doesn't go with the image, it doesn't. That hair—and the winged collar and tail coat. Out of date, if you ask me.”

“A man out of time.”

“Will any of your colleagues be joining you, sir?” Mac made it sound like an invitation to sit down and dine. As he applied the first towel, the politician offered up a soft moan and for a moment Mac thought he had applied it too hot, but it soon became clear that the pain came from an entirely different source.

“They promised, you know. Walter Elliot, and others. We'll be there with you, they said, right at your side. Munich was one goose-step too far. But where are they now? Elliot waffles on about how he can be of more use working from inside the Government than being a leper on the back benches.
Leper
. That's the term he used. The day before he was talking about honor, now it's become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep driveling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they'll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ's sake?”

Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.

“I despair. What's become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would've finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.”

Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. “Not to be
repeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn't really be telling you this but…Just between the two of us, eh?”

The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.

Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He'd been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings, and by Bloody Chaos. He'd seen both imperialism and communism up close—too close—and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map—until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.

This one was scarcely better than the rest. He wanted war and he'd get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That's what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier's boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where—and why—it had ever been.

Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he'd burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn't he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?