A Grave Man (11 page)

‘There’s a well,’ he explained grudgingly. ‘The water’s sweet but it’s not so easy having a bath.’

She recognized that he was trying to be civil so she refrained from making a smart remark indicating that she had noticed as much at dinner the previous evening. She spied a pile of paper beside a small typewriter. ‘Is that your book? Tell me about it.’

‘You don’t have to be polite, you know.’

‘I had no intention of being polite. I am still waiting for you to apologize for attacking me. You might have given me a heart attack.’ He smiled a little sourly but made no effort to apologize. ‘Anyway, I’d like to hear more about it.’

‘Well, if you really want to know, it’s an attack on the whole rotten thing – the way we live now.’

‘I see.’

‘No you don’t. I’m not sure I do. It’s the rage. It seems to blur my vision. I know I should be more effective if I were cool and clinical but I just can’t be.’

‘That’s what I feel about the war in Spain,’ she admitted.

‘I really did like your book, you know. I liked it because it was so angry. I only came to dinner to meet you.’

‘You didn’t show it,’ she said, gratified but still suspicious.

‘When I saw you dolled up in all your finery with all those men leering at you – I don’t know, it just made me mad. I wanted to smash that man’s face in but, of course, I can’t.’

‘Whose face? Roddy’s?’

‘No. He’s just an oaf. One of those bad actors who come on stage in the first scene and say, “What ho! Anyone for tennis?”’

She giggled. He had an unexpected gift for mimicry. ‘I don’t see you as a regular theatre-goer.’

‘Why should I be? Even if I had the money I wouldn’t want to see rubbish by fairies like Noel Coward. Why isn’t anyone writing plays about what is
really
happening in England?’

‘Like Shaw?’

‘Yes, but he goes in for satire. I want . . . I want anger. I want to make greedy pigs like Castlewood lift their snouts out of the trough for long enough to see what is going on right under their noses. When I was on the Clyde last year I saw things which . . . burned my eyes. Children starving . . . literally starving and living – if you can call it living – in dank basements without light.’ He was becoming excited and Verity, who the night before had considered him ugly, now found him disturbing, almost attractive. ‘I say – have you come across a fellow called Bill Brandt – a photographer? I met him in Sheffield. He was photographing everything he saw. He gave me this one.’

He threw over a creased photograph of three dirty, thin-faced children peering out of a basement window. ‘Stepney. It breaks your heart, doesn’t it?’

She looked at it and then at him. ‘And this is what your book is about? Is it a novel –
Love on the Dole
?’ She was referring to Arthur Greenwood’s bestselling account of surviving poverty.

‘No, it’s a polemic. Or it will be if I ever get to finish it.’

‘Last night you said you had finished it.’

‘I had to,’ he grinned, immediately looking younger. ‘I couldn’t let those goats think I was a complete failure. I have all these notes but, when I get down to pulling them together, they just won’t . . . I don’t know.’

‘I had the same sort of problem when I was writing my book on Spain. I couldn’t make it come out right. There was just too much to say and I didn’t know how to put into words what I had seen.’

‘But you
did
finish it.’

‘I met a wise woman – she’s dead now – who gave me some advice. I can’t even say exactly what it was but somehow it broke a barrier and I suddenly found myself writing. It was a blessed release, I remember that much.’

‘Are you writing another one?’

‘I have thought about it but it seems almost too late for books. There’s a war coming which will bring everything tumbling down around our ears for better or worse.’

‘You are probably right,’ Harvey said despondently. ‘Franco looks as if he has won the war in Spain. I think I’d like to die on the barricades. To die in Madrid!’

Verity looked at him suspiciously. ‘It’s not very romantic – dying.’

Graham looked sheepish. ‘No, sorry. I was being self-indulgent. Of course,’ he said, sounding more cheerful, ‘Mikhail Bakunin said that the lust for destruction is a creative lust. Perhaps Armageddon will herald the revolution.’

‘I didn’t mean it isn’t worth you finishing your book. Didn’t Sir Simon say it’s about politics?’

‘It’s about the
failure
of politics and politicians. In fact, I’ve called it
A Study in Failure
.’

‘My friend, Edward Corinth, whom you despise so much, thinks Churchill will be our saviour when the war comes.’

Harvey’s lip curled. ‘Churchill! He’s the worst of them.’

‘That’s what I think, too,’ Verity said eagerly. ‘He did his best to destroy the General Strike.’

‘And he succeeded. He’s a Fascist. I’ve got a few pages here of things he has written, his wit and wisdom!’ he added ironically. He riffled through a thick wodge of paper until he found what he was looking for. ‘Listen to this – his solution to poverty: “The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate . . . I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed.” That was twenty years ago but listen to this about the Arabs, and from someone who fought in the trenches. “I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.” Churchill’s what is called a social Darwinist which seems to mean that his class must subjugate every other class and race. It’s sickening stuff.’

‘But Edward says he stands up to the Fascists.’

‘He is on record as having admired both Hitler and Mussolini. He now calls himself a Zionist but he said this of the Jews: “They constitute a worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilization and the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development and envious malevolence.”’

‘He said that?’

‘On the record.’

‘So you don’t share Dominic Montillo’s belief in racial improvement?’

‘That man is truly sinister. I felt I was dining among wolves last night.’

‘I thought you liked Sir Simon but you call him a pig?’

‘I owe him for this.’ Harvey waved his hand at the cottage. ‘He means well but, come the revolution, he’ll be one of the first to be strung up.’ He smiled grimly and Verity shivered. He might be joking but she did not think so. He was eaten up with hatred and she thought that, under certain circumstances, he would be capable of killing Sir Simon Castlewood himself. ‘He heard about my being unable to finish my book because I had nowhere to live and nothing to eat and he lent me this. I am grateful but I don’t like being grateful and I don’t like him. That stuff he was telling you about at dinner – Tibet and his Aryan heritage . . . that poisonous nonsense. Bruno Berger, who’s behind it, is a Nazi – a member of Himmler’s SS. Castlewood’s getting into something he shouldn’t and I’d like to help him see it for what it is but he’d never listen to me. I’m just his fool and jester. He likes having me around to insult him and his friends. It makes him feel good to have a tame Communist at his table. When I said that about you being a traitor to the cause eating his food, I meant me, of course. I’m betraying everything I believe in by taking his crust.’

‘Well, why don’t you just leave? If it’s money . . .’

‘It’s not just money. I have to stay near . . .’ He hesitated.

‘Near what? Near whom?’

‘It doesn’t matter. I will leave soon, but not just yet.’

Verity decided not to probe further. Instead she said, ‘Sir Simon is quite taken in by this man Montillo.’ She sipped her coffee. It was surprisingly strong and bone-warmingly hot. She stopped shivering.

‘As I understand it, Montillo wants perfect physical specimens like Isolde Swann and her jackass of a boyfriend to breed a new race of supermen. And she’s agreed to have her baby there.’

‘She must be mad!’ Verity said, scandalized. ‘Is she pregnant?’

‘Not that I know of. They’re probably both virgins. They are planning to marry next month – from Swifts Hill. Roddy “hasn’t a bean”, he told me.’

‘I can see it all!’ she exclaimed. ‘They are to be used as a breeding experiment so they must marry and Isolde must give birth under Simon and Montillo’s control.’

‘You may be right. I expect Montillo will insist on accompanying them on their honeymoon to make sure he knows how to impregnate her.’ They both laughed but Harvey added, ‘To be fair, Montillo is a good surgeon. A friend of a friend of mine who had a child born with two fingers stuck together went to him and now you wouldn’t know the child ever had a deformity.’

‘I refuse to be fair,’ Verity said firmly. ‘Montillo’s a Nazi. That’s what Hitler is trying to do – breed a super-race. I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t steal Isolde’s baby off her. He has some idea of bringing up children away from their parents. He says it was what the Spartans did.’

‘Hang on,’ Harvey expostulated, now suddenly the ‘reasonable’ one. ‘I think you are exaggerating. He’s an unpleasant man but this is England, not Germany.’

They were silent for a few moments and Verity held out her mug for more coffee. When Harvey had finished pouring it from his battered metal pot, she said meditatively, ‘So it was Sir Simon, not Roddy, whose face you wanted to smash in?’

‘Yes, but not because of his views on race.’

‘Why then?’

‘Because he was pawing you, if you must know.’ He sounded disgusted with himself.

‘Me? What do you care? I thought you hated me.’

‘No, damn it. I ought to hate you because you call yourself a Communist and then I watch you kowtowing to these people but . . .’ He got up and came over to her. For a second, she was sure he was going to kiss her and she had no idea how she would respond. In fact, all he did was say, ‘But I don’t.’

Verity’s attempt to regain her bedroom without attracting attention proved a failure. The open window had been discovered by Lampton who had raised Sir Simon and he had come down in his dressing-gown to survey the scene of what might be another crime, or at least an attempted crime. He had immediately gone to check that none of his other precious artefacts had been stolen and was relieved to find everything there – except, of course, the dagger. Roddy had a gun and, as Verity arrived, was setting off to search the grounds with Montillo. Isolde stood behind them, looking fetching in her nightwear.

‘Gosh! I hope you didn’t think . . . I felt like a walk – it was so beautiful this morning and I couldn’t find the key to the front door. I hope I haven’t . . . I’ll go and dress. Won’t be long.’

Verity slid up the stairs, leaving them open-mouthed but mercifully silent. Hadn’t they ever heard of a guest wanting an early-morning walk, she thought crossly?

It began to rain about ten so there would be no tennis, for which Verity was secretly grateful. She was not very good at games. She had played a little tennis at school but being short had not helped her game and she did not like doing things she was not good at. She recognized it as a weakness but not one she intended to do anything about. If she had been asked to play, she could have claimed she still was not fit enough but that would have been a lie and she despised lying to avoid social embarrassment. Although she had now physically recovered from her wound – just the occasional pain in her shoulder when she least expected it – mentally she was more fragile. The fact was – and she faced it with her customary honesty – she was afraid to return to Spain. Each time she returned she had found it more and more difficult and after Guernica she felt she had had enough.

She had an idea, which she knew to be irrational, that she had escaped death on at least three occasions but, if she tempted fate again, she might not be so lucky. When she was in the front line with the bombs falling and bullets flying, she was all right. The adrenaline kicked in and her obsessive desire to see what there was to be seen and report it to – it had to be said – a largely indifferent world made her forget the danger. The waiting, the apprehension was bad, however. Gerda Meyer, who had died beside her in Guernica, reduced to bloodied pulp by a Luftwaffe pilot, had told her once that danger was a drug and she had to have her ‘fix’. She courted danger in the certain knowledge that it would be the death of her. Verity was not like that. Her courage, she had begun to think, was of limited supply and the gauge was showing empty.

Added to that there was something inexpressibly sad in witnessing the death of a good cause. She had no idea how long the Republic would fight but no reasonable person could avoid seeing that Franco and the Rebels had won and that it was only a matter of months before Madrid fell. A guerilla war fought from the mountains could continue for years but the real war was lost. Much more important and something she would never confess – not even to Edward – was that the cause for which the Republic had taken up arms – the defence of a democratically elected government – had been contaminated. The Republicans now took their orders from Moscow and these included ‘liquidating’ anyone who opposed the Stalinist line. She had begun to believe that the Communists hated other left-wing parties more than they hated the Fascists. She decided to ask her employer, Lord Weaver, if she could report for the
New Gazette
from some other country facing the Nazi threat. There were plenty to choose from. Her German was almost non-existent but that could be remedied. She would take a Berlitz course as soon as she was back in London.

She sighed and looked out of the window. The rain streaked the glass. Virginia was playing Lexico with Mrs Cardew. Isolde was asleep on the sofa with
Vogue
clutched to her bosom. The men had donned Wellington boots and gone out for a walk. Verity decided she would go and check on Maud.

Maud was not asleep. She was lying on her back, gazing forlornly at the ceiling. A battered E. Phillips Oppenheim shocker with a lurid cover lay beside her. Verity picked it up. ‘
Slane’s Long Shots
– any good?’