Famous Last Words (17 page)

Much of it puzzled him, but more of it frightened him. He was not quite sure what it was he’d been asked to join, though he guessed it was a sort of cabal whose power was greater than that of governments. He wished he had been more tolerant of listening to it all, for he now felt cheated by his anger since it had prevented him from hearing more and understanding more. He hadn’t told his wife, though she had guessed something traumatic had happened. He was silent all through supper and hadn’t laughed when she’d repeated the afternoon’s jokes. At midnight he came and sat on her bed, but he still didn’t speak.

The moonlight streamed through the windows and Diana

thought how subtly his profile was changing with time. He was such a good-hearted man. Sentimental. Kind. Ugliness of spirit in other people bewildered him. He had his weaknesses, but she was confident his integrity would hold against

whatever troubled him. Her father, “Old Redoubtable”, had

been the same. In a political crisis, no one was more reliable.

But if the toast was burnt or one of the children scraped a knee, he fell to pieces. “God…!” he would cry, with a great Victorian shout at Heaven. “Why is my toast always burning, God? Answer me that, if you can!” And Neddy was the same.

Neddy might scream blue murder when she told him she

was expected in town tomorrow, but he would survive the Lindbergh crisis—whatever it was.

“Do you want to talk?” she said, sitting back against her pillows.

He tightened his grip on her hand. “Not really,” he said.

“Just please don’t go to sleep.”

“No.”

They sat like that for another fifteen minutes, both of them looking out through the window at the moonlight on the

pond and then he said to her, “Do you remember, when Gus first came to England, what it was he was doing?”

“Trying to forget his troubles, I should think.”

“No, no. I mean his work. Don’t you remember?”

“Yes, yes. Oh, that!” Diana laughed. “He was working

with Alexis Carrel. They were trying to invent a mechanical heart.”

“That’s right,” said Ned.

“What about it?”

“I think he’s succeeded.”

All this happened on the 8th of September. On the 9th, Diana went up to town and had lunch with Juliet d’Orsey, this having been arranged many days before. Coming home that evening, she was somewhat surprised to discover Neddy

gone, though he’d left a note that told her he was suddenly called to Paris “on account of business with Maximus” (his brother, the Earl of Massie). But none of this was true. The fact is he had gone to Clerkenwell to speak with Eden and he did so, over the next two months, on at least four more fl| occasions. None of these meetings were recorded in his Parliamentary blotter. They were not of an official nature. Nor

did he ever speak of them to Diana. Maximus. however, was

119

warned to be prepared to back up the lie about the Paris rendezvous, which he did with good grace, being often used in this manner whenever his brother needed a “blind” for conducting delicate missions in behalf of the Ministry.

On September 14th, six days after Lindbergh’s visit to Nau)y, a coded message was received in Berlin from London. It was addressed to Deputy Puhrer -Rudolf Hess and it was signed by Germany’s Ambassador to the United Kingdom, Joachim

von Ribbentrop. It read: PLEASE BE ADVISED ALLENBY

DECLINES.

There is no reply on record. Of course, it is possible no reply was ever sent. It is even possible no reply was required.

One thing is certain. Edward Allenby was never to hear of “us” again.

He died with his son Charles Augustus, when the car they were riding in failed to brake at a corner on the winding road to Nauly. The funeral occurred on Friday, December llth, 1936—but the news of it was superseded by the fact that Edward VIII had abdicated the throne of England and was going into exile in Austria.

There were not as many at Nauly as should have been,

though all the best of them turned up. But I felt Ned was cheated of honours due him because of the Abdication, an event he would surely have abhorred. Indeed Baldwin later did a theatrical numberin-one in the House that had the ring of Neddy’s voice in it, which suggests the PM may have had some discussion with Ned on the subject. I too found the Abdication intolerable—but for quite another reason.

Poor Wallis. Not to be Queen.

I sat there that night in the semi-dark with Diana, Maximus, Harold, Vita and a few others listening to the King on

the wireless—all of us down with Ned and the boy in their graves—and I saw that halfway through the speech, or near

120

the end, or wherever it was when the King said; “I now quit altogether public affairs, and I lay down my burden…”

Diana reached to the table beside her and took up a photograph of Neddy in her hand, framed there in silver and

held it, not as if she watched him—but was letting him watch her. And then the King said; “it may be some time before I return to my native land, but I shall always follow the fortunes of the British race and Empire with profound interest.”

And as he said this, Diana laid the photograph back on the table—face down.

Every one of us valiantly tried to get drunk, but none of us managed.

The funeral itself was dire. Sometimes, there can be at least some sense of being uplifted into a community of mourners.

But not that day. Poor Diana, having just put down her

father—now her husband and her son Charles Augustus in one gesture. And of course it rained, and of course there was all the unavoidable buzz of the Abdication and, of course half the people who should have been there weren’t.

Someone did come, however, who was not expected. 1

was first aware of his presence in the churchyard, after we had gathered there for the throwing down of the earth. I was standing off to one side, opposite the principal mourners—

Diana, Freda Massie, Maximus and the others—when I noticed someone moving behind them.

At first I thought it was just someone come late, until I saw by his behaviour he was not a mourner, but an observer of some other kind. A policeman? Scotland Yard? Definitely not a “friend of the family”. He was on a scouting expedition, never standing still for a moment, making a circle of the mourners, walking round the outside, keeping his eyes on this one and that one (myself included), his hands in his pockets the whole time. And I don’t think 1 would have

noticed him, other than just to be aware that someone was moving while the rest of us were still, if it hadn’t been for his extraordinary appearance.

I had never seen a figure of’ such compelling menace. I had no idea who he was or why he might have been there

but I do know that whenever I see that funeral in my mind

121

it is dominated by his figure, dressed as he was in a teeming leather coat, hatless, no umbrella, with rainy hair curled against a skull like a Roman marble, and skin Italianate in colour…not quite six feet tall, I should say. And, even in spite of the rain and mud, wearing his shoes uncovered with either rubbers or galoshes. The ugliest pair of shoes I have ever seen. Shiny shoes; glossy shoes; sensual shoes, if such a thing exists—but appropriate, I suppose, for walking in the mud. Alligator shoes. And looking up at one point after I had forced myself to look away from him and concentrate on Freda Massie and Maximus standing either side of Diana, each one holding up the other, I noticed him watching me and it made me shiver, as if the rain had suddenly all poured down my back. Not only had he this pair of alligator shoes but also, in spite of his beauty, alligator eyes.

Paris: December, 1936

I was boarding the steamer for Dieppe—the Boulogne runs were booked for the next twelve months because the late king had passed that way and people wanted to stare at the water over which he had crossed—when 1 was confronted

by lulia Franklin, asking if 1 could help her find a porter to get her things on board. I suppose she must have known me well enough to realize that no matter what she had written and said, I would stillfeel constrained to plav the gentleman.

I should have known better, Julia Franklin, for all her well known emaciation, is about as helpless as a shark in a school of mackerel—Julia, with her rawboned arms and her hipless legs which she covered with trousers like a man.

This was during the time when every word that Julia

Franklin wrote was gospel to the leftist movement, and her pieces on Spain had practically been enshrined. She had also written a devastating attack on Ezra. which had caused

a sensation. No one else had yet begun to recognize the fact that Ezra, the man, could be as much a target for attack as Ezra, the literary lion. The tradition had been. until Julia Franklin appeared on the scene, that the private lives and personal views of literary figures were sacrosanct until there was a death under which a line could be drawn. No one, for instance, while Virginia Woolf still lived, would have dared to print such a sentence as “Mrs Woolf has bouts of serious depression” let alone “Mrs Woolf, from time to time, goes mad.” Julia Franklin would—and did—write sentences such as that, though she wrote them not about Virginia Woolf—

but Ezra Pound.

It must be said, however, if I am to make the point about this woman I intend to make—because she had a very real impact both on myself and on the events that follow—that Julia Franklin never wrote such things as 1 have suggested here merely to hurt or merely to be destructive or merely to elevate herself and her own importance. She wrote with commendable directness—never “pussy-footing” and never currying favour with either her subjects or her readers’. Her deviousness was all confined to method—never to matter.

This is not to say that Julia Franklin was a paragon—or infallible, and could not be wrong. It is only to saw she never knowingly lied. Which is why, to certain people, myself included, she could be extremely dangerous. All her truths were told from a single stance: she was red—without apologv —and the publication of everything she wrote was eagerly awaited.

Ezra had been her latest victim. 1 was to follow. It was dreadful—and not at all unlike being tracked and trapped by a kind of sainted killer; for no matter the political persuasions of her individual readers, everyone applauded when

Julia Franklin drew blood. I think this had as much to do with the age as anything else. It was. after all. the decade of the tabloid and a time in which the Press had the power to madden and drive a man like Lindbergh out of his native land—and even to turn him against it.

What then was 1 thinking of when I agreed to find Julia Franklin a porter at Newhaven? Perhaps it was simpiv that ^

123

something in me knew she could not. in the long run. be avoided. And I might as well get it over with. Maybe, too.

1 was thinking if she met me while the world was distracted with the Abdication, I should not perhaps suffer too greativ from the exposure. That I should have known better is no excuse. 1 walked in freely. And then she shut the door and struck—though 1 was not to know how hard or with what

effect for another week after we had crossed together into France aboard a very rockv boat.

There was then in Paris a great deal of rain: the weather, in fact. was as foul as any I can remember. Paris is no place to sit out the winter but it had been my choice because I wanted to write and needed a closet, so to speak, in which to do this. Not too many distractions. At first, the writing went well—but slowly. Paris got to me. Paris in November and December becomes more grew than is bearable; its leaves all underfoot have turned to mush: its pigeons are more than ever mournful in the eaves. It is every bit as doleful and depressing as a chapter from La Dame aux Camellias, the story of that desperate woman who perished in Paris of

winter and aloneness, curtained and cut off in a world hermetically sealed and utterly airless. Deserted even by laughter.

And by charm. Strange, how that Paris of the mid-1980s

rang with so many echoes of itself a hundred years before.

Dumas could have written the very room I sat in, to say nothing of my mood and my exile. Looking out. I could see his Paris and my own in one unaltered view. The rain. The rain. The rain. And the people. Looming. Glowering. Argumentative.

Bedraggled. Rebellious. Shaking their fists at

one another, even from a distance. The bleakness of it all.

Winters teem with French rain and rudeness. Slush—which they call there a demi fondue of snow—and a kind of hectoring social unrest which I call demi fondue of the brain.

I suspect the winter French are the most bad-tempered people in the world. On the streets, ill mannered; in the cafes and restaurants, intemperate: in the salons, intellectual bullies; in the Chamber of Deputies, lions with false teeth. As

124

for French politics, they are based entirely on emotion—

rabble-rousing fails et gestes and the corruption of the moment, be it money, real estate, peddled foreign influence or

women.

I had not had a single invitation since my arrival, though the reason was plain enough. It had to do with my relations with Wallis, and all my usual horde of hosts was waiting to see whose stocks would rise the furthest—the King’s or Mister Baldwin’s. Having appeared triumphantly September last with Wallis, I was presently in no man’s land. Not quite pariahcal (since it was still quite possible my horde of hosts might be required to rush to my side and embrace me) but still not acceptable as a guest at any table where my presence one night might prove embarrassing the next. And to think that in September 1 was turning down three or four invitations a day. The French upper classes are the world’s worst

snobs and it is surely not for nothing clique is a word universally employed without translation.

Then, late one evening, the telephone rang. The caller was Isabella Loverso, whom I had not heard from since the death of Diana’s father. She would not disclose her whereabouts.

“But how did you know I was here?” I asked.