Winston’s War (21 page)

The new whiskey disappeared in a trice.

“As you see, Mr. Burgess, he has a very large wastepaper bin.”

“How much do you want for this?” Burgess's eyes were sharp, nervous.

“
I
want nothing.”

“I apologize—how much does the lady require?”

Mac named his figure. It had been based on the research he had conducted one recent Thursday, concealed in a coffee shop within sight of Desdemona's doorway (she was always Desdemona to him when she was working). He knew from personal experience how much she charged. He multiplied that figure by the number of men he saw that day—then doubled it for Tuesdays, too. On top of that he added a premium of fifty percent for rainy days and the kids. He sipped his mild and once more wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

“Damn it, Mac, you strike a hard bargain.”

Burgess scanned the other man's face for any sign of posturing or willingness to compromise. He found nothing but Archangel ice.

“You can keep the sodding apple core, Mac. But as for the rest…” Slowly Burgess nodded his head and tried to quell the trembling in his hand.

“That's settled, then. Let me buy you another drink, Mr. B.”

Intimidation comes in many guises. Around the great estates that dominated the communities of West Perthshire it arrived dressed in a velvet glove. Crofters on the estates whose leases were coming up for renewal at Christmas received letters which proposed unusually favorable terms. The letters were folded inside leaflets demanding “VOTE SNADDEN.” And when workers on these estates picked up their pay packets they discovered the same leaflet had been stuffed into their brown envelopes, along with an unexpected “Christmas bonus.” The vote, on the Wednesday before Christmas, was by secret ballot, but the communities in and around the estates were tightly knit. Generations of deference meant that secrets were not readily hidden and all too easily betrayed—by a lowered glance, an uneasy smile. It was said that the lairds set the price of everything, but most particularly fixed the cost of disloyalty. Lose the sympathy of the laird and you lost your job, your home, and with them, perhaps, your family. Not worth the risk.

Bracken had found Anna inconsolable about the loss of her dog. All his careful preparations for her seduction had gone to waste. He hadn't even got past the door. Instead he heard himself promising to scour the streets in search of her precious little Chumpers and she insisted that he start that very night. It was a rash promise at the best of times, made all the more risible when it started to pour with rain. Not much chance of seeing a dog in the dark through the windshield of a rain-swept Bentley.

Yet it was clear that if he were truly to claim Anna's heart, he would have to find the bloody dog. So the following day Bracken retained the services of two private detectives, whom he commissioned to prowl the streets of Knightsbridge and South Kensington in search of the missing mongrel, offering a reward for relevant information to every postman, milkman, and pavement-watcher in the area. Their efforts were to no avail; there was no trace of the thing until, on the second day, a road sweeper showed them an ornate dog collar just large enough to fit around the neck of an overweight King Charles spaniel. The buckle was bent and the collar covered in blood. Bye-bye Chumpers.

Now he had to think of another plan.

It seemed as though the quarrels of men had been taken up by the gods themselves.

Across the sprawling constituency of Kinross and West Perthshire, polling day, the twentieth of December, dawned bathed in ice and adversity. Snow lay on the ground everywhere, blocking gullies and drifting ankle-high in winds that taunted those forced to step out. The constituency was one of the largest in the country, stretching for eighty miles north to south and nearly seventy east to west, and every square inch of it froze. A day for hiding, not for voting. The sort of day when he who drives, wins. Cars were the best and, in all too many cases, the only practicable means of transport, but along with the support of the Conservative Party Kitty Atholl had lost their formidable organizational powers—their volunteers, their committee rooms, and most of all their vehicles. Tories sat in the back of cars that drove them from door to door with blankets wrapped around their knees, while Kitty's supporters were forced to struggle out on foot into the cruel snow and a wind which that morning had come straight from Siberia. Many refused to leave their young children and their hearths. Many others were forced to turn back.

Four hundred miles further south in London it was less cold, the snow turning to rain that fell in gray, mischievous sheets. It sent most pre-Christmas revelers scurrying for shelter, yet as always Brendan Bracken had an eye for the opportunity.

His mind had become possessed by thoughts of Anna. Ever since she had lost that bloody dog, she had refused invitations and rebuffed his every approach. He had thought he might advance matters by explaining with all the sensitivity he could find that she must accept the sad fact that little Chumpers was, to all intents and purposes, lost. Gone. A fond memory. A tragedy which would sit alongside the fall of Rome and the sinking of the
Titanic
, but which nevertheless would have to be accepted. After all, had he not scoured the streets of Knightsbridge day and night in search of little poochy? Yet his concerns brought him no reward other than a few burbled words of grief and more streams of sobbing down the phone. It seemed she would grieve forever. Now Christmas loomed, and Bracken knew what he wanted for Christmas. He had it clearly in his mind, and at times it seemed to be the only thing he had in his mind. He wanted Anna. He wanted to possess her, he wanted her body, he wanted to have sex without paying for it, he wanted to enter the New Year with a relationship that people would talk about, with a much younger, importantly connected woman, and without all those knowing smirks that crept across people's faces when they discovered he was thirty-seven and neither engaged, espoused, nor actively shagging several actresses.

So, in the rain, he arrived on her doorstep, but he did not knock straight away. First, he stood in the downpour long enough to make sure he looked bedraggled. A man who had made a considerable effort just to be there. And in his arms, in the manner of a baby rescued from the lake, he clutched a puppy, a brown-and-white King Charles spaniel that his chauffeur had that afternoon obtained at kennels. Around the dog's
neck was a new collar, and through the collar was threaded a pink silk bow. Bracken stood long enough on the step to make sure the dog was shivering.

When Anna opened the door she was confronted with the pitiable sight. A sad and sodden Bracken, and a puppy—not Chumpers to be sure, but a tiny dog that might perhaps have been Chumpers's best friend or even a skinnier sibling—and both seeming in desperate need of affection and a home.

Irresistible.

He was in.

The apartment at 28 Chester Square was already ringing with screams and raucous laughter—early, even by the standards of Burgess's parties. His hospitality was notorious amongst both his friends and neighbors—his friends because he was a shameless collector of people and usually managed to cram into one room a most eclectic grouping, which stretched from Privy Counselors and press men to male prostitutes and poets (including Auden and Spender), and which embraced multiple politicians, a few female professors, and proselytizers of every hue. There was even the odd priest. Their only common denominator was their enjoyments, which by Burgess's strict decree had to be outrageous. It was this aspect that made these gatherings notorious to his neighbors, since inevitably these outrages ended up spilling through the front door and onto the landing where they would frequently dissolve into fights and tearful recriminations. Yet there were few complaints—at least, not directly—since whenever his neighbors knocked on his door they would be cowed by the combination of public figures and disheveled drag artists who appeared behind his shoulder, and Burgess had the irritating habit of responding to their objections by simply laughing and inviting them in. Invariably they refused.

He would not, however, have invited strangers into his home
this evening. In the sitting room the guests had started up a round of Christmas carols, led by a senior Minister, with words taken from a distinctly unauthorized version of the English hymnal, while in the other room an intense and distinctly irregular game of table tennis was in progress. Burgess's newfound friend, Tom Driberg, was playing against a much longer-established companion, Edouard Pfeiffer, the
chef de cabinet
of the French Prime Minister, Daladier. They were using the dining table as a playing surface and a young delivery boy stretched naked across the table as the net.

The players began disputing a point, raucously demanding that Burgess decide the issue. A smell of singeing varnish came from the sideboard where the Frenchman's cigar smoldered, while from the other room came the sound of carol singers murdering the Three Wise Men one by one. Chaos reigned, yet, for once, Burgess found no appeal in it. Christmas had come, and for a few days the world would stand still. Men would promise each other peace on earth and, for a few hours, might even mean it. Burgess's Christianity was faded but still sufficient to believe in Hell, and to know that it had arrived, here on earth, waiting for them all across the Channel, come the New Year. He was afraid. His hands trembled because he was a lush, but most of all because he could not rid himself of his fear that they were damned, every one of them, and he above all others, that whatever the outcome of the war there would be no hiding place for him. He was doomed, whichever side won. He wanted to close his eyes, to stop the trembling, to believe in something again, apart from Hell. He desperately wanted his Christmas to last forever.

So he emptied his glass and awarded the point to Driberg.

They counted the votes in West Perth that night. Chamberlain had won—by a slim margin, little more than a thousand votes, but it was enough. The Duchess was defeated.

The Times
said the result would be a great encouragement to Mr. Chamberlain, and hinted that it would come as a dire warning to all those who, like the Duchess, opposed him and his policies. They were on their own.

“Rejoice. Oh, rejoice! Blessed are the Peacemakers.” The Prime Minister's metallic and echoing voice poured from the end of the phone and so loudly that Wilson held it away from his ear. He could almost sense the gleam in the old man's eye, a rekindling of that inner light which he had carried back from Munich and had worn through all those photographs, yet which in the long weeks since had been dulled by the exhaustion of events. He had lost weight, was in need of recuperation, so Mrs. Chamberlain had taken him off to Chequers, his official country retreat, to recharge his batteries. That took longer nowadays.

Chequers was an ideal place for this purpose, a fine red-brick building of Tudor origins tucked away behind long avenues of Buckinghamshire beech. It was a hideaway, not a nerve center. Indeed it was not a center of any sort. It had only one telephone, which was regarded as an instrument of the Devil and had been hidden away in the pantry in order not to disturb the Prime Minister—even when he was needed. So Wilson had rung and rung, then rung some more, until in despair he had telephoned the local police constable in Princes Risborough, who had clambered on his bike and ridden through the snow to ask the Prime Minister if he'd be pleased to pick up the phone and “take a call from Sir 'orace what's been trying to get 'old of 'im all day, sir.” Chamberlain had discovered the phone hiding under a pile of freshly starched table napkins.