That afternoon Alex Troy was in his study. He would have liked to take a walk on the heath, but it was unseasonably cold for May. He would have liked to meet the world, if only for half an hour, but the telephone rang and the world came to him.
He picked up the phone.
‘Alex? It’s Max.’
A short syllable to introduce a short man with a long handle – Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express and Minister of State, until recently Minister of Aircraft Production, in Churchill’s government.
‘I held a lunchtime briefing for the Fleet Street editors at Claridge’s today. I half expected you’d be there.’
So, that’s what ministers of state did. They gave briefings.
‘Half? You are such an optimist, Max. Perhaps if you were to expect me a sixteenth or a thirty-second you would be less disappointed in me.’
‘I was wondering. Would you care for a drink at my club tonight?’
Beaverbrook usually asked him round for one or both of two reasons. He knew something you didn’t and wanted to lord it. What, after all, was the point in being a lord if you could not lord it? – as far as Alex was concerned this might as well be the Beaver’s motto in life. Or he had some crackpot theory he wanted to air, partly, as with the first reason, to remind you that he was close to the powers that be, and partly because it was not the sort of thing he could air in his newspapers without being guilty of the kind of rumour-mongering and defeatism the government deplored in the common people and would deplore the more in one of its own.
The last time they’d met had been May Day. Max had bored him silly with ‘The balloon’s up. We’re backs to the wall now, Alex. The war has turned ugly for us. I’d say two or three days at the most. Invasion is imminent.’ – when it transparently wasn’t. It made Alex wonder how much the Prime Minister really told him. Bugger all, it would seem. That he could not see for himself was shocking. The RAF had won the battle for Britain. Won it with the planes the Beaver had churned out as Minister of Aircraft Production. A job that had enabled him to rally the nation’s housewives into giving up their pots and pans to be melted down into aeroplanes. Alex had never been certain whether this was anything more than a morale-building stunt – ‘Women! You too can do your bit!’ – but ever after he’d thought of Beaverbrook as Lord Saucepans. There probably was a Beaver Brook, somewhere in the wilds of Ontario, probably several, along with Moose Gulch and Wild Ass Pass – they none of them managed to sound real when appended to the word ‘Lord’.
Alex had no desire to go to the Beaver’s club – to any of his clubs, the Carlton or the Marlborough, the former political, the latter royal in basis.
‘How about my club?’ he said.
‘The Garrick? Fine,’ said Beaverbrook.
They fixed a time and rang off.
Alex was going by the counter-theory of that applied by single women: ‘Never invite him in. Go back to his place, then you can always leave. Far easier than throwing a man out.’ He was taking Beaverbrook to his club – watering hole of old hams and young pretenders, where a distraction could always be arranged without the necessity of walking out, and where they were unlikely in the extreme to meet any other ‘gentlemen’ of Fleet Street – but, then, that was precisely why he had joined, to escape the ‘gentlemen’ of Fleet Street.