Reggie was sitting up in bed. A glass of brandy, a good book – The American by Henry James, the tale of a young, rich American – well, obviously – marooned among the importunate toffs of Europe. Pride and no-old-money versus innocence and oodles of new-money. Wasn’t that the plot of every Henry James? How can a chap get away with telling the same story over and over again? Anyway, it seemed appropriate. It put Reggie vaguely in mind of . . . and dammit, what was it Maisie knew? He’d forgotten.
The telephone rang. It was 2 a.m. Another night owl.
‘You weren’t sleeping, were you Reggie?’
‘You know me, Gordon. Up till the birdie tweets.’
‘Are you dressed?’
‘A matter of seconds, old chap.’
‘Good. Get over here right away will you. The PM wants a word.’
‘With me?’
‘Yes.’
Reggie could hear a wee tinge of exasperation creeping into McKendrick’s voice.
‘Where exactly is “here”?’ he asked tentatively.
‘Down Street. He’s decided to sleep in Down Street tonight. Don’t ask me why.’
Reggie could not remember quite when the London Passenger Transport Board had abandoned Down Street Station on the Piccadilly line – it had stood opposite Green Park, pretty well halfway between his old house in Chester Street and his tailor in Jermyn Street, quite the handiest of stations – but in its new guise it made an absolutely bomb-proof private shelter for Churchill. He understood McKendrick’s ‘don’t ask me why’ – keeping track of precisely where the PM laid his head each night was a nightmare. Both Downing Street and the bunker of rooms clustered around the Cabinet War Rooms had been strengthened, and he had beds in each, he also had Chequers, the country home of every Prime Minister since . . . since someone Reggie couldn’t quite remember had given it to the nation in the reign of . . . God knows . . . Etheldogg the Scoundrel? – and on nights when the moon was full he had Dytchley Park, and, of course, he had his own home at Chartwell. Being Winston Churchill, Reggie thought, was a bit like being England’s most well-heeled gypsy.
Well-heeled and well-guarded. When Reggie got out of the cab a couple of young Naval lieutenants were waiting for him, and behind them in the shadows, two armed guards in plain clothes.
‘A twopenny one to Earl’s Court,’ said Reggie.
From the darkness of the station entrance McKendrick’s voice growled, ‘Stop arseing about!’
Reggie followed McKendrick down the spiral staircase, deeper and deeper, wondering if Churchill might actually have a hammock strung between the tracks. Not far above platform level, McKendrick opened a steel door in the wall, led Reggie through an anteroom into a small dining room, with a central table, six chairs and a standard lamp with a big floral shade. It looked like a dream. A complete confusion of categories. The dining-room furniture, in that immovable Georgian taste that characterised every upper-class dining room in the land, a lamp from a suburban sitting room in South London, and instead of the stripy Regency wallpaper – also immovably upper class – London Transport’s black and white tiles, delicately interspersed with electrical junction boxes, cables as thick as sausages and a polite notice urging the reader to ‘Now wash your hands!’
Reggie plonked himself on a chair, McKendrick picked up a newspaper off the table and looked grim.
Churchill shuffled in. Carpet slippers and a siren suit in a tasteful shade of brown. Reggie found himself wondering what he’d look like in a yellow siren suit and the image of Winnie the Pooh sprang into mind. Winston and Winnie, simply swap Hunny for Havanas.
‘Good evening, Reggie, or rather I should say good morning.’
He flipped open a flat cigar box on the table and went through the smoking man’s ritual of clipping and pricking, saying as he did so, ‘Sorry about the ungodly hour, but Gordon has something we’d like you to read.’
McKendrick handed Reggie the newspaper. It was tomorrow’s, or rather today’s, Sunday Post.
‘We received this at midnight. If you’d just read the editorial . . .’
Newspapers were so thin these days. Four pages on the ration. And editorials so short. Reggie flipped to the centre pages. It wasn’t short. It was inordinately long. The papers might be rationed for newsprint, old Troy was not rationed for words. The first waft of best Cuban drifted across the table.
The Sunday Post
When I first came to these islands in the winter of 1910, I did not doubt that I would make my home here. As I have most certainly told my readers on too many occasions, having seen the prospect of England opened up to me when I stood upon the French coast and watched M. Blériot take flight, I entered into an exchange of letters with Mr H. G. Wells on the subject, fascinating to us both, of powered flight. When Mr Wells invited me to visit him in England I came. I stayed. My wife, our son, our two daughters and I ended our years a-wandering. I knew, had known throughout that time, that I would be unlikely in the extreme to see my native Russia again. Perhaps the luxury I have allowed myself of speculating in this column upon the nature and the fate of that unhappy land has been the nostalgic indulgence of an exile – or, on the other hand, perhaps it has been a necessity. In their fate lie all our fates. When, two years ago, I warned my readers that the Nazi-Soviet pact was not the act on which to judge and condemn a country making itself anew, I was all but deluged in mail. Little of it complimentary. Indeed I had not felt so scolded since my denunciation of the Zinoviev letter as a forgery in 1924. Well, I will say to my critics, read no further or take a stiff drink now, I am about to hector you again upon that same matter. Russia . . .
Russia is a land of extremes. To those of you who think it a land locked in permafrost, I would say that I have childhood memories of sunshine quite as glorious as any summer that tinges your memories of the playing fields of Eton or Wakes Week in a Lancashire mill town. But it is the extremes of mind that matter. In the last century the evolution of extreme doctrine produced the antithesis of religion – Nihilism – and the antithesis of politics – Anarchism. The indivisibility of church and state made extremes inevitable, made them the natural outcome for Russia. Her revolution, too, was natural in that it was inevitable. It should have surprised no-one. It surprised many. And many of us in the West have reeled from that act in shock ever since. We should not. Russia has ever been a troubled land and I doubt that I, or my children, shall live to see the day when it is untroubled.
Russia has an inordinate capacity for suffering – to have pain inflicted, to absorb it and to transmute it. Where else lies the origin of the inextinguishable myth of the great Russian mission to the West? It is in Tolstoy, born in the blood and snow of the long march he depicted in War and Peace, it is in the suffering of those lamentable brothers, the Karamazovs, there is more than a hint of it in the work of my fellow exile Berdyaev, and it informed every jot and missive of my father’s work in those interminable letters he wrote to newspapers other than my own – we were not, alas, the paper of record in his eyes – and it is, ironically, at the heart of the late Mr Trotsky’s opposition to Socialism In One Country. Russia suffers and in her suffering lie all our fates. Russia is the soul of Europe.
Some of the trouble of my native land I have seen at first hand – or, to be exact, heard and felt. When I was twenty-two I was a street away and heard the blast when Alexander II was assassinated. According to my father I was closer still when an earlier attempt was made upon the Tsar’s life in the 1860s, but being six years old at the time I have little memory of it. And, when I was forty-one a second cousin on my mother’s side shot and killed Nicholas II’s Secretary of the Interior. In each case, and emphatically if metaphorically in the last, I was, it would seem, too close for comfort. So are we all. Whatever happens now in Russia will affect us all. We are but a street away from the explosion. To go on telling ourselves, as we did in the thirties, that the Soviet Union is godless and Marxist and as such the natural enemy of both mankind and democracy would be nothing short of folly. Like it or not we have a new ally. And I am here to tell you all that it is time to stand by our new ally.
Alexei Troy
‘Bloody hell,’ said Reggie. ‘I mean to say it’s a bit steep. New ally? Talk about jumping the gun!’
Churchill took out his cigar, trailing spittle. ‘He knows,’ he said.
‘Surely, Prime Minister, he’s just guessing. He’s picked up on the speculation – he’s a pretty poor excuse for a press baron if he didn’t – and he’s heard what everybody’s heard about troop movements in Poland . . .’
‘He knows,’ Churchill said again. ‘Look closely at the final paragraph. Lift out the figures he gives, the odd ages he says he was at such and such an atrocity.’
Reggie scanned the paper, wondering what he’d missed. As he found them, eyes down, scarcely daring to look up, he could hear Churchill growling out each number in turn.
‘Twenty-two, six, forty-one. June 22nd 1941. The only thing he’s missed out is the time, but since we all know that Hitler calls at the same time as the Metropolitan Police making a raid, he need hardly spell out the word “dawn”.’
The truth dawned on Reggie. ‘Oh bugger,’ he said softly.
‘Oh bugger,’ said Churchill back to him. ‘I looked him up in Who’s Who. Alex Troy’s propensity for being coy with the truth about himself notwithstanding, he gives his birth date as 1862 – which would make him nineteen when the old Tsar was assassinated, not twenty-two. He knows, and he’s letting me know that he knows. I’ve known him for thirty years or more. In all that time he has only ever signed about half a dozen editorials. When he signs one it’s a mark of the importance he attaches to the issue and it inevitably means he’s talking to just one person – the editorial becomes an open letter. All that’s missing is “Dear Winston”. He came to the briefing I gave only yesterday. A rare enough appearance in itself. He heard what I had to say, and then he went home and wrote his “Dear Winston” letter.’
Churchill uttered the words ‘Dear Winston’ with a dash of sarcasm, much as Americans used the phrase ‘Dear John’.
‘Prime Minister. I’m most frightfully sorry. But I’ve no idea how he found out.’
‘The American?’ McKendrick asked.
‘He’s been sent home, as requested. And he was as green about England as it’s possible to be. I shouldn’t think he’d even heard of Alex Troy. He’d be as likely to write to The Times as anything. The obvious but naive gesture. He was nothing if not naive.’
Churchill waved the argument away with his cigar hand, a trail of pungent smoke filling the air.
‘We’re not here to dissect the corpse, Reggie. We’re here to decide what needs to be done.’
Reggie was silent in the face of this. McKendrick’s look told him to stay that way.
Churchill inhaled deeply, blew a smoke ring or two at the ceiling.
‘And I think there is only one thing to be done.’
He blew another smoke ring, head well back puffing out a perfect O. Reggie watched it float up to the ceiling, feeling as though he was on the carpet in front of the world’s most eccentric headmaster.
‘We shall take Alex at his word. We shall tell Stalin just one more time. He won’t believe us, but we shall tell him just the same.’