THE SOUND OF A SHIP’S HORN, ECHOING UNCANNILY through the peaceful English countryside, jolted Edgar at the car wheel. It conjured up images of an ice-strewn sea, of malevolent shapes looming in the fog. Then an open-top Crossley, honking loudly, passed him on his right, its passengers laughing gaily, and the notion was dispelled. He watched the vehicle vanish off into the distance, and with a somewhat forlorn sigh returned to his uneasy thoughts.
It was the summer of 1933 and, being of sound mind and sound body, if suffering somewhat of a nervous disposition brought about in the aftermath of a doomed love affair, from which he was still recovering, the young Edgar Waverley (as he now went by that name), twenty-one and not unhandsome, had accepted an invitation extended by an Oxford friend to spend a long weekend in the luxurious confines of Feebes Manor.
The manor, in the Devon countryside, was renowned far and wide as an architectural marvel, extensively rebuilt and renovated in the neo-Gothic style by the well-known philanthropist, Sir Edward Feebes, in the 1870s. A deeply devout man, it was said, Sir Edward followed the teachings of the Oxford Movement, to whom the Gothic was not only, as Augustus Pugin wrote, ‘a return to the faith and the social structures of the Middle Ages’, but in fact the only style suitable for Christian worship. The family had made its money some time past in the lucrative guano trade in South America, from which it got out just in time before its inevitable collapse. It had since spread out into banking, shipping and insurance; though it had reached an apex of wealth during the Great War, when it was singularly and spectacularly successful in the munitions trade.
An invitation to Feebes Manor, therefore, was a much coveted social engagement, and Edgar, though in his private thoughts about wealth was increasingly leaning towards the somewhat heretical teachings of Engels and Marx, was acutely aware of its significance. It would be an opportunity to meet and mingle with some of the finest in the land and in the wider Empire, those of a high social standing – people, in other words, who could help advance one’s career. Though he was born a Savage, and comfortably wealthy, his father, John, died shortly after Edgar was born, in circumstances never entirely explained, and following the collapse of his financial dealings. Edgar’s mother, Lily, eventually remarried, to the dependable and not unkind James Waverley, a man of many good qualities but not, unfortunately, a man of great affluence. Edgar had won his place in Oxford, but it was expected that he would make his own way in the world henceforth. A weekend at Feebes Manor should go, he felt certain, towards assisting in that course of action, should he but play his cards right.
The question of his future was much on Edgar’s mind just then. He was in his final year in Oxford, and reading History, which provides great insight into the past but offers little immediate reward going forwards. A job in the Civil Service, perhaps in the Foreign Office – something to do with the management of Britain’s imperial domains. A posting in the Near East might suit him, he thought. He had spent some time in Egypt the previous school break, helping on an archaeological dig in Abu Simbel, under Mallowan, then went by felucca down the Nile to Cairo. He found the city exciting, and when the hot days settled into warm nights he frequented the cafés and bars where expatriates from all across the world met to conduct business. He found that he could blend in; that people liked him, on the whole; and that if he listened quietly he could hear more, perhaps, than was anticipated he would. Later, on his return to Oxford, he was approached one grey morning by a man in a trilby hat as he sat drinking coffee alone at the Cadena. The man pulled up a chair and sat down without being invited. He placed his hat on his lap and regarded Edgar with some evident interest. Edgar watched him back, curious and unwilling to be rude. The man reached for a pouch of tobacco and a pipe. For a moment he paused.
‘You do not smoke?’ he said.
‘No,’ Edgar said.
The man nodded. He lit his pipe and puffed out smoke with a contented air, and put away his pouch of tobacco.
‘Drink?’ he said.
‘Socially.’
The man nodded again.
‘Coffee, though, of course,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
The man signalled the waiter, who hurried over with a cup already prepared. They knew this man here, Edgar thought.
‘Thank you, Rudolph,’ the man said.
Edgar waited. The man took a sip of coffee, nodded to himself, and put down the cup.
‘Any other vices?’ he said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘Everyone has vices,’ the man said. ‘The question is, what are yours?’
Edgar shrugged. He tried to hide his discomfort.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
The man smiled. He drew in smoke. Exhaled. Took a sip of coffee.
‘I understand you have only recently come back from Cairo,’ he said.
Edgar considered the situation he found himself in. The pieces were fitting together rapidly. He had met one man like this in Cairo, a gregarious Englishman, who said he was with the Joint Committee of Cotton Trade Organisations, whatever that was. He bought everyone drinks but never got drunk. He laughed at everyone’s jokes but watched everything without any humour in his shrewd eyes. He had noticed Edgar watching him one evening, laughed, and said, ‘You’re a dark horse, Edgar,’ and left shortly after. Edgar had almost forgotten him, until now.
‘Yes,’ Edgar said.
‘You met many interesting people?’ the man said. He brushed ash from the brim of his trilby.
‘I suppose,’ Edgar said.
‘Meet any Germans?’
‘A few.’
They were all over Cairo, the Germans. The old ones, with their Prussian eagles, and the new ones with the swastikas.
‘Baron von Bolschwing,’ the man said. ‘Ring a bell?’
Edgar nodded.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I met him.’
The man leaned across now. His eyes were harder somehow.
‘Tell me about him,’ he said.
So Edgar did. He did not know von Bolschwing well, had not liked the man, but observed him. He had been floating around in the same social circles as Edgar, one of the new Nazis, what Edgar heard one of the others refer to contemptuously as May Lilies.
‘He was on his way to Palestine, I think,’ he told the man now. He told him everything he knew and remembered, not embellishing, giving clear, concise reportage, the way he would write a history report.
The man in the trilby hat nodded thoughtfully when Edgar was done. He had taken no notes, but Edgar thought he remembered everything. He asked a couple of follow-up questions, then subsided. He rose abruptly, left exact change on the table to account for two coffees, and shook Edgar’s hand.
‘Thank you,’ he said.
With that he was gone. It had been a strange, momentary episode, and Edgar was all but certain that the man was from the Secret Service. He gripped the wheel of the car, concentrating on the dark road. He had packed evening and leisure wear, toiletries and a couple of volumes from Tacitus’s Historiae. He did not expect he would have much time to read. The car, a Hornet, wasn’t his. It was a loan from a close friend, the same one, in fact, who so badly affected Edgar’s current disposition, for only the previous night they had both agreed it was finally over between them. This was not the first love of Edgar’s life, nor, he thought, would it be his last. There was something wonderful about being in love, and a part of him, too, relished the secrecy that had to accompany a love of this nature, which could not be made public. Love, to Edgar, was a complex system of agreed-upon signals, of clandestine meetings and unseen departures. As Tacitus long ago observed, the illicit has an added charm.
And though Edgar knew that he must, surely, sooner or later fall in love again, a part of him grieved this final parting, for this friend was very dear to him, and perhaps in another life, another time, they would not have had to hide themselves from the world.
Nevertheless, Feebes Manor beckoned, and with it a weekend promising to be filled with delightful company and sparkling conversation, excellent food and wine and comfortable lodgings, which would make quite a change from his cramped college accommodation and otherwise frugal sustenance. And, whatever else, it was a chance to get away for a while, for which he was grateful.
The car handled well on the country road. The air smelled agreeably of summer, and in the distance birds called and brooks rushed, and trees rustled their rustly leaves. Tacitus, who had something to say about most things, was silent on the benefits or otherwise of nature. He was more concerned with power and its abuses, which was also much on Edgar’s mind. His father’s death, though he did not remember him, impacted him greatly. He was born rich, or so he was told. Then the riches went away, and he and Mother went through several homes, each shabbier than the last – the last being even without a servant. The union between Lily and the kindly Mr Waverley restored a semblance of normality the young Edgar much needed. Once more there were clean, pressed sheets, wood beside the fireplace, hot porridge and tea in the mornings, roast beef and potatoes for lunch. James Waverley worked as a junior solicitor in the City, specialising in the dull but dependable field of commercial contracts, of which there were plenty. When he took little Edgar with him into the offices, Edgar found himself in the company of men of power, of riches. Men who needed people like his adoptive father to set their agreements amongst themselves in ink and parchment. James Waverley, Edgar realised, had a proximity to power, but not power itself. It was wealth that ruled the City, and there were those who had money and those who worked for the men who did.
Mr Waverley – Father – saw no wrong in this arrangement. He was well-regarded, even liked, and provided for his family. If he was disappointed that Lily never gave him a child of his own he gave no sign of it. He treated Edgar kindly and raised him as his own.
It wasn’t, the young Edgar thought, fair that Father should be working for the rich, or that others should be poor, the way Edgar and Mother had been poor. Something did not sit right with him, though he found it difficult to put it into words.
There was church, of course, and the admonition that no man can serve two masters, those being God and Mammon. But the church was richly decorated and collected its worshippers’ offerings, which always included James Waverley’s tithe. He explained to Edgar that it was like a tax. Edgar asked what a tax was. James laughed and said a tax was the money one had to pay to the government so it could go about its business, and that taxes were as old as time and as inevitable as death itself. This led to a broader explanation of finance, which took in banks, inherited wealth and, inevitably, the importance of commercial contracts. Edgar did not quite understand all of what Father was telling him, but it seemed to him it boiled down to the basic notion that some people collected the money and other people paid it.
The question of fairness, Father explained, seldom if ever came into it. Being kind, he had left it unsaid that fairness was in essence a childish notion, but Edgar got a sense of it even so.
None of this was foremost in Edgar’s mind growing up, but it niggled. He was a quiet, watchful child, recognised that in himself and accepted it. He had few friends, but a few were all he felt he needed. He was not unhappy. He did well in his studies, was adored by his mother, spoiled by his father, and destined to the bar. It was a cause of some disappointment to Father when, on getting into Oxford, Edgar elected to read History instead.
But history taught him that there had always been rich and poor. Some men were kings and others were slaves. This was merely the nature of humanity, and it often made for exciting reading, in the comfort of the Bodleian and away from the bloodshed and horror that accompanied the acquisition of wealth. That this wasn’t fair seemed indeed a childish notion, one he still carried within him, but then he discovered the writings of Gaius, Fourier, Owen and Marx. The idea that others had found so exciting, of creating a new, more equitable society, Edgar found exciting too, almost exhilarating. And the men who set out to create such a new society, people like Lenin and then Stalin, were far from childish dreamers but men of action, not afraid to shed blood for the cause. There were others in Oxford at that time with similar notions and feelings as Edgar, students who formed communist circles and societies and the like. But Edgar avoided them, and did not share his emerging views with others. He was not committed one way or the other, anyway. There was too much of the English in him, he felt. Staid, respectable, he was a man who would make a capable administrator, not a fighter for workers’ rights.
The moon hung in the sky, the car drove as if by itself along the road, and then he beheld the stately home rising in the distance, its many turrets, chimneys, attic dormers and gables forming a jagged and curious skyline above the imposing building that squatted there in the darkness like a huge and somewhat hostile toad. The house was lit, and the electric lights did not so much dispel the Victorian gloom that clung to that edifice as somehow accented it, as though drawing the eye, and the mind that beheld it, to contemplate the vanity that riches can buy. Edgar felt quite nervous. Which was no doubt the intention. To approach here, the buildings whispered, you must yourself be powerful, moneyed, well-connected. The Feebeses had become so rich off guano that Edward Feebes’s descendants could purchase their way into peerage. Now Henry, 1st Baron Feebes, sat as MP in London, where he was also chairman of Feebes Bank. His father, Admiral of the Fleet Edmund Feebes, a corpulent and amorous man, died in service in the Great War, not so much going down with his ship as going down on a Parisian prostitute, or so rumour went. Edgar drove to the gates, which were open, the name Feebes inscribed upon them in elaborate wrought-iron and the requisite Gothic typeface. He thought somewhat uneasily of the gold watch in his pocket, which similarly, though less elaborately, had that same name engraved upon it. How it came into his possession he wasn’t sure. An old family heirloom, Mother told him. A dear friend of hers had wanted him to have it.
It was a cheap watch. Edgar had had it appraised. Still, he kept it, and kept it wound and showing the correct time. Why, he couldn’t quite say. Mother had seemed quite emotional when she gave it to him, just before he went to Oxford. He smiled fondly when he thought of Mother.
He drove slowly through the gates and into the grounds.