THE NARRATOR IN WILLIAM Morris’s News From Nowhere awakes in London to find that summer has at last arrived. The air smells sweeter as he wanders the streets, half in a daze. The Thames runs cleaner, and the buildings along its banks have been transformed into glorious works of art. The people wear bright costumes, and smile at each other as they go about their everyday tasks. There is no poverty. Everywhere, there are pretty houses set amid fields: the rigid barrier between town and country has dissolved. Children camp in the Kensington Woods. The Houses of Parliament have been turned into a vegetable market.
A full century and a half before Morris predicted, as I gaze down from an airship droning high above the stately parks and teeming streets and the sun-flecked river, his dream of Nowhere has come true. Even the old landmarks look remade in this vision of London. Truly, I think as I sip my chattering glass of iced gin, this city has never looked lovelier. The Adelphi Theatre. Cleopatra’s Needle. The sightseeing boats that thread their wakes across the Thames. The trams like insects as they move over Blackfriars with their shining beetle backs, their raised antenna…
The aspidistra beside me nods in agreement and we tilt back over London towards the westering sun, but the other passengers aboard The Queen of Air and Darkness are subdued as the gondola sways. Most are sitting as far away as possible from the airship’s windows. The beautiful second wife of a Modernist Zulu chief is covering her eyes, and the Chief Executive of Northumberland County Council is the colour of Christine and Barbara Cumbernald on the drive back from Penrhos Park. The Rolls Royce engines change tone as we tilt on some stray zephyr over Vauxhall. The wires tense and sing. For the Director of the Tate Gallery, as she moans and buries her face into a sick bag, it is already too late.
The engines rise to a piercing roar as the Queen sinks down through the skies and across the flashing lakes and lidos of Hyde Park, and pram-pushing mothers shade their eyes to look up. Eventually, after much tilting and squealing of airbags, the airship is safely moored to a huge gantry, and we are escorted along a wobbling tunnel to the lift that bears us to the ground. There, a bus sponsored by Cozy Stoves and Oxo awaits to take us along Park Lane, Resolution Hill and the Mall. This autumn day still feels balmily warm, trapped with city heat as I climb, my limbs easy from the gin and the tablets, to the bus’s open top.
We are slowed by the traffic of trams, taxis, Bristols, Ladybirds. The London pavements, too, bustle with businessmen, sightseers, shoppers. The air smells of diesel, cigarettes, frying onions. The lenses of a Pathé News camera follow us from the corner of Oxford Street and Portland Place. It would be rude not to smile and wave. Who knows, a darker thought nudges me, this image of the killer’s face may be the one that makes it into history. From further down the bus, I can hear Father Phelan effing and blinding. A comic-turn Irish priest of the kind you get in Ealing B-film comedies—the only kind of Irishman, in fact, that you’re likely to see on mainland Britain—Father Phelan supposedly coached John Arthur in boxing after the War, although that’s the one thing he won’t talk about. Our bus turns into the wide new architecture of Charing Cross Road. Then Trafalgar Square. A pigeon on each shoulder, Nelson stands huffily on his pedestal. Vast, sheer, the Victory Spire at the end of Park Lane looks like some Jules Verne rocket, or a new secret weapon. Compared with all of this, and even cleaned of all the grime and bird mess, the great government offices along Whitehall are solid and sombre. Their Victorian arches seem to frown; reluctant participants in this Summer Isles dream. Yet they, too, radiate power. From beneath them, it is said, tunnels, offices and air raid shelters fan out across this whole city.
To our right lies Downing Street. Even as we watch, the gates slide open on electric hinges. Out rolls a black Rover 3 Litre with Austin police patrol cars ahead and behind. There are no bells, no flashing lights. As the cars turn up Whitehall—perhaps towards New Buckingham Palace—I glimpse John Arthur’s face, absorbed in thought as he stares from the Rover’s plain unsmoked glass. My heart freezes. For a moment, even Father Phelan is dumbstruck.
Our bus crosses the new Waterloo Bridge. Ahead on the South Bank, easily dwarfing the old County Hall where John Arthur made his first lunge at power, lies the National Theatre, the Empire Exhibition Centre, our own New Dorchester Hotel. Wrought shamelessly of glass, steel girders, concrete, these buildings are massive, slope-shouldered, aspirational. After years of semi-classical drifting, Greater British architecture has found its true voice. There are hints of Venetian Palaces, pagan ruins—something Mayan, even; the sea-dipped relics of a lost civilisation. But above all, the buildings on the south bank of the Thames look like nothing more than a brace of art nouveau wardrobes.
The buses pull in at the New Dorchester’s entrance through the dust of the work on the new Underground. A loud-hailer calls out incoherent instructions as we minor dignitaries mill about on the marble paving. Slowly, muttering in several languages, we shuffle through the revolving doors. Hugh Reeve-Ellis, the Under Secretary who’s in charge of us here, maintains his usual weary air. Once one of his underlings has retrieved my forgotten walking stick from the bus, he lays a moth-like hand on my shoulder and steers me across the New Dorchester’s vast main atrium where fountains burble, Elgar’s Chanson De Nuit plays from hidden loudspeakers and high, high above, beyond the recessed galleries, bare-breasted caryatids raise their arms to support the arches of the glass-domed roof like the colliding prows of a dozen ships.
“Two days before the big day now, Brook. About time we had that little chat…”
I nod without enthusiasm, although I know Reeve-Ellis is making a point of talking privately with all the Trafalgar Celebration guests he’s responsible for. He leads me past the hotel souvenir shop. There, beside a door marked NO ADMITTANCE, a plump Police constable T3308 lounges on a chair, his holstered pistol hanging between his legs like a cock. I’ve yet to fathom what dictates whether a particular job should be done by the Metropolitan Police, the regular army or the KSG. He stands up as we approach.
“Good day for the weather sir?”
“Well… You know…” Reeve-Ellis mutters dismissively as the door closes solidly behind us. My skin prickles, but along each side of the corridor beyond lie rooms from which typewriters crackle, phones ring, filing cabinets drawers boom open and shut; it’s the very picture of bureaucratic ordinariness. People rush up to Reeve-Ellis. He snaps at them. They rush away again. There’s an air of controlled crisis.
“So this is where everything gets done?”
“I wish it was…” Reeve-Ellis shows me into a temporary office and shuts the door. “’Fraid everything’s a mess here,” he says as he removes his jacket and shrugs on a baggy grey cardigan. “Been meaning to ask, by the way. You don’t remember Pim Wargrove?”
“I’m afraid not.”
“Before your time at the Varsity, I suppose…” His little moustache bristles. He attempts a smile.
I know already that Reeve-Ellis is a Balliol man, 1909 intake, that he went straight into Whitehall, and was working in Cabinet Office when Lloyd George resigned. So he’s seen it all, has Reeve-Ellis, has toiled under every shade of administration. A generalist through and through, he takes Modernism in his stride. He’s near the end of his career now, seconded for the term of the Trafalgar Celebrations from his usual job supervising prison budgets at the Home Office. You get the impression he wishes he wasn’t.
“So. Everything just the way you expected it to be?”
“I had no idea what to expect.”
“Good. Good.” He studies me. Pale and brittle, he’s much easier to imagine dead than Cumbernald—in fact, he seems half-way there already. “So I suppose Monday evening’s the big event for you…”
“I’ve been meaning to ask. Exactly how—”
“—You’ll be up in the VIP seats for the afternoon parade up the Mall. Have to miss the end of that, though, I’m afraid, if we’re going to get you across to Downing Street in time.” He smiles. “Don’t look so worried. The streets will be cleared.”
“So there’ll be—what?—about twenty or so people in the gardens at Number Ten. And I suppose some… Staff?”
“That’s about right. It’s an informal occasion.”
“Is there anything I need to bring?”
“Just yourself will do.”
We drift into silence for a moment. A phone bings.
“What if it rains?”
“We’re a lucky country, Brook. It won’t rain—and there are contingency plans, anyway, if it does. Not many of us get the chance to meet the PM. Least of all to be able to call him an old friend. He’s very keen, so I’m told by the people who actually know about these things. Of course, I’m just the conduit…”
He smiles again.
“And I can assure you that when the PM’s keen for something to happen, it happens. As I say, keep a space in your diary for six o-clock, Monday. Everything has been arranged. Don’t worry about protocol or what suit to wear—JA’s the least bothered person about that kind of thing you could possibly imagine.”
“I do have a new suit, actually,” I say. “It was delivered to me this morning from Hawkes on Saville Row.”
I’m in my usual old slacks and tweeds at the moment, so Reeve-Ellis can’t help but look a little relieved. Hand-tailored, crisp and smelling of starch and cool unadulterated newness, the thing cost me a fortune, and feels quite different to any clothing I’ve ever worn. Just as I requested, the jacket has been tailored with an especially strong and deep inner left-side pocket. The cut is so good you’d never know it was there.
In my room, I disentangle my feet from my shoes and gobble my tablets. A fresh Evening Standard lies on the marble table. FRANCE AND BRITAIN CLASH OVER EGYPT. You can feel the news hotting up as autumn slowly cools, although this is probably just another Embassy bombing. The French have their own right wing ultra-nationalist government now that Blum’s been succeeded by De Gaulle, although it seems a poor shadow of our own Modernism.
I flop down on the huge oval bed and gaze up at the nymphs and seashells on the ceiling. My throat aches. My heart hammers. Beyond that, everything is eerily silent. Just the buzz of the air-conditioning, the maritime bustle of the evening river softened to a whisper by the thick double glazing of my balcony doors.
Lying here, I can summon anything I want just by pressing the lines of brass buttons above the mahogany headboard. I can call Room Service. I can make the lights brighten. There are bakelite angels, deep fur rugs, soft leather chairs, a shrine-like corner which houses a huge television set, and an ornate stained-glass frieze depicting Saint George Resting In A Forest set into the far wall.
I press a button marked MUSIC. An orchestra swells. The one beside it is CURTAINS, and causes red velvet to whisper across my balcony windows. I lie there as the music flows, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Then, sitting up, crossing my room, I slide back the shining teak doors that hide my suitcase and few clothes.
There was an awkward moment on my arrival when the porter virtually insisted on unpacking for me. Still, I managed to dissuade him; I was probably helped by the look of this old suitcase. It needs straps now just to keep it together. Moving as much by touch as sight in this gloom, I lift it out from the wardrobe, open the lid and slide my hand into the bottom’s flabby lining, feeling for the gnarled stock of the pistol.
I sit down on the bed with it gripped in my hands, conscious of the weight of the metal, the pull of history, gravity, fate. Then—now seems as good a time as any—I begin to load it from a crumpled and faintly lavender-smelling handkerchief with my five remaining bullets. I tested the others from close range against a dead stump late one evening in Readon Woods when the very stars seemed to shrink back and the trees in the clearing rustled in surprise at each loud sound. Now, each bullet makes a tiny but purposeful click as I slide it home. The pistol still smells faintly of oil and of Walter’s Bracken’s shed. Is this what death smells like? Is death so clean? I spin the cylinder, ease back the hammer, then lock it home.
Later, unable to rest, I put on my coat, take the lift and head out into the sprawling London night. The traffic roars by as I cross Westminster Bridge and pass the old Houses of Parliament; floodlit, not even the vegetable market that Morris envisaged, but a lesser stopover on London’s ever-expanding tourist circuit, they look no more real now than the reflection that slides and breaks in the Thames. The strung lights along the Embankment twinkle as I stride at my best walking stick-assisted pace. People are running, amazingly enough, dressed up like athletes in shorts and vests, and there are accordionists and street vendors, floating restaurants, arm in arm lovers, wandering tourists. I, as ever, turn along darker ways. Beside Blackfriars, the arches remain litter-strewn, sootily furred, and ghosts of old newspapers rise on the air as a train clanks overhead, drawing up scents of decay. A footstep scuffs amid the unlit backs of buildings. A shadow retreats. But I’m safe here in this new country that I find myself in. There are no tramps and perverts left to bother me.
I visit a bar along Fleet Street, which has a blurry and expectant air as it waits for the weary journalists to arrive once their papers have been put to bed. Drinking several pints of Fuller’s expensive and overrated ale, I try to summon the energy for the long walk back to the New Dorchester, or at least to find the nearest Underground or taxi rank. Back in central London after an age, I can’t help feeling a twinge of my old erotic longing. It was always at its strongest in me at the times like this when sex was only a chance, an unfathomed possibility. It was really more about simply being here; about being a stranger. The line of a knuckle; the curve of a jaw; a dark hint of eyelash; grey eyes; a glimpsed line of belly hair. I could love people more easily if they came broken up into smaller packages.
The door bursts open. Loud and beery from the all places they’ve already visited, a group of lads rush in from the night. I study their close-cropped necks and the workings of their shoulders as they crowd close to the bar. Linking arms, they begin a jokey chorus of Happy Birthday To You, and I find that something in my head is singing also, grinding and buzzing in my ears like some huge engine in the way that the world sometimes does if I’ve had either too many or too few tablets.
Suddenly, it comes back to me. I’m standing in another London pub, depressed and sore after having staggered through the nettles of a patch of wasteground from my assailant-lover. I can’t get a drink, and there’s something odd about the atmosphere. Violent, even. Then there’s a stir in a corner. A few voices are raised jokingly in song—Happy Birthday To You—before a man breaks from them. He’s good-looking and still seems youthful, although he’s starting to grey and there are lines around his eyes. He climbs up onto the bar—jumps, really. He smiles, raises his hands…
Yes, now I remember. Now, I understand why he’s invited me. That night at the Cottage Spring when I first saw John Arthur will, I realise, lie exactly 15 years into history in two days’ time.
I thought I’d already been through all the possible stages of grieving for my Francis by then. I’d been angry. Almost suicidally miserable. I’d been frantically busy—and near-comatose with self-pity. Eventually, just as one grows weary even of weariness on the longest of journeys, I’d come to imagine that my life was no longer under his shadow.
But just knowing how I looked to him as I stood in that pub—the way he almost smiled and turned away—made me realise that everything about me was still Francis, Francis, Francis. What, otherwise, was I doing in London in the first place, if not trying to wipe out my love for him?
The first ripples of knowing that Francis was still alive brought a fierce self-questioning. Alone, unloved, I saw my life for the shambles it was. After that, I became desperately angry. Angry with him—this John Arthur who stood up in the Cottage Spring—for living. Angry with Francis for choosing to die. For the first time in my life, I was even angry with history itself.
After that, I came to doubt my own sanity. Had I really seen Francis? Had he ever died? Had I ever really been in love with him? And one man can easily look very much like another—especially after so many years.
Predictably for me, it all soon became a matter of research. Hence a burrowing in the Lichfield City Council records. Hence a sudden interest in London East End politics. But, even in 1925, John Arthur was no longer a totally obscure figure, and I was soon saved the trouble of having to delve through my specially-ordered copies of National Rights! and The Spitalfields Chronicle to follow his activities. As if my finding him conferred some form of blessing, John Arthur started getting mentions in the national press.
Politics was still an alien sport to me. At that time, apart from the chance it gave me to study John Arthur’s face in the newspapers and follow the greying of his hair, Churchill’s use of right wing groups such as Saint George’s Men to help break the long succession of strikes didn’t seem especially significant. On the back of this, though, John Arthur’s was one of several names to emerge into the wider acres of political debate. Many of the others are now also major figures, or have died in mysterious or shameful circumstances. But John Arthur was always ahead of the rest. His gaze was straight. His voice came across clearly, honestly. The press and the radio and the cinema adored him for his young face, the grey hair, those penetrating blue eyes, the mixture of youth and maturity that he presented. With his accent, his manners, he seemed both educated and working class: no wonder I’d loved him. In an age of lost certainties, he made good copy. And he had a knack of simply stating the obvious—that Britain was poor, that we were shamed by the loss of Ireland and Empire—that most politicians seem to lack. After the next year or so, when Churchill had succeeded in curbing the powers of the unions and stabilising the economy, he no longer needed the likes of John Arthur’s shabby troops, and stated so publicly. No doubt he thought they would sink back into the mire from which he had raised them.
I didn’t believe John Arthur would survive this wilderness period, either. He’d been a talking point of sorts, but few people had taken very much notice of what he actually said, and even fewer embraced it. When he led the remnants of his renamed Empire Alliance on a march to take County Hall in the spring of 1927, it seemed as if this one rash act had finally burst what little remained of Britain’s Fascist bubble.
The trial for sedition that followed was John Arthur’s turning point. He used it as a platform to expose the snobbish barristers, the senile judges, the callow press; all the rottenness at the heart of Britain. Was I urging him on, clapping and cheering like that jury? I suppose I was—the part of me, anyway, that didn’t fantasise about a defeated and powerless John Arthur becoming Francis Eveleigh again, returning to Lichfield in anonymity and resuming the life that he and I had lost before it even began. Unlike William Arkwright, Peter Harrison and the soon-to-be rising star of Jim Toller, John Arthur was never openly racist or intolerant. He criticised De Valera’s government, but not the Irish. He condemned crime—but then, who didn’t? He spoke sadly but hopefully about the problems of those who, for one reason or another, found it impossible to fit into British society. Gypsies. Deviants. Jews. The mentally subnormal. The criminally insane—and homosexuals. The more enlightened hoped that this was merely an acknowledgement of the country’s problems. The naive, stupid and violent found justification for all their existing prejudices.
After his triumphant acquittal, John Arthur was fully established as a major public figure. His views were sought on every issue, his speeches were reported verbatim in the press. Many people still found him objectionable—a peddler of poorly-concealed hate and ludicrously simple solutions—but even they were talking about him. His carefully-cultured background, the wanderings, the War record, the boxing, the thuggery and unemployment of the East End, presented, like the rest of the man, so many facets that you could select the one you preferred and cling to it whilst ignoring the rest. And there was always the chance that anyone who spoke too openly against him would find their house burnt down, or fail to notice an oncoming lorry.
In the winter of 1927, John Arthur stood at a by-election in Nottinghamshire as the first-ever Empire Alliance candidate. He won easily against the usual Tory and Labour nobodies. His maiden speech in Parliament was awaited breathlessly, and the large turn-out of communist and socialist demonstrators on the streets of London only added to the sense of occasion. Nowadays, it would be broadcast live on television and radio. As things were then, I only read the full text next morning. I can well remember that moment when I picked up my copies of the Times, Telegraph, Mirror, Express and Sketch from my doormat and studied the similar headlines, the similar photos of John Arthur, and felt the usual giddy churning in my belly.
Appropriately enough, I think it was the Sketch that ran a smaller by-line asking WHO IS GEOFFREY BROOK? I could have posed the same question myself until I read the article, which quoted an aside in John Arthur’s speech about how he’d briefly attended school in Burntwood, Lichfield, where he’d been much influenced by a teacher named Geoffrey Brook. After all, I was a distant memory to him; a lonely man on whom he’d taken pity in exchange for a free holiday just before the War. There was no reason why, in generously giving me a raft to cling to in my rapidly-sinking life, he should exactly remember my name. Sometimes even now, when I’m awake in the darkest corners of the night, I’m tormented by the possibility that there is a real Geoffrey Brook still out there waiting to claim my life, and that I am nothing but an impostor.
Over the next few days, when the press somehow discovered my address, I had my own few moments of fame. They called me Geoffrey, and it seemed churlish to correct them when they were so nearly right. Would it have made any difference if I had announced from my doorstep that, whilst I knew little enough about this man who called himself John Arthur, he reminded me markedly of someone else with whom I had once had a homosexual affair? Other than betraying a trust and guaranteeing my death in some freak accident, I doubt it.
The next year, 1928, whilst John Arthur was joined by another 10 EA MPs at the spring General Election, and Churchill continued about the dogged business of keeping himself in power, the editor of the Daily Sketch approached me about writing a weekly column, although I always thought of the money and satisfaction that came from being a populariser of history as a last gift from my Francis. At last, I felt like someone who mattered. My life, much as his own had been, was remade.
Churchill lasted until October 1929 and the Wall Street Crash, when Britain became the world leader in the 1930s Depression. Churchill resigned after all the usual crises and gambled on calling another General Election. This time he didn’t get back in. The Empire Alliance returned with 30 MPs, Ramsey MacDonald became Prime Minister of a Government of National Unity whilst Oswald Mosley attempted to reunite Labour before giving up entirely and joining the EA six months later, thus forcing another General Election. John Arthur travelled from constituency to constituency by Vickers aeroplane, and such was the dangerous glamour of the EA by then that even his fat deputy George Arkwright became a vote winner with his trademark Homburg hat, his down-to-earth manner. Uniformed EA members marched in the streets of all the big towns, and noted names as people emerged from polling stations. The EA won seventy seats. Amid an atmosphere of increasing crisis—unemployment, means tests, riots and starvation, open revolt in India, popular support for Unionist terrorist attacks in Ireland—John Arthur refused new Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s offer of a post in his Cabinet.
Chamberlain’s get-tough policy in India only served to increase the bloodshed, and the rest of the Empire was also starting to fray. A new Egyptian Government, encouraged by the French, nationalised the Suez Canal. In Britain, a State of Emergency was declared. Welsh and Scottish nationalists began to talk of independence. The country was in a state of collapse.
Chamberlain was probably right in imagining that Britain would be torn apart by another pointless General Election. He was running out of options, but there remained one figure that the great mass public still seemed to believe in. Not really a politician at all, it was true, and head of an organisation that had never properly disowned violence. But controllable, surely; a useful figurehead to keep the prols happy and the bully boys at bay whilst the real brains got on with sorting out the mess that the country was in. It was thus without fuss or bloodshed, in a deal in which he seemingly played no part, that John Arthur was finally summoned to Number 10 and offered the only Cabinet post that he had said he would ever consider accepting.
Just after six o-clock on the chilly evening of November 10 1932, John Arthur emerged from that famous black door to the clink of flashbulbs. In those days, traffic was still allowed along Downing Street, and he had to check left and right before he crossed over and raised his arms and smiled slightly as he looked about him like someone who is expecting to awake at any moment from a pleasant but puzzling dream.
He made to open his mouth, then hesitated, waiting for the journalists to quieten, for the expectant silence to grow. He muttered something about wishing he’d combed his hair. There was laughter, again quickly stilled. Then he said that he’d be heading off to Buckingham Palace in a few minutes, where he planned to seek King George’s advice about forming Greater Britain’s first Modernist Government…
Just by saying this, he’d probably already broken the protocols he’d agreed with Chamberlain. There was no talk of balances and coalitions. No mention of negotiations with other parties. But it didn’t matter now. Everything would soon be changed. John Arthur was in power.