A Question of Guilt

SIR ELIOT BECKETT VC KBE MD FRCP.

Gallantry rightly takes precedence on brains, he thought.

'Isn't your wife having dinner?' asked Lord Dawson of Penn, as Eliot sat beside him.

'Nancy's with the Queen.'

'Excellent. I'm sure she'll steady the Queen's nerves better than any dose I could prescribe.'

Eliot reached for the menu in its silver clip with the royal arms. Potato soup, turbot and roast mutton. He supposed one man's death was no reason for another going without his dinner.

Eliot Beckett was 53, tall and lean, the strong bones of his face a memorial to youthful good looks. He brilliantined his thick dark hair, and trimmed his moustache like Ronald Colman's. Noticing the grandfather clock, he glanced automatically at his wristwatch. 'Why should the time at Sandringham be half an hour faster than the rest of the world?'

'For punctuality at King Edward VII's shooting parties,' Dawson told him.

'King Edward the Seventh! But he hasn't shot for twenty-five years, unless over the Elysian fields.'

'Ah! From royal whim to unshakable tradition is an easy step in this country.'

Eliot was new to Sandringham. The 11,000 acre estate on the marshy north Norfolk coast against the Wash had cost the former King Edward a quarter of a million pounds. The long, low redbrick house could never contain the exuberant generosity of his hospitality. As a young doctor with an empty pocket, a full heart, low prospects and high principles, Eliot had warmed himself agreeably with indignation at the dozen royal balls there a season, the elaborate shooting of ten thousand pheasants, the "King's Special" steaming daily from London, loaded with guests in their tweeds and furs, with their guns and dogs, their leather luggage polished like saddles by their packs of servants.

In York cottage beyond the lake, a villa of suburban glumness overwhelmed by shrubbery, the King's son George played bluff naval officer turned blunt squire and waited for the throne. Now King George V, a quarter of a century later, lay comatose over their heads, his quitting the world only another regal formality.

'The King went downhill very rapidly this afternoon.' Eliot refused wine from the tail-coated footman.

'That Privy Council meeting this morning severely taxed him,' said Dawson. 'Yet it was nothing but a tragic pantomime. The King sat in his dressing-gown, leaning on a bed-table across an armchair. He could make only a couple of "Xs" for his signature.'

Dawson was the only medical man among 400-odd politicians sworn as a Privy Councillor. He seems to collect honours as an actress compliments, Eliot thought. Dawson had a taut face, straight eyebrows and a bushy moustache. He was genial, sensitive, ambitious and impatient. As the King's physician, he had penetrated British consciousness like airwoman Amy Johnson or cricketer Jack Hobbs. His name footed the brief handwritten bulletins policemen hung on Buckingham Palace railings when the King was near death before, in 1928. He was the man the newspapers telephoned for a doctor's view on the Modern Girl, the Motor Age or Whither Europe? Eliot heard that the King chose Dawson as his doctor because he never fussed and was good with dogs and horses.

'Why hold the meeting at all?' asked Eliot.

'Ramsay MacDonald insisted. He wanted a Council of State to hold power during the King's incapacity. As in 1928. MacDonald's a terribly nervy fellow, you know.'

'Isn't the King's death a favourite moment for revolution? Lord Wigram can tell us.'

On Eliot's right was a straight-backed, smooth-faced man with a clipped moustache, a former Bengal Lancer in his mid-sixties. He wore a starched shirt and dinner-jacket. A dying King created difficulties of convention-no gentleman in the 1930s dined in a lounge suit, but doctors could hardly attend the sickbed as though dressed for the play. Eliot and Dawson retained their professional uniform of morning coats, striped trousers and wing collars.

'Yes, indeed,' said Wigram, the King's private secretary. He could talk of constitutional subtleties like the King's butler of the wines in his cellar. 'On the death of King Edward, a troop of Life Guards was under orders at Albany Street Barracks, ready to be turned out within five minutes of a trumpet call.'

'Perhaps I deserved their attentions?' suggested Eliot. 'Remember, I was a bolshevik. I'd probably have stood cheering, if we'd cut the hedonistic old gentleman's head off in Whitehall like Charles the First's.'

'You cannot make our flesh creep,' Dawson chaffed him. 'Even Mr Pickwick's Fat Boy had to grow up. Wigram, we shall need to compose a bulletin.'

'Yes. I looked out the final one on King Edward in 1910.' Wigram efficiently produced a folded sheet from his inside pocket.

'I know what it says. I signed it,' Dawson reminded him. "His Majesty's condition is now critical" was stark enough for the morning papers. Now we have the wireless. The BBC will want something to put on the air between nine and ten, when people start going to bed. We must send a message which will touch their hearts.'

Dawson reached for the menu card in its clip, and wrote quickly on the back-

_The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close._

Wigram nodded appreciatively. Eliot wondered how early in his patient's illness Dawson had composed the phrase.

'I'll take it to the Queen at once, then have it telephoned to Portland Place.' Dawson rose.

'I'll come with you,' said Eliot, abandoning his fish. 'I'm not hungry.'

The remaining men at the table also stood. Lady Beckett had entered the dining-room.

Nancy Beckett was better known than Eliot in Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Manhattan. Her social star had twinkled before cultivating Americans in London society had moved from the freakish to the smart. Her hair was cut square and loose like Greta Garbo's, and had never been a richer shade of auburn. She had large green eyes and a pert nose. Her pale skin, as clear as a silk mask, was submerged regularly under mud-packs in Bond Street. Her figure represented a slim-waisted trophy for self-discipline. She wore a black silk calf-length dress, and in deference to the melancholy evening no jewellery except a diamond the size of a humbug.

She exchanged a smile with her husband. Her place was next to Lady Evesham, a lady-in-waiting with pale grey hair, which Nancy suspected she would have loved to peroxide.

'I was so thrilled at Sir Eliot's VC,' Lady Evesham began. 'I was a VAD nurse during the war, you know, at the base hospital at Wimereux-the medical men were terrible old dug-outs. It was such a boost for our morale-a doctor at the front winning the supreme decoration. That terrible March of 1918! Ludendorff taking us completely by surprise on the Somme, poor Hubert Gough sacked for retreating, the Germans expected in the Channel ports any day, and Douglas Haig's wonderful order about "Our backs to the wall."'

Nancy was aware that the war had been conducted for Britain largely by members of Lady Evesham's own family.

'You must have always known Sir Eliot a brave man?' Lady Evesham added.

'I'm afraid I'd no chance to tell. You see, he was a conscientious objector until the middle of the war.' Lady Evesham looked aghast. 'When conscription came in 1916, my husband had the choice of going either into the army or into jail. And Eliot is simply a man who develops wholehearted enthusiasm for anything he happens to find himself doing. Pacifists are the fiercest of people,' Nancy confided, 'If Bertrand Russell had provided himself with a machine-gun instead of a typewriter, there wouldn't be room on his chest for medals.'

Eliot and Dawson were walking upstairs together. The Queen was with the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York and Kent. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had been packed back to Windsor, where their mother the Duchess of York was recovering from pneumonia, complicating flu caught in that winter's savage epidemic. The Duke of Gloucester was in Buckingham Palace with a sore throat. The three Privy Councillors-Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon-had the unsought adventure of a flight back to London that chilly, bright afternoon. The Prince of Wales' offer of his private plane from nearby Bircham Newton aerodrome was unrefusable. Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, past seventy, gaitered and aproned, bald and sharp-nosed, fonder of Christians if they were kings, had arrived with vulturish timing.

Eliot wondered if Dawson resented Nancy as well being invited to Sandringham, but decided him too seasoned, too secure a courtier. Eliot had been summoned from their home in Kent by telephone at three on the Sunday morning. Dawson recognized that Eliot knew more about the heart than himself, and the King's was starting to fail. He almost killed the old boy in 1928, Eliot reflected, missing a pocket of pus hidden behind the lung until almost too late. Everyone had heard how he failed his exams as a student at the London Hospital. Dawson's skill was stagemanager of the sickbed, the impressario of dramatic illness.

'I read your _Health of Nations_ when it was published after the war,' Dawson said politely.

'I'd toned it down enormously. A young man can do his future severer damage by publishing a book than indulging his irresponsibility with racehorses and women.'

'No man is one person, but a succession,' Dawson ruminated. 'We're like the portrait-gallery of wicked ancestors in Ruddigore, always liable to step from their frames and haunt the latest version. I'd trimmed my own views, when I reported to the Government on our medical services in 1920. But a State health scheme will come one day, be sure of it.'

'It's unthinkable to the medical profession.'

'The unthinkable is often inevitable. The death of kings is more certain than the birth of princes.'

Eliot admitted, 'I suppose it was unthinkable to kill germs with mouldy bread, when I tried in 1910. Now Professor Fleming at St Mary's has proved me right. He's even purified the penicillin mould, you know. But unlike me, Fleming's a canny Scot, he doesn't claim too much for it.'

'Very sensibly. Penicillin will never have any use whatever outside the laboratory.'

'I offered it as a panacea because I was a zealous revolutionary.' Eliot smiled. 'And revolutionaries generally come to grief through their own egotism.'

'Thank God for all of us you did, in those particular activities.' Eliot was gratified to sense Dawson's feeling as genuine.

They had reached the landing. Behind the door to their right lay the ruler of an Empire on which the sun never set. He received the loyalty of 66 million white subjects, and of 372 million coloured ones, who had no option. King George V had a talent for fatherliness, whether at a Delhi durbar or on the wireless at Christmas, and had presided with equal composure over the House of Lords revolt in 1910, the General Strike of 1926 and the Great War.

'Did you find much change this evening?' asked Dawson.

'No. The cyanosis is worse. There's only slight pulmonary congestion, but the heart is obviously failing.'

'His illness of 1928 ran a heavy overdraft on his powers of recuperation.' Dawson paused, menu-card in hand. Seventeen years later, Eliot was to see it again, at a dinner on the evening of his patient's granddaughter's Coronation. 'I must not delay this message, but I hope for another word alone with you this evening. About yourself.' Dawson hesitated. 'If this Government-or a future Government-decides to take over the medical profession, the wisest of us will safeguard ourselves, and our fellow-doctors, by becoming sufficiently important in the eyes of the country to dictate the terms.'

They exchanged glances. 'Very well,' said Eliot.

That night did not end for Eliot until six o'clock. Nancy was asleep, smeared with cold cream, the bedside lamp burning. She stirred as he gently opened the door. 'He's dead?'

'At five to midnight. I had to stay up. The embalmers got lost.' Eliot tore off his wing-collar. 'I could do with a bath, but it's about half a mile away. What a ridiculous country! Why must snobbishness be equated with unnecessary discomfort?'

The Becketts lived in a castle, gutted and refurbished with steam heating, gushing plumbing, hygienic kitchens, efficient drains. Its off-white reception rooms were designed as a favour by Syrie Maugham, and hung with Impressionists chosen by Nancy's admirer Lord Duveen. Nobody gets value for money like an American millionairess.

'When's the funeral?'

'Today week. It's been planned by Lord Wigram and the Lord Chamberlain down to the last tap of muffled drums. Parliament must meet, and Stanley Baldwin's going on the wireless.' He sat on the silk coverlet, taking her chin in his hand. His eyes gleamed with the mingled excitement and exhaustion she seldom saw now. 'Why must you lard yourself like a joint for the oven, old thing?'

'Surely you wouldn't have me wrinkled?'

'Creams and mudbaths are useless. Let me send you for a face-lift to Harold Gillies.'

'If you let me send you for monkey-gland treatment to Professor Voronoff in Monte Carlo.'

'We're not going to Monte.'

'Oh, Eliot! You know London's absolutely empty after Christmas.'

'Don't be cross.' He grinned, dropping his hand. 'There's something worth staying to enjoy. I'm to be made a lord.' She drew in her breath. 'And our eldest son shall become a lord. And his eldest son, and so on for ever and ever. Dawson told me, while we were waiting for the King to die. Oh, we're two real professionals, Dawson and I. He's to be a viscount. The only medical man to reach it. It's the age we live in, isn't it? Ever since MacDonald's Socialist cabinet appeared in their knee-breeches at Buckingham Palace. Or does it prove again that a doctor's reputation depends on the distinction of those dying in his care?'

Nancy kissed him. 'So I'm to be a lady twice over? Well! How do I live it down in the States?'

'You'll be the envy of New York. Americans are crazy on titles. Have you seen the rapture of a bishop from the mid-West called "My lord" at a London dinner party?'

She was sitting upright. 'Everyone will say you did it through my money.'

'I'll tell them that first. No doctor hides the truth. Dawson wants me with him and Lloyd George in Germany next September, to meet Herr Hitler.'

'Surely he's not for those awful Nazis? 'she exclaimed.

'Only on the keep-fit level. He thinks our unemployed should have compulsory physical jerks. Dawson fancies himself as a politician. Well, I did once. We fail, because we imagine everyone's mind as disinfected of emotion as a doctor's. Hitler will make a dreadful fool of him.'

Eliot pulled off the heavy silk-lined tail coat he had been wearing almost twenty-four hours. Nancy asked, 'What was the end like?'

'Imperceptible. Lang appeared in his cassock to say some prayers. Does it better a man in Heaven, being seen off by the Archbishop of Canterbury, or by the chaplain of Pentonville jail? As I watched the King die, I found myself thinking quite ridiculously about our old friend Crippen. Though the prison chaplain doesn't say prayers,' Eliot recalled, 'he reads the burial service. Which is rather kicking a man when he's down, don't you think?'

'The chaplain's farewell would stand a man better in Hell, where presumably Crippen went.'

'Thank God the poor little fellow didn't hear the authorities bury him, no more than subsequently feeling them hang him.'

'If he swallowed your dose.'

'I'm sure of it. I heard from Campion, the prison medical officer.' Eliot drew his white shirt over his head. 'I'd not be attending His Majesty tonight-nor entering the House of Lords next month-without that nasty little murder twenty-six years ago in Hilldrop Crescent.'

'If Charlotte Corday hadn't murdered Marat in his bath, Napoleon would be remembered only as a competent artillery officer. I do wish you'd forget that Crippen episode.'

'Who could? When Paul Martinetti died in Algiers a dozen years ago, _The Times_ said only, 'Crippen Case Recalled.' Yet he was famous on the halls before you and I knew him. It's as hard as Leigh Hunt being only remembered as Shelley's friend. And I really think Crippen didn't murder her.'

'You thought so then because we were terribly romantic.'

'We were terrible hypocrites.'

'I certainly wasn't bogus! I honestly wanted to devote my life to the sick.'

'There isn't room for more than one Florence Nightingale in the century, my dear. Anyway, she was a dreadful woman. She saved the lives of the rabble by driving good men to their graves.' He unstrapped his wristwatch. 'You needn't look twice at the time tomorrow. His new Majesty King Edward VIII has put the clock back at Sandringham. His first act on accession. Is that significant?'

Nancy slipped under the bedclothes. 'And no one in England knows about Wallis Simpson?'

'No one. No one common, I mean.'

'She'll be the next Queen.'

_'Pourquoi pas?_ Edward's the first British monarch to fly. Why not the first to wed a twice-divorced American? God, I'm dead beat. Quite suddenly, my inner supply of adrenalin's given out. It'll be getting light in half an hour. Just think of those poor blighters of reporters, shivering the night away inspecting the decorative ironwork of the gates at the end of the drive.'

'It wasn't Crippen who led you here, my darling,' said Nancy sleepily. 'It was accident-the next compartment to mine being empty in the wagon-lit from Basle to Calais.'

'Accident!' he exclaimed. 'I knew perfectly well at the time you'd engineered it.'

'Well! You've waited long enough to tell me.'

'No woman cares to believe that she contributed to her own seduction, no more than any child cares to stop believing in Father Christmas.' He yawned. 'This place depresses me. I've ordered the Bugatti at the door by eleven.'