The Invisible Victory

19

'Tonight Hitler sleeps in the Hrad?any Palace in Prague. It is time to redefine our attitudes.'

Archie said this without a shred of self-consciousness. All men become caricatures of themselves, but he achieved it younger than most. It was three years later, the evening of March 15, 1939, and the four of us were eating dinner in his Belgrave Square home. Since his father's death, he had combined the huge dining-room with the sitting-room in the modern flat-dwelling fashion, redecorating and refurnishing the rest of the place with pleasing, extravagant plainness.

'The Ides of March are come,' said David Mellors, unusually gloomily.

'Ay, Chamberlain; but not gone,' added Elizabeth Tiplady, who had left school more recently than the rest of us.

'So much for Hitler's "last territorial demand in Europe", over the Sudeten Germans,' I said.

'Do you realize the significance of what's just happened?' Archie demanded of the table in general. 'By now, we're sickeningly used to Hitler invading neighbouring countries. But for the first time he's enlarged the Reich not simply to include expatriate Germans like the Austrians or Sudetens. He's gobbled up a foreign nation, the Czechs. Who knows who's next?'

'The Poles,' David poured himself more claret-a '34, claimed by Archie to be the best out of ten terrible years.

'Us?' suggested Elizabeth.

'What's Chamberlain going to do?' I asked, Archie being a fount of political information more immediate if not always more accurate than the newspapers.

'Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He's done all he can do already. Did you read what he said in the House this afternoon? That the collapse of Czecho-Slovakia was inevitable. That the Slovakia half of it simply declared itself independent, so we're no longer bound to guarantee its frontiers under the Munich agreement. Fancy falling back on legal niceties with the Gestapo already in Prague! Chamberlain whines about a breach of the Munich spirit, as though Hitler had omitted to send him a Christmas card. The whole business is utterly disgraceful. Poor, old, ill President Hбcha has been horribly let down, just as we let down President Beneљ. No wonder the Tory party's looking sick. If I was a Conservative MP today, I'd vomit over the benches.'

'What's this we're supposed to be eating?' asked David. 'Stewed pheasant?'

'It couldn't possibly be. Pheasant shooting ends on February the first,' said Archie severely. For all his socialism, he had the aristocrat's disdain for ignorance of country matters.

'It's chicken, _I think.'_ Elizabeth struggled to cut it.

'I don't know the first thing about food,' remarked Archie airily. 'It's a dish which Watson seems to like cooking. I suppose because he finds it one of the easiest.'

'Do you think Watson appreciates that instead of not having to call you "Sir", he now doesn't have to call you "My Lord"?' I enquired.

'Oh, this title!' Archie complained. 'Do you realize, politically it's like those concrete overcoats in which gangsters drop their rivals into New York harbour. One simply disappeared without a gurgle. Of course, none of us expected my father to die so suddenly last Christmas. I so much wanted to make some sort of impact on the Commons before being shoved into the Madame Tussaud's of the Lords. When I think of the constituencies I've nursed!' He ended pathetically.

Archie had always seemed to be nursing a constituency since going down from Cambridge, though the foundlings were never grateful enough to elect him to Parliament. But he did good among them, helping the inadequate and the inarticulate before they were lavished with the bounty of the Welfare State.

'Can't you shed your title the way people do with their awful christian names?' asked Elizabeth. 'Or sell it to the Americans like all the nicest country houses?'

'Archie, you really ought to sack Watson,' David advised. 'He'll give you a recurrence of your duodenal ulcer.'

'I don't eat at home very much. I'm far too busy.' Archie reached towards the cluster of wine bottles. 'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' he repeated. frankly admit, that for a while I simply couldn't take Hitler seriously. I'll admit that I thought him perfectly justified reoccupying the Rhineland in 1936, for instance. But wasn't I one of many, who asked why he shouldn't be allowed to move his soldiers about his own back yard? And after all, he was doing a lot for the unemployed, which nobody was here.'

'Do you ever hear from your friends there, Jim?' David asked.

I shook my head. I stopped writing to Gerda when I married Rosie. 'I shouldn't care to provoke a letter returned _Empfдnger unbekannt.'_

'"Addressee Unknown" has terrifying implications,' Archie commented sombrely. He went on, 'It was Spain which changed my mind about Hitler.'

'Darling, it was such a pity that you never got there,' Elizabeth told him sympathetically.

'I couldn't help developing an ulcer.'

'It must have been terribly frustrating, it all going on and you having to lie on your back in Swanage instead.'

'I almost enlisted,' he told her irritably. He had recounted the story that evening in the expectation-which he should have known to be perfectly ridiculous, it being Elizabeth-of impressing my young lady. 'I'd got as far as Paris. That's why Spain decided me more than Abyssinia. Because it was possible to get involved onself. After all, two thousand of us in Britain joined the International Brigade. And five hundred of us won't come back. Thank God the whole thing seems almost over.'

'According to George Orwell, it was all a tremendous fiasco, even for a war,' I observed.

'"I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain",' he quoted W H Auden, raising his glass. 'Then of course there's the German Jews.'

'Our Freud which art in Hampstead,' said David.

We were interrupted by Watson in his tail coat. He had become fatter and even ruder, and I thought in many respects resembled Mussolini. 'All right, is it?'

'Divine,' Elizabeth said.

'You haven't cleared away the cocktail things,' Archie told him sternly.

'I can't do everything, can I?'

'I don't think any of us want any more.' Archie pushed away the half-eaten dish. 'You may serve the pudding.'

'There ain't none. I've some fruit.'

'Open a couple of bottles of Cliquot,' Archie commanded. He added as Watson withdrew, 'Do you know what I heard yesterday? When Halifax went to Berchtesgaden a couple of months ago, he was greeted at the front door by Hitler in that usual ridiculous get-up of brown jacket and dress trousers. Our lordly cabinet minister mistook him for the footman. He was within an inch of handing over his hat and stick. Think how the course of history might have been changed!'

'Hitler would have sent his Air Force to blow us up between the soup and fish, I expect,' said Elizabeth.

'London may not be so beautiful as Paris or Prague,' said Archie, who had travelled to both. 'But like any Frenchman or any Czech I don't want wakening at dawn to the crash of bombs. That's why I was incredibly relieved by Munich.'

'Like everyone else,' I said. The iron-crossed wings of Hermann Gцring's Luftwaffe overshadowed Europe. No one had experienced mass aerial bombardment, but after Spain everyone could imagine it. The German Air Force was the atomic bomb of the 1930s.

'It's Wednesday!' Elizabeth jumped from the table to switch on the radiogram beside the fireplace. 'I mustn't miss Arthur Askey.'

'It is time to redefine our attitudes,' Archie declared once again. 'I now commit myself to standing up to Hitler, whatever the cost. With Russia, all the better-if Europe hadn't been so neurotically afraid of Communism, Hitler would never have got where he has. If not, alone with France.'

'And America?' I suggested.

'America is only interested in the World Fair on Flushing Meadow,' Archie said irritably.

'What about this champagne, boy?' asked David.

'I expect Watson's forgotten.' Archie reached his long arm for the bell. 'The question remains, what exactly can one do.'_

'Get your blood group registered,' suggested David practically. 'They're going to need the stuff by the gallon.'

'With Spain, it was easy. One simply volunteered.' Archie often seemed genuinely to believe that he had fought on the hard-baked, blood-soaked ridges of Catalonia.

'Volunteer as an air raid warden.' I told him. 'Or a fireman. I saw in today's paper that the government wants a hundred thousand of them.'

'I'd volunteer for the Army, but what's the point when the Government are moving towards the utterly oppressive step of conscription in peacetime? Which I and every other socialist should have imagined unthinkable in this country.'

'What's the matter?' called Watson from the doorway. 'I'd like to listen to the wireless myself, you know.'

'The Cliquot, Watson.'

'You didn't mean it, did you? I didn't think this was a champagne dinner.'

'You'll find some brandy in the cocktail cabinet,' Archie told David. 'Help yourself.'

'Darling, I can't hear the jokes,' complained Elizabeth, her ears directed to _Band Waggon_ on the London Regional.

'I'm having a serious political discussion,' Archie told her severely.

'You know that I've never been in the slightest interested in politics.'

'That's what some unfortunate French aristocrat protested at the guillotine. "Which is precisely why you are here", said the executioner, strapping him down.'

Archie's tart reply sprang from her teasing about Spain and his ulcer. Elizabeth stood up, pouting, and strode from the room saying, 'I'm going to powder my nose.'

She left Archie sitting gloomily at the table. I knew that he would be instantly sorry for provoking her. I had been living in the flat almost four years since Rosie died. I had discovered that Archie's was the tenderest conscience of any I dared to probe. In a way, he turned this conscience into a talent, by which he might make a political career. David handed him a balloon glass well filled with brandy. By way of making conversation, I said, 'Have you seen that travel poster put out by the Reich Tourist Office? A beautiful coloured picture of a schloss, and underneath, _Come To Mediaeval Germany._ Either the Nazis have absolutely no sense of humour, or they flatter us with an uproarious one.'

'Can't you turn that rubbish off?' Archie scowled at the radiogram.

David obliged and sat down on the sofa, picking one of the yellow jacketed volumes from the low table before the fire, which had _The Times,_ the _Daily Worker, Apollo, Punch_ and other periodicals laid out in club-like precision. 'What's this bloody rubbish?'

'The Left Book Club', Archie told him shortly. 'You get a couple of books cheap on current affairs every month. Surely you've heard of it? It's been going two or three years now.'

'Who are the doctors prescribing such intellectual tonics?'

'Well, there's Harold Laski-'

'Of course,' said David.

'And John Strachey.' Archie swallowed some brandy. 'He was at Eton. They've fifty or sixty thousand members, you know.'

David sat frowning, flicking over the pages. 'What sort of people would those be, I wonder?'

'Not intellectuals particularly, but people who regard themselves as intellectuals. Schoolteachers, university students who've seen through their dons. Anybody who feels he can't make enough of himself, who's frustrated by the political and social system.'

'Exactly the people in Germany who got the Nazis going,' I said.

Archie made a grimace. 'I know what you mean. Steam escaping from a faulty boiler by one crack rather than another. Of course, the Left Book Club's pretty Communist. It flatters a lot of people, rather dangerously, that they're more intelligent and better educated than they actually are. But I wish I'd had the idea. It would have been more useful than going to Spain, and made a lot of money.'

Archie spoke with a Bloomsbury publisher's combination of idealism and salesmanship. He had written a novel while recovering from his duodenal ulcer-_Scrannel Pipes,_ criticized by James Agate as 'the minutes of a rather decorous meeting of a committee comprising Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Ronald Firbank.' As nobody had leapt to publish it, Archie founded the Urn Press in a basement. At the time of our dinner party, he was losing a thousand or two a year in the business, as comfortably as any other moneyed and cultured young gentleman down from the University. He rose abruptly from the table, saying he had some telephone calls to make. 'I hope I didn't upset Elizabeth,' he apologized in my direction.

'Lord Meddish is in his self-analytical mood tonight,' I observed, smiling after our departed host. 'He wants to stop Hitler, but he doesn't want conscription.'

'Oh, Archie's mind is always as confused as an old woman's sewing-basket.' David sat sipping his brandy, the yellow-jacketed book on his knees. 'Do you suppose Elizabeth's having a good cry?'

'Elizabeth? Don't be silly.'

'You're pretty thick with her, aren't you?'

'On the contrary, she only lets me take her to occasions like this, when there are other people about. We never enjoy what Norman Douglas called 'a friendly teat-a-teat'. I don't see very much of her at all, really, as she spends most of the winter on the Riviera with her mother. She maintains a relationship of steely flippancy.'

'I don't know how you put up with it. I certainly wouldn't take that sort of selfishness from any woman. Even a stunner like her.

'I'd take even worse from Elizabeth,' I told him soberly. 'Surely you can understand my feelings? For years she was the untouchable embodiment of everything I wanted. Not just in the feminine way, but everything in life-money, home, _savoir faire,_ friends, parents. I was happy if she threw me a word, like a fish bone to one of Sir Edward's damn cats. Lady Tip hated me, of course, and still does. She always treated me with the utmost contempt, and I didn't see any reason why Elizabeth shouldn't do likewise.'

'Why didn't she?' asked David bluntly.

'She's much more civilized than her mother. Ever since Lady Tip was once horrible to me in her presence, she's felt guilty, perhaps. And of course my elevation to work with her father must have helped. Besides, things are changing, aren't they? Our Hitler makes class warfare look a silly game.'

'Didn't you once say she wasn't his daughter?'

'That was the gossip below stairs.'

'Personally, I think she's just a high-class prick teaser.'

Elizabeth came in, recovered from her pique and smiling. Noticing the book on David's lap, she exclaimed, 'Don't say you've taken to Mr Victor Gollancz's high-minded publications? Is he supporting this thing in Parliament to abolish flogging? You know that he doesn't eat the day when anybody's hanged, don't you? Not a thing. Daddy's seen him in the Savoy. Only a glass of champagne and a cigar.'

David knocked back his brandy and stood up. 'I must go, if I want to slip into Mary's and see Margaret before catching my train. Why is the last one to Oxford so bloody early? The dons like early nights, I suppose.'

David had been a doctor about three years. He was then working as an assistant to one of the consultant physicians at the Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford. I was to be best man at Easter when he married a staff nurse he had met while doing his house jobs at St Mary's. She had been denied the feast that evening through night duty.

'What's Archie up to?' David asked Elizabeth.

'Talking to Watson about the Test Match in Durban. Apparently it rained just as England were winning. That seems to sum up our national destiny in general, doesn't it?'

'Can I take you home in a taxi?' I asked her.

'Of course, darling.'

It was a cold, windy, showery night, handfuls of rain rattling against the cab window. 'Must you go in yet?' I pleaded. 'It's dreadfully early. I whisked you off because I saw how Archie wanted to get rid of us all.'

'I promised Daddy I shouldn't be late.'

'You mean, you don't want to be alone with me longer than it is strictly polite to allow?'

In reply, she said, 'It must be a dreadful strain living with Archie. I wonder you're not a nervous wreck.

'I don't see a lot of him. He's always out in the evenings organizing committees, speaking at meetings, engineering interviews or buying drinks for journalists. He's a crusader with many banners.'

'Archie seems to think there's going to be a war.'

'It'll be a relief, really, won't it? After having to run our lives from one of Hitler's speeches to the next.'

'If there's a war I shall do something useful.'_

'Cut your hair and make munitions. Lots of girls did last time.'

'I'd be a nurse. I'd be one now, you know, honestly. But of course you have to be twenty-one before they let you start.'

'Can I kiss you?'

She formally closed her eyes and pursed her lips. I said, _Ich Liebe dich, and du schlдfst.'_

'What's that mean?' I translated. 'Please, Jim, don't start getting pompous,' she protested, much as Gerda had.

'But you're quite aware that I do love you.'

'Don't be serious, darling. You know how being serious spoils everything.'

We lay back in our separate corners of the taxi. 'You're lucky that I'm-well, not frightened of women, but frightened of making a fool of myself over them. That happened once.'

After a moment's puzzlement, she said, 'Oh, Rosie,' rather bleakly.

'And of course, as far as you're concerned, Elizabeth, I'm still the butler's boy.'

'Why must you keep bringing that up?' she asked crossly. 'It's awfully unfair. You're like Archie, trying to make us all feel utterly ashamed of ourselves because people in Bermondsey have got less to eat for dinner than we have. Wasn't that chicken ghastly?'_

'How long are you staying with your father?'

'I don't know. Mummy may remain in Monte Carlo, though of course it's dreadfully unfashionable after Easter.'

We arrived at the newly-built block of flats in Mayfair, where Sir Edward Tiplady now lived alone. Lady Tip had walked out about the same time as King Edward the Eighth abdicated. As I reached to open the cab door, she adopted again the ceremonial expression indicating that she would allow herself to be kissed.

'Come and see _Design for Living_ tomorrow,' I asked temptingly. 'Diana Wynyard and Rex Harrison.'

'Darling, there's simply no time for going to the theatre. Tomorrow I absolutely must go to a party with Hugo Mottram.'

'Who's Hugo Mottram?'

'He's frightfully rich on the Stock Exchange. I'm having an utterly passionate affair with him. Daddy's so pleased.'

'Good night.'

'Good night, darling. You're really the most wonderfully saint-like man, and of course I completely adore you.'

The taxi drove back to Archie's. Unrequited love is painful enough, love shrivelled by frivolity can be suicidal.