Unity (2 page)

iii.
Felicity Benthall & Luke Dent

Contrary to my method with fiction, I find myself needing to describe Felicity and Luke. In no other area is a novelist so despotic as in his allocation of physical traits. Conscious of my power to dye a brunette blonde, make a hook-nose snub and pluck beetle brows at the stroke of a pen, I prefer to leave such details to the reader’s imagination and concentrate, instead, on my characters’ inner lives. In this case, however, the protagonists exist not only in my mind but in my memory. My task is not so much to make them well-rounded as to make sure that they are clearly defined.

Felicity was a large girl – nothing in comparison with Unity, who was six foot with enormous hands and feet – but tall and
big-boned
. Height was neither an encumbrance nor an embarrassment and she had long since dispatched her mother’s attempts at
camouflage to the Oxfam Shop. Her hair was the colour of Harvest Festivals. Her pale eyes stared straight from an Arthur Rackham edition of an Arthurian Romance, while her creamy complexion evoked a world of cowslips and Cornwall and antique lace.

Luke matched her in both stature and presence. He was
broad-shouldered
and so lean that, when he sat down, his skin did not even crease. He had a mass of sandy curls with surprisingly dark roots that, when Felicity and I ganged together, we would suggest were in need of attention (his utter lack of vanity prevented his taking offence). His long lashes gave him a hint of ambivalence, but his expression was far too guileless to be gay. His high
cheekbones
were prone to flush at the first sign of either a compliment or a rebuke. His smile would make sense of suicide pacts.

A unique blend of good looks and good nature made him as attractive to men as to women. His own warmth was reflected in a universal welcome which, Felicity and I were agreed, gave him an unrealistically rosy view of the world. He had a childlike
openness
which, according to circumstance, I regarded either as admirable or naive. A perfect example occurred when he
interpreted
his German supervisor’s departure on ‘a busman’s holiday’ to Greece as a coded confession of a taste for rough trade. He expressed his support with a theory, largely culled from me, that gay men needed differences of caste to make up for their sameness of sex, only to face the full fury of a closeted don who was leaving for a United Nations conference on developing literacy. It is fair to say that even Luke’s hyperactive cheekbones had never flushed so fast.

They could not have come from more dissimilar backgrounds. Felicity was the granddaughter of a baronet – and the daughter of a younger brother, as her mother never let her father forget. They lived in the dower-house on her uncle’s estate. As a young man, her father had raced cars, now, he drank. Her mother bred roses –
her daughter maintained that she preferred not to think of anything higher up the reproductive chain than a flower. She had a brother in the city and two sisters ‘at stud’. She was the youngest by ten years (‘not so much an afterthought as a reproach’). For all the obvious precedents, her affair with Luke was not meant as an act of rebellion, since one of the banes of her life – and, I feel sure, a primary cause of the disaster that ended it – was that she had nothing against which to rebel. Her father showed himself a democrat in that he spread his contempt evenly across society. Her mother showed herself an aristocrat in that she modified her morality to suit her own needs. Far from wishing to shock her parents, she had long ceased trying to attract their attention. I have no doubt that, within the limitations of her egoism, she genuinely loved Luke.

In its very different way, Luke’s upbringing seemed to exude the same glamour as Felicity’s – at least from my privet-hedged perspective. His father’s post-war disillusion prompted him to leave England for the Sudan where he worked in the embryonic oil industry. He met Luke’s mother, a nurse, when she flew out on a year’s contract. Luke and his brothers grew up in one of the most volatile regions of Africa. As children, they picked bullets out of the sofas at the airport after it had been used by a firing squad. On another occasion, the violence edged even closer when a gang of rebels murdered a security guard in the European compound. The following day, his colleagues randomly rounded up a group of Africans, chopping them into pieces which they then placed, as a warning, on the compound walls. When the eight-year-old Luke cried at the sight, his father told him to be a man.

In the late sixties, the family lost everything, having been forced to flee the country overnight after Luke’s father found himself on the wrong side of a coup. They moved to Hastings, from where his father sold encyclopaedias for an old army friend. His parents never addressed a further word to each other from the moment
that they boarded the plane. Luke dated his interest in theatre to that day.

It is unnecessary to say anything about myself. I am merely the Prologue. It falls to me to set the scene for the action that follows. I have published three novels and a collection of stories. Anyone interested can look up the biographical details in a stack of
interviews
, although I would not vouch for their unalloyed truth. As regards my appearance, I shall no doubt succumb to the traditional authorial vanity of a photograph on the cover. I trust that more dispassionate observers will not share my difficulty in
chipping
out the fresh-faced undergraduate from the granite-faced middle-aged man.

iv.
Unity in Cambridge

Unity
was born out of pique. In spite of her startling performances at several Smokers
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(I still chuckle at her impersonation of a suburban matron whose ‘husband has never been a handful in the underwear department’), Felicity failed to be cast in the annual Footlights revue. She fell victim to internal politics – specifically, one of her rivals bedding the professional director first. Her fury erupted in a flurry of sanctimonious slurs. All her dreams of glory – and, more pressingly, an answer to the question of what to do come June – had collapsed. Luke, in a valiant attempt at consolation, offered to write her a play that we would put on ourselves. It was pointless her tackling Millament or the Shrew (‘or Cleopatra,’ Felicity interjected), who would simply be drowned out in the usual classical clamour but, if we could choose the right – that is, controversial – theme, the Footlights would be put in the shade.

The primary requirement was a peach of a part for Felicity … ‘One that will showcase all your many facets’, I fawned. ‘Not possible!’ she retorted. My rudimentary knowledge of marketing – I was on the theatre-hiring committee – combined with Luke’s literary tastes to favour the historical. Our collective self-image narrowed the field to the 20s and 30s. The choice fell on Nancy Cunard, the tempestuous heiress whose drift from Belgravia to Bohemia seemed to be the perfect fit for Felicity, but we found ourselves unable to do justice to her advocacy of black power from the ranks of our Cambridge friends. It was then that I – or, possibly, Luke (as in so many relationships, paternity only became an issue after the split) – hit on Unity.

The timing was perfect. A brilliant account of her life had appeared the previous year.
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The Mitfords were beginning to establish a hold on the national consciousness as a madcap sorority who stood, as one of the Edinburgh reviewers neatly put it, midway between the Brontes and the Beverleys.
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Moreover, the subject tapped deep into Luke’s rich and hitherto unexposed vein of social unease. This stretched all the way from Felicity’s
Leicestershire
home where, he confessed, confusion over the phrase ‘gun-broken’ had caused him more anxiety than the knottiest French or German translation, to Cambridge itself. I had failed to grasp how alien he felt from the dominant undergraduate ethos: the effortless assumption of superiority with which I, ever the chameleon, contrived to blend. It was as if he identified, in the gilded immaturity, a moral vacuum that could so easily be filled, like Unity’s, with salutes to the ‘divine Storms!’
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v.
Unity Mitford

Unity
, the fourth of Lord and Lady Redesdale’s seven children, was born in 1914, having been conceived when her parents were prospecting for gold at a place called Swastika in Canada, thereby providing conclusive evidence for those who view geography as fate. After an unconventional upbringing, overtly fictionalised in her older sister Nancy’s novels and covertly fictionalised in her younger sister Jessica’s memoirs, she attended finishing school in Munich in 1934, where she honed her fascist sympathies. A year later, she attained the pinnacle of her desire when Hitler summoned her to join him in the restaurant where she sat, day after day, hoping to catch a stray glance. During the four years that followed, she was to enjoy a further one hundred and forty such meetings, mainly for lunch and tea and mainly in Munich, although he also invited her to his mountain-retreat at
Berchtesgaden
and to the Chancery in Berlin.

So close was their friendship that, on one occasion, Lord
Redesdale
was obliged to place an announcement in the
Sunday
Pictorial
denying that they had plans to marry. It was a friendship that exposed her to equal suspicion from both British diplomats and the Führer’s own staff, many of whom were convinced that she must be a spy. Her political influence was nil, although she may have confirmed Hitler in his belief that England saw Germany as a kindred spirit and would not oppose its territorial ambitions. After the
Anschluss
, he declared: ‘They said England would be there to stop me but the only English person I saw was on my side.’ That person was Unity, who had rushed to Vienna in order to hail her hero at his moment of triumph.

At the outbreak of war, Unity shot herself – in another geographical quirk, the place that she chose was Munich’s English Garden. The bullet lodged in her head and she was taken to a nearby hospital, where Hitler visited her for the last time. As soon as she had sufficiently recovered, he arranged for her to be
transported
to Switzerland, where she was collected by her mother and brought back to England. She lived on until 1948, incapacitated and incontinent and, according to her nephew, with a mental age of around eleven.
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Felicity’s portrait of Unity was based on sibling rivalry. Strongly influenced by a supervisor who had achieved broadsheet fame with her monograph,
Shakespeare on the Couch
, she saw the key to Unity’s malaise as ‘middle child syndrome’, exacerbated by membership of such a competitive family. She was a bundle of negatives: neither as witty as Nancy, as beautiful as Diana, as clever as Jessica nor as cosseted as Deborah. She was a romantic without a cause – until she found one in Hitler. Her intellectual flirtation with Mosley had been compromised by his marriage to Diana. Through her friendship with Hitler she became, for the first time, the dominant sister, putting Diana’s parochial conquest to shame.

To Hitler, Unity’s attraction seems to have been that she was the one person who spoke to him freely. The same lack of imagination that rendered her insensitive to the horrors of Nazism blinded her to the character of its leader. To some extent, we were guilty of a similar misjudgement. For all our awareness of the Holocaust, our approach remained studiedly superficial. Not only did we fail to look seriously at Unity’s politics, we cited her as proof that we did not need to take politics itself seriously. In our hands, extremism became eccentricity: glamour conquered all. Now, I see her as the perfect representative of a nation that prefers its fascists dressed in frou-frou and tulle than in greatcoats and jackboots. At the time, I saw her as the heroine of a real-life
Beauty and the Beast
. The fact that Luke later wrote me such a detailed account of his months in Munich attested, I believe, to 
his own desire to redress the balance. Unity was not the only one deserving of blame.

vi.
The Author as Hitler

I played Hitler, although I trust it is superfluous to state that, unlike Felicity, I was not typecast. Physically, I was hardly ideal, although it is surprising how much can be achieved with a
well-judged
moustache. My claim to the role was assured when I not only gave up the part of Cyrano de Bergerac, but persuaded Cambridge’s leading director, Brian Sterkin,
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to scrap his whole production and take on ours. As one whose school syllabus stopped short at the Glorious Revolution, I date my interest in twentieth century history to that summer. Had I put the same effort into reading my set texts as I had into researching my character, I might have emerged with a better degree.

It is my deep conviction, reinforced by thirty-five years of theatre-going, that no actor can play pure evil. I call it the Edmund syndrome, in which Shakespeare’s most gratuitously malevolent character is endowed with a boyish swagger or a winningly self-aware smile. An actor needs a motive as much as he needs an audience. So Richard III is driven by his disability, Macbeth by his lack of an heir and Edmund by the stigma of
illegitimacy
. Indeed, I suspect the reason that actors in previous eras were excluded from society (all those dead-of-night burials that fired my childhood imagination) lay less in their sexual laxity than in the fact that their artistic practice refuted the simple pieties of the Church.

I was no exception, my dramatic instincts and philosophical insights leading me to the same place. I played Hitler as a
frustrated
 
painter, the key to whose character could be found in his failure to be accepted into the Vienna Art Academy and his subsequent discovery that four out of the seven members of the Jury who rejected him were Jews. He wrote a letter to the Director which ended with the threat ‘For this, the Jews will pay.’ And, if nothing else, he proved true to his word. I still stand by the basic interpretation. As Chancellor, Hitler liked to surround himself with artists and, indeed, to be regarded as one himself. When Eva Braun pointed out that he was whistling an operatic air out of tune, he replied ‘I am not out of tune; the composer made a mistake here.’ He took an active role in the infamous 1937 Exhibition of German Art. Even holed up in the bunker, when Allied bombers were effecting his squalid Götterdämmerung, he sat for hours staring at a model for the rebuilding of his home town of Linz.