Winston’s War (22 page)

Yet now his joy was unconfined. Never mind that the majority was so slim. Mind even less that it had been delivered by snow and storm and outright skulduggery, and mind not at all that it was one of his own colleagues, once a friend, who
had been put to the sword. To the elderly Prime Minister it was a victory that seemed inspired by God and, like loaves and fishes, it could be made to go a very long way. He could feed the entire country on this, and in return it would be only right for him to claim the rewards of the peacemaker. His place in history, alongside Disraeli, Wellington, Gladstone. Why, alongside Moses, even, for had he not rescued his nation from the bondage of war? Delivered them from evil? How proud his father and Austen would have been. At last he could show them, show their memories, at least. Oh, but then there were the Churchills, the Attlees, the Edens, the Duff Coopers, the entire ungrateful mess of the vainglorious who had for so long been snapping at his heels. Yes, he'd show them, too, show them all in the new year, in 1939. His Year of Retribution.

Chamberlain slipped away from the pantry in excellent humor, wondering if there was any more of that excellent hock he had been sent by Ribbentrop. He forgot to replace the receiver on the telephone. He was out of touch for another two days.

The Duchess cancelled her victory celebrations, went home to her ailing husband, and spent the evening playing Beethoven sonatas on her piano. Her supporters evaporated into the Siberian night, their tears freezing to their faces.

The following day she received a telegram from a fellow MP, Josiah Wedgwood:

To Socrates they gave hemlock. Gracoleus they killed with sticks and stones. The greatest and best they crucified. Katharine Atholl can hold up her head in good company. Let the victors, when they come, when the forts of folly fall, find thy body by the wall.

Blenheim Palace, Monday, December 26.

Boxing Day. A Black Dog Day. One of those days that came to haunt Churchill and cast him into despair.

Churchill walked stiffly through the grounds that “Capability” Brown had laid out two centuries earlier to mark the Battle of Blenheim. Brown had landscaped the grounds along the lines of the opposing forces that confronted each other that day; he wanted the memory of that great victory to endure as long as men walked these paths. And Churchill would never forget. Yet there would be no gardens built, no great palaces erected, to commemorate the Meeting at Munich, not in England, at least, nor anywhere in unoccupied Europe. Looking back. He seemed to spend so much of his time looking back. Writing histories. Remembering great ancestors. What else could he do? No one would listen about tomorrow.

Churchill had been born here, at Blenheim. Prematurely, so his mother said, always in a hurry. Seven months after she had married. The palace was the ancestral home of his cousin and great companion, Sunny, the ninth Duke of Marlborough—a dull man, but family—and Churchill had returned to celebrate Christmas. He had also come to hide, to escape from the miseries of today by clinging to the memories of a glorious past that was, well, precisely that. Past. Out of time. Like him.

Churchill had never felt more alone. Clemmie was gone—had been gone for weeks—on a tour of the West Indies designed to restore her spirits and her health. She had recently stubbed her toe against the claw foot of an Empire table in Paris and become debilitated; she needed some time away from the difficulties she was forced to share with him at home. So off she had gone, accompanied by another of her outrageously expensive wardrobes, and was now relaxing beneath the Caribbean sun while he trod the damp, leaf-strewn grass of England. He missed her, needed her. She was the only one who came close to understanding, the only one on whom he could rely without
question. Yet even she complained—about his impersonal telegrams, about the letters to her he dictated through others, demanding letters be written in his own hand. If only he had time! But he was out of time.

Her absence had at least allowed him to come to Blenheim to be with Sunny, his chum. Clemmie didn't see it that way—she and the Duke had fallen out over such a silly matter. When Anthony Eden had resigned as Foreign Secretary in protest at Chamberlain's policies she had written kindly to him on notepaper bearing the Blenheim crest. The Duke had objected, and Clemmie had immediately packed her suitcases and left, thereafter finding excuses to see as little of Sunny as she could. So senseless, Churchill mused, to mix personalities and politics, to loathe someone for their rotten opinions rather than their rotted heart. Yet it was a lesson he thought Randolph might never learn. Churchill had arrived at Blenheim with his twenty-seven-year-old son and his youngest daughter, Mary, to be greeted by a host of relatives and close friends, and already Randolph had fallen out with many. It was becoming a habit. Randolph would present himself for dinner, drink, eat, drink much more, then argue and spread insults like salt upon a wine stain. A tongue that hadn't yet understood the difference between irony and pure acid. And the habit had extended to breakfast—Sunny had been forced to order him from the table that morning after he had called another guest “an inexcusable idiot” for suggesting that holidays in Tuscany were far more pleasurable since Mussolini had sorted out the trains. Randolph playing with his tongue was like a toddler discovering a loaded revolver in the middle of a playground.

And Randolph had asked for another loan. A loan that Churchill, in all honesty, could not afford. The boy would get it, nonetheless. Just as Clemmie had acquired another new wardrobe and Chartwell would gain a new cottage in the grounds. There never seemed to be enough money. He had earned a
fortune—several fortunes—and always spent a penny more. He was working tirelessly on his literary ventures, working double shifts, dictating until two or three in the morning, surrounded by secretaries and scurrying research assistants. He was working on the “English-Speaking Peoples,” for which he had been paid the enormous advance of twenty thousand pounds. But that had been in 1933. The money had long since disappeared. Only the work remained.

And Beaverbrook had canceled his contract with the
Evening Standard
. “Winston, every time you write about your goddamned war, a hundred thousand of my readers crap themselves and head for the hills.” The contract had been replaced by one with the
Daily Telegraph
, but the money was less. Yet it was the setting aside of friendship that Churchill mourned, as much as the money. Beaverbrook and he had sat together in the Cabinet of Lloyd George, had conspired and cajoled and caroused and got drunk together. Then they would argue. He and Max fell in and out of friendship as frequently as Max clambered in and out of a young woman's bed, and at the moment he was sleeping with appeasers. One day, Churchill felt, Max would finish with them, as he always did, and come back to him.

There were fewer friends this year, fewer than ever. The invitations to dinner were less frequent, requests to speak in a colleague's constituency had all but dried up. A sense of formality rather than friendship surrounded his dealings, even with those like Eden and Duff Cooper and Leo Amery who had sat beside him in protest and abstained on the Munich vote. It was as though they sensed he was a drowning man and feared death by association.

There were some who still supported him, or at least his cause, but they were about as reliable as sunshine in spring. Harold Macmillan rushed around babbling wildly about leaving the party every time he found Boothby in bed with his wife.
Not that Macmillan any longer found it impossible to live with his wife's infidelity, but it seemed to provoke in him a need to find other outlets for proving his virility. Boothby himself had been banned from Chartwell by Clemmie for an outburst at the dining table which had concluded in him upsetting an entire decanter and describing Nancy Astor as “nothing but a fucked-up little fart-catcher.” Clemmie was scarcely a shrew, yet she had scrupulously high standards which allowed forgiveness only for Winston. Bracken, too, was barely tolerated by Clemmie. She had no time for his inventions and fantasies. “Brendan,” she had once remarked, deliberately unkindly, “is the type of man for whom two and two make twenty-two.” She endured him only for his dogged loyalty to her husband. Yet even Brendan had begun acting queerly, strangely distracted. All queer folk, these elusive allies.

Churchill passed beneath the towering, bare elms that stood like sentinels by the bridge, disturbing the crows, who flapped away, crying in annoyance. His knees ached in the damp air that clung around the roots of these great trees. Behind him the baroque splendors of the palace had almost disappeared from view, a memorial to times past and ancient victories which now lay hidden in the gray English mist. Yet he felt so comfortable here, like an old relic who had at last found his place. He had already lived twenty years longer than his own father, longer than his uncle, the seventh Duke, longer perhaps than was due to him. Moldering leaves clung to the end of his walking stick; death seemed to surround him. He had just read in the newspapers of the death of Sidney Peel, a man who had courted Clemmie and almost won her hand. Decent fellow, but his decencies hadn't saved him. So many of those Churchill had known when he was young were dying now, and he himself had reached that age of uselessness when old men run out of time. He prayed he might live as long as the squabbling crows, and die before his faculties decayed and grew dark.

He wrapped the scarf more firmly around his neck and continued on his lonely walk by the shores of the lake. The rest of the company was off hunting, had tried to insist he join them, but today he had no joy in it. Perhaps the chase would exhaust Randolph and the evening would be one of civilized conversation around the dinner table, but usually the excitement only fired him up. By the lake the mists grew thicker, closed in around him. Trees and shrubs appeared like ghosts, until out from the shadows emerged a figure clad in a dark cloak that to his surprise he thought was Kitty Atholl. But it was only a momentary mistake. Soon he realized it was nothing other than Guilt, disguised as a beech tree.

Oh, but he could have made the difference. To lose the seat, to lose all they had fought for, for a thousand votes. Votes which he could undoubtedly have delivered, had he gone, and taken others with him. Had he fallen so far—was he so old, so distracted, so worn out that his entire life's work could have been pushed aside for a half-hour meeting with a bank clerk? He had saved Chartwell, for a while, but what would that be worth if what he feared and what Kitty had fought against came to pass? Nothing but ashes. At times Churchill disliked himself very much. Kitty had offered no recriminations, had died with great dignity, and alone. It only made Churchill feel worse.

His path led him upwards, through the clinging mists to a high point above the lake where stood a small temple in the Greek style dedicated to the goddess Diana. It was here, on the bench thirty years before, that he had proposed to Clementine. She had been in a disdainful mood that day. He had lingered in bed and she had been on the point of packing her bags and leaving. Then they had walked and been caught by a shower of rain, and taken shelter in the temple. There, on the bench on which he was now sitting, he had asked her to marry him and to put up with all his impossible ways. “Most of them,” she had replied, “so long as you put up with an equal number of
mine.” So it had begun, and continued. It would be a good end, whiling away their final days with each other.

Except…

Except that every time he looked ahead, he saw anguish walking arm-in-arm with disaster, and they would not leave him alone to die a graceful death. Hitler attacked him personally and viciously in the German press, called him a scheming warmonger and a drunkard, while Chamberlain treated him scarcely any better. It was difficult at times to know who posed the greater danger, the mad little Austrian who screamed and spat, or a British leader who sang his songs of silence. “Do not tie my hands,” the Prime Minister had pleaded to Parliament, justifying his negotiations with Hitler over Europe.
Monstrous idiot.
Didn't he realize that soon the rope would be knotted not for his hands but for his neck? For all their necks?

Churchill knew he was a stubborn old man, and that was an end to it. And yet a beginning, too, perhaps. For besides being obstinate he was also eloquent—those were words that young Burgess had used about him, the day after Munich—and these troubled days were a time for eloquence rather than Chamberlain's songs of silence. He could continue to speak out, to persist. Warn of the dangers in Europe and fight for the right of Britons to be free and fickle, and not just vassals. It might mean tearing his party apart, but what did that matter when the country itself was on the brink of being torn apart? Country before party, always, there was no middle way.

They could bury him with his conscience, at least, and maybe sooner than he cared for. He had been summoned to appear before the executive of his Epping constituency—
to explain himself and his recent positions,
in the words of the peremptory letter. To defend himself against charges of disloyalty, to show why he should not be put aside in the same manner they had cast aside poor Kitty, to argue that loyalty to a party and a misguided leader was not the highest duty of a politician.
After all, what was loyalty? A word, an excuse, a shield behind which cowards hid their own nakedness. The party didn't need loyalty, it was suffocated in the stuff, what it needed so desperately was the fresh air of imagination and leadership.

He had received a Christmas card from young Burgess, a hand-drawn cartoon which was crude but which displayed considerable talent. And insight—it had shown the entire Cabinet standing in a circle with their heads embedded firmly up the next man's backside, and although their heads weren't visible, most of the characters were easily recognizable. The figure at the front had a wing collar and was clutching an old umbrella. The cartoon was entitled simply: “Leadership.” A man of considerable imagination, was young Burgess.