Winston’s War (69 page)

It was shortly after three when Attlee hurried away from the gathering of the NEC. The issues had been resolved, the decisions made, and the momentous consequences of those decisions would be played out in Westminster, not Bournemouth. He was anxious to get back. The Labour Party was an open book, congenitally incapable of retaining secrets for long, and they had already issued a press release declaring
their willingness to join in a coalition Government, but an innate caution and sense of personal decency within Attlee insisted that they make no public announcement about the matter of the prime ministership until those involved had been informed. They should be the first to know; it was only decent. Told formally, confidentially, and in writing. Everything by the rules.

So on his way to the railway station, Attlee instructed the taxi driver to stop at a post office. From there he sent a telegram to Downing Street. On the buff-colored form, he constructed a message in language that was intended to be understood only by its recipient.

“TO + THE + FIRST + QUESTION + NO + STOP + TO + THE + SECOND + YES + UNDER + H + STOP + RETURNING + LONDON + IMMEDIATELY + ARRIVING + FIVE + FIFTEEN + STOP + ATTLEE”

Economical, as was Attlee's habit. Less than two dozen words. He didn't refer to Churchill—it would have cost an extra penny a word, and some on the NEC didn't think Churchill was worth that. Attlee, on the other hand, was genuinely undecided. He sensed a trap. He knew the Tories, knew they couldn't be trusted, not until they were buried. He thought it better to leave the door ajar. Just in case. He handed across one shilling and seven pence, asked for a receipt, then hurried back to the taxi. He was anxious not to miss his train.

Sue was startled. It wasn't every day that a famous man walked into her post office and asked to send a telegram to the Prime Minister. If she hadn't recognized the Labour leader's dark features and neatly trimmed moustache she might have thought it was a practical joke.

When he had gone, doffing his cap and bidding her good-day, she settled down in a tiny, airless room to the rear of the shop which she reserved for valuable items. It was here she kept
the safe with its store of stamps, postal orders, savings books, and the petty cash, and alongside it was a bookshelf stacked with the many manuals and circulars of post office procedure. It was also here that the Creed teleprinter had been installed. The teleprinter was a machine that translated its messages into perforations on a paper tape. The tape then passed through an automatic transmitter which directed the message to its intended destination, where it would be printed out, on more paper tape and pasted onto a telegram form. As Sue shuffled her chair closer to make herself comfortable in front of the keyboard, the teleprinter began to tremble into life. A telegram was coming through. As the tape and its message slowly stuttered forth, she realized with some surprise it was addressed to her. She bent over, passing the paper tape through her fingers and reading as the machine continued to chatter and produce its message word by word.

“REGRET + TO + INFORM + YOU + THAT + SGT + J + WHITE + KOYLI + IS + REPORTED + BY + HIS + UNIT + AS + MISSING + BELIEVED + KILLED + IN + ACTION…”

Her eyes stared unblinking, held immobile by the lengthening ribbon of paper, and what more it said she could no longer see. A paralysis began to move throughout her body, from her eyes to her neck, arms, fingers, legs, every muscle. She sat hunched over the machine, uncomprehending, unmoving.

Some time later she was found. Two concerned customers discovered Sue Graham still bent over her machine. They could get no sense out of her, and with some difficulty moved her to her father's old smoking chair in the back parlor. They closed the door to the security room and locked the front door of the post office, then sat by her side sipping tea while they waited for the doctor to arrive.

There are times when even a man of prodigious appetites, who has spent a lifetime swimming without a care on a tide
of alcohol, relaxes his restraint and gets drunk. It has little to do with quantity, much more to do with deciding to let go and simply sink. Churchill had decided to let go. He no longer cared, content to drown amongst memories and a multitude of regrets. His companion at lunch was Bracken—loyal, dogged Bracken, who could be relied upon later to return his master to wherever was appropriate, no matter what his condition.

They hadn't even made it through the first bottle of claret yet already the old man had run the gamut of his dark emotions. What was at first merely maudlin soon became misery, regret turned to recrimination, anger to outrage, until none of it made too much sense. He grew tearful, sobbing that he had failed. “I am a Churchill. I was born to fight this war, Brendan, to lead us through it, but it is lost. Lost! We shall be destroyed, a thousand years of English independence swept away.”

“But we've scarcely started…”

“He will not fight! Halifax will not fight! He will run, like the wretched foxes he pursues, until we shall all be hunted down. Nothing to stand in their way, no hiding places. Oh, if only I had the rifles…”

“But that's why you're here,” Bracken began to object, but was waved into silence as Churchill's voice and emotions began to climb.

“They said I wanted them to fight my own war—my own war. As though it were a war of an entirely different character to their war. Damn them, perhaps they were right. Perhaps my war might have been different—no, indeed, Brendan, I tell you that my war would most certainly have been different, fought without mercy and without respite until the victory was ours! And yet there is always that most dangerous of foes, Brendan—no, not those in front of you in the moment of battle, but those treacherous bastards who attack you from behind. They are the real enemy, the enemy within. Oh, perhaps we should have used those rifles after all!”

Bracken began to stutter in alarm but his protests were swept aside in the onslaught.

“Cromwell purged this kingdom with four hundred cavalry, so just think—think what a Churchill might have done with four hundred thousand Mausers?” Then his voice flooded with apprehension. “And what, now, will Hitler do with them? There's the question.” Tears began to glisten on his cheeks.

The enemy within. Did he mean Chamberlain? Halifax? The party? Or those ghosts within himself which continually haunted him. Bracken had never seen the old man in such misery.

“But you'd never have used the rifles, not for yourself. Would you, Winston?”

“Marlborough would've. He would have fought.”

“Yes, but surely…”

“If I could raise an army of stout-hearted Englishmen, what could I not have done? Most surely I would have used them.”

“But…against whom?” Churchill responded with nothing but an expression of exquisite pain, a man at war within himself and with a world that had brought him low.

They were now halfway through their second bottle, but they were not to finish it. A messenger had arrived. There was to be yet another meeting of the Cabinet. The Prime Minister's apologies, but would the First Lord mind presenting himself forthwith?

“My firing squad,” Churchill bellowed, throwing his napkin to the floor. He stumbled out without a backward glance or word of thanks.

At almost precisely the same moment that Churchill returned once more to Downing Street, a messenger from the Secret Intelligence Service also arrived. He was carrying two additional files for the small, neat pile that was mounting on
the in-tray of Wilson's desk. Both were no longer than a single paragraph and were marked with a yellow flag for the exclusive attention of the Prime Minister. The first related how, at a recent diplomatic reception in Berlin, a drunken Russian well into his cups had been overheard telling his German counterpart that Chamberlain was ill. Deeply unwell. Stomach trouble. Knew it for a fact, so he claimed. Because buried deep inside the Kremlin they had a copy of the Prime Minister's personal medical report.

The second file was more detailed. It was headed “MR. CHURCHILL,” in capital letters and underlined. It stated that following recent investigations into the First Lord's personal finances, it had been discovered that the majority of his income during the past twelve months had derived from a single payment. Although nominally the payment had come from a British-based trust, the trust received all its monies from a single source, a privately owned trading company named Omni-Carriers. Omni's only known office was in Bucharest and its bankers were in Geneva, but almost every other detail of its activities was shrouded in deliberately manufactured mystery. Yet SIS had got there eventually (with the assistance of an embittered and impoverished former employee, although this detail was omitted from the report to the Prime Minister). For Omni had begun its life trading not in its customary raw materials but in antique works of art. Enormous quantities of them, and every one of them Russian. The sort of supply that could not have continued without official sanction. And when, like so many other companies, it had nearly gone under during the great crash of 1929, Omni had been able to survive only through an emergency injection of funds. These funds, so the former employee swore, came from the Narodny Bank. Of Moscow.

All the strands of an extraordinary noose were now present in the files on Wilson's desk. They required nothing more than a little threading together, and one sharp tug.

Burgess arrived at the club only minutes after Churchill had departed, having wheedled from the old man's secretary the location of his lunch. As he leapt from the back of the taxi, he almost bowled into Bracken who was coming down the sandbagged steps into St. James's. Bracken scowled.

“Bugger off, Burgess.”

“I have to see Mr. Churchill.”

“Never ceases to surprise me how often you seem to need to see Winston. And it never ceases to astonish me how, in spite of it all, he manages to struggle on without you.” Bracken didn't bother to break his stride.

“I have to see him!” Burgess repeated breathlessly, not bothering to hide his anxiety.

“Can't!” Bracken sang out merrily. “Gone!”

“Where?” Burgess grabbed the other man's sleeve.

Bracken turned, his eyes filled with loathing. “Get your filthy hands off me!”

“Not until you tell me where Mr. Churchill is.”

“Rot in hell,” Bracken spat, moving off again.

“Then I'll share damnation with you. And Anna Fitzgerald.”

Bracken pulled up sharply. “What's your stinking little game, Burgess?”

“Did you think you could keep your affair with her secret?”

“Never been a problem. I 'm happy to be associated with her,” Bracken responded, his words growing clumsy through surprise. “If you think I have something to hide—”

“Sorry. I was forgetting. It's Miss Fitzgerald who's got the problem. On account of the fact that she's also having an affair with a Swedish gentleman. Name of Svensson. Bjorn Svensson.”

Bracken prayed that his face remained inscrutable behind his bottle-thick glasses, but there was no disguising the flush of astonishment and torment that had begun rising in his cheeks. “You miserable bastard. You repeat one word of that and I'll
break you. I'll make sure you never work again. And when I've finished breaking you into pieces I'm pretty sure Joe Kennedy will be standing in line to feed what's left of you back into whichever sewer you crawled from. I'll destroy you, Burgess. And it will give me the most immense pleasure.” He turned his back and was off again, striding forcefully down towards the park.

His total destruction. Yes, there might be many people standing in line for that pleasure, but it was a risk Burgess knew he had no option but to take. To destroy himself, if that's what it took, in order to get to Churchill. Oh, God, this was it. No turning back. He began to run after the retreating figure of Bracken.

“Then we'll go down together. She'll destroy you, too, Bracken.”

Still the other man did not stop, striding out ever more impatiently, pushing his way along the crowded pavement and leaving looks of irritation in his wake.

“Do you know she tells the Swede everything. Everything you tell her.”

A slight faltering in the step, but still Bracken pressed onwards. Burgess had almost caught him, was up to his shoulder.

“Do you know that's how the Germans found out the invasion date for Norway? Because you told her.”

Bracken stopped but did not turn, as though he had walked into an invisible wall.

“Thousands of British lives lost, Bracken. Because of you. And her.”

At last he turned, his face a battlefield of rage and misery.

“Lies,” he whispered. “Lies! Absurd lies!”

“Face it, Bracken, why the hell d'you think she hangs around with a character like you? To get tips from your hairdresser?”

Bracken grabbed the lapels of Burgess's crumpled suit. “Svensson's nothing more than a friend of her uncle!”

“A very well-connected man, is Mr. Svensson. Lots of business interests in Germany. Trades all sorts of things, he does. Currencies. Timber. Rubber. And pillow talk.”

Their faces were only inches apart.

“Know what she does, Bracken? Goes directly from your dining table to his bed. Takes your bloody roses with her.”

That's when Bracken hit him, lashed out and connected with Burgess's chin so forcefully he sent him sprawling in the gutter. Bracken stood towering over the fallen figure, ready to do it again.

Burgess felt his chin, then managed a smile through a lip he knew had split. “That's nothing to what they'll do to you, Bracken, when they find out about your little love triangle. Beat bloody hell out of you, I expect. But that'll be kids' play compared with what they'll do to your career. And that of Mr. Churchill. Everything destroyed, because you got up the wrong piece of skirt.”

The foot went back, ready to kick the insult out of him, but something snapped in Bracken's memory. The Swede in the company of Anna and Joe Kennedy, at dinner when he'd first met Anna, then their encounter walking through the park. A man of many contacts, Kennedy had called the Swede—Christ, they'd just come from the Palace. And Anna had been so remarkably, irritatingly coy.