Джеймс Хилтон - Time And Time Again

‘He likes letter writing?’

‘I’d say he must.’

‘Well, he’s in real trouble about it now. He’s been sending letters to Hitler and Goebbels.’

After all the preliminaries the gist of the thing came out like that, in a simple sentence, for Gosford had a technique of his own. Charles countered it by underplaying his reaction. ‘Oh dear,’ he said, in the manner of an old lady who has dropped her knitting. Then he added, establishing a small line of resistance: ‘I deplore his taste, but surely until September that was no crime?’

‘He’s been trying to communicate since, through a known German spy in Bucharest.’

Charles was shocked and silent.

Gosford watched him for a moment, then continued: ‘Of course our Intelligence has been intercepting it all—they’re not QUITE such fools… Does all this surprise you—or doesn’t it?’

Charles answered carefully: ‘Nothing about my father surprises me very much, but he’s an old man, almost eighty, and I know him well enough to feel sure that any correspondence he’s been having with Hitler and Goebbels is a waste of time… and I mean THEIR time.’

Gosford opened a desk drawer and took out a file. ‘Care to look at some of the letters?’

Charles spent the next ten minutes reading them and pretending to be still reading when actually he was thinking. They were photostatic copies. Those from Havelock were in his undisguised handwriting and on Beeching note-paper. In brief—and considering the magnitude of the subject they WERE brief —they told the Germans what to do to clean up the world. They also assured their addressees of Havelock’s personal admiration and that they could count on him as a supporter of any English movement similar to theirs. The English government was denounced as effete and the English people as ripe for dictatorship if a strong man should arise, and there was a definite hint that in default of any other suitable candidate Havelock would not consider himself too old for the job.

The return letters were fewer and shorter. Neither Goebbels nor Hitler had sent any, but those of underlings were non-committally flattering and one of them mentioned a source that would supply the names of other Germanophile Englishmen with whom Havelock might care to make contact. It looked as if the Nazis had been only mildly impressed by Havelock as an Englishman of title and substance who might just conceivably be worth cultivating—a small possible cog in the machinery of the master plan.

Charles handed back the letters with a close concealment of his concern. ‘I still say he’s wasting their time.’

Gosford put the letters back in the drawer. Then he contemplated the yellow windows that were getting yellower. Already the fog had percolated into the room so that one could hardly see the full-length portrait of some eighteenth-century statesman above the marble mantelpiece.

‘You know, Anderson, we English have missed the tremendous test of armed invasion for a couple of centuries or so, and this immunity has led us to indulge in the most comforting and therefore the most dangerous illusion —that we’re fundamentally different from other people. I don’t believe we are. I don’t believe an Englishman can jump off a cliff without falling. I don’t believe that a hostile army, if strong enough, couldn’t land here, or that if it did, it would find no Englishman ready to co-operate… So you see how interesting these letters are—especially the one that mentions a source from which certain other names can be obtained.’

‘Yes. I see that.’

‘Of course we know that source and we have those names.’

‘IMPORTANT names?’

‘I’m sure it would surprise you if I told you.’

Charles did not ask for an elucidation, because he guessed that so donnish a speaker as Gosford would not be equivocal except deliberately. Gosford suddenly got up and paced across the room. ‘You see where this leads us, Anderson? If the government has to start making arrests, it might be difficult not to include Sir Havelock.’

‘I see that too. Though perhaps on account of his age—’

‘A point certainly. Of course it’s all outside my province except so far as it concerns your own immediate future. It would be a pity if you were in a position to be embarrassed by anything unpleasant that might occur.’

Charles nodded, and out of the bitterness of his heart answered: ‘Yes, it would be embarrassing to be at a reception in a neutral capital when the B.B.C. announces the arrest of one’s father for high treason.’

Gosford gestured slightly against this dramatization. ‘Please understand I’m not forecasting any such thing. When does your leave expire?’

‘The twenty-fifth.’

Gosford made a note on his desk pad. ‘I ought to be able to tell you more before then. Don’t do anything yet.’

‘What CAN I do? Seems to me I’m pretty helpless… Perhaps, though, I ought to tackle my father—find out at least if he realizes how serious it is. Any objection?’

‘ I have none. And I don’t see why…’ Gosford stopped pacing and put an arm on Charles’s shoulder. He became human and the humanity made him sixth-formish. ‘Look, Anderson, this is the damnedest situation. Your father’s probably being watched, and there’s nowhere he can run to even if he tried, so what harm can it do to talk to him all you want? He may have done nothing at all but just write letters. On the other hand, these are incalculable times and there are circumstances that might arise… a parachute landing, for instance. What would he do in such a case? Do YOU know? Does anybody know? That’s the sort of problem the authorities are up against.’

Charles suddenly thought of the Tunnel of Love, with his father popping out of the canvas chute on to the lawn. The thought gave him ease to meet Gosford’s greater cordiality with his own as he answered: ‘You mean what would he do if German parachutists came down on his land at Beeching? Well, he might shoot them if he had a gun and they didn’t shoot him first. Or he might ask them into the house and offer them brandies and soda. Or he might recite them a poem he’d just composed… That’s the sort of problem I’M up against.’

Charles found his father in quite a rollicking mood; wartime excited him, and local hostility (for he had made no secret of his political views) did not make him unhappy. His whole life, since the age of forty, had been a training to accept the penalties of disfavour, and this was only the climax of it, all the more endurable because at such an age many things become easier, to compensate for many others that become harder.

When Charles began, without much preamble: ‘I’m afraid, father, you’ve got yourself in a considerable mess’—something flicked across his memory; it was Havelock, two decades before, making almost the same remark, though in sharper accents, on that last day of Charles’s last term at Cambridge. ‘You were in a damned mess and I got you out of it.’ Perhaps if Charles could have added the second half of the sentence he might also have copied the sharper accents; as it was he could give no such assurance and therefore spoke quietly. He just told Havelock what had happened, without elaboration or drama.

Even after long experience there was never any certainty how his father would take things. This time Charles had been prepared for an outburst, some tremendous diatribe against England, the government, democracy, and all they stood for; but instead Havelock merely shrugged and poured himself more port. ‘All right then. They can jail me. I’ve jailed plenty in my time. One thing, though, I won’t need counsel. I’ll defend myself.’ It was clear from his eyes that he was already composing a great speech from the dock. Charles was ready to deflate this mood. In fact for some time deflation had been his familiar weapon in dealing with his father’s ebullitions; it had proved better than indignation or censure, and was specially suited to Charles’s own temperament. He had long ago ceased to hope that his father could be reformed or would ever become much different; the problem, therefore, was to come to terms with an insolubility. Charles had often found himself in a similar position in regard to some professional issue, but if one accepted from the outset the philosophic idea that certain problems in life (as in mathematics) MIGHT be insoluble, it was easier to tackle them, to shirk them, to pretend they did not exist, or by starving them of attention to find one day that they had solved themselves. Charles, therefore, tried to regard his father as something like the Macedonian Problem to those who lived in Macedonia; and it was comforting then to reflect that many people living in Macedonia were doubtless completely unaware that there was such a thing.