Robert Butler: The Empire of Night

As if, offstage, the sound effects man heard his cue, a bomb thumped distantly and shuddered faintly beneath our feet.

Buffington paused only for a single beat as if to let his point sink in. Before me and to the side I could see most of the men in the room, and I knew I could assume the same of the others: not one of us had flinched. And here in this London home, the bomb’s fading vibration in our feet and legs and chest supported Buffington’s point.

He said, “Gentlemen, if we fail, this dark age will be longer than the last. Those previous five centuries will seem the winking of an eye compared to this. And the new dark age will be infinitely more terrible. Mankind’s vaunted advances of manufacturing and technology can be used for good, but they can just as readily and effectively be used for evil.”

One more drub of a bomb, much closer, rattled our knees and stirred the silverware on the tables.

Buffington boomed in response, “Consider that the call to roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.”

We all certainly were happy to take that attitude, but no one moved. Not even Buffington. We waited for the next one. This moment and the next. The Germans were still working on aerial warfare. So far the raids were widely spaced and had come with one or two airships following a single, ongoing path across the city and flying away. This bomb was very near and from the direction of the earlier, distant blasts; the next would either be farther away along the flight path or it would be right on top of us.

We waited.

“Shall we sit?” Buffington’s voice had diminished a little. This was a question now, not a defiant suggestion.

And there was a stroke of sound. More distant. Barely felt in Buffington’s cellar.

“Bloody hell,” someone said nearby, very low, to himself.

We heard no more until we were sitting with four others at the far table. Trask and I were beside each other and I could look, if I wished, between two steel-gray, slick-maned Brits across from me and down the darkened corridor leading to the rest of the basement floor. We heard one more bomb before the food, like a distant stroke of thunder, someone else’s storm.

And then we ate. Our companions introduced themselves but did not declare their work, nor did they ask ours, which made me suspect they were Foreign Office types, secret service no doubt, at least some of them. Their talk was casual but it was bluntly critical about Britain’s progress so far in the war. About the disastrous four-week gap between the sea attack and the land attack in Gallipoli, about the severe shortage of artillery shells, about the hasty training of a million new troops, about the U-boat threat and the Zeppelin threat and the sudden vulnerability of sacred British soil after centuries of comfortable insularity.

Trask and I said little.

When the four began to lean toward each other and debate the need to dissolve the government and form a new one, I leaned too, toward Trask, and said, low, “Are all these guys in your line of work?”

Trask nodded. “In varying degrees.”

The four men stopped talking abruptly.

I thought at first that they’d overheard us, trained as they perhaps were. But their faces had turned not to us but to a point higher up and beyond Trask’s far shoulder.

I looked, and Buffington had arrived and he put his hand on the shoulder of a stout man with a crooked cravat sitting next to Trask. The man needed no word. He nodded and rose and moved off and Buffington sat down.

He said to the other three, “Sorry, gentlemen. Continue.”

And they did, with one of them saying Kitchener — who was the secretary of state for war and who all three agreed was responsible for the shortage of artillery shells — had to resign no matter what they did with Asquith.

Buffington drew Trask toward him. I leaned along as well and neither of them made the slightest gesture to suggest I was not invited.

Buffington said, “Stockman’s throwing a weekend house party.”

“Your man?” Trask said.

Buffington said, “In the vicinity.”

Trask nodded. And then he made the tiniest intentional movement of his head, so tiny that I instantly doubted my perception, figured I was an example of how you can overtrain a secret service agent. The movement, I thought, was this very slight turn in my direction — since I’d drawn near, behind Trask’s right shoulder — as if it was a subtle gesture to Buffington, reminding him of my presence. “Is she ready?” he said.

What did all that have to do with me?

I sat back in my chair.

My eyes moved across the table and between the two steel-gray heads, who had sat back as well, now that they’d agreed to throw out Asquith and Kitchener and all the rest of them.

I looked into the darkness of the corridor.

And the darkness moved.

That was the first impression, lasting only a brief moment. The darkness shifted, swelled, and then points of light began to clarify into a face, hands, and a piano started playing the instrumental introduction to a song — and I recognized it, the intro to “Keep the Home Fires Burning”—and the face emerging from the shadows of the corridor, heading this way, became clear, and now I recognized it as well, even as I had a sense of movement to my left, Buffington no doubt standing up to address us all. He said, “Gentlemen, in the interests of preserving civilization as we wait out this latest barbarous attack, I give you the great Isabel Cobb.”

My mother emerged fully into the room, dressed in black, and she stopped, framed in the doorway, as the men at our table wrenched around, turned their chairs, applauded, and cried out “Hear! Hear!”

The introduction was over and Mother shot the piano player a brief glance as he fumbled a bit with the transition to the verse. I glanced with her, and it was the stout man Buffington had replaced at the table. This was a select and secretive group; Isabel Cobb’s accompanist was drawn from one of our own number. He wasn’t terrible at this, however, and he found his way into the verse and Mother looked back to us and began to sing.

I heard her voice, but for a few moments, as far as I knew, she could have been singing a soliloquy from Hamlet , as I grappled with my surprise at her presence here. And then she was inserting that phony ache into her voice that she was so good at. Phony mostly to my ear, of course; fans loved it. But, indeed, she drew even me in with it now as she sang:

“Let no tears add to their hardships

As the soldiers pass along,

And although your heart is breaking,

Make it sing this cheery song.”

The secret service pianist did all right with the transition to the chorus and Mama floated on in, more achy than ever. “Keep the home fires burning, while your hearts are yearning,” she sang and she began to work the room, gliding along the tables, singing to each stiff upper lip individually—“Though your lads are far away, they dream of home”—and bringing a tear to each eye and a stirring to each stirrable part—“There’s a silver lining, through the dark clouds shining”—and she gave me a little less eye contact than the others and a pat on the shoulder as she slid by. “Turn the dark cloud inside out, till the boys come home.”

I watched her as she moved on to Trask.

He lifted his face to her, and a son knows certain things for reasons he can’t put his finger on easily. Or the reasons seem minute and insubstantial. But Trask’s eyes and my mother’s held on each other for one pulse beat, one intake of breath, and I knew there was something between them. This particular son knowing certain things about this particular mother made me think in my usual, weary little way: lovers.

Then he nodded, once, very faintly, with those blank eyes of his, and I felt my intuition shift. She was not sleeping with him. She was working for him. Is she ready? he’d said. Ready for Sir Albert Stockman’s weekend party.