The public library in Pimlico was open until seven that evening. It had a ground-in, sweet-and-sour aroma of beeswax and half-burnt coke, but it suited Ruth Mueller. She did not want to get back to her rented room before eight. By that time the family who lived below would have finished their dinner; it was bad enough having to go hungry without smelling the rest of the world at the trough.
Unlike her room, the Pimlico library was warm and quiet, but it was the books, of course, that had first drawn her here, particularly the Hitler books. Sadly, they had long since been banished from the shelves, and none of them had been very good, either Marxist tracts or hagiography. So she was left to wonder and to grapple with her half-formed impressions of the man. What about his childhood? What about his early days as a vagrant on the streets of Vienna? What about his early friendships with Jews, his devotion to his mother, his inability to form any other close relationship with a woman, his vegetarianism and his fondness for cream cakes? Who was he, why was he? He was physically brave, a man of courage. Like Churchill, so she had been told, and perhaps more so, for the young Hitler had received many wounds and war decorations. Yet he was childish. In 1918, Hitler had been invalided to a military hospital. When he heard that an armistice had been signed and that Germany had surrendered, he’d put his head beneath his pillow and sobbed. Bawled like a baby. And he’d been shouting like a petulant child ever since. Some said that was like Churchill, too …
She’d been trying to forget about Churchill but he had an irritating habit of wheedling his way back into her thoughts. She picked up a newspaper and tried to shake him away once more.
Hah! Civil servants, The Times announced, were to get a war bonus. The guilty men cosseting themselves at the very moment they were putting up the price of coal yet again. Outside the library the sun was shining brightly, but she couldn’t prevent a shiver of apprehension running through her body. She had frozen in her garret through the last winter, and dreaded what the next one might bring. On the following page there were tips for ‘cooking through the war without fear of rationing’. Dishes such as eggs with anchovy, bean and liver casserole, coconut rounds (a concoction based on bread soaked in evaporated milk) and macaroni and rabbit pie. She imagined every rabbit in the country dashing for cover.
Not that he would be eating anchovies or rabbit pie. At Chartwell it had been salmon, venison, pheasant and beef, washed down with the finest wines. The cost of a single bottle would have got her through an entire week, rent and all, yet he had the impertinence to lecture her about his sacrifices! What did he know about sacrifice?
Her mind wandered back to that summer of 1914, August, the last time she could remember being happy. There was sun, and the sound of children’s laughter. Then the summons had come. War. And the men had left with the horses, leaving behind the women with their young ones and their unspoken fears. So it had begun. The war was fought a million worlds away in France and Russia, but it had come rapping at their doors, gently at first. Strange shortages appeared. Suddenly there was no paper. She had begun to write letters not only across the page but up its length, too, in writing so minuscule her husband had required a glass to find his way through the kaleidoscope of scribbles. Worn-out shoes had to be repaired with card or resoled in wood; the children were asked to bring all their old bones and even cherry stones to school, to be turned into fertilizer. And they brought illness with them, everyone got sick, not least in their souls. Children were taught to hate, to kill even before they had become men, and were told by their teachers and priests that this was good and right. Hatred and intolerance were taught alongside geography and the Lord’s Prayer, and was so much simpler to learn. Hatred had become a great patriotic game, honed by hunger, and it had been played so long that it would never be stopped, not while Germany, this Germany, survived.
Ruth Mueller was a German. But she was also an intellectual, a free thinker with a mind of her own, for what it was worth. And above all, she was a mother with memories of a starving child whose cries still woke her in the darkest moments of the night. She had fled, but she had not escaped, and whatever she did now, in the end some part of her soul would be shredded. She was a German in a foreign land, an intellectual reduced to scraping through on scraps of translation and proofreading, a mother with no child. But doing nothing would not be an option, not in this war.
Then she remembered that Winston Churchill had said please. It was a cry of vulnerability, like a child’s plea for help. It had been a long time since anyone had said please.
She put aside the newspaper and went to the enquiries desk.
‘May I help you?’ The assistant was formal, unfriendly – she disapproved of Ruth Mueller’s strange reading habits, and of Ruth Mueller even more.
‘I would like some books. Something written by Mr Churchill, please. Perhaps something he has written about his father?’
They had expressed their collective concerns and reservations about the new Prime Minister, after which, politics being politics, they had trooped through the Division Lobby to give him a unanimous vote of confidence. Afterwards it had taken Churchill some while to leave the Chamber for, politicians being politicians, many had paused to congratulate him – but not for too long. Even Chips Channon had joined the throng.
‘Not one of us,’ Bracken had warned, whispering in Churchill’s ear.
‘Chips? Of course he is. Chips is everyone’s,’ Churchill had replied gaily. ‘Don’t worry about him. It’s the other buggers we have to watch out for.’ And Churchill had forced his way through to the side of Neville Chamberlain, taking his arm, smiling, ensuring that they were seen together and offering him an ostentatious display of gratitude and warmth.
Afterwards he had noted Bracken’s quizzical eye. ‘That’s the way it shall be, Brendan, both publicly and in private, for as long as is required. I’m haunted by enough damned ghosts, I’ve no need of more.’
They strode away, out of earshot and hidden behind a fog of cigar smoke. ‘Brendan, I have a task of some delicacy for you. I am being forced to fight on too many fronts. I have nominated the most senior Ministers in my Government, now I want your help in selecting the great mass of the remainder. I need to get on with the other war.’
‘Magnificent. I always enjoy a little vengeance.’
‘You will start this evening. You will do it with David Margesson.’
‘Margesson? Winston, you’ve gone mad …’
David Margesson was a name no one took lightly. He had been Neville Chamberlain’s Chief Whip, his immensely powerful organizer of the parliamentary party. He had known the details of every plot and piece of parliamentary wickedness during the last decade, largely because he had initiated most of them, and none of his plots had been more vicious than that against Churchill himself.
‘Winston, barely twelve months ago Margesson was on the point of getting you deselected. Thrown out of the party. He tried to destroy your whole life – he hates you! The only reason you’re here today is because the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia the night before the deselection meeting. God knows, but Adolf Hitler’s done more for your career than bloody Margesson! He’s a comprehensive bastard!’
‘Ah, but a most effective one. Which is why you will sit down with him and reshuffle the rest of my government, allowing as many as possible of the other bastards to remain.’
‘I am lost,’ Bracken gasped, his mind exhausted.
‘Come on, Brendan, it’s your own idea: Mark Antony, embracing the conspirators in order to give himself enough time.’
‘For what?’
Churchill stopped, grabbed the other man’s sleeve and spun him round until he was staring directly into his eyes.
‘To survive! If we rock this boat too violently, it will sink. It may be overloaded with men not to our hearts, but if we are to let them go, slip them over the side, it had best be done as quietly as possible and at night. So mark out the troublemakers. Give them new jobs, different jobs, impossible jobs, but always some job; never forget