‘No doubt about it.’ Churchill gave himself another whisky and siphoned soda water into it. ‘Now let’s get that phrase of yours back off the shelf.’
‘What phrase was that?’
‘He, Stalin that is, would like to see the capitalist powers fight each other to a standstill. It made my hair curl, Brendan, what little there is left of it. Of course you’re absolutely right, that’s just what old Joe would like to happen.’
Patiently, Bracken waited for enlightenment.
Holding his glass of whisky in one hand, pausing to tap some of the books in the cases with one small, plump finger as though they contained the answers to the questions that had defied the sages, Churchill began to pace the room again. There was his own novel, Savrola, written in his youth; there was The Aftermath in which he had poured out his post-war hatred of the Bolsheviks. ‘It’s strange,’ he said, finger lingering on The Aftermath, but my fear – yes, fear, Brendan – of the Reds has always been greater than my fear of the Nazis. We shouldn’t have squeezed the Nazis so hard, Brendan, we should have left them a little pith.’
Still Bracken waited.
‘Supposing,’ Churchill said, turning to study Bracken’s reactions, ‘supposing we reversed the process to which you have just referred. Supposing we took steps to make sure that Russia and Germany fought each other to a standstill?’
Tentatively, Bracken said: ‘A formidable proposition, Winston,’ aware that he was being used as a sounding board.
Churchill got up steam. ‘I wonder if it could be done … why not … it has always been possible to manipulate great men … just kick them in their Achilles heel – conceit …’
‘But what about this pact you’re so sure they’re going to sign?’
‘It won’t fool either of them. Hitler intends to march through the steppes, Stalin knows it. It’s just a matter of buying time. Like Munich,’ he added, scowling.
The distant clock chimed again. A single note. Half an hour had passed since Clementine had taken herself to bed. It was 12.30 a.m.
Like Munich … That was the only truth, Bracken realised. He had been frog-marched into a debate about a war that hadn’t been declared, a Soviet-German Alliance that didn’t exist.
But Churchill had become an exultant prophet, his glass of whisky his crystal ball. ‘What we must do,’ he said, ‘is make the sands of time run with great alacrity.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t understand, Winston, you’re talking in riddles.’
Churchill’s words lost their ring. ‘No more you should, Brendan, no more you should. I’m not even sure that I do at this moment. But it will come, it will come.’
He sat down abruptly.
Then, voice sombre, he wound up the debate: ‘But I tell you this. Unless some stark and terrible measures are devised, this island of ours is doomed to be pillaged by the barbaric hordes of either the Nazis or the Bolsheviks.’
Watched by a stunned Bracken, he drained his crystal ball. ‘We have but one hope of survival and that is to make sure that these two arch-enemies of freedom fight each other to the death.’
Without warning he strode to the door. Turning, he said: ‘Come on, Brendan, there’s a good chap, you’re keeping me from my bed.’
By the second week of June 1940 much of Europe lay in ruins, the people dazed and beaten by Hitler’s Blitzkrieg. Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland and Belgium had fallen and France was poised to throw in the Tricolour.
But in Lisbon you could have been forgiven for forgetting that there was a war on at all.
The sun shone; the boulevard cafés in the cobbled squares and wide avenues were crowded with customers, British and German among them, the broad, flat waters of the Tagus estuary were scattered with ships of many nations; the little yellow tramcars butting along their shining rails and climbing the steep hills were stuffed with cheerful, sweating passengers.
In the grand arenas of the Baixa, business in the banks was brisk, hotels were full, shops were relatively well-stocked. In the precipitous maze of the Alfama, women garlanded their leaning cottages with laundry, dogs slept in the alleyways and the hot air was greased with the smell of grilling sardines.
It was only on closer inspection that you realised that the Portuguese capital had not entirely escaped the war. There was a restlessness abroad in those pavement cafés; conversations were muted, money changed hands surreptitiously. And in the grand hotels, the Avenida Palace and the Aviz, the atmosphere was majestically clandestine.
The perpetrators of this atmosphere were mostly refugees but quite a few were spies. The refugees had flocked to neutral Portugal from the countries over-run by the Nazis, following in the footsteps of the Jews who had fled from Germany itself. Together they formed a cosmopolitan society that shivered with intrigue and suspicion.
At first they all had but one aim – to get out of Europe through Lisbon, the gateway to freedom. The rich usually managed it, liberally tipping the custodians of the city’s portals. Their poorer brethren, those more used to using the tradesmen’s entrance, didn’t escape so easily.
And it was they who were the most furtive. Selling jewellery, worthless bonds, secrets and their bodies if they were well nourished enough. Lying, cheating, cajoling, bribing. Anything to get a berth on a ship or, more ambitiously, on a New York-bound Clipper seaplane or an aircraft flying by night from Sintra airport. For preference a passage to the United States, traditional haven of desperate emigrants; second choices Britain, because, being at war, she was less hospitable to aliens, and South America, which was such a long way off and the sympathies of some of those far-off countries were suspect.
They wore incongruous clothes, these homeless fugitives. Long coats and cloaks, slouch-hats and absurd peaked caps, moth-eaten stoles and peasant blouses. Collectively they looked like extras from a dozen period movies. And the longer they stayed the more threadbare became their costumes, the more humble their homes.
The really tough persevered, in particular the Jews who were used to such privations. Others, dogged by ill-luck, double-crossed by swindlers, took to the hills or one of the shanty settlements on the outskirts of Lisbon where they could share their poverty without humiliation.
Their empty seats in the cafés were immediately filled, their rooms soon occupied by newcomers feverish with optimism. Some were luckier than others, in particular the British – many of them in transit, via Spain, from the South of France – who were accommodated outside the city. After all, Portugal was Britain’s oldest ally even if she had to placate the Germans – you didn’t upset Hitler, not if you were as small and unprepared as Portugal, you didn’t.
On June 13, the eve of the German occupation of Paris and a fine, dreamy day in Lisbon, the plight of the refugees seemed more stark than usual.
Or so it seemed to the tall young man in grey flannel trousers and white shirt striding loose-limbed along the Avenida da Liberdade, the Champs-Elysées of Lisbon, on his way to meet a girl in the Alfama.
It was feira, the Festival of St Anthony of Padua, Lisbon’s own saint, and the groups of dark-clad aliens seemed so remote from it; particularly the children with their hollowed eyes, pale skin and sharp bones. They should have been part of it – the processions, the feasts, the fireworks – because feira is a time for children (and lovers and drunks); instead they sat quietly in their ghetto groups in their peaked caps and too-long shorts, having learned already that insignificance is