‘Lift the chin for me, will you, sir? Thank you. Because of what, sir?’
‘Damn it, McFadden! We won the bloody war. Never again, we said. Then Hitler comes along and starts building his squadrons of panzers and fighter planes – purely for defence, he assures everyone, and we believe him. Even when he marches into the Rhineland we believe him. Two years later he’s trampling all over bloody Austria, and now he’s ripping Czechoslovakia to pieces. And still our Prime Minister says he trusts him!’
His client was tense, his moustache a-bristle. Mac reclined the chair even more to help him relax.
‘Tell me, McFadden, what do you think of our beloved Mr Chamberlain?’
Mac didn’t care for such direct questions. All his adult life had been spent in the mentality of the gulag, never openly complaining, always seeming to conform, never risking a row. Perhaps that’s why he had agreed to marry, not so much to avoid disappointing the lady but more because it was the simplest way to fit into the flow of things. Yet there weren’t any simple ways open to him any more. The time had come when even barbers had to take sides.
‘I think Mr Chamberlain wears his hair too long,’ the barber replied softly.
‘God, but what would I do to get near him with a razor,’ the politician spat.
‘Doesn’t go with the image, it doesn’t. That hair – and the winged collar and tail coat. Out of date, if you ask me.’
‘A man out of time.’
‘Will any of your colleagues be joining you, sir?’ Mac made it sound like an invitation to sit down and dine. As he applied the first towel, the politician offered up a soft moan and for a moment Mac thought he had applied it too hot, but it soon became clear that the pain came from an entirely different source.
‘They promised, you know. Walter Elliot, and others. We’ll be there with you, they said, right at your side. Munich was one goose-step too far. But where are they now? Elliot waffles on about how he can be of more use working from inside the Government than being a leper on the back benches. Leper. That’s the term he used. The day before he was talking about honour, now it’s become some sort of disfiguring disease. The bastard. And the others keep drivelling on about there being an election around the corner and how it would be suicide to resign now, how party headquarters would make sure they never got another job again. What sort of job do they think they’ll have when the Wehrmacht comes marching down bloody Whitehall, for Christ’s sake?’
Mac held back on the final towel. It was as though the politician was pouring out all the anguish and pain of betrayal he would never be able to display in the House, needing somehow to get to grips with the wreckage that only hours ago had been a grand life.
‘I despair. What’s become of my party? I thought we were a league of gentlemen, but only Eden telephoned. And Winston, of course. In tears. Sentimental old bugger. By God, if tears could drown Hitler, Winston would’ve finished him off before a single jackboot ever trod on Vienna.’
Mac hobbled around the chair to apply the final towel. Before his face disappeared, Duff Cooper muttered the words that Mac had heard so many times from this chair. ‘Not to be repeated, of course, McFadden. Shouldn’t really be telling you this but … Just between the two of us, eh?’
The politician wanted a sounding board and who better than a slow, stupid Jew-boy barber? Mac dropped the towel and at last the politician was silent.
Mac held a simple view about politicians. He loathed the lot. He’d been governed by Tsars, by Kaisers, by Kings and by Bloody Chaos. He’d seen both imperialism and communism up close – too close – and he had a pretty clear idea about Nazism, too. They were all the same. They were politicians. They sat behind vast desks in their vast palaces and moved vast armies backwards and forwards across the map – until the armies were no longer vast but had been destroyed and the game was over, for a while. Lives of millions of men sliced to pieces by arrows on a map.
This one was scarcely better than the rest. He wanted war and he’d get it, in the end, if not over Czechoslovakia then over some other god-forsaken patch of Europe. At some point someone would draw a line in the sand and soon it would run red and be so drenched in tears that eventually the line would be swept aside. Vanish. That’s what happened with lines in the sand. The soldier’s boot, the storm, the downpour of tears. Then the line would disappear, leaving everyone except old women struggling to remember where – and why – it had ever been.
Duff Cooper, of course, would stand in his place that afternoon and insist he was defending the cause of the common man, but Mac was about as common as they came and he’d burn before he saw any sense in it. If Cooper was defending freedom, as he claimed, why hadn’t he done so in Spain, and why not in Austria where Jews were already being rounded up and sent on their railway journeys to nowhere? What was so special about fucking Czechoslovakia?
No, for the politician this was nothing more than a glory hunt, a game of ambitions and advancement, a game pursued from the day he had been shoved out of his nursery and sent to learn the rules of the sport on the playing fields of some English public school.
The shave and trim were finished, the moustache back in its proper place. The politician was ready to face the enemy. ‘Have a good day, sir,’ Mac said at the door, holding out his client’s freshly brushed hat.
The soon-to-be former great person barely heard. In his mind he was already on his feet making one of the most memorable resignation speeches of the age, a speech which might yet rock the Government, even bring its house down. He tried to ignore the worm that had been wriggling deep inside all morning and telling him that he should come to his senses, be realistic, understand that the most he could hope to achieve was to sway the House enough for the door to swing open and allow him back in.
‘I’ll be back,’ Cooper barked.
Mac declined to offer an opinion.
Guy Francis de Moncy Burgess woke badly. It was not a good place in which to wake badly. His apartment, in Chester Square near Victoria Station, was decorated with a deliberate taste for the grotesque – the carpet was red, the walls a murky white, the curtains and sheets beneath his heavy Italianate bed-head an uncertain blue, and everything covered with a film of nicotine. As he opened his eyes the colours and stale tobacco mounted a co-ordinated assault on him, and he groaned. His mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, and very soon he would be late. Again.
He slipped out of bed and stumbled to the window. On his way he knocked over a pile of books on which was balanced a glass of red wine. Fortunately the wine, like Burgess, had been almost completely consumed and the stain would be invisible amongst the rest. He threw open the window and lit a cigarette, coughing as a trickle of fresh air tried to penetrate the room. It was miserably squalid, but as he insisted on telling his friends, if this was squalor it was nothing compared to what you’d find in Guernica or some of the side streets of Moscow. So, you’ve been to Moscow, have you? they would invariably ask. How was it? Tough, uncompromising, intellectual, unsentimental, he would tell them. He would relate his encounter with a militiaman who had threatened to beat him up for walking on the grass, but that was only half the story. He’d been throwing up over a statue of Stalin at the time.
He flung the cigarette stub out of the window and hauled up a piece of dried fish that he kept dangling on a string from his windowsill, tearing off a piece before throwing the rest back out again. Breakfast on the run. But his mouth was so dry he couldn’t chew, not until he’d poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s and swilled it round the back of his gums.
‘To mastication,’ he murmured, raising his glass to the straw-stuffed Regency buck that stood by the wardrobe. It stared back at him in reproach, the glass