Winston’s War. Michael Dobbs

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ

      ‘My name is Burgess, sir.’

      ‘So?’

      ‘I telephoned …’

      The Great Man scowled, trying to recall. ‘You can see I’m busy,’ he snapped. ‘The world has decided to destroy itself, so I am building a wall.’

      Burgess tried to follow the politician’s logic. Perhaps it was a symbolic act of defiance, or nothing more than an outstanding sulk. This wasn’t quite the greeting he had expected, or required. ‘Guy Burgess,’ the young man repeated. ‘From the BBC.’

      Churchill’s eyes were swollen and sleepless, red with anxiety. They travelled across the unexpected visitor, taking in the unruly hair, the crumpled suit, the sorely bitten fingernails. ‘You don’t look much like the BBC.’

      Burgess returned the stare. The old man was wearing an ancient and much-soiled overcoat whose middle button had been ripped away. His homburg looked as if it had just taken part in the Eton wall game and the boots were covered with splashes of cement. ‘You don’t look much like a great politician, either,’ he replied bluntly.

      The cigar twisted between the lips as the Great Man sized up this impudent intruder. Then he threw the trowel to one side. ‘Perhaps we had better discuss our mutual lack of authenticity inside.’

      Churchill led the way back up to the house, stomping impatiently but with remarkable vigour for a man of his age, his balding head bent forward like a battering ram. He threw off his outer garments to reveal a blue boiler suit which strained beneath the thickening waist, then led Burgess up to a study on the first floor. More architectural disappointment. The room was intended to be impressive with a vaulted timber ceiling in the manner of a mediaeval hall, but Burgess found it unconvincing. And isn’t that what they said about Churchill – pretentious, posturing, and unconvincing? Yet the windows offered still more magnificent views across the Weald. From here Churchill could see far beyond the gaze of almost any man in England. Some said that about him, too.

      ‘Whisky?’ Churchill didn’t wait for a reply before pouring.

      Burgess glanced at his watch. It was barely eleven.

      ‘You wanted me to perform on some radio programme of yours, is that it?’ Churchill growled, splashing large amounts of soda into two crystal glasses.

      ‘Yes, sir. It’s called The Week in Westminster.’ Burgess was waved into one of the wing chairs near the fireplace. Logs were glowing in the grate.

      ‘Without fear of contradiction I can tell you, young man, there’s not the slightest damned point.’

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because –’ Churchill refused to sit but paced impatiently on the other side of the fireplace, stabbing his cigar angrily in the younger man’s direction – ‘you represent the BBC and you have plotted and intrigued to keep me off the airwaves ever since I upset you over India and the Abdication …’

      ‘Not me, sir,’ Burgess protested, but the other man had no intention of pausing to take prisoners.

      ‘ … but most significantly because our Prime Minister …’ – the cigar was trembling, the voice seeming to prickle in despair – ‘I hesitate to speak so. The families of Mr Chamberlain and I go back a very long way in politics. His father Joseph was a great statesman, his brother Austen, too. Friends of my own father.’ The voice betrayed a sudden catch. Ah, the sins of the father … At Cambridge Burgess had been a brilliant historian and needed no reminding of Churchill’s extraordinary father, Lord Randolph – the most prodigious and enticing of men, widely favoured as the next Prime Minister, yet who had destroyed himself at the age of thirty-seven by storming out of the Cabinet and into the quicksand of exile, never being allowed to return. He had died suffocated by sorrows, although his doctors diagnosed syphilis. He was regarded as unsound. So was his son. It was an awesome and uncomfortable inheritance.

      ‘Our Prime Minister lays claim to leading the greatest empire on earth, Burgess, yet he has returned from his meeting with that odious Austrian upstart waving his umbrella and clutching in his hand an agreement that drenches this country in shame.’ As he slipped into the grip of his emotions the characteristic sibilance in Churchill’s voice – the result of a defect in his palate – became more pronounced. His words seemed to fly around the room in agitation looking for somewhere to perch. ‘I despair. I feel cast into darkness, yet there is nothing I can do. I am an old man.’

      ‘Not as old as Chamberlain.’ Burgess had meant to encourage, but already he was discovering how difficult it was to interrupt the Churchillian flow.

      ‘Hitler will give us war whether we want it or not. I have done all I can to warn of the perils, but no one listens. Look!’ He grabbed a pile of newspapers from his desk. ‘They call themselves a free press, but they haven’t a free thought amongst them. Chamberlain controls them, you know, all but writes the editorials for them.’ He threw the newspapers into the corner where they subsided like startled chickens. ‘What did The Times say this morning? I think I can recall them, words that burn into my heart. “No conqueror returning from a victory on the battlefield has come home adorned with nobler laurels than Mr Chamberlain from Munich yesterday…”.’ Churchill seemed incapable of continuing with the quotation, shaking his head. ‘He has sacrificed not only little Czechoslovakia, but also our honour.’

      ‘Hitler’s only got the German-speaking bits of Czechoslovakia.’

      Churchill turned on Burgess with fury. ‘He has got everything he wanted. He demanded to feast upon a free and democratic country, and instead of resisting we have offered to carve it up for him course by course. Some today, the rest tomorrow. It won’t even give him indigestion. You know the Czechs had thirty divisions of fine fighting men? Thirty divisions – imagine! Protected behind great bastions of concrete and steel. Enough to give Hitler endless agonies, but instead of fighting they are reduced to raising their frontier posts and waving the Wehrmacht through. The Nazis have been able to occupy half of Czechoslovakia with nothing more threatening than a marching band.’

      The cigar had gone out, exhausted, but Churchill seemed not to have noticed. He was standing by the window, looking out over his beloved countryside towards the Channel and the turbulent continent that lay beyond. ‘I love this spot. It was once so quiet, so peaceful here, Burgess, yet now there is nothing but the howling of wolves from every corner of Europe. They are growing louder, more insistent, yet there is nothing I can do about it. I am alone.’ The old man sank into silence, his body seeming to deflate as Burgess watched. The shoulders that had belonged to a prizefighter now seemed merely hunched and cowering before the blow that was to come.

      ‘Mr Churchill, you are not alone. There are many of us who share your fears.’

      ‘Are there? Are there truly?’ Churchill turned. ‘Not according to those harlots who infest Fleet Street.’ He lashed out with his foot at the pile of newspapers.

      It was odd, Burgess thought, for a politician like Churchill who took the shilling of Fleet Street as regularly as anyone in the land to describe them as harlots. Odd, but not incorrect.

      ‘What can I do? I have no armies to command, no powers to turn against the enemy.’

      ‘You have a voice.’

      ‘One voice lost in the midst of the storm.’

      ‘When a man is drowning even one voice can СКАЧАТЬ