The Abominable: A Novel

29.

Chartwell was Churchill’s country place near Westerham in Kent, some twenty-five miles from London. I dropped by to pick up my new clothes at the tailor’s at noon, tried them on, let the tailor pronounce them proper, stayed in one of the white shirts they’d chosen for me and in the tan linen suit they’d just made for me—the tailor chose a modest green and burgundy tie for it—and caught the 1:15 train with the help of a waiting car sent by the Ministry. (Which “Ministry” I had no idea.) Another such chauffeur-driven limousine picked me up at the Westerham station and drove me the few miles to Chartwell proper.

I’d expected another huge estate such as Lady Bromley’s or the one I’d heard described that Richard Davis Deacon had given up after the War, but Chartwell looked more like a comfortable house in the country somewhere in Massachusetts. I was to learn much later that rather than its having been in the Churchill family for a dozen generations, Chartwell—a rather plain brick house made ugly by additions and bad landscaping in the 1800s—had been fairly recently purchased and more or less rebuilt by Churchill’s workmen.

And by Churchill himself.

After I’d been shown to a room by a servant and had time to “freshen up” a bit, an older male servant came to the room and told me that Mr. Churchill would like to see me and asked if the time was convenient for me. I told him it was.

I expected to be led into a huge library, but instead the tall gray-haired servant who’d answered my query about his name only with “Mason, sir” led me around to the side of the house where Winston Churchill, wearing a white fedora and a dark mortar-spattered coverall, was laying bricks.

“Ho, welcome, Mr. Perry,” he cried, using a trowel to level off some mortar before laying another brick in place.

It was a long wall.

“I spend ten hours a day in my office in London, but this is my real work,” continued Churchill. I’d already come to realize that the monologue was his favorite form of conversation. “This and writing histories. I took care to contact the bricklayers’ union before I did my first wall. They made me an honorary member, but I still pay my dues. My real work this week has been two thousand words written and two hundred bricks laid.”

He set the trowel down and, taking me suddenly by the elbow, led me around to the back of the house.

“The ‘Cosy Pig,’ I call it,” said Churchill.

“Call what, sir?” I said.

“Why, the house, of course. Chartwell. And if you’re Mr. Perry, then I am Mr. Churchill; no more ‘sirs.’”

“All right,” I said, just avoiding uttering the “sir.”

We stopped on a patio amidst a low formal garden, but it wasn’t the garden that the Chancellor of the Exchequer had brought me around the house to see. “This is why I bought the place three years ago,” he said.

I knew he meant the view from this hilltop. It was then—and remains today—the single most beautiful and verdant view of a peacetime countryside I’d ever seen. There were distant forests of beech, chestnut, and oak, countless wide green meadows, and the longest, grassiest slopes I’d ever encountered.

“The Cosy Pig sits in its eighty acres of all this,” said Churchill, “but it’s this view of the combe and the larger Kentish Weald that convinced me to buy the place, although Clementine said it was—and would be in its rebuilding—too dear for me. For us. And I suppose it has been.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, realizing how inadequate the words were.

“Not as beautiful as Mount Everest, I would imagine,” said the heavyset little man. His bright eyes were watching me carefully.

“That’s a different beauty, si—…Mr. Churchill,” I said. “All rock, ice, harsh light, air. Almost everything, including the air, is so cold it cuts. There’s no green there, usually, above Base Camp, not even a lichen. Nothing alive but the climbers and the rare raven. No trees, no leaves, no grass…almost nothing soft, Mr. Churchill. Just rock and ice and snow and sky. This is infinitely more…gentle. More…human.”

Churchill had been listening carefully, and now he nodded. “I’d best be getting back to work. When I finish that wall for what will be the final terrace extension to Clementine’s bedroom, I need to build another dam.” He waved his short arm and chubby hand to the left. “I built those ponds as well. Have always enjoyed looking at water and things that like to live in water.”

The ponds were beautiful and natural-looking. But this time I said nothing.

“Make yourself at home, as you Yanks like to say,” said Churchill. “If you’re hungry at all, tell Mason or Matthews; they’ll have cook make up a sandwich for you. The liquor’s in the drawing room, and there is some good whisky—Scotch, I believe you fellows call it on your side of the pond—in your suite. There are books in your room, but feel free to borrow from the library. If you can’t reach the book, it’s because you weren’t meant to be able to. Anything else is fair game. We’ll have sherry or whisky at six, dinner’s at seven thirty—early tonight because one of our guests had his people bring a projector with a motion picture for us to see later. Or for the children to see, I should say. I think you’ll find all our dinner guests amusing tonight, but three of them especially so. See you in a while, Mr. Perry.”

The first guest I met was T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” the American reporter Lowell Thomas had called him during and after the War—who was descending the stairs for drinks just when I was. Lawrence was wearing the full robes of a prince of Arabia, complete with a jewel-handled curved dagger tucked in his sash.

“Silly, I know,” he said after we’d introduced ourselves and shaken hands, “but the children love it.”

We were soon joined by an older man whom Churchill called “Prof.” This was Professor F. A. Lindemann, and Lawrence later whispered to me that in 1916, when countless RAF pilots were dying because they were unable to get their flimsy paper and wood aircraft out of a flat spin, “Prof” Lindemann had worked out, using advanced mathematics, a maneuver which he announced would bring any aircraft out of even the worst tailspin. When the RAF establishment and the pilots said the maneuver wouldn’t work—according to Lawrence, who was still wearing his rather effeminate white cotton headdress and headband as he told me all this—the professor had taught himself how to fly, taken up a SPAD while wearing no parachute, deliberately put the craft into the worst flat spin imaginable, and deftly pulled it out—using his mathematically concocted maneuver—with hundreds of feet to spare. Evidently the secret was in getting one’s hands and feet off the controls; the aircraft, said Professor Lindemann, wanted to fly straight and level and would do so if the pilot left it alone. It was, he announced, all the correcting and overcorrecting inputs to the controls that turned spins into death spins. And then, according to Lawrence, the “Prof” had taken up another, older biplane, set it into a terrible spin, and allowed it to recover yet again.

After that, T. E. Lawrence assured me, all RAF pilots were required to learn the Prof’s maneuver.

During dinner that night—there were about a dozen people at the table, including the children: a sixteen-year-old daughter, Diana; a son, Randolph, who looked to be about fourteen; and an eleven-year-old girl named Sarah, as well as two cousins, a boy and a girl (whose names I forget) roughly the ages of Diana and Randolph—Churchill challenged Prof to “tell us in words of one syllable, and taking no longer than five minutes, what this quantum theory rubbish is all about.”

While Churchill checked the watch from his waistcoat pocket, Professor Lindemann did so with twenty seconds to spare. Everyone at the table, including me, burst into applause. I’d actually understood it.

The other “special guest” for that night’s dinner had taken me aback somewhat when I first saw him in the drawing room accepting a large glass of chilled champagne.

It was, I saw, Adolf Hitler. I’d been reminded of that name during my month of convalescing—in truth, merely waiting in hopes that the Deacon and Reggie would show up someday—with Dr. Pasang at the tea plantation. I’d read everything I could get, at the plantation and during the weeks on the boat coming back from India, about Herr Hitler.

And here Hitler was—for a moment I was filled with a terrible indecision (not what I should do, had to do, but how could I do it then and there?)—but then I noticed the wavy hair and pleasant expression, the slightly longer bone structure in the face, and realized it was only the fake mustache—which he removed after amusing the children but before dinner—that really caused the resemblance. This man, as Churchill introduced us, was Charles Chaplin, who although born in England was now a fellow U.S. resident.

This, then, was why we were dining earlier that evening and the children dining with us—Chaplin had brought his most recent release (along with a portable cinema projector) to show us his new movie after dinner, before it got too late for the children.

But as pleasant and smiling as Chaplin was, he irritated our host even before drinks were finished and we were shown into the long dining room. Chaplin, it seemed, was very serious about his politics, and was pressing Churchill on why the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Baldwin government had insisted on going back onto the gold standard. “It will hurt your economy, you know,” pressed Chaplin over drinks. “Most of all, it will hurt the poor people as the prices of everything will go up.”

Churchill obviously hated being told he was wrong, much less confronted with such an argument in his own home, so he was in a full, silent sulk by the time we all found our places around the table.

But then Chaplin did an odd thing to break the ice. “Since I have to get back to London tonight and we may not have time to chat after I show our new movie to you, I’ll give you a preview of it here at the dinner table,” he said. He’d brought a print of his new four-reeler called The Gold Rush, which had premiered in the States in June but not yet reached England.

Chaplin took two forks and stabbed them into two dinner rolls. “My Little Tramp,” said the actor, “is up in Alaska hunting for gold and trying to impress a young woman he’s met. At least in his fantasy, he’s with her and trying to impress her. And since he cannot speak, he communicates with her in this way instead.”

And with that, the political, serious Charlie Chaplin disappeared and a smiling, lovable version of his Little Tramp character appeared, shoulders hunched over his forks and the dinner rolls as if the rolls were his feet, the forks dug into the rolls his legs, and he proceeded to do a little dance with the rolls and forks, humming the tune as he went, even doing high kicks and athletic “splits” with the forks and rolls, and finally ending it with a dinner-roll-and-forks curtsey and Little Tramp simper.

Everyone applauded again. The ice had been truly broken. Churchill, who’d laughed hardest of all, became his gregarious, host-like self again, all signs of his petulance fled.

There was one other odd moment to the otherwise witty and delightful dinner. At one point T. E. Lawrence leaned over the table toward Chaplin on the other side, the silk wings of Lawrence’s headdress almost dipping into the sorbet, and he said to the movie star, “Chaplin, Chaplin. Is that Jewish? Are you a Jew, sir?”

Chaplin’s smile never wavered. He raised his glass of white wine—we were having pheasant—in Lawrence’s direction and said, “Alas, I did not have that honor at birth, Mr. Lawrence.”

Later, when the children and guests were rushing into the long drawing room where chairs and the projector had been set up, I excused myself—saying I was tired, which I was—and shook hands with Chaplin, telling him that I hoped we might meet again someday. He returned the warm handshake and wished me the same.

Then I went up to my room and to sleep while gales of laughter floated up from the main floor for the next ninety minutes or so.

I was awakened—softly but insistently by the servant named Mason—in what felt like the middle of the night. My father’s watch said it was just before four a.m.

“If you do not mind the hour, sir,” whispered Mason as he held a candle, “Mr. Churchill is in his study, just finishing his work, and would like to speak with you now.”

I did mind. I minded not only the rudeness of the hour and being so summarily summoned to the Great Man’s study at his whim, I minded everything. The previous evening’s dinner and conversation had been interesting—meeting Charlie Chaplin had been an experience outside my realm of reality—but no amount of social niceties could make up for the anger and despair I still felt about what had happened on Mount Everest and why my friends had been sent there. My heart was filled with darkness, and I was in no mood for any more witty chatter or social merrymaking. I resolved to ask the Minister of the Exchequer directly and bluntly why he thought he had the power to waste lives such as Percival Bromley’s, Jean-Claude Clairoux’s, Richard Davis Deacon’s, Lady Bromley-Montfort’s, or the lives of the fine Sherpas who’d died and the young Austrian Kurt Meyer, who—I wanted to track down T. E. Lawrence and shout in his face—had been a Jew. And one with more balls than any silk-dress-wearing English-Arab fop I’d ever met.

I must still have been frowning when I joined Churchill in his study. Despite my black mood, I had to acknowledge to myself that the top-floor room was impressive. Being shown in by Mason through a Tudor doorway decorated with what I later learned was called a molded architrave—Mason silently slipped away and equally silently closed the door behind him—I looked around and up. And up. The ceiling had obviously been removed and now revealed vaulting beams and rafters that looked to be as old and solid as England itself. The huge room had broad and faded carpets on the floor, but much of the center part of the space was empty. Built into the high wall were bookcases overflowing with volumes (and I’d already seen that the downstairs library would have been sufficient to serve the reading needs of any mid-sized city in the American Midwest). There were a few chairs scattered around and a couple of low writing desks, including one magnificently carved mahogany desk with a comfortable upholstered chair behind it, but Churchill was standing and writing at a high slanted desk made of old, unvarnished wood.

“A Disraeli desk,” barked Churchill. “Our Victorian predecessors liked to work standing up.” He touched the ink-stained slanted writing surface carefully, as if he were caressing it. “Not Disraeli’s actual desk, of course. I had a local carpenter knock it up for me.”

I stood there, feeling foolish in my robe and slippers. But I’d seen immediately that Mr. Churchill was in his robe and slippers: the robe a silken explosion of green, gold, and scarlet threads. His ill-fitting slippers made a sound—hirff, hirff, hirff—whenever he moved, as he did now to pour a sizable glass of whisky for each of us. I took the glass but did not drink.

Churchill noticed me glancing up again at the high rafters and old paintings on the wall.

“This happens to be the oldest part of Chartwell,” rumbled Churchill. “It dates to ten eighty-six A.D., just twenty years after the Battle of Hastings. I do my writing in here. Did you know that I make my living as a writer? Mostly historical tomes. Usually I dictate to one secretary, who has to be good at her shorthand to keep up. Tonight, since I’m working on two volumes simultaneously, I’ve been dictating to two young ladies. I also had two of my male researchers here helping me. You must have just missed them all on the staircase.”

I nodded but kept silent. We continued to stand facing each other. Churchill sipped his whisky. I ignored mine.

“You’re angry, Mr. Perry,” he said over the top of his whisky glass. His bright little eyes missed nothing but kept moving from side to side, as if staying wary that no one was sneaking up on him.

I gave him my best approximation of J.C.’s Gallic shrug.

Churchill smiled. “I don’t blame you for being angry. But what are you angriest at, young man? The sordid nature of the photographs you delivered to me yesterday or the seeming waste of your friends’ and others’ lives in obtaining those nasty things?”

We moved toward two chairs set near the large mahogany writing desk—the desk’s surface uncluttered and, to all appearances, unused by the writer whose books and manuscript pages were all stacked on the long, high Disraeli desk—but we didn’t sit down.

“I’m wondering, Mister Churchill,” I said, “exactly what makes a turncoat politician, someone who can’t even decide which party he should be in—as long as he clings to power in one or the other—decide that anyone should die for anything.”

Churchill’s head snapped back, and he seemed to see me for the first time. For a moment, the entire household was silent except for a clock chiming four somewhere three flights down. I don’t think either Churchill or I blinked during that interval, much less spoke.

Finally the pudgy Chancellor of the Exchequer in his bold silken robe said, “Did you know, Mr. Perry, that my mother was American?”

“No,” I said, allowing the flatness of my tone to express my total lack of interest in the fact.

“It may be the reason that I have always been rather interested in American politics as well as British politics, not to mention what passes for politics on the Continent. Would you like to know the major difference between politics in your country and in the United Kingdom, Mr. Perry?”

Not much, I thought, but stayed silent.

“I don’t pretend to know who President Coolidge’s cabinet advisors really are,” said Churchill, just as if I were interested. “Perhaps at first he kept on some of Harding’s people after your previous president’s sudden death in California. But I guarantee, Mr. Perry, that after Mr. Coolidge’s election on his own last year, defeating that weak Democrat Davis and that rather interesting Progressive chap, La Follette, Calvin Coolidge has not only become his own man but has, by now, fully surrounded himself with his own men. Does this make any sense to you, young man?”

“No,” I said. I was thinking of J.C. grappling with Sturmbannführer Sigl and the air rushing out of Jean-Claude’s perforated oxygen tanks as both men fell through the snow cornice into 10,000 feet of empty air. I was thinking of the last glimpse I had of Reggie’s and the Deacon’s faces before they turned west and started climbing the last of the North East Ridge onto the snowfield toward the Summit Pyramid.

“What I’m saying, Jake…may I call you Jake?”

I remained silent, just staring coldly at the heavy man with the babyish face.

“What I’m saying, Mr. Perry, is that American parties elect their presidents, but those presidents’ advisors and cabinets change from election to election. President Coolidge even replaced a few of President Harding’s lower choices after Harding’s death…before Coolidge was his own man.”

“What are you trying to say?” I demanded.

“I’m saying that in England, things do not work that way, Mr. Perry. Different parties win and different prime ministers move in and out of power along with their parties but the same basic core of the political class—politicians, you would say— stay in power over the decades. I will be only fifty-one years old as of this coming November, and yet in my few decades of public life I have been President of the Board of Trade, Home Secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty…until the fiasco that was Gallipoli…then in the army fighting at the Front for a bit, then back to the corridors of power as Minister of Munitions, Secretary of State for War, then Secretary of State for Air, and now Chancellor of the Exchequer.”

I waited. Finally I took a drink of the Scotch whisky. It was strong and smooth. It did nothing to settle my nerves or lower my level of anger.

“A British politician such as myself needs to keep a network of friends—and even foes—tied to him, you see,” continued Churchill, “even when we are out of power. And those of us who have run intelligence operations in the army or navy or ministries of state or war—or, in my case, all four—do not abandon those networks. Information is power, Mr. Perry, and the proper intelligence, however gathered, can mean the life or death of one’s nation and empire.”

“A very impressive résumé,” I said, trying to make all four words of the sentence sound sarcastic. “But what does it have to do with a private citizen such as yourself ordering good men and women into harm’s way to steal some…filthy photographs?”

Churchill sighed. “I agree that the entire affair—the entire intelligence effort—of obtaining such images from Herr Meyer was sordid, Mr. Perry. Most actual intelligence work is sordid. Yet at times it is the most sordid elements of life which make for the most effective weapons of war or peace.”

I barked a laugh at this. “You’re not going to convince me that a few photographs of that German…that mustachioed clown and madman…are going to make any difference to the future safety of England or any other country.”

Churchill shrugged his shoulders. Such a motion for such a heavy man wearing such a fancy robe gave a sort of vague Oliver Hardy feel to the gesture. “Those photographs may make a great difference,” said Churchill, and his voice changed. I sensed he was using his public voice on me—a goddamned radio voice. He reached for a book he’d been reading when I arrived and which he’d laid facedown to one side of a counter near the mahogany desk. “I have here an advance copy of the book that Herr Adolf Hitler spent his time in prison writing and months while you were in the Himalayas rewriting and copyediting and, in general, making perfect for his small but fanatical readership. Herr Hitler wanted to title this monstrous thing—and I assure you, it is monstrous, Mr. Perry—Vierinhalb Jahre Kampf gegen Lüge, Dummheit und Feigheit, roughly translated as ‘Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity, and Cowardice.’ As one writer to another, Mr. Perry, I could have told Herr Hitler that his title would not sell books. Luckily—for Hitler—his German publisher shortened the title of the actual published book to Mein Kampf, ‘My Struggle.’”

I waited for the punch line. There didn’t seem to be one.

Churchill held the book toward me. “Take it, Mr. Perry. Read it. Feel free to keep it. It may be on sale in England and America in a few years. In Germany, it may be required reading in a few years. See what mad plans Herr Hitler and his Nazi”—Churchill pronounced it Nah-zee—“goons have for Germany, for Europe, for the Jews, and for the world.”

“I don’t read or speak German,” I said coldly. I was holding the book in my free hand; I took another drink of the Scotch. Part of me wanted to thrust the volume back at him and just turn and walk out of the room, pack my bags, and get the hell out of this place even if I couldn’t find a taxi out here in the country in the middle of the night. I’d walk.

But I hesitated instead, still holding the heavy Hitler volume in one hand and my whisky glass in the other.

“Anyway,” I said, “even as a writer, you should know that books aren’t important. People’s lives are important.”

Churchill’s old slippers made their little hirff-hirff sound as he took a step closer. “Know this, then, before you leave, Mr. Perry. I knew and revered Richard Davis Deacon’s father and knew Richard himself before, during, and after the War. He understood what I…what we…were doing. Richard Deacon had seen the price of unchecked aggression.

“Know this also,” he continued, no bluster in the slow rumble of his somewhat singsong voice. “That I have known and loved young Reggie Bromley since she was nine years old. Her cousin Percy was not only loved and valued by me, but was the centerpiece of my Naval Intelligence network both during and after the Great War. He sacrificed much—including his reputation—for our nation, Mr. Perry. And now I weep, I actually and literally have wept, sir, that I cannot even let his valor and sacrifice be known…but such are the ways of intelligence services, Mr. Perry.”

I set the empty whisky glass on the inlaid leather of the mahogany desk—what years later I would read had been Churchill’s father’s desk—but I did not set down the heavy book he’d given me. The larger part of my mind wanted to lash out at this fat little man, sting him with words the way my memories of my three friends were stinging my heart, but another part of me only wanted to get away from here and think about what Churchill had just said. Reject it in the end, I was sure, but think about it nonetheless.

“Do you wish to leave this morning—when it gets light, of course, and the morning trains start running—or stay at Chartwell for the rest of the weekend so that we can chat again?”

“Leave,” I said. “I’ll have my things packed and ready to go by eight a.m.”

“I’ll have a breakfast laid on for you by seven and my driver take you to the station at your convenience,” said Churchill. “I’m afraid I shan’t see you in the morning since I sleep rather late and then do much of my day’s work in bed before rising for the day. Will you be in London for a while, Mr. Perry?”

“No. I’m leaving London and England as quickly as I can.”

“Back to the Alps, perhaps?” said Churchill with that red-cheeked baby’s smile.

“No,” I said sharply. “Home. To America. Away from Europe.”

“I wish you a safe trip, then, and I thank you for the extraordinary things you’ve done and for all you’ve sacrificed, along with our dear mutual friends,” said Churchill and finally extended his hand.

I paused only a few seconds before shaking it. He had a surprisingly firm and even calloused grip, perhaps from all that bricklaying, pond digging, and dam building.

As the car flowed almost silently down the long lane carrying me away from Chartwell later that morning—away from, what had he called it? The “Cosy Pig”? God, the Brits could be insufferably cute—past the giant old oaks and elms, the laurels and cut-back rhododendrons, then past the final thick clusters of conifers near the entrance gate, all gleaming from dew in the morning light, I resisted the impulse to turn and look back.