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The voting system was cumbersome. Instead of raising their hands, or ticking slips of paper, M.P.s had to leave the chamber and be counted as they walked through one of two lobbies, for ayes or noes. The process took fifteen or twenty minutes. It could have been devised only by men who did not have enough to do, Ethel said. She felt sure it would be modernized soon.
Lloyd waited on tenterhooks. The fall of Chamberlain would give him profound satisfaction, but it was by no means certain.
To distract himself he thought about Daisy, always a pleasant occupation. How strange his last twenty-four hours at Ty Gwyn had been: first the one-word note, "Library"; then the rushed conversation, with her tantalizing summons to the Gardenia Suite; then a whole night of waiting, cold and bored and bewildered, for a woman who did not show up. He had stayed there until six o'clock in the morning, miserable but unwilling to give up hope until the moment when he was obliged to wash and shave and change his clothes and pack his suitcase for the trip.
Clearly something had gone wrong, or she had changed her mind, but what had she intended in the first place? She had said she wanted to tell him something. Had she planned to say something earth-shaking, to merit all that drama? Or something so trivial that she had forgotten all about it and the rendezvous? He would have to wait until next Tuesday to ask her.
He had not told his family that Daisy had been at Ty Gwyn. That would have required him to explain to them what his relationship with Daisy was now, and he could not do that, for he did not really understand it himself. Was he in love with a married woman? He did not know. How did she feel about him? He did not know. Most likely, he thought, Daisy and he were two good friends who had missed their chance at love. And somehow he did not want to admit that to anyone, for it seemed unbearably final.
He said to Bernie: "Who will take over, if Chamberlain goes?"
"The betting is on Halifax." Lord Halifax was currently the foreign secretary.
"No!" said Lloyd indignantly. "We can't have an earl for prime minister at a time like this. Anyway, he's an appeaser, just as bad as Chamberlain!"
"I agree," said Bernie. "But who else is there?"
"What about Churchill?"
"You know what Stanley Baldwin said about Churchill?" Baldwin, a Conservative, had been prime minister before Chamberlain. "When Winston was born, lots of fairies swooped down on his cradle with gifts--imagination, eloquence, industry, ability--and then came a fairy who said: 'No person has a right to so many gifts,' picked him up, and gave him such a shake and a twist that he was denied judgment and wisdom."
Lloyd smiled. "Very witty, but is it true?"
"There's something in it. In the last war he was responsible for the Dardanelles campaign, which was a terrible defeat for us. Now he's pushed us into the Norwegian adventure, another failure. He's a fine orator, but the evidence suggests he has a tendency to wishful thinking."
Lloyd said: "He was right about the need to rearm in the thirties--when everyone else was against it, including the Labour Party."
"Churchill will be calling for rearmament in paradise, when the lion lies down with the lamb."
"I think we need someone with an aggressive streak. We want a prime minister who will bark, not whimper."
"Well, you may get your wish. The tellers are coming back."
The votes were announced. The ayes had 280, the noes 200. Chamberlain had won. There was uproar in the chamber. The prime minister's supporters cheered, but others yelled at him to resign.
Lloyd was bitterly disappointed. "How can they want to keep him, after all that?"
"Don't jump to conclusions," said Bernie as the prime minister left and the noise subsided. Bernie was making calculations with a pencil in the margin of the Evening News. "The government usually has a majority of about two hundred and forty. That's dropped to eighty." He scribbled numbers, adding and subtracting. "Taking a rough guess at the number of M.P.s absent, I reckon about forty of the government's supporters voted against Chamberlain, and another sixty abstained. That's a terrible blow to a prime minister--a hundred of his colleagues don't have confidence in him."
"But is it enough to force him to resign?" Lloyd said impatiently.
Bernie spread his arms in a gesture of surrender. "I don't know," he said.
vi
Next day Lloyd, Ethel, Bernie, and Billy went to Bournemouth by train.
The carriage was full of delegates from all over Britain. They all spent the entire journey discussing last night's debate and the future of the prime minister, in accents ranging from the harsh chop of Glasgow to the swerve and swoop of cockney. Once again Lloyd had no chance to raise with his mother the subject that was haunting him.
Like most delegates, they could not afford the swanky hotels on the cliff tops, so they stayed in a boardinghouse on the outskirts. That evening the four of them went to a pub and sat in a quiet corner, and Lloyd saw his chance.
Bernie bought a round of drinks. Ethel wondered aloud what was happening to her friend Maud in Berlin; she no longer got news, for the war had ended the postal service between Germany and Britain.
Lloyd sipped his pint of beer, then said firmly: "I'd like to know more about my real father."
Ethel said sharply: "Bernie is your father."
Evasion again! Lloyd suppressed the anger that immediately rose in him. "You don't need to tell me that," he said. "And I don't need to tell Bernie that I love him like a father, because he already knows."
