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Lucas loved Charles—of course he did—but it was not a comfortable love. They had grown apart over the years. He had told himself it was a generational thing, but Charles was five years older than Howard, the same generation. He and Howard had experienced the same loneliness, the same guilt of failure, and the thrill of victory.
And Elena, Lucas’s granddaughter, was twenty-eight, and yet except for Josephine, he loved her more deeply than anyone else. In a way, Elena was the most comfortable, the easiest to be with. He had never known what to do with babies, but as soon as she could talk they had become friends. She adored him. She asked questions incessantly, all of them beginning with “Why?” or “How?” Margot was less curious. She had experimented for herself, refusing his help.
Now he watched Howard throwing sticks for Toby. Howard had told Lucas what he needed to. It was time they went home. Being absent long enough to need to explain was an error. When Howard turned toward him, he nodded, and they started walking back through the bluebells toward the oak tree, and the place where their paths divided.
* * *
—
The following afternoon, Lucas headed to an appointment he had made on returning home from meeting Peter Howard, with Winston Churchill himself. He enjoyed driving. He had an old Armstrong Siddeley cabriolet, with long, sweeping lines and a top that took a bit of maneuvering to open. On a day like this it was a pure joy.
As the crow flies, it would have been simpler to go through part of the city, but he never did that. The country routes were far quieter, and the extra miles flew by. He sang as he went, very often one of the patter songs from the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It brought back memories of a holiday he had taken with Elena a few years ago. They had driven up to the Highlands of Scotland, just meandering around, going wherever they pleased. The trip had included Fountains Abbey and Rievaulx Abbey, in Yorkshire, on the way. Somehow the scarred and topless towers reaching up into the sky were more impressive, more emotionally moving, than if they had been complete. The imagination created more than reality could.
They had bought fresh, crusty bread, local cheeses and fruit, and found picnic places in deep grasses by a river, or under trees, always hearing the whisper of the leaves. They had talked about hundreds of things, from the distance between the stars to what kind of apple was best. They had quoted Shakespeare and Lewis Carroll and told endless jokes and invented limericks with impossible rhymes.
Lucas wondered if she had thought of it as often as he had since, and with as much pleasure.
He had silently thanked God that she was a girl, not a boy, and too young for the war anyway. Her loss was a thought he could not bear even to imagine.
Today was a sunny day. The countryside was richly green, some fields hazed over with sheets of buttercups, but he hardly noticed them. His thoughts were occupied with the political situation and the uncertain future.
Although he liked Churchill, he was also afraid for him. The years out of meaningful office were taking a toll. Lucas dreaded finding him in a dark mood today. He felt helpless to offer anything to hope for, and platitudes were beneath either of them.
He rounded the last curve on the road and saw the house ahead of him, surrounded by its garden, and even from here he could see the brick walls that Churchill found so soothing to build.
Fifteen minutes later he was standing next to Churchill by a tub of mortar and a stack of bricks. He was a stocky man, several inches shorter than Lucas, and today he looked old and tired. If Churchill weakened and lost the fight he had pursued all his life, Lucas did not know to whom else he could turn.
“Looks good,” he said, regarding the wall.
“I can build a hell of a good wall,” Churchill replied without pleasure. “But what am I keeping in? Or out? I have no idea. I do it because I don’t have anything else to do.”
“You will have,” Lucas said instantly, then wondered if he meant it, or, more important at the moment, what Churchill would make of his remark. He already had the familiar “black dog” on his shoulder. Could one die from lack of hope? Perhaps.
Churchill turned and gave him a dark look. “Did you hear Mosley the day before yesterday?”
“Yes,” Lucas answered, recalling the sharp and ugly memory. Mosley was an admirer of Hitler and all that he stood for. Some people said Hitler’s Brownshirts had modeled their uniforms on Mosley’s black-shirted army. There had been too many eager faces at the rally in the West End, bright with conviction. They believed what they wanted to, what they needed to, as an alternative to the horror behind them.
Churchill waited for him to go on.
What could Lucas say that was honest? “I’m afraid of him,” Lucas admitted. “But with just a little more rope, I believe Mosley will hang himself.”
“Do you!” Churchill glared at him. It was a challenge, not a question.
“We’ve got to make damn sure it happens,” Lucas said firmly, as if he had no doubt. “I’m still getting news from Germany,” he added.
Churchill was now listening, curiosity piqued.
“The facts are very bad. Opposition is being got rid of; Hitler is either assuming more power himself or appointing bloody awful men to do it for him. Himmler, for example. Used to be a chicken farmer, now he’s strutting around in uniform like the only rooster on the dung heap, and exercising all the power he has.”
“I suppose every culture has them: men in bondage to their own inadequacies, who will never be satisfied because the emptiness is inside them.”
“Yes,” Lucas replied. “They’re always there, the misfits. It’s the measure of a leader, which men he picks for the next tier of command…With Hitler it’s the men who were failures in their own eyes before and have a chance to take their revenge on society now.”
&n
bsp; “Bitter…” Churchill responded.
Lucas half turned, looking around him, then back at Churchill. “Where does it stop, this tide of…violence? How long do we wait before we start doing something? When it’s only Germany? When it’s only Germany and Belgium, or Austria, or part of Poland? When it gets into France as well? A bit late by the time it gets to the cliffs of Dover.”
