Sweet Sorrow (7 page)

‘And I suppose that pleases you?’

‘Not at all, Joe. I’ve seen enough of it to last a lifetime but there are times when one has to . . .’ She suddenly remembered a favourite quotation of Edward’s, ‘“stiffen the sinews and summon up the blood”.’

Weaver harrumphed. ‘I haven’t forgotten you, if that was what you were worried about. It’s either Paris or Madrid. I haven’t quite decided.’

‘Gosh! Thank you, Joe. I won’t let you down.’

Weaver looked at his watch. ‘Look, I’m having lunch with Jock Reith. To be honest, I find him hard work. It might annoy him but amuse me if you came along.’

‘Oh, I say, I don’t want to gatecrash . . .’

‘It could do you some good. The Prime Minister has asked him to head a new Ministry of Information. Top secret at the moment, you understand.’

Weaver smiled. He loved gossip and delighted to be ‘in the know’. He found Reith’s earnest morality irritating and he knew Reith considered him a rascal but they needed each other. Both men lived for the powerful institutions they had created – the
New Gazette
and the BBC.

Reith had created the British Broadcasting Corporation in his image. It was principled, independent and directed according to strong public service principles. A Scot, and the son of a United Free Church minister, Reith carried with him into adult life the strict religious principles of the Kirk. During the General Strike, the Labour Party had criticized the BBC for taking the government side while the government accused it of being unpatriotic and threatened to take it over if it did not broadcast the official line. It was Reith’s finest hour. He resisted the pressure from both sides and succeeded in retaining the BBC’s independence.

Reith hated Communists, disliked the idea of women taking jobs which, in his view, were unsuited to their femininity, and believed they should play no part in public life. It amused Weaver to think that, if he took Verity with him to lunch, she would tell Reith that his views were outdated and insulting to women and he would be indignant and either sulk or lecture her. In either eventuality, he would sit back and enjoy the fireworks.

‘Joe, I thought we were going to . . . you did not tell me . . .’ Reith struggled to his feet, letting his napkin drop to the floor.

‘Waiter, bring another chair, will you? Jock, I wanted you to meet one of my most talented correspondents – Verity Browne, now Lady Edward Corinth.’

Verity smiled her sweetest smile and watched Reith struggle to control himself. He was immensely tall with a high-domed forehead and shaggy eyebrows. She remembered Edward telling her that Churchill, who did not like him, called him Wuthering Height.

‘Very nice to meet you, Miss Browne . . . Lady Edward. I met your husband when I was at the BBC. I have admired your work though I can’t approve . . . you are a Communist, I believe?’

‘Not any more, Sir John. The Party I joined has long gone. I’m afraid it is now a tool of the Soviet Union. I saw it happen in Spain. Good men betrayed by unscrupulous apparatchiks.’

Reith’s face cleared. ‘I’m glad to hear you say that. The Prime Minister would have us ally ourselves with Stalin against Hitler but I have tried to persuade him that we can’t be in league with the devil.’

‘Mr Churchill says that our enemy’s enemy is our friend,’ Verity remarked meekly.

‘That is cynicism at its worst. But please sit. Waiter . . . what will you have to drink?’

‘Just water, thank you. I never drink at lunch,’ Verity replied primly but truthfully.

Reith smiled broadly and said to Weaver, ‘You were right, Joe. You have done very well to secure Miss Browne’s services. I think I shall call you “Miss Browne” if that is all right with you?’

Verity nodded and smiled and Weaver sighed. He had been done out of his fireworks – though not entirely. Verity did not hesitate to launch an attack on the BBC for employing women only to read stories on Children’s Hour or talk about cooking or clothes. Reith defended himself vigorously but without rancour, pointing out that women read the news as early as 1926 during the General Strike.

‘I’d say another thing,’ he went on with a seriousness that impressed Verity. ‘No one can deny we have lived in a Britain of two nations, rich and poor. The BBC has begun to bring the two together. Three-quarters of British homes now have a wireless set. You can buy one for as little as two pounds. Now, the Durham coal miner, after a day down the pit, can listen to a top dance band playing in a smart London hotel – Lew Stone on Tuesday, Roy Fox on Wednesday, Harry Roy on Friday . . . And when war comes, the BBC will bring the nation even more closely together to forge a patriotic alliance of rich and poor.’

‘There’s something in what you say, Sir John,’ Verity admitted, ‘but if you were a miner working in a dangerous pit, coming home dirty because the pit owner failed to provide showers at the pithead, squatting in a tin tub in front of the fire with water from a primitive boiler, no cooker, just a gas ring, the house verminous, the children ill-fed and diseased – you could not afford the five shillings to call out the doctor, remember – would it not make you bitter to hear the clink of champagne glasses and the smooth sounds of a dance band playing in some swanky hotel? It would me.’

‘I don’t think so. I agree that the conditions in which many people live are intolerable but things are already changing for the better. In the past year, we have built thirty thousand new houses, many in the suburbs of our cities – healthy, new homes – and after the war the government will use the powers it has taken to build a better society.’

‘The first thing will be to nationalize the coal mines,’ Verity grumbled, feeling quite uncomfortable as Reith propounded a vision of a just society to which any Communist would have to subscribe.

‘And as for class envy,’ he went on, disregarding her interjection, ‘I do not believe that working people enjoying dance-band music on the wireless want to be in one of those – as you put it – swanky hotels dancing and drinking champagne. It is like the cinema. Twenty million people go the pictures every week usually to watch worthless rubbish but they don’t believe they could dance like Fred Astaire or Ginger Rogers or live the life they see on the screen. It is pure escapism and we all need that. I won’t deny that I would rather they wanted less trivial entertainment and more instruction to help them live better and more useful lives, but at least we can make ordinary people aware of what there is out there and appreciate the England for which they are going to be asked to fight.’

As she watched Reith’s eyebrows waggle with excitement, Verity realized what an extraordinary man he was. He had a vision, and if it wasn’t one she shared in its entirety, it certainly had its appeal.

‘Well, Sir John, I am impressed but when I am next in 6 Stanhope Gate,’ this was Gunter’s restaurant in which debutantes gathered in the season to drink champagne and spend a working man’s wage on a single meal, ‘and see the noses of the unemployed pressed against the plate-glass window, I will think of you and not be embarrassed.’

Reith smiled, knowing he had won.

‘This is all too worthy for me,’ Weaver grumbled, though he was secretly intrigued to find that these two, who on the surface had so little in common, shared similar views on the state of the nation. ‘Jock, did you know, Lord Edward has recently bought a house in Sussex, near Virginia and Leonard Woolf?’

Weaver knew this seemingly innocent remark would precipitate another lecture from Reith on the loose morals of the ‘artistic’ set and so it did. He did not hesitate to label them immoral, free thinkers – unpatriotic and corrupters of the young. It was apparent that the morality he had learnt as a child brooked no challenge from the modern, post-war materialistic world.

‘During the Great War, those people – long-haired layabouts living in Bloomsbury – were conscientious objectors and should have been put up against a wall,’ he said indignantly. ‘My time in the trenches was the making of me. I’d go so far as to say they were the happiest years of my life, even though I was wounded.’

‘I know what you mean,’ Verity agreed, to Weaver’s surprise. ‘There is something about the sheer excitement of war – the feeling of being alive
because
so near to death that makes life doubly valuable.’

‘Wait a moment,’ Weaver interjected. ‘I thought you said, Verity, that you didn’t want war.’

‘Of course I don’t. You’d have to be mad to want death and destruction. I’m simply saying that, once you’re in it, there can be a kind of satisfaction in seeing how one measures up to it.’

Her eyes shone and Reith looked at her with surprise and approval. Joe sighed again. All this mutual admiration was getting on his nerves. Lighting a cigar, he said, ‘Were you sad to leave the BBC, Jock?’

‘I admit I was, Joe. I created it and I think I did a good job but I have learnt in life that there’s no point in looking back. The Prime Minister – I speak in complete confidence – has asked me to set up a Ministry of Information to control the media in the event of war so I’ll once again –’ his eyes twinkled mischievously – ‘regain some authority over the organization I created. Ogilvie’s a good fellow but, between ourselves, he isn’t up to the job of Director General.’

Verity wondered at how indiscreet these great men could be, talking in front of journalists they neither knew nor trusted. Reith could not resist denigrating the man who had usurped him, whatever the consequences.

‘These foreign broadcasts are a good idea,’ she said.

‘Yes, I’m glad you think so. My friend Dr Wanner, who was head of the South German Broadcasting Organization until the Nazis took over, is doing a very good job, so much so that the Germans try to “jam” his broadcasts. The PM told me the other day that he was unhappy at the tone of the BBC’s foreign broadcasts, that they were too gloomy. I pointed out that the news
was
gloomy and that the best way of making sure the BBC was listened to and trusted in Europe was to tell the truth however gloomy. Then, when there was good news to report, it would be believed.’

‘And the talks by Harold Nicolson and Byron Gates – they are very popular but serious, too,’ Weaver put in. ‘Gates, in particular, strikes just the right tone – serious but not pompous, cultured but not patronizing.’

‘Ugh! That man Gates. I can’t stick him,’ Reith said vehemently. ‘He’s immoral and irreligious – a damned hypocrite. According to one of my people, he almost got himself kicked out of the building just before I left. I would have done so myself but Ogilvie has kept him on.’

‘What had he done?’ Verity inquired with interest.

‘Women! What else. Someone’s wife – it’s all too sordid to go into, my dear. Saving your presence, when I was in charge I tried to do without them. It’s bad enough having them as secretaries. They flirt with the men and . . .’ Seeing the twinkle in Weaver’s eye, he stopped himself. ‘Well, don’t get me on my hobby horse.’

Verity stifled a protest. She looked at Weaver and saw that he was surprised and even a little disappointed that she had been able to control herself.

On their way back to the
New Gazette
, Weaver said, ‘I hope you enjoyed that, Verity.’

‘I was very interested to meet Sir John but I still don’t understand why you took me along with you. Was it just to rile him? He really wanted to see you on your own.’

‘He’s going to be Minister of Information, as he said, and I want him to use you, if possible. I need someone who can stand up to him and who knows about newspapers, which he doesn’t.’

‘But . . . I’ll be abroad, won’t I?’

‘I hope so, I very much hope so. I don’t want to sound defeatist but, a year from now, will there be anywhere in Europe for you to report from?’

‘Paris – there’ll always be Paris.’

‘I hope so, Verity,’ he repeated. ‘It was almost lost in the last war and that was before the Germans had Panzers . . .’

Verity, suddenly aware of the very real possibility that Britain would be defeated, lapsed into silence.

4

That evening, Verity didn’t altogether feel like going out but Edward had got it into his head that these were the last moments of peace and that they would look back with nostalgia on a London of bright lights and innocent pleasure. However, once she was dressed in a shimmering gown she had bought from Schiaparelli and had straightened Edward’s white tie, she felt she would, after all, enjoy herself.

The West End was crowded with people intent on having a good time, determined to put out of their minds the imminent catastrophe. It would come but, until it did, they would party. Edward and Verity dined at Gennaro’s and then, as it was a warm evening, strolled down to the Embassy at the Piccadilly end of Bond Street. Verity felt her spirits lift and tunelessly – she was not musical – hummed the lines from a popular song. ‘There’s film stars, peers and peeresses, all crowded on the floor. There’s the Prince of Wales and Lady F and every crashing bore I know in the dear old Embassy.’

The nightclub was reached down a wide, low-ceilinged tunnel. The entrance at the far end was guarded by a tall, impressive-looking commissionaire who greeted Edward as though he had been in just a few days before, though it was at least a year since he had been ‘out on the tiles’, as he put it. He bought a buttonhole from the one-legged man at the door and they made their way through a throng of dancers to a table well back from the dance floor.

Verity went off to ‘powder her nose’. The ladies’ cloak-room was fitted out with marble basins and gold taps. Looking at herself in the mirror, she thought Edward had no need to be ashamed of his wife. Her new dress, sensuous blue silk that hugged her body, made her feel desirable. Maybe she wasn’t as smart as the expensively dressed women making up their faces on either side of her – and talking across her as though she did not exist in harsh, high-pitched voices – but she did not envy them. Their air of extreme boredom and consequent discontent, though possibly adopted to convey worldly wisdom, made their eyes hard. The powder with which they covered their faces turned their skin a deathly white so that, in the bright artificial light, they appeared to be wearing masks. She thought she recognized one or two of them but they belonged to a world of which she had never been part. She might be Lady Edward Corinth but she knew – or thought she knew – that these idle, wealthy women would despise her as a
parvenue
if they ever deigned to notice her.