The Empire Trilogy (129 page)

On his way into the dining-room Matthew, attempting to demonstrate to the Doctor the width of a stream where he had once caught a number of trout, struck Mrs Blackett a blow in the stomach that robbed her of her breath for a moment or two. A fuss then took place. Matthew fell back, disgraced, while the other guests crowded around to help her to a chair, offering her drinks of water and telling each other to move back and give her air. She sat there, gasping. Matthew watched her from a distance, discomfited and surprised: it had not seemed to him that he had struck her very hard. The impression left on his knuckles by the blow was already fading but he was pretty certain that it had never amounted to a good, solid punch, the sort that one might have expected would drop one's hostess to her knees. The unworthy thought occurred to him that Mrs Blackett might be putting it on a bit. But women were, after all, members of a gentler sex. It was distressing, whichever way one looked at it. He had been hoping to start off on a better footing with the Blacketts.

Meanwhile, Dr Brownley, at Mrs Blackett's side, kept saying: ‘Highly interesting … Highly interesting' as if to himself; this caused Walter to look at him askance but actually the Doctor had been saying ‘Highly interesting' to Matthew before the blow had been struck and was now merely repeating it. Sometimes a word or a phrase would get stuck in the Doctor's mind and rattle around in it for hours without any apparent reason. Occasionally, if by misfortune the phrase expressed some powerful image, it might stay in his mind for days or weeks. Once, for example, he had heard a dentist admonishing a patient who was inclined to neglect her teeth: ‘Your nose will meet your chin!' For several weeks this phrase, alien, violent, rapacious, eating up all other thoughts, had whirled around his mind like a rat in a refrigerator. ‘Your nose will meet your chin!' He had thought he would never get rid of it. In the end only the desire for an article he happened to see in Whiteaways had been sufficient to suffocate it. ‘Highly interesting,' he murmured as Mrs Blackett, getting to her feet with a sigh, declared herself sufficiently recovered for the dinner to proceed.

This incident, fortunately trivial, did serve a useful purpose, however. It reminded Matthew that he must keep a stern watch over his comportment while at the dinner-table. It was not simply a question of table manners, though years of eating by himself with his eyes on a book beyond his plate rather than on the plate itself (how often had he been roused from his thoughts by something hot and slippery, a grilled fish, say, or a great bundle of spaghetti, dropping into his lap from an incorrectly angled fork!) certainly left room for improvement in that respect. No, it was more a tendency to grow over-excited in the course of what he knew should be an urbane discussion, to utter great shouts of derision at the opinions of his table companions, to gloat over them excessively when he found them guilty of faulty reasoning or some heretical assumption. Next day he would realize, of course, that he had behaved boorishly and would be filled with remorse, but next day it would be too late. Alas, more than once in Geneva he had found a door closed to him after he had allowed himself to get carried away. With the Blacketts he must watch his step!

Often had the Blacketts wondered precisely how Matthew had spent the years since he had left Oxford. Why had his infrequent letters been sent from hotels in remote corners of Europe? What was it, at a time of life when most young men decide to settle down in a home of their own, that had kept him flitting across frontiers like a lost soul? While these questions were being put to him Mrs Blackett, looking tired after her ordeal, glanced around the table to make sure that everything was in order; her gaze lingered for a moment on an unoccupied chair next to Joan and a shadow of concern passed over her features. Meanwhile, a bowl of soused fish was being proffered by the ‘boys' to each guest in turn.

Oh, the answer to that was simple, Matthew explained, fishing in the dark tide of vinegar and peppercorns. He had been working for a charitable organization in Geneva called the Committee for International Understanding, vaguely connected with the League of Nations.

‘My dear boy,' said Walter, ‘I'd be surprised to learn that a single one of those charitable organizations ever did a damn thing that was any practical use to anybody. Geneva, if you ask me, is a city of hot air and hypocrites and that's all there is to say about it.' Walter hesitated, glancing at Dupigny who appeared to be rolling his eyes in horror at this opinion of Geneva, uncongenial, perhaps, to a former functionary of the Ministère des Colonies: but it might simply have been that Dupigny was flinching away from the fumes of vinegar rising from the bowl of soused fish which had now been offered to him in turn. He somewhat grimly captured a piece of fish on the serving spoon, inspected it for a moment, sniffed at it, then dropped it back into the dish, indicating to the ‘boy' that he did not want any.

‘These idealistic committees are a waste of time and as for the League itself …!'

Matthew chewed his fish calmly even though such a remark would normally have provoked him to vociferous argument: lucky that he had been reminded of his weaknesses a few moments earlier! Moreover, in a sense Walter was right. It was true that the Committee for International Understanding, which was merely one of hundreds of such idealistic barnacles clinging to the hull (already low in the water) of the great League itself, had not achieved any visible success in all the years he had worked for it. In the early days he had spent hour after hour writing letters to politicians urging them to good behaviour in the interests of the ‘world community'. Invariably these letters had been answered in vague but polite terms by private secretaries who hinted that there were grounds for optimism. But as for any concrete improvement, well, that was another matter! All that one could say for sure was that ‘out there' (Matthew had spent hours during his first winter in Geneva gazing out through the rain-rinsed window of his office in the direction of the lake), in the real world there was a sort of counter-Committee composed of private secretaries whose letter-writing labours exactly mirrored his own and, it had gradually dawned on him, were equally without significance.

And what a dismal place Geneva had been! The steadily falling rain through which one might occasionally, if one were lucky, be permitted to see the brooding mass of the Grand Salève across the lake, the bitter wind from the Rhône valley churning the waves to a grey cream beneath the low blanket of cloud, the sensation of oppression which lay over the city during its never-ending months of winter, Geneva was no place for the experiment that was taking place there, the most daring, most idealistic, the grandest, most thrilling and sublime effort to introduce reason and equity into the affairs of nations. And gradually, so it had seemed to Matthew, the proceedings of the Assembly with its myriads of committees and sub-committees emitting a thick fog of quibbling resolutions and differing points of view, which thickly cloaked its good intentions just as mist clouded the Grand Salève, had come to resemble the Geneva weather. For month after month you could see nothing through the curtains of rain tumbling out of the sky but then abruptly, like a miracle the clouds would disappear, the sun would shine and Mont Blanc would appear white and glittering in the distance across the water. Yet how rare it was that the fog lifted from the Assembly's proceedings! On those rare days, the opening of the great Disarmament Conference in 1932 had been one of them, Matthew had believed himself to be present at one of the great turning-points in the history of mankind. He had been wrong as it had turned out and now he was sadder and certainly older, if not much wiser.

‘Did someone mention Geneva?' asked Brooke-Popham who, at first busy with a large helping of fish, had now got the better of it and was free to enter the conversation. ‘Met a young chap only the other day who'd been a couple of years there. Said it was a deuced awful hole. What was his name now? M'memory isn't what it was. American. Capital fellow. Very obliging. Let's see now. Colonel … no, Captain Erinmore. No. D'you know the chap I mean, Walter? Said he knew you and your charming daughter here. Herringport. No…Now let me see …'

‘I don't believe I've had the pleasure, Sir Robert,' said Walter somewhat stiffly, exchanging a quick glance with Joan. The whole table, including Matthew, gazed at Brooke-Popham as if hypnotized.

‘I know …' said Brooke-Popham. A tremor ran through his audience and Joan turned a little pale as she waited for the Commander-in-Chief to speak. There was silence, however, until it became clear that Brooke-Popham, worn out by his long day, had momentarily dozed off. However, his staff officer, the General whose name Matthew had failed to catch, now smoothly took control of the conversation in the place of his slumbering superior and launched into a lengthy reminiscence, not of Geneva but of Lake Maggiore where he had been on holiday in 1925 with his wife, who was a god-daughter of Chamberlain's wife. And this, by the most fortunate coincidence, for he had never been to Lake Maggiore before or since, had happened to be the historic October of Locarno! What an extraordinary scene he had witnessed! The peasants, their clothes white with dust, tramping in from the surrounding hills with vast hood-shaped baskets of grapes on their backs. And Chamberlain himself, a bizarre figure among these sons of toil. Ah, the General could see him still as if it were yesterday, his monocle glinting in the autumn sunshine as he lolled among the scarlet cushions of his red Rolls-Royce whose long silver horns like trumpets occasionally cleared their metal throats to scatter the rustics from its path: this machine, once the property of a maharajah, had been hired locally, it seemed.

‘But…' began Matthew, becoming indignant despite his good intentions.

The General, however, had not yet reached the high point of his reminiscence, which amounted to nothing less than an invitation from the Chamberlains to join them for the excursion in celebration of Mrs Chamberlain's birthday so charmingly thought up by Briand and his friend, Loucheur: they had hired an Italian lake steamer, the
Fleur d'Oranger
for the occasion. On that delightful, extraordinary trip on the lake the General and his wife had mingled with all the chief delegates to the Conference, with Skrzynski and Benes, with the bearded, bespectacled, floppy-hatted Belgian, Vandervelde, with the shaven-headed, thick-necked German, Stresemann, his duelling-scarred cheeks set on fire by the sun and champagne … what a day to remember! In his mind's eye he could still see Loucheur with his round pop-eyed face and the curling black moustaches of a Victorian waiter, chuckling as the champagne flowed. And then, to cap it all, Mussolini, ostentatious as ever, had made a dramatic dash by racing car from Milan to Stresa and from there by speedboat to Locarno!

And then, the General's voice became solemn at the recollection, on the following day a great crowd of peasants had gathered in front of the town hall as the autumn twilight thickened. The word spread quickly through the crowd. The Treaty had been signed! Like a holy relic the document was carried to the window and shown to the crowd. A great cry had gone up. The church bells had been rung and women had wept and prayed. The Treaty had been signed!

‘But just look at the result!' cried Matthew, his kindly face transfigured with emotion.

‘Eh?' said the General, taken aback.

‘Just look at the result! “By our signatures we affirm that we want peace,” Briand declared and yet within fifteen years France and Germany were at war again and the rest of Europe with them. And the reason was this: Locarno was the
old way of doing things
! Behind-the-scenes diplomacy between the Big Powers. Whitehall and the Quai d'Orsay and the Wilhelmstrasse up to their old tricks again …'

‘I know, his name was Herringdorf,' exclaimed Brooke-Popham waking up suddenly, but nobody paid any attention to him and presently he dozed off again.

‘And so it goes on. So it has always gone on. If the League failed to prevent this war it was because Britain, France, Italy and Germany, while paying lip-service to the idea of an international assembly to settle differences between nations, were never prepared to submit to its authority. Nor give it the power it needed. Who could take the League seriously when the real business was not being transacted in Geneva at all but aboard a pleasure steamer on Lake Maggiore! The Big Powers have brought this horrible destruction down on their own heads because their half-baked foreign ministries staffed by upperclass dimwits, who have more in common with each other than with the people of their respective countries, preferred to make cynical treaties rather than give real meaning to their membership of the League.'

‘Steady the Buffs!' said Walter, not in the least concerned by Matthew's unfortunate harangue.

Matthew's face had grown flushed as he spoke. In his excitement he had wound a napkin round his clenched fist and delivered a terrible uppercut to the under surface of the table with the result that a miniature earthquake accompanied his final words, causing the glasses to dance on the table. Mrs Blackett, painfully surprised by this outburst for which she could see no sane explanation, glanced significantly at her husband to warn him against pursuing the argument. But Walter, calmly reaching out a hand to steady the tinkling cutlery beside his plate, said with a smile: ‘Strong nations, Matthew, will always take advantage of the weak if they can do so with impunity. This is a law of nature. After all, as you must agree, the disapproval of the League did nothing to inhibit Japan from taking over Manchuria …'

‘Well, exactly!' shouted Matthew. ‘Because the League was given no support. Because Sir John Simon and the Foreign Office preferred to turn a blind eye to the crying injustice done to China and give tacit support to Japan!'

‘Even without Britain's tacit support Japan would not have acted differently. Well, François, you're the expert at this sort of thing, what d'you think?'