Green Ink E-Book

Stephen May

• Herausgeber: Swift Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 346

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

THE TIMES BOOKS TO LOOK OUT FOR IN 2025 'Stephen May has a nose for fascinating historical events' The Times 'Very fine and fun novel' The Spectator 'Skilfully orchestrates a large cast of both historical and fictional characters' Financial Times 'The spry, sardonic voice of the new historical fiction' Hilary Mantel 'Vivid and wholly credible recreation of post-Great War London' Robert Edric 'Intrigue, betrayal, redemption' Rachel Seiffert David Lloyd George is at Chequers for the weekend with his mistress Frances Stevenson, fretting about the fact that his involvement in selling public honours is about to be revealed by one Victor Grayson. Victor is a bisexual hedonist and former firebrand socialist MP turned secret-service informant. Intent on rebuilding his profile as the leader of the revolutionary Left, he doesn't know exactly how much of a hornet's nest he's stirred up. Doesn't know that this is, in fact, his last day. No one really knows what happened to Victor Grayson – he vanished one night in late September 1920, having threatened to reveal all he knew about the prime minister's involvement in selling honours. Was he murdered by the British government? By enemies in the socialist movement (who he had betrayed in the war)? Did he fall in the Thames drunk? Did he vanish to save his own life, and become an antiques dealer in Kent? Whatever the truth, Green Ink imagines what might have been with brio, humour and humanity; and is a reminder that the past was once as alive as we are today.

Leseprobe

For Zephyr

Contents

Prologue1. My Darling Pussy 2. Kindness, Time and Money 3. Courtesan Murmurs 4. House of Murderers 5. Joyless Arseholes 6. Every Eden Is Temporary 7. Wet Bob 8. Humanity’s Best Friend 9. A Gift Nobody Wants 10. Animal Dances 11. A Chamber Piece 12. Bad Angel 13. A Rum Do 14. Curtains 15. An Astute Observation EpilogueAcknowledgements

‌Prologue

The man lies sprawled on his back in the soaked muck of Palmerston Street. He coughs and he chokes. By his side his fingers flex. Curl and uncurl. Grip and release, trying to get some kind of purchase on the putrid city air.

A woman approaches him with a confident long-legged stride, athletic in her army breeches. She looks with fascination at the neat hole in his waistcoat. Her ears are ringing, a sudden and hellish tinnitus, a headful of breaking glass. She unbuttons the man’s waistcoat and the shirt beneath it. The man trembles. Shivers… Seems to gather some strength from the bruised and frowning night, to borrow some energy from the density of it. Now he is writhing on the rutted and potholed ground, legs kicking in feeble agitation. He’s a desperate beetle on its back. He whispers obscenities, gouges out a sob. She feels an intense relief. He’s alive!

The man has been shot in the stomach, but looking at him now, all the woman can see is a prettily pink-frilled contusion on the surface of his belly. It looks almost innocuous. Almost artistic, in fact. Back in the war, an injury like this would have been taped up and he’d have been sent back into the crazed, star-shelled glow of no man’s land within half an hour.

What she doesn’t yet know is that the bullet has lodged near his spine. And that on the way there, it seared its way through his intestines, his pancreas, his spleen, shredded his diaphragm and drilled through his lungs. Tissue in every one of these organs is exenterated. Diced. The pressure wave caused by a bullet travelling at 850 feet per second has ripped flesh from his ribcage. Tendons have turned to pulp. Treacle-thick, treacle-black arterial blood is seeping into the cavity of his chest.

The woman may not know yet that there can be no good outcome, but the man does. As he lifts his head from amid the filth of Palmerston Street, the horse shit, the spilled vegetables, the slopped remains of hurried dinners, the congealing guck and the slimy rubbish, the man knows that you don’t come back from this kind of wound.

No actual pain yet, but this man, this veteran of the Western Front, this former hero, knows that this too is not a good sign. When wounded, what you want is for Pain to arrive quickly, before the nurses, before the doctors, before the fussing with bandages, stretchers and ambulances. Pain first, first aid later, that’s the rule of survival. Where Pain takes its time, where it dillies and dallies, it allows nastier things to get in. Shock, sepsis, gangrene and all the other microscopic jackals of fatal debilitation, if they can nip in ahead of Pain to begin their silent work, then you are taking the count. Everyone who has ever been in the forces knows this.

So, this is it, he thinks. This is how it ends. Doesn’t seem right. Doesn’t seem fair. Just as things were looking up.

He mutters something. The woman moves closer to him, that clanging in her head, it’s still making her dizzy, making her slow.

‘What?’ she says. ‘What did you say?’

‘Bollocks. I said bollocks. Now just bloody well help me will you? Do summat!’

The flat and bolshy Northern vowels push hard against the folded arms of the London night, but there’s no real power there. The man’s voice collapses into a damp gurgle. No surprise that in this extremity his roots are showing. This happens to everyone. Like the poet almost says, in the end we show our beginning. Reveal ourselves for what we are, for what we have always been.

One

‌My Darling Pussy

Saturday, 25th of September 1920Chequers, the early hours

1

Frances Stevenson watches as the prime minister removes his things in a hurry. The sturdy tweed jacket, the good walking trousers, the flannel shirt, the thick woollen socks. His vest. His underpants. A sudden hummock of clothing forming on the grubby carpet of this servant’s bedroom. The room is lit by the marmalade glow of a single lamp by the bed, but it’s enough for her to make out the curves and angles of his body and she smiles to herself. Skinny legs supporting a tummy as soft and as rounded as a new-risen loaf, long grey hair swept back from his forehead and ragged at the sides. A closely clipped moustache. Bright eyes in a rosy face. He looks, she thinks, like a hedgerow bird. An amorous sparrow. She feels especially fond of him at moments like this, when he shows his fleshy vulnerability. As he crosses the few feet from the door to the narrow bed, as he pulls back the thin blankets and slides in next to her, the fuzz on his legs tickles. She doesn’t mind. It’s nice. She moves her hands through his sparse chest hair and over the vaguely feminine slopes of his torso, and David Lloyd George whispers in Welsh. Endearments, she supposes. My sweet pet, my thrilling girl, my only one, things like that.

She shivers. It’s a draughty room. Chill intimations of autumn. Cold weather comes early for the servant class, she thinks. His own suite will be warm, the blankets soft, thick and plentiful, the remains of a fire in the grate, a cowboy novel on the table by the bed. A glass of whisky. Everything a prime minister could want. She wonders if she’ll ever get to see it.

They kiss now and she moves her hand down to the junction of his thighs. Gentle as a nurse, she takes his shy pidyn in her hand. She feels him relax, hears him sigh. Like a man returning home from a long journey.

‘My darling Puss,’ he whispers, in English.

‘My own sweet man,’ she replies.

Bolder now, she strokes and squeezes. A few minutes of this and she’ll roll on top of him, move up by inches and finally lower herself on his face, arms crossed and resting against the cool wall as she grinds her doodle, her gwain, against her lover’s nose and mouth. She loves it when his head is trapped between her strong golfer’s thighs. She loves his urgency then, his eagerness to please. Loves the way he works to find the secret places she’s shown him over the seven years they’ve been together. Loves the way his lips and her hips synchronise movements. The way the liquid heat inside her builds.

The power is intoxicating. Here he is, David Lloyd George, triumphant wartime leader, the head of the world’s greatest empire, in thrall to her. While David is beneath her he’s not a politician planning or scheming, he’s not a prime minister, he’s just a man. No, not even that – in sex he’s a beast, a handsome animal, her Welsh bull.

She likes to get herself almost there and then climb off his face, to kiss her way back down his body, before rolling him on top of her. Once she’s underneath, flattened against the bed by his comforting heft, she’ll guide him in, will urge him on. She likes to touch her button while he heaves and pants above her.

The best thing, the very best thing, is to get there just before he does, to grasp him tight around the shoulders, nails digging deep. She loves the way orgasm is pulled from her, the way it makes her gasp against his neck. She loves to feel him twitch in sympathy inside her. That sudden flash of hot fluid, the way he grunts with relief. It’s a sweet thing. A joy.

Tonight though, it seems his beloved pidyn is coy, reluctant, doesn’t respond to her careful tenderness. Retreats from her. Hides.

‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘This is disappointing.’

Her lover sighs. ‘I know, cariad, I’m sorry.’

Don’t you cariad me, she thinks. She can’t help it, she’s put out. Cross. They get little enough time for intimacy as it is and it’s dispiriting to not be able to make it count. She’s been looking forward to him arriving in her bedroom for days now, but he’s not been able to get to her flat and now, at Chequers, the staff have insulted her – and, by extension, him – by sticking her in this garret away from the central buzz and bustle of the house, as if she were just another civil servant flunky, just another Liberal Party bag-carrier. She feels a stab of irritation. It’s another of those nights when she realises how peripheral she is to his life. She went into this with her eyes wide open but still, it gets to her sometimes.

‘Never mind. These things are to be expected at your age.’

This is cruel. David Lloyd George is fifty-seven and paranoid enough about losing his vitality, about his energy declining just as he reaches the pinnacle of his political life. He doesn’t need Frances calling attention to it. He sighs again.

‘It’s not that, Puss.’

‘What is it then?’

She waits, her head on his chest listening to the percussion of his heart. It seems unsteady to her, arrhythmic somehow. Dangerously agitated. She inhales the warm, biscuity smell of him. She feels mean now and she wants to make amends. She kisses a nipple, tries to reassure him that she’s not really annoyed.

‘Just politics,’ he says. ‘Just matters of state. The usual sewage. I don’t feel like getting into it to be honest.’

Another sigh. A long exhalation, a kind of prayer. Now he’s not a man coming home with relief in his heart. Now he is a man worn out, a man at the end of his rope.

2

Just politics. She’s relieved. It could have been worse. So much worse. Could have been another woman. She knows he struggles to behave. Worse than that even would have been the news that he was unmanned by worries about his children or his wife. Things have been difficult since the summer, since his daughter discovered that Frances, her former tutor, the one-time schoolfriend of her sister, was rather more than simply her father’s employee. The way she found out was unfortunate too. It makes her blush to recall it, and David must shudder to think of it too, although he is not the kind of man to dwell on past embarrassments.

‘I wish you’d let me help,’ she says. ‘Things go better when I do. You know it.’

He does know it. This is why he took her with him to the peace conferences after the war. Her official role as private secretary isn’t simply cover for a love affair. She takes it seriously and she’s pretty good at it. Talking through the events of those tough first conferences with her had helped David clarify his thoughts. She likes to think that if it wasn’t for her, Germany might have managed to wriggle out of some of its responsibilities, might have got too easy a ride. She takes some modest credit for helping to midwife the Versailles treaty.

She remembers the last French premier, Clemenceau, in Paris.

‘I can see what David likes about you,’ he had said, fierce eyes glowing, luxuriant eyebrows waggling. ‘You are beautiful, yes, but you also have a fine mind. Very fine.’

Which was sweet of him, if not quite right.

She knows exactly what David Lloyd George finds appealing about her mind. He appreciates that she’s bright and she’s clear-thinking, but more than that he likes that she’s not intimidatingly smart. For David, Frances’s brain is like her body: nimble, athletic, flexible without being freakish. She won’t disillusion him, so she keeps her intelligence artfully clothed, just as she keeps her wit innocently flirtatious.

Frances knows when to merge into the background. Yes, she’d like to be the next Mrs Lloyd George, yes, she’d like a child with him. She’s always been explicit about that. She loves him and women in love want to be married, don’t they? They want to have children with their lovers. That’s normal. But for now, Frances accepts that a public life together is just not possible, and she’d never embarrass him by being too visible. She keeps herself a beautiful secret, her role in his life known by only the right kind of people in the right kind of places.

She has worked hard at becoming a perfect mistress and in return has a life she could never have dreamed of when she was a teacher. Good teachers are important, she knows that, but what she has now even the best teachers never have. Impact, influence, not just on a few bored children, but on millions of people. She helps shape the whole damn world. She has clout. How many women can say that?

Anyway, she’s only thirty-one. She’s got time.

‘It’s this political fund debacle,’ he says now.

‘Oh, that,’ she says.

‘Yes, that.’

‘Have there been developments?’

‘Maybe.’

She waits. She’ll let him gather his thoughts. He hates being disrupted mid-contemplation, it can make him irritable, can even destroy his mood entirely. Thing with David is that a mistimed interruption can lead to him flouncing off back to his own room. David Lloyd George likes to express himself fully, likes to speak in proper paragraphs, ones with complete sentences that themselves contain multiple subordinate clauses. David Lloyd George is not a man to ration his words.

His talk now is a river, a subdued but steady flow. A plangent retelling of the incompetence of his friends and the skulduggery of his enemies. The bald fact is that They plan to ruin him. They plan to give details of exactly how much an honour costs. The precise amount you’ll need to pay Lloyd George in order to gain an OBE or an MBE. How much it will set you back to become a lord and where the money goes and how it is spent. Which is embarrassing, as right now it mostly goes to Lloyd George directly and quite a lot of it has been spent on new houses, including one for Frances.

It’s an outrage. So unfair. Everyone sensible knows that the sale of honours is one of the principal ways the whole party system is sustained. Done informally – a favour provided, followed by an apparently unprompted honour some time later – well, this is all right. More than all right. Expected. Done explicitly with price lists and negotiations over what is included in the sale, then it’s scandalous, apparently.

People are bleating that this kind of trade should be criminalised, and those who participate in it disgraced, pilloried, obliterated. Especially those, like David, who have been honest and open – more or less – about how the system works.

When he finally comes to a halt, when that river has run its course, they lie wrapped around each other in the dark. She listens to the drumming of his heart again, and to other noises too. A house like this is never entirely quiet. Never dead silence even in the early hours. Always rustlings and creaks, always something moving. The purr of the wind finding gaps in old walls. Mysterious dripping sounds. Mice. Ghosts.

Time passes and the agitation of his breathing subsides, his pulse steadies. She feels safe enough to speak.

‘Who are They?’

‘Former friends, so-called allies, those who hate progress. The usual crew.’

‘Yes, but who specifically?’

‘I’m not sure. I think the plan is for the chief bastards to give the material to some plausible dupe who will write it all up for the papers, someone who will make a crusade out of it, someone who won’t be bought off.’

‘Surely everyone can be bought off for the right price?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘It’s serious then.’

‘It’s serious.’ Which is when he mumbles a name. She doesn’t catch it at first.

‘Who?’

‘Victor Grayson. He’s the dupe. You’re too young to remember him, but he’s always been a pain in the arse. A socialist. An infantile rabble-rouser. A discredited drunk.’

She does remember the name. He was in all the papers, all the time, for a while.

David Lloyd George’s river of talk begins to flow again, this time rolling through the messy scrublands of Victor Grayson’s sad history.

‘Well, what’s the problem?’ she says, trying to keep impatience from her voice. ‘Yesterday’s man. Yesterday’s alcoholic man. What damage can he do? Who will believe him?’

‘People believe what they want to believe. And They – the bastards – are planning to give him receipts, letters, contracts. Everything he’ll need to do maximum damage. And you don’t know this man, he’s not without charisma, he can make an impression when he wants to. And he’s reckless. When he’s desperate enough he’ll do anything.’ He sits up, seems full of energy suddenly.

Frances smooths the silvery squall of her lover’s hair, murmurs to him as if he were a restless pony. Horses, men and dogs, they’re not so different from each other.

How does he know all this, she asks. He is vague. ‘Something someone said to me.’

‘Who?’

‘Just someone.’

She is instantly alert, on her guard. Vagueness like this means it was a female someone. Someone with designs.

‘Come on, David.’

‘Roberta.’

Oh, Roberta. David’s daughter-in-law, the wife of his son, Dick.

‘How would she know?’

‘She’s surprisingly well informed about things. More so than Dick, usually.’

This is true. Dick Lloyd George is an amiable lush, everyone likes him, no one is impressed by him. Roberta on the other hand, named after her father, the pugnacious self-made construction millionaire Robert McAlpine, is the opposite. Just twenty-one years old, she is nervily acerbic, energetically astringent. She is also someone who, in Frances’s opinion, chooses her associates unwisely. Actors, musicians, headshrinkers. She is a proponent of faddy diets and quack health remedies. Always trying to get Dick and his father to try vegetarianism or some new juice. She needs keeping an eye on.

‘He’ll see a chance to get back in with his old comrades,’ David continues. ‘They despise him now, so he’ll need something big to get back to where he was. Bringing down a government might do it.’

He lies back down, seems calm again.

It’s amazing how he can do this, how he can put difficult things from his mind seemingly by an act of will. A real talent and a handy one for a man in his position.

‘Maybe it’ll all come to nothing. There have been plots against me before, plenty of them, and they’ve all failed. Your old man is tougher than anyone thinks.’

More relaxed now, David tells her that he’s arranged a meeting tomorrow – well, today actually, he supposes – to discuss the problem. He’s framed it as not really being about him personally, but about this fuss being a security risk to the whole system. Edward will be there, he says, and the police chap, Basil Thomson, and J.T. Davies of course.

‘Of course.’

She feels his body ripple and shift and knows he’s smiling at her dismissive tone. He knows better than anyone what she thinks of J.T. Davies.

‘I’m not sure it’ll do any good,’ he says. ‘I’m not sure the security people are ever entirely on our side, my love. It’s frustrating because there’s so much else I could be doing, so many more important things to deal with.’

This is true, she knows. There’s Ireland for a start, people dying daily in street battles. There’s the trouble with the trade unions, the threats of strikes at the docks, in the mines and on the railways, not to mention Europe and the ongoing tensions over the post-war settlement. There’s Russia and there’s Poland. There’s the French delegation here at Chequers this weekend to discuss Mesopotamia. She’s been worrying about that herself.

It’s also true that this meeting to resolve David’s own political problems might not go so well. He can be high-handed when dealing with civil servants, with his fellow cabinet ministers too, if truth be told. He is bored by them, looks past them, daydreams in their company, makes jokes at their expense, belittles them with his inattention, even when he’s not belittling them with his actual words. She’s better with officialdom than he is, she knows how to get the disappointed men in cheap suits to fall in line.

‘I could chair the meeting,’ she says. ‘I should be there if J.T. is there. You should have invited me anyway. I could go in your place; let you get on with properly important work. It’s not like I haven’t chaired meetings before.’

There’s a pause.

‘I didn’t like to ask you.’

She knows why not. This whole money-for-honours saga is an embarrassment to him, reflects badly on him, and he doesn’t want his lover to see him in a negative light. Foolish man. She loves him because of his flaws not despite them. And as a beneficiary of the system she should be prepared to defend it. Anyway, she’ll always take any chance to make herself useful to him, to resolve problems for him, and her record on getting her way – their way – at meetings is pretty good.

He sighs.

‘Thank you, cariad.’

She smiles, kisses him.

‘I haven’t done anything yet.’

‘But you will. If anyone can sort this out it’s my own sweet girl.’

He turns towards her. They kiss.

‘Cariad bach.’

‘My own sweet man.’

‘My darling Pussy, my thrilling girl.’

‘My love.’

They kiss again. She moves her hand towards the centre of him, feels for his pidyn and yes, it’s as she suspected, things are in progress there. He’s back. Fifty-seven is nothing. David Lloyd George is a man in his prime.

‘Hello,’ she says.

‘Hello,’ he says.

Things are as they should be now. Not an old politician and his young mistress. Not that tired and tawdry story. Instead, it’s just two lovers alone in the dark. Two free people. A man and a woman without burdens, without worries. No children, no wife, no Europe, no Ireland, no trade unions, no French delegation. Just this. Just limbs touching in a narrow servant’s bed in the velvet time before dawn.

Something occurs to her.

‘Hey, dearest, what were you saying when you first came to my bed tonight, when you opened my door?’

‘Did I say anything?’

‘Yes, when you first arrived here – late – you spoke Welsh to me. I was wondering what you said.’

He chuckles, his moustache scratches her ear as he nibbles at the lobe. He puts a hand on her breast. How ridiculous this all is, she thinks. How daft, how lovely.

‘Ah, I wasn’t really talking to you, cariad. I was muttering threats to my Honourable Member. I was cajoling Mr Pidyn, the MP for my own girl. I was telling him to behave, to rise, to do the right thing.’

She laughs. ‘He seems better disposed now.’

‘Yes, yes, my darling. Mr Pidyn, MP, Minister of Love, he sulks sometimes but he can’t ever resist my pet for long.’

3

Pity the poor secret serviceman placed in the hidden alcove behind the stud wall of this room. The man from C Division who has to use legible shorthand to record anything said or done, who has to type it all up using the approved departmental green ink. Who has to report the precise details back to his superiors. Who must leave nothing out. Every coo, every gasp, every half-formed whisper, they must all be pinned, fixed and interrogated for any meaning they might have beyond the obvious. You never know what might be part of a code. The sooner they get a machine for this work the better.

‌Two

Kindness, Time and Money

St James’s, morning

1

The wet dawn smears itself over the windows of the apartments and the shops, and Victor Grayson, self-proclaimed agitator, freelance scribbler, speechifier for hire and one-time firebrand MP, wakes up crying. This is happening more and more, nearly a daily occurrence now. As much part of his morning as the parched throat, the headache and the sense of generalised anxiety. It’s the grog of course, he knows that. Just booze and going to bed too late and, perhaps, just possibly, the caravan of nameless – more or less faceless – lovers that pass through these borrowed rooms. And money of course. The lack of it. No one without money is ever free of night-time terror.

He notes in a foggy kind of way that he isn’t in his bed but instead rising from under a pile of old coats on the couch in the sitting room. He moves naked through a chill grey light to the dirty sink. He stands on tiptoes and pisses in it. The urine is dark, toffee-coloured, and the smell that rises is sugary, like fermenting fruit.

Now he gets himself a glass of tepid, brownish London water. He rinses out his mouth and spits, once, twice, three times. No matter how dry and seedy he feels, he tries to avoid swallowing this stuff. London water is not like the clean Northern variety, it’s acky, full of filth. Get a taste for it and it’ll kill you faster than alcohol.

He moves away from the sink and heads to the broad window that overlooks the street. He goes slowly, carefully. His ribs are still sore from last week’s kicking and there’s rumours of cramp in his toes.

There’s life outside in the murk. Already there is the beginning of the city’s weekend clamour, the gossip and grumble of traffic, the trolleybuses nagging and whining, the market porters catcalling at the shop girls, those girls shouting back, police whistles. Dogs barking at nothing, the way that they do. Somewhere not too far off an outraged donkey makes its feelings known. The insistent rattle of the tube, like a beggar with a tin can wanting farthings and ha’pennies. London yawning, farting, getting itself going. All this activity muted by fog. It’s like overhearing the distant rehearsal of some modernist orchestra, he thinks. Noises that were outlandish once but are increasingly accepted, welcome signs of progress. Reassuring even. All’s well with the world because London is tuning up. If things aren’t exactly shipshape now, these everyday stirrings suggest they might yet come right. London, like Victor himself, always has a hangover. Like him, the city wakes every day feeling as rough as a badger’s arse, but, like him, just gets on with things anyway. Yes, there’s life, so there must be hope. And this city, the place that can generate the most life, must also provide the most hope. There’s logic for you.

Victor Grayson rubs his eyes, returns to the sink, splashes more water onto his face. He feels stronger now. Worries evaporating or, if not quite that, then retreating, definitely. Moving to the corners of the room, hiding under the furniture. It’s daft to be weeping in his dreams, especially when he can never remember what they are. Except for these embarrassing tears, his dreams leave no traces.

He looks again at the restless street below. London. More precisely, St James’s. More precisely still, Georgian House. The epitome of modern metropolitan living in the very epicentre of the empire, that’s what it says in the agent’s brochure. The truth is that the empire’s capital, however squalid, however treacherous, however tainted the water, means more to him now than Liverpool, more to him than Manchester, more even than the mill towns of West Yorkshire, though these are places that have loved him fully in ways that London never has.

He looks again, peering hard. The threadbare plane trees choked by petrol fumes, the passageways between apartment buildings, the places where vans and carts unload. Nothing sinister there and he feels relief that the salaried yobs, the state-sponsored watchers, the publicly funded head-breakers, don’t seem to be in position this morning. Maybe it’s like his friend Hilda tells him, he’s just paranoid and wouldn’t be so melodramatic if he drank a little less and ate a little more. But last week’s beating, that was real, and it had felt methodical, felt like the result of some kind of training, like the men dishing it out were recent graduates of a course. How to Hurt Without Inflicting Lasting Injury. Didn’t feel random.

The room is cluttered. This flat is furnished with heavy, old-fashioned and mismatched objects. It is Victor’s experience that landlords as a class lack taste as well as compassion. It’s like an antique shop in here, one run by someone with no eye for value and no talent for presentation. As well as the fusty settee, there’s a battered leather armchair, a sideboard, a variety of lamps that he resists lighting because when lit they seem to make the space more gloomy rather than less.

The epitome of modern metropolitan living? Balls.

There’s a dining table which is too big for the room, and on which is piled a selection of yesterday’s newspapers, half of them still unopened. Victor Grayson picks up The Times and squints at it. Just enough grimy light to read by. He begins, as ever, with the ‘In Memoriam’ columns. The war has been over nearly two years and yet these grim lists of dead boys still fill the front page. All of them seem to have lived nobly and died bravely and done it so others might live. Or they died for God. Or for England. Or for Peace. All claptrap. The truth is they died for sweet Fanny Adams. These children who would just be coming into their majority now, given a line or two of bad poetry to immortalise them. Lines paid for by mothers or sweethearts, lies commissioned to try and alleviate an ache that will never go away. It sickens him daily, the more so because he was once part of the industry that sent these children into the meat mincers of Flanders.

The thundering line of battle stands,

And in the air death moans and sings;

But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,

And Night shall fold him in soft wings.

This doggerel is dedicated to a Lieutenant Bruce Freeman, signed Mother, and what absolute, desperate, disgraceful blether it is. Victor was there. Victor knows that the only true line is the first one. As for the rest, Death never sang – it was silent or else it spat in your face before it ripped out your entrails. Whoever Lieutenant Freeman was, Day never clasped him in strong hands and Night didn’t fold this child in soft wings. Instead it left him to rot in French mud, dumped him in the soil at Cambrai as so much manure for the growing of the wheat that England imports now.

He notes too that Lieutenant Freeman was folded into the mud just six weeks before the end of the slaughter.

Stupid sod. A typical Rupert. Six weeks of taking some basic care, of not leading patrols, of hanging back, of keeping his head down, and he might have returned from those pitiless foreign fields. Some judicious skiving through the final skirmishes of history’s most pointless war and he might have had a life. Had children of his own. Might have saved his mother from despair.

It still makes Victor’s blood boil, the memory of that officer class who fused incompetence with audacity. Public schoolboys who didn’t yet shave, who could barely tie their own shoelaces, but who still felt they had to make a point of performing courage, of showing conspicuous leadership for the edification of the peasantry who made up the poor bloody infantry. The PBI, meanwhile, certainly despised cowardice but feared inexperience more, and, most of all, hated the rugger-field bravado of their supposed betters.

He needs a brightener now, but there is no whisky in the house. Why did he bring it out last night? Should have told his visitors that he had nothing in, but instead he’d acted like a big shot. Used up his emergency rations. Trying to impress is never worth it, it always costs you in the end. Then again, his guests should have brought more than bottled beer from the pub. What kind of chuff is it who, when invited round a new friend’s place, only brings a couple of pints?

He moves on to the columns of personals. He much prefers the stories glimpsed in these short paragraphs. No one dying nobly here, instead you have Mrs Edith Hope possibly hearing something to her advantage if she contacts Messrs Andrew, Wood, Purves and Sutton, solicitors, in Bedford Row.

The men fallen on hard times wanting donated suits so they can begin new business lives. The once-in-a-lifetime chance to invest in the import and distribution of Egyptian cigarettes.

Or the more mysterious ads: Pater, I feel my ignominious position acutely, will you not be generous and attribute it to a lack of years rather than wilful folly? This is simply signed N.T. Or what about the message from a Fred to a Tootsie imploring her to wipe the old scores off the slate and let bygones be bygones. Why can’t people communicate straightforwardly, rather than in code through the newspapers? Tootsie should tell Fred to stick it. He hopes she does.

But this won’t do, he needs to find some real news. A story that will give him something to opine about in those periodicals still willing to give him a platform.

There’s more in the Daily Herald. Plenty of raw material here. A paper you can rely on. Another night of reprisals by the Royal Irish Constabulary in Belfast, avenging the attacks on their officers by killing civilians. He reads the response from Sir Nevil Macready, the forces’ commander-in-chief, saying that his men are only human. Three murders of civilians after the shooting of a policeman and the senior British officer is shrugging and saying, in effect, ‘Oh well, what can you do? Boys will be boys. Police will be police. You can hardly expect them to simply turn the other cheek now, can you?’

There must be an article in that.

Or what about the prospect of peace between Soviet Russia and Poland? The Russians have made a lavish offer, the dropping of all territorial demands on Polish land. Well played, Comrade Lenin, well played, you really pulled the rug out from under the feet of the imperialists there. How can the warmongers of France and Britain claim they are defending Poland now? The military presence in Russia is revealed as what it is, an attempt to crush the revolution by force. Yes, definitely an opinion piece there, practically writes itself. The contrasting of the reasoned attitude of the new powers with the stubborn geriatric dogmatism of the old order.

He sighs. Runs his hand through his fine, dry hair. He needs to find something. He needs to start earning a proper living again.

2

‘Anything in the fish-wrappers then, or is it just the usual garbage?’

He turns, startled. One of last night’s guests – Hardit something? – is poised in his underwear in the doorway between sitting room and bedroom. In this melancholy light he is nowhere near as vivid as he had seemed in the Queen’s Head and certainly not the giddy and muscular presence he had been in bed. His skin is a greyish bronze and he’s thin, lilac rings beneath sardonic eyes, handsome in a smudged kind of way. A year or two ago he would have been beautiful, but now he’s undefined somehow, a bit squishy around the edges. How old is he? Twenty-eight maybe? Certainly he’s no older than thirty, but the longish hair is greasy and thinning at the temples. His short-legged union suit looks like it has seen better days too, but his smile is genuine and warm. It’s also knowing. His strong-toothed grin is that of someone who has been in this situation many times and has decided shame, embarrassment even, are fripperies he can live without.

He comes closer, looks Victor straight in the eyes. ‘Bit shickery are we mate?’ Says it softly, kindly, but urgently too. His voice is deep, musical, the accent appealing in the way it blends with the English idiom. There’s something he wants. The usual thing.

‘You got out of bed,’ the man says now.

‘Yes,’ says Victor. ‘I was restless. Didn’t want to disturb you.’

‘It’s all right, mate. We’re pretty hard to offend. And it’s a small bed for three.’

He puts his arms around Victor, pulls him into an embrace. Victor closes his eyes, feels his blood kindling. Victor rests his head on the man’s shoulder and is humiliated to find his eyes are filling up again. His throat is constricted, it is suddenly hard to get a breath. The man strokes Victor’s hair, murmurs wordlessly, soothingly. Victor relaxes, finds he can breathe again. He allows himself to exhale deeply, to ease into the hug. The man smells of sweat and tobacco. There’s always this, Victor thinks: when nothing else is left, there is always this.

‘Hey, steady on there.’

The men turn and face the new voice in the room. A bright, cheerful, female voice. Bubbles of laughter in it. Upper-class too. Upper-middle-class anyway. A voice trained to be charming, while giving orders that it expects to be obeyed. The woman with the voice is wrapped in a sheet, and she is skinny in the modern way. She is young, in her early twenties perhaps. Boyish face, but beautiful. Cheekbones you could ski down. Hair fashionably short. Mouth fashionably voracious. Long-fingered hands. She looks, it has to be said, like his wife. His dead wife. The fact that she’s wearing a bedsheet as a robe just adds to the similarity with Ruth. She’s fashioned it into a kind of toga, and he remembers his wife wearing something similar as Titania, as Viola, as Calpurnia, as Lady Macbeth. In her time on the stage Ruth Grayson played all the fiery temptresses, all the women with the quick wits. He should never have married her, but bloody hell, how he misses her.

The men move apart. Victor is conscious of his nakedness. How ridiculous is that? To be shy now? He drops a hand to hide himself from the woman’s steady regard.

‘Good morning, Babs,’ says Hardit. ‘Beautiful timing as usual.’

‘Morning, H. Feeling OK?’

‘Hip playing up a bit, but not too bad.’

Ordinary chit-chat, like neighbours meeting on the doorstep. He remembers that this Hardit Joshi was, like Victor himself, wounded at Passchendaele. It’s coming back to him now, the conversation in the pub, the one about how they’d both been lucky, wounds bad enough to get them removed from the front and sent back to England for rehabilitation, but not bad enough to permanently maim or disfigure. Blighty wounds. The best kind. He remembers mentioning that Blighty was a corruption of the Urdu word bilāyatī and in return getting a spirited speech about how all the good words from the war were really Indian words. Cushy, pukka, dekko, chat – all of them from India. The fellow had begun to give painstaking proof of their derivation. In the end this girl here had given him money to shut up and get to the bar.

She breaks in again, that cool voice as sharp and as clean as a ceremonial bayonet.

‘I have to say, boys, that was one of my more memorable Friday nights. Splendidly unexpected.’ A twinkly pause. ‘Give me a chance to have a piss, wash my bits, and we could try another go-round if you like.’

Hardit releases Victor.

‘You sure you’ve got the time and the energy?’ The tone is easy, light, teasing. It tells Victor that Hardit and this Babs are old friends, brave adventurers who trust each other implicitly. Pioneers of the great change in the ways of being that has happened since the war. Has happened for some people anyway. People with money. Or those without money but with things the monied want to possess. Like looks, like youth, like life.

It seems to Victor that every time there is a convulsion in society the rich find a way not just of keeping their old privileges, but of adding new ones. It is the leisured class, or their children, that get to dance in the fashionable nightclubs, who buy gramophone players, who listen to ragtime and jazz. Who get to take sexual pleasure whenever they like, with whoever catches their eye.

‘It is disgustingly early, H. We have all the time in the world. As for energy, if it’s anything like last night then I expect I’ll be watching more than I’ll be playing.’

How open these post-war women are. How bold. He licks cracked lips. Does he really not have any liquor in? How has that been allowed to happen? It must never happen again.

Hardit laughs, squeezes Victor’s arm. ‘I expect you might at that. It’s fair enough, our friend here is pretty battered, you can’t blame him for going a bit easy.’

‘You noticed that,’ Victor says.