'I'll come with you,' said Eliot, abandoning his fish. 'I'm not hungry.'
The remaining men at the table also stood. Lady Beckett had entered the dining-room.
Nancy Beckett was better known than Eliot in Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Manhattan. Her social star had twinkled before cultivating Americans in London society had moved from the freakish to the smart. Her hair was cut square and loose like Greta Garbo's, and had never been a richer shade of auburn. She had large green eyes and a pert nose. Her pale skin, as clear as a silk mask, was submerged regularly under mud-packs in Bond Street. Her figure represented a slim-waisted trophy for self-discipline. She wore a black silk calf-length dress, and in deference to the melancholy evening no jewellery except a diamond the size of a humbug.
She exchanged a smile with her husband. Her place was next to Lady Evesham, a lady-in-waiting with pale grey hair, which Nancy suspected she would have loved to peroxide.
'I was so thrilled at Sir Eliot's VC,' Lady Evesham began. 'I was a VAD nurse during the war, you know, at the base hospital at Wimereux-the medical men were terrible old dug-outs. It was such a boost for our morale-a doctor at the front winning the supreme decoration. That terrible March of 1918! Ludendorff taking us completely by surprise on the Somme, poor Hubert Gough sacked for retreating, the Germans expected in the Channel ports any day, and Douglas Haig's wonderful order about "Our backs to the wall."'
Nancy was aware that the war had been conducted for Britain largely by members of Lady Evesham's own family.
'You must have always known Sir Eliot a brave man?' Lady Evesham added.
'I'm afraid I'd no chance to tell. You see, he was a conscientious objector until the middle of the war.' Lady Evesham looked aghast. 'When conscription came in 1916, my husband had the choice of going either into the army or into jail. And Eliot is simply a man who develops wholehearted enthusiasm for anything he happens to find himself doing. Pacifists are the fiercest of people,' Nancy confided, 'If Bertrand Russell had provided himself with a machine-gun instead of a typewriter, there wouldn't be room on his chest for medals.'
Eliot and Dawson were walking upstairs together. The Queen was with the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York and Kent. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had been packed back to Windsor, where their mother the Duchess of York was recovering from pneumonia, complicating flu caught in that winter's savage epidemic. The Duke of Gloucester was in Buckingham Palace with a sore throat. The three Privy Councillors-Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon-had the unsought adventure of a flight back to London that chilly, bright afternoon. The Prince of Wales' offer of his private plane from nearby Bircham Newton aerodrome was unrefusable. Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, past seventy, gaitered and aproned, bald and sharp-nosed, fonder of Christians if they were kings, had arrived with vulturish timing.
Eliot wondered if Dawson resented Nancy as well being invited to Sandringham, but decided him too seasoned, too secure a courtier. Eliot had been summoned from their home in Kent by telephone at three on the Sunday morning. Dawson recognized that Eliot knew more about the heart than himself, and the King's was starting to fail. He almost killed the old boy in 1928, Eliot reflected, missing a pocket of pus hidden behind the lung until almost too late. Everyone had heard how he failed his exams as a student at the London Hospital. Dawson's skill was stagemanager of the sickbed, the impressario of dramatic illness.
'I read your _Health of Nations_ when it was published after the war,' Dawson said politely.
'I'd toned it down enormously. A young man can do his future severer damage by publishing a book than indulging his irresponsibility with racehorses and women.'
'No man is one person, but a succession,' Dawson ruminated. 'We're like the portrait-gallery of wicked ancestors in Ruddigore, always liable to step from their frames and haunt the latest version. I'd trimmed my own views, when I reported to the Government on our medical services in 1920. But a State health scheme will come one day, be sure of it.'
'It's unthinkable to the medical profession.'
'The unthinkable is often inevitable. The death of kings is more certain than the birth of princes.'
Eliot admitted, 'I suppose it was unthinkable to kill germs with mouldy bread, when I tried in 1910. Now Professor Fleming at St Mary's has proved me right. He's even purified the penicillin mould, you know. But unlike me, Fleming's a canny Scot, he doesn't claim too much for it.'
'Very sensibly. Penicillin will never have any use whatever outside the laboratory.'
'I offered it as a panacea because I was a zealous revolutionary.' Eliot smiled. 'And revolutionaries generally come to grief through their own egotism.'
'Thank God for all of us you did, in those particular activities.' Eliot was gratified to sense Dawson's feeling as genuine.
They had reached the landing. Behind the door to their right lay the ruler of an Empire on which the sun never set. He received the loyalty of 66 million white subjects, and of 372 million coloured ones, who had no option. King George V had a talent for fatherliness, whether at a Delhi durbar or on the wireless at Christmas, and had presided with equal composure over the House of Lords revolt in 1910, the General Strike of 1926 and the Great War.
'Did you find much change this evening?' asked Dawson.
'No. The cyanosis is worse. There's only slight pulmonary congestion, but the heart is obviously failing.'
'His illness of 1928 ran a heavy overdraft on his powers of recuperation.' Dawson paused, menu-card in hand. Seventeen years later, Eliot was to see it again, at a dinner on the evening of his patient's granddaughter's Coronation. 'I must not delay this message, but I hope for another word alone with you this evening. About yourself.' Dawson hesitated. 'If this Government-or a future Government-decides to take over the medical profession, the wisest of us will safeguard ourselves, and our fellow-doctors, by becoming sufficiently important in the eyes of the country to dictate the terms.'
They exchanged glances. 'Very well,' said Eliot.
That night did not end for Eliot until six o'clock. Nancy was asleep, smeared with cold cream, the bedside lamp burning. She stirred as he gently opened the door. 'He's dead?'
'At five to midnight. I had to stay up. The embalmers got lost.' Eliot tore off his wing-collar. 'I could do with a bath, but it's about half a mile away. What a ridiculous country! Why must snobbishness be equated with unnecessary discomfort?'
The Becketts lived in a castle, gutted and refurbished with steam heating, gushing plumbing, hygienic kitchens, efficient drains. Its off-white reception rooms were designed as a favour by Syrie Maugham, and hung with Impressionists chosen by Nancy's admirer Lord Duveen. Nobody gets value for money like an American millionairess.
'When's the funeral?'
'Today week. It's been planned by Lord Wigram and the Lord Chamberlain down to the last tap of muffled drums. Parliament must meet, and Stanley Baldwin's going on the wireless.' He sat on the silk coverlet, taking her chin in his hand. His eyes gleamed with the mingled excitement and exhaustion she seldom saw now. 'Why must you lard yourself like a joint for the oven, old thing?'
'Surely you wouldn't have me wrinkled?'
'Creams and mudbaths are useless. Let me send you for a face-lift to Harold Gillies.'
'If you let me send you for monkey-gland treatment to Professor Voronoff in Monte Carlo.'
'We're not going to Monte.'
'Oh, Eliot! You know London's absolutely empty after Christmas.'
'Don't be cross.' He grinned, dropping his hand. 'There's something worth staying to enjoy. I'm to be made a lord.' She drew in her breath. 'And our eldest son shall become a lord. And his eldest son, and so on for ever and ever. Dawson told me, while we were waiting for the King to die. Oh, we're two real professionals, Dawson and I. He's to be a viscount. The only medical man to reach it. It's the age we live in, isn't it? Ever since MacDonald's Socialist cabinet appeared in their knee-breeches at Buckingham Palace. Or does it prove again that a doctor's reputation depends on the distinction of those dying in his care?'