Powerscourt was lost for words. ‘Thank you for telling me that,’ he said finally. ‘I am most grateful.’ There seemed little left to say. The two men sat quietly for a while, lost in their own thoughts.
‘Is there anything else I can tell you, my lord? I should be getting back soon.’
‘Not for the present, I don’t think,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Just one thing, though. Did the late Earl ever mention anybody who might want to kill him? Was there anyone he was frightened of?’
‘Not that I remember, my lord. Mind you, there was one person he was always frightened of. You recall we were talking about banks earlier?’
‘I do,’ said Powerscourt, wondering if the bankers of Lincolnshire had taken to murdering their heavily indebted clients.
‘When I was assistant steward to my father, it must have been nearly thirty years ago, the bank manager was a great brute of a man, six feet four if he was an inch and a fist the size of a blacksmith’s. When he came over to meet the Earl, he would virtually lie down on the floor and grovel. Yes, my lord. How are the children, my lord? And your lady wife, my lord? This sort of thing could go on for five or ten minutes. The late Earl lapped it up, probably thought that was how everybody should address him. The bank manager today is a little tubby man with very strong glasses. Unlike most of them, he does actually look like a bank manager. I don’t think he even got to his feet when the late Earl entered the room. “Well then, well then,” he would say, waving a piece of paper from his bank – he always came with a piece of paper, maybe it was the same one – “things haven’t got any better since I was last here, have they? They’ve got worse. What do you propose to do about it?” And he would look up at my late master as if he was some schoolboy who had just been caught cheating at exams. The Earl didn’t like him. He didn’t like him at all. He didn’t like the message either. I think he was actually frightened of the tubby bank manager. “You know, Savage,” he said to me once, “that ridiculous little man is the only person in the world who could take all this away – house, lands, horses, furniture, the lot. Can you believe it?’
Powerscourt felt he had just listened to a vital chapter in the social history of England called ‘The Slow Death of Deference’. Things would never be the same again.
9
Sandy Temple, friend of Lady Lucy’s sister’s daughter Selina, was leafing his way through a number of old notebooks, filled with incomprehensible squiggles. Incomprehensible, that is, to people not inducted into the wonders of shorthand, an essential prerequisite for anybody who wanted to be a reporter for the parliamentary pages of The Times. Sandy was checking his old notes on proceedings since Lloyd George introduced his Budget in the House of Commons earlier that year. Since the furore over the Budget began Sandy had been keeping a diary. It covered every single day of the relevant proceedings in the Commons and in the country and would soon report on the Lords when the debate moved there. In the middle of the night, when everybody in his house was asleep, Sandy would dream of his diary being published when the battle was finished, a matter of public record rather like Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year. Every politician of substance would have to read it. He would be promoted. He would be famous. But for now, in the daylight, he pulled down a large notebook with a dark red cover and looked through the pages.
‘Saturday October ninth, 1909,’ he read, ‘King’s Cross station, nine o’clock express to Newcastle and Edinburgh. On my way to hear Lloyd George deliver a great speech in Newcastle. Sir Francis Weygand from the Treasury told me earlier in the week that it would be important. And Lloyd George himself is on this train! The same train as me! I saw him a few minutes ago striding up the platform with his cane accompanied by a couple of officials from the Treasury and a scared-looking little man from the railway. Three or four porters gave a ragged cheer as the Chancellor of the Exchequer went by.
‘I have been watching Lloyd George very carefully for months now. I feel I know him better than any other politician in the House. He has, I think, an immense talent for making himself unpopular, even hated by his enemies. David Lloyd George is, above all else, an outsider. He came to the Commons with no faction, no relations, no great estate, no cohorts of admirers stretching back to a shared past in the common rooms of Christ Church and Balliol and the dormitories of expensive prep schools in the Home Counties. He trades in a different currency, one of words and language. I think he is the most impressive orator in the country, less fluent than Asquith perhaps, but more natural, more passionate than Churchill. He knows how to talk to the working people of this country, a skill not learnt in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union.
‘Some of the gossip I have heard circulated in the Commons about Lloyd George could only come from his enemies. Rumours have swept around the Welshman for years, many of them, I am sure, invented by the Conservatives. The Palace of Westminster has frequently been awash with stories of extramarital affairs. His wife refuses to come and live in London, preferring to stay close to her roots and her family in north Wales. The goat, as he is sometimes referred to, hunts alone. Even in adultery, if the stories are correct, Lloyd George remains true to his political affiliations. He only ever misbehaves with the wives of Liberal MPs, never with the wives of Conservatives.
‘We are leaving Durham now, cathedral and castle standing proudly above the river. I wonder if Lloyd George has spent the journey preparing his speech. We should arrive in Newcastle in less than fifteen minutes. I am more excited than I can say.’
‘Are you still engaged in that frightful profession of investigating?’
Lady Lucy’s great aunt Leticia was a formidable old person. She was extremely slim, almost emaciated, possibly due to the eccentric diet, and her distinguishing feature was an enormous bun of silvery white hair which followed the movements of her head like a guardsman’s bearskin. The first part of the conversation, before they sat down to the beetroot, had consisted of a microscopic investigation of Lady Lucy’s past and the precise location in the family tree of all her mother’s relations so that the exact degree of consanguinity could be established and pinned on an imaginary board, like a preserved butterfly. The relationship crossed over a number of cousins, some three or four times removed, and, thought Powerscourt, whose mind had been on other things, a great uncle who had emigrated to New Zealand but whose relations had come back to live in England, weary of sheep and Maoris. The vicar’s wife’s home-made wine, duly imported from the outhouses, had been rather a trial. Pressed to partake out of politeness, Powerscourt had managed to decant most of the ghastly beverage into a large pot full of herbs. He did not rate their survival chances very highly. Now the old battleaxe was moving in on him with her question about whether he was still investigating.
‘I am as a matter of fact,’ said Powerscourt, smiling politely at his new relation.
‘How dreadful for you all. It’s no profession for a gentleman, prying into people’s lives and accusing them of murdering their wives or husbands.’
Powerscourt didn’t reply. He could see Lady Lucy making some elaborate hand signs to him but he couldn’t work out what they meant.
‘Do you have a special celebration the day these miscreants are found guilty? Do you go out to celebrate at the Ritz?’
‘Of course,’ said Powerscourt. ‘Champagne all round.’