On the top floor a detachment of Parisian whores were plying their trade energetically in the servants’ bedrooms. They had been imported specially from Paris for the occasion and reckoned they would make more money in this one night than they had in the previous two years. The queue stretched down the stairs. Cheers would ring out every time a young man, usually fastening the buttons on his military uniform, made his way down the stairs and cleared a path for the next candidate.
Lord Winterton led Sandy and Selina down to the bottom end of the great saloon. A huge marquee turned into a ballroom had been erected running from the end of the house down into the garden with artificial grass replacing the wet lawns en route to the high wall at the end. Winterton pointed out the shooting range way over to the left. ‘Wigmore’s changed the look of the targets for this evening. No more of those boring circles in different colours tonight. Now you can shoot at the face of Lloyd George on the left and Asquith on the right. Our host has had to replace them twice already they tell me, the targets shot to pieces.’
They had reached the lake now. Two imitation Venetian gondolas with closed compartments amidships were drifting slowly across the water towards the island in the centre. The noises coming out of one of them showed that they were fulfilling the same function they did on the waters of the basin of St Mark.
Behind the island was an enormous bonfire. ‘Two o’clock,’ said Winterton, ‘Wiggers is going to make a speech. I wonder if we should try the dancing in the meantime.’ London’s finest band was working its way through the waltzes of Strauss. Wigmore had apparently given orders that he wanted only waltzes on this night. The musicians were playing them faster and faster. A couple of handsome aristocrats took Selina off to the dance floor. Sandy thought the dancers were more abandoned than he had ever seen at a great party like this. Deep down, really deep down, perhaps they know, he thought. Tonight we dance. This morning we dance. At dawn we dance. Tomorrow our downfall begins.
Shortly before two a strange cart began to make its way towards the bonfire. There seemed to be some objects in the bottom but it was hard to make out what they were. The cart, Lord Winterton observed to nobody in particular, looked exactly like a tumbril, the conveyance used to transport the French aristocrats to the guillotine in the days of the Revolution and the Terror.
The band played on. The people inside the gondolas showed no sign of coming out. The traffic up in the servants’ quarters showed no sign of abating. But everybody else began to assemble round the bonfire, some holding bottles of champagne. To the left and right of the revellers the other great houses of Grosvenor Square and Park Lane stood dark and silent in the night. To the front, Hyde Park stretched out across a sleeping London towards Kensington and Notting Hill. The tumbril, pulled by two tall footmen, came to a stop at the side of the bonfire. In front of it two more footmen carried a large table and a set of steps. The crowd back at the dance floor began to open out like the waters of the Red Sea. A dark-haired aristocrat, dressed in the robes of a hereditary peer of the House of Lords, was making his way towards the bonfire.
‘Go for it, Wiggers!’
‘You tell them, Wigs!’
‘Hurrah for Wigmore!’
Lord Richard Peregrine Octavius Wigmore, one of the principal architects of the defeat of the Budget, was moving down his grounds to address his people. Sandy was right in front of the bonfire, standing close to Winterton. Selina was still being whirled round the dance floor by a handsome hussar with a scar on his left cheek, oblivious to bonfires and high politics. One of the footmen held the stairs steady while Wigmore climbed on to his table. You could never tell what a lot of champagne might do to a man, even if he was a lord. Wigmore tottered uncertainly towards the very front of the table. The two footmen appeared by his side as if by magic. Good servants will support their masters at all times and in all places. He banged his foot on the table. Gradually the crowd fell silent.
Wigmore raised his hands to the crowd. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he began, ‘before I say a few words, I think we should give thanks to those who made this evening possible. I hope you will agree with me that our manner of giving thanks fits perfectly with their contributions to this occasion. Let us give thanks for the Welsh wizard’s greatest friend in politics, President of the Board of Trade, Winston Churchill!’
Two of the enormous footmen pulled a guy, like those seen on Bonfire Night, out of the tumbril. The face of Churchill, at once babyish and devious, glowered from the top. The footmen held it aloft for a second or two to be inspected by the crowd. Then they hurled it into the bonfire where it flared up immediately. Sandy thought it must have been treated with petrol.
‘Our esteemed Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith!’ In went the incumbent of Number Ten Downing Street, the flames catching hold of the hairs on his head. Once again there were huge cheers from the crowd.
‘Finally, the man we have to thank for this evening and this celebration, our revered Chancellor, David Lloyd George!’
The loudest shouts so far shot up into the night sky of London where the stars were clear and bright. ‘Lloyd George! Burn him, burn him!’ the crowd shouted, waving their fists in the air. This went on for some time. Indeed Sandy thought it could have gone on for ever if Wigmore hadn’t called it off.
‘My friends,’ he went on, ‘I have been reading my history books to find a precedent for what has just happened in our great capital. It took me a long time. Marlborough’s triumphs, Wellington’s many victories over the French, even Nelson at Trafalgar did not seem appropriate to what the Lords did two days ago. I think we have to go back further than that and I think we have to take our greatest playwright with us.’ He paused. Sandy Temple, who had heard him often in the House of Lords, thought he was more eloquent in his own back garden than he had ever been speaking from the red benches.
He spoke very quietly when he resumed.
‘“This day is called the Feast of Crispian.”’ Silence had fallen over the great crowd. Even the revellers in the gondolas held their peace. ‘At Agincourt a small, dispirited English force defeated a larger, better equipped army of Frenchmen. The underdog triumphed as it did today. The people who bore the brunt of the fighting would never forget it.
‘And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.’
All across the grass, from one end of the garden to the other, the revellers linked arms and swayed slowly in the night air. Wigmore was still speaking softly, resisting the temptations of the battlefield shout.
‘And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon St Crispin’s day.’
Lord Wigmore looked round his audience, still swaying like flowers in a spring breeze.
‘The band will cease playing at six o’clock. But I propose that we round off our evening in a fitting manner. Love of country, love of England underpinned everything we did today. Let us therefore all sing the National Anthem.’
For some reason the huge crowd took it fairly fast, unlike the funereal pace it was normally sung at. Sandy Temple thought they made it sound like the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’. As the crowd began to drift home he found that Selina was still dancing, her head resting on the shoulder of another young officer. Suddenly Sandy made an important discovery. This, he realized, was the world Selina wanted to live in, the world of London high society, of powerful men and powerful women, of salons and luncheon parties and extravagant dinners where politicians rubbed shoulders with great financiers and newspaper magnates and the new class of millionaires. She wanted to be a chatelaine in these high-flying gatherings. But for him? Sandy knew they were not for him, these evenings. At best he would be a sardonic observer. He would never belong. There could be no point in marrying Selina. They would only make each other unhappy. He took a last look at her waltzing in ecstasy round the floor and walked on through the atrium and out of the front door into the pale light of dawn filling the Mayfair morning. He would write to her this evening. Like Theseus, he had abandoned his Ariadne on the island, dancing the dances of the transported with the god Dionysus himself. All Sandy had to do now was to remember to change the sails.