One can only pray, I said, after I had told Mrs Cornelius that Brodmann had found me again. It was the same in Marrakech. What harm had I ever done him? He had chosen Bolshevism. I had not forced him to join the Cheka. I had not made him a Jew. What did he hate me for? For being a victim? For keeping the faith he had himself renounced. Perhaps it was true that he thought he detected in me, as Mrs Persson suggested once, the evil that was actually within himself. Perhaps he had the puritanical zeal of the truly tempted, pursuing some hated innocent rather than confronting the unexamined truth of his own conscience? I reminded him in my note that Heaven redeems only the truly repentant. Mrs Cornelius is impatient with me on this. ‘Wot bloody ‘arm ‘as ‘e done yer in forty years, Ivan?’
What harm? This is amusing, I say. He has played with me, cat and mouse, ever since I left Odessa - even before! He delights in secret information, in what he witnessed at Hrihorieff’s camp! He gloats. That is why he wants to keep me alive as long as possible. Do not be surprised, I tell her, if one morning my shop is not open, and suddenly the world has never heard of me. I keep a diary, but they could always find it. It was the same in 1984. Peter Ustinov lost four stone to play that part. He was never better. ‘Ten years ter go, Ivan,’ says Mrs Cornelius. ‘Wot price Big Bruwer nar?’ I say nothing. I would rather she was happy. Is this truly The Country of the Blind?
This is why they call me ‘Shylock’, those stupid boys. Shylock was a noble Jew. Should I be insulted? I regularly went to see Wolfit, the finest of all English actors. Beside him Sir Laurence ‘Olivier’-Cohen was anaemic. Wolfit’s voice was like some great Russian tenor’s, reverberating through the Old Vic’s tawdry music-hall plush and tarnished gilt to turn all that was vulgar into unique vibrant beauty. He was the last of the Edwardian giants. His Lear roared and wept and challenged Fate; his Hamlet looked upon the gloomy evidence of human folly and spoke only of the Pit; his Macbeth proclaimed in dark horror and thunderous warning the fate of those who would overthrow God’s established order, while his Titus preached the deeper danger of linking one’s fate to the fate of kings. Wolfit took his Shakespeare casually and with confidence; he took it with enormous, old-fashioned respect for the immediate substance of the story and his voice was the last voice of insouciant individualism in England. By the time it was stilled, the BBC had imposed upon the country Respectable Mediocrity and the Home Service and instilled its bland decencies in every middle-class child. And so, as the British shudder through a sea-change whenever they must choose to spread their scones with margarine or butter, the rest of the world writhes in the grip of Red Carthage, screaming for help, for a miracle which only the British Empire and its allies could have provided.
For this dismissal of reality they paid the price of the Second World War. What on this globe can these islanders actually turn their backs upon? Europe? China? America? Arabia? So they throw up a scrim around the whole dreaming nation and on it project from within visions of their glorious past, reminders of their contributions to the arts and the sciences, their establishment of institutions and language around the Earth. By this means they see only vaguely the cruel and painful pageant of the world beyond their screens. This sense of distance is in all their films. It is in their radio and most of their television. It is why they pretend to despise the American programmes they love so much. They became terrified of their own vulgarity, their own capacity to kill and to destroy, to be brutes. I saw it happen during the 1950s. The Old, free-wheeling, careless stage-shows of the thirties, where every aspect of life was addressed, gave way to American cosmetics and Technicolor. I went to see London Town. It was impossible. Even Petula Clarke had lost her earlier charisma, though she was never Shirley Temple. The Americans have triumphed. Only the foreign culture is remembered by the young. Alice Faye, Fred Astaire and Howard Keel, certainly; but what of Sonnie Hale and Jessie Matthews, who brought a sexuality to the screen that no Hollywood process could contain? That is why Miss Matthews returned to England and went mad. Only when I heard that the poor creature had, like Clara Bow, died insane did I begin to interpret the conundrum of Mrs Dale’s Diary. None of them know what you mean, these days. This nation got its fortunes from piracy for so long she has forgotten how to make an honest living. She has instead learned to become the good little sidekick to Uncle Sam. Auntie Samantha is busy these days with her own exercises in self-hypnosis. She is learning the arts of graceful submission. And she says she has nothing in common with Arabia!
If I had continued my acting career, I should have modelled it on Wolfit. As it was, my life had taken on some of the aspects of one of those farces they so enjoy in Belgium. Our liaisons became increasingly elaborate and secretive and I began to suspect, too late, that much of Rosie von Bek’s lust was fired by an insatiable thirst for danger and novelty. I began to wonder how safe our balloon trip had actually been. Per miracolo, we survived. Per miracolo, I suspect we went undetected not through any care on our own part but through the carelessness of the Pasha himself, who no doubt would not believe anyone capable of my folly. I also wondered later if he did not merely turn a blind eye to our liaison, as these people do to the bribery system they themselves encourage: until such time as it is politic to ‘discover’ a crime in a no longer useful employee? Whenever I see some potentate’s outraged dismay reported at his ‘discovery of corruption’, I remind myself of my own experience. The Bolsheviks are not the only ones to learn the usefulness of making everything uncertain and nothing completely legal. It is through unpredictability and sudden changes of mood that the successful tyrant rules. But he is not always the tyrant who rules longest, unless he devotes himself to institutionalising his tyrannies and finding some way of turning them into ideals which all his people can support. This, of course, was Churchill’s great skill. He and El Hadj T’hami were close friends on the golf course and elsewhere. Both were inferior painters but masters in reconciling contradictions. Now it is fashionable to be contemptuous of qualities of leadership, but in my day we looked up to great leaders. Do we steer a better course in our years of lazy democracy? You are making me laugh, I say to the Cornelius girl, who wants to burn her underwear, and it was me who pinned her nappies. She says the world is yearning for equality. It’s nonsense, I say. Look around you. Listen! This country is yearning for a tyrant. If she is to base so much of her life on Faith, I said, I could offer her a better alternative than her friend Miss Brunner. She never listens. It is as if I am speaking a foreign language.
Even the ones who say they are ‘re-born’, these bloodless hippies who mince into my shop playing tunes, which even a Nubian would find distasteful, on flutes imported from India at enormous profit to some immigrant entrepreneur, talk of Jesus as if he were a lisping nancy-boy. Even a C. of E. Protestant could not stomach it! It is worse than blasphemy! They are embracing only the 19th-century sugar with which the missionaries coated the gospel pill. This is not enlightenment. It is comforting darkness. Such grinning followers of Christ have no will to go forward. Are they the best of our army? Is Christendom so drained of authority, so forgetful of her own vitality, so careless of the salvation even now at their disposal? Is God dead and His Son staggering in confused retreat from Satan? Can this be nothing less than the great struggle at the end of the world. Is this Armageddon? Is this Gotterdammerung? Is it Christendom’s Last Fight? Or was the battle already lost on the day the Winter Palace was stormed? Has everything since been a last guard falling back, fighting for every inch of moral ground, as Satan, a giant of scarlet steel with sickle in one claw and hammer in the other, comes drooling poisoned venom to stand in certain triumph upon the ruins of our last retreat? And they say Wagner was not a prophet! What would they rather play? A Hero’s Life by Richard Strauss? I did not say I apologise for the Nazis. Their failures and follies are nowadays all too clear. But in those days it seemed we had only a limited choice and those of us opposed to Bolshevism were sometimes drawn willy-nilly into alliances with strangers. I am not the only voice of truth. I remember the Bishop in the pub, three weeks ago, telling anyone who cared to hear that he would stand by his admiration of Hitler as an intellectual no matter what his followers had done. He said the same of Enoch Powell. The pub was full, as usual, of West Indians, Irish, Greeks and so on, yet not one of them turned to protest. And this was the villain we were told would live forever in the world’s nightmares? He is today as harmless, as vaguely comforting in his familiarity, as Charlie Chaplin. Heil Hitler! It has become part of the schoolboy’s giggling repertory. Even the Jews do not know what a Jew is, in Notting Hill at least. No wonder Mosley got less than a hundred and fifty votes. It was too late for Notting Hill. He should have stood for Surbiton or Shirley where people still value their way of life and keep their morals as carefully as they keep their lawns.