So they sat down and ordered tea, which came in glasses contained in metal holders with handles.
‘Constance is a fan of yours,’ said Marjorie. ‘She has been dying to meet you.’
‘I wasn’t aware that I had any fans,’ said Alston, bemused.
‘I’ve read all your speeches,’ said Constance. ‘And Marjorie says you are frightfully clever.’
Alston glanced at his friend’s niece, who blushed. ‘Shh, Constance, you weren’t meant to say that. Constance is very keen on politics,’ she explained.
‘Oh. What sort of politics?’ Alston asked.
‘Common-sense politics,’ Constance said. ‘The war is stupid. The Jews started it. If we leave Hitler alone, he’ll leave us alone. We have the greatest empire the world has ever seen, and we should be left to enjoy it.’
‘That sounds like common sense to me.’ Alston glanced at Freddie, and then back at Constance. ‘Are you a member of any political party?’
‘No, not really. I was a member of the Nordic League, but they’ve disbanded that now.’ The Nordic League was a hysterical anti-Semitic organization that had blossomed a couple of years before and then wilted with the onset of war. ‘That’s where I met my husband Patrick. He’s away at sea in the navy.’
Alston felt a tinge of regret on hearing that this intriguing girl was married, followed by relief that her husband was probably three thousand miles away in a large metal boat.
‘You are not a member of the BUF, then?’ The BUF was the British Union of Fascists led by Sir Oswald Mosley. Alston didn’t like the British Union of Fascists. Neither, it transpired, did Constance.
‘Gosh, no. All that strutting around wearing silly shirts. It’s childish, don’t you think? And Tom Mosley is a weasel.’
‘A weasel?’ Sir Oswald Mosley, known to his friends and conquests as ‘Tom’, was notorious for his ways with women. Usually other people’s wives.
‘Yes. He mistreated a friend of mine — a friend of ours,’ she nodded to Marjorie.
‘A weasel,’ Marjorie confirmed. ‘Look, shall we leave you two to talk? I know you have a scheme you want Constance to join in. Come on, Uncle Freddie. Drink up.’
Freddie did as he was told and left Alston and Constance alone over their tea.
‘So what’s this scheme, Sir Henry?’
Alston hesitated. He was enjoying the girl’s directness. ‘It’s a little delicate,’ he said.
‘Oh, I see.’ Her eyes widened. ‘So you want to veto me first?’
‘Vet, I think is the word,’ Alston said. ‘And yes, I do need to find out a little bit more about you.’
‘Fair enough,’ said Constance. ‘But first I’d like to ask you a question. How did you get those terrible scars? Was it doing something frightfully brave in the war?’
‘Sadly, not,’ said Alston. He smiled.
‘Why are you smiling?’
‘Because people are usually too timid to ask me.’
‘Are you angry with me?’
‘No,’ said Alston. ‘Not at all. Quite the contrary.’
‘Good. Because you haven’t told me how it happened.’
‘It was a lion,’ said Alston.
‘No! Really! Where?’
So Alston told Constance all about the business trip to South Africa when he was a young banker, how he had travelled up to Northern Rhodesia with a colleague whose uncle had some mining interests there, and how he and his colleague had gone big-game hunting, wounded a lion and then come face-to-face with it. The colleague had run, Alston had fired and missed, and the lion had knocked him to the ground with a blow to his face, standing over him rather than mauling him further. One of the native trackers had killed the lion with a spear. Apparently Alston had been lucky that it was a lion and not a lioness that had caught him. A lioness would have finished him off right away.
‘That’s an amazing story!’ said Constance, who did look amazed. Then she frowned. ‘Was your friend Jewish?’
‘Yes,’ said Alston. ‘How did you know?’
‘A banker and a coward. Got to be Jewish, surely?’
Alston checked Constance for a hint of humour but found none. She had a point.
‘I loathe the Jews, don’t you?’ said Constance. ‘You must come across heaps of them in banking.’
‘Some,’ said Alston. ‘They’re not all bad.’
‘But some of them are, aren’t they?’
Alston thought of the partner of Bloomfield Weiss in New York who had sold him stock in a radio company in 1928 that had almost brought his merchant bank down. It had taken all of Alston’s ingenuity to get it off the bank’s books and into his clients’ accounts at cost price.
‘Yes. Some of them are,’ he admitted. Usually he was very careful not to broadcast his mistrust of the Jewish race: he had to work with them every day after all. But there was something about Constance, her directness perhaps, that encouraged him to lower his guard.
‘My father was bankrupted by a Jewish stockbroker,’ she said. ‘Daddy owned a packaging firm in Manchester. He sold it in the twenties and then invested the money in the stock market through a Jewish firm. That and Argentine railway bonds. Nineteen twenty-nine came along and he lost it all.’ For once the enthusiasm had left her. ‘He killed himself four months later.’
‘I’m very sorry,’ said Alston. ‘So you moved up to London?’
‘Yes. My sister, my mother and I. We stayed with my aunt in Dulwich. It’s when my life started going wrong. I was fourteen.’
‘I hope it didn’t keep going wrong?’ Alston asked.
‘No,’ said Constance. ‘It’s going better now.’ She hesitated. ‘I, um… took steps.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Alston, curious as to what those ‘steps’ were. ‘Is that the owner of this place?’ He nodded towards a well-dressed man with white whiskers and a pointed beard, sitting over a glass of tea reading a book.
Constance glanced over her shoulder. ‘Yes, that’s the admiral. He’s quite a gentleman.’
Alston looked around the tea rooms. ‘What sort of people come here?’
‘Right-thinking people,’ Constance said. ‘Captain Maule Ramsay comes here a lot; you know him, don’t you?’
‘Yes. He’s a fellow Scottish MP,’ Alston said. And a fool, he could have added but didn’t. Perhaps this wasn’t such a good place to meet, after all. Alston was sure that the likes of Ramsay and certainly Mosley would attract the attention of Special Branch. He didn’t want to be added to that list.
‘So. What would you like me to do?’ Constance asked, her eyes glowing with excitement. ‘Or do you have some more questions for me?’
Alston smiled. He didn’t really know Constance; there were probably more questions he could ask. But he had a good feeling about her. He trusted her. Marjorie had said she was all right, and he knew and trusted Marjorie. She was the right person.
‘Just one,’ he said, in German. ‘Have you ever been to Germany?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Constance answered, also in German. ‘I spent a year in Berlin in 1937 as a governess and to learn the piano. I loved it. I think it’s a wonderful country. Modern, exciting, not like fuddy-duddy old England. Have you been?’
Constance’s accent was awful, but she seemed fluent and assured, although she had invented the Germanic word fuddyduddyisch.
‘Many times, working for the bank,’ Alston said. Then, switching back to English. ‘Yes. I think you’ll do very well. But I’d rather not discuss what I want you to do here.’
Constance looked around. ‘Oh, I see. We might be overheard. Where shall we go?’
Alston hesitated. ‘We could walk up to Hyde Park. It’s not too far.’
The glow in Constance’s eyes deepened. ‘It’s quite public, though. And it’s much too cold. Marjorie said you lived near here?’