During dinner that night—there were about a dozen people at the table, including the children: a sixteen-year-old daughter, Diana; a son, Randolph, who looked to be about fourteen; and an eleven-year-old girl named Sarah, as well as two cousins, a boy and a girl (whose names I forget) roughly the ages of Diana and Randolph—Churchill challenged Prof to “tell us in words of one syllable, and taking no longer than five minutes, what this quantum theory rubbish is all about.”
While Churchill checked the watch from his waistcoat pocket, Professor Lindemann did so with twenty seconds to spare. Everyone at the table, including me, burst into applause. I’d actually understood it.
The other “special guest” for that night’s dinner had taken me aback somewhat when I first saw him in the drawing room accepting a large glass of chilled champagne.
It was, I saw, Adolf Hitler. I’d been reminded of that name during my month of convalescing—in truth, merely waiting in hopes that the Deacon and Reggie would show up someday—with Dr. Pasang at the tea plantation. I’d read everything I could get, at the plantation and during the weeks on the boat coming back from India, about Herr Hitler.
And here Hitler was—for a moment I was filled with a terrible indecision (not what I should do, had to do, but how could I do it then and there?)—but then I noticed the wavy hair and pleasant expression, the slightly longer bone structure in the face, and realized it was only the fake mustache—which he removed after amusing the children but before dinner—that really caused the resemblance. This man, as Churchill introduced us, was Charles Chaplin, who although born in England was now a fellow U.S. resident.
This, then, was why we were dining earlier that evening and the children dining with us—Chaplin had brought his most recent release (along with a portable cinema projector) to show us his new movie after dinner, before it got too late for the children.
But as pleasant and smiling as Chaplin was, he irritated our host even before drinks were finished and we were shown into the long dining room. Chaplin, it seemed, was very serious about his politics, and was pressing Churchill on why the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Baldwin government had insisted on going back onto the gold standard. “It will hurt your economy, you know,” pressed Chaplin over drinks. “Most of all, it will hurt the poor people as the prices of everything will go up.”
Churchill obviously hated being told he was wrong, much less confronted with such an argument in his own home, so he was in a full, silent sulk by the time we all found our places around the table.
But then Chaplin did an odd thing to break the ice. “Since I have to get back to London tonight and we may not have time to chat after I show our new movie to you, I’ll give you a preview of it here at the dinner table,” he said. He’d brought a print of his new four-reeler called The Gold Rush, which had premiered in the States in June but not yet reached England.
Chaplin took two forks and stabbed them into two dinner rolls. “My Little Tramp,” said the actor, “is up in Alaska hunting for gold and trying to impress a young woman he’s met. At least in his fantasy, he’s with her and trying to impress her. And since he cannot speak, he communicates with her in this way instead.”
And with that, the political, serious Charlie Chaplin disappeared and a smiling, lovable version of his Little Tramp character appeared, shoulders hunched over his forks and the dinner rolls as if the rolls were his feet, the forks dug into the rolls his legs, and he proceeded to do a little dance with the rolls and forks, humming the tune as he went, even doing high kicks and athletic “splits” with the forks and rolls, and finally ending it with a dinner-roll-and-forks curtsey and Little Tramp simper.
Everyone applauded again. The ice had been truly broken. Churchill, who’d laughed hardest of all, became his gregarious, host-like self again, all signs of his petulance fled.
There was one other odd moment to the otherwise witty and delightful dinner. At one point T. E. Lawrence leaned over the table toward Chaplin on the other side, the silk wings of Lawrence’s headdress almost dipping into the sorbet, and he said to the movie star, “Chaplin, Chaplin. Is that Jewish? Are you a Jew, sir?”
Chaplin’s smile never wavered. He raised his glass of white wine—we were having pheasant—in Lawrence’s direction and said, “Alas, I did not have that honor at birth, Mr. Lawrence.”
Later, when the children and guests were rushing into the long drawing room where chairs and the projector had been set up, I excused myself—saying I was tired, which I was—and shook hands with Chaplin, telling him that I hoped we might meet again someday. He returned the warm handshake and wished me the same.
Then I went up to my room and to sleep while gales of laughter floated up from the main floor for the next ninety minutes or so.
I was awakened—softly but insistently by the servant named Mason—in what felt like the middle of the night. My father’s watch said it was just before four a.m.
“If you do not mind the hour, sir,” whispered Mason as he held a candle, “Mr. Churchill is in his study, just finishing his work, and would like to speak with you now.”
I did mind. I minded not only the rudeness of the hour and being so summarily summoned to the Great Man’s study at his whim, I minded everything. The previous evening’s dinner and conversation had been interesting—meeting Charlie Chaplin had been an experience outside my realm of reality—but no amount of social niceties could make up for the anger and despair I still felt about what had happened on Mount Everest and why my friends had been sent there. My heart was filled with darkness, and I was in no mood for any more witty chatter or social merrymaking. I resolved to ask the Minister of the Exchequer directly and bluntly why he thought he had the power to waste lives such as Percival Bromley’s, Jean-Claude Clairoux’s, Richard Davis Deacon’s, Lady Bromley-Montfort’s, or the lives of the fine Sherpas who’d died and the young Austrian Kurt Meyer, who—I wanted to track down T. E. Lawrence and shout in his face—had been a Jew. And one with more balls than any silk-dress-wearing English-Arab fop I’d ever met.
I must still have been frowning when I joined Churchill in his study. Despite my black mood, I had to acknowledge to myself that the top-floor room was impressive. Being shown in by Mason through a Tudor doorway decorated with what I later learned was called a molded architrave—Mason silently slipped away and equally silently closed the door behind him—I looked around and up. And up. The ceiling had obviously been removed and now revealed vaulting beams and rafters that looked to be as old and solid as England itself. The huge room had broad and faded carpets on the floor, but much of the center part of the space was empty. Built into the high wall were bookcases overflowing with volumes (and I’d already seen that the downstairs library would have been sufficient to serve the reading needs of any mid-sized city in the American Midwest). There were a few chairs scattered around and a couple of low writing desks, including one magnificently carved mahogany desk with a comfortable upholstered chair behind it, but Churchill was standing and writing at a high slanted desk made of old, unvarnished wood.
“A Disraeli desk,” barked Churchill. “Our Victorian predecessors liked to work standing up.” He touched the ink-stained slanted writing surface carefully, as if he were caressing it. “Not Disraeli’s actual desk, of course. I had a local carpenter knock it up for me.”
I stood there, feeling foolish in my robe and slippers. But I’d seen immediately that Mr. Churchill was in his robe and slippers: the robe a silken explosion of green, gold, and scarlet threads. His ill-fitting slippers made a sound—hirff, hirff, hirff—whenever he moved, as he did now to pour a sizable glass of whisky for each of us. I took the glass but did not drink.