CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
As the plates were cleared away from the last course, I lit a Capstan Super Strength and looked at the glass of very red port the young footman had poured for me. A bath, a shave, two hours of dinner in a warm room, and dressed in a suit of my own clothes, and I was feeling more my usual self. I felt like a man who has been swept overboard from a liner into stormy seas, and who now, unaccountably, feels solid ground beneath his feet. Macmillan nodded at the footman, who bowed and left the room. As he closed the door behind him and we were alone, the Foreign Secretary smiled at me from across the table.
“I do think, young Anthony, you deserve some kind of an explanation for what has been happening,” he said reassuringly. I took a sip of port and smiled nervously back. He paused and looked at me awhile in silence. “You may recall that, when we met a few months ago to discuss your Churchill biography, my people made you sign the Official Secrets Act. Do you consider yourself still bound by that?” He laughed softly. “Oh, the officials would tell you that signing the Act is rather like losing your virginity—you’re never unbound by it! However, it would be helpful to me if you could confirm that whatever I say to you in this room will not turn up again somewhere in print.” I nodded.
“Excellent,” he said. “That really makes everything easier. All I have to do now is try and gather my thoughts to tell you in a few words what a whole volume might not exhaust.” He stopped again and reached for his port. I took what I hoped was a delicate puff of my cigarette and waited. “There is a conspiracy we have known about since before Christmas,” he said. “In the past few days, since you—unwittingly, of course—became one of its tools, it has begun to move at great and unexpected speed.
“You know, dear boy, my first lesson on becoming Foreign Secretary was to learn that the relatively smooth face of international events covers some wild and very nasty currents. You may have noticed how old Halifax has grown of late. The real surprise, I’ll tell you, is how long he’s been able to hold things together. In the five years since he delegated everything to me, I’ve grown perceptibly older! The apparently massy gold of the Pax Britannica is, in many places nothing more than a coat of the thinnest gold leaf over nothing at all. We may be in a stronger position than at the time about which you are writing—the late ‘30’s were dangerous days. Even so, an increased pressure at any one point may be enough to knock large holes in the structure that will encourage further attacks at all other points.”
“So, how was the Churchill Memorandum allowed to fall into American hands?” I asked in the long pause that followed. Macmillan gave weary smile and waved his good hand vaguely at the ceiling.
“Don’t ask me that, Anthony,” he said. “Everything about Winston was chaotic towards the end. The family assured us that anything dodgy would be sifted out before the whole archive was shipped off. We did have someone go through it for our own assurance. But there was so much of it, and it was so jumbled, I don’t blame anyone if something got overlooked. I suppose we should be grateful the American authorities took no special interest in it. But it is a shame that, of all the papers destroyed in the fire bombing of Harvard, parts of this one had to survive.
“There is some philosopher woman in America—her name slips my mind. She’s presently in one of Anslinger’s more salubrious concentration camps. Her followers somehow got wind of the Memorandum, and decided it might be a useful weapon for making trouble on her behalf. Naturally, our people in Canada overheard their plotting. Their plot, by the way, was to smuggle the document out and get it to the Germans. They couldn’t try for a direct route to Germany—that would have alerted the intelligence wing of the Republican Guard. So they took advantage of your visit to get it into your luggage. You’d then be followed back to England and your flat would be robbed. From here to Germany seemed an easier hop than from there to Germany.”
“So you sent Major Stanhope to make sure they got it out of America,” I said. “But why didn’t he simply get it from me the moment we were in Croydon?” Macmillan raised his eyebrows quizzically. “Major Stanhope,” I said. “He—he….” I trailed off, then explained what had happened in New York and subsequently. Macmillan looked at the tobacco pouch that had been left beside his pipe, but reached instead for the port decanter.
“Anthony,” he said with heavy emphasis, “I want you to know that I have never heard of this ‘Major Stanhope’. Certainly, our own agent in New York was taken by the Republican Guard. That’s where we lost track of things.” I sagged in my chair. Greenspan had been our man in New York. But if Stanhope had been anything to do with the Rand people or the Germans, why had he then killed those raiders? I wanted to try thinking this one through, but Macmillan was continuing.
“Anthony,” he said, “I want you to promise that, if this man ever approaches you again, you will find me and tell me directly.” I nodded. There was no point thinking too hard about this. For the moment, it was best simply to listen, and then try later to put some shape on it all. I lit another cigarette and watched the cloud of smoke writhe and disperse above the candle flames.
“The Germans, you can be sure,” he went on, “are not passive watchers in this game. Even without any approach from these American lunatics, they learned about the Memorandum about the same time as we did. The moment they can lay hands on it, they’ll publish it to our considerable and perhaps irreparable embarrassment.” He now repeated and amplified on the points I’d covered with Pakeshi.
“But, surely,” I objected, “the Germans are a satisfied power. They may use their Jewish and Turkish proxies to mess up the Arab oil markets. But they have no interest in any return to general instability?” Macmillan smiled and filled and lit his pipe..
“Anthony,” he said very gently, “we are talking here about the Boche—the Beastly Hun, the Germans! Do you suppose they’ve ever forgiven us for the Great War?” Rather like Stanhope in New York—recollections of the pipe only added to the sensation—he held up his injured right arm. “Dear boy, I was there in 1918. Whatever they said afterwards about the ‘stab in the back’, we defeated them in the field. We looked them in the face in the summer of 1918, and they ran. We chased them all the way to Cologne. You know this as well as I do. And they know it too. It’s very nice for the Jews if the treason charges have been buried. All it’s done for the Germans is to remind them how fifty years of goose-stepping left them utterly smashed by the despised nation of shopkeepers.
“Oh, they’ve simmered down no end since their Austrian corporal had his accident in Prague. Goebbels is Rector of Heidelberg. Himmler’s been pushing up the daisies since his failed putsch against Goering. Now Hayek and von Mises are running things, the apparently more civilised Danube has been flowing strongly through Berlin. But, if they go about in funny uniforms speaking of blood and soil, or if they wear shiny hats and talk Manchester economics, a Hun is still a Hun.” He got up and went over to stand by the fire. Stooping, his moustache drooping down in its usual sad way, he looked older than his sixty five years—older, yet still very much in charge of all about him. He looked back at me, glass in one hand, pipe in the other.
“The time we spoke about Winston,” he took up again, “we touched on our immense economic progress since 1931. And, whatever measurement you care to use, that great burst of prosperity compares well with anything even in Victorian times. Indeed let us be frank about it—most of our people have never had it so good. But the Germans have hardly been standing still all this time. Even before the present lot took over, they were doing very nicely. A decade of their own sound money, plus even lower taxes than we’ve been able to manage, and they’re more than running level with us.