The Last Man in Europe Page 6

  The tiny cottage shivered, rattling its windows in their dried putty. The darkness was arriving, sped up by the arrival of a high, sprawling thundercloud of the deepest purple. From his window on the second floor he regarded the village. The pond where he and Eileen picnicked and fished the previous summer was black and icy, and the winter-stripped elms which bordered it were starting to bend under the approaching gale. Thirty or forty yards across from his rented field a light appeared. It was the farmer rounding his pigs, goats, milking cows and horses into the warmth and safety of a great and ancient-looking barn, on which he could just make out a rusting sign carrying the property’s name: Manor Farm.

  The first surge of the storm snapped a tree branch somewhere close by, making a loud crack. It was going to be violent; probably blow the roof off the henhouse again, and he’d just got the damned thing back on. Time to get his own motley collection of animals in. He headed out into the yard, pausing to tell Eileen he was ‘battening down’, and ushered the hens and ducks into the henhouse, and his goats, Muriel and Kate, into one of the two sheds. He let his black poodle, Marx, into the house, where he could sit on the rag mat by the fire.

  In honour of his imminent completion of the book on Spain, Eileen, who had finally mastered the cottage’s shambles of an oven, had roasted their troublesome rooster, named Henry Ford, and got the once squalid cottage in reasonable order. After the main meal she sat on his lap, spooning her speciality – apple meringue pie – into his mouth. She contemplated the scene: a fire in the grate, his slippered feet perched on the fender, a pile of unread newspapers and magazines on the floor, the typewriter in the corner.

  ‘You think you’re back in Wigan, don’t you, in your council house with me and the dog.’

  ‘This is far too bourgeois.’

  ‘By gum, ye be right,’ she said.

  ‘Not such a bad idea, though, living like the proles. We could head up north, disguise our voices, get jobs in a mill and have ten children.’

  ‘Nine kiddies only; I have my figure to think of. And I’m not wearing wooden clogs.’ She paused, thinking about it. ‘We’d probably have more money, though. I did some calculations today. It’s only our chickens and goats that are keeping us alive.’

  ‘Good old Ford. He was delicious.’

  ‘Let’s hope the hens don’t go on strike, or we’ll starve.’ She gave him the last piece of pie.

  ‘This won’t go on forever, you know,’ he said, ‘living like this.’ He turned to her, more eagerly. ‘I’ve got a new idea for a book. It’s about a man who sees there’s a war coming and tries to escape, to the past.’

  ‘You’re far too young to be writing your memoirs, darling.’

  ‘I’m serious. I think it will hit a chord.’

  ‘Yes – how to be a socialist, but Tory at the same time. Not much of an audience for that nowadays.’

  ‘It will be the first book about the next big war. This war’s going to have its great novel before it even starts. Should keep us fed for a while.’

  ‘Unlike our little farm.’

  ‘Except tonight. Survived another day.’

  ‘Well, it be a right good thing they don’t give you money for to write books about farming,’ she said, laughing.

  He kissed her.

  ‘That’s the pudding done. Would you like some Pig now?’

  *

  The next morning, he stepped into the kitchen to boil water for his shave, only to get his slippers soaked. The house was like a sponge. The storm-blasted village looked like a battlefield, the belting rains petering out in the middle of the night, but succeeded by a heavy frost. The laneway to Manor Farm had turned into a drain full of freezing water.

  Later, as he was feeding Muriel on the frozen, muddy patch opposite, he observed that old Field’s van, which was doing its regular weekly rounds, picking up some of the town’s livestock to take to market in Baldock, had become badly bogged. Field, who was renting him the patch of land, waved and walked off in the direction of the farm entrance for help. Ten minutes later, he heard a loud ‘clop, clop, clopping’ and saw Field returning with a little boy, perhaps ten years old, who was driving the great big brute of a carthorse, whipping as it shied away from its duty, which was to haul the stranded van clear. If only the poor creature knew its own strength, the tables would be easily turned.

  ‘Imagine,’ he said to Muriel, scratching her ear, ‘Marxism from the animals’ point of view.’ She licked the bowl of mash he was holding. ‘Actually, when you consider it, old girl, it makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it?’

  His fall made Muriel start.

  It was half an hour later that Eileen spotted him.

  ‘It is my lung,’ he said, in a small voice. A stream of blood had trickled from his mouth. His long neck was stretched out, and he looked too weak to do so much as lift his head. Unable to move him, Eileen raced over to The Plough and raised the publican’s daughter, who told her to wait while she searched for her father, who was soon found in the basement, moving great barrels of beer.

  Eileen dropped to her knees by his side and raised his head onto her lap. In the two years since they had married, his appearance had gradually altered, and it was only now that she saw it clearly. When they had first met, there had remained a vestige of smartness about him, and while his tall, bony body had never been fat, there had been a solidity appropriate to his frame. Now his shoulders looked sharp and shrunken, and his hips had lost their fleshy padding; his patched and frayed suit, expensive and well-tailored when bought, hung about him like the rags on a scarecrow.

  She started sobbing. ‘Darling, now do you see you must slow down?’

  He reached up and patted her head, which helped her regain her composure, but conceded nothing.

  ‘No more work until the summer’s over. That’s an order from The Pig.’

  ‘Darling, there’s really nothing to worry about,’ he managed to say. ‘Probably just pleurisy. I’ve felt something coming on. Anyway, I’ve been looking forward to a rest.’

  ‘Good. I shall put you out to pasture here with the goats. Muriel can keep you company. Don’t give her fleas.’ But her sobbing continued. She could only be so brave.

  The publican appeared and carried him back to the cottage, where a bed was made up on the couch by the fireplace. His temperature climbed and the spitting of blood continued. On the third morning, after vile black liquid began oozing from his mouth onto his blankets, she went to the telephone at The Plough and called her brother, Laurence. For all the hopelessness of the situation, there was a kind of providence in it – Laurence O’Shaughnessy was one of the country’s foremost specialists in the treatment of tuberculosis. He would see to everything.

  The next day, as the rain pelted down, he was led into the back of a large ambulance. With the door closed and the vehicle starting to move, he watched Eileen waving to him through the window, disappearing as they accelerated away.

  *

  On his third day at the sanatorium, Laurence appeared in his doorway, tall and stern in a well-cut double-breasted suit, waving a file in his hand. ‘No more bloody trooping off to fight for the brotherhood of man.’ He knew Laurence had never really taken to him, and he could see his point: after all, what famous surgeon would be happy about his younger sister marrying an Etonian who spent his time writing about consumptive beggars, miners and anarchists, and who didn’t have five pounds to his name?

  ‘I don’t want any charity, Laurence, and it’s bad form that I’ve got my own room when the veterans are in common wards. They’re talking, I hear. I shan’t object to being moved.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, old boy. You’re earning your keep as a case study for my forthcoming monograph.’

  ‘On?’

  ‘TB.’

  He nodded.

  ‘I want you isolated so I can keep a good eye on you. Don’t want to corrupt my statistics.’

  There seemed no point in resisting.

  ‘It seems an old lesion, lik
ely from some filthy old tramp or miner you met. But these things are uncertain. Complete bed rest, fresh food and vitamin injections. And no typewriter. I promised The Pig, and The Pig, as we both know, is always the boss.’ With that he left, shoving the file under his armpit, not having conveyed to his patient the calculations it contained: if the case was serious, there was a seventy per cent likelihood he’d be dead within six years, and ninety per cent he wouldn’t last a further five after that.

  He thought of what to do, now that he couldn’t write. Luckily, Laurence had left his copy of the Times; one could read it all day and still not finish. The news had been depressing for weeks. Blum’s Popular Front government was in chaos. Hitler’s troops had entered Austria, and again the Tories were counselling doing nothing. The debate on the war estimates was in full swing, and to ram it home there was a photograph of the RAF’s newest monoplane fighter. And now, from the arrows on the maps, he could see that the Republican siege of Huesca had been lifted, meaning his old trenches at Monte Oscuro were in fascist hands. It was going to be one of those summers, he thought, like 1914, a sleepwalk into disaster and misery. He turned another page.

  The instant he saw the photographs he grasped their significance. Perhaps to another they might have seemed ordinary enough: three portraits picked out from a larger tableau – probably a group photograph of Bolshevik congress delegates. Their faces looked calm, happy even, not hinting at anything sinister; and yet he knew that in some essential if not wholly obvious way, their images explained everything.

  The first photograph was of a man in a uniform that he guessed to be that of the NKVD. He looked to be in his mid-forties and therefore must already have been a grown man when the revolution began, twenty years before. He looked surprisingly clean-cut, with a noble yet stern bearing which, combined with that uniform, suggested idealism gone wrong in some undefined way. The second man, far older, had a more conservative appearance – he was bearded and wearing the old-fashioned high collar of some European government minister before the war. If he had to guess, he would have placed him as a liberal-radical or social-democratic lawyer, of the sort you seldom met in England. The last was the giveaway: balding at the front, with a goatee beard and the mischievous eyes of a man who read too much Balzac – features that identified him with absolute precision as a Marxist intellectual from the same generation as Lenin. There was even a smile on his face. Their names were in the caption at the bottom: Yagoda, Rykoff and Bukharin. And above the story stood the headline:

  EXECUTIONS IN MOSCOW

  18 PRISONERS SHOT

  THE CHIEF VICTIMS

  He had mostly ignored Stalin’s show trials until then, thinking them too absurd to be taken seriously. Yet he now grasped that it was their absurdity that explained their meaning. The accusations and evidence were obviously lies, but they were conducted in such a way that no one who mattered could gainsay them without forfeiting his life. In the absence of public contradiction this made them incontrovertibly true.

  The first of the men, Genrikh Yagoda, had until the previous year been the head of the Soviet secret police, yet he looked more like a bureaucrat than a mass killer. The other two had also been among the original leaders of the revolution, the rest of whom, with the exceptions of Stalin and the exiled Trotsky, had been swallowed up in the great purges that had started the decade before. Now, it appeared, the last of them were being wiped out once and for all.

  Horrified and yet drawn to know more, he asked the nurses to bring him back copies of the Times from the sanatorium’s library. As soon as he read each edition, he dropped it to the floor and reached for another, having cut out the most interesting articles for future reference.

  He could see that this particular trial – distinguished from the rest by the name ‘The Trial of the Twenty-One’ – followed the same absurd trajectory to the graveyard. Like Kamenev and Zinoviev before them (whom Yagoda himself had disposed of), the three accused had previously been denounced and rehabilitated, but this time they had run out of luck, being forced into fulsome confessions to an absurd list of crimes: plotting with Trotsky to murder Lenin and Stalin, to undo collectivisation, to restore capitalism, to dismember the Soviet Union, and even to wreck the Soviet economy by blowing up trains and putting glass fragments in packets of workers’ butter. Thousands of pornographic photographs had supposedly been found hidden in the walls of their dachas. At various times, he began to chuckle to himself at the comic nature of it all. At one point in the trial, two of the twenty-one defendants had confessed to having plotted a coup d’état with Trotsky, only for it to be revealed that, at the time of the correspondence, Trotsky was at sea, on his way to Mexico. It made the verdict a nonsense, and in any other country the trial would have been aborted, but the victims confessed their guilt regardless, logically impossible though it was. Now being on the official record, and repeated endlessly in the communist press, the lie had become the truth. It wouldn’t be long, he thought, until all the original Bolsheviks – bar Stalin and Trotsky, whom Stalin needed, in the way God needed Satan – were written out of the Party’s official histories and ceased to exist.

  The whole confected story now lay across his bed, table and floor. He reached for another issue and kept reading. He circled a passage from one of the Times’ special correspondents: ‘According to Soviet law, crime and the intent to commit crime are virtually the same thing … In the coming trial the prosecution expects to show that the accused premeditated certain crimes although they never committed them – and therefore are little less guilty than if the crimes had actually been committed.’ Thought itself has become a crime.

  The stupidity of it! How could they expect the workers to take socialism seriously in the face of such nonsense? He felt restless, and, getting up, began pacing the room, the better to think. The Soviet debacle was now total. As a socialist, it should have made him angry, yet it left him inwardly exultant. Here was proof – physical proof, spread about his room, that he could feel under his feet – that the picture he had painted of communist madness in Homage was essentially correct; anyone could see that now. The revolution was finally dead, and some dreadful new form of society had taken its place.

  His agitated mind filled with questions. Were all revolutions, all attempts to create a better world, doomed? Were all men ultimately irredeemable, incapable of living up to the hopes idealists had invested in them? Were they all now unworthy of the brave comrades he had left behind, who at that very moment were being squeezed into the shrinking Republican redoubt to face death, but determined to fight on to the end? Could a brotherhood of man really exist in this world?

  He put on his slippers and dressing gown and wandered down the corridor, and in short order was struck by a memory. Perhaps it was the sanatorium’s dormitory, built in the nature of a school, but his mind turned to the first time he had pondered these questions: Eton.

  *

  Eton College, June 1918. The almost blind Aldous Huxley was by all agreement a truly hopeless teacher. He was tall and gaunt, dressed after the fashion of Oscar Wilde, and was considered an eccentric fop. Blair was one of the few who admired him.

  Emboldened by Huxley’s myopia, the boys at the back of the class were playing cards. In an effort to quell their increasingly rowdy behaviour, made worse by the fact it was the last day of the school year, Huxley set the class regular tests, which, he assured them, though unconvincingly, would reflect on their standing in the grades. This test was simple: Whom do you consider the ten greatest men now living?

  ‘Pens down, gentlemen,’ Huxley said, feebly. ‘Pass your papers to the front.’ He stood before the blackboard, flicking rapidly through the papers, which he held close to his face. ‘Who is going to volunteer to tell me their answer?’

  ‘I can, sir. It’s Blair.’ He wasn’t by nature a keen student, but thought the class’s mocking of the afflicted Huxley scandalous.

  ‘Yes, Blair, I can see you.’ He handed Blair’s paper back to him. ‘Your top t
en, please.’

  Sitting at his desk, he read it out. ‘Wells, obviously, sir. Shaw, equally obviously. Galsworthy. Jack London. Henri Barbusse.’

  ‘Barbusse, Blair? Bravo,’ Huxley said. ‘But where on earth did you get a copy of Le Feu?’ The anti-war novel was considered almost seditious.

  ‘From the provost, sir.’

  ‘That’s five so far, Blair. Continue.’

  ‘Bertrand Russell—’

  ‘Oh, Blair!’ one boy called out, ‘this is just too funny. I knew you were a Shavian and a Red, but a conchie? This is hilarious.’ The card-playing boys threw screwed-up papers at him.

  He dodged the missiles and kept going. ‘Keir Hardie—’

  ‘Dead!’ someone yelled out. ‘You of all people should know that, Blair.’

  ‘Bukharin—’

  ‘Never heard of him!’

  ‘Editor of Pravda,’ said Huxley. ‘Reputedly the most brilliant of all the Bolsheviks.’

  More laughter and missiles.

  ‘Trotsky.’

  ‘That’s nine, Blair.’

  ‘And Lenin.’

  ‘Lenin indeed, Mr Blair. I’ve just had a glance at all sixteen papers, and fifteen name Lenin. Why do you think that is?’

  ‘He represents the future happiness and freedom of man, sir.’

  ‘Do you really think so? Blair, does the future happiness and freedom of man lie in Jacobinism? Did Cromwell and his Ironsides deliver happiness?’

  ‘It lies in equality.’

  ‘Imposed by force? As under Robespierre and the Terror? You’ve read Carlyle?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Violence … well, it seems necessary, sometimes.’