The Last Man in Europe Page 8

  He flicked forward another page.

  June 5th, 1940. Last night to Waterloo and Victoria to see whether I could get any news of Laurence.

  Laurence – killed at Dunkirk. He remembered now, watching for day after day following the evacuation, hunting for any news of Laurence’s fate as trains packed with half-drowned soldiers and refugees pulled in at Waterloo. When the worst was finally confirmed (as much as any truth could be confirmed in the confusion and veil of secrecy that shrouded the war), his first thought had been that Laurence’s fate was somehow connected to his own. After all, he had lost his surgeon, the renowned TB expert, who he knew would do all he could to keep him alive, if only for Eileen’s sake. With her bedridden with grief – she was still yet to get over her brother’s death a whole year later – it had fallen to him to write the obituary for the Times, and he pieced together the expected heroic death: machine-gunned by Nazi aeroplanes while tending the wounded on the beach, an example to everyone, etc., etc. It might have been true – he thought so at the time – but now he wasn’t so certain.

  He read on.

  June 20th, 1940. If we can only hold out for a few more months, in a year’s time we shall see red militia billeted in the Ritz …

  He winced. How much more wrong could he have been? Caught up in the moment, he had hoped the collapse of 1940 would end in an English socialist revolution, and him part of a revolutionary militia, poised for street fighting, man against tank, to prevent the Quislings in the Tory Party from selling out to the invading Nazis. He had given public lectures in guerrilla warfare, and even now, when walking down a perfectly ordinary street, his mind would sometimes busy itself working out the best place to site a machine gun. A handful of well-positioned men on The Strand could hold up half a division. ‘If the gutters have to run with blood, so be it,’ he had written.

  He could see now, though, it had all been wishful folly. The revolution had ended before it had even begun, and English socialism had been stillborn. He thought it rather a good thing; better for the revolution to have never happened than for it to have been betrayed, as it inevitably would have been. As his eyes drifted down the page, an underlined sentence stood out: ‘Thinking always of my island in the Hebrides.’ What could it mean? The Hebrides? Some idea of escape? Somewhere safe from the bombs? A last redoubt against Nazi terror? Somewhere, maybe, he could write in peace? He tried to recall scribbling these words in the diary, but couldn’t.

  He flicked forward and could see that it was all rubbish. The entries were little more than a stream of consciousness, recording newspaper reports, gossip and even the newsreels he had seen at the flicks. It was pointless, and its predictions mostly wrong. Street fighting? Revolution? English socialism? Who would believe a word of it, except maybe enemies looking to discredit him? No, the history of this war would be written by the victors, by some dull propagandist, some jumped-up clerk, trying to second-guess which version of events conformed with the current party line. That was to say, someone with a job just like his! What truth did the leader want? That was the only question that mattered. The rantings of people like himself would be ignored. Their diaries would be hunted down and burned. History itself would be as the leader demanded, nothing more.

  He chewed over the thought gloomily. Writing a diary was nothing but a conceit: the very idea that under a dictatorial government – Nazi, Tory-Quisling or communist – you could be free inside. Ha! That down in the street below, six-foot-wide posters of the leader might glare at you from every hoarding, and the stormtroopers demand to see your papers, but upstairs in a room like this you could record your thoughts freely … what rot! Hadn’t the NKVD invaded his room in Barcelona and confiscated his diary about Spain? The concentration camps, the cork-lined cells, the torture chambers – that’s where the free spirits like him would end up. After the liberation of Europe, if it ever happened, few diaries would be found, of that he was certain. The literature of liberalism was finished, and the literature of totalitarianism was coming to take its place. He knew what it would be like: inhuman, cold, mechanical, ugly words riveted together.

  He sucked the nib of his pen to remove the grease and began to write his last entry:

  August 28th, 1941. There is no victory in sight at present. We are now in for a long, dreary, exhausting war, with everyone getting poorer all the time. The quasi-revolutionary period which began with Dunkirk is finished and the task now is to prevent the war itself from destroying what it has set out to save. I have therefore decided to wind this diary up.

  He read over it. He was right to end it. How could you make an appeal to the future when it was likely that not a trace of your thoughts would survive? There must be a better way, but at the moment it was beyond him.

  *

  He could pinpoint the cause of his gloom. That morning he had been in the usual meeting room at Broadcasting House, the Eastern Service discussing its program schedule. He dreaded these meetings: the arrival on his desk of the agenda, with its summons to Room 101, with its endless, dreary discussions about which academic should be invited on to discuss Boswell or Keats, induced in him a sense of panic. He was convinced that the whole business of wartime broadcasting was designed simply to soak up the mental energies of people like himself, occupying them with trivia when they might otherwise be questioning the war effort or challenging the government’s excesses. Each time the clock ticked down to the meeting, he contemplated all manner of escape: forgetfulness, illness, resignation, lying about having been bombed out of his flat. But there was no escape and life had to be faced up to with a false smile. Keep calm and carry on, as B.B.’s slogan commanded.

  This morning during the meeting he had drifted off. He was thinking of his recent meeting with Anthony Powell at the Café Royal, and how splendid he had looked in his father’s Brigade of Guards ‘blues’, with its stiff collar and polished brass buttons and those straps under his trousers. They had talked about Evelyn Waugh – a commando of all things! The Tories got all the luck. Powell and Waugh (he now regretted calling them bum-kissers) were both household names and fabulously wealthy, while he spent his time listening to pompous academic bores, filling a dull post merely to keep himself alive.

  ‘Why not this UCL chap Geoffrey Tillotson?’ asked the chairman, Rushbrook Williams. ‘Expert on Dryden, I hear.’

  The question had been meant for him, but he was staring down at the agenda and doodling as his mind wandered. Wigan Pier, Homage to Catalonia, those novels of which he was now ashamed … all remaindered or turned to smoke when Gollancz’s warehouse went up in the Blitz. And here he was, talking rot about Dryden with these people who were too ill or too old or too gormless to fight, and wasting his evenings square-bashing with the Home Guard. The tightening in his chest he’d been feeling all week became more noticeable.

  ‘Blair, what do you think about Tillotson’s suitability? You’ll be producing this series. Blair?’

  Tillotson? All he could think was that it was another of those Marxist-sounding names. Just the sort of name some comrade academic would have. ‘Well, you see,’ he began in his halting, wheezing voice. As he was trying to think of what to say next – he hadn’t bothered to prepare for the meeting – he felt a sudden spasm in his lungs and began a painful coughing fit, his chest convulsing as if it were trying to eject some foreign object from the centre of his body. It wouldn’t stop, and the contractions of his chest muscles got deeper and more powerful until it felt like they would eventually snap his spine. He had turned white and his face was running with sweat.

  ‘My God, man, are you alright?’ he heard someone say. ‘Blair! I say, are you alright?’

  One person rushed across with a glass of water, but the others instinctively covered their faces. The coughing continued, but he finally managed to wheeze enough air into his lungs to avoid passing out. They laid him down on the floor, where he remained for some minutes while everyone listened in horror to the frightening rattling of his chest. Eileen was called to tak
e him home. It had been two years, but the disease had returned.

  *

  He heard a key in the lock. Eileen! He guiltily placed the notebook in the desk drawer and locked it. Exactly why he did this he wasn’t sure, except that the diary was in some way connected to Inez. It had been her idea, although the collaboration had soon been dropped: two writers giving alternate perspectives on the progress of the war and the revolution that might follow. Rubbish!

  Eileen appeared at the door with a basket of food, which she had spent an hour after work queuing to buy. Like everyone in London, she had been worn down by the war. Her luscious figure had become thin, and her thick brunette hair was now noticeably speckled with grey. Her once fine woollen suit, which looked like it hadn’t been brushed since the invasion of Poland, was flecked with cigarette ash.

  They had been married for five years, but whenever she was out of his presence it was surprising even to him how infrequently he thought of her. It had all started so well, but Spain and the war, and especially Laurence’s death, had done something to her. At times she seemed completely spiritless. The rebelliousness, the sexiness, even her sense of irony – all the things that first attracted him – had been burned out of her, leaving in her face a perpetually empty stare. She did everything that marriage required, but with a lack of excess motion, and when not fulfilling necessary duties would sometimes sit or lie immobile for hours on end; everyone noted her silence at parties. They still made love occasionally – but mechanically, as if she were some sort of jointed wooden doll, and out of some unspoken duty to produce from their marriage a child.

  ‘Eric,’ she said, putting down the basket, ‘Wells will be here soon.’

  He had forgotten: H.G. Wells had accepted an invitation for dinner that evening.

  2

  The Wells dinner had been Inez Holden’s idea, and came from a chance meeting with the great old man himself. At the height of the Blitz her block of flats copped it, and the ever-generous Wells, who had admired the experimental novel she had written in the synthetic language Basic English, offered her use of the mews apartment above the garage of his sprawling terrace in Regent’s Park. The place gave off a residual smell of horse sweat and pigeon dung, but its view over trees provoked an impression of being in the countryside. It was a convenient place for her and Orwell to meet after his Home Guard parade drills, and they had been dozing there in the mews flat one afternoon, curtains closed, when a note was slid under the door inviting them both to afternoon tea before Inez left for her night shift at the aeroplane factory.

  Orwell had been highly embarrassed, but Inez was unfazed. ‘Don’t worry for a moment about old H.G.,’ she said. ‘He’s not a gossip. Very discreet. Anyway, he’s in no position to talk: this is where he brings that crazy Russian mistress Gorky passed on to him. He’s probably just intrigued about you, that’s all; you’re starting to gain a reputation.’

  Still in awe of Wells, he agreed. First Inez had to get ready. She went to the bathroom and emerged wearing the blue-grey overalls of an airframe assembler. It was standard issue for manual workers in the Ministry of Aircraft Production, dull but emboldened by a bright handkerchief tied around her head, which, she said, was to keep her hair from falling into the machinery. Even the dullest overalls couldn’t completely suppress her urge to be different. He noticed she’d put on make-up too.

  ‘How do I look?’ she asked.

  ‘Vaguely communist and pure. Like some automaton out of one of H.G.’s novels.’

  She did a curtsey and sang in her best Gracie Fields voice: ‘It’s a ticklish sort of job, making a thing for a thingummybob …’

  ‘The thingummybob that’s going to win the war!’ he sang back, almost automatically. The tune – part of B.B.’s propaganda drive to encourage women into the factories – had become inescapable. One heard women especially humming it endlessly on buses and in the tube.

  Soon they were sitting on a sofa in Wells’ drawing room, listening to the great man hold forth. Orwell wasn’t the type to be in awe, but this was H.G. Wells. In a world of pedants, golfers and sniggering Latin masters, Wells had known before 1900 that the future was not going to be the way respectable people imagined it. And yet he found in front of him not the prophet of the future, but a man clearly in decline. It wasn’t just Wells’ physical shrinkage – he was now over seventy – but the way he launched into his monologue on the usual rigmarole: the world state and the Sankey Declaration – which, as Wells reminded them, should really have been called the Wells Declaration, as he’d written ‘most every word’.

  The longer Wells talked, the clearer it became that the world had not turned out as he had predicted, and yet he just couldn’t see it. Inez, who’d seen the old man in this form before, steered the conversation towards literature instead. ‘H.G., George here is one of your biggest fans. Simply adores your books.’

  ‘Is that so, Orwell?’ the old man replied. ‘Any favourites?’

  ‘The early scientific romances, of course; couldn’t split them. Maybe The Sleeper Wakes.’

  ‘Awakes, Orwell. Awakes!’ Wells seemed miffed. ‘Why?’

  ‘Think of how marvellous it was for us as children, H.G. There we were, bored rigid by dimwitted schoolmasters, but when we got back to the dorm we could pull one of your books from under the covers and read about the inhabitants of planets and the bottom of the sea, and someone waking up in the year 2100 to lead a world revolution. Simply smashing. Did you ever want to do these things yourself? Fly, I mean. Cruise under the ocean, visit the stars?’

  A look of disappointment crept across Wells’ face. ‘Well, yes … Once, I suppose.’

  ‘Actually, I recall one morning in summer in Prep sneaking into Cyril Connolly’s – you know him, editor of Horizon – sneaking into his dorm and stealing his copy of … I forget which collection of short stories. They were cracking, all about travel to the stars.’

  ‘Nothing more serious? What about my social novels?’

  ‘Well, if forced to choose, I’d have to say Mr Polly. Everyone loves a good antihero. The draper, the clerk, the nobody getting his revenge on the system.’

  ‘Not anything more recent? Not my political tracts? I thought you were a Trotskyist, Orwell. That’s what I’ve been told.’

  ‘Sorry, I haven’t read much of them, except your articles in the newspapers. I enjoyed the film of Shape of Things to Come, but that was a few years ago now too.’

  ‘Yes, well, the costumes were good. Come to think of it, I can see how Mr Polly would appeal to you, Orwell. One man in a simple room with a woman to love. Your sort of utopia, I guess!’

  ‘Ah, you see, so much to talk about,’ said Inez hurriedly. ‘I suggest a dinner party so we can discuss literature more fully.’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed Wells. ‘Alright, I suppose; now, just wait a minute.’ He walked over to a bookshelf and rummaged through an opened brown-paper parcel, returning to hand Orwell a paperback. ‘Here’s my latest: Guide to the New World. Perhaps you can tell me what you think of it when we dine.’

  *

  A month later Wells sat at Orwell’s tiny dining table in Langford Court. Given the shortages of food, Inez and William Empson had joined them after the meal. The atmosphere was tense with the expectation of battle. Orwell was shuffling his enormous feet under the table and Eileen was filling the wine glass in front of Wells, whose expression suggested a man spoiling for an argument. A copy of The Sleeper Awakes sat in front of him and beside it a pen, both untouched by the great man.

  ‘Bill, darling; Inez,’ said Eileen. ‘Where have you both been? We’ve been waiting ages.’

  ‘Connolly treated us all to dinner in Soho,’ said Empson. ‘Eels and rice, I think it was, but I might be mistaken.’

  ‘Washed down with lots of wine as usual, wasn’t it, Billy?’

  ‘Glad to say, yes. How they’ve managed to preserve such a cellar is a mystery.’

  ‘Well, have some more; H.G. brought plenty.’ Eileen pointed t
hem to the divan, which Empson nearly tripped over before easing himself down.

  ‘Must be a good view from up here, Eileen,’ Inez said. She went over to the window and peeped through a tiny gap in the blackout curtain. ‘Senate House lit up like a beacon as usual. Helping the Luftwaffe aim its bombs. Now, what have you two been talking about?’ she said, turning to Orwell and Wells.

  Orwell broke an ominous silence. ‘Gissing and Huxley. H.G. knew both of them, didn’t you?’

  ‘The elder Huxley only. The younger one was too much of a cynic for my liking. Taught Orwell here to be likewise.’

  ‘Personally, I think if Gissing was still alive he’d be a fascist; reckoned the working class were savages.’

  ‘That’s because he was another one of your underfed, rebellious clerks, Orwell.’

  ‘Like Kipps and you once were,’ Orwell returned.

  Wells bristled; a meanness entered his eyes and he pushed the book and pen in front of him down the table. ‘So, how is Connolly? Because, funnily enough, his magazine recently mentioned me.’

  No one replied.

  Wells got up, walked over to the coat stand and pulled a rolled-up magazine from the pocket of his jacket, returning to slap it down on the table. It was the latest Horizon. He turned to a folded-down page. ‘Yes, here it is. “Wells, Hitler and the World State”, by George Orwell. My thanks to you, Inez, for procuring it.’ The journal bore heavy scorings in blue ink.

  Wells began reading aloud. ‘“If one looks through nearly any book that Wells has written in the last forty years, one finds the same idea constantly recurring: the supposed antithesis between the man of science who is working towards a planned World State and the reactionary who is trying to restore a disorderly past. In novels, Utopias, essays, films, pamphlets, the antithesis crops up, always more or less the same. On the one side science, order, progress, internationalism, aeroplanes, steel, concrete, hygiene: on the other side war, nationalism, religion, monarchy, peasants, Greek professors, poets, horses. History as he sees it is a series of victories won by the scientific man over the romantic man.” So says Orwell.’