Mr. American Read online

  Home the day after tomorrow, to the peaceful informality of Castle Lancing, thought Mr Franklin, and in the meantime we'll break the monotony by a spirited chat with Lady Helen on the subject of women's rights, or the provocation of policemen, and see if there isn't a more amiable side to her after all.

  But in this he was disappointed. When the party returned to the house it was discovered that she and her great-uncle had left unexpectedly. General Flashman, excused the shooting party on the score of his age and presumed infirmity, had belied the latter by beguiling the time indoors with sporting activities of his own. These had included a late breakfast of champagne mixed with brandy, and the pursuit of a personable young between-stairs maid to whom, by report, he had offered the most enthusiastic familiarities. The maid, a nimble girl, had escaped by a short head, but the old warrior's ardent advance had resulted in his losing his footing at the head of the stairs, colliding with a table loaded with photographs of Queen Victoria's German nieces, and coming to rest in the hall with a sprained ankle. In the circumstances his great-niece had thought it best to remove him, and he had been borne protesting to a motor car which had carried them both to King's Lynn. None of which was referred to publicly, of course, the official version being that the General had had one of his feverish turns again - which was true enough, in its way. The full facts were gleaned from the servants' hall by Samson, who reported to an astonished Mr Franklin that there was considerable scandal among the senior staff, but that the maid herself had remarked giggling that the General was a game old devil and couldn't half shift when he wanted to.

  'She doesn't seem to realise, sir, that she's fortunate not to have lost her situation, with no character,' Samson added. `Very fortunate indeed.'

  `Why on earth should she? She's the injured party, I'd have thought.'

  `Quite so, sir. But most employers do not care to retain female servants who have attracted the attention of gentlemen.'

  Mr Franklin stared. `You mean because she's a pretty girl, and was unlucky enough to come within reach of that dirty old rip, she should lose her job?'

  'Well, sir, many household superintendents would feel that she should have been careful to avoid being placed in such a position. I am putting out the lovat suit, sir, and the fawn tie. However, Lady Helen Cessford's intervention made it quite certain that no steps would be taken to give the maid warning, I understand.'

  'Lady Helen, you say? What's she got to do with it?'

  'I imagine her ladyship has had to deal with similar difficulties, sir, where her great-uncle was concerned. And she has strong views on the position of women, of whatever class.' Samson tucked a handkerchief deftly into Mr Franklin's breast pocket. 'I gather from the senior maid that her ladyship sent for the butler and informed him that she would countenance no action against the maid; indeed, she went so far as to hint that if the young woman suffered at all, the matter would find its way into the newspapers. The butler was quite put out, sir, according to the senior maid.'

  Mr Franklin whistled. 'I'll bet he was! My, she's quite a young lady that one, isn't she? She threatened to tell the papers! Yes, I'll believe it.'

  'Her ladyship is unconventional, sir.'

  'Unconventional is right. Mind you, with a great-uncle like that, she probably needs to be. I hope the old scoundrel's suitably ashamed of himself - but I doubt it.'

  'No, sir. Indeed, I gather that when he left the General was only with difficulty restrained from offering the maid a post in his own employ. Her ladyship spoke to him quite sharply, they tell me.'

  'I can just hear her. You know, Thomas, she's a remarkable girl. I don't know much about suffragettes, but I'd guess it must be pretty difficult for her to keep her place in your polite English society - I've hardly met her, but I've seen her commit breach of the peace and common assault, and come as close as dammit to getting arrested. And now she's threatened to make a public scandal involving the royal family. How long's society going to put up with her?'

  'Her father is the Marquess of Ivegill, sir, and greatly respected.'

  'My God, I'd forgotten about him! He's here, isn't he - that slim, frail old stick with the eye-glass? Or has he gone, too?'

  'His lordship is still here, sir, I believe.'

  'Well - what did he have to say about it all? Isn't Flashman his uncle?'

  'His late wife's uncle by marriage, I believe, sir. They do not speak, I understand.'

  'Yes, but dammit, if your late wife's uncle, who is a fellow-guest, tries to act indecently with a royal servant - well, you can't ignore it, can you? Darned embarrassing, I'd call it.'

  'I doubt if his lordship is aware of the incident, sir, or will notice that his daughter and the General have left the premises.'

  'Not aware? He was here, wasn't he? He certainly wasn't out with us on the shoot.'

  'No, sir, he was down at the lake all day, sir. Watching the fish. He is greatly interested in carp, sir, and roach.'

  Mr Franklin stared at his attendant for a long moment. 'I see. He's crazy, is that it?'

  'His lordship is a very detached gentleman, sir, so they tell me. I fancy that it is time for afternoon tea, sir; the other guests will be assembling in the drawing-room.'

  It was a thoughtful Mr Franklin who absorbed his tea and ginger biscuits that evening, and those thoughts were concentrated on Lady Helen Cessford. A remarkable girl, as he'd said to Samson; what would Peggy have thought of her? Not much, probably - or, rather, too much. They wouldn't have got on: there was too much character on both sides. Both highly attractive girls in their different ways - Peggy was undeniably the more beautiful, but Lady Helen was ... interesting, and it was going to be a dull Sunday without the possibility of seeing her.

  Or her disgraceful great-uncle, for that matter. Now, there was a character, and no mistake: still chasing tweeny maids at the age of eighty-seven, treating old age as an advantage rather than a handicap, obviously. What must it be like to be that ancient, and just not give a dam? Mr Franklin could not envy the General, but as evening passed again with its ritual of dressing and dinner and languid conversation and bridge and more conversation and supper, he found himself half-regretting his own inability to break out of the deadening convention that the royal circle imposed. Not that he wanted to pursue giggling housemaids, or get drunk, or go to sleep over the port, or any of the other unimagined things which the eccentric General might have done - he was the kind who would have wandered off to the kitchens and exchanged drinking reminiscences with the butler, or charmed the cook with recollections of exotic foods eaten at the ends of the earth, or started a five-card school with the under-footmen, or lured Admiral Fisher into some impossible bet over the billiard-table.

  Mr Franklin sighed as he realised that it was not in him to do any of these things; he would have been content to pass the evening talking to Lady Helen, or Peggy, or cute little Pip from the Folies Satire - was he turning into a squaw man? There had never, somehow, been much time for women until he came to England, and here much of his time seemed to be spent in their company. He must be getting susceptible, and he smiled at the thought, and had to make up a bantering explanation of the smile to Mrs Keppel, who offered him a penny for his thoughts.

  Sunday seemed interminable, the high spots being a twenty-minute conversation about San Francisco with Admiral Fisher, whose discourse was a remarkable mixture of breezy anecdotes larded with Biblical quotations, and a game of billiards after tea with Churchill who, it turned out, had an American mother, and appeared fascinated by Mr Franklin's metamorphosis from Western transient into English squire.

  'It's all that's going to matter, you know, in the long run - America and England,' the young politician told him cheerfully. 'It's the hope of the world; the only hope. When the struggle comes - with Germany, with Russia, or whoever it is - China, perhaps, some day, perhaps even France again, as it was in the past, although it isn't fashionable to say that now - but whenever it comes, the great crisis, you won't have long to make up you
r minds over there. And you'd better pick the right side - you can't stay out, you know. You're too big to be neutral, and in the end you'll find that we're the only friends you've got. I don't say we aren't rivals, because we are - and we may even cut each other's throats in the way of trade and politics and so forth - but when the guns are on the table, and they will be, then for our own sakes the differences must be sunk, and we have to stand together. Otherwise, as one of your eminent statesmen said, we'll assuredly hang separately.'

  'You think there's going to be a war?' asked Mr Franklin.

  'If there isn't, it'll be something new in history. There are always wars, and always will be as long as people have different aims and interests. I expect to be in uniform again within the next ten years. Do you think,' said Churchill, squinting along his cue, 'that that red will go in the top pocket? I doubt it; have a look.'

  Mr Franklin obligingly squinted in his turn. 'It'll touch the white,' he said. 'But, you know, quite a lot of people in America might not feel like fighting a British war. Suppose it was against the Germans -

  there are a lot of German-Americans who might want to take the other side.'

  `Then they ought to have stayed in Germany. By becoming Americans they've picked their side already. I don't mean there's any moral obligation on them to support us - just that if they're realistic people, with sound common sense, they'll see where their interest - and their children's interest - lies. You're an English country, whether you like it or not, with English ways and English traditions. Don't misunderstand me - I'm not suggesting that you belong to us, in any sense whatever, just because we're older, or the mother country; we belong to you just as much. We both come from the same root, and it doesn't matter who came first. Of course, you'll change, as we will. But we must stay together. I think the red will go,' added Churchill, and struck the cue ball; the red quivered in the jaws of the pocket and stayed out. 'Well, it would have gone, if I had hit it properly. Anyway, when the war comes, I hope and pray you'll be on our side.'

  'I don't know anything about it,' confessed Mr Franklin, 'except that everyone over here keeps saying that it's going to happen, but somehow it never does. If you're an outsider, like me, you get quite alarmed at first - I remember feeling shocked the first night I was in this country, and heard them singing a song in a music-hall about how they were going to sink the Kaiser's fleet. I thought I'd better book my passage back to the States pretty smart. But three months later I'm used to it, and when I see a story in the papers - as I did a couple of days ago - claiming that your Mr Asquith is deliberately trying to get up a war with Germany to distract attention from your Budget thing - well, I get kind of sceptical, you know?'

  Churchill grinned. 'I enjoyed that one. I can think of fifty excuses for fighting the Germans, but that was one that hadn't occurred to me - worried me rather: it seemed so far-fetched that for a moment I wondered if it was true. However, I am now reassured. But when it comes - and it will - it will quite likely appear to be over something equally trivial. But the real reasons won't be apparent; they seldom are -

  'What are the real reasons? Go on, tell me - I'm on the outside, you're on the inside, and you know about these things. Why do wars start?'

  'That's easy,' said Churchill. 'Greed. And fear. And both those emotions are concerned with power and money. That's all. And they work away, until some accident - or some contrivance, although people are seldom clever enough to be able to contrive exactly - sets them off into war. Then the justifications - liberty, patriotism, compassion, indignation, religion, even - come into play. But they aren't reasons. Money and power, they're what count.'

  Mr Franklin replaced his cue in the rack and considered the fresh, rather baby face with its humorous mouth and lively eyes under the balding forehead. Slowly he said: 'I'd have thought those other things you mentioned - liberty, patriotism, and so on - I'd have thought they mattered, too.'

  'Of course they matter,' said Churchill. He stood waiting for Mr Franklin, his hands on his hips, his head thrust forward. 'Of course they matter - nothing matters more.' He smiled at the American, nodding. 'But money and power are what count.'

  He and Fisher left for London that evening, and since the King was slightly indisposed with a cough aggravated by the previous day's shooting, Mr Franklin was spared a final bridge session. He and Samson left on the following morning and reached Castle Lancing late in the afternoon; it was too late to pay a call at Oxton Hall - somehow it seemed the most natural thing in the world to want to see Peggy again and give her the news of his visit to Sandringham, but it would have to wait until tomorrow. But having done nothing for the past three days, or so it seemed, Mr Franklin was not prepared to sit about the house until bed-time; he recalled that it was more than a month since he had last looked in at the Apple Tree, and after Sandringham there was something strangely attractive about the prospect of a large beer in that cosy taproom, with no ginger biscuits or polite trivialities about Town life, where no one would cross an elegantly trousered leg to show an ankle encased in pearl-grey spats, where no one would make a steeple of his fingers and talk with urbanely-arched brows, and where a man could sit down without worrying about soiling the furniture. So it seemed to Mr Franklin in his rather exaggerated relief at getting home; he interrupted Samson's unpacking and said: 'Thomas, get your hat, and come on. I'm going to buy you a pint.'

  For the first time in their acquaintance Samson betrayed genuine surprise. He stood with a pile of Mr Franklin's shirts in his hands and said: 'A pint, sir? You mean at the Apple Tree.'

  'I don't mean at Thetford Town Hall,' said Mr Franklin cheerfully. 'Let's go.'

  Samson laid down the shirts on the bed carefully and straightened

  up. 'That's very kind of you, sir. But thank you, I'd rather not.'

  'Don't tell me you don't like beer,' said Mr Franklin, grinning. 'You've been up at the pub often enough. Come on, put your jacket on.'

  Samson hesitated. 'It's not that, sir.' He seemed to be reaching a decision. 'It's just - I don't think we should drink together, sir. Not in the village, at any rate.'

  'What?' Mr Franklin stared. 'Oh, bosh! You mean because you work for me? What's that got to do with it? You're off duty, man! Heavens above - look, I'll tell you something! When I was working in cattle, as a ranchhand, we were on a drive into a place called Magdalena, and the boss of the whole spread, Big Jim Eliot - a man who owned more acres than the Duke of Devonshire, and a millionaire ten times over - bought me a beer at the end of the trail - so why shouldn't I buy you one?'

  Samson looked vaguely uncomfortable. 'I think it's better we don't, sir.'

  'Oh, come on! This isn't Sandringham, you know. Are you worried about what the neighbours'll say? Well, I'm not - and it's my responsibility. So put down those shirts and -'

  'Not entirely, sir.' Samson was frowning. 'It's my responsibility, too.'

  'How d'you mean?'

  'Well, sir.' Samson was obviously choosing his words with care. 'It's like this. I enjoy working for you, sir, very much; I'm very well suited here. And I hope you are, too - '

  'You know very well I am. What's that to do with it?'

  'Thank you very much, sir. What I mean is - it's still a two-sided arrangement. It has to suit you - and me, if you understand me. And - it's nothing personal, sir, but I wouldn't feel altogether proper if we were to be seen drinking together, in public. You know what I mean?'

  'Not exactly,' said Mr Franklin. 'We're not quite the usual ... what's it called, master and man couple, are we? At least, I hope we're not.' He paused. 'Are you trying to say it would be an offence against your professional ethics?'

  'In a way, sir. Yes, you could say that. As I say, it's nothing personal. If it was - well, I wouldn't be here in the first place. And I wouldn't tell you straight out why I'm declining your kind offer. I'd make some excuse or other.'

  Mr Franklin laughed. 'Well, that's honest!' He shook his head. 'Maybe you're right. You know better than I do about the ... conve
ntions. But I still don't see why we can't have a beer together ... Look, suppose you were still in the Army, and I was your .. . company commander or whatever it is. What about it then?'