‘And shall it be a masque?’ asked Esmé. ‘A fancy-dress?’
Seaman shrugged. He was deeply embarrassed, burning scarlet. ‘I’m not sure that Grace will allow our properties to be used . . .’
‘It’s easy enough to dress up as Arabs,’ Mrs Cornelius escalated her enthusiasm. ‘We’ve orl got sheets on our beds, 1 ‘ope. We’ll make the most o’ wot’s arahnd.’
I was captured by their enthusiasm, though I suspected some of it had to do with the element of boredom which so often overtakes shipboard life, leading to childish pranks and unsuitable couplings. It had been some while since I had properly celebrated Easter, so I began to look forward to the party. Indeed, anticipation helped relieve the slightly morbid sense of dread gathering at the farther corners of my mind. It was impossible to tell the origins of this dread, though the iconography of the landscape forever reminded me of Hades. I was not reconciled, in those days, to the Fact of Death. I was impatient to make my mark in this world. I would leave it to the priests to worry about the afterlife. Old age brings either wisdom or defeat, I am not sure which.
Esmé and I now found plenty of time together, since Mrs Cornelius had made Professor Quelch and, occasionally, Wolf Seaman, into card-players, together with Radonic and Chief Sri Harold. We had all by now become active at night and saw the dawn as a preliminary to sleeping until lunch-time, when we would all gradually congregate in the restaurant as if we had not seen a soul since dinner the night before. Something in the dry Egyptian air combined with our cocaine to bring Esmé and me unimagined sensations and delights. We became obsessed with exploring them. Only when the intensity began to drop did I turn to less energetic pleasures rather than, as so many tyros do, attempt somehow to boost sensation with sordid games and pornographic postcards. For me, to patronise these Sex Shops would be a sign of failure.
I celebrate sexuality with women on their own terms, and I have willingly explored those terms to the fullest extent. That is why they trusted me. Today there are no ways of knowing how to trust a man. These Maydays and Pentaxes promise too much and fulfil no one; creating a hunger for a non-existent food which, if it did indeed exist, would anyway be a coarse and inferior alternative to food already available. If we are patient, giving, willing to learn, willing to be malleable sometimes and to be masterful at others, so we shall taste the food of the gods, the food of quintessential human love. This, in those noisy nights, is what I taught Esmé, and the nights became tranquil again. There is an exquisite and particular harmony in savouring the past and predicating the future. Much of this, I admit, I learned from my Baroness and from other dear comrades whom a friend would not name in the current climate. By the middle of the 30s we had learned discretion and lost our innocence. By the 40s we had discovered the delicate pleasures of restraint and sacrifice, of brevity. By the 50s these things had become mere habits and everyone had forgotten the reason for their creation; they were rejected in the 60s as being of no value whatsoever and everything was sudden Licence. Their newspapers are the work of mad spiders, of psychopathic sex criminals, of irresponsible hooligans, of repressed middle-class children whose fathers and uncles and older brothers are daily bread to the specialist prostitutes of Colville Terrace and Talbot Road. Sometimes they run into one another, the Portobello hippy indulging some infected North African narcotic and publicly groping his bewildered PreRaphaelite concubine, and his father, just popping out from Madame Lash’s Chamber of Desire. They tell me there is a difference. I cannot see it. One by one they surrender to the Power of the Beast. Do they see virtue in infecting the public with their own filthy ikons, their shameful desires and social diseases? These papers hold up every form of torture and humiliation as an extension of human sexuality. And you say the Goat does not stretch His hairy body across Portobello’s rotting slates and look down on that agitated human flux which might have spilled from some Islamic slum, and laugh through His pain? Achieve even, perhaps, a modicum of pleasure? Can this be what all great civilisations come to? A people which brought the Pax Britannica to half the globe and won the right to plant the flag of Christendom in the very heart of Arabia, carrying it into Mecca itself and destroying the very roots of our present disease. Instead, horribly, Britain fell in love with Arabia as she fell in love with the Jews. She loved all Semites. And then she was torn between two rivals. Which to choose? She did what every femme fatale has done since the time of Eve: she compromised; she vacillated. She should have turned her back on them both and recovered her matronly self-respect. Everyone thought she would. Especially the Germans, who would otherwise never have gone to war. And when the British socialist parliament stated quite clearly where their new loyalties lay, what choice had she but to make a treaty with the Bolsheviks? The date of their shame is May 23, 1939, when they made an independent state of Palestine. That some Jews attacked this declaration, as well as Arabs, is an indication that there are sane people even amongst our opponents. Britain had become a Jew’s whore, servicing the Arab trade. Hitler saw it as his duty to save the British Empire. But he reckoned without her new Uncle, Sam, who now clutched the purse-strings of more than one nation. How could he know so many Christian lands had already fallen to the strutting carrion released from their old restraints by the violence of War and Revolution? How could he know that he was to be betrayed by everyone he had counted on, even Mussolini? I am no apologist for Hitler. I do not condone his excesses or, indeed, many of his methods; but neither do I blame him alone for the entire collapse of the world into thinly-disguised barbarism. He was badly served. He trusted too many of the wrong people. Churchill shared my views. He confided as much to Mrs Cornelius on that night she still refers to as when ‘me an’ littel Winny ‘ad a bit o’ fun tergever’, some time during 1944, if that was when we began to get the V1 rockets. It was that same week I saw Brodmann coming out of Downing Street and standing beside the sandbags to strike an illegal match for his cigarette. He was dressed as an ARP Warden, with the white webbing and lamp. It was twilight, the trees were black, like cracks in grey glass. Just as I started across Whitehall to buttonhole him, the siren went off and we were rushed to the evil-smelling shelters. I think that if I were to murder anyone, it would be Brodmann. How he mocks me with his knowledge. He is the only living witness to my shame. I can come to terms with the shame. I have learned I should not blame myself. But I always hated recalling that Brodmann, a renegade Jew, the worst example of his race, had seen what he saw in the Cossack camp before I was given Yermeloff’s pistols. It is no worse, I admit, than what Quelch observed later - what little he observed - but Quelch is dead. The Palmach did not keep hostages beyond their usefulness. It is all blood down the gutter now, as we used to say in Slobodka. I cannot speak of any of this, however, without shivering. My whole body cries out for me to stop. It is self-torture. My hands refuse to hold the pen. My head refuses language.
My plane was called The Hawk. She sailed above the world. She sailed through history. She sailed through time.
They say in the papers that we are on the edge of a new Ice Age. Will it cleanse or will it merely preserve the world, I wonder? Was that miserable conflict, which ended in 1945, not our Ragnarok?
My ship is called The Rose. With dawn light turning her silver-green fins to shimmering pink, she rises into a golden sky touched by the faintest bands of blue and grey. She could have been the first of a fleet - the mother of my flying cities, my new Byzantium.