“Same with me, sir,” Walsh didn’t know Cartland had been an officer, but an MP serving in the ranks struck him as wildly improbable. And he liked the certainty of status rank gave. After so long away from it, the arbitrary, whimsical nature of civilian life confused him. “I’d just got back from Norway when the Hun came parachuting down.”
Cartland upended his glass of whiskey. When Walsh signaled to the barman, the MP shook his head. “Another time. For now, why don’t you come with me?”
“Come with you where, sir?”
“Some chaps I’d like you to meet. They’d like to meet you, too, believe me.”
Walsh frowned. “I fancy the crowd I’m in with now.”
“Well, I understand that. I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t feel the same way. But…” Cartland’s voice trailed off, as if there were things he wanted to say but didn’t want overheard. “Please, old boy?”
Wondering what he was getting into, Walsh stood up and lit a Navy Cut. “Lead on, sir. I expect I’ll follow.”
Once they were out of the Lion and Gryphon, Ronald Cartland let out a sigh of relief. “Bound to be people spying in there-maybe the tapman, maybe a customer, maybe the tapman and a customer, to make sure they don’t miss anything.”
“Who’s they?” Walsh asked.
“People who report to Horace Wilson,” Cartland answered. “Like Neville before him, he keeps tabs on anyone who disagrees with him and has a chance of doing anything about it. And he’s smarter than Neville ever was, damn him.”
“Why’s he sucking up to the Nazis, then?” Walsh demanded.
“Because he’s afraid of them. It’s the only thing I can think of.” Cartland walked on a few paces, then added, “Almost the only thing, I should say. He’s jealous of them, too. Dictators are very popular these days, as Edward said before he got to be King.”
“Did he really?” Walsh said. Crawford nodded. Walsh blew out a big cloud of smoke. “A good job he didn’t stay King long, then.”
“Yes, a lot of people thought so,” Cartland said, and not another word, leaving Walsh to wonder whether Edward’s passion for his American divorcee was the only thing that caused him to lay down the crown.
Cartland’s case-hardened reserve would have effortlessly turned a question about that. Seeing as much, Walsh just asked, “Where are we going, sir? You can tell me now, eh?”
“Why, to Parliament, of course,” Cartland answered in surprise. “I should have thought you’d work that out for yourself.”
“Sorry to be so slow.”
“Don’t worry about it. It will all come right in the end… unless, of course, it doesn’t.” On that cheerful note, Cartland led him past the guards outside-who nodded respectfully-and into the Parliament building.
Everything was smaller and shabbier and lit worse than Walsh had expected. This was the fount of democracy in the modern world, wasn’t it? Shouldn’t it be bright and clean and shiny? Evidently not. It reminded Walsh of nothing so much as a down-at-the-heels club for veteran sergeants. The thought made him feel more at home than he’d dreamt he could.
Cartland rounded up several other MPs. Eden, Macmillan, Cranborne (who seemed to go by Bobbety)… Names washed over Walsh. He wasn’t sure he had them all straight, or connected to the right faces. It seemed to matter little. The others were all at least as incensed with the government and its policies as Cartland.
“We have to take back the country’s soul,” one of them said; Walsh thought it was Macmillan, but he wasn’t sure. The MP went on, “Whatever our sins, we haven’t done anything to deserve this. ” He waved his left hand. He didn’t use his right arm much. Had he caught a packet in the last war? He was the right age.
“How do you propose to do that, sir?” Walsh asked. “Short of using soldiers, I mean? There’s plenty who like what’s going on-especially the blokes who don’t have to fight the Fritzes any more.”
Macmillan and his comrades all looked unhappy. “Ay, there’s the rub,” one of them murmured. “They think they can ride the tiger without coming back inside him.”
You could get drinks in the commons, as you could in a club. The MPs did. Cartland put Walsh on his chit. He’d come up in the world a bit, all right. These men were as disgusted and furious as any of the veterans in the Lion and Gryphon. Whether they had any better idea about how to change things remained to be seen.
November 5, 1940, was chilly and gloomy in Philadelphia. It drizzled on and off. It wasn’t cold enough to turn the water in the streets to ice, but it didn’t miss by much. Peggy Druce would have been more disappointed if she’d been more surprised. Indian summer might linger this late, but more often than not it didn’t.
Her polling place was at a school only a couple of blocks from where she and Herb lived. Every fence and telephone pole was plastered with Roosevelt or Willkie posters. Some had both. Some had Alf Landon posters, too. Some had one guy’s stuck on top of the other’s. Some had a bunch of different layers going back in time like the rock strata that confounded geologists. Whoever got there with his stack of flyers and pastepot won… till the other side’s guys came by.
She marked her ballot for FDR and stuck it in the box. “Mrs. Druce has voted,” intoned the snowy-bearded poll attendant. He didn’t look old enough to have fought in the Civil War, but he might well have been alive through it.
She wondered if he’d ever seen Lincoln. One of her grandfathers had. She also wondered what Honest Abe would have made of the present sorry state of the world. If Lincoln could have found anything good to say about it, she would have been very much surprised.
After completing the little secular ceremony, she went out onto the street. The rain had started up again while she was voting, so she raised her umbrella against it as she started home.
Several men who looked like bums collecting a day’s pay for booze called out Roosevelt’s name. Several others made noise for Willkie. Pennsylvania had laws against electioneering within a hundred feet of a polling place, but it wasn’t as if anyone took them seriously.
Peggy peeled off her galoshes when she got back. She was glad she’d worn them, even if they were ugly. She boiled water on the stove, poured it into a cup, and stuck in a bag of Lipton’s tea. They laughed at such things in England, but for fast and easy you couldn’t beat a teabag.
Her mouth twisted. She’d loved England and everything it stood for when RAF bombers unloaded on Berlin. They might have killed her, but she loved them anyhow.
Now… Now loving England wasn’t so easy. She wasn’t fighting Nazi tyranny any more. She was marching with it side by side. How could you say Horace Wilson-or Chamberlain before him-was any better than Hitler?
Oh, the English didn’t censor their newspapers… too much. They didn’t persecute their Jews… yet. Well, Mussolini didn’t persecute his Jews, either, but how many people held him up as a paragon?
“Shit,” Peggy said. Why not? Nobody was there to hear her, so the tree fell soundlessly in the middle of the forest. She poured some cognac into the hot tea. Maybe it would help sweeten her mood.
She drank the improved tea. It did warm her body the best way, from the inside out. Her spirit remained unthawed.
The radio might help. She turned it on and waited for it to warm up. The station it was tuned to gave forth with a quiz show so nauseating, she almost broke off the dial in her zeal to find a different one. Glenn Miller’s orchestra blaring away pleased her more… for a little while. The Nazis couldn’t stand jazz.
But her smile quickly slipped. Now that England was marching with Hitler, would it outlaw this “degenerate” music, too? And how about France? How about Django Reinhardt? He wasn’t just a jazz guitarist. He had the nerve to be a Gypsy jazz guitarist. The Nazis gave Gypsies as hard a time as Jews, though Jews outside of Germany made more noise about what happened to their kind. Would the French abuse Django to sweeten up their partners in greed?