Abdication A Novel

Chapter TWELVE





The trip up north had begun with a minor catastrophe for May. In her anxiety to make sure the car was properly packed, she had left her overnight case behind. Julian could not guess what was so wrong, as his intriguing young companion fell silent. An uneven flush, an unruly series of blotches, was spreading upwards from May’s collarbone. He had an awful feeling she was on the point of tears.

“Do you want to confess? Have you silently run over anything? Oh I am so sorry. Not funny. Sorry.”

May reddened even more.

“I have left my overnight bag behind.”

For a moment they were both silent.

And then Julian remembered he had two spare shirts. “You can have one of them. We will buy a toothbrush and some soap. And after all, it is only for a few nights.”

What an idiot she was, she had told him. But she had accepted his old shirt and reported the next morning that she had slept better than she had for many days.

The three young people chose to have their breakfast in a nearby café rather than at the grubby linoleum kitchen table in the boarding house with its bottle of Worcester sauce, piles of ancient crumbs, and unidentifiable slops of liquid on its greasy oilcloth. Over a cup of tea and a thick slice of bread, Peter said he was intending to accompany his friend Eric to Spain before the year was out. Despite the short span of their acquaintance, Peter’s passion for the cause made his invitation to Julian to join them sound persuasive. The Communist Party could do with all the help it could get against the right-wingers, Peter told him eagerly. If Julian thought the mining industry was in trouble over here he should also take a firsthand look at the working conditions in Spain. A major conflict over there was not only inevitable but also imminent. Peter wanted to be there to record it and Julian assured him he would think seriously about his proposition.

As they left the stifling heat of the brightly lit café, thanking Peter and wishing him well with his research and the writing of his paper, they adjusted their eyes to the darkness outside. Both were in a jaunty mood as, turning the corner, they were confronted with what looked like a giant orange gobstopper balanced on a tall black pole. Julian recognised the Belisha beacon at once. The transport minister, Mr. Hore-Belisha, was a parliamentary friend of Sir Philip’s and had stayed at Cuckmere the preceding summer just after the first beacon had gone up. He had joked to Julian that pedestrians had at last won their independence from the tyranny of cars.

“You are witnessing an historic landmark of the future,” Julian assured May in an exaggeratedly dramatic voice.

But May was looking bored.

“I thought you would be interested, what with you being a car buff,” he said in a tone of mock-hurt.

“Interested in lamps on sticks? You must be mad. Anyway, I’ve seen them before. They’re all over the place. You notice things like that when you drive a car, you know.”

She spoke in such a robust way that Julian burst out laughing at his pomposity. And then May laughed too. Together they walked through the streets, their carefree mood evaporating as they became conscious of the curiosity they invited in passers-by with their clean, neat clothes and their healthy, well-fed cheeks. At first the greyness and despair that Julian had anticipated seemed to be everywhere. Row upon row of identical buildings, built back to back, stretched out in front of them. Washing lines hung in the backyards, on which newly washed clothes were flapping, already grubby from air that tasted bitter with coal dust. Gutters were full of discarded crusts and tea leaves. Miniature cemeteries crowded out the flowerbeds that must once have brought some brightness to the front gardens.

May heard Julian’s indrawn breath. A man was hunched against a wall for support, coughing the life out of his guts, gasping and heaving between each spasm. A sailor was crossing the road, carrying a parrot on his arm, the blue and green plumage of the ragged bird muffled as if it had been dipped in muddy water. A small boy flinched in the doorway of a shop, as a woman raised her fist, lowering it as soon as she noticed she was being watched, her anger temporarily thwarted from making contact with its target. Bunched up at the street corners, and standing outside the high iron-grilled factory gates, groups of men smoked, huddled together in twos and threes, their caps dragged well down over their eyes, their jacket collars pulled up firmly to their necks, the top button done up. Every moment or two one of them would suck in his cheeks, before landing a globule of foamy spit on the pavement.

“These men and two and a quarter million more cannot find work,” Julian said more to himself than May, shaking his head.

But May was not listening. She was looking at a man whose face was so ingrained with coal that it seemed that no amount of washing could ever remove the stains. May smiled at him, her gesture returned with an expression that lit up the young man’s face, his smile revealing white teeth that dazzled in contrast to his sooty lips.

“For a moment that boy reminded me of my brother,” she said, smiling once again at the thought, as she and Julian walked on. “Same sort of age, I think.”

And as they both looked more closely they began to see that among the scenes of hopelessness there was an intense vitality to these streets. Groups of shoeless children were playing near the steps of the houses, jumping, hula-hooping and chasing one another around the cold hard pavements with as much abandon as the children May had watched playing on the powdery sand of her island home. Women stood in animated conversation, sharing grudges and gossip, their arms tightly folded over their dingy aprons. Some knelt, their backs rounded over a pail of sudsy water, or squatted with a brush, demonstrating their pride in producing the most gleaming of thresholds. A couple of women were turning a skipping rope, their chatter uninterrupted by the children who hopped over the whirling arc between them. Two little girls were absorbed by something in the sky directly above them and, following their gaze, May and Julian made out a vapour trail emerging from the tail of a high-flying aeroplane, as it formed the word “OXO” in blurry white letters.

Julian closed his eyes as shame began to creep over him. What had he been expecting to gain by this cursory visit north? On the way up he had tried to defend the research-based purpose of the visit to May. His own words returned to him now and he regretted them. Over breakfast May had told Peter about some of the families who lived in her cousins’ neighbourhood in East London. The children, many of whom had so little, played together and laughed together as if the riches of the world were theirs. Women who spent back-bending hours of the day cleaning and cooking and doing their best to manage, viewed life with a cheerfulness that was instinctive, infectious. And men, even though unemployment meant they struggled to maintain their natural place in the hierarchy of society by providing for their families, were rarely beaten entirely. May’s ability to look beneath the superficial was unmistakable. Her insight startled him.

That evening the mayor had moved on and two single rooms had become available in the hotel. Julian suggested they go out to a film and a plate of fish and chips afterwards. As Popeye, the spinach-eating sailor, appeared on the cinema screen accompanied by his hoop-eyebrowed girlfriend, May was unable to suppress a shout.

“That’s it! It’s her! Different body but same face!”

“Who?” hissed Julian, taken aback by the little outburst.

“Tell you later,” she promised.

But later Julian had forgotten to ask her why she had laughed so much at the sight of Olive Oyl, although he did notice that May pushed the chips to one side of her plate, leaving them uneaten. By an unspoken agreement they did not dwell on the sights and experiences of the day they had just spent together. Both sensed a need to leave the subject alone for a while. Instead, May wanted to know about Julian’s life in Oxford. She had glimpsed that beautiful city once from the window of a coach, she told him, and longed to visit it again properly. Julian told her how his father had taught at the university, how instead of sending him to sleep Matthew Arnold’s dreaming spires had woken his mind and how long hours in the Bodleian library raced by as he read everything he could lay his hands on. Locke and Berkeley and other writers May had never heard of seemed to be speaking directly to him, he said, although he couldn’t get on with Kant. And for that matter he was having a hard time getting on with his flatmate.

“Rupert is a member of a club called the Bullingdon,” he told May. “God alone knows what they all get up to except drink and eat and demolish as much precious property as possible. About ten years ago club members smashed up nearly five hundred windows in Peckwater Quad at Christ Church. They are a bunch of vacuous, spoiled, snobbish, stupid idiots,” he said, suddenly furious. “And what’s more, their current hero is Oswald Mosley, the fascist leader, one of the most wrong-headed men in Britain. God knows where it is all going to lead.”

“Why on earth do you share a flat with Rupert?” May wanted to know.

“I sort of fell into it,” Julian admitted. “The truth is I am annoyed with myself for not having ended the arrangement. Too late now, though. But that’s my trouble. I say I will do things and I mean it when I say it, but then the motivation slips away. But I do rate his parents. Especially her. Poor Joan. She worries so much about Rupert. She deplores all that right-wing talk.”

Julian changed the subject.

“Tell me about you,” he said to May. “What sort of place did you grow up in? What do the West Indies look like? I know nothing about that part of the world.”

May needed no more prompting. She began to tell Julian of the monkeys who hung from their stringy arms in the trees around the plantation, waiting for the right moment to sneak a banana from the lunch table. She spoke of the rustling sound made by the wind that whispered its way up and down the green swaying sugarcane. She told of the brilliance of the new growth of the cane, the colour of crushed peas, and described the way she would peel the waxy skin from the stalks and suck out the sweet sticky juice. She spoke of the markets held in village squares, where the country people would come, balancing baskets on their heads packed high and tight with shiny avocadoes, olive- and coral-coloured mangoes, lemons still attached to their leafy branches, shiny green peppers and crescent-moon-shaped chillies. And without mentioning her mother, or the accident, May told him about the island’s deserted beaches, which lay below cliffs lined with scrawny hawthorn trees, bent almost double by years of storms that had tried to dislodge them from their precarious footholds. Finally, when she began to describe the sea itself, in all its mesmeric, ceaseless, churning, dangerous, deep blue beauty she fell silent, floored by the power of her memories.

When May came to the end, her eyes shining as bright as seawater, Julian gazed at her.

“Thank you,” he said, eventually. “That was so lovely. You are lovely.”


Julian and May had stayed on in Wigan for two more days and when the time came to leave Julian had learned something, but not the lesson he had been expecting. Instead of the mixture of detached, analytical pity that he had anticipated as the legacy of his visit to the North, he was instead conscious of something more elusive, more humbling and more valuable. He felt chastised by his self-importance.

During the long drive back Julian struggled to work out how he should respond to the preceding days. Something of his old confused thinking returned as he tightroped between a sequence of intellectual and emotional choices. Maybe he could volunteer to teach at a local school once his exams were out of the way, to which May had ventured, “Well now, that is an idea.”

“Education is everything,” he said, adding in a lighter voice, “perhaps we should bring the king back with us on our next trip?” Between them, he suggested, they could dissuade the king from looking at Germany for answers, and force him to concentrate on the problems at home.

“He might hear us but do you think he would really be listening?” Julian asked her with a hard little laugh, not expecting a reply.

With May’s prompting he talked about the Great War. He was studying its cause and effect as part of his degree. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted dreadful consequences to the harshly punitive treaty with Germany that had ended the four years of conflict. The trouble is, Julian explained, off on one of his rambles, that however hard you try to dissolve patriotism with the other ingredients of an emotional stew, it always floats to the top, just like grease finding its way to the surface of a meat broth. There were still so many older people alive who believed that it was a glorious thing to die for one’s country. In Julian’s view it was madness. He looked at May. Her eyes were on the road ahead of her but the occasional affirmative nod confirmed that she was concentrating on what he was saying. He went on. An Oxford friend was being taught economics by a don who had once slept with Keynes and pronounced him (“only out of bed, mind you”) to be the most terrifying of that group of artists and writers and thinkers who called themselves the Bloomsbury Group. The leader of the bunch was Virginia Woolf, writer of luminous, poetic prose and, with James Joyce, one of the most innovative novelists the century had so far seen.

“I have heard her speak on the wireless. She has a beautiful voice,” he said clearly impressed by the woman. “And come to think of it, she also has a beautiful face, judging by the photographs I have seen of her.”

Julian’s offer to lend May his copy of Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway was accepted at once although May did not mention she had met Virginia Woolf on several occasions. The well-known writer and feminist lived in the village of Rodmell near Cuckmere Park and May had driven Mrs. Cage over there several times for lunch with her friend, Mrs. Woolf’s cook. Mrs. Woolf was always most courteous to May on these visits. Usually she was busy putting on her hat and about to leave for the train to London but she never failed to ask May questions about herself.

“I have a terribly nosy habit of wanting to know every detail about everyone,” she had confided with a laugh, “especially someone with an exotic life like yours.”

May thought Julian quite right to have remarked on Mrs. Woolf’s beauty. She had been struck by that long, elegant face and also by the movement of her large yet graceful hands as they adjusted the angle of her hat. Julian rattled off some more names associated with this illustrious bunch of writers and painters and thinkers but when he reached Morgan Forster, May stopped him. A Passage to India had been one of her mother’s favourite books. And in this roundabout way the conversation arrived at May’s recent tragedy.

Although they were only separated by a year in age, there could have been no two young women more different than Charlotte Bellowes and May Thomas. Julian had been watching May as she emerged from those recent grief-sodden days and he had been amazed by the resilience with which she had handled her mother’s terrible accident. He tried to imagine what he would feel if his own mother died and decided not to pursue the thought.

Shortly after Sam had arrived with the telegram at Cuckmere Park, the Blunts had insisted that May should take some time off in London with her brother and cousins but she had returned to Cuckmere the following Sunday at teatime, ready for the new week, assuring Sir Philip that she would prefer to be working than weeping. Joan had suggested that rather than stay behind alone in the house, May might like to come with them to evensong in the village church. Ever conscious of the healing power of a funeral, balm that she herself had once been denied, Joan thought that a service with some prayers might be of some help to May. For several generations, the Cuckmere custom had been for everyone at the house on Sunday evening—family, guests and staff—to go together to church. Mr. Hooch had given May’s arm a squeeze. This young woman who no longer looked away when he spoke as so many others did, reminded him of someone he had once loved and lost.

“Don’t mind me not coming with you tonight,” he said. “I used to believe in all that church and God rigmarole, although after this,” he gestured towards his face, “I can’t often think of much to be thankful for. But tonight, before I read Puck of Pooks Hill to Florence, as I have promised her I will, I am going to break a twenty-year rule and have a quiet word with Him up there about keeping an eye on you down here,” he said, tipping his battered chin skywards.

At what the poetically minded locals called “the violet hour,” the time of day when a rich purplish light would enfold the curves of the Downs, the geese set out on their evening journey, their abrasive cawing at odds with the grace of their synchronised wings. Sunday evening walkers, out with their dogs on the banks of the river, looked upwards as the birds flew towards the sea, horizontal ballet dancers, in perfect formation. Beneath the flight path the Cuckmere Sunday household walked the short distance to church in procession. Florence was at the back, kicking at the white flints that littered the mossy ground, and holding tightly onto May’s hand. Inside the tiny church, not much more than a chapel, the Blunt family took their usual places in the front pew, bunching themselves up in order to make room for Evangeline. Mrs. Cage and Cooky turned into the pew behind the family, with Florence and May beside them. The congregation settled itself, disengaging the little needlepoint kneelers from the hooks, opening the hymn books at the right page, nodding across to the other side of the church to friends. The gentle sway of Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” coming from the organ at the back of the church stilled the fidgeting. A late arrival, his honey-coloured hair hidden beneath a cap, hurried up the aisle. Seeing there was no room in the front, he squeezed in beside May. The service was short. The familiar words and tunes of “Lead Kindly Light,” and “O God our Help in Ages Past” sparked childhood memories in which May dared not indulge. Everyone had been so kind. Curiously enough, Miss Nettlefold had been the only person not to offer May more than a brief formal expression of “her condolences.” Whenever May found herself alone with Miss Nettlefold, the subject of Mrs. Thomas’s death was never mentioned. May knew that Miss Nettlefold’s mother had also died quite recently and assumed that the reluctance to talk of the accident in Barbados stemmed from her own as yet unsettled grief.

During the prayers, May was distracted first by Florence, who was dealing with her boredom by chewing the pew in front of her, and next by Julian’s insistent nudge at her elbow. Evangeline was struggling to raise herself from the tapestry hassock, onto which her fleshy knees had sunk some ten minutes earlier. Julian, caught between horror and mirth, leant over to offer his help. But Evangeline made one more breathy effort and a huge bottom loomed up only a foot from Julian and May’s noses before lowering itself onto the wooden bench. The pressure on May’s elbow increased and for the first time in many days she felt like laughing.

However, as Julian sat in the passenger seat on the way down south from Wigan, he was nervous about opening up the pain of memory again. At first May sounded willing, even eager to talk. The everincreasing remoteness of her mother’s physical presence was one of the worst things about it all. As the gap between the present and the accident grew, May found herself working harder to remember what it was like doing ordinary things with her mother: walking, eating, talking, laughing. She was reminded how as a child she had longed to chase the setting sun, willing it not to disappear over the horizon.

“Please don’t let it vanish forever,” she would beg her mother as the scarlet ball started to drop towards the smudgy line that distinguished sea from sky.

“Don’t be so worried,” her mother would say. “It will come back tomorrow before you are even awake.”

Appalled by the thought of infinite absence, May was abruptly resistant when Julian asked her about her father.

“I would rather not speak of him,” she looked up, her eyes angry.

“Of course, of course,” Julian replied, trying to calm her by resting his hand softly on hers. “Would you believe me if I told you how much I envy you right now?” he asked. “Do you know Tennyson’s memorial poem to his friend Hallam? Sometimes the most hackneyed lines in poetry make the most sense. Everyone understands, I think, that it is better to have loved and lost than never to have had that experience. But there is another line that affects me more. Can I tell it to you?”

May nodded. Julian’s hand remained resting on hers.

“Well, it’s also from In Memoriam and is just this: ‘An infant crying for the light.’ My father died when I was three and although my mother is still alive she does not know how to love me. And so I have never known the light of parental love such as you have experienced. And,” he said simply “that is why I envy you.”

After May had dropped Julian off at Birmingham station to catch the train to Oxford he wondered if he had said too much. One of the two subjects that had not been discussed between them was one on which they were both sworn to secrecy. But if a disturbing love affair involving the head of state was taboo, then another matter, equally unspoken of, was forming between them. Even though he had removed his hand from hers soon after mentioning Tennyson and the nature of parental love, he had immediately wanted to put it back.


At the end of April Julian returned to Magdalen College for his final examination term and shortly afterwards, when the purple wisteria was trailing down the railings of Hamilton Terrace, May drove Sir Philip up to Oxford. After meeting with the master of Balliol, who was an old friend from undergraduate days and now also the vice-chancellor of the university, Sir Philip was staying on at his old college for the night. May was about to make the long drive home but after a moment’s thought she changed her mind. Somewhere within these ancient quadrangles and libraries, she knew she might find Julian.

She began her search at the café in the covered market where, according to Julian, they served the best homemade ginger beer known to man. For forty years George’s had sat undisturbed among the hallways of the market, the smell of exotic coffee lingering in the air above the fruit stalls, the fish market and the first-class butcher, an entire village of enclosed shops in the heart of the city. May took a corner table near the door, which was pinned all over with notices advertising bicycle repairs, Mandarin lessons, spare rooms to let and all manner of activities including postings for amateur theatricals, film clubs, wine society tastings, a talk at Merton College by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice to the university literary society and the latest get-together of the Oxford hamster club.

One flyer in particular caught her eye. There was to be an open-to-all meeting of Oswald Mosley’s New Party at three that very afternoon at the Carfax Meeting Rooms, just at the junction of the city’s crossroads.

“Mosley here in Oxford in person!” the poster announced.

May looked at her watch. The meeting was to begin in half an hour. Asking directions from the waitress she made her way through the narrow streets, dodging cyclists in gowns and women with shopping until ten minutes later she reached the hall. Although the large room was almost full she found an empty metal-framed chair three rows from the front and sat down. Men were standing around the perimeter of the hall like sentinels, their arms folded across tightly fitting fencing shirts, their trousers tucked into the top of long boots and held up by belts with shiny buckles imprinted with an encircled jagged line. Despite the uniform, the men did not look particularly menacing and May could not help thinking that there was something rather attractive about their severe dress code. The woman beside May caught her admiring look.

“You wouldn’t think much of them if you was married to a Cowley man,” she said with a sniff of disapproval. “Can’t get work for love or money, my Clive can’t. We want to know what Mosley plans to do about the unemployment at the Morris works. It’s all right for some, isn’t it?”

May started at her accusing look, as the woman took in the smart chauffeur’s uniform, relieved that she had parked the Rolls far out of sight of the hall. On the other side of the aisle just ahead of her, she spotted a familiar figure in a tweed jacket with his back to her, deep in conversation with a youngish bespectacled man with wild-looking hair. But there was no time to go up to the pair as all at once a loud burst of marching music announced the arrival of the speaker. May recognised the tall figure of Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, as he strode up the central aisle of the hall accompanied by two of his black-suited consorts. May shuddered inwardly, feeling yet again a disturbing physical excitement in this man’s presence.

As Mosley reached the stage and saluted his audience, his elbow bent and his palm facing outwards as if directing the traffic, May took in every detail of the man. His hair was slicked back, not a strand out of place beneath its smooth, oiled pomade, just as it had been when he had passed by so close to her in the hall at Cuckmere several weeks before. Now that she had time to scrutinise him more closely, she saw that his small moustache looked as if it had been pencilled on and given the same greased-down treatment as his hair. His taut, athletic build reinforced his authority. May was near enough to see that instead of the thick, side-fastening cotton shirt favoured by his escorts, Mosley was wearing a far sleeker version made from silk. His eyes shone black. The audience was mesmerised, silenced and stilled by this dynamite combination of haughtiness and sexuality. A woman behind May whispered to her companion, “My word, Glenda, what a virile animal!”

May knew exactly what she meant. She wondered what would happen if one was quite alone in a room with Oswald Mosley. She might as well ask Mrs. Cage, who would have discovered the answer when she took up the breakfast tray to the flowered spare room at Cuckmere and had returned so flustered.

Lifting his arms above him for silence and taking a deep breath, Oswald Mosley’s chest expanded like a swimmer about to take an Olympic dive. As he began to speak, several dozen people raised their newspapers and, pretending to read, produced a synchronised rustling that filled the room. The sentinels shifted on their feet. From behind a screen of Daily Workers came a barrage of offensive remarks as Mosley continued speaking to a wall of newsprint. After little more than half a minute of sustained interruption, Mosley paused in his attack on the Jewish financiers of the Labour Party, warning that any disturbance in the hall would be firmly dealt with. The heckling continued from behind the anonymous protection of the newspapers.

“Red Front” came a cry from the back of the room, followed by a burst of enthusiastic applause. Two or three Blackshirts moved into the central aisle.

“If anyone repeats those words they will be evicted from the room,” Mosley thundered, adding the single word “forthwith” to emphasise there would be no delay to his threat. His exaggerated vowels rang around the room.

“Stand fast!” he shouted.

The bespectacled man, his hair by now sticking up in disarray, pushed his way into the centre of the hall to find himself trapped in a thicket of raised chairs and fists.

“Red Front!” came the cry once again from the back.

A steel chain held by one of the Blackshirts was brought down in one stroke onto the spectacled man’s face, while at the same time May saw a hefty knee rammed between his thighs. The spectacles tumbled to the ground. The noise in the room was fantastic. Another of Mosley’s men had removed his belt, revealing the sharp, upright spikes that had up until then lain dormant behind the shiny buckle. Whirling the belt round his head the Blackshirt brought it down with a whack on the buttocks of one of the Cowley men. And just as the confrontation began to escalate into something truly frightening, half a dozen policemen broke into the room.

“All women onto the platform at once!” May heard someone shout, but everyone, women included, was leaving the hall as quickly as possible by the main exit. May spotted Mosley vanishing through a side door escorted by two of his men, but there was no sign of the recently de-spectacled victim, nor of the familiar tweed jacket.

May was about to make her way back to the car when she turned round one more time to look at the empty platform. Something was moving beneath the piano, within three feet of where Mosley’s black boots had been defiantly planted only minutes earlier. As she watched Julian emerge slowly from his hiding place, his legs stiff from the awkward position into which they had been folded for the past half hour, his usually firm-cheeked face buckled.

“Frank, have you seen Frank? F*cking Nazis! What have they done to Frank?” he shouted as he stumbled across the hall towards her. “It was me that started the sign to attack!” Julian spluttered. “It was me that cried ‘Red Front.’ If Frank’s hurt it is all my fault.”

Tentatively, May put her arms around Julian as he buried his face in her shoulder. When Julian eventually pulled out of the embrace he looked up at May. His face was streaming with tears.