Letters from London (12 page)

Skeptics, of course, suggested that there was one there already:
Mrs. Thatcher’s ghost would haunt No. 10, and her disembodied voice speak from the backseat of John Major’s car. Certainly, and inevitably, in the frenzied second half of November 1990, his accession was eclipsed by her departure. How do politicians leave office? Broken in spirit? Sadder but wiser? Quietly proud? Anxious about the Verdict of History? Mrs. Thatcher, who after all had been dismissed from the highest public office by her own closest supporters and in full public view, left not just bullishly but in a mood of rampant self-congratulation. She took History by the lapels and slapped it around the face in case it was planning to give her less than her due. Speaking to Tory Party Central Office workers, she commented on how other European leaders were “quite grief-stricken” at her departure (which must be one of the drollest misconceptions of the last decade). Standing outside No. 10 Downing Street while the moving van headed for the South London suburb of Dulwich, she bade the public temporary farewell, reverting once more to the royal “we”—an increasing tendency in her latter years. “We are very happy,” she said, “that we leave the United Kingdom in a very, very much better state than when we came here.” It was breathtaking, quasi-regal, and also reminiscent of those discreet plaques in French water closets which beg you to leave the place on departure as clean as you would hope to find it on arrival.

She left, and all the main players could reflect that they had achieved something. Mr. Howe had gained the removal of Mrs. Thatcher; Mrs. Thatcher the succession she favored; Mr. Major the keys to No. 10; Mr. Heseltine a seat in the Cabinet and his own political rehabilitation. And Mr. Hurd? Even Mr. Hurd could joke that at least he’d got a good plot for a novel out of the previous fortnight’s events. Other commentators reckoned the affair more than just the stuff of fiction. The word
tragedy
was frequently invoked, especially with reference to
Julius Caesar
, while the esteemed journalist Peter Jenkins, of
The Independent
, claimed to have observed a “tragic drama” rooted in Mrs. Thatcher’s “Nietzschean will.” But it’s hardly likely that future tragedians scouring the twentieth century for material will fall delightedly upon the events of November 1990. Of course, they
were richly exciting, and it is arguable that Mrs. Thatcher’s inflexible sense of purpose and rightness, so much her strength when she was climbing to power and clamping herself there, became the weakness that helped her lose that power. But there was no great fall, as was demonstrated by the former Prime Ministers appearance in the Commons the very afternoon of her resignation. Here was no riven character; she was infrangible, buoyant, even jolly. And it’s hard to talk of tragedy when the estimated price of the victim’s memoirs is several million pounds and her husband has been rewarded with the hereditary title of baronet. So, at most, we had witnessed an absorbing drama, in which a democratically elected leader of the Conservative Party was democratically rejected by the same party, which decided that although she had won three general elections, her chances of winning a fourth were markedly slimmer than those of someone else.

And should we even be quite so certain of the pattern of events which apparently led so inescapably to this conclusion? When Mr. Heseltine walked out of the Cabinet in 1986, was it a decision of high principle or merely a resignation waiting to happen? When the Biting Doormat nipped the ankles of the Lady of the House, was it on a new matter of major importance, some unprecedented aspect of Thatcherian behavior, or just a weary sense that even downtrodden bristles can take only so much? And when the Conservative Party finally gave the Prime Minister too exiguous a majority for her own survival, were they censuring her style of leadership (which had brought them so much), or declaring that her stance on Europe was henceforth unacceptable, or worrying about the poll tax? It suits us to identify specific reasons, to play the game of if-only-she-hadn’t-done-this, but perhaps what occurred was less close to Shakespeare and Nietzsche than it was to a marriage that runs out of steam and hits the divorce court. There the couple seek the reasons that explain their legal requests, and these reasons have to be couched in a way that the court understands: look how he knocked me about, see how she neglected the kids. But sometimes there are no reasons except that one partner doesn’t want to live with the other anymore and doesn’t see why he or she should. “Europe” was partly the cause of Mr. Heseltine’s resignation,
and of Sir Geoffrey Howe’s resignation, and of Mrs. Thatcher’s unacceptability. But one of the most perceptive, if least dramatic, views of her departure was offered by the Honorable William Waldegrave, whom Mrs. Thatcher had recently appointed Minister of Health. Did she have to go because of Europe? He replied, “Apart from two small groups, one of federalists, and one of anti-Europeans, it’s very difficult to get the Conservative Party to argue over Europe. It was more a feeling that time passes, and eleven and a half years was enough.” The divorce had its acrimonious moments, but the Conservative Party retains some gentlemanly instincts, and the couple will go on seeing quite a lot of each other despite the decree absolute. In fact, you could say they’re getting on rather better now that they’ve divorced than they did in the last few years of their marriage.

January 1991

4
Year of the Maze

I
was once waiting for a plane at Heathrow, sitting in one of those bland pieces of space designed to turn the anxious into docile, processible units. Opposite me, an equally characterless passenger funnel began to disgorge arrivals from a Swissair flight. Some businessmen, a few tanned sporters of upmarket leisure wear, and then about two dozen inhabitants of the nineteenth century: a squire in noisy tweeds, a bishop in full fig, two lushly draped satiny ladies, a masher with velvet jacket and waxed mustaches, another gentleman of the cloth in black stockings. They moved with the assurance of the previous century, their carry-on luggage of finest Victorian leather. Silver-topped cane or three-decker novel to hand, they ignored both the twentieth-century surroundings and the twentieth-century disbelieving gaze. It felt like a moment of Carrollian hallucination. But reality’s explanation proved both simpler and more interesting: here were members of the Sherlock Holmes Society of London returning from an outing to the Reichenbach Falls.

Nobody pointed, nobody mocked, no bustle was goosed. The British rather enjoy their reputation as a people poised between formality
and eccentricity, and this applies not just to players but also to airport spectators: the fact that a whole bunch of these Victorian oddities existed confirmed their legitimacy. When playing the fool, there is safety in numbers. During Evelyn Waugh’s time as an Oxford undergraduate in the twenties, there was a society called the Hysteron-Proteron Club. Its members, he recalled in
A Little Learning
, “put themselves to great discomfort by living a day in reverse, getting up in evening dress, drinking whisky, smoking cigars and playing cards, then at ten o’clock dining backwards starting with savouries and ending with soup.” Today’s less decadent undergraduates might instead join the Oxford Stunt Factory, whose members jump off suspension bridges while attached to large rubber bands, or roar down the Cresta Run in washing-up bowls while smoking a hookah.

A nation’s larger character shows in its foreign policy, its formal architecture, its great writers. Curlicues of temperament are apparent farther away from the center. One typical indicator is garden design. In France, the continuing ferocity of bourgeois values can be observed even in up-country villages; nature there is mercilessly subdued, gravel laundered, bulbs regimented, hedges barbered, flowers submitted to rigid class distinction. The British tradition is more easygoing, treating nature more as chum than as victim; individuality and self-indulgence are allowed their say. At the suburban level, this might translate into a monkey puzzle tree in the front garden, a lean-to greenhouse at the back where an attempt is being made to grow the world’s largest gooseberry, plus an ornamental pond in which plaster gnomes silently fish. At the grander level, this shows itself in the long tradition of the architectural folly: not just the sham ruin and shell grotto but the Gothic boathouse and castellated forge, the Moorish pagoda and Egyptian aviary, or the forty-foot-high stone pineapple at Dunmore Castle, in Stirlingshire. Another emanation of this spirit of planned fantasy is the garden maze, that curious form which lies at the conjunction of two English passions: the love of horticulture and the love of crossword puzzles. Rather to the surprise of even the relatively few people who have noticed, 1991 has been officially designated the Year of the Maze. Why 1991? Because this year the British, apart from melodiously huzzahing the bicentenary of Mozart’s death
like the rest of the world, have been able to celebrate pianissimo the tercentenary of the planting of the Hampton Court Maze.

On the ninth of June, 1662, the diarist and gardening expert John Evelyn visited Hampton Court, finding it “as noble and uniform a pile, and as capacious as any Gothic architecture can have made it.” He praised the “incomparable furniture;” the Mantegnas; the “gallery of horns” (hunting trophies); the Queen’s bed, which had cost eight thousand pounds; and the chapel roof, “excellently fretted and gilt.” When he went outside, Evelyn, the translator of
The French Gardener
and soon-to-be author of the influential arboricultural treatise
Sylva
, was at first equally impressed: by the park, “now planted with sweet rows of lime trees,” and by “the canal for water now nearly perfected.” The “cradle-work of horn beam in the garden is, for the perplexed twining of the trees, very observable”—an adjective that, though certainly a term of praise, sounds rather cautious, like the word
collectible
as used by antique dealers to recommend items they consider vulgar but in which the moneyed amateur ignorantly delights. Evelyn concludes his description with the only moment of courtly doubt to ease from his pen. “All these gardens,” he notes, “might be exceedingly improved, as being too narrow for such a palace.”

Within Evelyn’s lifetime, the gardens were indeed exceedingly improved, by George London and Henry Wise. Their plantings included the hedge maze, the most venerable of its kind extant in Britain and the world’s most famous horticultural puzzle. Whether in fact we are right to celebrate its tercentenary this year is somewhat open to doubt: the gardens were laid out between 1689 and 1702, no precise planting record survives, and the birth year most commonly agreed on hitherto has been 1690. But we shouldn’t be overfastidious when commerce and the tourist trade beckon. As Adrian Fisher, the country’s leading maze designer, who for the last decade has been pushing for
any
year to be the Year of the Maze, explains, “an odd-dated year is best, because it avoids the Olympics, the World Cup, and things like that.” Almost as usefully, 1991 makes a numerical palindrome, the sort of thing that appeals to mazophiles.

The Hampton Court Maze has had much to put up with in its first three hundred years. Early on, it had to fight off the attentions of
Capability Brown, who, as Royal Gardener, lived close by from 1764 to 1783 and had to be specifically instructed by the King not to interfere with it. In the following century, the maze had to endure sanctification in Jerome K. Jerome’s jocose late Victorian banjo-’n’-boaters classic,
Three Men in a Boat.
And in modern times it has been required to survive the greedy descent of coach parties thronging to one of the most famous sites in England. The pathway has become asphalt, the plantings (originally hornbeam but now multispecied, with yew predominating) have to be protected in places by assegai railings, traffic throbs constantly on the road past the nearby Lion Gate, and the entrance fee has gone up from twopence in Jerome’s time to £1.25. Despite all this, the maze retains a certain mystery, and the height of the hedges (about seven feet) even gives it a gentle menace. It is also a gratifyingly complicated maze. Harris, in
Three Men in a Boat
, confidently proclaims that all you have to do is keep taking the first turning to the right, and is punished by getting pompously lost. The correct, quick way to get to the center is to turn left on entering the maze, then right, right again, left, left, left, and left. The alternative, slow way is to use the “hand on wall” technique, which unfailingly—if ploddingly—cracks labyrinths of this type. Place your right (or left) hand on the right (or left) wall of green, and doggedly keep it there, in and out of dead ends, and you will finally get to the middle. There you will find two white horse chestnuts whose trunks bear a furious intaglio of victorious names. Cyril, Mad, Tito, Yin, Mig, and Iky, among others, have all conquered the complexities of this trapezoid puzzle, whose design, incidentally, was used for many of the earliest behaviorist experiments on rats. Then there is the problem of getting out. All you need to do is … but that would be telling. And don’t expect any help from the man at the ticket kiosk, either. What does he do when people shout for help? “We don’t take any notice.” These are cruel times, still stained by the ideal of Thatcherite self-help. “In the old days there used to be someone on the viewing platform to guide people out at the end of the day. Now we just lock up and go away. They’ll find the turnstile sooner or later.”