Authors: William Nicholson
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Pamela. ‘It must be the sherry.’
Harriet took herself up to her bedroom. Mary came downstairs. She’d read Emily her bedtime story, and now Emily was ready for her goodnight kiss. Pamela told her that Hugo was down in the cellar, and Harriet was up in her room with a headache.
‘Oh, poor Harriet,’ said Mary. ‘Do you think there’s anything I can do for her?’
‘You could chuck a bucket of cold water over her,’ Pamela said.
Mary burst into a guilty laugh.
‘Oh, don’t!’
‘I bet you it’d work faster than aspirins.’
‘I’ll go and see if there’s anything I can bring her.’
While Mary was upstairs, Hugo emerged from the cellar, brushing dust off his hands.
‘How’s the sherry?’ he said. ‘Has it done the trick?’
‘I think so,’ said Pamela.
‘Where’s Harriet?’
‘Headache.’
He nodded as if he had known before he had asked. He poured himself a glass of sherry.
‘I like it down there,’ he said, nodding at the floor. ‘It’s cool and orderly, and stacked with fine bottles that are steadily getting finer. That’s quite something, isn’t it? A place where the future is guaranteed to be better than the past.’
‘I hope that’s true even above ground,’ said Pamela.
‘Me too,’ said Hugo.
Then his eyes met Pamela’s and they looked at each other and neither of them spoke.
The front doorbell rang. It was Rupert.
‘I’ve come to say goodbye,’ he said. ‘I’m off to Ireland in the morning.’
‘Stay and have a drink,’ said Hugo. ‘Stay for supper.’
Hugo and Pamela both knew it was Mary that Rupert had come to see. These days Pamela spoke openly of her belief that Rupert was in love with Mary. She said it not because she believed it, but because it displeased her. There was too much need on either side. It was all a little too pitiful for her liking.
Rupert declined supper. Hugo went up to Harriet, and Mary came down. Rupert told her that he was going to Mountbatten’s summer home in County Donegal, on the west coast of Ireland. Pamela, hearing this, slipped upstairs to her room.
‘And where would it be in Donegal?’ said Mary.
‘It’s called Mullaghmore. A few miles north of Sligo.’
Mary said nothing to this.
‘I’m told it rains all the time.’
‘So it does,’ she said.
‘Promise me. No running away. I’ll only be gone a week.’
After Rupert had said his goodbyes, and was walking briskly down the street towards the Broadway, Pamela came running after him. She pressed a folded piece of paper into his hand.
‘I made her tell me where she’s from. It’s called Kilnacarry. In Donegal.’
Mountbatten’s summer house in Ireland turned out to be a castle. Set on a low headland jutting out into the sea, its massive granite walls and pointed turrets dominated the landscape for miles around.
‘Some people find it a bit grim,’ said Mountbatten, walking Rupert round its roof terraces, gazing out over the iron-grey Atlantic. ‘I love it. The worse the weather, the happier I am.’
Classiebawn Castle was a neo-Gothic fantasy, built by Lord Palmerston, the pugnacious Victorian statesman. Like most of his grand properties, Mountbatten had inherited it from Edwina.
‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘after you’ve paid 80 per cent death duties, and handed over another 15 per cent to the girls, there’s not much of the inheritance left.’
This was a working holiday, not a family holiday, so Mountbatten’s daughters, sons-in-law and grandsons were not in residence. The great house was gloomy and silent. The party from London was four: Mountbatten, his defence adviser, his secretary and Rupert. The regime was strict. From breakfast to lunch, Mountbatten pored over the minutiae of the service departments, as he refined his proposal for a centralised command structure. Rupert, alone in a separate room, worked on his own paper. They came together for lunch in the long bleak
dining room. Then, in the afternoon, they went mackerel fishing, or shrimping, or walking.
Rupert was undoubtedly surplus to requirements. He knew very little about the controversial defence reorganisation. He wondered why he’d been invited. Then on the second afternoon Mountbatten said to him, ‘Come along, Rupert. I’ll show you our beach.’
It was a grand blowy day. Mullaghmore beach stretched in a long crescent of brown sand almost all the way to Bundoran. Across the choppy water of Donegal Bay they could see St John’s Point and Drumanoo Head.
‘We come here every August,’ said Mountbatten, striding into the wind. ‘But it’s not the same without Edwina. You never married, did you, Rupert?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? If you don’t mind my asking.’
‘I don’t think I’m the marrying kind,’ said Rupert. ‘Bit of a loner.’
‘A loner? I can’t really imagine that. I hate being alone. Even when Edwina and I were fighting, and God knows there was enough of that, I’d rather be with her than on my own.’
Rupert said nothing. He understood that it was a comfort to Mountbatten to have someone to talk to about Edwina.
‘Poor old bugger, banging on about his wife.’
‘Not at all,’ said Rupert. ‘I envy you.’
‘Don’t bother. It’s hell losing her. They told me on the phone, in the middle of the night. It was the governor of Borneo himself. Edwina was in Borneo for the St John Ambulance people. I didn’t know what he was saying at first.’
They walked on over the sand.
‘I still dream the phone’s ringing, and I answer, and this voice is there, telling me she’s dead.’
‘But you wouldn’t want never to have known her.’
‘No. God, no. It’s a funny business, though. I adored her, but I’m not sure she adored me. I never really felt good enough for her.’
‘Maybe we expect too much,’ said Rupert.
‘How do you mean?’
‘This idea of love. We expect the other person to love all of us. But I don’t see how that’s possible.’
‘Oh, it is!’ cried Mountbatten. ‘Edwina could be foul, utterly foul, but I loved her even then. That’s what happens when you truly love someone. You even love their faults. You love all of them.’
‘Do you think you knew all of her?’
‘Oh, yes.’ But then he frowned and corrected himself. ‘Though perhaps not. I didn’t always understand her. Is that what you’re getting at?’
‘I’m not sure that people can ever fully know each other,’ said Rupert. ‘Did Edwina know all of you? In the way you know yourself?’
Mountbatten thought about that.
‘No. Not like that.’
‘But you didn’t try to conceal part of yourself from her?’
‘No. I don’t think so. Not consciously, at any rate.’
‘Then it must be that no one can ever know you as you know yourself. Because each one of us is simply too complicated. It’s like someone saying, “Oh, I know France well, I adore France.” The truth is he knows hardly anything of France at all.’
‘Well, well.’
He came to a stop, and began scraping at the damp sand with the toe of one boot.
‘It’s not a lot of fun thinking the way you do, though, is it? A bit on the gloomy side.’
‘It can be.’
‘So you’ve given up on love, have you?’
‘I’ve learned to be content on my own.’
As he said this Rupert thought of Mary Brennan.
‘But you never know,’ he added. ‘There might be someone out there.’
‘Someone you could love?’
‘Someone I could be with, while still being on my own.’
‘You’re a hard man to please, Rupert,’ he said. ‘You’re determined to suffer.’
His scraping away at the sand was taking the form of a circular ditch. He turned to look at the waves hissing into the shore.
‘The tide’s coming in. We could build a moat. Have you ever built a moat?’
‘No.’
‘It’s really great fun. I’ll show you. But we should get nearer to the water.’
He strode towards the waves, and picked a spot a pace or two from the highest current water-mark. Then throwing himself down on his knees, he began to burrow in the sand with his hands.
‘Come on. We’re building a castle with a moat.’
Rupert squatted down beside him and together they set about heaping sand into a mound, and hollowing out a surrounding channel.
‘How are you getting along on my “Aim for the West”?’
‘Very well,’ said Rupert. ‘Actually, I’m having a bit of a struggle stopping myself from getting carried away with it.’
‘Get carried away. Why not?’
‘You don’t want a treatise on eschatology.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Last things. Death, judgement, heaven, hell.’
‘Do you think we need it?’
‘I think the Cold War’s about more than great power rivalry.
That’s what makes it so scary. I think it’s really a war of religion.’
‘You call Communism a religion?’
‘Actually, I think something a bit more involved than that. I think we in the West, and the Americans in particular, see Communism as a religion. That’s why they’re so afraid of it. America is a righteous nation, a land of believers. They hear the claims of Communism, about how they’ve got history on their side, and they understand that as a claim of faith. I’m not sure the Russians see it that way. But that’s another matter.’
‘So you think the Cold War is a religious war because that’s the way Americans think?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s bad?’
‘Very bad. The worst wars are wars of religion. More atrocities are committed in religious conflicts than in battles for land or resources. Religious wars are about good and evil. You die before you surrender. Killing your enemy is a kind of purification of the world.’
‘God help us!’
‘If he’s there.’
The sandcastle was growing. The moat round it was almost complete.
‘Now,’ said Mountbatten, ‘we dig a channel to the sea. But we leave a wall between the channel and the moat.’
The digging progressed.
‘So you see,’ said Rupert, ‘I’ve rather lost sight of your “Aim for the West”.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ said Mountbatten. ‘What you say gives me hope. I find myself thinking of our British way of doing things. We don’t go in for ideology. We don’t go in much for revolutions. We’re reformers. We make the world a better place one step at a time. That way of thinking doesn’t hold with religious wars.’
‘Not at all. But it’s not exactly a rallying cry, is it? Make the world a better place one step at a time.’
Mountbatten laughed. He stood up.
‘Now, you see, the channel’s almost there. Shall we make it longer, or wait for the tide?’
Rupert looked at what they’d built. The channel in the sand ran from the water’s edge up the beach to the castle with its surrounding moat. As the tide came in it would find the channel and run down it to the castle.
‘Let’s make it longer,’ he said.
‘That’s what my grandsons always answer. It’s the lust for destruction.’
He knelt down once more and resumed scooping.
‘So have you come up with an answer yet?’ said Mountbatten. ‘I’m getting there,’ said Rupert. ‘I see it in two stages. The first stage is all about managing the intentions of the other side. The second stage is about managing our own intentions. And whatever we do there has to take account of America’s sense of manifest destiny. Somehow we have to take that drive to destroy the evil enemy, and redirect it into a mission to save the world.’
‘A mission to save the world. Not bad.’
‘If we can get all their generals and their missile launchers and their bomber crews to be prouder of not starting a war than of starting one, then maybe we can make it to the end of this century.’
Mountbatten was on his feet again.
‘The next wave will find it,’ he said.
They stood side by side in the wind coming off the Atlantic, and waited for the next big wave. It came at last, seething and boiling, sucking in on itself and breaking, then rushing in a sheet of spreading foam over the sand. The water entered the channel and swept down to the wall of sand that defended the moat.
‘The third wave will break through,’ said Mountbatten.
‘Is that a prophecy?’
‘No, that’s hard intelligence. I’ve done this before.’
The second wave rolled in. The sand wall began to crumble.
‘I like what you say, Rupert,’ said Mountbatten.
‘All the arguments about weapons deployment,’ said Rupert, ‘they’re all irrelevant. The danger lies in the ideas behind the weapons.’
The third wave rushed in. The sand wall fell. The moat filled with seawater.
‘Now,’ said Mountbatten, ‘if you were a seven-year-old boy you would jump on the castle and destroy it.’
‘Plenty of seven-year-old boys in the world,’ Rupert said.
Neither of them jumped on the sandcastle. They stood and watched as the swirling seawater caused it to crumble slowly away.
On the fourth day of his week at Classiebawn, Rupert borrowed one of the estate cars to drive to Kilnacarry. The car was pulled up in the narrow yard bounded by the castle walls, in front of the main entrance. Mountbatten, detail-obsessed as ever, came out to instruct Rupert.
‘There’s only one way to turn here. Hard right forward, then back, pulling hard with your left. Then forward again. Then back.’
Rupert attempted this manoeuvre, but not to Mountbatten’s satisfaction.
‘No, no! Not hard enough around!’
He leaned in the car window and seized the wheel himself. In this way the car was turned at last.
Rupert drove off, through Donegal and round the coast road to Killybegs, filled with amusement at how Mountbatten had controlled the car even when he wasn’t in the driving seat. How frustrating, if you have the habit of leadership, to find you have only limited power after all, and the world refuses to do your bidding. But what self-confidence! As so often with Mountbatten, Rupert marvelled that the man who had been proved wrong by life so many times continued to overflow with the certainty that he was right. It was a kind of animal energy,
the same drive that propelled his vanity. And yet alongside it lay the deep diffidence of a man who could say, ‘I’ve never been much good with women.’
From Killybegs he followed the signs across the wild peninsula to Ardara, and so down a bumpy white road to Kilnacarry.