'"The prisoner of Zenda"? Seems familiar...'
'Of course it's familiar. It's a book.'
'Yes, yes, I know it's a book.'
'You wouldn't know it, I guess. It's not from your time. But when I was a girl... it was the first touch of romance we knew. There weren't pop singers nor The Beatles. Only romantic novels. We weren't allowed to read them in the morning. Only in the afternoon.'
'What extraordinary rules,' said Sir Stafford. 'Why was it wrong to read novels in the morning?'
'Well, in the morning, you know, the girls were supposed to do something useful. You know, arranging the flowers or polishing the silver portrait frames. All these things that young girls were supposed to do. Studying a bit with the governess... all these things. In the afternoon we wee allowed to read stories and novels, and "The prisoner of Zenda" was usually the first that we got hold of.'
'A very pretty story, very respectable, wan't it? I seem to remember something about it. Perhaps I did read it. All very pure, I suppose. Not too sexy?'
'Certainly not. We didn't have sexy books. We had romance. The Prisoner of Zenda was very romantic. One fell in love, usually, with the hero, Rudolf Rassendyll.'
'I seem to remember that name too. Bit florid, isn't it?'
'Well, I still think it was rather a romantic name. Twelve years old, I must have been. It made me think of it, you know, your going up and looking at that portrait. Princess Flavia,' she added.
Stafford Nye was smiling at her.
'You look young and pink and very sentimental,' he said.
'Well, that's just what I'm feeling. Girls can't feel like that nowadays. They're swooning with love, or they're fainting when somebody plays the guitar or sings in a very loud voice, but they're not sentimental. But I wasn't in love with Rudolf Rassendyll. I was in love with the other one - his double.'
'Did he have a double?'
'Oh yes, a king. The King of Ruritania.'
'Ah, of course, now I know. That's where the word Ruritania comes from: one is always throwing it about. Yes, I think I did read it, you know. The King of Ruritania, and Rudolf Rassendyll was stand-in for the King and fell in love with Princess Flavia to whom the King was officially betrothed.'
Lady Matilda gave some more deep sighs.
'Yes. Rudolf Rassendyll had inherited his red hair from an ancestress, and somewhere in the book he bows to the portrait and says something about the - I can't remember the name now - the Countess Amelia or something like that from whom he inherited his looks and all the rest of it. So I looked at you and thought of you as Rudolf Rassendyll and you went out and looked at a picture of someone who ought have been an ancestress of yours and saw whether she reminded you of someone. So you're mixed up in a romance of some kind, are you?'
'What on earth makes you say that?'
'Well, there aren't so many patterns in life, you know. One recognizes patterns as they come up. It's like a book on knitting. About sixty-five different fancy stitches. Well, you know a particular stitch when you see it. Your stitch, at the moment, I should say, is the romantic adventure.' She sighed. 'But you won't tell me about it, I suppose.'
'There's nothing to tell,' said Sir Stafford.
'You always were quite an accomplished liar. Well, never mind. You bring her to see me some time. That's all I'd like, before the doctors succeed in killing me with yet another type of antibiotic that they've just discovered. The different coloured pills I've had to take by this time! You wouldn't believe it.'
'I don't know why you say "she" and "her" -'
'Don't you? Oh, well, I know a she when I come across a she. There's a she somewhere dodging about in your life. What beats me is how you found her. In Malaya, at the conference table? Ambassador's daughter or minister's daughter? Good-looking secretary from the Embassy pool? No, none of it seems to fit. Ship coming home? No, you don't use ships nowadays. Plane, perhaps.'
'You are getting slightly nearer,' Sir Stafford Nye could not help saying.
'Ah!' She pounced. 'Air hostess?'
He shook his head.
'Ah well. Keep your secret. I shall find out, mind you. I've always had a good nose for things going on where you're concerned. Things generally as well. Of course I'm out of everything nowadays, but I meet my old cronies from time to time and it's quite easy, you know, to get a hint or two from them. People are worried. Everywhere - they're worried.'
'You mean there's a general kind of discontent - upset?'
'No, I didn't mean that at all. I mean the high-ups are worried. Our awful governments are worried. The dear old sleepy Foreign Office is worried. There are things going on, things that shouldn't be. Unrest.'
'Student unrest?'
'Oh, student unrest is just one flower on the tree. It's blossoming everywhere and in every country, or so it seems. I've got a nice girl who comes, you know, and reads the papers to me in the mornings. I can't read them properly myself. She's got a nice voice. Takes down my letters and she reads things from the papers and she's a good kind girl. She reads the things I want to know, not the things that she thinks are right for me to know. Yes, everyone's worried, as far as I can make out and this, mind you, came more or less from a very old friend of mine.'
'One of your old military cronies?'
'He's a major-general, if that's what you mean, retired a good many years ago but still in the know. Youth is what you might call the spearhead of it all. But that's not really what's so worrying. They - whoever they are - work through youth. Youth in every country. Youth urged on. Youth chanting slogans, slogans that sound exciting, though they don't always know what they mean. So easy to start a revolution. That's natural to youth. All youth has always rebelled. You rebel, you pull down, you want the world to be different from what it is. But you're blind, too. There are bandages over the eyes of youth. They can't see where things are taking them. What's going to come next? What's in front of them? And who it is behind them, urging them on? That's what's frightening about it. You know, someone holding out the carrot to get the donkey to come along and at the same time there is someone behind the donkey urging it on with a stick.'
'You've got some extraordinary fancies.'
'They're not only fancies, my dear boy. That's what people said about Hitler. Hitler and the Hitler Youth. But it was a long careful preparation. It was a war that was worked out in detail. It was a fifth column being planted in different countries all ready for the supermen. The supermen were to be the flower of the German nation. That's what they thought and believed in passionately. Somebody else is perhaps believing something like that now. It's a creed that they'll be willing to accept - if it's offered cleverly enough.'
'Who are you talking about? Do you mean the Chinese or the Russians? What do you mean?'
'I don't know. I haven't the faintest idea. But there's something somewhere, and it's running on the same lines. Pattern again, you see. Pattern! The Russians? Bogged down by Communism, I should think they're considered old-fashioned. The Chinese? I think they've lost their way. Too much Chairman Mao, perhaps. I don't know who these people are who are doing the planning. As I said before, it's why and where and when and who.'
'Very interesting.'
'It's so frightening, this same idea that always recurs. History repeating itself. The young hero, the golden superman that all must follow.' She paused, then said, 'Same idea, you know. The young Siegfried.'
Chapter 7
ADVICE FROM GREAT-AUNT MATILDA
Great-Aunt Matilda looked at him. She had a very sharp and shrewd eye. Stafford Nye had noticed that before. He noticed it particularly at this moment.
'So you've heard that term before,' she said. 'I see.'
'What does it mean?'
'You don't know?' She raised her eyebrows.
'Cross my heart and wish to die,' said Sir Stafford, in nursery language.
'Yes, we always used to say that, didn't we,' said Lady Matilda. 'Do you really mean what you're saying?'
'I don't know anything about it.'
'But you'd heard the term before.'
'Yes. Someone said it to me.'
'Anyone important?'
'It could be. I suppose it could be. What do you mean by "anyone important"?'
'Well, you've been involved in various Government missions lately, haven't you? You've represented this poor, miserable country as best you could, which I shouldn't wonder wasn't rather better than many others could do, sitting round a table and talking. I don't know whether anything's come of all that.'
'Probably not,' said Stafford Nye. 'After all, one isn't optimistic when one goes into these things.'
'One does one's best,' said Lady Matilda correctively.
'A very Christian principle. Nowadays if one does one's worst one often seems to get on a good deal better. What does all this mean, Aunt Matilda?'
'I don't suppose I know,' said his aunt
'Well, you very often do know things.'
'Not exactly. I just pick up things here and there.'
'Yes?'
'I've got a few old friends left, you know. Friends who are in the know. Of course most of them are either practically stone deaf or half blind or a little bit gone in the top storey or unable to walk straight. But something still functions. Something, shall we say, up here.' She hit the top of her neatly arranged white head. 'There's a good deal of alarm and despondency about. More than usual. That's one of the things I've picked up.'
'Isn't there always?'
'Yes, yes, but this is a bit more than that. Active instead of passive, as you might say. For a long time, as I have noticed from the outside, and you, no doubt, from the inside, we have felt that things are in a mess. A rather bad mess. But now we've got to a point where we feel that perhaps something might have been done about the mess. There's an element of danger in it. Something is going on - something is brewing. Not just in one country. In quite a lot of countries. They've recruited a service of their own and the danger about that is that it's a service of young people. And the kind of people who will go anywhere, do anything, unfortunately believe anything, and so long as they are promised a certain amount of pulling down, wrecking, throwing spanners in the works, then they think the cause must be a good one and that the world will be a different place. They're not creative, that's the trouble - only destructive. The creative young write poems, write books, probably compose music, paint pictures just as they always have done. They'll be all right - But once people learn to love destruction for its own sake, evil leadership gets its chance.'
'You say "they" or "them". Who do you mean?'
'Wish I knew,' said Lady Matilda. 'Yes, I wish I knew. Very much indeed. If I hear anything useful, I'll tell you. Then you can do something about it.'
'Unfortunately, I haven't got anyone to tell, I mean to pass it on to.'
'Yes, don't pass it on to - just anyone. You can't trust people. Don't pass it on to any one of those idiots in the Government, or connected with government or hoping to be participating in government after this lot runs out. Politicians don't have time to look at the world they're living in. They see the country they're living in and they see it as one vast electoral platform. That's quite enough to put on their plates for the time being. They do things which they honestly believe will make things better and then they're surprised when they don't make things better because they're not the things that people want to have. And one can't help coming to the conclusion that politicians have a feeling that they have a kind of divine right to tell lies in a good cause. It's not really so very long ago since Mr Baldwin made his famous remark - "If I had spoken the truth, I should have lost the election." Prime Ministers still feel like that. Now and again we have a great man, thank God. But it's rare.'
'Well, what do you suggest ought to be done?'
'Are you asking my advice? Mine? Do you know how old I am?'
'Getting on for ninety,' suggested her nephew.
'Not quite as old as that,' said Lady Matilda, slightly affronted. 'Do I look it, my dear boy?'
'No, darling. You look a nice, comfortable sixty-six.'
'That's better,' said Lady Matilda. 'Quite untrue. But better. If I get a tip of any kind from one of my dear old admirals or an old general or even possibly an air marshal - they do hear things, you know - they've got cronies still and the old boys get together and talk. And so it gets around. There's always been the grapevine and there still is a grapevine, no matter how elderly the people are. The young Siegfried. We want a clue to just what that means - I don't know if he's a person or a password or the name of a Club or a new Messiah or a Pop singer. But that term covers something. There's the musical motif too. I've rather forgotten my Wagnerian days.' Her aged voice croaked out a partially recognizable melody. 'Siegfried's horn call, isn't that it? Get a recorder, why don't you? Do I mean a recorder. I don't mean a record that you put on a gramophone - I mean the things that schoolchildren play. They have classes for them. Went to a talk the other day. Our vicar got it up. Quite interesting. You know, tracing the history of the recorder and the kind of recorders there were from the Elizabethan age onwards. Some big, some small, all different notes and sounds. Very interesting. Interesting hearing in two senses. The recorders themselves. Some of them give out lovely noises. And the history. Yes. Well, what was I saying?'
