Page 25

They left on the Thursday morning after answering the roll call at morning assembly. They crossed the playing fields and slipped away through a gate at the back of the school grounds into a copse, where they used the shelter of the trees to change out of their uniforms into the casual clothes that they had brought with them in their shoulder bags. Then they followed a track and cut back down to the bus stop on the main road, where they waited nervously, thinking that it would not be too long before one of the passing cars would screech to a halt and disgorge a schoolmaster or monk ready to drag them back to Father Philip.

Secretly, Theo would not have been unhappy with such an outcome, although he kept his cold feet to himself. He hadn’t tried to get out of going because he knew that changing his mind would mean the loss not just of Esmond’s respect but also of his own, which he valued more than his safety or his future. However, he couldn’t be held responsible if fate now intervened and put a stop to their adventure before it had even begun. An attempted truancy would merit punishment but certainly not expulsion, whereas premeditated participation in a London riot could well lead to that end.

Looking back across the road to the tower of the abbey rising above the trees, he felt a stab of regret for what he was leaving behind, perhaps for the last time: his comfortable study and his friends. They were shallow perhaps and nothing like Esmond, but they liked him and he had shared his life with them for nearly two years. In that time he had become part of a tradition, captured in the photograph of the first fifteen taken at the end of the rugby season, now hanging on the wall of the main hall at the end of lines of similar framed pictures stretching back to the nineteenth century. In the photograph, he sat in the position of honor at the center of his team, holding the ball with which Saint Gregory’s had won the Challenge Cup, and underneath, his name was recorded on the mount in black ink: Theodore Sterling, leading try scorer .

That tradition—that sense of being part of something bigger than himself, as his stepfather had once put it—called to him now as the bus appeared around the corner of the road. The summons was unexpectedly powerful and he closed his eyes for a moment, trying to push it from his mind.

“Come on. All aboard. We haven’t got all day, sonny,” the conductor called down to Theo, breaking into his introspection.

“Sorry,” said Theo, stepping up. He could see Esmond with his back to him, taking his seat, and he didn’t want his friend to be aware of his hesitation.

The die is cast, he thought, remembering Caesar at the Rubicon as he sat down beside Esmond, and then laughed at himself, thinking that boarding a bus was hardly analogous to taking a Roman army across a river. But the laugh sounded hollow in his ears and he breathed deeply, trying to prepare himself for what lay ahead.

They got to London early in the afternoon, and Esmond promptly led Theo down into the underground, where they took a series of subway trains, walking from one to another down long, cylindrical, white-tiled corridors echoing with the cacophonous noise of hundreds of hurrying footsteps. And then, just as it seemed to Theo that they would never see daylight again, he followed Esmond onto an escalator that took them up out of the troglodyte darkness into the afternoon sunshine.

They were in Acton, a run-down but not impoverished neighborhood in West London, with no trace of greenery anywhere in sight to relieve the ubiquitous concrete, except for a sickly sycamore tree on the other side of the road, under which a newspaper vendor was calling out the headline: Mosley Rally Tonight—Mps to Attend .

Theo had been lulled by the long train journey into feeling that their evening destination was far away, but now it seemed suddenly close and real, sending a shiver down his spine.

They walked down a road full of dusty shops until they came to the dustiest one of all—a bookshop with a bell that jangled as Esmond pushed open the door.

The window was so dirty that only a gray light entered the interior, so it was hard to make out the titles of the books crammed haphazardly into the shelves that lined the walls, but Theo recognized from Esmond’s study some of the left-wing magazines that were spread out across the tables— Student Vanguard , The Daily Worker , and Russia Today . In a glass cabinet behind the counter were replicas of Esmond’s white plaster statue of Karl Marx as well as representations of Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, whose iconic photograph in military uniform stared down at the customers from the wall above, inside a black frame.

Underneath, wedged in beside the cabinet, the owner of the bookshop sat on a high stool with a face that seemed to have been constructed as a caricature of the Soviet leader—the same thick walrus mustache and wide forehead with the hair brushed back above—but the overall effect spoiled by a pair of rimless glasses perched on the end of his nose.

“Hullo, Esmond,” he said without moving. His stillness was unnerving. “Who’s your friend?”

“Theo Sterling. I’ve told you about him before, Jacob. You remember?”

“Of course. I remember everything. You know that,” said Jacob, tapping the big dome of his head with a smile that came and went in an instant. “But what I don’t remember is agreeing to provide him with one of our valuable tickets for the show tonight.”

“He’ll do the job as well as me,” said Esmond. “I wouldn’t have brought him if I didn’t think so.”

“I’m sure you wouldn’t,” said Jacob evenly. “But what you think doesn’t matter, does it? You’re a foot soldier in this business. One of many, carrying out party orders, and you’d do well to remember it, instead of jeopardizing the security of the whole operation by bringing along boys who haven’t been vetted and could rat us out to Mosley before we’ve even got started.”

“I told you I’ll vouch for him,” said Esmond angrily.

“And I told you, you can’t,” Jacob shot back. “The party needs comrades who are disciplined, not schoolboys who think they know best. Now make yourself scarce while I have a chat with young Theo here.”

Esmond opened his mouth to respond, but then thought better of it, and turned to Theo instead. “You’ll be fine. He won’t bite,” he said, and then pulled open the door, which jangled again as he walked out.

Jacob didn’t move and didn’t speak. He just gazed at Theo, who shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other, wishing there was somewhere to sit down.

He felt intimidated. He’d never seen anyone talk down to Esmond in the way this Jacob just had, and he was shocked at Esmond’s submission to such treatment. But he was angry too. He’d risked everything to come, and now this old huckster was accusing him of being a rat.

“How old are you?” Jacob asked.

“Sixteen. I’ll be seventeen in October.”

“You’re American,” said Jacob, sounding surprised.

“Yes. Didn’t he tell you that?”

“Maybe. So why are you here?”

“Because I don’t like Fascists and bullies and people taking away other people’s rights and because Esmond made it sound like we could wake England up to what’s going on before it’s too late.”

“Are you a Communist?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I am. There’s something badly wrong with capitalism, and the Communists seem to be the only people who are trying to do something about it and about the Fascists. I know one thing I’m not, though, and that’s a rat, so I’ll thank you not to call me that again.” Theo spoke without thinking, with the words tumbling out of him in a rush, but at least this had the merit of conveying sincerity.

Jacob looked at Theo quizzically for a moment and then got down off his stool and pulled back a curtain, disclosing a small pantry where a teapot was sitting atop an iron samovar. He poured tea into two small white cups and brought one over to a table near where Theo was standing and cleared a space for it among the magazines. Then he carefully transferred a tottering tower of books that was piled on an upright chair behind it down onto the floor and ushered Theo to sit.

“Do you believe me?” asked Theo. His mood had changed from the morning. He couldn’t stand the idea of being excluded from the protest, now that there was a question mark hanging over his involvement.

“That you’re not a rat? Yes, I think you’ve satisfied me on that point,” said Jacob, smiling. “But I am concerned that you don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. You could get hurt. You know that?”

“Isn’t that the point?” said Theo.

“Yes, in a way. Has Esmond told you what to do?”

“No.”

“The disturbances are staged through the evening, beginning from when Mosley starts speaking, whenever that is. Every four minutes, in different parts of the hall, so the Fascists won’t know where the trouble’s going to come from next. You and Esmond will be nearer the front, and you’ll have to wait for over an hour. Do you think you can do that?”

“Yes,” said Theo with absolute conviction.

“I’d have put you in at the beginning if I’d known how young you are, but almost all the tickets have gone out now, so there’s nothing to be done. It’s Esmond’s fault for not telling me you were coming.”

“He’s young too,” said Theo. “But you trust him, don’t you?”

“About the big things, yes. He’s one of the best we’ve got.”

Theo nodded. He thought the same. Esmond inspired him, and at that moment he would have followed his friend wherever he led, even through the gates of hell.

They went out for dinner at a workman’s café next to the station. The menu chalked on a blackboard by the door offered an incomprehensible choice between bubble and squeak and toad in the hole. Ashamed to confess his ignorance, Theo chose the toad and was pleasantly surprised when the sausages-in-batter dish turned out to be delicious.

Esmond wanted to order beer, too, but Jacob stopped him. “You’ll need to have all your wits about you tonight,” he said.

He went over the instructions again, checked their watches, and gave Theo a small white card on which he’d written down the telephone number of the shop. “Call me if you need to,” he said. “And good luck to both of you. This’ll be the most important night of your lives. Make the party proud.”

The words went to Theo’s head even more strongly than beer would have done, and the aboveground train journey to Olympia passed in a haze of terraced houses and advertising hoardings and squat chimneys belching smoke. Once, the train stopped without explanation at the entrance to a tunnel and they looked out of the window at an ugly embankment of pale, churned-up soil in which a few brown weeds were clinging stubbornly to life. Theo gripped his armrests and willed the train to move, imagining what it would be like if they had to remain here imprisoned in the carriage as the sky got dark outside and history was made without them, a few miles down the line.

But the delay was short and they arrived at Olympia in good time. There were police everywhere, directing people coming up the escalators either to the left, where there was a big sign reading Ticket Holders Only , or to the right, where a covered glass walkway led around to the road. Theo couldn’t see the crowd that was out there, but he could hear it: a great baying, booming noise that unnerved him, even though he wasn’t going to show it.

He started toward the left, taking the ticket that Jacob had given him out of his pocket, but Esmond pulled him back.

“We’re early,” he said. “There’s no point going in yet. I want to see what it’s like outside. Jacob said the party’s got thousands here from all over the country. Come on.”

The crowd dwarfed anything Theo had ever seen in New York. They were packed together in a seething mass being kept back from the entrance area by a squadron of mounted police. The protesters’ faces under their flat caps were contorted with passion as they shouted anti-Fascist slogans and waved placards and clenched fists. Some were losing their balance but were prevented from falling by the tight press of bodies all around them.

Theo felt excited by their angry energy, but he was frightened too. His legs felt weak and he had to force himself to keep up with Esmond, who had found a way to get close to the front by edging along the side of the roadway nearest to the station, where the crowd was less concentrated.

Close up, the horses appeared huge and terrifying to Theo as they neighed and reared and clawed the concrete with their hooves, and the faces of their riders were taut with nervous concentration as they gripped the reins with one hand while holding their truncheons ready in the other. How much longer could they control the animals? Theo wondered.

Beyond the horses, Theo caught glimpses of men and women in evening dress getting out of Rolls-Royce and Daimler automobiles and hurrying into the hall through the monumental white-stone entrance archway, pursued by the jeering catcalls of the demonstrators.

Above their heads, newspaper photographers were leaning their cameras out of the upper windows in the hall’s facade. At a distance, it was easy to mistake the lenses for the barrels of guns and the cigarette smoke of the cameramen for puffs of gunfire smoke. There was a palpable sense of danger in the air, as if an immense storm was about to break, even though there was not a cloud in the evening sky.

All at once the crowd surged forward, waving their placards and breaking into a deafening chant:

Hitler and Mosley, what are they for?

Lechery, treachery, hunger, and war!

Between a gap in the horses, Theo caught sight of a column of men in black led by a tall man whom even at a distance Theo recognized from the newspapers. Mosley! Seeing him shocked Theo. The enemy had always been an abstraction, but now he had taken physical form. It made their mission real, and he was glad that he’d come.

The Fascists were marching five abreast up the empty roadway beyond the police line and turned in tight formation as they approached the hall and went inside. They were singing, but their voices were drowned out by the crowd, who had now switched to a variation of the previous chant:

One, two, three, four—What are they for?

Thuggery, buggery, hunger, and war.

Theo wanted to laugh and he wanted to cry. His heart was pounding like a relentless hammer in his chest, and he thought he was going to be sick.

Esmond had hold of his arm. “It’s time,” he shouted, putting his mouth to Theo’s ear to make himself heard. “Let’s go.”

They pushed their way back to the station, produced their tickets, and were waved through.

Inside Olympia, the noise of the crowd was muffled and soon disappeared as they walked down windowless corridors until they came to the metal stairway that matched their ticket number and walked up and out into the light.

Theo was overwhelmed. The vast size of the auditorium took his breath away as he craned his neck, looking up past tier upon tier of seats to high galleries under the great barrel-vaulted glass roof through which he could see a pale moon riding high in the twilit sky.

There must have been twice as many people inside the hall as outside, but their behavior couldn’t have been more different. Instead of the deafening noise and chaos, there was an atmosphere of hushed expectation, and everything was rigidly ordered. There were no police, but the lines of stewards in black jerseys manning the aisles would not allow anyone to stand or mill around. They stood with their arms folded across their chests, exuding menace.

Soon every seat was taken, but still the minutes ticked by until the lights finally flickered and dimmed and invisible trumpets blew a fanfare. Four powerful searchlights that had been illuminating the empty speaker’s platform at the front of the hall now turned their beams toward the back, where a phalanx of Blackshirts was entering, holding aloft Union Jacks and the black-and-yellow standards of the British Union of Fascists. And a few paces behind them came the leader, flanked by four young bodyguards. Mosley was unmistakable even at a distance because he was so much taller than everyone around him.

They came slowly down the wide central aisle as the audience on both sides got to their feet, shouting Mosley’s name, and raised their outstretched right arms in salute, which Mosley acknowledged with a wave of his upturned hand. Theo noticed that a woman sitting next to him was crying, and she smudged her face with mascara as she reached up to wipe away her tears. He worried that sitting still amid the hysteria would draw attention to him and Esmond, but no one seemed to notice them. Everyone’s focus was on the leader, who bounded up onto the stage and stood ramrod straight, facing his followers as the flag bearers arrayed themselves around the rostrum and the band played “God Save the King.”

The din continued after the anthem was over, and Mosley let it flow over him for another minute or two before he raised his arm for silence and began to speak. Straightaway, Theo realized that this was a man in love with the sound of his own voice. It rose and fell, amplified to booming decibels by the loudspeakers, as Mosley switched from mourning the sacrifice of the soldiers who had fought in the Great War to unleashing his rage on the politicians who had betrayed them. He punched the air with his hand, and the floodlights picked out his rolling eyes and gleaming teeth and the flashing silver of his belt buckle against the black silk of his shirt. And then, as he paused for effect, the interruptions began.

The first was high up in a gallery near the back of the hall. It was indistinct to begin with, but then Theo caught it:

Hitler and Mosley, hunger and war.

It was the same chant as outside, but thin and ragged here in the great cavern of the auditorium. Mosley could have drowned them out if he chose, but instead he stopped his speech in mid-flow and the arc lights swung their beams up toward the disturbance, picking out a group of stewards who were attacking several protesters, while other Blackshirts were leaping across the chairs to join them. After a few moments the stewards manhandled the protesters to the nearest staircase exit and threw them out. There was a scream followed by a shocked silence, and Mosley began speaking again as if nothing had happened.

Four minutes later the protest was repeated, eliciting precisely the same response. And so the preplanned interruptions continued, erupting one after the other in different parts of the hall, and each time Mosley stopped, arms akimbo as he waited until his men had done their work under the blue-gray glare of the spotlights.

Now two young men and a girl rose up from their seats in the central stalls less than fifty yards from where Theo and Esmond were sitting. Theo could see the fear on their faces but the determination too. They had their arms around each other, supporting each other to stand, as they shouted, “Fascism is murder!” and “Down with Mosley!”

The girl was beautiful, with high cheeks and almond-shaped eyes and blond hair cascading down over her shoulders, and she was wearing an evening gown with blue flowers on a white background. Theo thought she must have dressed up to avoid suspicion, and his awareness of her planning made him feel connected to her, as if he knew her and they weren’t strangers. She was so delicate and he wanted to reach out and push her back down out of sight before the stewards came, but he couldn’t.

In a moment the girl and her two friends were surrounded and down on the floor, invisible as the Blackshirts pummeled them with their fists and kicked them with their boots. And then they were on the move again, carrying their victims away. Theo caught sight of the girl with her pretty dress half torn off and her head forced back by the pressure of the stewards’ hands. It was appalling. He had to help her. He got up from his chair but immediately felt himself being pulled back down, and Esmond’s mouth was at his ear again:

“Damn you, Theo! Stay in your seat! You agreed to wait. You can’t back out now.”

Theo closed his eyes and breathed. Esmond was right. He had to stay. But what was Esmond accusing him of? Trying to run because he was a coward, or trying to intervene to help the girl because he was brave? Which was it? He couldn’t answer, but then he realized he wanted to do both, and so both were true.

He opened his eyes and the girl was gone, but he remembered her completely even though he’d seen her for less than a minute, and her eager face would remain imprinted on his memory for the rest of his life, not fading like his father’s or others’ that he loved and lost. He would remember her with an infinite sadness, as if he’d missed something that he knew he would never find again, and he honored her memory with a determination to stand up and be brave, whatever the cost.

There was pandemonium all around him. Chairs were flying through the air and people were screaming and heading for the exits and Mosley was shouting at them through the loudspeakers: “Keep your seats! Please keep your seats!”