Churchill's Hour by Michael Dobbs Page A

their wives. Don’t want to bring their wives. In fact, truth be told, sometimes they have very little to do with their wives, not only here but when they’re at home. You get my drift?’
    Héloise wasn’t sure.
    â€˜The guests are all rich folk, important people, well-to-do. They don’t live like the rest of us. They may have…’—she stretched hesitantly for the appropriate phrase—‘arrangements. Understandings. Now they’re all decent and respectable folk, mind, every one of them, but sometimes…well, you French understand these things. Life gets complicated. Particularly during times of war. The men think they’ve not got long to live, the womenfolk get swept up in the passion of the times, never knowing what tomorrow will bring, and so they…live a little for the moment. After lights out. No harm done, so long as no one knows and none tell.’
    â€˜You mean, while the lady guests are in their rooms…’
    â€˜â€¦the gentlemen visit.’
    â€˜The Walk o’ Many Wonders,’ Sawyers said, mostly to himself.
    â€˜Don’t surprise you, do it? You being French, an’ all.’
    â€˜And Mr Churchill, he knows what is going on?’
    â€˜Mr C? Good Lord, no. He’s as blind as ruddy old Nelson, he is. Don’t know—and I suspect don’t much care, either. He’s got far more important things on his plate—er, mind. So, if two guests have what we might call an understanding, we make sure their rooms are suitable. Close by. Rules of the English country house.’
    â€˜But how do you know this? About strangers?’
    â€˜Bless me, they’re not strangers. We know their servants. There ain’t no secrets below stairs.’
    Suddenly Héloise began to laugh. ‘So that is why Mr Sawyers goes through the guest wing banging the breakfast gong so very early in the morning. It is not for breakfast at all. It is…’
    â€œCos gentlemen need to know when time’s come to be back in their own beds,’ Sawyers said, completing the thought.
    Héloise began to giggle into her polishing cloth.
    â€˜Now don’t you go telling me this don’t happen in France,’ Sawyers said, determined to defend English honour.
    â€˜â€™Course it does,’ the cook responded softly, gazing once more into the steaming pot. ‘And not just above stairs. How d’you think I got my hubby?’
    â€˜Cook!’ Sawyers protested.
    â€˜Well, in them days, of course, you could rely on a Frenchman to do the honourable thing,’ she said, wiping her hands on her apron and smiling.
    The impressive thing about Churchill’s Black Dog of depression was not simply how savagely it would attack him but also how suddenly it would stop. One moment it was there, the next it had fled, run away into the darkness. When he joined his guests for drinks in the Great Hall before dinner that evening, his spirits seemed to have been entirely restored. He walked in with cigar ash tumbling down the front of his dinner jacket and Nelson the cat inhis free hand, demanding that something loud be played on the gramophone. He chose Noel Coward, tripping round the room from guest to guest, singing along with the music in a voice that was loud and out of tune, but word-perfect. ’In a jungle town where the sun beats down to the rage of man and beast the English garb of the English sahib merely gets a bit more creased. In Bangkok at twelve o’clock they foam at the mouth and run, but mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun…’
    â€˜Mr Coward is a close personal friend,’ he told the Americans. This seemed to startle them since they assumed Coward was, as Harriman put it, ‘one of those actors who never knew which way round to button his trousers.’
    â€˜He is a great Englishman,’ Churchill responded, which scarcely seemed to answer the Americans’ doubts.