A Question of Loyalties Read online

  ALLAN MASSIE

  A Question of Loyalties

  Introduced by Alan Taylor

  First, for Alison:

  then, for Euan and Jane

  All we have gained then by our unbelief

  Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,

  For one of faith diversified by doubt:

  We called the chessboard white, – we call it black.

  Browning – ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’

  Introduction

  For France, perhaps more so than for any other country, the Second World War was a humiliating affair. After eight enervating months of the drôle de guerre, the phoney war, the Germans invaded on 10 May, 1940. Within six short, traumatic weeks France was overwhelmed. For a population still reeling from the monstrous losses suffered during the First World War, it was without doubt the worst of times.

  Though national pride in the victory of 1918 was high, the French public was not keen to rush into another conflict. Indeed, in the months before the declaration of war against Germany in September 1939, there were many in France who enthusiastically espoused pacifism. Thus they were ill-prepared to confront Hitler and his brutish regime which had been sabre-rattling and re-arming for the best part of a decade. In the French forces, the emphasis – if such it can be called – was on defence. But in the words of one British eyewitness, ‘the French perceptibly froze’.

  Bullishly, Churchill urged them to make a last stand in Paris, but the stuffing had been knocked out of them. Divided about what they were meant to be fighting for, and desperate to avoid ruination, the French capitulated. It was left to 84-year-old Marshall Phillipe Pétain to call on his countrymen to lay down their arms and negotiate an armistice, first with Germany and then with Italy. Thus from June 1940 to the Allied invasions of 1944, France was subject to German occupation.

  Until November 1942, however, there was an unoccupied zone in the south, centred on the spa town of Vichy. From there, Pétain led a government which, as the war wore on, became increasingly identified with collaboration. When the Germans were finally evicted, many of those associated with the authoritarian Vichy State suffered retribution and were labelled traitors. Their legacy – known as the ‘Vichy syndrome’ – is one of shame and guilt, and ambiguity laced with controversy.

  The questions persist to this day. To what extent were the supporters of Vichy complicit with the conquerors? Did they have any inkling of the atrocities carried out in Hitler’s name, given that the Vichy government was responsible for sending back to Germany thousands of Jewish families who had fled to France for refuge? Or was the prime concern the preservation of France whatever the cost, a pragmatic decision taken in the hope of salvaging as much as possible from the débâcle of defeat?

  All of which is grist to the mill of a novelist such as Allan Massie, whose favourite stomping ground is the no man’s land where bald ‘facts’ leave chasmic holes in the historical narrative. For Massie, history is full of unlit corners and unwritten characters. It is not so much about events as individuals. In his author’s note to A Question of Loyalties, he pays tribute to Richard Cobb, the maverick historian of the French Revolution, who wrote: ‘I have never understood history other than in terms of human relationships.’ Massie aussi. For him, as for Cobb, history is human. It is not empirical or predictable or manageable but chaotic and inchoate, affecting people as individuals, each of whom is happy or unhappy in his or her own way.

  This is particularly true in a time of war, when none of us knows how we will behave. Circumstances differ. Old hierarchies are swept aside. Temperaments alter and past enmities re-surface. Fear is the great leveller, blighting everything in its path. Living constantly with its spectre can turn peacetime heroes into villains and vice versa. War complicates an already complex existence, turning things on their head; undermining definitions, demanding decisions, determining on which side we stand. Lucien de Balafré, the central character in A Question of Loyalties, a well-read man of refined tastes and sensitive disposition, understands better than most the dilemmas thrust upon us by war. ‘We live,’ he says, ‘unfortunately, in a time of categories.’

  Lucien is a good man in a dire situation. An idealist with an ingrained sense of civic duty, he is the kind of character who appears often in the novels of Allan Massie. His avowed aim is to serve his country, which seems on the surface to be relatively straightforward. But in a war in which one’s country has been subjugated, how best to achieve this? Unlike de Gaulle, who spearheaded the resistance movement from London, Lucien chooses to remain in France. Like so many of his countrymen, he remembers the First World War, in which he served at the Front albeit for only a couple of months. ‘There’s no denying it,’ he says, ‘war today, modern war, is simply an atrocity, an offence against God and a surrender to whatever is infernal in our nature.’

  As a young man, maturing between the wars, he is determined to throw himself into a public life – ‘because after all it is my duty, it is the duty of people like myself’ – in order to ensure there will be no more war in Europe. He studies at the Sorbonne then enters the Foreign Office and ends up in the embassy in Berlin, where he connects with a young German of noble birth and similarly high ideals, with whom he drinks ‘to the fundamental integrity of Europe’. Lucien is blind to the significance of the rise of Nazism. In hindsight, however, he realises that the 1918 Treaty of Versailles, which was designed to prevent future wars by redrawing Germany’s boundaries and restricting her armaments, had actually ‘spawned’ Hitler, who demanded that the Treaty be repudiated. His German friend tells him he ‘all but joined the Party’. Later he plots in vain Hitler’s assassination with dire consequences for all concerned.

  It is an example of the cruel way in which war makes a mockery of individuals. The machine has no respect for doubters or prevaricators; it has no patience for those uncertain of their position. Decisions which in normal circumstances would be insignificant are exaggerated and become life threatening. The same is true of friendships and family background. In a world turned upside down Lucien flounders, serving in the Vichy government because he thinks he is a patriot. He loves the boulevard cafes of St Germain. He reads Balzac, Gide and Colette, André Malraux, Henri de Montherlant and Louis Aragon. In Provence, he even appreciates the icy gusts of the mistral rattling the naked olive trees. He is au fond an aesthete with dilettantish tastes. Before the war he edited L’Echo de l’Avenir, a literary magazine, which was his true métier.

  Some forty years after Lucien’s mysterious death, his son, Etienne de Balafré, tries to reconstruct his father’s life, using journals, letters, official documents and personal memories. Now 55 years old and washed up in Switzerland, Etienne dovetails the account of his own pallid lifestyle with that of his father, talk of whom ‘was forbidden territory for many years’. As he delves, he discovers to his surprise that he rather liked him. ‘I traced in my father a desire to succeed, but on his own terms. He returned time and again to the consequences for France of what he described as the abdication of the gens du bien – the well-born men of property. According to him, all the ills of the country – socialism, irreligion, the dominance of the Jewish interest and high finance – stemmed from the disinclination of men from families like ours to involve themselves in public life.’

  In part, A Question of Loyalties is an exploration of the limitations and the possibilities of genres – fiction, biography and history. The plural in the title is profoundly significant. Massie has always been interested in ideas and in this book – arguably his best, certainly his most ambitious – he challenges many common perceptions and received opinions. It is a novel, like others in his oeuvre, which argues against rhetoric. Above all, he asks the reader to
put himself in the shoes of a fallible, honourable man like Lucien, who desires to do his best in a world without absolutes, and imagine what it must have been like in those dark and desperate days. Doubt, for which war allows no room, is Massie’s governing emotion, as underlined in the novel’s epigraph, which is taken from Robert Browning’s ‘Bishop Blougram’s Apology’:

  All we have gained then by our unbelief

  Is a life of doubt diversified by faith,

  For one of faith diversified by doubt:

  We called the chessboard white, – we call it black.

  Eventually Lucien, a nervy man of ‘fluctuating will and some imagination’, realises that he is impotent in the face of fate. He is a pawn pulled every which way and is dragged reluctantly into politics. His instincts, like Massie’s, are literary, and A Question of Loyalties is a very literary book. To Lucien, thinking and dreaming are preferable to doing. He is one of life’s observers. ‘Only one thing depressed him that first winter of the war,’ we’re told. ‘This was the stream of people approaching him to beg that he should intervene on their behalf with the authorities, to procure a licence for this, a post for a son, a special concession of some sort. He did not yet admit that their importunity defined the regime to which he had given his heart and mind, but he was embarrassed to be seen as the fount of favour.’

  To Lucien, loyalty to France is non-negotiable. But how to interpret that loyalty? How to respond to it practically in a war that does not respect borders? Questions like these hover over Massie’s novel like an albatross. Lucien, whose fallibility is almost painful, is a man overburdened by loyalty, to his wife, his family, friends, France, to himself. His journals, like Gide’s, are not concerned with his private life but the discussion of ‘abstract, quasi-philosophical political matters’. Etienne wonders if his father was a bore and concludes, perhaps correctly, that he was to some people. To others, however, including his meretricious wife Polly, he had charm. It is the curse of the diplomat who, in attempting to please everyone, ends up pleasing no one.

  Therein lies the tragedy at the heart of this engrossing, provocative novel. With a surefooted grasp of the period and ranging across England, Germany, Switzerland and South Africa, as well as France, it is epic in its embrace, encompassing almost the whole of the twentieth century. It is a learned book but imaginatively so. Indeed, Lucien’s lack of imagination may partly account for his inability to see the Vichy regime as others saw it. For all his agonising, he is no visionary. He is locked in a way of thinking that is suffocating.

  This is Allan Massie’s sixth novel in what has proved to be a remarkable and prolific career. In his earlier books, including Change and Decay in All Around I See and The Death of Men, the influence of Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene was apparent. A Question of Loyalties, however, has more in common with its immediate predecessor, Augustus, the first in his celebrated series of ‘Roman’ novels, in which he reconstructs the lives of the emperors. Like Augustus, Lucien is a man at the centre of events. But unlike Augustus, he is unable to exercise any control over them. He is an ordinary man grappling with extraordinary circumstances, his sins – if such they be – magnified until they are blurred because of the context in which they are revealed. In war, Massie suggests, everyone is a loser, though some, like Lucien, have more to lose than others.

  Alan Taylor

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  Part One: 1986

  Chapter One

  Part Two: 1951

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Three: 1898–1945

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Part Four: 1986–7

  Chapter One

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1986

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE OTHER EVENING, for the first time since I came to live here two months ago, I crossed over into France. I took the little suburban train at the Gare des Eaux-Vives. I smoked a cigar as we clanked up the mountainside and then I descended at Monnetier, and strolled, still smoking, to the restaurant which the Baroness had recommended. It was, she said, ‘in the country style, which has become ubiquitous, of course, but nevertheless this one is, I assure you, authentic’. I didn’t really care about that; I was interested rather in my own sentiments; what it would feel like to be again in France.

  I live in Geneva now, because Switzerland is comfortable; you are valued simply according to the promptitude with which you settle your bills. And I am always prompt.

  The restaurant was quiet. Only two other tables were occupied. There was an American couple and a stout Frenchman who exuded bourgeois respectability. He wore the ribbon of the Légion d’Honneur in his buttonhole. It was absurd that in that ribbon, which is awarded to every postmaster and to every clerk who has shuffled papers for thirty years in the Ministry of This or That, I should see something denied me. Yet I did.

  The dinner was equally unremarkable. What they call ‘mountain trout’ – justifiably since the fish-farm will be situated on the mountainside – a tranche d’agneau in a sauce too sharp with too many peppers – which passes for peasant style – and then the choice between the inevitable flan, the peach or cheese which you can always buy in better condition in the market-place. The coffee was burned, and I sighed to think of the coffee, without chicory, which Hilda used to prepare for me at what I still think of as home.

  Then, I asked the bored proprietor if he had a marc de Provence. Provence not Burgundy, I insisted, knowing that he would prefer to give me the supposedly superior and more expensive variety, and, when I tasted its harsh and fiery corruption, I knew my little excursion had been a failure, and went out into the night.

  Of course it was ridiculous to imagine that I might exorcise ghosts in such a perfunctory manner. There was a wind coming off the lake as I walked from the station to my hotel, that nipping wind which never quite leaves Geneva, and which is nevertheless for me one of its attractions.

  When I am asked my nationality nowadays I generally say I am South African. It is true I carry a South African passport, but I would not have any difficulty in replacing it with another. And I think I may have to do so, for it has become tiresome and even embarrassing to be marked South African. People are so often sympathetic. They assume that I have left the Republic because I disapprove of its policies. In fact I am indifferent to them. Apartheid is evil but I have no reason to think any politics other than evil; they are the clearest expression of the truth of the doctrine of Original Sin. That’s all. I detest all politics and all politicians. How could I do otherwise, being what I am?

  And actually my heart is in South Africa. ‘Whoever has once drunk Vaal water will always return’, says a proverb which I take to be Bantu originally. It is an enchanted land, which, doubtless, is the reason it has been given over to its infernal politics. We can live only a brief
season in Eden. Yet when I dream it is generally of the infinite spaces of the high veld or those rocky sun-baked hills of Cape Province which rise from vineyards, orchards, water-meadows and cool woods of chestnut. They are closer to Arcady than anything Europe has known since the Ancient World, and yet, spared Europe’s history which hammers on us its relentless message of man’s cruelty, violence, fear and lust for power, there remains, even today in South Africa, an indefinable and empty remoteness. The land lives aloof from man. Nowhere that I know so firmly insists that man is and is not, while the land remains. It is splendidly and proudly impersonal, that landscape. It eats into my dreams and fills my heart.

  I spent much of my youth there, important years, and were I to choose a moment of well-being I would place it there: I would take a summer morning when, rising before dawn at an hour in which the cold still nips the empty veld and mist hangs around the fringes of the sky, I would saddle my pony Ben, and with the boy Joshua mounted on his beside me, gallop, it seemed for ever, towards the sunrise. Oh, the sharp beauty of the air, the tang of the reek of dung fires rising from the kraals, the sour-sweet scent of mimosa, and then, the ride home, as mules and oxen cough in the dust, but the dew – and there is no dew like it, not even the Alpine dew that sparkles on the gentian – still shines iridescent. Joshua slips off to the kitchen quarters to chew biltong, or for his bowl of mealies, and I stand by the pony’s heaving side, smelling its sweet flesh, before turning to breakfast on the terrace. Do you wonder that I rhapsodise? Do you wonder that it comes back to me in dreams as by the waters of Babylon the children of Israel longed for Sion?

  But my mother and stepfather are already on the terrace, and, seeing them, I am at once dragged from my idyll into the all-too-personal. Who was it said ‘When you go to heaven you can choose to be exactly what you like, and I shall be a child’? He must have forgotten the grown-ups.