The Collected Short Stories - Jeffrey Archer [95]
He trotted on ahead of me, not waiting for my reply, a man obviously used to living on his own. He led me down a small, dark corridor into his living room. I was shocked by its size. Three walls were covered with indifferent prints and watercolors, depicting English scenes, while the fourth was dominated by a large bookcase. I could spot Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen, Trollope, Hardy, even Waugh and Graham Greene. On the table was a faded copy of the New Statesman. I looked around to see if we were on our own, but there seemed to be no sign of a wife or child either in person or picture, and indeed the table was set for only two.
The old man turned and stared with childlike delight at my pile of newspapers and magazines.
“Punch, Time, and The Observer—a veritable feast,” he declared, gathering them into his arms before placing them lovingly on the bed in the corner of the room.
The professor then opened a bottle of Szürkebarát and left me to look at the pictures while he prepared the meal. He slipped away into an alcove that was so small that I had not realized the room contained a kitchenette. He continued to bombard me with questions about England, many of which I was quite unable to answer.
A few minutes later he stepped back into the room, requesting me to take a seat. “Do be seated,” he said. “On reflection, I do not wish you to remove the seat. I wish you to sit on it.” He put a plate in front of me that had on it a leg of something that might have been a chicken, a piece of salami, and a tomato. I felt sad, not because the food was inadequate, but because he believed it to be plentiful.
After dinner, which despite my efforts to eat slowly and hold him in conversation, did not take up much time, the old man made some coffee, which tasted bitter, and then filled a pipe before we continued our discussion. We talked of Shakespeare and his views on A. L. Rowse, and then he turned to politics.
“Is it true,” the professor asked, “that England will soon have a Labour government?”
“The opinion polls seem to indicate as much,” I said.
“I suppose the British feel that Sir Alec Douglas-Home is not swinging enough for the sixties,” said the professor, now puffing vigorously away at his pipe. He paused and looked up at me through the smoke. “I did not offer you a pipe as I assumed after your premature exit in the first round of the competition that you would not be smoking.” I smiled. “But Sir Alec,” he continued, “is a man with long experience in politics, and it’s no bad thing for a country to be governed by an experienced gentleman.”
I would have laughed out loud had the same opinion been expressed by my own tutor.
“And what of the Labour leader?” I said, forbearing to mention his name.
“Molded in the white heat of a technological revolution,” he replied. “I am not so certain. I liked Gaitskell, an intelligent and shrewd man. An untimely death. Attlee, like Sir Alec, was a gentleman. But as for Mr. Wilson, I suspect that history will test his mettle—a pun which I had not intended—in that white heat and only then will we discover the truth.”
I could think of no reply.
“I was considering last night after we parted,” the old man continued, “the effect that Suez must have had on a nation which only ten years before had won a world war. The Americans should have backed you. Now we read in retrospect—always the historian’s privilege—that at the time Prime Minister Eden was tired and ill. The truth was he didn’t get the support from his closest allies when he most needed it.”
“Perhaps we should have supported you in 1956.”
“No, no, it was too late then for the West to shoulder Hungary’s problems. Churchill understood that in 1945. He wanted to advance beyond Berlin and to free all the nations that bordered Russia. But the West had had a bellyful of war by then and left Stalin to take advantage of that apathy. When Churchill