Free The More Deceived by David Roberts Page B

another house and looked rather fraudulent in its new home, as if it had come down in the world and knew it.
    Chartwell was different from what he had imagined. It sat in a green valley with glorious views over the Weald.The grounds had been improved with a lake and a sickle-shaped ridge of wood on the opposite side. Terraces, covered in sweet-smelling rhododendrons, made the best of the view towards the South Downs. The house itself was Victorian red brick and he had expected it to be ugly but he should have remembered that Churchill was a painter.
    Churchill had bought it in the 1920s and enlarged it but there was no feeling of being in a grand house. The hall and the passages running out of it were narrow and the ceilings low. The light came grudgingly through small, cottage-type windows. But it was alive – Churchill’s presence had the same effect as that of a queen bee and people buzzed from room to room with the air of having important business to transact even if it were only replacing the garden flowers which Mrs Churchill liked to have in every room.
    The butler ushered Edward into the drawing-room where he perched on an uncomfortable sofa and looked about him with great curiosity. Windows on three sides made the room light and airy and he rose to stare out over the garden and, beyond it, the heads of green trees marching inexorably towards the horizon, as Birnam Wood had marched to Dunsinane. The butler reappeared and he was taken up a narrow flight of stairs and along a corridor to the study. Before the butler knocked on the door, Edward could hear that slurred yet booming voice which could only be Churchill’s – Edward had heard him speak in the House of Commons – dictating, Edward assumed, an orotund passage concerning the the battle of Blenheim. The butler did not hesitate, however, and Edward was ushered into Churchill’s presence, mumbling apologies for interrupting. He was standing at a wooden lectern – of his own design, he was proudly to inform Edward later – a sheaf of papers in his hand, spectacles perched insecurely on the end of his nose, arrested in mid-sentence. He made no objection to being interrupted and nodded to a man taking dictation who left quietly, closing the door behind him.
    Churchill’s place of work was a room quite unlike any other in the house. The architect he had employed when he bought the house had removed the ceiling to reveal beams and rafters of the older house and, rather oddly Edward thought, introduced a Tudor doorway with a moulded architrave. The windows looked west across the front lawn to Crockham Hill and east across the garden to the lake.
    ‘Lord Edward! How good of you to come. You find me correcting the proofs of my biography of my ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough. I drive the printer mad by adding new paragraphs when I should leave well alone but I can’t seem to get a feel for the shape of a book until I see it in proof. You seem to have damaged your eye. Have you been in a fight?’
    Edward was unable to resist Churchill’s wicked smile. Here was a man who would always enjoy a fight.
    ‘I was playing football, sir, Old Etonians against a team from the East End. I’m afraid it degenerated into a brawl but the odd thing was that seemed to unlock a kind of comradeship and, by the time we got to the pub, we were all great friends.’
    ‘I understand. I have always held that the nation is bound together by an invisible chain. Ordinary people take it for granted that the aristocracy will exploit them and rob them. But, on the whole, they don’t think of them as the enemy in the same way the French peasant thought about the aristocracy before the Revolution. There’s a bond that we must call patriotism which binds us class to class and which will, I pray, see us through the next conflict.’
    ‘I must tell you, sir, that your account of the Great War did more to make me understand why we had to fight than anything else I have ever read.’
    ‘It