The Abominable: A Novel

I knew he meant the view from this hilltop. It was then—and remains today—the single most beautiful and verdant view of a peacetime countryside I’d ever seen. There were distant forests of beech, chestnut, and oak, countless wide green meadows, and the longest, grassiest slopes I’d ever encountered.

“The Cosy Pig sits in its eighty acres of all this,” said Churchill, “but it’s this view of the combe and the larger Kentish Weald that convinced me to buy the place, although Clementine said it was—and would be in its rebuilding—too dear for me. For us. And I suppose it has been.”

“It’s beautiful,” I said, realizing how inadequate the words were.

“Not as beautiful as Mount Everest, I would imagine,” said the heavyset little man. His bright eyes were watching me carefully.

“That’s a different beauty, si—…Mr. Churchill,” I said. “All rock, ice, harsh light, air. Almost everything, including the air, is so cold it cuts. There’s no green there, usually, above Base Camp, not even a lichen. Nothing alive but the climbers and the rare raven. No trees, no leaves, no grass…almost nothing soft, Mr. Churchill. Just rock and ice and snow and sky. This is infinitely more…gentle. More…human.”

Churchill had been listening carefully, and now he nodded. “I’d best be getting back to work. When I finish that wall for what will be the final terrace extension to Clementine’s bedroom, I need to build another dam.” He waved his short arm and chubby hand to the left. “I built those ponds as well. Have always enjoyed looking at water and things that like to live in water.”

The ponds were beautiful and natural-looking. But this time I said nothing.

“Make yourself at home, as you Yanks like to say,” said Churchill. “If you’re hungry at all, tell Mason or Matthews; they’ll have cook make up a sandwich for you. The liquor’s in the drawing room, and there is some good whisky—Scotch, I believe you fellows call it on your side of the pond—in your suite. There are books in your room, but feel free to borrow from the library. If you can’t reach the book, it’s because you weren’t meant to be able to. Anything else is fair game. We’ll have sherry or whisky at six, dinner’s at seven thirty—early tonight because one of our guests had his people bring a projector with a motion picture for us to see later. Or for the children to see, I should say. I think you’ll find all our dinner guests amusing tonight, but three of them especially so. See you in a while, Mr. Perry.”

The first guest I met was T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia,” the American reporter Lowell Thomas had called him during and after the War—who was descending the stairs for drinks just when I was. Lawrence was wearing the full robes of a prince of Arabia, complete with a jewel-handled curved dagger tucked in his sash.

“Silly, I know,” he said after we’d introduced ourselves and shaken hands, “but the children love it.”

We were soon joined by an older man whom Churchill called “Prof.” This was Professor F. A. Lindemann, and Lawrence later whispered to me that in 1916, when countless RAF pilots were dying because they were unable to get their flimsy paper and wood aircraft out of a flat spin, “Prof” Lindemann had worked out, using advanced mathematics, a maneuver which he announced would bring any aircraft out of even the worst tailspin. When the RAF establishment and the pilots said the maneuver wouldn’t work—according to Lawrence, who was still wearing his rather effeminate white cotton headdress and headband as he told me all this—the professor had taught himself how to fly, taken up a SPAD while wearing no parachute, deliberately put the craft into the worst flat spin imaginable, and deftly pulled it out—using his mathematically concocted maneuver—with hundreds of feet to spare. Evidently the secret was in getting one’s hands and feet off the controls; the aircraft, said Professor Lindemann, wanted to fly straight and level and would do so if the pilot left it alone. It was, he announced, all the correcting and overcorrecting inputs to the controls that turned spins into death spins. And then, according to Lawrence, the “Prof” had taken up another, older biplane, set it into a terrible spin, and allowed it to recover yet again.

After that, T. E. Lawrence assured me, all RAF pilots were required to learn the Prof’s maneuver.

During dinner that night—there were about a dozen people at the table, including the children: a sixteen- year-old daughter, Diana; a son, Randolph, who looked to be about fourteen; and an eleven-year-old girl named Sarah, as well as two cousins, a boy and a girl (whose names I forget) roughly the ages of Diana and Randolph— Churchill challenged Prof to “tell us in words of one syllable, and taking no longer than five minutes, what this quantum theory rubbish is all about.”

While Churchill checked the watch from his waistcoat pocket, Professor Lindemann did so with twenty seconds to spare. Everyone at the table, including me, burst into applause. I’d actually understood it.

The other “special guest” for that night’s dinner had taken me aback somewhat when I first saw him in the drawing room accepting a large glass of chilled champagne.

It was, I saw, Adolf Hitler. I’d been reminded of that name during my month of convalescing—in truth, merely waiting in hopes that the Deacon and Reggie would show up someday—with Dr. Pasang at the tea plantation. I’d read everything I could get, at the plantation and during the weeks on the boat coming back from India, about Herr Hitler.

And here Hitler was—for a moment I was filled with a terrible indecision (not what I should do, had to do, but how could I do it then and there?)—but then I noticed the wavy hair and pleasant expression, the slightly longer bone structure in the face, and realized it was only the fake mustache—which he removed after amusing the children but before dinner—that really caused the resemblance. This man, as Churchill introduced us, was Charles Chaplin, who although born in England was now a fellow U.S. resident.

This, then, was why we were dining earlier that evening and the children dining with us—Chaplin had brought his most recent release (along with a portable cinema projector) to show us his new movie after dinner, before it got too late for the children.

But as pleasant and smiling as Chaplin was, he irritated our host even before drinks were finished and we were shown into the long dining room. Chaplin, it seemed, was very serious about his politics, and was pressing Churchill on why the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Baldwin government had insisted on going back onto the gold standard. “It will hurt your economy, you know,” pressed Chaplin over drinks. “Most of all, it will hurt the poor people as the prices of everything will go up.”

Churchill obviously hated being told he was wrong, much less confronted with such an argument in his own home, so he was in a full, silent sulk by the time we all found our places around the table.

But then Chaplin did an odd thing to break the ice. “Since I have to get back to London tonight and we may not have time to chat after I show our new movie to you, I’ll give you a preview of it here at the dinner table,” he said. He’d brought a print of his new four-reeler called The Gold Rush, which had premiered in the States in June but not yet reached England.

Chaplin took two forks and stabbed them into two dinner rolls. “My Little Tramp,” said the actor, “is up in Alaska hunting for gold and trying to impress a young woman he’s met. At least in his fantasy, he’s with her and trying to impress her. And since he cannot speak, he communicates with her in this way instead.”

And with that, the political, serious Charlie Chaplin disappeared and a smiling, lovable version of his Little Tramp character appeared, shoulders hunched over his forks and the dinner rolls as if the rolls were his feet, the forks dug into the rolls his legs, and he proceeded to do a little dance with the rolls and forks, humming the tune as he went, even doing high kicks and athletic “splits” with the forks and rolls, and finally ending it with a dinner- roll-and-forks curtsey and Little Tramp simper.

Everyone applauded again. The ice had been truly broken. Churchill, who’d laughed hardest of all, became his gregarious, host-like self again, all signs of his petulance fled.

There was one other odd moment to the otherwise witty and delightful dinner. At one point T. E. Lawrence leaned over the table toward Chaplin on the other side, the silk wings of Lawrence’s headdress almost dipping into the sorbet, and he said to the movie star, “Chaplin, Chaplin. Is that Jewish? Are you a Jew, sir?”

Chaplin’s smile never wavered. He raised his glass of white wine—we were having pheasant—in Lawrence’s direction and said, “Alas, I did not have that honor at birth, Mr. Lawrence.”

Later, when the children and guests were rushing into the long drawing room where chairs and the projector had been set up, I excused myself—saying I was tired, which I was—and shook hands with Chaplin, telling him that I hoped we might meet again someday. He returned the warm handshake and wished me the same.

Then I went up to my room and to sleep while gales of laughter floated up from the main floor for the next ninety minutes or so.

I was awakened—softly but insistently by the servant named Mason—in what felt like the middle of the