The Order of the Day by Mark Polizzotti & Eric Vuillard

Author:Mark Polizzotti & Eric Vuillard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: 20th Century, Austria, Europe, France, Germany, History, Military, World War II
Publisher: Other Press
Published: 2018-09-25T03:00:00+00:00

FAREWELL LUNCHEON ON DOWNING STREET

he following day, in London, Ribbentrop was invited by Chamberlain for a farewell luncheon. After several years in England, the Reich’s ambassador had just received a promotion: henceforth, he would be Foreign Minister. He was back in London for a few days to say his farewells and return the house keys—for before the war, Chamberlain, who owned several properties, apparently counted Ribbentrop among his tenants. From this anodyne fact, this strange conflict between the image and the man, this contract by which Neville Chamberlain, the “lessor,” agreed for a price, the “rent,” to allow Joachim von Ribbentrop quiet enjoyment of his house in Eaton Square, no one has drawn the slightest inference. Chamberlain must have received his rent check between two pieces of bad news, two low blows. But business is business. No one, then, has detected any anomaly here, or conferred on this little morsel of Roman law the slightest significance. Some poor devil on trial for robbery gets slammed with a long list of priors, and suddenly the facts speak for themselves. But if those facts concern Chamberlain, well, it’s steady on, old boy. A certain decency is called for. His politics of appeasement are just an unfortunate mistake, and his activities as a landlord are, in the annals of history, no more than a minor footnote.

The first part of the meal was perfectly pleasant and good-humored. Ribbentrop told stories of his athletic prowess, then, after a few jokes at his own expense, he brought up the pleasures of tennis; Sir Alexander Cadogan listened politely. Ribbentrop rambled on for a while about serves, and about that little globe of felt-covered rubber, the ball, the life span of which was very short, he stressed, not even the duration of a full match! Then he evoked the great Bill Tilden, who could serve like a demigod, he enthused, and dominated the tennis of the 1920s as no one ever would in his wake. In five years, Tilden did not lose a single match, and he walked off with the Davis Cup seven times in a row. He had what they used to call a cannonball serve, with a physique ideally suited for that sublime performance: tall, slender, with wide shoulders and huge hands. Ribbentrop embellished his shaggy-dog story with endless tidbits and anecdotes. For instance, Tilden, at the start of his most prolific series of victories, had had the tip of his finger amputated, after accidentally slicing it open on a fence. After the operation, he played better than ever, as if this little fingertip had been an error of natural selection that modern surgery had corrected. But more than anything, Tilden was a strategist—Ribbentrop stressed, wiping his lips on his napkin—and his book The Art of Lawn Tennis is a gold mine of reflections on tennis discipline, like Ovid’s on the art of love. But especially—the quintessence of being, for the man his youthful friends had teasingly called “Ribbensnob”—Bill Tilden was nonchalant, so wonderfully nonchalant. And elegant: his backhand was like a reverence.

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