Your Royal Hostage

by Antonia Fraser

  'Dreadful!' exclaimed the pleasant-looking woman sitting next to him. She nudged her companion and pointed to the paper's headline, now virtually in her face since the heavy-set man had opened the paper somewhere at the start and was reading it. The respectable-looking woman sounded pleasurably indignant.

  'Tch,' went her companion, also a woman, also middle aged.

  The train stopped at Old Street. Some people got out - one woman from the opposite end of the carriage - but the train as a whole was not full. It was that short lull in mid-afternoon before the office workers started scurrying home in their hordes, and after the comparative intensity of the lunchtime movements.

  Once the train started again, Monkey turned to the City pages at the back of the evening paper. The meeting had begun, which meant that Chicken and Pussy no longer enjoyed their privilege of talking to each other as though they were friends (in reality Chicken and Pussy had never met until Innoright brought them together and never now met outside 'working hours' for reasons of security).

  Tom, who was lounging by the doors, sat down in the empty seat next to Monkey. Beagle, already seated by the small door at

  the end of the carriage, moved up until he was next to Lamb, who was on the other side of Monkey. Fox came next. Before he moved, Fox had gazed anxiously out of the window at the departing platform, as though worried whether he had missed his proper stop; he also consulted a small paper map of the Underground and then looked up at the map on the upper side of the carriage, as though comparing the two. Fox sat down with an air of relief.

  It was all standard practice. The routine had been laid down several months earlier when this particular cell of the main Innoright Group had been founded - by Monkey, who had hand-picked the members from Innoright protest meetings, studying their record cards for suitable biographical details. In view of the nature of The Plan he wanted a special mixture of daring, practicality and imagination: plus true commitment to the cause that held them together. In theory, of course, any member of Innoright should possess such commitment. But in practice Monkey (a founder of Innoright to which he had privately devoted much of his City-made fortune) discovered that members differed radically in their particular angle of interest; this meant that they also differed radically in what they were prepared to do for Innoright.

  Members who were particularly horrified by vivisection for example could not easily be induced to lobby food shops, regarding them as very much secondary objects of attack so long as laboratory conditions remained iniquitous. Other members believed with equal passion that the animals used for scientific research were at least living in conditions over which some control was exerted by law, whereas the lives of battery hensBut the six people Monkey had picked to be part of his team were all of them more persuaded by the general nature of Innoright's philosophy than by any particular part of it. The innocent should never suffer at the hands of the guilty, guilty in the first place because of their torture of the innocent. In that cause, Monkey's team, he was convinced, would do anything, anything that might be asked of them by Innoright, as represented by Monkey. It was an awe-inspiring thought. It was a good thought. Monkey liked being in control of things.

  Because Monkey was in control, it was Monkey who had laid down the necessity for a constantly changing meeting-place so that they could not afterwards be easily identified as knowing each other. To avoid suspicion.

  ' "Afterwards"?' asked Lamb, 'What do you mean by "afterwards"? I thought we were going to declare ourselves. That was the whole point.'

  'Finally, yes. But you don't imagine, my dear Miss Lamb, that there will be no hue and cry.' Monkey had a way of putting words in italics with his resonant voice. He looked round and raised an eyebrow. 'We want no eager landlady coming forward with information about our constant meetings, no one afterwards to connect the seven of us. After all, we are sufficiently disparate, are we not, for such a connection not to be immediately suspected.'

  They were certainly disparate, in Monkey's phrase. Although the second thing those members picked by Monkey had in common was a certain convenient flexibility of employment, if not actual lack of it, the reasons for this varying considerably with the members' different ages and classes.

  The cell had held its first rendezvous at the National Portrait Gallery, gathering on Monkey's instructions by a huge royal portrait (that appealed to his sense of humour). He chose the study of King George VI, Queen Elizabeth and the two young Princesses over a family breakfast table, hung at the head of a staircase, garishly coloured, impossible to miss. On Monkey's instructions also, at this first encounter they divided into plausible groups; that is to say, Lamb, who might have been Monkey's docile daughter, stood close by him; while Chicken and Pussy chatted animatedly to each other.

  'Look at Princess Margaret Rose! What a little poppet! To think that now her own children ...' The words flowed happily.

  Beagle, in baggy grey cotton trousers (in spite of the spring cold), loose whitish T-shirt, camouflage jacket, trainer shoes without socks, lounged alone. The trouble with Beagle was that he looked not so much implausible as subtly menacing in the context of the National Portrait Gallery. He even attracted the attention of one of the uniformed attendants who spoke to him.

  'I'm unemployed, right? And it's free here, right? Any other questions?' was Beagle's response.

  'You're asked not to touch the frames of the pictures,' said the attendant pleasantly. 'That's right,' said a young man with a rather high voice standing next to Beagle, self-importantly. 'There's a lot of history here, you know, and it belongs to everyone.' It was Fox. Beagle glared at him. Lamb, close to Monkey, felt the older man stir angrily.

  'Just what we don't want to happen,' he muttered, 'calling attention to us. Beagle mustn't do that. And what Fox said was unnecessary.'

  It was then that Lamb came up with the idea of rendezvousing on the Tube, 'where you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it,' as she put it and then blushed (although Lamb rarely blushed). She blushed because Beagle looked at her, a hard slightly mocking look. Afterwards Beagle told Lamb that was when he first decided to have her.

  'You were so sweet and innocent, Lambkin, so polite. One of these days, Beagle to have a taste of Lamb. That was the resolution.'

  At the time Lamb corrected her statement to 'where everybody meets everybody'. And so - after an appreciative hum, hum, a raising of the upper lip and eyebrow from Monkey, the Underground Plan was born.

  It proved strangely easy to carry out, given that Lamb's original unguarded remark — 'you sit next to absolutely anybody without thinking twice about it' - was undeniably true about the London Underground system; even if opinions might vary as to who 'absolutely anybody' was. The seven members of the cell were all of them physically common or unremarkable types - which was in fact the third principle on which Monkey had selected them originally.

  Beagle for example was, to the outward eye, an apparent loafer of vaguely aggressive demeanour; a prejudiced observer might put him down as unemployed 'and happy with it; the sort who doesn't even want to work.' But there were after all many such travelling by Tube. In essence, Beagle's medium height, his neat features, lightish-brown hair, lightly tanned skin all combined to make him unremarkable: a common type. It was Lamb who knew that the body beneath the T-shirt and baggy trousers was hard, muscular — and scarred.

  Pussy on the other hand had an air of silent self-righteousness, the air of one waiting for someone to light up a cigarette in order to ask them to extinguish it, which made her a common enough type too. She was also the mistress of the uninteresting-looking plastic shopping-bag, providing herself with an extraordinary variety of them as the weeks passed; what the logos of the bags had in common was that you could not possibly want to know more about the contents of any bag emblazoned with them. Pussy, although fat, was not so fat that you would remember her for exceptional obesity; just heavy, in the way that some women over a certain age are inclined to spread in the hips an
d bosom so that the waist is gradually eliminated.

  In the same way, Fox, although on the short side, was certainly no dwarf; his lack of height was not even particularly noticeable unless he was standing side by side with a girl, say, Lamb. Slender as Lamb was, she topped Fox by an inch or two. The most noticeable thing about Fox originally had been his habit of bringing his mongrel dog, an aged bulldoggish sort of animal, to Innoright meetings. The hairless dog, with its crushed apologetic face, had made an odd contrast with the neatly dressed young man.

  The dog, called Noel - 'for Coward, because as a result of my training, he doesn't get into fights' - had caused some dissension at early Innoright meetings; his continued presence being in the end responsible for the Innoright rule that meetings were, 'without prejudice', for human beings only. This was because some Innoright members had strong views on domestic pets - 'no better than Negro slaves on plantations' - and others equally strong views in the opposite direction. Monkey, while assuring Fox that Noel's presence at meetings had been perfectly acceptable to him personally, had delicately persuaded him to leave Noel behind for the cell meetings also, on grounds of Noel's noticeability.

  Tom was vaguely foreign looking - but the foreignness was sufficiently unspecific for him to merge into the vast confluence of youngish foreign looking men on the Underground who might be students or at least carrying students' cards. His complexion was darkish — but it was olive-dark, not brown, and might even be the product of a recent holiday in the sun. Spanish or Portuguese blood? Possibly. Not Asian, at least probably not Asian: Tom was tall. Iranian or an Arab of some sort? Could be. Something Middle Eastern was certainly plausible. In general Tom might have been the kind of actor who plays foreign parts on television, minor characters in established series, never more than half seen or half remembered by the general public. It was the fact that Tom could vary the racial impression which he gave, which had persuaded Monkey to enrol him when he was produced by Beagle (Monkey had had to reject the idea of recruiting a handsome black from East Ham, of Nigerian descent, a founder member of Innoright, because his ethnic origin was too easily identifiable).

  As for Monkey, Chicken, Lamb, their particular types, the City gent, the neatly if drably dressed woman of a certain age, the nice girl in her thoroughly Sloane-Ranger clothes, these types reproduced themselves endlessly around them.

  'Nothing exceptional about us.' It was Monkey's theme song.

  'Except what we're going to do, darling,' murmured Tom.

  'No connections between us.' It was Monkey's other constantly reiterated cry.

  'Except that we're all members of Innoright.' This time Tom spoke louder.

  'Correction. We all were members of Innoright. Beagle resigned in protest against current policy, on my instructions. As a matter of fact, Lamb never joined, only went to a couple of meetings and met Beagle. I'm a member, so is Pussy.'

  'I was a very early member, a founder member, I think you'll find, unlike Pussy,' put in Chicken in her comfortably firm voice, the voice of the teacher who will not be overlooked in the midst of the class. 'I have consistently voted against the amalgamation of Innoright with other groups on the grounds that -'

  'Absolutely, my dear Miss, or should I say Mrs, Chicken?'

  Monkey interrupted her hurriedly, this was no time for that hoary old Innoright issue concerning its links with other groups.

  'Absolutely. And Fox here was, like myself, a founder member. But he too has resigned. On my instructions.'

  The treatment of Noel —' began Fox in a mutinous voice; he had been becoming visibly restive during Chicken's speech.

  'Provided the perfect excuse,' finished Monkey neatly. 'So you see, Tom, no secrets about it, all carefully worked out, except we don't hand about our membership list in the first place. And you? It's news to me that you are a member. Are you a member? Under what name?'

  'I vouch for Tom.' Beagle, leaping to Tom's defence again.

  At recent meetings these frictions had been stronger than ever, as the date on which the Plan had to be carried out drew closer and could not of its very nature be postponed. And yet, as Lamb said privately to Beagle afterwards, these arguments, these niggling disagreements were ludicrous, really. She wished she could tell Beagle her worry about Tom, the way he kept looking at her and other things. But she had to remember Tom was Beagle's friend.

  Instead she said: 'We all want the same thing.'

  'Innocent Rights,' said Beagle, and he took the lobe of Lamb's delicate ear in his fingers and gave it a little sharp nip.

  This afternoon Monkey was angry. Lamb could tell by the way he sucked down his lower lip.

  'What was all that about?' he asked Tom in a low voice, pointing to the headline in the Standard, palace outrage (although Tom had actually asked him if he could look up the time of a film - another agreed code).

  'It was fun, darling.'

  'Fun?. Fun for who?'

  'For us.'

  'And the blood? Fun for the animals? You know how careful we are. We simply cannot afford to fall into their trap of violence -'It wasn't animals' blood. Cool down, Monko.' 'It wasn't human blood! Are you crazy?'

  ‘It was paint, Monkey, paint. Oxblood, I think it's called. I'll

  get you the name if you want to repaint your posh dining-room.'

  'Yes,' Beagle chipped in impudently. 'We thought we'd give the little Princess an early wedding present. Anything wrong with that? And advertise our presence, as it were. A trailer for the big show.'

  Monkey was silent. Lamb supposed that he did not trust himself to speak. He turned over the page of his newspaper and then turned it back.

  'Any luck with the shoes, dear?' Chicken spoke to Pussy in her adopted character, which she was not supposed to do during a meeting.

  'Nothing in beige leather at all,' Pussy responded gallantly, scuffling in one of her plastic bags. 'Not a real beige anyway; plenty of cream and canary. I settled for taupe.'

  Actually Pussy, like many of the members oflnnoright, avoided leather in all its forms and thus her shoe shopping took rather a different form as she searched for synthetic footwear, made in large comfortable sizes for her heavy feet. The avoiding of leather was not however mandatory for members of Innoright (it was not considered in the same light as fur, for example). Monkey's polished shoes looked like leather as did Lamb's; one could not be quite sure about Chicken's classic shoes, possibly patent leather, possibly imitation.

  Just as Pussy had not in fact been searching for beige leather, so Pussy was not actually the harmless if slightly fussy woman she appeared to be. Pussy, together with her only child, a daughter called Caro (otherwise known as Otter) had been responsible for some of the most daring night-raids on those boutiques, beauty shops and stores which stocked cosmetics notoriously tested out on animals. This was because Caro-Otter was, or rather had been, a model. But Otter (like her mother) was cunning; she had not advertised her strong views on the protection of animals to her agent, beyond declining gracefully to model fur coats (and that was by now a not uncommon stance among top models). Instead she had seized every opportunity to garner information as to which products were actually 'guilty'.

  Then by night with Pussy she had poured super-glue into locks, and sprayed walls with the red Innoright logo with its huge pathetic animals' eyes gazing out of the letter O. Otter and Pussy had a particular taste for paint-stripping the cars of the smart young (male) managing directors of cosmetic firms who dated Otter following a photographic session on behalf of their products. However mother and daughter were also careful to paint-strip women's cars as well; the fact that it was not so emotionally satisfying was, they agreed, no reason to avoid such a necessary task.

  But Otter was dead, dead in a car crash, the car driven by one of those smart young executives who was dating Otter and had dined rather too well in the process. (The man himself had survived.) She would have been twenty-two this month - the same age as Princess Amy, something which Pussy occasionally bore in mind
when looking at newspaper photographs of nubile Amy, Amy smiling fetchingly into the camera, 5' 3", plump and privileged Amy who was alive while 5' 10" attenuated willowy Otter lay in her grave.

  Pussy had become quite ruthless since Otter's death, and her single-handed attack on butchers' shops (including the savaging of an Alsatian which guarded one shop at night) had caused some disquiet among the Innoright Overground Group who had not been consulted.

  'Even if Alsatians are incurable meat-caters, as you know we regard that as human failure,' began the Chairman. 'Besides which, the whole subject of canine re-education towards vegetarianism is in its infancy, and Innoright Overground policy —'

  'That Alsatian tore a cat to pieces last week,' said Pussy coldly.

  'Yes, but surely using a knitting-needle -'

  Monkey thought of that conversation now as he gazed at Pussy's broad slightly flushed face. He had been given a free hand to choose his own team by the Innoright Overground, and had thus not mentioned to them that he had chosen the woman who was known as Pussy. He had believed at the time that he could handle her, use her dedication, her madness springing from heartbreak, for the good of the cause. As with Beagle in the National Portrait Gallery, Monkey hoped he had not made a mistake.