“Sir,” Urquhart interjected, “we are alone. I would welcome any advice.”
“No, not for the moment. You have much to do and I must not delay you.” He rose to indicate that the audience was at an end, but he made no move toward the door, steepling his fingers to the point of his bony, uneven nose and remaining deep in thought, like a man at prayer. “Perhaps—if you will allow me?—there is just one point. I’ve been reading the papers.” He waved toward the chaos of his desk. “The old Department of Industry buildings on Victoria Street, which are to be demolished. The current buildings are hideous, such a bad advertisement for the twentieth century, they deserve to go. I’d love to drive the bulldozer myself. But the site is one of the most important in Westminster, near the Parliament buildings and cheek by jowl with the Abbey itself, one of our greatest ecclesiastical monuments. A rare opportunity for us to grasp, don’t you think, to create something worthy of our era, something we can pass on to future generations with pride? I do so hope that you, your Government, will ensure the site is developed…how shall I put it?” The clipped boarding school tones searched for an appropriately diplomatic phrase. “Sympathetically.” He nodded in self-approval and seemed emboldened by Urquhart’s intent stare. “Encouraging change while preserving continuity, as one wise fellow put it? I know the Environment Secretary is considering several different proposals and, frankly, some of them are so outlandish they would disgrace a penal colony. Can’t we for once in our parsimonious lives make a choice in keeping with the existing character of Westminster Abbey, create something that will respect the achievements of our forefathers, not insult them by allowing some misguided modernist to”—his lips quivered in indignation—“to construct a stainless-steel mausoleum that crams people on the inside and has its mechanical entrails displayed without?” Passion had begun to overtake the diffidence and a flush had risen to color his cheeks.
Urquhart smiled in reassurance, an expression that came as easily as oxygen. “Sir, I can assure you that the Government”—he wanted to say “my Government” but the words still seemed to dry behind his dentures—“will have environmental concerns at the forefront of their considerations.” More platitudes, but what else was he supposed to say?
“Oh, I do hope so. Perhaps I should apologize for raising the matter, but I understand the Environment Secretary is to make a final decision at any time.”
For a moment Urquhart felt like reminding the King that it was a quasi-judicial matter, that many months and more millions had been poured into an official planning inquiry that now awaited the Solomon-like deliberation of the relevant Minister. Urquhart might have suggested that, to some, the King’s intervention would look no better than jury nobbling. But he didn’t. “I’ll look into it. You have my word, sir.”
The King’s pale blue eyes had a permanent downward cast that made him appear always sincere and frequently mournful as though burdened by some sense of guilt, yet now they sparkled with unmistakable enthusiasm. He reached out for the other man’s hand. “Mr. Urquhart, I believe we are going to get along famously.”
Seemingly unbidden, the King’s Private Secretary was once more at the open doors and with a bow of respect Urquhart made his way toward them. He had all but crossed the threshold when he heard the words thrown after him. “Thank you once again, Prime Minister!”
Prime Minister. There it was. The first time. He’d done it.
***
“So…what did he say?” They were in the car on the way to Downing Street before his wife roused him from his reverie.
“What? Oh, not a lot. Wished me well. Talked about the great opportunities ahead. Went on about a building site near Westminster Abbey. Wants me to ensure it’s built in mock Tudor or some such nonsense.”
“Will you humor him?”
“Mortima, if sincerity could build temples then the whole of England would be covered in his follies, but this is no longer the Dark Ages. The King’s job is to give garden parties and to save us the bother of electing someone else president, not to go round interfering.”
Mortima snorted her agreement as she fumbled impatiently through her bag in search of lipstick. She was a Colquhoun by birth, a family that could trace its descent in direct line from the ancient kings of Scotland. They had long since been stripped of the feudal estates and heirlooms, but she had never lost her sense of social positioning or her belief that most modern aristocracy were interlopers—including “the current Royal Family,” as she would frequently put it. Royalty was merely an accident of birth, and of marriage and of death and the occasional execution or bloody murder; it could just as easily have been a Colquhoun as a Windsor, and all the more pure stock for that. At times she became distinctly tedious on the subject, and Urquhart decided to head her off.
“Of course I shall humor him. Better a King with a conscience than not, I suspect, and the last thing I need is sour grapes growing all over the Palace. Anyway, there are other battles to be fought and I want him and his popularity firmly behind me. I shall need it.” His tone was serious and his eyes set upon a future of perceived challenges. “But at the end of the day, Mortima, I am the Prime Minister and he is the King. He does what I tell him to, not the other way around. The job’s ceremony and sanctimony, that’s all. He’s the Monarch, not a bloody architect.”
They were driving past the Banqueting Hall in Whitehall, slowing down as they approached the barriers at the head of Downing Street, and Urquhart was relieved to see there were rather more people here to wave and cheer him on for the benefit of the cameras than at the Palace. He thought he recognized a couple of young faces; perhaps party headquarters had turned out their rent-a-crowd. His wife idly slicked down a stray lock of his hair while his mind turned to the reshuffle and the remarks he would make on the doorstep, which would be televised around the world.
“So what are you going to do?” Mortima pressed.
“It really doesn’t matter,” Urquhart muttered out of the corner of his mouth as he smiled for the cameras as the car turned into Downing Street. “As a new King the man is inexperienced, and as constitutional Monarch he is impotent. He has all the menace and bite of a rubber duck. But fortunately on this matter I happen to agree with him. Away with modernism!” He waved as a policeman came forward to open the heavy car door. “So it really can’t be of any consequence…”
Three
Loyalty is the vice of the underclasses. I hope I am above such things.
“Put the papers down, David. For God’s sake take your nose out of them for just a minute of our day together.” The voice was tense, more nervous than aggressive.
The gray eyes remained impassive, not moving from the sheaf of documents upon which they had been fixed ever since he had sat down at the breakfast table. The only facial reaction was an irascible twitch of the neatly trimmed mustache. “I’m off in ten minutes, Fiona; I simply have to finish them. Today of all days.”
“There’s something else we have to finish. So put the bloody papers down!”
With reluctance David Mycroft raised his eyes in time to see his wife’s hand shaking so vigorously that the coffee splashed over the edge of her cup. “What on earth’s the matter?”
“You. And me. That’s the matter.” She was struggling to control herself. “There’s nothing left to our marriage and I want out.”
The King’s press aide and principal public spokesman switched automatically into diplomatic gear. “Look, let’s not have a row, not now, I’m in a hurry and…”
“Don’t you realize? We never have rows. That’s the problem!” The cup smashed down into the saucer, overturning and spreading a menacing brown stain across the tablecloth. For the first time he lowered his sheaf of papers, every movement careful and deliberate, as was every aspect of his life.
“Perhaps I could get some time off. Not today, but…We could go away together. I know it’s been a long time since we had any rea
l chance to talk…”
“It’s not lack of time, David! We could have all the time in the world and it would make no difference. It’s you, and me. The reason we don’t have any rows is because we have nothing to argue about. Nothing at all. There’s no passion, nothing. All we have is a shell. I used to dream that once the children were off our hands it might all change.” She shook her head. “But I’m tired of deluding myself. It will never change. You will never change. And I don’t suppose I will.” There was pain and she was dabbing her eyes, yet held her control. This was no flash of temper.
“Are you…feeling all right, Fiona? You know, women at your time of life…”
She smarted at his patronizing idiocy. “Women in their forties, David, have their needs, their feelings. But how would you know? When did you last look at me as a woman? When did you last look at any woman?” She returned the insult, meaning it to hurt. She knew that to break through she was going to have to batter down the walls he had built around himself. He had always been so closed, private, a man of diminutive stature who had sought to cope with his perceived physical inadequacies by being utterly formal and punctilious in everything he did. Never a hair on his small and rather boyish head out of place, even the streaks of gray beginning to appear around his dark temples looking elegant rather than aging. He always ate breakfast with his jacket on and buttoned.
“Look, can’t this wait? You know I have to be at the Palace any—”
“The bloody Palace again. It’s your home, your life, your lover. The only emotion you ever show nowadays is about your ridiculous job and your wretched King.”
“Fiona! That’s uncalled for. Leave him out of this.” The mustache with its hint of red bristled in indignation.
“How can I? You serve him, not me. His needs come before mine. He’s helped ruin our marriage far more effectively than any mistress, so don’t expect me to bow and fawn like the rest.”
He glanced anxiously at his watch. “Look, for goodness’ sake, can we talk about this tonight? Perhaps I can get back early.”
She was dabbing at the coffee stain with her napkin, trying to delay meeting his gaze. Her voice was calmer, resolved. “No, David. Tonight I shall be with somebody else.”
“There’s someone else?” There was a catch in his throat; he had clearly never considered the possibility. “Since when?”
She looked up from the mess on the table with eyes that were now defiant and steady, no longer trying to evade. This had been coming for so long, she couldn’t hide from it anymore. “Since two years after we got married, David, there has been someone else. A succession of ‘someone elses.’ You never had it in you to satisfy me—I never blamed you for that, really I didn’t, it was just the luck of the draw. What I bitterly resent is that you never even tried. I was never that important to you, not as a woman. I have never been more than a housekeeper, a laundress, your twenty-four-hour skivvy, an object to parade around the dinner circuit. Someone to give you respectability at Court. Even the children were only for show.”
“Not true.” But there was no real passion in his protest, any more than there had been passion in their marriage. She had always known they were sexually incompatible; he seemed all too willing to pour his physical drive into his job while at first she had contented herself with the social cachet his work at the Palace brought them. But not for long. In truth she couldn’t even be sure who the father of her second child was, while if he had doubts on the matter he didn’t seem to care. He had “done his duty,” as he once put it, and that had been an end of it. Even now as she poured scorn on him as a cuckold she couldn’t get him to respond. There should be self-righteous rage somewhere, surely, wasn’t that what his blessed code of chivalry called for? But he seemed so empty, hollow inside. Their marriage had been nothing but a rat’s maze within which both led unrelated lives, meeting only as if by accident before passing on their separate ways. Now she was leaping for the exit.
“Fiona, can’t we—”
“No, David. We can’t.”
The telephone had started ringing in its insistent, irresistible manner, summoning him to his duty, a task to which he had dedicated his life and to which he was now asked to surrender his marriage. We’ve had some great times, haven’t we, he wanted to argue, but he could only remember times that were good rather than great and those were long, long ago. She had always come a distant second, not consciously but now, in their new mood of truth, undeniably. He looked at Fiona through watery eyes that expressed sorrow and begged forgiveness; there was no spite. But there was fear. Marriage had been like a great sheet anchor in strong emotional seas, preventing him from being tossed about by tempestuous winds and blown in directions that were reckless and lacking in restraint. Wedlock. It had worked precisely because it had been form without substance, like the repetitive chanting of psalms that had been forced on him during his miserable school years at Ampleforth. Marriage had been a burden but, for him, a necessary one, a distraction, a diversion. Self-denial, but also self-protection. And now the anchor chains were being cut.
Fiona sat motionless across a table littered with toast and fragments of eggshell and bone china, the household clutter and crumbs that represented the total sum of their life together. The telephone still demanded him. Without a further word he rose to answer it.
Four
The scent of victory blinds many men. The game isn’t over until the bayonet has been run in and twisted.
“Come in, Tim, and close the door.”
Urquhart was sitting in the Cabinet Room, alone except for the new arrival, occupying the only chair around the coffin-shaped table that had arms. Before him was a simple leather folder and a telephone. The rest of the table stood bare.
“Not exactly luxurious, is it? But I’m beginning to like it.” Urquhart chuckled.
Tim Stamper looked around, surprised to discover no one else present. He was—or had been until half an hour ago when Urquhart had exchanged the commission of Chief Whip for that of Prime Minister—the other man’s loyal deputy. The role of Chief Whip is mysterious, that of his deputy invisible, but together they had combined into a force of incalculable influence, since the Whip’s Office is the base from where discipline within the Parliamentary Party is maintained through a judicious mixture of team spirit, arm twisting, and outright thuggery.
Stamper had ideal qualities for the job—a lean, pinched face with protruding nose and dark eyes of exceptional brightness that served to give him the appearance of a ferret, and a capacity for rummaging about in the dark corners of his colleagues’ private lives to uncover their personal and political weaknesses. It was a job of vulnerabilities, guarding one’s own while exploiting others’. He had long been Urquhart’s protégé; fifteen years younger, a former estate agent from Essex, it was an attraction of opposites. Urquhart was sophisticated, elegant, academic, highly polished; Stamper was none of these and wore off-the-rack suits from British Home Stores. Yet what they shared was perhaps more important—ambition, an arrogance that for one was intellectual and for the other instinctive, and an understanding of power. The combination had proved stunningly effective in plotting Urquhart’s path to the premiership. Stamper’s turn would come, that had been the implicit promise to the younger man. Now he was here to collect.
“Prime Minister.” He offered a theatrical bow of respect. “Prime Minister,” Stamper repeated, practicing a different intonation as if trying to sell him the freehold. He had a familiar, almost camp manner that hid the steel beneath, and the two colleagues began to laugh in a fashion that managed to be both mocking and conspiratorial, like two burglars after a successful night out. Stamper was careful to ensure he stopped laughing first; it wouldn’t do to outmock a Prime Minister. They had shared so much over recent months, but he was aware that Prime Ministers have a tendency to hold back from their colleagues, even their fellow conspirators, and Urquhart didn’t continue laughing for lon
g.
“Tim, I wanted to see you entirely à deux.”
“Probably means I’m due to get a bollocking. What’ve I done, anyway?” His tone was light, yet Urquhart noticed the anxious downward cast at the corner of Stamper’s mouth and discovered he was enjoying the feeling of mastery implied by his colleague’s discomfort.
“Sit down, Tim. Opposite me.”
Stamper took the chair and looked across at his old friend. The sight confirmed just how much their relationship had changed. Urquhart sat before a large oil portrait of Robert Walpole, the first modern and arguably greatest Prime Minister who had watched for two centuries over the deliberations in this room of the mighty and mendacious, the woeful and miserably weak. Urquhart was his successor, elevated by his peers, anointed by his Monarch and now installed. The telephone beside him could summon statesmen to their fate or command the country to war. It was a power shared with no other man in the realm; indeed, he was no longer just a man but, for better or worse, was now the stuff of history. Whether in that history he would rate a footnote or an entire chapter only time would tell.
Urquhart sensed the swirling emotions of the other man. “Different, isn’t it, Tim? And we shall never be able to turn back the clock. It didn’t hit me until a moment ago, not while I was at the Palace, not with the media at the front door here, not even when I walked inside. It all seemed like a great theater piece and I’d simply been assigned one of the roles. Yet as I stepped across the threshold every worker in Downing Street was assembled in the hallway, from the highest civil servant in the land to the cleaners and telephonists, perhaps two hundred of them. They greeted me with such enthusiasm that I almost expected bouquets to be thrown. The exhilaration of applause.” He sighed. “It was beginning to go to my head, until I remembered that scarcely an hour beforehand they’d gone through the same routine with my predecessor as he drove off to oblivion. That lot’ll probably applaud at their own funerals.” He moistened his thin lips, as was his habit when reflecting. “Then they brought me here, to the Cabinet Room, and left me on my own. It was completely silent, as though I’d fallen into a time capsule. Everything in order, meticulous, except for the Prime Minister’s chair, which had been drawn back. For me! It was only when I touched it, ran my finger across its back, realized no one was going to shout at me if I sat down, that finally it dawned on me. It isn’t just another chair or another job, but the only one of its kind. You know I’m not by nature a humble man yet, dammit, for a moment it got to me.” There was a moment of prolonged silence, before his palm smacked down on the table. “But don’t worry. I’ve recovered!”
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Page 36