“Then I hope you understand your women just as well, and much better than that oaf of a Housing Minister…In the political rather than the biblical sense,” she added as an afterthought, offering a slightly impertinent smile.
“I’m not sure I follow.”
“Women. You know, fifty-two percent of the electorate? Those strange creatures who are good enough to share your beds but not your clubs and who think your Government is about as supportive and up-to-the-mark as broken underwear elastic?”
In an Englishwoman her abruptness would have been viewed as bad manners, but it was normal to afford Americans somewhat greater license. They talked, ate, dressed differently, were even different in bed so Urquhart had been told, although he had no firsthand experience. Perhaps he should ask the Housing Minister. “It’s surely not that bad…”
“For the last two months your Party has been pulling itself apart while it chose a new leader. Not one of the candidates was a woman. And according to women voters, none of the issues you discussed were of much relevance to them, either. Particularly to younger women. You treat them as if they were blind copies of their husbands. They don’t like it and you’re losing out. Badly.”
Urquhart realized he was relinquishing control of this conversation; she was working him over far more effectively than anything he could have expected from the charity representatives, who had now drifted off in bitter disappointment. He tried to remember the last time he had torn apart an opinion poll and examined its entrails, but couldn’t. He’d cut his political teeth in an era when instinct and ideas rather than psephologists and their computers had ruled the political scene, and his instincts had served him very well. So far. Yet this woman was making him feel dated and out of touch. And he could see a piano being wheeled into a far corner of the huge reception room.
“Miss Quine, I’d like very much to hear more of your views, but I fear I’m about to be called to other duties.” His wife was already leading the tenor by the hand toward the piano, and Urquhart knew that at any moment she would be searching for him to offer a suitable introduction. “Would you be free at some other time, perhaps? It seems I know a great deal less about women than I thought.”
“I appear to be in demand by Government Ministers this evening,” she mused. Her jacket had fallen open to reveal an elegantly cut but simple dress beneath, secured by an oversized belt buckle, which for the first time afforded him a glimpse of her figure. She saw he had noticed, and had appreciated. “I hope at least you will be able to say please.”
“I’m sure I will.” He smiled as his wife beckoned him forward.
Eight
Royal palaces are dangerous places in which to sleep or serve. They have far too many windows.
December: The Second Week
The signs of festive celebration were muted this year. Mycroft, with the pressure of work easing as journalists forsook word processors for the crush of Hamleys’ toy counter and the karaoke bars, trudged aimlessly through the damp streets in search of…he knew not what. Something, anything, to keep him out of the tomb-like silence of his house. The sales had started early, even before Christmas, yet instead of customers, the shop doorways seemed full of young people with northern accents and filthy hands asking for money. Or was it simply that he’d never had time to notice them before? He made a pretense at Christmas shopping along King’s Road, but quickly became frustrated. He hadn’t the slightest idea what his children might want, what they were interested in, and anyway they would be spending Christmas with their mother. “Their mother,” not “Fiona.” He noticed how easily he slipped into the lexicon of the unloved. He was staring into the window of a shop offering provocative women’s lingerie, wondering if that was really what his daughter wore, when his thoughts were interrupted by a young girl who, beneath the makeup and lipstick, looked not much older than sixteen. It was cold and drizzling, yet the front of her plastic raincoat was unbuttoned.
“’Ullo, sunshine. Merry Christmas. Need anything to stick on top of your tree?” She tugged at her raincoat, revealing an ample portion of young, pale flesh. “Christmas sale special. Only thirty quid.”
He gazed long, mentally stripping away the rest of the raincoat, discovering a woman who, beneath the plastic, imitation leather, and foundation, retained all the vigor and appealing firmness of youth, with even white teeth and a smile he could almost mistake as genuine. He hadn’t talked to anyone about anything except business for more than three days, and he knew he desperately missed companionship. Even bickering with his wife about the brand of toothpaste had been better than silence, nothing. He needed some human contact, a touch, and he would feel no guilt, not after Fiona’s performance. A chance to get back at her in some way, to be something other than a witless cuckold. He looked once again at the girl and even as he thought of revenge he found himself overcome with revulsion. The thought of her nakedness, her nipples, her body hair, the scratchy bits under her armpits, the very smell of her suddenly made him feel nauseous. He panicked, at the embarrassment of being propositioned—what if someone saw?—but more in surprise at the strength of his own feelings. He found her physically repellent—was it simply because she was the same sex as Fiona? He found a five-pound note in his hand, thrust it at her, and spat, “Go away! God sake…go away!” He then panicked more, realizing that someone might have seen him give the tart money, turned and ran. She followed, calling after him, anxious not to forgo the chance of any trick, particularly one who gave away free fivers. He’d run seventy yards before he realized he was still making a fool of himself out on the street and saw a door for a drinking club. He dashed in, lungs and stomach heaving.
He ignored the sardonic look of the man who took his coat and went straight to the bar, ordering himself a large whiskey. It took a while before he had recovered his breath and his composure sufficiently to look around and run the risk of catching someone’s eye. The club itself was nothing more than a revamped pub with black walls, lots of mirrors, and plentiful disco lights. There was a raised dance floor at one end, but neither the lights nor juke box were working. It was still early; there was scarcely a handful of customers who gazed distractedly at one of the plentiful television monitors on which an old Marlon Brando film was playing, the sound turned off so as not to clash with the piped Christmas music the staff had turned on for their own entertainment. There were large photos of Brando on the walls, in motorcycle leathers from one of his early films, along with posters of Presley, Jack Nicholson, and a couple of other younger film stars he didn’t recognize. It was odd, different, a total contrast to the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall to which Mycroft was accustomed. There were no seats; this was a watering hole designed for standing and moving, not for spending all evening mooning over a half pint. He rather liked it.
“You entered in something of a hurry.” A man, in his thirties and well presented, a Brummie by his accent, was standing next to him. “Mind if I join you?”
Mycroft shrugged. He was still dazed from his encounter and lacked the self-confidence to be rude and turn away a friendly voice. The stranger was casually but very neatly dressed, his stone-washed jeans immaculately pressed, as was his white shirt, sleeves rolled up narrow and high and with great care. He was obviously fit, the muscles showed prominently.
“You looked as if you were running from something.”
The whiskey was making Mycroft feel warmer, he needed to ease up a little. He laughed. “A woman actually. Tried to pick me up!”
They were both laughing, and Mycroft noted the stranger inspecting him carefully. He didn’t object; the eyes were warm, concerned, interested. And interesting. A golden shade of brown.
“It’s usually the other way round. Women running from me,” he continued.
“Makes you sound like something of a stud.”
“No, that’s not what I meant…” Mycroft bit his lip, suddenly feeling the pain and the humiliation of being alo
ne at Christmas. “My wife walked out on me. After twenty-three years.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Why should you be? You don’t know her, or me…” Once more the confusion flooded over him. “My apologies. Churlish of me.”
“Don’t worry. Shout if it helps. I don’t mind.”
“Thanks. I might just do that.” He extended a hand. “David.”
“Kenny. Just remember, David, that you’re not on your own. Believe me, there are thousands of people just like you. Feeling alone at Christmas, when there’s no need. One door closes, another opens. Think of it as a new beginning.”
“Somebody else I know said something like that.”
“Which must make it right.” He had a broad, easy smile that had a lot of life to it and was drinking straight from a bottle of exotic Mexican beer with a lime slice stuffed in the neck. Mycroft looked at his whiskey, and wondered whether he should try something new, but decided he was probably too old to change his habits. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had tried anything or met anyone new, outside of work.
“What do you do, Kenny?”
“Cabin crew. Fly-the-fag BA. And you?”
“Civil servant.”
“Sounds horribly dull. Then my job sounds horribly glamorous, but it’s not. You get bored fending off movie queens in first class. You travel a lot?”
Mycroft was just about to answer when the piped strains of “Jingle Bells” were replaced by the heavy thumping of the jukebox. The evening was warming up. He had to bend close to hear what Kenny was saying and to be heard. Kenny had a freshly scrubbed smell with the slightest trace of aftershave. He was bawling into Mycroft’s ear to make himself heard, suggesting they might find a place to eat, out of the din.
Mycroft was trembling once again. It wasn’t just the prospect of going back out alone onto the cold streets again, perhaps finding the tart waiting to accost him, or returning home to an empty house. It wasn’t just the fact that this was the first time for years someone had been interested in him as a person, rather than as someone who was close to the King. It wasn’t even that he felt warmed by Kenny’s easy smile and already felt better than he had done all week. It was the fact that, however much he tried to hide from it or explain it away, he wanted to get to know Kenny very much better. Very much better indeed.
Nine
His royal mind progresses by a series of afterthoughts. He treads the tightrope that stretches between the Constitution and his conscience with the blinding sense of purpose of a pilchard.
The two men were walking around the lake, one dressed warmly in hacking jacket and gum boots while the other shivered inside his cashmere overcoat and struggled to prevent his hand-stitched leather shoes slipping in the damp grass. Near at hand a domestic tractor was plowing up a substantial section of plush lawn marked off inside guide ropes while, beyond, a pair of workmen maneuvered saplings and young trees into holes that further disfigured the once gracious lawn, already scarred by the tire marks of earthmoving equipment. The effect was to spread dark winter mud everywhere, and even the enthusiasm of the King couldn’t persuade Urquhart that the gardens of Buckingham Palace would ever recover their former glories.
The King had suggested the walk. At the start of their first weekly audience to discuss matters of state, the King had clasped Urquhart with both hands and thanked him fervently for the decision on the Westminster Abbey site, announced that morning, which had been hailed as a triumph by heritage groups as vehemently as it had been attacked by the luminaries of the architects’ profession. But as Urquhart had concluded at Cabinet Committee, how many votes had the architects? The King inclined to the view that his intervention had probably been helpful, perhaps even crucial, and Urquhart chose not to disillusion him. Prime Ministers were constantly surrounded by the complaints of the disappointed and it made a refreshing change to be greeted with genuine, unaffected enthusiasm.
The King was ebullient and, in the characteristically Spartan fashion that often made him oblivious to the discomfort of others, had insisted on showing Urquhart the work that had begun to transform the Palace gardens. “So many acres of barren, closely cropped lawn, Mr. Urquhart, with not a nesting place in sight. I want this to be made a sanctuary right in the heart of the city, to re-create the natural habitat of London before we smothered it in concrete.”
Urquhart was picking his way carefully around the freshly plowed turf, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the cloying earth and divots while the King enthused about the muddy tract. “Here, this is where I want the wildflower garden. I’ll sow it myself. You can’t imagine what a sense of fulfillment it gives me, dragging around a bucket of earth or manhandling a tree.”
Urquhart decided it would be ill-mannered to mention that the last recorded instance of someone with such an upbringing manhandling a tree had been the King’s distant ancestor, George III, who in a fit of clinical madness had descended from his coach in Windsor Great Park and knighted an oak. He also lost the American colonies, and had eventually been locked away.
“I want to bring more wildlife into the garden; there’s so much that can be done, so simply. Choosing the right mix of trees, allowing some areas of grass to grow to their natural height so they can provide cover. Look, I’m putting up these nesting boxes.” He indicated a workman halfway up a ladder, fixing wooden boxes to the high brick wall that ran all the way around the gardens.
The King was walking, head down and fingers steepled, in the prayer posture he so often adopted when engrossed in thought. “This could be done in every park and large garden in London, you know. It would transform the wildlife of our city, of cities all round the country. We’ve wasted so many opportunities in the past…” He turned toward Urquhart. “I want to put an idea to you. I would like to make our weekly meetings an opportunity to discuss what the Government might do to promote such matters. And how I might help.”
“I see,” Urquhart mused, the creeping cold sending his left leg into spasm while a pair of ducks splashed their way into flight from the lake. Wonderful targets, he thought. “That’s a kind offer, of course, sir. But I wouldn’t want the Environment Secretary to feel in any way that we were undermining his authority. I have to keep a happy team around me…”
“You are absolutely right, I do agree. That’s why I took the precaution of chatting about this with the Environment Secretary myself. I didn’t want to put any proposal to you that might be an embarrassment. He said he would be delighted, offered to brief me himself.”
Bloody Dickie. He’d no sense of humor, that was clear; now it appeared as if he had no other sense either.
“Today this is just a muddy field,” the King continued. “But in the years to come this could be a new way of life for us all. Don’t you see?”
Urquhart couldn’t. He could see only piles of mud spread around like newly turned graves. Damp was seeping through the welts of his shoes and he was beginning to feel miserably uncomfortable. “You must take care, sir. Environmental matters are becomingly increasingly the stuff of party politics. It’s important that you remain above such sordid matters.”
The King laughed. “Fear not, Prime Minister. If I were meant to become involved in party politics the Constitution would have allowed me a vote! No, such things are not for me; in public I shall stick strictly to matters of the broadest principle. Simply to encourage, to remind people that there is a better way ahead.”
Urquhart was growing increasingly irritable. His socks were sodden, and the thought of the public being told from on high that there was a better way ahead than the one presently being pursued, no matter how delicately phrased, smacked of grist to the Opposition’s mill and filled him with unease, but he said nothing in the hope that his silence would bring an end to the conversation. He wanted a warm bath and a stiff whiskey, not more regal thoughts on how to do his job.
“In fact, I thought I might pursue t
he point in a speech I have to make in ten days’ time to the charitable foundations…”
“The environment?” The irritation and impatience were beginning to show in Urquhart’s tone, but the King appeared not to have noticed.
“No, no, Mr. Urquhart. An address intended to bring people together, to remind them how much we have achieved, and can continue to achieve, as a nation. Broad principles, no specifics.”
Urquhart felt relieved. An appeal to motherhood.
“The charitable foundations are making such prodigious efforts, when there are so many forces trying to divide us,” the King continued. “Successful from the less well-off. Prosperous South from the Celtic fringe. Suburbs from the inner cities. No harm in encouraging families secure in their own homes this Christmas to spare a thought for those forced to sleep rough in the streets. In the rush, so many seem to have been left behind, and at this time of year it’s appropriate to reach out to the less fortunate, don’t you think? To remind us all that we must work toward being one nation.”
“You’re intending to say that?”
“Something on those lines.”
“Impossible!”
It was a mistake, a rash outburst brought on by frustration and the growing cold. Since there was no book of rules, no written Constitution to order their conduct, it was vital to maintain the fiction of agreement, of discussing but never disputing, no matter how great their differences, for in a house of cards that lean one upon the other each card has its place. A King must not be seen to disagree with a Prime Minister, nor a Prime Minister with a King. Yet it had happened. One impatient word had undermined the authority of one and threatened both.
The King’s complexion colored rapidly; he was not used to being contradicted. The scar on his left cheekbone inflicted in a fall from a horse showed suddenly prominent and purple while his eyes carried an undisguised look of annoyance. Urquhart sought refuge in justification.
The House of Cards Complete Trilogy Page 39