Reckless

by William Nicholson

  Contents

  Cover Page

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  PRELUDE

  PART ONE: Warning 1945 – 1950

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO: Deterrence January 1961 – June 1962

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  PART THREE: Mutually Assured Destruction July – September 1962

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  PART FOUR: Retaliation October 1962

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  HISTORICAL NOTE

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Quercus Editions Ltd.

  55 Baker Street

  7th Floor, South Block

  London

  W1U 8EW

  Copyright © 2014 William Nicholson

  The moral right of William Nicholson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  HB ISBN 978 1 78206 642 2

  TPB ISBN 978 1 78206 643 9

  EBOOK ISBN 978 1 78206 644 6

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  You can find this and many other great books at:

  www.quercusbooks.co.uk

  Also by William Nicholson

  The Trial of True Love

  The Society of Others

  The Secret Intensity of Everyday Life

  All the Hopeful Lovers

  The Golden Hour

  Motherland

  Books for children

  The Wind Singer

  Slaves of the Mastery

  Firesong

  Seeker

  Jango

  Noman

  Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just before his death, which I know and love. From it a quotation:

  ‘As East and West

  In all flat maps – and I am one – are one,

  So death doth touch the resurrection.’

  That still does not make a Trinity, but in another better known devotional poem Donne opens, ‘Batter my heart, three-person’d God … ’

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, on why he named

  the first atom bomb test ‘Trinity’

  Batter my heart, three-person’d God; for you

  As yet but knock …

  Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

  But am betrothed unto your enemy;

  Divorce me, untie me, or break that knot again,

  Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

  Except you enthral me, never shall be free,

  Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

  John Donne, Holy Sonnet XIV

  PRELUDE

  Tea at Cliveden: September 1943

  Rupert Blundell did not want to go to tea with the princess. He was unsure how to address her, and he was shy with girls at the best of times. Lord Mountbatten, his commanding officer, brushed aside his murmurs of dissent.

  ‘Nancy wants some young people,’ he said. ‘You’re a young person, and you’re available.’

  Rupert was twenty-six, which felt to himself both young and old. Princess Elizabeth was of course much younger, but being heir to the throne she was unlikely to be short of savoir-faire.

  ‘And anyway,’ said Mountbatten, ‘you’ll like Cliveden. They still have a pastry cook there, and it has one of the best views in England.’

  So Rupert put on his rarely worn No.2 dress uniform, which fitted poorly round the crotch, and reported to COHQ in Richmond Terrace. A car was to pick him up from here and drive him to Cliveden, Lady Astor’s country house.

  ‘Very smart, Rupert,’ said Joyce Wedderburn, passing through on her way back to her office.

  ‘I’m under orders,’ said Rupert glumly.

  ‘Aren’t the trousers a bit small for you?’

  ‘In parts.’

  ‘Well, I think you look very dashing.’

  She gave him one of her half-smiles that he could never interpret, that suggested she meant something other than what she seemed to be saying. But Rupert liked Joyce. He could talk to her more freely than to the other girls. There was no nonsense about her, and she had a fiancé in the Navy, in minesweepers.

  The car arrived: a Humber Imperial Landaulette, driven by one of Lady Astor’s chauffeurs. Its rear hood was down, and sitting in the wide back seat was an American officer of about Rupert’s own age. He introduced himself as Captain McGeorge Bundy, an aide attached to Admiral Alan R. Kirk, commander of the Allied amphibious forces.

  ‘Call me Mac,’ he said.

  He revealed to Rupert that they were to represent the wartime allies at this tea party. There was to be a Russian too. All this in a crisp monotone, as if to impart the information in the most efficient way possible.

  The Russian was news to Rupert.

  ‘I’ve no idea what we’re supposed to do,’ he said. ‘Have you?’

  ‘I think the idea is the princess wants to meet people nearer to her own age,’ said Bundy.

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Maybe it’s a blind date.’ Bundy smiled, but with his mouth only. ‘How’d you like to marry your future queen?’

  ‘God preserve me,’ said Rupert.

  Mac Bundy was trim and sleek, with sand-coloured hair brushed back smoothly over his high forehead. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His navy-blue uniform had every appearance of being excellently cut. Looking at him, Rupert felt as he did with so many Americans that they were the physically perfected version of the model, while he himself was a poor first draft.

  He shifted on the car seat to ease the itching in his trousers. The landaulette drove through Hyde Park, past the Serpentine. From where he was sitting he could see himself reflected in the dr
iver’s mirror: his long face, his thick-rimmed spectacles, his protruding ears. He looked away, out of long habit.

  ‘So who got you into this?’ said Bundy.

  ‘Mountbatten. He’s a friend of Lady Astor’s.’

  ‘Kirk fingered me,’ said Bundy, adding in a lower tone, with a glance at the driver, ‘His actual order was, “Go and humour the old bat.”’

  They exchanged details of their postings. Bundy confessed he owed his staff job to family connections.

  ‘I wanted a combat posting. My mother had other ideas.’

  His father, Harvey Bundy, was currently a senior adviser in the US War Department under Henry Stimson.

  ‘So this princess,’ he said. ‘I hear she’s all there.’

  ‘All there?’ said Rupert.

  Bundy curved one hand before his chest.

  ‘Oh, right,’ said Rupert. ‘I wouldn’t know.’

  He had never thought of the seventeen-year-old Princess Elizabeth as a sexual being.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Bundy. ‘I’m not going to wolf-whistle.’

  Rupert looked at the passing shopfronts and was silent. Wartime was supposed to change things, break down the barriers. But even when the barriers were down, you had to do it yourself. No one was going to do it for you. There was no one you could talk to about these things. No one in all the world. About feeling ashamed. About wanting it so much.

  The car emerged onto the Bayswater Road.

  ‘I asked round for tips on meeting royalty,’ said Bundy. ‘Apparently you call her ma’am, and you don’t sit until she sits.’

  ‘Ma’am? The poor girl’s only seventeen.’

  ‘So what are you going to call her? Liz?’

  ‘In the family she’s called Lilibet.’

  ‘How’d you know that?’

  ‘Mountbatten told me.’

  ‘Okay. Lilibet it is. Have another slice of pie, Lilibet. Want to take a walk in the shrubbery, Lilibet?’

  Rupert glanced nervously at the back of the chauffeur’s head, but he showed no signs that he was listening.

  ‘Is that what you do with girls?’ said Rupert. ‘Take them into the shrubbery?’

  ‘I’ll be honest with you,’ said Bundy. ‘I’m no expert.’ He leaned closer and spoke low. ‘When I was twelve years old we went to Paris, and my mother took me to the Folies-Bergère. The way she tells it, I got bored by the naked girls and went outside to read a book.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘That’s her story.’

  The car was now turning into Kensington Palace Gardens. There on the pavement outside the Soviet embassy was a young Russian officer, standing stiffly, almost at attention.

  ‘Our noble ally,’ said Bundy.

  The Russian had a square, serious face and heavy eyebrows. He gazed inscrutably on the open-backed car as it pulled up beside him.

  ‘You are the party for Lady Astor?’

  He sounded exactly like an American.

  ‘That’s us,’ said Bundy. ‘Jump in.’

  He squeezed onto the seat beside them, and the car set off down Notting Hill Gate to Holland Park. His name was Oleg Troyanovsky. His father had been the Soviet Ambassador in Washington before the war, and he had been sent to school at Sidwell Friends. Within minutes he and Bundy had discovered mutual acquaintances.

  ‘Of course I know the Hayes boys,’ said the Russian. ‘I was on the tennis team with Oliver Hayes.’

  ‘So what are you doing in London?’

  ‘Joint committee on psych warfare.’ The wrinkles between his eyebrows deepened as he spoke. ‘My father arranged it, to keep me away from the eastern front.’

  ‘Check,’ said Bundy. ‘Privilege knows no boundaries.’

  ‘And here we are, going to tea with a princess.’

  They grinned at each other, bound together by a shared awareness of the absurdity of their situation. The car picked up speed coming out of Hammersmith and onto the Great West Road. The wind blew away their words, and conversation languished. They looked out at the endless line of suburban villas rolling by, and thought their own thoughts.

  The war had gone on too long. It was no longer a crisis, with the excitement that crisis brings with it, and the promise of change. It had become an intermission. The phrase most often heard was ‘for the duration’. Shops were closed ‘for the duration’. Trains ran a restricted service ‘for the duration’. Life had paused, for the duration.

  Meanwhile, thought Rupert, my youth is slipping away.

  Last month Mountbatten had accepted a new appointment, as Commander-in-Chief, South East Asia.

  ‘You’ll come with me, won’t you, Rupert? I must have my old team round me.’

  Rupert was more than willing to go. A brighter sun, a bluer sky. Maybe even a new dawn.

  The landaulette turned off the main road at last and made its way up a wooded hill, through the pretty red-brick village of Taplow, and so to the great gates of Cliveden. A long drive wound through a wilderness of untended woodland, until quite suddenly there appeared before them a fountain, in which winged and naked figures sported round a giant shell. No water flowed, and the angels, or goddesses, wore an embarrassed air, as if sensing that their nakedness was no longer appropriate. The car made a sharp left turn. Ahead lay a broad beech-lined avenue, at the end of which stood a cream-coloured palace.

  ‘Ah!’ sighed Troyanovsky. ‘What it is to be rich!’

  ‘Not rich,’ said Bundy. ‘Very rich. They don’t come richer than the Astors.’

  The house grew as they approached it, revealing on either side of the central block two curving wings, reaching out as if to embrace the awed visitor. To the right there rose an ornate water tower, faced with a clock that had perhaps once been gold, but was now a tarnished brown. The grass of the flanking lawns grew long round ancient mulberry trees.

  The chauffeur drew the car to a stop before the porte cochère, and a butler emerged from the house to greet them.

  ‘Her ladyship and her Royal Highness will join you shortly, gentlemen.’

  They followed the butler into an immense oak-panelled hall, hung with faded tapestries. At one end, before a carved stone fireplace, tea had been laid out on two small tables. To the left of the fireplace hung a full-size portrait of a young woman in a gauzy pale-blue dress, her hands clasped behind her back, her head turned coquettishly to the viewer.

  ‘That is Nancy Astor,’ said Bundy with crisp authority.

  ‘But she’s beautiful!’ exclaimed Troyanovsky. He stood back to appreciate her, evidently as a woman rather than as a work of art.

  ‘She was younger then, of course.’

  Rupert was puzzled by the painting. The pose was unusual: a slight forward tilt from the waist, as if she was on the point of running away.

  Bundy examined the waiting tea. There was fruitcake topped with marzipan. A silver dish with a lid stood warming on a spirit lamp. He lifted the lid to discover a nest of small scones.

  ‘What do we have to do to deserve this?’

  ‘We could link arms and perform a dance,’ said Troyanovsky gravely. It took the others a moment to realise he was making fun. ‘Or perhaps we could sing together, to represent the harmony of the Alliance.’

  They grinned at that.

  ‘And youth,’ said Rupert. ‘We’re here to represent youth.’

  ‘I’m not young,’ said Bundy. ‘Who wants to be young? I want to be a grown man, in charge of my own destiny.’

  ‘Only an American could say that,’ said Troyanovsky. ‘We who come from older civilisations know that we will never be in charge of our own destinies.’

  He looked to Rupert as he spoke, his heavy brow wrinkling. Rupert nodded to be friendly, unsure whether or not he agreed.

  ‘But you know what?’ said Bundy. ‘I’m all for this idea of us singing together.’

  He started to croon the current hit by the Andrews Sisters, making small hand movements before him in the air.

  ‘There were three litt
le sisters

  Three little sisters

  And each one only in her teens—’

  A door opened, and he fell silent. In swept a small tornado of a woman, followed a few paces behind by a young girl.

  ‘Oh my God! They’re here already! Make yourselves at home, boys! Which one of you is Bundy?’

  Mac Bundy presented himself.

  ‘I knew your father, I knew your mother, I warned them not to marry, and if they had to marry, not to produce any children. Bound to be morons. Are you a moron?’

  ‘No, Lady Astor,’ said Bundy, smoothly unperturbed. ‘I don’t believe I am.’

  ‘Humph. We’ll see about that.’

  She was in her mid-sixties, her face now bony, but her bright blue eyes as brilliant as in the portrait. She held her head high, and moved in hops and starts, as if unable to contain the energy within her. Her voice was thin and crackly, half American, half English.

  ‘This is just an informal get-together. No need to stand on ceremony.’

  The three young officers were introduced to the young girl, who turned out to be Princess Elizabeth. She was even smaller than Lady Astor, and had wavy dark-brown hair, and very white skin. Her modest knee-length white dress, patterned with pink flowers, could not disguise the fact that she was, as Bundy had put it, ‘all there’.

  ‘Come along, Lilibet,’ said Lady Astor. ‘You sit here. You know no one can sit down until you’ve sat down. God, what a country! How I’ve stood it all these years I’ll never know.’

  They sat down. Their hostess poured out tea, talking as she did so.

  ‘I’ve told Lilibet that family of hers keeps her far too shut away, she never meets anyone at all, so I promised her some young men, and here you are. You must help yourselves to the scones. It was Lilibet’s idea to invite our allies, and a very good idea if I may say so. You three’ – teapot in mid-air, piercing blue eyes fixed on the young men – ‘you are the future of the world. You must make a better job of it than we have.’

  ‘With Her Royal Highness’s help,’ said Bundy, leaning his upper body forward as if attempting a bow while sitting down.

  ‘Oh, the royals can’t do a thing,’ said Lady Astor. ‘No one pays the slightest attention to a word they say. Of course, everyone loves them, but only in the way you love a family pet.’ She reached out one hand to pat the shy young princess. ‘Do you mind me going on like this, darling? Are you shocked?’

  ‘Not at all,’ said the princess in a small clear voice. ‘But I’d like to hear what the gentlemen have to say.’