To Play the King

by Michael Dobbs

  Rochester who would get the credit for the story rather than the court correspondents he had worked with and grown to respect over all these years. As the camera shutter clicked away, he began to find his calmness being steadily eaten away by his acid dislike of Rochester with his curled lip and ingratiating whine. He could feel himself beginning to tremble and he held on more tightly. Don't lose control, he shouted at himself, or the Rochesters will win, tear you to pieces. For God's sake be professional, go out on your own terms!

  They were well inside the car park now, heading for the bustle of the departures building. Through his lens, Rochester's photographer saw Mycroft tap the driver on the shoulder and say something which caused the coach to turn aside and park in a quiet lay-by some considerable distance from the terminal. As the coach stopped, Mycroft squeezed out a tight smile for the throng around him. He was right in their midst.

  'Before you finish this tour, there's one part of the story you haven't yet got. It might surprise you. It might even surprise the King . . .'

  Urquhart sat on the Government Front Bench, shielded only in part by the Dispatch Box, surveying the army of waving hands and wagging tongues before him. George Washington? He felt more like General Custer. The restraint of Opposition shown on McKillin's doorstep had gone as the backbench hounds scented blood. It needed nerve, this job, to withstand the slings and arrows and all the vile taunts of which a parliamentary enemy could think. He had to believe in himself, utterly, to force out any room for doubt which his enemies might exploit. Perfect, absolute, uncompromising certainty in his cause. They were a rabble, not only lacking in principle but also in imagination; he wouldn't be surprised if in their new-found royalist fervour they descended to singing the national anthem, right here and now, in the Chamber of the House of Commons, the one place in all the Kingdom to which the Monarch was denied entry. His eyes lit on The Beast and he smiled grimly. The Beast was, after all, a man true to himself. While others around him roared and waved and stirred themselves to heights of manufactured passion, The Beast sat there looking simply embarrassed. The cause was, to him, more important than victory. He wouldn't cast it aside simply to grasp the opportunity of humiliating his opponent. Bloody idiot.

  They were such petty, unworthy specimens. They called themselves politicians, leaders, but none of them understood power. He would show them. And his mother. Show her that he was better than Alistair, had always been better, would always be better than them all. No doubts.

  As the first backbencher was called, Urquhart knew what he would say, regardless of the question. But they always asked such predictable questions. It would be the King. And Madam Speaker would object, but he would answer it anyway. Emphasize the principle of keeping the Monarch out of politics. Deprecate their ill-concealed attempt to drag him into partisan warfare. Insinuate that any damned fool could identify problems, the responsible looked for solutions. Encourage them to make as much noise as possible, even if it meant an afternoon of prime ministerial humiliation, to tie themselves as tightly as they could to the King so that they could never unravel the knots. Then, and only then, would it be time to push His Majesty off the mountain top.

  'Damn! Damn! Damn!!!' The expletives ricocheted off the walls as Stamper gave vent to his fury, for a moment drowning the television commentary.

  Sally and Urquhart were not alone. Stamper sat in one of the large leather armchairs of the Prime Minister's study, agitatedly devouring the news report and his finger nails. For the first time since their relationship had started, she was being shared with someone else. Perhaps Urquhart wanted others to know, maybe she had become a status symbol, another prop for his virility and ego. Or maybe he had simply wanted an audience to witness another of his triumphs. If so, he must be sorely chagrined at the scenes unfolding in front of their eyes.

  'In an astonishing finale to the Royal tour this afternoon, the King's press secretary, David Mycroft, announced his resignation,' the reporter intoned.

  ‘I am a homosexual.' The pictures of Mycroft were not particularly clear, there was too much backlighting coming from the windows of the coach, but they were good enough. Surrounded by seated colleagues, sharing news with them as he had done for many years, a player plucking at his audience. This was no fugitive with shifting eyes and sweaty brow, cornered, back to the wall. This was a man in control.

  ‘I had hoped that my private life would remain just that, and not interfere with my responsibilities to the King, but I can no longer be sure of this. So I am resigning.'

  "What was the King's response?' a reporter was heard to challenge.

  'I don't know. I haven't told him. When last I asked to resign, he refused my resignation. As you all know, he is a man of the utmost compassion and understanding. But the task of the Monarch is more important than any one man, particularly a press aide, and so I have taken it upon myself to relieve him of any responsibility by announcing my resignation publicly, to you. I only hope that His Majesty will understand.'

  'But why on earth is being a homosexual a bar to your job?'

  Mycroft bent his face into an expression of wry amusement. 'You ask me that question?' He laughed as if someone had made a modestly good joke. No animosity, no snarl of an animal at bay. God, it was a fine performance. 'A press officer is meant to be a channel for news, not the target of it. Speculation about my private life would have made my professional duties impossible.'

  'Why have you hidden it all these years?' It was Rochester from the back of the bus.

  'Hidden it? I haven't. My marriage broke up recently after many years. I was always faithful to my wife, and I am deeply grateful to her for the years of happiness we spent together. But with that break-up came a new understanding and possibly a final opportunity, to be the man that perhaps I always wanted to be. I have made that choice. I have no regrets.'

  With apparent utter frankness he had turned the attack. Anyway, most of the people here were old colleagues, friends, nothing could disguise the atmosphere of sympathy and goodwill. Mycroft had chosen his moment, and his interrogators, well.

  Urquhart turned off as the TV reporter continued the saga of the Royal aide, whom he described as 'much respected and well liked', against a background of footage from the just-completed tour.

  'Selfish bastard,' Stamper muttered.

  ‘I thought you wanted him out,' Sally interjected.

  'We wanted him hung, not walking into the sunset with the applause of the crowd ringing in his ears,' snapped Stamper. Sally suspected he was irritated by her presence in what had formerly been an all-male preserve.

  'Don't fret, Tim,' Urquhart responded. 'Our target was not Mycroft, but the King. And even as he surveys his realm from the mountain top, the ground beneath his feet is beginning to crumble. Almost time to give him a helping hand. In the small of the back, I think.'

  'But you only have a week before . . . Those images of the tour are killing you, Francis,' she said softly, marvelling at his composure.

  He looked at her with narrowed, hard eyes, as if scolding her for lacking faith. 'But there are images, dear Sally, and there are images.' A dark smile split his face but his eyes remained like rock. He crossed to his desk, extracting a small key from his wallet before slowly unlocking a top drawer. He extracted a large manila envelope and spilled its contents across the desk. Every action was meticulous, like a craftsman jeweller displaying his most precious stones. There were photographs, perhaps a dozen of them, all in colour, which he sorted through to select two, holding them up so that Sally and Stamper could clearly see.

  'What do you think of them?'

  She was uncertain whether he meant the photographs or the pair of breasts they prominently displayed. The two photographs, as all the others, revealed the uninhibited charms of Princess Charlotte. The only variation on the central theme was the precise position of her body and the contortions of the young man with her.

  'Oh, I say,' breathed Stamper.

  'One of the more onerous burdens of
being Prime Minister is that one is entrusted with a variety of secrets. Stories that are never told. Such as the tale of a young military equerry to the Princess who, fearing that his favoured position at the side and on top of the Princess was in jeopardy, took out an insurance policy in the form of these photographs.'

  'Oh, I say,' Stamper said once more as he rifled through the other shots.

  'It was the equerry's bad luck,' Urquhart continued, 'that he should try to encash the policy with the wrong man, an investigative journalist who also happens to be a former operative for the security services. And so the photographs finished up in my drawer while the unfortunate lovesick boy has been told in no uncertain terms that his testicles will be ripped from his body should any copies find their way around Fleet Street.' He took back the photographs, which Stamper had been clinging to perhaps a moment too long. 'Something tells me, Timothy, that I wouldn't wish to be in his predicament in a few days' time.'

  The two men laughed bawdily, but Urquhart noticed that Sally seemed not to be enjoying the moment.

  'Something bothering you, Sally?'

  'It doesn't feel right. It's the King who is doing the damage to you, not Mycroft or the Princess.' 'The limbs first. . .'

  'But she's done nothing. She's not involved.' 'Bloody soon will be,' snorted Stamper.

  'Call it an occupational hazard,' Urquhart added. His smile was stretching more thinly.

  'I can't help thinking of her family. The effect on her children.' An edge of stubbornness was beginning to creep into her voice and her full, expressive lips pouted in defiance.

  His response was slow and stonily firm. 'War breeds misery. There are many unfortunate victims.'

  'Her only sin, Francis, is to be saddled with a healthy sex drive and an inbred English wimp for a husband.'

  'Her sin is getting caught.'

  'Only because she's a woman!'

  'Spare me the collective feminism,' Urquhart snapped in exasperation. 'She's spent a lifetime living off the fat served at the Royal table, and the time has come for her to pay the bill.'

  She was about to respond but she saw his eyes flare and pulled herself back. She wasn't going to win this argument and, in pursuing it, she might lose much more. She told herself not to be so naive. Hadn't she always known that a woman's sex was no more than a tool, a weapon, which as often as not fell into the hands of men? She turned away, conceding.

  'Tim, make sure these get a good airing, will you? Just a couple for the moment. Leave the rest.'

  Stamper nodded and took the opportunity to bend over the desk and rifle once more through the photographs.

  'Now, Tim. There's a good fellow.'

  Stamper's head came up sharply, his eyes flickering as he looked first at Urquhart, then at Sally, then back to Urquhart. The ember of understanding began to glow in his eyes, and with it rivalry. She was muscling in on his relationship with the boss, and had an advantage not even Stamper with all his guile and gamescraft could match.

  'I'll get right to it, Francis.' He gathered up two of the images and looked sharply at Sally. 'Night, one and all.' Then he was gone.

  Neither of them spoke for some time. Urquhart tried to appear nonchalant, taking great care to adjust the razor-sharp creases of his trousers, but the softness of the words when eventually they came belied their menace.

  'Don't go coy on me now, O Gypsy.'

  'She's going to get a very raw deal out of this one.'

  'It's them or me.'

  ‘I know.'

  'Still on side?'

  In answer, she crossed slowly to him and kissed him passionately, forcing her body up against his and her tongue into his mouth. Within seconds his hands were fondling, bruising. She knew his instincts were angry, animal. Roughly he bent her forward across his desk, sweeping his pen tray and telephone to one side and knocking over a framed photograph of his wife. Her skirt was lifted over her back and he was at her, tearing at her underwear, forcing himself inside, kneading the flesh of her buttocks with such intensity that she winced at the bite of his nails. She was prostrate across the desk, her nose and cheek forced flat into the leather top. And she remembered. As a young girl of perhaps thirteen she had taken a short cut through the back alleys of Dorchester on her way to the cinema and there had come face to face with a woman, bent low across the hood of a car. She was black, with bright crimson lips and gaudy eyes which were hard, impatient, bored. The man behind her was fat and white and had sworn at Sally, foul, disgusting words, but he had not stopped. The memory crowded back in all its chilling clarity, as Urquhart's nails dug ever more deeply into her skin and her face was pressed painfully into the scattering of photographs across the desktop. She felt like crying, not in ecstasy but in pain and degradation. Instead, she simply bit her lip.

  Mycroft found him on the moors above Balmoral, where he often went when troubled and wanting to be alone, even in the middle of winter with snow on the ground and an easterly wind which had found nothing to obstruct or deflect it since it had gathered strength in the shadows of the Urals two thousand miles away. There were ageless spirits up there, he had once said, which lurked in the crannies of the granite outcrops and sang as they ran with the wind through the rough heather, long after the deer had sought the shelter of lower pastures. The King had seen him coming, but had not offered any greeting.

  'I had no choice. We had no choice.'

  'We? Since when was I consulted?' The regal tone betrayed a sense of insult and personal hurt. The anger - or was it solely the wind? - brought a bucolic flush to his cheeks and his words came slowly. 'I would have stuck by you.'

  'You think I didn't realize that?' It was Mycroft's turn for exasperation. 'That's why I had to take the decision out of your hands. It's time to start following your head rather than your heart.'

  'You have committed no offence, David, broken no law.'

  'Since when did such things matter? I would have become a monumental distraction. Instead of listening to you they would have been sniggering behind their hands at me. You've taken such personal risks to carry your message across without interference and I would simply have got in the way, another excuse for them to sidetrack and confuse. Don't you see? I didn't resign in spite of you. I resigned because of you.' He paused, searching the mists which clung to the moorland around them and burying himself deeper inside the borrowed ski jacket. 'And, of course, there's someone else. I had to think of him, too. Protect him.' ‘I feel almost jealous.'

  'That I could love two men in such different ways I never thought possible.' Mycroft's hand reached out to touch the other man on the arm, an unforgivable action between man and Monarch, but the words and the freezing wind seemed to have stripped the formality away.

  'What's his name?'

  'Kenny.'

  'He will always be welcome. With you. At the Palace.'

  The King placed his hand to cover that of Mycroft, who lowered his head, weighed down by gratitude and emotion.

  'Ours was a very private matter, not something for headlines and the baying of hounds, of having his private life turned inside out,' Mycroft explained.

  'Such plants rarely grow when showered in innuendo and the manure of publicity.'

  'I'm very much afraid this may all have been too much for him. But thank you.'

  The wind sighed through the heather, a low, mournful sound as the light began to fade, like demons of the night come to reclaim their land.

  'It has all been such an unhappy accident, David.' 'Funny, but I feel almost relieved, released. No regrets. But no accident, either.' 'Meaning?'

  'I'm not a great believer in coincidence. It was timed to detract from your tour, meant to damage you as much as me.' 'By whom?'

  'By whoever had a motive to get at you. And by whoever had the opportunity. By someone who knows the Member for Dagenham and who has the resources to track down a private phone number.'

  'It would require someone who could sink very low.' 'The lowest. And he will continue his pursuit of yo
u, have no doubts. There will be more.'

  'Then I hope I can find your courage.'

  'You already have. All you need is the courage to face up to yourself, that's what you said. To play the man - your own words. Facing up to others holds fewer torments, believe me. But I think you already know that.'

  ‘I shall need your advice, David, more than ever if, as you say, it is all to get worse.'

  Slowly at first, then with gathering force, drops of cold-hardened rain began to fall across the two lonely figures. Darkness was encroaching fast.

  'Then the best advice I have for you, Sir, is for us to get off this bloody moor before we both freeze to death and save Francis Urquhart the bother.'

  February: The Second Week

  It took less than a second for the phone to be answered in the foreign-currency dealing room at one of the City's leading finance houses which squatted alongside the Thames, in a site near to where the Great Fire that had destroyed half of London more than three centuries earlier had started. It wouldn't take another fire to ruin the City again, they joked, just another Japanese takeover.