A La Carte

by Jeffrey Archer

  ‘Shhhhh,’ said Joan, in agony. ‘Shhhhhh.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter, no, let me tell you, if the safety of the nation is going to depend on condoms, then …’

  At this point a young man who had been sitting near them, listening, got up because it was time for him to be off on his way to somewhere or other in the world. He tapped Sybil on the shoulder and said, ‘If you can’t get the hang of condoms, then just get in touch with me …no, no, any time, a pleasure!’

  His words were far from an invitation, were more of a public rebuke, and on his face was the look that goes with someone taking it on himself to keep things in order. But from the door he sent them a glance and a grin and disappeared for ever with a wave. As for Joan and Sybil, they sat half turned to watch him go. They looked like a couple of teenagers, their hands half- covering scandalised and delighted smiles.

  THE BUNTING AFFIRMS

  H. R. F. Keating

  The King came out of the Home Office into Whitehall at twenty minutes to eleven exactly. The year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty. Maurice, from his place in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd almost directly opposite with the swathed shape of the newly-erected Cenotaph between them, fastened his eyes on the bearded uniformed figure.

  King, he thought. But didn’t he have a body too? Coiled intestines, toe-nails that needed cutting? He had had to go to the lav like anyone else that morning. And he would have eaten his bacon and eggs. But served, of course, from a silver dish. A man, too, had had to serve that man down there, that white body, soft belly, dangling thing inside the stiff uniform breeches. A man had had to bow as he had lifted pink rashers out of a silver dish for him.

  He watched the isolated figure in its smooth khaki, with the imprisoning strap of the Sam Browne a dark band across his chest, go stiffly and proudly over to the steps of the Colonial Office where the others were waiting – the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, Prince Henry, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a figure of floppy white and straitlaced black among the khakis and dark blues of the uniforms, and little stumpy Lloyd George, black again, tailcoat and top hat, with half a dozen other cabinet ministers all looking the same. Dressed up, false, wrong. There had been plenty of time to decide which of them was which since the barriers had been removed at the end of Whitehall just before ten.

  And the day would come when they were all puffed away. Their world looked strong enough now. But it would go. They might laugh at the very name People’s Trumpet now. They might never even have seen a copy, in their palaces, their clubs, their Ministries. But one day a trumpet would sound, and that would be more than just the name of a thin newspaper selling not much more than a thousand copies – no, be honest, not selling a thousand copies. It would be a blast of hatred, swelling up from the people, that would sweep them away, all the pretences and inequalities and cant. All away.

  Suddenly the thought, the tiny possibility, that the blast would begin to blow today, that it should begin with him himself in only nineteen minutes’ time, at eleven exactly, snickered up to the surface of his mind like the tip of a thin black blade beginning to rip from underneath a smooth stretched white cloth. This might be it. It might be the signal. Coming at that hushed moment of silence, when, as they said, an Empire would be still and pay homage, coming then the words he was going to call out, the words he was going to shout aloud, might do it. They might run like a fissure along the whole sugar-icing façade of the great sham and split it apart for ever.

  Down in front of the tapering square block of the new Cenotaph, wholly draped in its bunting, a man in the uniform of a police superintendent walked quickly over to the short dark wooden pillar on which the King was to press the button that would make those too-bright flags fall. He held a brief conference there with a young official in top hat and long black overcoat. After a minute or so they both walked away together into the Home Office.

  Maurice’s heart raced suddenly. Could information about their plan have somehow got out? Was that short conference down there to discuss how to get him quietly arrested before the Silence began? But at once he told himself that this was impossible. So few of them were in the secret. Only the inner group of the party and the two who had been asked to make the demonstrations, himself and Frances, himself here and Frances in Fleet Street at the People’s Trumpet office.

  The suddenness of his onset of panic worried him. He had thought his nerve had been steadier. He had prided himself, for all his lack of years, on being the equal in courage to the men who had been in the trenches and, boastful or quiet, were so besottedly pleased with themselves for having undergone that experience. And yet a flush of sweat had risen up between his legs and on either side of his chest at the mere thought of arrest.

  When the time came would he even be able to break in on that hush of quiet? But he must. He would.

  He turned to look north over the heads of the dense and curiously subdued crowd towards Trafalgar Square, hidden in the misty haze, despite the extraordinarily blue sky and clear golden sunshine that graced, as they were saying everywhere, this November day. At any moment – Yes, here it was. Clearly over the uncanny noiselessness of the immense crowd the sound of a high-barked order came. And then the little tinny rattle of a piece of military drill being perfectly executed. What they called ‘reversing arms’. There had been, of course, endless reverent explanations in the papers of everything that was to be done. They had proved useful enough in making the plans, but what sickening boot-licking they were to the whole great stage-managed structure. And now the band music was just audible, the faint faraway notes of the Chopin funeral march played crassly on great brass tubas and trumpets.

  All round him that distant miniature music was having an almost tangible effect. A woman in close-fitting black two paces in front of him had given one gulping, hastily stifled sob that had sounded extraordinarily loud in the quiet. He could not blame her: for all their brassiness those faraway notes were moving.

  Coming nearer bit by bit now were the sounds of the troops who were lining the procession route reversing arms company by company, first the piping cry of the order and then the tiny distant crash of rifles being slapped and thumped. The ritual: that would go. All the pomp. It would go one day, and perhaps the start of its going would come – he slipped a hand under his coat and pulled out his watch – in sixteen, no in fifteen, minutes from now.

  The sound of Big Ben chiming the three-quarter hour boomed hollowly out in the clear air, echoing over the slowly rising band music. The King moved forward like a clockwork doll – there would be no soldier toys in the new world – from his place in front of the Colonial Office to a new position facing the uprearing bulk of the hidden Cenotaph and the huge, garish and brutal Union Jack draping its whole front. And after the King came his sons and what they called his Ministers. His. Elected by the people, or some of the people, and yet called his.

  And now it had come into sight, what the King and all of them were waiting to receive, the funeral procession of the Unknown Warrior. Poor hopeless victim of cruel and greedy forces he would never have known anything of. But there it was, the procession. First, four policemen on white horses – symbolic figures, little though the onlookers realised it – then the bands, four of them, the regiments of the Foot Guards, their scarlet shining with soft deepness in this mellow-clear light, and next the pipers of the Scots Guards. That keening music had taken over now. And then – Maurice involuntarily caught his breath – the drums. Their muffled insistent beat seemed to enter on the scene all at once as if they had stepped through an invisible sound-proof curtain. At the same instant, it seemed, it was possible to pick out the drummers from the dark haze-swallowed serpent of the procession, the drummers and their black-draped drums and just behind them the bright flag spread over the coffin on its gun-carriage.

  He watched, held in fascination, as they approached. The minutes ticked by. The long column of Servicemen split to left and right and took up places lining three-deep the wide roadw
ay on either side of the Cenotaph. And at last the solemn beat of marching feet – that brutal, steel- tipped sound would have no place in the new world – was stilled and the gun-carriage with its Union Jack draped coffin and the steel helmet on it was at rest in front of the massive veiled memorial. Then the bands broke all together into the tune ‘O God, our help in ages past’. And the close-packed surpliced choirs on either side of the Home Office steps sang. God, the biggest sham of all, Maurice thought with harsh-grinding force. The great unseen prop. That would come tumbling down too. And the first tiny ripple of energy that must in the end topple the whole piled-on false structure might be his own voice in five – in four minutes from now.

  But why did that damned tune have to remind him of so much in the past? Of all the things that had once seemed rock-solid?

  The hymn, with the steady rolling of the draped drums underpinning its deep-throated music, came at last to an end. There was a brief silence. Maurice estimated the effect his voice would have breaking the longer, more deliberate silence soon to come. ‘It’s a sham. It’s all a sham. You’ve been tricked. All of you.’ He could almost hear his words ripping into the calm sun-mellowed air. But down by the tall draped block the Archbishop had taken half a pace forward and now it was his voice that was breaking the hush, with the words of the Lord’s Prayer. All round people were taking up the sentences, a dull heavy murmur. Words rising up like the chimney smoke today, straight into the still air. And disappearing into nothingness as completely.

  Another silence now. The tension as the whole vast throng waited for the coming of the chosen hour – it would be his hour, too – was like a vibration too low to hear but impossible not to be aware of.

  And then it came. The rising chime of Big Ben about to strike eleven. Impinging on the rounded gentle notes there was added the sound of distant shouted commands from the direction of Westminster. Then the first thunderous stroke of the hour. The King stiffly extended a hand and touched the button on the dark wooden stand in front of him. On the monument the great areas of bright bunting slowly fell away. Everywhere, from the moment that the huge block of white stone was revealed, heads were bowed. The Silence had begun.

  Maurice stood staring at the unveiled block, the crumpled bunting swathing its foot. Every detail of the scene, and all the invisible panoply behind, seemed to enter his whole body and his whole being. The still, sun-glowed air, the silent bowed spectators, the small figure of the King, the symbolic shape of the flag-draped coffin on the gun-carriage and that little khaki-coloured rounded helmet – each piece of the complex so exactly in its place, all at a meeting-point of held suspense. Immovable, unbreakable.

  And then with a suddenness that made him start as if an ear-splitting shriek had rent out right at his back the first high, clear notes of the bugles sounding the Last Post penetrated the huge fixed bubble of silence.

  It was over. It was too late. His time had gone by. Had he lacked at the pinch courage? It must have been so. It could have been nothing else.

  He ceased to see what was around him. He ceased to know what was going on. Like a fog-tasting black scarf the sense of what he had failed to do blotted out everything.

  Eventually the crowd beside him must have moved, and he must have been carried along with it. But where he was taken he did not know. What else was happening on this day of solemn remembrance made no impact on him at all. He walked, because at some moment a jostle from the crowd had given him an impetus and there was nothing to stop him.

  It was some time in the afternoon – he lacked the initiative even to pull his watch from his waistcoat pocket – that his self-laceration began to take a new form. Perhaps, without realising it, he was starting to emerge from his waking coma and had gained enough awareness to take note of a pair of lovers. But, for whatever reason it was, he abruptly thought of Frances.

  He had lost her for ever. That was certain. Work at the People’s Trumpet had brought them together. Their shared ideals had been their love. And now he had forfeited it all. By his inexplicable cowardice he had lost any right to know her, much less to love her. While she, doing in Fleet Street what he had not been able to do at the Cenotaph, had removed herself as far upwards as he had sunk low.

  At this point in his blind progress it occurred to him to buy a copy of The Star. Quite what he had expected to see in it he never formulated in his own mind. Perhaps he hoped, and yet feared, to read wide-ranging reports of social revolution springing from the shattering of the almighty mutedness by one fearless girl.

  What he did read eventually was a short news-story of brutal simplicity. ‘Silence Broken by Girls’ it was headed. Four short paragraphs followed, describing in the words of a couple of witnesses the small scene in which the girls of the People’s Trumpet staff had banged tin lids, danced on a table in view of the street and sung. And then the last paragraph: Those standing silent in Fleet Street waited until the end of the ceremony. Then they burst into the office. The men stood aside while indignant girls and women gave the disturbers of the peace a thorough beating, which ceased only when the police arrived.

  There was no more to it than that. Maurice dropped the paper, took one wild glance around him till he recognised where he was and set off, fast as his striding legs would go, for Fleet Street.

  When, some twenty minutes later, he arrived at the People’s Trumpet office, that narrow garishly red-painted small shop, he found the outer door locked. He knocked and there was no answer. But he could think of nothing else to do but knock again. And this time the door was cautiously opened a crack and he saw Frances’s white face, grubby with dried tears and with a long blood- scabbed scratch down one cheek. She let him in.

  ‘Maurice, you look all right. Did they set on you, or what?’

  For an instant he was tempted to evade the truth. But he knew that with Frances there was no possibility of that.

  ‘I didn’t – I couldn’t – Oh, God, Frances, I never uttered a sound.’

  Standing there with her back against the hastily closed shop door, she took him in her arms. And he allowed himself for a tiny space of time to feel the comfort of it. But then he broke away.

  “No,’ he said. ‘It’s all over between us. It must be.’

  But again she held out her arms to him.

  ‘Maurice, it’s no shame that you couldn’t do it when the time came. We each of us do what we can. The others’ll understand.’

  Her voice tailed away as her never-baulking mind told her how unlikely it was that the others would understand. But she went bravely on.

  ‘Well, I understand. That was something I could do, though God knows if I could again. Now.’

  Then the tears that had dried on her face broke out once more, and it was his turn to hold out his arms and offer comfort and to try and blot out, impossible though it was with mere murmured words, the memory of what had been done to her.

  But as he stroked the hard, jerking surface of her rounded shoulders and as he produced the meaningless, designed-to-ease babble, he realised that it was from his hands that one last blow was to have to fall on her. And when after a long while her tears had slackened he said, as quickly as he could to get it over with, the thing that he found he had to say.

  He led her to a bentwood chair and made her sit down. Then he stood a little way away from her.

  ‘Frances,’ he choked out, ‘it wasn’t because I was afraid. I thought it was, afterwards. I still thought it was when I got here. But seeing you and talking to you I realise what the truth of it is. It wasn’t because I didn’t have the guts to do it: it was because it was all so right there. Frances, it was right. Everything. The sunlight, the people standing so still, the Cenotaph, the flags on it. Even the King. It was all so right, Frances.’

  For a few seconds he was silent, and so was she, sitting on the dark chair with her head dropped forward and her hands clutching the varnished rim of the seat. Then he spoke again.

  ‘So it’s goodbye, isn’t it?’ he said.
r />   ‘Yes,’ she whispered. ‘It’s goodbye.’

  He went out of the office and walked, with tears streaming down his face, along Fleet Street. Above him, from the walls of the tall newspaper offices bunting hung, garishly bright in the gathering gloom of the November twilight.

  OLD FLAME

  William Trevor

  Grace died.

  As Zoë replaces the lid of the electric kettle – having steamed the envelope open – her eye is caught by that stark statement. As she unfolds the plain white writing-paper, another random remark registers before she begins to read from the beginning. We never quarrelled not once that I remember.

  The spidery scrawl, that economy with punctuation, were once drooled over by her husband, and to this day are not received in any ordinary manner, as a newspaper bill is, or a rates demand. Because of the sexual passion there has been, the scrawl connects with Charles’s own neat script, two parts of a conjunction in which letters have played an emotional part. Being given to promptness in such matters, Charles will at once compose a reply, considerate of an old flame’s due. Zoë feared this correspondence once, and hated it. As ever my love, Audrey: in all the years of the relationship the final words have been the same.

  As always, she’ll have to reseal the envelope because the adhesive on the flap has lost its efficacy. Much easier all that is nowadays, with convenient sticks of Pritt or Uhu. Once, at the height of the affair, she’d got glue all over the letter itself.

  Zoë, now seventy-one, is a small, slender woman, only a little bent. Her straight hair, once jet-black, is almost white. What she herself thinks of as a letter-box mouth caused her, earlier in her life, to be designated attractive rather than beautiful. ‘Wild,’ she was called as a girl, and ‘unpredictable’, both terms relating to her temperament. No one has ever called her pretty, and no one would call her wild or unpredictable now.

  Because it’s early in the day she is still in her dressing- gown, a pattern of dragons in blue and scarlet silk. It hugs her slight body, crossed over on itself in front, tied with a matching sash. When her husband appears he’ll still be in his dressing-gown also, comfortably woollen, teddy-bear brown stitched with braid. Dearest, dearest Charles the letter begins. Zoë reads all of it again.