Saving the Queen

by William F. Buckley

  The whole of the literature was engrossing to her, not only the theoretical books but the polemical tracts. Miss Oyen was never in search of humor or relaxation, but she was in search of a drastically better world, and so was Peregrine Kirk. She told him about Stalin’s response to Lady Astor when that formidable lady had accosted the primate of the Communist world in Moscow at a reception in the thirties and asked, “Comrade Stalin, when are you going to stop killing people?” He had replied: “Your government killed thirty million people in a long war just fifteen years ago. To accomplish what? I may end up responsible for killing one million people—to accomplish a new world.” Miss Oyen cherished that reply and asked Kirk if he did not find it apt, and he confessed that he did, allowing his mind to wander over the dull pomposities of his father’s set as they belabored the Bolsheviks.

  Somewhat to his surprise his interest grew keener, and in the endless days on his back he read through the corpus of the official writings of Marx and Lenin and Stalin. He began then to read the journals, the New Internationalist Review, Mainstream, and the left organs in America, which he found more passionate than the English journals; probably, he mused, because America is more easy to despise. He felt about his own country that it was headed toward satellitehood to America, a nice historical paradox; that it was bound to be devoured by American money, power, and avarice. Britain he could not hate because Britain had, really, become useless—a vermiform appendix in the world’s social organism. Britain had some pleasant institutions, and even some pleasant people in it, but, viewed geopolitically, it was becoming nothing much more than America’s Gibraltar off the western flank of Europe.

  In another week he would be permitted to go to Aberdeen to begin there his long recuperation at home, under the guidance of a retired therapist his father had retained to live at Holly Manor for three months. When the doctor announced the timetable, after scrutinizing that morning’s X rays, he saw Miss Oyen turn away and face the wall, and he knew that his leaving had moved her, however much the professional she was. He could understand why: because his leaving moved him, also. He had never had such an experience, six weeks on his back which grew from a tortured isolation into an invitation to consolidate his complaints against the world and see it whole for the first time—its complex, anomalous, contradictory phenomena, now harmoniously choreographed by a man of unique vision, a true social cosmologist. Miss Oyen—he liked the symbolism—who had washed his feet, had also awakened his mind and his spirit. He yearned to be a conscious part of the revolutionary struggle. He thought about this, with taciturn, lewd delight, as, strapped down on the specially constructed mattress in his father’s custom-made Rolls wagon, he headed toward Holly Manor to rejoin the governing class. He had kissed Miss Oyen deftly on the cheek, and she had returned the gesture with an antiseptic kiss on his cheek. He gave her a first edition of Das Kapital—he had asked his tutor to secure him a copy, which had cost him seventy-five pounds—and she gave him a copy of Sholokhov’s And Quiet Flows the Don. “I will write,” he said as they wheeled him out; and he did, every week, until, initiating his contact with Boris Andreyvich Bolgin, he thought it prudent to stop, and did so abruptly.

  He yawned, but before slipping off to sleep he reminded himself that on his return to London, he would summon Boris and give him a simple assignment. Establish, through an operative in America, whether the American atomic physicist in residence at Yale University, Rene Wallack, ever employed one Blackford Oakes, undergraduate, as an assistant. He should also attempt to establish whether Wallack had recently hired an assistant from MIT.

  Fourteen

  Blackford was not left long in doubt on the one point. On his breakfast tray, brought in by Masterson, was a sealed envelope. He waited until Masterson had left—

  “Shall I draw your bath, sir?”

  “No thank you, Masterson, not yet. I’ll ring.”

  He opened it.

  “My dear Mr. Oakes,” he read in a filigreed but authoritative hand that tilted sharply to the right. “I leave you to your researches during the morning and early afternoon. But the weather being clement, I would suggest that at three o’clock you might be ready for a little sun and exercise. In which event I have a mount ready for you, and would take pleasure in leading you through some of the lovely trails in Windsor Park. The Prime Minister will be calling on me at five-thirty, and leaving, I should judge, at about seven, unless he has details to communicate of the Parliament’s incompetence more egregious than usual. There is no other guest in residence, nor have I invited anyone else, for fear that I might be too extensively separated from Mr. Wouk’s psychodrama. I should be pleased, then, if you will dine privately with me. But if you would prefer to devote the evening to your work, I should understand your decision, commend it, and very probably profit from it. But pray let me know on the matter of this afternoon. It is inconceivable that you do not know how to ride. But if that should be the case, perhaps, in the interest of orderly priorities, you should forgo the archives during the morning and take lessons? My children’s groom is available. Yours truly, Caroline, R.”

  Blackford gave thought to the exact wording of his reply, and then wrote down:

  Your Majesty:

  Your thoughtfulness is greater by far than that of the chief of state of my own country, whose hospitality I very briefly experienced a few months ago. I cannot believe that if H.M. George III had been so attentive of the feelings of his colonials, it would all have ended so sadly. I accept with great pleasure your invitation to ride with you. I am a competent horseman, but not in a class with Viscount Kirk, so please do not judge me harshly. And, of course, it would be a great honor to dine with you.

  Yours faithfully,

  Blackford Oakes

  He rang for Masterson, gave him the communication, asked him to deliver it and return, which he did, in a few minutes.

  “If you will draw the bath, that would be helpful, Masterson,” Blackford said, seeking a reason to detain him. “And by the way, Masterson, the Queen has asked me to ride horseback with her this afternoon and I’m afraid I have no proper riding suit. One of my tweed jackets will do, but I have no jodhpurs, breeches, or boots. I wonder: Do you suppose Viscount Kirk would mind if I borrowed a set of his, since we are approximately the same build?”

  It worked. “I am certain he would not mind, sir. He keeps an entire closet of clothes here, mostly for riding. Shall I fetch you something appropriate, sir, or do you wish to ring him up first? He left about an hour ago, and should be in his flat very soon now. Though, actually, I don’t believe it necessary, because the Queen once had me go through the closet to outfit a visiting gentleman, and we merely pressed the trousers and replaced them.”

  Blackford feigned to be going through his shelves in order to take stock of the clothes he had actually brought with him.

  “The Queen is certainly thoughtful about the desires of her guests.” Blackford decided to attempt a considerable flyer. “… Or is it just Viscount Kirk who keeps his riding clothes here?”

  Masterson took no notice of any inquisitive inflection.

  “Well, sir,” he said while testing the temperature of the water, “Viscount Kirk and the Queen used to ride together as children, and when she moved into Windsor Castle she specified that a closet would be kept for her second cousin so that they might ride together as spontaneously as when they rode together in Scotland. But he is the only friend of the Queen’s who has these arrangements. Besides, sir, the Duke’s wardrobe is very extensive, and there is not so very much room left over. The Queen insists that the guest suites be maintained in perfect order and that no family clothing be stored in any of the recesses here.”

  “But surely the Duke has regular friends who visit frequently enough to keep a few of their things here—sports equipment, golf clubs?” said Blackford, walking into the bathroom and brushing his teeth.

  “The Duke does not regularly invite friends to Windsor, sir, only visitors of state. His friends he invit
es usually to Sandringham or Balmoral. He feels that Buckingham Palace and Windsor are formal places of residence that belong to the sovereign, as indeed they do. So it is, actually, only Viscount Kirk, who is practically a member of the family.”

  Masterson left, and Black considered putting in a call to Singer Callaway, but decided against doing so through the palace switchboard. Besides, the following day he would surely know more. Then he could take a stroll through Windsor and use a pay telephone.

  He had ridden as a boy, during two summers at a ranch his father sent him to during brief moments of prosperity; and again regularly at camp in Maine. He had never hunted, or shown, and he was more accustomed to a western than to an English saddle. But Blackford found himself strangely comfortable on the mount the groom brought out for him, a stately but docile animal, markedly in contrast to the frisky black stallion the Queen favored, whom she had named after General Eisenhower seven years earlier, at the tail end of her crush on the general, who had subsequently been quoted in the press as saying disparaging things about British contributions to NATO forces—Churchill, Eisenhower’s constant defender, had explained to her that generals never knew anything about the extra-military economic problems of countries, and tended to think only in terms of military needs, reminding her that Eisenhower, as a young lieutenant, had had to train American soldiers using brooms as facsimiles for rifles, so parsimonious had the American isolationist Congress been toward the army, and that no doubt he was residually bitter on the subject. The Queen’s attitude toward Eisenhower did not materially change, even though she predicted to the P.M. (and to Peregrine) that he would be the next President of the United States. But she never changed toward Ike, her stallion, who never gossiped and did not know the secrets of the House of Commons.

  They began at a walk, and soon the Queen egged her horse into a trot. Blackford followed her and quickly accommodated to the even gait of his mare, Prissy, and soon they were cantering easily through the apparently endless forest, the Queen stopping here and there, to point out an object or panorama of special natural, historical, or personal interest.

  “From here you can see—over there, Blackford—if I may, I shall call you Blackford. After all, it is a rather formidable name, hardly the same thing as suddenly calling you Al, or Butch, or whatever else is a typically American name—Chuck?—over there, you can see the remains of the Windsor Lodge built out of wood by Henry VIII—the stone came later.…”

  The experience was elating. The weather, by British standards tropical in hue and temperature on this January day, conspired to heighten the experience they were both feeling, a flash of recognition of what lies behind what is seen routinely: the great sinewy trees, the pine needles, the fresh-swept meadows, the modest but adamantly pointed spires, the communicable enthusiasm of the riders for Ike and Prissy, the unencumbered fascination with one another. The conversation was awesomely intimate, but without edge or strain, impulsiveness or opportunism. “I came here alone the afternoon after the funeral. You can imagine the combination of sensations. For one thing I actually liked her, though we would never have become friends, in a way that Peregrine and I are friends or, even, already, you and I. The journalists of the whole world were here. The press the next morning reported that there were over five hundred of them. Five hundred photographers and writers from over one hundred countries. I was alone; the Duke was at Buckingham Palace, receiving intensive training in his own new duties, which he learned at disconcerting speed. The guards did a wonderful job of keeping them away, but it required an entire regiment I was right over there”—she pointed to a small glade in the trees—“and I’d stopped for a minute when I heard a terrible crashing noise, and suddenly, six feet away from me, was a body. I dismounted, walked over and found a young Japanese, with his camera and all those fancy lenses, hugged to his bosom—as he fell, he had thought only to protect them. In a few minutes he came to, looked at me in a most fearful state, and started, in not the easiest English to understand, to apologize, and to confess that he had spent twenty-four hours on that tree, just on the chance that I might go from Westminster Abbey to St. George’s to Windsor Park, and perhaps unbend a little on horseback. He now expected that my bodyguards would be along any second, to take him to the Tower of London for summary execution. I told him I was alone and asked him to show me how to work his camera. At first he was uncomprehending, but very quickly he forgot his oriental awe, and took great pride in showing me one of the first Nikons.” She laughed with intense pleasure. “Then I told him I would take a few pictures of him, provided he would co-operate by climbing up to the perch he had sat on all night, from which he had just now fallen, and that I in turn would trust him to write down his impressions of the incident. He did exactly as he was told, and then I submitted to an interview.”

  She paused pensively, as their horses walked in perfect tandem along the sunny-wintery trail.

  “Actually, it was my very first. All the questions were the obvious ones, and it gave me a chance to formulate some of those vapid responses that are indispensable to the success of a constitutional monarch.

  “‘I shall do everything to live up to the high standards set by my cousin.… I am here as the servant of the people …’—that kind of thing. Of course I believe this, Blackford, but I know that if I didn’t believe it, I would be saying exactly the same thing, and the public would be wanting to hear exactly the same thing. One can only imagine the reaction to a statement by a freshly anointed Queen to the effect, ‘This is a pretty good job, I have inherited a lot of money, and a lot of junk, and a lot of perquisites, but there is something in it for everybody because of the presumptive necessity, the people having lowered their idealistic sights during the past generations, to worship something—somebody—worldly; by biological accident, I am she. I shall see what personal uses I can put this personal veneration to.’”

  She laughed in delight at herself.

  “Oh dear, oh dear, I pray that the Lord will restrain me, as I am sure he will, but you know, the temptation to say such a thing to one of Lord Beaverbrook’s reporters is very nearly overwhelming! Beaverbrook is a very smart man and a tough cookie, as they say in your movies, but he is the world’s premier establishmentarian. Do you know the story of Nicholas Murray Butler?”

  “All I know about him is that he was forever the president of Columbia University and the soul of propriety.”

  “Exactly,” said Caroline, “and I read somewhere, in one of your uninhibited journals, that it was the ambition of Heywood Broun the journalist to become rich for the sake of indulging himself in only a single pleasure. He proposed to hire the whole of the Metropolitan Opera House and give a benefit concert sending out all the tickets gratis. But he would arrange to send tickets to prominent bald-headed New Yorkers seating them in the orchestra floor so as to describe, for the benefit of the balconies, one huge S H I T—with Nicholas Murray Butler dotting the i!” She roared with pleasure. “I am telling you, Blackford, if I had had the keys to the Tower of London I’d have sneaked off in the dead of night and yanked out a ruby or an emerald or something from one of my thrones, and dispatched it anonymously to Mr. Broun. I wish I were as knowledgeable as one day I propose to be about the workings of our own intelligence system. That’s the way to use secret money.” She was combining fancy and fantasy and effortlessly moved from the ribald to the solemn: “Ten or fifteen thousand pounds going through MI-6—they wouldn’t notice. Certainly it would not be missed from the money they are supposed to be spending in intelligence and counterintelligence to understand a defense system you Americans seem to confide to us on such an eccentric basis.”

  They were loping back now, on the hardening trail—the cold pursued the setting sun—toward the castle, and the Queen observed that horses should never be allowed to race home—“it gives them very bad habits.”

  “Just what do you mean by that business about American intelligence, ma’am?” Blackford would not be deterred. “My understanding, bot
h as a reader of the public press and as an engineer with a special knowledge of the whole hydrogen bomb business, is that our orders are to give the stuff along to British scientists as fast as we develop it.”

  “That is the official line, I know. But I also know, from the confused answers of my own Prime Minister, that there is something funny going on. Either the Americans are running into difficulties they hadn’t anticipated and are afraid to let us know what those difficulties are, or some of those Anglophobes in Congress, or some of the people who are afraid of Senator McCarthy, are urging an unnecessary secretiveness, because we simply aren’t getting consistent information. And I think there is nothing more important for England to know than the answer to the question: How reliable is America’s nuclear umbrella? How reliable is the general assumption that America will be able to continue to protect Europe, leaving entirely aside whether America, ten years from now, will be disposed to do so?” Her thoughts on the matter were clearly well organized, and she obviously suffered from a shortage of appropriate audiences.

  “How well do you know Peregrine? Did you talk to him at any length last night? Or were you put off by that rather silly business he brought up about your time at Greyburn?” Blackford told her, deceitfully, that he hadn’t minded the Greyburn business at all—that was old stuff—that in fact he had had a good talk with Peregrine about the new jet fighter planes, and in fact they were going to try to facilitate an exchange in testing out their countries’ new models.