Ten Minutes to Turn the Devil

by Douglas Hurd

  Under a dripping archway, apart from the Irish, Flack explained. Everything had gone very smoothly. Flack, though he did not say so, had enjoyed his brief hour of acting as a Minister.

  The Irish had accepted all the British amendments to their draft. He had not heard that the Secretary of State was landing, only that he had been frustrated by the fog. There seemed no reason to hold things up. Indeed this might have wrecked the deal.

  ‘And the arms proviso?’

  ‘What arms proviso, Secretary of State?’

  And of course Flack knew nothing of an arms proviso. It was not in his brief. It was not in the document he had signed. It was not in the agreement that the Taoiseach had just announced.

  It was one of those moments of choice that come perhaps two or three times in a political career. The Secretary of State looked at Flack, at the Irish officials grouped a few yards away, at the dispersing journalists, at the Castle where Viceroys had held sway, where the prisoners of the Easter Rising had been held and shot. He thought of the Prime Minister, of the House of Commons; of his career. Even of his wife. Hard to do anything, hard to do nothing. Then he decided. To do nothing. To let it pass.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, approaching the Taoiseach. ‘A good day’s work. And now I deserve a drink.’

  Twelve weeks later the Secretary of State approached Hillsborough by helicopter. The two referendums had gone smoothly. A low turn-out in the South and a predictable majority for a United Ireland; in the crucial referendum in the North a majority to maintain the Union with Great Britain. The constitutional parties had at once agreed the devolution plan that had been held in reserve for such an outcome. Sinn Fein had split. A minority had decided to continue the terrorist campaign. The main leaders were gathered with the other parties at Hillsborough to sign the agreement with the Secretary of State.

  By the lake below the Castle three men waited under dripping beeches. They could just see the pad where the helicopter would land, though the weather was thickening. They wore the uniform of the Royal Ulster Constabulary, and were consulting the top secret itinerary of the Secretary of State’s movements. Northolt, Londonderry, Coleraine, Antrim, Belfast, Hillsborough.

  ‘A triumphal tour,’ said one.

  ‘Till the end,’ said his companion.

  The two Blowpipe missiles were at their feet. They were the ones stolen weeks earlier from the Shorts factory in Belfast where they were manufactured. The Army helicopters had no countervailing techniques.

  ‘Quiet, here he comes.’

  They could hear the buzz of the two helicopters through the fog. They must be over the Maze prison, just a couple of miles away. Time to make ready the missiles.

  The Sergeant addressed the Secretary of State on the intercom. He sat shivering in a borrowed Army greatcoat, earpads and safety belt in place. James was beside him, clutching a red box as if it were a precious child. It had already fallen once out of the helicopter into Ulster mud.

  ‘Very sorry, sir, we can’t get down. Fog particularly thick over your house. Danger of hitting the trees.’

  The Secretary of State fiddled with his mouthpiece, ‘So?’

  ‘Aldergrove, I’m afraid, sir. A car will take you straight to Hillsborough. You’ll be forty-five minutes late.’

  ‘What’s forty-five minutes in the history of Ireland?’ asked the Secretary of State, but neither James nor the Sergeant replied.

  Within two hours the agreement was signed, the champagne served, the Troubles ended. The lights of Hillsborough shone warmly out over the garden, the lake, the trees and the helicopter pad.

  The two men from the dissident minority waiting by the lake had heard the cars drive up the other side of the house and guessed what had happened. They swore and, drawing their revolvers, scrambled up the garden slope towards the cars, desperate to retrieve something from the years of struggle even at the last minute. The RUC spotted them in their protective beams, closed in, scuffled, caught them.

  The Blowpipes were discovered in the morning by a group of politicians strolling through the garden after breakfast, talking of constitutional matters, just as if the future of Ulster were theirs.

  7 Sea Lion

  It wasn’t working. It wouldn’t work. This was his last week in the Islands. Perhaps one more conversation with the sea lions would do the trick.

  Richard was allowed to use the motorbike on which old David Macgregor visited his sheep. He drove it brutally through the colony of penguins about half a mile from the knoll on which the farmhouse and hotel stood. A dirty cloud of their own droppings enveloped the birds as they waddled indignantly away. In his present mood the extraordinary tameness of the wild life was an affront to Richard’s sense of reality. Why couldn’t penguins and elephant seals and sea lions learn to protect themselves like ordinary creatures? Why couldn’t David Macgregor and his like recognise that they lived next door to Argentina and thousands of miles from Scotland? But in both cases they didn’t and wouldn’t.

  Richard made for the bluff at the end of the island and the memorial to HMS Sheffield. Somewhere out there, to the south of the most southerly of the Falklands, her tow line had finally snapped 14 years ago, and the work of the Exocet had been accomplished.

  Richard could not afford to repay the publisher’s advance, but knew he would have to. George Schonbrum could hardly reclaim the return air fare as well, but that was small consolation. It had seemed such a good idea over lunch at the Savoy, just the thing to revive his flagging reputation. Brilliant young historian turns the tables on his own Tory past and exposes the falseness of the Falklands War. Secrecy, of course, was essential. To Lady Thatcher, to the Foreign Office, to the Governor and to Mr Smith, the Curator of the Museum in Port Stanley, he had presented himself as working on a straightforward account of the war, updating the quick book put out at the time by Max Hastings and Simon Jenkins. They had all been most helpful. Richard had kept his good looks and could deploy plenty of boyish charm. Only Schonbrum the publisher knew that Richard had reached the answer before he started asking the questions.

  Richard liked the company of the sea lions. They did not fuss like the penguins. They were not as gross or familiar as the elephant seals. They lay, a mix of tawny and black, on the rocks beneath him, economical with their movements and their grunts. There were eight of them on that particular stretch, more than usual, and looking along to the next bay Richard saw the reason. The French marine botanists were at it again, photographing through the glass bottom of their boat. They occupied all eight small white bedrooms of the hotel, which was why Richard was lodged with the farmer, David Macgregor. They were, he understood from Macgregor, making an immensely intellectual film, based on the ripples of the floating local seaweed or kelp, which they repeatedly photographed in all lights and all weathers.

  Richard was one of those Englishmen who shuns the French for fear that they might be more intelligent than himself. He had made no contact with them. Macgregor had, however, told them with satisfaction the story of the young Frenchman who had mysteriously committed suicide on the island 40 years earlier. Macgregor’s uncle had had to pull down a partition in the farmhouse to provide wood for his coffin. The four puny conifers struggling in David Macgregor’s garden were still the only trees on the island. Though the Falklands were not as cold as Richard had expected, the wind was incessant.

  Richard sat in the lee of a huge mound of tussock grass. Its roots were exposed by the wind, and he could see the black layer of ash from the time when the island had been on fire. The peat had burned for several months, set alight, it was supposed, by castaways in search of warmth. The Islands were full of such stories. Those of the 1982 war fitted well with the tales and emblems of earlier drama – skulls, masts, whalebones, the prows of abandoned vessels, and now the wreckage of crashed Mirages.

  Richard heard the air taxi before he saw it approach the mown grass strip. The autumn light was fading and the Cessna did not linger. Within 10 minutes it was in the air again. A tal
l girl was carrying a suitcase to where David Macgregor was waiting in his Land Rover. Of course, his daughter Laura, back for Easter from Southampton University. ‘She talks a bit,’ David had said. Since David himself was monosyllabic, it was hard to say what the comment meant. David, a widower for 20 years, disliked any intrusion on his sheep and his solitude. Soon the airstrip would close for the winter, ‘and there’ll be an end to all this noise and pother,’ David had remarked, as if he lived in Mayfair. Against this background Richard’s evenings in the farmhouse had not sparkled. He had read and reread his research materials, but the answer to the Falklands problem lay dozing in front of the peat fire. There were no powers of force or charm that would turn David Macgregor into an Argentine citizen.

  With Laura the evening was certainly different. She spoke at once as if they had met often before.

  ‘How did you vote?’ she asked.

  Richard had forgotten it was election day in Britain.

  ‘I voted by post. The ballot is secret.’

  ‘Don’t be tiresome. I need to know for my thesis on political communication. How did you vote?’

  ‘I voted Labour for the first time.’ Richard was 29. He spoke as if a lifetime of electoral experience weighed upon him.

  Laura passed him the mint sauce. The lamb was homebred. She had bought the mint sauce at Tesco’s in Southampton on her way to the airport, together with the Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut which her father particularly favoured. She was tall and freckled, too thin for Richard’s taste, but with direct blue eyes which could not be ignored. As the evening passed and she moved about the kitchen and dining table in her tight jeans his first disappointment passed.

  ‘How on earth did you turn Left? All those articles of yours belong to the sour Right.’

  Richard wished she had mentioned the book rather than the articles. His biography of Sir Austen Chamberlain, published five years ago, had been well researched, well received, earned little. But it had opened the columns of the Right-wing press to him, editors paid well and Richard found he could earn more from bitter topical articles than from attempting another book. The more caustic the article, the higher the fee paid on behalf of Messrs Murdoch and Black. He carried a folder of recent articles in his suitcase to reassure him as necessary of his own cleverness.

  ‘The Government is so awful,’ he answered her question lamely. ‘Anything would be better.’

  ‘Then why did you try so hard to get selected for places like South Hants?’

  ‘How the hell do you know that?’

  She refilled his Nescafé.

  ‘I told you. I am reading politics. I follow these things.’

  She was getting warm. That had been the most humiliating year of his life. Handsome young historian, darling of The Spectator, constantly compared to the slashing early Disraeli – full of his own future, he had trailed round constituency selection committees being rejected by old women, estate agents and seedy councillors. He had conceived a fierce hatred of the present Conservative Party which neglected such obvious talent.

  ‘That’s all over now. I’m working on another book.’

  David Macgregor had mumbled his way upstairs to bed. Outside the wind, never still, was rising and rattling the windows.

  ‘You could cheat on the book, I suppose. I mean, you could decide after all that the Argentines offered us a good deal and Margaret Thatcher insisted on war to fix the ’83 election.’

  He stared at her again. His years as a columnist had taught him not to blush.

  ‘I’ve given up wondering how you know what you know,’ he said after a pause. ‘It must be the second sight of the Macgregors.’

  ‘It’s John Wilson at the Museum in Stanley. He rang me in England to say you’d been nosing around the archives. Asking slanted questions. Trying to suggest that we were an unreasonable bunch. Or else a lot of fools exploited by electioneering politicians at home.’

  ‘But it won’t work!’ Richard found himself saying to the girl what he had said to the sea lions.

  Despite all those tendentious column-inches, he had started as a scholar and still believed in evidence. There were therefore still limits to what he could write. Unfortunately there was no evidence in London, or New York, or Buenos Aires or Stanley to support the thesis which he and Schonbrum had tossed around over lunch at the Savoy.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she said. Reaching out, she touched his hand. ‘It would have been bad if you had come out against the Islands.’ She paused. ‘Maybe we can do you a good turn one day.’

  ‘You have already,’ he said, lightening the tone. ‘The lamb was delicious, and …’

  But she was already up the stairs.

  The next morning he had time before the Cessna came for him. He went with Laura to see the Slipway. The wind was still stiff. Yesterday’s clouds had blown away, and the waves sparkled as they formed, rose high and toppled in white explosion upon the rocks. The Frenchmen had wisely pulled their boat ashore. There was no harbour on Sea Lion Island. Before the days of the air taxi, supplies came to the farm three times a year and were hauled almost vertically on an iron pulley up a wooden slipway to a ledge of tussock grass 40 feet above deep water. The crew would scramble up the rocks to help David Macgregor and his father before him to work the pulley.

  ‘Grief, look at that!’

  Laura had reached the ledge first. Below them, exactly where the lighters had once bobbed and scraped against the rock face, was a smart white launch tossing furiously but tied to a rusty iron ring set in the rocks. It was empty.

  ‘The French must have brought in a second boat.’

  ‘No, look at that.’

  Because of the lie of the land they now saw for the first time the cruise ship out in the bay which formed the southern shore of the island. In the sun it, top, shone white, and through her binoculars Laura could see the Greek flag.

  ‘Greek, Russian, Japanese – they come quite often nowadays, but usually only to Stanley.’

  Richard heard the footsteps before she did. ‘Down,’ he whispered loudly, pulling hard at her sweater. They lay side by side on the ledge, concealed by the long wiry hummocks of grass from the upward path which sailors had once made and which the sheep preserved. A young man, dark and wiry, was near the top. He carried a handheld TV camera. Behind him followed a girl, looking exactly like him, carrying what seemed to be a canvas gun-case slung over her shoulder.

  Long ago sailors had built a small cairn to mark the top of the Slipway. The couple paused at the cairn, and spoke together. They were too far off for Richard to know more than that they were speaking a language he did not understand. The young man began to organise his camera. The girl opened the long tubular canvas case and took out the contents. A couple of neat movements and she had achieved her purpose. The camera made it immortal.

  ‘Grief!’ said Laura again.

  ‘Bellissimo,’ shouted the young cameraman.

  On the day when the new British Government was formed, the blue and white flag of Argentina, rooted in the cairn, flew bravely over the southernmost of the Falklands.

  Without a word or gesture to Richard, Laura charged across the open space straight at the flag. She shoved the amazed girl aside, snatched the flag, and threw it down the Slipway. Without any concern for her own safety, she watched it rattle down between the parallel ridges of wood into the sea, and spread lazily in the waves. When she turned round she faced the young man’s pistol.

  ‘That was not an intelligent action,’ he said in excellent English. But that was all. Afterwards Richard often asked himself why he had acted as he did. No calculation, no thought, just an impulse which changed for ever his view of himself.

  Richard was in reasonable training. Vague memories of the rugby field produced the perfect tackle.

  ‘It wasn’t loaded,’ he said, picking up the gun. The Argentine sat on the grass, nursing his knee.

  ‘Of course not. We are not bandits.’

  ‘At least we have the picture,’ said
his sister, ‘which is what we came for.’

  The young man got up. ‘Permit me to introduce ourselves. We are Roberto and Susanna Tuzman, partners in the public relations company of that name, based in Buenos Aires.’ He broke off, and in a different tone shouted at Laura: ‘Stop that! It is not yours.’ But Laura had already thrown the camera down the Slipway. Its descent was noisier than that of the flag, and ended dramatically with a combination of crash and splash.

  ‘Better go while you can,’ said Richard. ‘I don’t suppose the Greeks will wait for ever.’

  The two invaders took his advice.

  ‘It would be better if you did not mention this to anyone,’ said Roberto Tuzman.

  ‘Viva las Malvinas,’ said his sister.

  Then they were down the path, and three minutes later the launch was on its way.

  Laura gave him a kiss just before he boarded the Cessna. But that was that. No shared comradeship after victory, no discussion of what had happened or why.

  ‘Not much point,’ was all she said when he began. ‘It’s all pretty obvious. A PR stunt which went wrong. Lucky we were there. I’ve sent a radio message to Stanley with the gist of it.’

  Richard never knew what that message of hers contained. The Cessna came down at Mount Pleasant, and Richard was put without explanation into an Army helicopter. Within 10 minutes he landed on the grass between Government House and the elegant new Comprehensive School.

  The Governor was there, with his red London taxi, also the Commander British Forces, Mr Smith, the Curator of the Museum, elected Councillors and the Chief Executive. Four police officers saluted. A television camera flashed.

  ‘You didn’t give us time to get the Marine band organised,’ said the General.

  ‘Stout work,’ said the Governor. ‘You’ll stay overnight with Hilda and myself, I hope. A lot of people will want to hear from you direct.’

  The next 24 hours were a splendid muddle. John Major had been re-elected with a majority of 20. The British press linked this with the repulse of a second Argentine invasion of the Falklands. Lady Thatcher sent Richard a telegram. He broadcast repeatedly. He held a public meeting in the hall at Stanley, attended by a high proportion of the town’s inhabitants. He tried to get in touch with Laura, but in vain. He ate a huge celebratory lunch with much Chilean wine at the Upland Goose Hotel. He had a few minutes of final packing before he left in the Governor’s red taxi for the airport.