To Play the King

by Michael Dobbs

  He ignored the sardonic look of the man who took his coat and went straight to the bar, ordering himself a large whisky. It took a while before he had recovered his breath and his composure sufficiently to look around and run the risk of catching someone's eye. The club itself was nothing more than a revamped pub with black walls, lots of mirrors and plentiful disco lights. There was a raised dance floor at one end, but neither the lights nor juke box were working. It was still early, there was scarcely a handful of customers who gazed distractedly at one of the plentiful television monitors on which an old Marlon Brando film was playing, the sound turned off so as not to clash with the piped Christmas music the staff had turned on for their own entertainment. There were large photos of Brando on the walls, in motorcycle leathers from one of his early films, along with posters of Presley, Jack Nicholson, and a couple of other younger film stars he didn't recognize. It was odd, different, a total contrast to the gentlemen's clubs of Pall Mall to which Mycroft was accustomed. There were no seats; this was a watering hole designed for standing and moving, not for spending all evening mooning over a half pint. He rather liked it.

  'You entered in something of a hurry.' A man, in his thirties and well presented, a Brummie by his accent, was standing next to him. 'Mind if I join you?'

  Mycroft shrugged. He was still dazed from his encounter and lacked the self-confidence to be rude and turn away a friendly voice. The stranger was casually but very neatly dressed, his stone-washed jeans immaculately pressed, as was his white shirt, sleeves rolled up narrow and high and with great care. He was obviously fit, the muscles showed prominently.

  'You looked as if you were running from something.'

  The whisky was making Mycroft feel warmer, he needed to ease up a little. He laughed. 'A woman actually. Tried to pick me up!'

  They were both laughing, and Mycroft noted the stranger inspecting him carefully. He didn't object; the eyes were warm, concerned, interested. And interesting. A golden shade of brown.

  'It's usually the other way round. Women running from me,' he continued.

  'Makes you sound like something of a stud.'

  'No, that's not what I meant . . .' Mycroft bit his lip, suddenly feeling the pain and the humiliation of being alone at Christmas. 'My wife walked out on me. After twenty-three years.'

  'I'm sorry.'

  'Why should you be? You don't know her, or me . . .' Once more the confusion flooded over him. 'My apologies. Churlish of me.'

  'Don't worry. Shout if it helps. I don't mind.'

  'Thanks. I might just do that.' He extended a hand. 'David.'

  'Kenny. Just remember, David, that you're not on your own. Believe me, there are thousands of people just like you. Feeling alone at Christmas, when there's no need. One door closes, another opens. Think of it as a new beginning.'

  'Somebody else I know said something like that.'

  'Which must make it right.' He had a broad, easy smile which had a lot of life to it, and was drinking straight from a bottle of exotic Mexican beer with a lime slice stuffed in the neck. Mycroft looked at his whisky, and wondered whether he should try something new, but decided he was probably too old to change his habits. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had tried anything or met anyone new, outside of work.

  'What do you do, Kenny?'

  'Cabin crew. Fly-the-fag BA. And you?'

  'Civil servant.'

  'Sounds horribly dull. Then my job sounds horribly glamorous, but it's not. You get bored fending off movie queens in first class. You travel a lot?'

  Mycroft was just about to answer when the piped strains of 'Jingle Bells' was replaced by the heavy thumping of the juke box. The evening was warming up. He had to bend close to hear what Kenny was saying and to be heard. Kenny had a freshly scrubbed smell with the slightest trace of aftershave. He was bawling into Mycroft's ear to make himself heard, suggesting they might find a place to eat, out of the din.

  Mycroft was trembling once again. It wasn't just the prospect of going back out alone onto the cold streets again, perhaps finding the tart waiting to accost him, or returning home to an empty house. It wasn't just the fact that this was the first time for years someone had been interested in him as a person, rather than as someone who was close to the King. It wasn't even that he felt warmed by Kenny's easy smile and already felt better than he had done all week. It was the fact that, however much he tried to hide from it or explain it away, he wanted to get to know Kenny very much better. Very much better indeed.

  The two men were walking around the lake, one dressed warmly in hacking jacket and gumboots while the other shivered inside his cashmere overcoat and struggled to prevent his hand-stitched leather shoes slipping in the damp grass. Near at hand a domestic tractor was ploughing up a substantial section of plush lawn marked off inside guide ropes while, beyond, a pair of workmen manoeuvred saplings and young trees into holes which further disfigured the once gracious lawn, already scarred by the tyre marks of earth-moving equipment. The effect was to spread dark winter mud everywhere, and even the enthusiasm of the King couldn't persuade Urquhart that the gardens of Buckingham Palace would ever recover their former glories.

  The King had suggested the walk. At the start of their first weekly audience to discuss matters of state, the King had clasped Urquhart with both hands and thanked him fervently for the decision on the Westminster Abbey site, announced that morning, which had been hailed as a triumph by heritage groups as vehemently as it had been attacked by the luminaries of the architects' profession. But as Urquhart had concluded at Cabinet Committee, how many votes had the architects? The King inclined to the view that his intervention had probably been helpful, perhaps even crucial, and Urquhart chose not to disillusion him. Prime Ministers were constantly surrounded by the complaints of the disappointed and it made a refreshing change to be greeted with genuine, unaffected enthusiasm.

  The King was ebullient and, in the characteristically Spartan fashion that often made him oblivious to the discomfort of others, had insisted on showing Urquhart the work which had begun to transform the Palace gardens. 'So many acres of barren, closely cropped lawn, Mr Urquhart, with not a nesting-place in sight. I want this to be made a sanctuary right in the heart of the city, to recreate the natural habitat of London before we smothered it in concrete.'

  Urquhart was picking his way carefully around the freshly ploughed turf, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the cloying earth and divots while the King enthused about the muddy tract. 'Here, this is where I want the wild-flower garden. I'll sow it myself. You can't imagine what a sense of fulfilment it gives me, dragging around a bucket of earth or manhandling a tree.'

  Urquhart decided it would be ill-mannered to mention that the last recorded instance of someone with such an upbringing manhandling a tree had been the King's distant ancestor, George III, who in a fit of clinical madness had descended from his coach in Windsor Great Park and knighted an oak. He also lost the American colonies, and had eventually been locked away.

  ‘I want to bring more wildlife into the garden; there's so much that can be done, so simply. Choosing the right mix of trees, allowing some areas of grass to grow to their natural height so they can provide cover. Look, I'm putting up these nesting boxes.' He indicated a workman halfway up a ladder, fixing wooden boxes to the high brick wall which ran all the way around the gardens.

  The King was walking, head down and fingers steepled, in the prayer posture he so often adopted when engrossed in thought. 'This could be done in every park and large garden in London, you know. It would transform the wildlife of our city, of cities all round the country. We've wasted so many opportunities in the past . . .' He turned towards Urquhart. 'I want to put an idea to you. I would like to make our weekly meetings an opportunity to discuss what the Government might do to promote such matters. And how I might help.'

  ‘I see,' Urquhart mused, the creeping cold sending his left leg into spasm while a pair of ducks splashed their way into flight from the lak
e. Wonderful targets, he thought. 'That's a kind offer, of course, Sir. But I wouldn't want the Environment Secretary to feel in any way that we were undermining his authority. I have to keep a happy team around me . . .'

  'You are absolutely right, I do agree. That's why I took the precaution of chatting about this with the Environment Secretary myself. I didn't want to put any proposal to you which might be an embarrassment. He said he would be delighted, offered to brief me himself.'

  Bloody Dickie. He'd no sense of humour, that was clear, now it appeared as if he had no other sense either.

  'Today this is just a muddy field,' the King continued. 'But in the years to come this could be a new way of life for us all. Don't you see?'

  Urquhart couldn't. He could see only piles of mud spread around like newly turned graves. Damp was seeping through the welts of his shoes and he was beginning to feel miserably uncomfortable. 'You must take care, Sir. Environmental matters are becomingly increasingly the stuff of party politics. It's important that you remain above such sordid matters.'

  The King laughed. 'Fear not, Prime Minister. If I were meant to become involved in party politics the Constitution would have allowed me a vote! No, such things are not for me; in public I shall stick strictly to matters of the broadest principle. Simply to encourage, to remind people that there is a better way ahead.'

  Urquhart was growing increasingly irritable. His socks were sodden, and the thought of the public being told from on high that there was a better way ahead than the one presently being pursued, no matter how delicately phrased, smacked of grist to the Opposition's mill and filled him with unease, but he said nothing in the hope that his silence would bring an end to the conversation. He wanted a warm bath and a stiff whisky, not more regal thoughts on how to do his job.

  'In fact, I thought I might pursue the point in a speech I have to make in ten days' time to the charitable foundations . . .'

  'The environment?' The irritation and impatience were beginning to show in Urquhart's tone, but the King appeared not to have noticed.

  'No, no, Mr Urquhart. An address intended to bring people together, to remind them how much we have achieved, and can continue to achieve, as a nation. Broad principles, no specifics.'

  Urquhart felt relieved. An appeal to motherhood.

  'The charitable foundations are making such prodigious efforts, when there are so many forces trying to divide us,' the King continued. 'Successful from the less well-off. Prosperous South from the Celtic fringe. Suburbs from the inner cities. No harm in encouraging families secure in their own homes this Christmas to spare a thought for those forced to sleep rough in the streets. In the rush, so many seem to have been left behind, and at this time of year it's appropriate to reach out to the less fortunate, don't you think? To remind us all that we must work towards being one nation.'

  'You're intending to say that?'

  'Something on those lines.'

  'Impossible!'

  It was a mistake, a rash outburst brought on by frustration and the growing cold. Since there was no book of rules, no written Constitution to order their conduct, it was vital to maintain the fiction of agreement, of discussing but never disputing, no matter how great their differences, for in a house of cards which lean one upon the other each card has its place. A King must not be seen to disagree with a Prime Minister, nor a Prime Minister with a King. Yet it had happened. One impatient word had undermined the authority of one and threatened both.

  The King's complexion coloured rapidly; he was not used to being contradicted. The scar on his left cheekbone inflicted in a fall from a horse showed suddenly prominent and purple while his eyes carried an undisguised look of annoyance. Urquhart sought refuge in justification.

  'You can't talk of one nation as if it didn't exist. That implies there are two nations, two classes, a divide which runs between us, top dogs and the downtrodden. The term reeks of unfairness and injustice. It's not on! Sir.'

  'Prime Minister, you exaggerate. I'm simply drawing attention to the principle - exactly the same principle as your Government has just endorsed in my Christmas address to the Commonwealth. North and South, First World and Third, the need to secure advancement for the poor, to bring the different parts of the world community closer together.'

  'That's different.'

  'How?'

  'Because . . .'

  'Because they're black? Live in distant corners of the world? Don't have votes, Prime Minister?'

  'You underestimate the power of your words. It's not what the words mean, it's how others will interpret them.' He waved his arms in exasperation and sought to pummel life back into his frozen limbs. 'Your words would be used to attack the Government in every marginal constituency in the country.'

  'To read criticism of the Government into a few generalized Christmas-time sentiments would be ridiculous. Christmas isn't just for those with bank accounts. Every church in the country will be ringing to the stories of Good King Wcnceslas. Would you have him banned as politically contentious? Anyway, marginal seats, indeed . . . We've only just had an election. It's not as if we have to worry about another just yet.'

  Urquhart knew it was time to back down. He couldn't reveal his election plans - Palace officials were notoriously gossipy - and he had no taste for a personal dispute with the Monarch. He sensed that danger lay therein. 'Forgive me, Sir, perhaps the cold has made me a little too sensitive. Just let me say there are potential dangers with any subject as emotive and complex as this. Perhaps I could suggest you allow us to see a draft of the speech so that we can check the detail for you? Make sure the statistics are accurate, that the language is unlikely to be misinterpreted? I believe it is the custom.'

  'Check my speech? Censorship, Mr Urquhart?'

  'Heavens, no. I'm sure you would find our advice entirely helpful. We would take a positive attitude, I can guarantee.' His politician's smile was back, trying to thaw the atmosphere, but he knew it would take more than flattery. The King was a man of rigid principles; he'd worked hard for many years developing them, and he wasn't going to see them smothered by a smile and a politician's promise.

  'Let me put it another way,' Urquhart continued, his leg once more going into spasm. 'Very soon, within the next few weeks, the House of Commons must vote on the new Civil List. You know how in recent years the amount of money provided for the Royal Family has become increasingly a subject of dispute. It would help neither you nor me if you were engaged in a matter of political controversy at a time when the House wanted to review your finances in a cool, constructive manner.'

  'You're trying to buy my silence!' the King snapped. Neither man was renowned for his patience, and they were goading each other on.

  'If you want a semantic debate then I put it to you that the whole concept of a constitutional monarchy and the Civil List is precisely that - we buy your silence and active cooperation. That's part of the job. But really . . .' The Prime Ministerial exasperation was undisguised. 'All I'm offering is a sensible means for us both to avoid a potential problem. You know it makes sense.'

  The King turned away to gaze across the bedraggled lawns. His hands were behind his back, his fingers toying irritably with the signet ring on his little finger. 'What has happened to us, Mr Urquhart? Just a few moments ago we were talking of a bright new future, now we haggle over money and the meaning of words.' He looked back towards Urquhart, who could see the anguish in his eyes. ‘I am a man of strong passion, and sometimes my passion runs ahead of what I know is sensible.' It was as close to an apology as Urquhart was going to get. 'Of course you shall see the speech, as Governments have always seen the Monarch's speeches. And of course I shall accept any suggestion you feel you must make. I suppose I have no choice. I would simply ask that you allow me to play some role, however small and discreet, in pushing forward those ideals I hold so deeply. Within the conventions. I hope that is not too much to ask.'

  'Sir, I would hope that in many years to come you and I, as Monarch and Prime Mi
nister, will be able to look back on today's misunderstanding and laugh.'

  'Spoken like a true politician.'

  Urquhart was uncertain whether the words implied compliment or rebuke. 'We have our principles, too.'

  'And so do I. You may silence me, Prime Minister, that is your right. But you will not get me to deny my principles.'

  'Every man, even a monarch, is allowed his principles.'