by James Philip
The anger of Zorin’s immediate rebuttal had been genuine.
‘I am not in an American courtroom, sir, and therefore I do not wish to answer a question that is put to me in the fashion in which a prosecutor does. In due course, sir, you will have your reply. Do not worry.’
For all that Adlai Stevenson was the darling of the centre-left of the American establishment, a two-time failed Presidential candidate and supposedly the great figurehead of reason in the Cold War imbroglios of the 1950s, Zorin had been anything but in the other man’s thrall. He had risen through the ranks at the People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs to be appointed Ambassador to Czechoslovakia in 1945, where his reward for managing the February 1948 putsch had been the post of Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, spells as Ambassador to West Germany and from 1956 his appointment as one of the two permanent Soviet representatives to the United Nations Security Council.
‘...You are in the court of world opinion right now and you can answer yes or no. You have denied that they exist. I want to know...if I've understood you correctly?’ Adlai Stevenson had blustered.
Zorin had retorted: ‘You will have your answer in due course!’
But it had been the Americans who had given their answer first, raining nuclear fire down upon the Motherland.
“It is good to meet again,” the older man observed.
Dobrynin nodded.
“We live in strange times,” he offered.
Both men nodded.
Mrs Nordstrom had watched the reunion from the doorway with polite disinterest. Eighteen months ago she had been a rich man’s housekeeper and the sometime surrogate aunt and mother figure to that rich man’s daughter; a daughter whose own mother had gone off and married a feckless, good for nothing actor when Gretchen was just six years old, and whose step mother had quietly abdicated any ‘motherly’ duties. Now Gretchen was exactly where she had always wanted to be; at the centre of a firestorm of TV, radio and newspaper controversy, and newly married to a man who loved her ‘just the way she was’; and the former rich man’s anonymous housekeeper had become Claude Betancourt’s accomplice in facilitating a meeting which might well alter the course of history.
The two Russians realised she was still in the room.
They looked to her.
“The Secretary of State and the Attorney General will be here in thirty minutes, gentlemen,” Mrs Nordstrom announced. “May I offer you coffee and light refreshments while you are waiting for them to arrive?”
Chapter 8
Saturday 6th June 1964
Junior Common Room, King’s College, Oxford
Margaret Thatcher had asked the Cabinet to convene at ten forty-five that morning, and requested the Chief of the Defence Staff to ensure the attendance of the other two Chiefs of Staff at that time. At that hour she had made no attempt to explain the absence of the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Henry Tomlinson, or the increased military presence in and around King’s College. If any of the men or women around the big, polished table that morning thought it remotely odd that her mood was self-evidently one of defiance and her manner almost aggressively purposeful, nobody remarked upon it.
“Thank you all for being here in such good time,” the Prime Minister prefaced, slowly making eye contacts all around the table.
To the right of Sir Henry Tomlinson’s empty chair sat the Secretary of Defence, William Whitelaw the forty-five year old Conservative Member of Parliament for Penrith and Borders, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, fifty-four year old Peter Thorneycroft, the man with the unenviable distinction of being the last pre-October War Tory grandee still in the government. Fifty-three year old Barbara Castle, the combative red-headed firebrand of the pre-war Labour left and now the Minister of Labour, had settled beside the Chancellor and had been chatting animatedly with him when the Prime Minister entered the room. The chair at the right hand end of the table was vacant having been brought in after all the other members of the Cabinet had already arrived and taken their places.
Continuing counter-clockwise around the table sat the oldest member of the Cabinet, sixty-five year old Lord Brookeborough – who preferred to be known as Sir Basil Brook – a nephew of Winston Churchill’s wartime Chief of the Imperial General Staff, and since 1943 the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and the de facto Secretary of State for the province in the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, softly drumming his fingers on the table top.
Beside Brooke, Airey Neave, the forty-eight year old MP for Abingdon who had taken on the poisoned chalice of the newly formed Ministry for National Security in April, waited impassively, calmly even though his one-time protégé and close friend, Margaret Thatcher had given him no inkling of what might be in store. Sitting next to him was Alison Munro, the fifty year old senior civil servant who had joined the top table of government upon Neave’s assumption of the Security Brief, taking over the Ministry of Supply, which was currently in the process of wholly subsuming Energy and Transportation into its responsibilities. This formidable woman – effectively, the nation’s ‘rationing queen’ upon whom the onerous and often impossible demands of the military also fell – was in the process of re-organising the United Kingdom’s ramshackle command economy displaying in the process, an indefatigable disregard for vested interests and a pragmatic callousness for the wounded sensibilities of her ministerial colleagues.
The Chiefs of Staff sat in a block opposite the Prime Minister’s chair; presumably for mutual support and protection, other members of the Cabinet secretly joked.
Air Marshall Sir Christopher Hartley and the First Sea Lord, Sir Varyl Begg, flanked the elder statesmen, Field Marshall Sir Richard Amyatt Hull. Fifty-one year old Hartley was a big, outdoors loving man. Winchester College and Balliol educated he had taught at Eton before flying night fighters in the Second World War. He had been Air Officer Commanding 12 Group, Fighter Command before the October War.
Sir Varyl Begg was a slighter, more cerebral figure. He had been the gunnery officer of the battleship HMS Warspite at the Battle of Matapan in 1941 when the Mediterranean Fleet sank three Italian cruisers; a brace of them, the Fiume and the Zara in literally two minutes flat. Later he had commanded the 8th Destroyer Flotilla during the Korean conflict, been in charge of the Naval Contingent at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, and captain of the aircraft carrier HMS Triumph. At the time of the October War he had been slated to take over from Julian Christopher in the Far East in the second half of 1963.
Sir Richard Hull had commanded 12th Infantry brigade and then 26th Armoured Brigade in North Africa in 1943, 1st Armoured Division in Italy in 1944 and 5th Infantry Division in the final throes of the war in North West Europe in the winter of 1944-45.
Christopher Mayhew, the Secretary of State for Health had seated himself a little apart from the First Sea Lord; this morning he was visibly uneasy, a little morose.
Not so Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson. The former Permanent Secretary of the Foreign Office, which he had headed since the demise in the Balmoral atrocity of his predecessor Sir Alec Douglas Home, had mentally ‘gamed’ the most likely scenarios of what was likely to happen today and he was intensely curious to discover if any of his guesses were remotely close to the mark. Although he had not asked to be elevated to the post of Foreign Secretary back in December, life had been uncommonly interesting in the last six months; he had no inherent right to the job and if somebody thought they could do it better, good luck to them!
A little out of his place and possibly, his depth, Nicholas Ridley, the thirty-five year old MP for Cirencester and Tewkesbury who was occupying – he imagined temporarily only – the chair of his sadly deceased Secretary of State at the Ministry of Information, Iain Macleod, tried not to broadcast his anxiety.
Like Margaret Thatcher, he had been one of the tranche of MPs elected to the House of Commons for the first time in the 1959 General Election. The second son of a Viscount – his mother was Ursula Lutyens, daughter of the famous architect Sir
Edwin Lutyens – after graduation from Balliol College in 1947 he had soldiered briefly before pursuing a career in civil engineering. He had only been working with Iain Macleod since March and although – on their occasional encounters - the Prime Minister had always been very civil to him he had not expected to be invited into this august company on this of all days.
The Home Secretary, Roy Jenkins met Ridley’s eye and winked conspiratorially. Jenkins had a reputation for being the least cliquish of politicians with a host of old and firm friendships that crossed party lines and a famous willingness to seriously consider all points of view regardless of their political flavour.
At the Home Secretary’s right sat the Secretary of State for Scotland. John Scott Maclay was a throwback to a different political age. Educated at Winchester College and Trinity, Cambridge he had rowed in the victorious light blue Eight in the 1927 Boat Race. He was the National Liberal and Conservative MP for West Renfrewshire. In his fifty-ninth year he had enjoyed an uneventful political career in which he had held a number of junior ministerial posts before Harold MacMillan had seemingly ‘put him out to grass’ by sacking him during the course of the so-called ‘Night of the Long Knives’ in July 1962, during which ‘Supermac’ had sacked a third of his Cabinet.
At Margaret Thatcher’s left hand sat James Callaghan, the Deputy Prime Minister, Leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party of the United Kingdom, Secretary of State for Wales and MP for Cardiff South East. He was weary, his lugubrious good humour absent as he waited for the axe to fall.
All eyes had settled on Margaret Thatcher’s face.
“You will know that as is the custom in the wake of an unfavourable vote of confidence in the House of Commons,” Margaret Thatcher declared in a businesslike tone, “I was granted an audience with Her Majesty the Queen at Blenheim Palace late last evening at which I tendered my resignation and that of my government.”
She paused, as if hurriedly rehearsing what she planned to say next.
“While I was with Her Majesty at Woodstock the news from the Persian Gulf was still coming in. And, of course, the confirmation that the Argentine Military Governor of ‘the Malvinas’,” this she said with a frown of profound distaste, “has seized an unspecified number of hostages from among the civilian population and is threatening to shoot them if the Total Exclusions Zones are not lifted to permit the resupply of his ‘forces of occupation’ on the Falkland Islands. Last night the Royal Navy and the RAF carried out my orders to intercept the French warships responsible for the attack on HMS Hampshire. RAF bombers operating from Gibraltar, Malta and the United Kingdom have successfully carried out attacks designed to neutralise the threat posed by the remainder of the French Corsican Squadron, and to disable its shore establishments at Ajaccio. At the time of my audience with Her Majesty, I was not in a position to apprise her of the most up to date military situation.”
A frown began to form on her lips.
“Nor at the time I was at Blenheim Palace was it clear whether anybody at the Embassy in Philadelphia had been killed or injured yesterday in the two car bomb attacks on the compound; an attack that the perpetrators seem to have co-ordinated to coincide with President Kennedy’s address to Congress demanding that the UAUK lift the ‘blockade’ on the Irish Republic before he considers laying a ‘second Marshall Plan before Congress’.”
She nodded acknowledgement to her Chancellor at this juncture. Peter Thorneycroft had briefed every member of the ‘political cabinet’ individually or in pairs on the rough outline of the proposed ‘Fulbright Plan’; not so much a revamped version of the post-1945 Marshall Plan that selflessly pumped something like $13 billion into the war-shattered economy of Western Europe; as a multi-billion dollar cash injection to stabilise the United Kingdom’s economic and industrial base while simultaneously revitalising the balance sheets of the half-dozen biggest banks in America. The US taxpayer would never get a cent of the money back but then it was not as if US taxpayers were having to fight America’s foreign wars with their husbands and brothers and sons; that responsibility having been comprehensively abdicated by the isolationist proponents of the ‘America First’ abomination.
“In any event,” Margaret Thatcher concluded. “Her Majesty, in receiving my resignation, asked to address Cabinet this morning before she decides how best to ensure that the governance of her Kingdom and its Dominions overseas may best be conducted in the coming days.”
This said she rose to her feet.
“Her Majesty will be here presently,” she explained and walked out of the old Common Room, her heels clicking rhythmically on the bare boards of the floor.
There was a short delay.
Nobody spoke.
“Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth!” Barked a Guardsman, presenting arms and crashing his two large booted feet together noisily on the ground.
The proclamation and the sound of other rifles clicking metallically to the ‘present’ in the hallway outside galvanised and, for some of the ministers, came as a horrible heart-pausing shock.
Chair legs squealed and everybody struggled to their feet.
Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of Great Britain, Ireland and the British Dominions beyond the Seas Queen, and Defender of the Faith walked slowly, regally into the ancient, somewhat shabby Common Room.
The Queen’s expression was forbiddingly stern and she avoided eye contact as she walked stiffly, and a little painfully, down the side of the table. Only the three Service Chiefs and the Cabinet Secretary had had official pre-warning of the Sovereign’s intention – or rather, her expressed implacable will – to attend this specially convened meeting of the Cabinet of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom.
The Queen was dressed like the housewife she liked to think she was at home with her family, except that the knee length fawn dress was obviously a pre-war Norman Hartnell creation, her hair was freshly coiffured, and her tan shoes polished to a perfect, high sheen. She wore a dark jacket with a single small glittering pin in the form of a thistle over her heart.
Margaret Thatcher had re-entered the Common Room two steps behind her monarch, her left arm threaded through the crook of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh’s right arm as he tottered valiantly forward, his stick clacking loudly on the floor with every uncertain step.
A giant Welsh Guardsman followed carrying a heavy, high-back chair as if it was no weightier than a matchstick. Sir Henry Tomlinson brought up the rear, waiting by the door to the Common Room until the extra chair had been positioned at the head of the table just behind where the Queen’s right hand would be when she was seated.
The Guardsman marched out.
The Cabinet Secretary closed the door and tiptoed to his position by the Prime Minister’s right hand.
The Queen paused to gently cajole her consort to: “For goodness sake sit down, Philip!” Before, she herself still standing, turned to give her full and undivided attention to her ministers.
In that moment the sound of a pin dropping on a carpeted floor a hundred yards away would have sounded like the distant eruption of Krakatoa.
Chapter 9
Saturday 6th June 1964
Embassy of the United Kingdom, Bellfield Avenue, Philadelphia
The Pennsylvania National Guardsmen who had been deployed on the streets and in the parkland around the embassy compound the previous day had been replaced with M-48 Patton tanks of the 3rd Marines and troopers of the 101st Airborne Division. M-113 armoured personnel carriers and Philadelphia Police Department cruisers were patrolling the surrounding districts broadcasting that: By order of the President of the United States of America all demonstrations and public gatherings are hereby forbidden within a one mile radius of the boundaries of the British Embassy compound. Any person breaching this order will be liable to immediate arrest or to be shot on sight.
Lady Marija Christopher was angry.
Not so much about having had her luncheon with her husband and her friends interrupt
ed yesterday by the two explosions in the road nearby, but by the fact that nobody would let her help with the clearing up. She was three months pregnant, almost. She was not ill and she hated sitting around doing nothing when there was work to be done. Once the people who had been hurt by flying glass had been given emergency first aid everybody had started treating her as if she needed to be wrapped in cotton wool!
It was ridiculous!
Even now Sten-gun armed Royal Marines stood guard at the doors.
Just because she and Rosa Hannay had sneaked out and gone with the injured to the hospital, they had been scolded like naughty children and she had been ‘grounded’, whatever that meant!
They were to stay in their apartment – fortunately hardly damaged by the bombing – until it was ‘safe’.
Marija and her sister had been ‘locked up’ this way all day.
The attack had come without warning.
The first car bomb had blown out most of the windows at the front of the main building; the second had splintered several on the upper floors at the back. Lord Franks, the Ambassador had reported that at least ten National Guardsmen and Philadelphia PD officers had been killed in Bellfield Avenue as well as an unknown number of unfortunate people who were just passing by. Inside and outside the Embassy at least fifty people had been injured.
“The boys were worried about us, sister,” Rosa Hannay reminded her friend diplomatically.
Marija began to pull a face at her sister then thought better of it, knowing that Rosa and her husband, Alan, the sweetest man imaginable – apart from her own husband, obviously – had had their first scene yesterday. She and her Peter had not had that sort of argument, yet, but they surely would; all husbands and wives fell out eventually, that was the way of the World.
“I know,” Marija agreed, unconsciously brushing her right hand across her abdomen, momentarily putting down the dress she was working on. She had never had her mother’s gifts as a seamstress and until now, never really worried about it overmuch. She needed to let out two or three of her dresses without completely ruining them, and in comparison with her work as a nurse and midwife it was horrendously fiddly and complicated. “Ouch!” She muttered, pricking her finger, again.
