Saving the Queen (22 page)

“Come along, I have a surprise.”

They darted into the lodge, and she came out bearing a basket and blankets that had been laid there for them. The sun was directly overhead, and through the young horse-chestnut trees she would see out onto the lake and the grass beyond. Their privacy was total, and she gave him the Alsatian wine to open, and quickly drank one and then a second glass, before she began opening and eating the finger sandwiches, and the eggs, and the cold pheasant, and cakes and coffee, by which time they were well through a bottle of claret, just cool enough, and she drew the blanket around her and snuggled close to Perry.

What she liked best about him was that he always talked with her, and almost never about the kind of thing queens get talked to most about. In great exasperation one time she had asked Mabs to help her calculate how many conversations on an average working day she, the Queen, had had respecting the weather.

“Such a nice day, ma'am!”

“Yes, it is a very nice day, isn't it, Lady Leonard? Quite unseasonable, for this time of the year.”

“Yes, indeed, ma'am, but I remember once when we had such weather—I was a child, spending the winter in Shropshire—for two whole weeks, and it quite ruined the natural rhythm of the farmers. Let me see now, would that have been 1907 or 1908?”

“I wouldn't know, Lady Leonard, but surely it was 1907 because 1908 was the year of the great blizzard in Shropshire.”

Lady Leonard would retire, trying to refresh her recollection about the great blizzard of 1908, which hadn't occurred.

“Is there no other neutral subject, Mabs?” she asked, when Lady Lunford, her pencil quiet at last, computed that Her Majesty discussed the weather approximately ninety-four times per day on a typical day.

“I'm afraid not, ma'am, though flowers are fairly reliable. Most people know
something
about flowers, even the men.” The Queen said she would find a discussion of the weather a great relief over the discussion of flowers.

“What would I say? Are your petunias big and strong this season, Lady Shaftesbury?… Or: If you really want a great big petunia, Lady Shaftesbury, you can borrow one of mine. I must have the biggest stud in the vegetable kingdom, and he'll bugger anything you have in sight.” Lady Lunford laughed.

“Oh, do stop it, ma'am!”

Perry asked her whether she had had a chance to talk to the Duke about his findings in Africa. “We spoke for a while,” Caroline said. “Richard is, as you know, terribly anxious to oblige everything except British tradition.”

“But you know, he's probably right. It's only a matter of time, and the whole lot of them will want to be free. What then matters is the nature of the Commonwealth.”

“I have ideas about that,” Caroline said. This sounded portentous, so she added, “Everybody does.… The problem is so much the problem of pride. When you think that the Stone of Scone was taken from Westminster Abbey in protest against an amalgamation several hundred years old, you can get a feeling for what the separatists want in Africa.”

“And—I expect—what they'll probably get.”

“Perry, do you know Westerley Aston well?”

“No, though Father does. Says he's an awful ass, but that could mean simply that he missed more than the permissible number of birds last time they shot together. Why, is he botching the Colonial office?”

“Not so much botching it,” said Caroline, “as giving everywhere the impression—to which His Royal Highness, my husband, contributes—that we are the one surviving colonialist power. Occasionally you will find him making references to French and Portuguese and even American overseas appetites. But he never criticizes the Soviet Union's grip on Eastern Europe. Why can't we call that colonialism?”

“We should,” said Perry. “It's that at least. Why don't you mention it to the P.M., if you'd rather not talk directly to old Westerley?”

Caroline drew closer to Perry. “I wish you were my minister plenipotentiary. I would trust you to do all these things for me, and then if anything at all went wrong, all I would have to do is simply behead you”—she reached over and ran her fingers through his silky red hair.

Perry put his arm about Caroline's neck and, with his other, stroked, ever so lightly, her lashes, which she had closed against the brilliant sun. She raised her hand and laid it on his, and patted it gently.

“I think not, Perry,”

“I'm sorry, Caroline. But remember, it will never be too late for me, because there will never be anyone else.”

“You're a duck, and I do adore you. I mean
really
adore you. But that is all I want to say right now, except that it would be quite awful, wouldn't it, if the Soviets were to subdivide Windsor Park?”

Blackford knew nothing about the background of the man called Rufus, but it did not require much knowledge to know that Rufus was one of those men of infinite patience in whom displays of impatience are simply patience's tool. “Goddammit, Singer, haven't you got the log from the NSC for last week yet?” didn't mean that Rufus was reproachful of Singer, merely that a shift into the hortatory mood would probably suggest more directly than any other kind of explanation Rufus's impatient desire to see promptly the logs of information passing through from American officials to the Prime Minister, directly and indirectly. Blackford was struck by the relationship between the two men. Callaway's veneration of Rufus was transparent, but a world removed from sycophancy. And Rufus listened carefully to Callaway, rejecting most of his spirited ellipses, but pausing here and again, raising his hand for silence, to suggest that Callaway had come up with something particularly interesting, as when, in the presence of Blackford on that first and very long afternoon, Callaway had suggested that perhaps Blackford should carefully lead a casual conversation, if the Queen should indeed continue to march toward conversational informality, in the direction of nuclear technology, to test whether anyone around the Queen had anything more than a comic-book familiarity with it.

Rufus, leaning back in his chair and studying the cigarette smoke that issued from his respiratory system from reveille to the end of his day as evenly as if through a factory steam pipe, addressed Blackford.

“Did you study nuclear physics at Yale?”

“I had courses in advanced physics,” said Black, “and touched on it. I could deliver a layman's lecture on how the A-bomb is made. But I don't know any of the hydrogen-bomb stuff, naturally. I guess the best way to put it”—he smiled happily, and Rufus and Singer quickly found that, like most people, they thawed, and their minds ran more fluently, under Black's uninhibited smiles—“is that I don't in fact know anything about the projected hydrogen bomb I'm not supposed to know.”

Rufus spoke. “I have spent a very intensive month in studying the hydrogen bomb. I've talked with Teller and Urey and with their subordinates. I've had scientific training, and I attempted to classify what I have learned into three orders of difficulty. The first could be explained to anyone with a keen mind and a basic aptitude for mechanics. The second and higher order of difficulty would require that the listener had spent time in formal study. Not a great deal of time—I am not talking about someone who has studied atomic physics for several semesters, but someone who has familiarized himself sufficiently with the great scientific impasses that at various stages in the struggle to achieve the bomb have constituted roadblocks of historical obduracy.”

Blackford found himself enjoying Rufus's manifest capacity to speak whole thoughts, and wondered idly whether, during the war, he and Ike had needed an interpreter.

“And—finally—I have studied, and put into the third classification, the keys to those impasses. They number, by the most convenient count, nine. Anyone who chose to do so could reclassify them so as to multiply them to as high a figure as twenty-two, or as low a figure as six, depending on the taxonomic tables you choose. I think of nine as reasonably distinguishing nine problems different in generic kind. It would be possible for someone who was not a trained physicist to apprehend those nine solutions and, by rote, pass them along to an atomic engineer who, acting on them, could proceed to crack these impasses. For instance, I could myself, knowing what I now know, put pencil to paper and fill half a standard-sized notebook, turn it over to Sakharov, and the Soviet Union's problems would reduce to mechanics—
provided they could get computer capability
. Granted, mechanical problems are real problems.
But they would know how to proceed
. And it is obvious that this is the category of information that Stalin now needs. And it's just as obvious, however incredible, that some of that information is beginning to filter through to him, thanks less, I should think it safe to assume, to anyone's technical training of the Queen—if she is the source—in the abstruse world of nuclear physics, than to what must be her extraordinary mimetic powers to repeat exactly what the informant, no doubt sweatily, in turn has memorized for her benefit. We need to discover how much of it is being convoyed through to the enemy under the paradoxical protection of someone high up and, above all, to whom.”

He went on without interruption, except to light another cigarette, turning to Blackford: “I know about you, your record, and your aptitudes. I propose to teach you secrets I have designated Classification One and Classification Two. You must become
entirely
conversant with them, as if you had picked them up in the course of your studies at Yale and your close association at Yale with a consultant to the Atomic Energy Commission—is there one?”

“I don't know,” said Blackford. “If there is, I didn't run into him. But I can find out.”

“No—Singer, you find out; and find out something about him.

“You will spend all your time before next Wednesday here, with me, listening to what I explain to you and reading material I have here. Then, in your conversations at Windsor on the general subject of engineering, let the conversation drift toward the miracles of modern engineering, and see what anybody around does with it. We should know, if we can, the level' of theoretical and mechanical sophistication of the Queen herself and anybody in her regular or irregular entourage. As far as we
know
, as I say, the Prime Minister doesn't pass along to her any written material, though I frankly can't guess what he would do if she flat-out asked for it. If we
have
to nudge up to him with that question, we'll try to find a plausible excuse for our curiosity—”

“Maybe,” Blackford suggested, with the air of the bright-boy at class, observing a positive suggestion, “you could get Senator McCarthy to give a speech demanding an investigation of the passenger pigeons in Buckingham Palace?”

Rufus would not have dealt with anyone whose digressions betrayed a genuinely frivolous concern with grave problems. Already he had accepted Black's interpolations as stylistic; so that he went on with his analysis, serenely confident that the strong current he was discharging would not, in Blackford, dissipate through mindlessness.

“We've laid a bait,” Rufus continued. “We've fingered a British radio operator—Foreign Service—guilty as Mata Hari. He's been passing secrets for over a year. We've been feeding him placebos, with every now and then something semi-solid to maintain his interest, and standing with his Soviet bosses. A week ago, referring back to a phony cable from Washington requesting the services of Professor Wintergreen of Oxford to help crack a specific problem, we slipped in a coded cable saying the request was canceled—that the “Teller-Freeze Bypass' appears to be ‘entirely successful.' Just that—the “Teller-Freeze Bypass.' Now that will go from the radio operator (the Brits will be arresting him in a couple of days) to his contact. We haven't been able to find out who that is, and we wouldn't be surprised if they use the mail—probably someone in London. If it works, Moscow is going to be screaming to the guy
we're
looking for to find out what the hell the Teller-Freeze Bypass is. These things get around quickly, so I give it a couple of weeks, maybe less, to ripen. If this one doesn't work, we'll use another one. But we'll drop the second one through another mole: We can't let our radio operator discover, before he is whisked away, that there isn't any such thing as a Teller-Freeze Bypass outside the imagination of a counterintelligence unit.

“… Meanwhile,” Rufus continued, “I assume you both noticed in the Court Circular that Sir Edmund Hawkins accompanied the P.M. to Buckingham Palace last week—it was made to sound like a ceremonial visit. He's a family friend, but family friends don't usually,
qua
friends, go to the palace in the company of prime ministers on official business.”

Rufus paused. One of his long pauses. Singer succeeded, by minimum physical motion, in communicating that during the interval—and, Blackford generalized, others like it—silence was appropriate. Blackford ran his mind over the cliché—Watson, motionless during the ratiocinative convulsions of Sherlock Holmes; Archie Goodwin, silent lest he distract the great Nero Wolfe. But Black, even as a very young man, knew precociously—however amused by them, or even antagonized—that on the whole it was more than social indulgence to give decent berth to the eccentricities of people who commanded his respect, whether because of his knowledge of their attainments or because of his intuitive respect for their capabilities. Rufus, he had very quickly concluded, was an unusual man, of unusual talent and experience, brought in to cope with an unusual problem. Blackford would not mock him; would not treat him like a Dr. Simon, foolishly, dangerously, patronizingly suggesting that the means by which to force one's mind on a problem was some counterpart of
THINK LATIN
. Blackford didn't interrupt Rufus's silence, or show signs of impatience; or mock it, ever.