Saving the Queen (27 page)

He lay back in bed, opening the curtains and looking out in the moonlight past the garden over those irenic fields that had bred, according to the famous adage, the flower of British youth. He felt suddenly a return of that rage he had never excreted, rekindled tonight by the smug coarseness of Kirk's reference to Greyburn. So he had been head boy. He remembered him, of course, though he had forgotten his name. He was, to Oakes the third-former, a remote and glamorous athletic and administrative figure, who had never given him, by any word or deed, any indication that he was himself aware of Blackford Oakes. He made a note to himself: He must write to Anthony Trust and ask what impression Trust had of Kirk, who as head boy would have presided over the prefects' meetings. He had always sensed that Dr. Chase would have planted the legend of the Cowardly American running home to his mother rather than endure what every British schoolboy endures as a matter of course, and Anthony had never told him whether, in the few days that Anthony remained at Greyburn before himself shipping out for America, he had made any effort, or met with any success, in modifying the legend Dr. Chase would have worked so hard to propagate. He wondered whether his stepfather's letter to Dr. Chase had been given any surreptitious currency. He wondered at Chase's endurance as headmaster—whom was he beating? Were there any other fresh Americans to whom he could say, after the torture session, “Courtesy of Great Britain, sir”?. It was less than the obsession it used to be, but Blackford knew that someday he would need to expunge it from his emotional system, though he could not guess how, or even let his mind run over hypothetical means of taking condign, if asymmetrical, revenge. Perhaps he had no alternative than one of these days, after completing his present mission, driving his MG down to Greyburn, climbing up those stone steps, walking past Leary-deary's nose, or his successor's, into the inner sanctum, and beating the shit out of the august Dr. Chase.… Odd, that after several years of letting that fantasy subside, it revived now in his mind. He knew why. It was Kirk, and what Kirk had said at the dinner table. Black always expected to come up, somewhere, upon it, but he imagined it would be late at night, at a drunken evening at a gentlemen's club. It had happened at a sedate, intimate dinner in the presence of the Queen of England. Black's emotional resentment was bright again, like the fire in the living room, which he had lit on coming in, and at which he was now staring.

In another wing of the castle, Peregrine Kirk lay, also looking out the window and wondering whether communism, really, wouldn't have come easier to people in general if he had come up with an extra-scientific provenance to smooth the pilgrim's way: perhaps in the bowdlerized editions.…

He reminisced, thinking now with some excitement about his long recovery. It wasn't very far from Wembley to St. George's Hospital, but he very nearly did not survive the journey, and it was a week before he grew conscious of his small bedroom, and the constant presence of a nurse, ascetic in appearance and manner, who when she was not massaging him or superintending his leg and arm exercises or bathing his broken body with lotions, sat patiently in the corner of the room, reading. It was several weeks before he had fought his listlessness sufficiently to inquire what it was that engrossed her so. She replied that she was reading, at that moment,
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
. He laughed, which hurt; and then wondered whether he had hurt her, but she was evidently used to it. She never brought up the subject, but did not shrink from it, and in another week she was reading Lenin aloud to him.

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 invites 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.