The Prime Minister’s Royal Marine bodyguard formed a broad tunnel directing the two politicians towards the cars. The Angry Widow’s Praetorians were particularly grim-faced this morning, as if they were looking for somebody to shoot.
If anybody in Oxford was stupid enough to think that Margaret Thatcher was about to bow to pressure and quit, or in any way go quietly, they had another thing coming to them!
Chapter 60
Lady Marija Christopher dispensed with any pretence at decorum instantly she spied her husband at the foot of the stairs in the lobby of the Embassy. She could hear the jeering and chanting of the big crowd outside the high, razor-wire topped wall of the Embassy and had watched the bottles and bricks flying through the air, crashing onto the roofs and the bullet-proof windows of the battered cavalcade returning from the airport.
“Peter!” She screeched ecstatically and flew down the stairs. Given her propensity to lose her balance and fall flat on her face when she tried to hurry, let alone run, this was an insanely reckless thing for a woman in her condition to do. Or it would have been had she not been absolutely convinced that if she fell her husband would surely catch her.
This was pretty much what happened.
“Careful! Careful!” Her husband pleaded, but only after he had wrapped his wife in his arms. He would have made a much bigger thing of ‘being careful’ had he not been too busy hugging and kissing the woman who was the love of his life. Presently, he became aware that he and Marija were blocking the stairs.
“Oh, dear,” he sighed, leading back Marija upstairs. “The natives outside seem to be unusually restive today!”
That morning’s ‘demonstration’ seemed angrier and hugely better attended than the usual ‘rent a mob’ affairs that increasingly greeted official events and meetings attended by senior embassy staff in and around Philadelphia. The surging crowds along the road in front of the compound were waving particularly offensive placards, mainly on the themes of ‘GO HOME BRITS!’, demands to cease ‘the Irish genocide’, and various invitations to ‘get your hands off our oil’. Peter had thought this last was a bit rich coming from citizens of this particular gas-guzzling land. The chanting had been vitriolic and apparently, organised, as had the hurling of missiles at the vehicles in the convoy from the airport.
“I think they are all crazy in this city,” his wife concurred but as always, without malice. “Well, some of the people. Tell me everything!”
This had to wait a few minutes because Rosa Hannay tripped down the first floor corridor to peck the homecoming hero’s cheek — a feat only made practical because Peter Christopher bent his head down and Rosa literally jumped up on the tips of her toes. Alan Hannay, more prosaically, shook his friend’s hand. Together the two couples retired to a day room overlooking parkland to the rear of the Embassy.
“I went sailing with President Kennedy,” Peter announced. “We talked about the Navy, his and ours. Oh, and we’re all going to California. I’m to be some kind of special ‘Consul’ to the West Coast Confederation.”
“California?” Marija laughed. She was suddenly delving into the folds of her frock. She produced an official looking envelope and brandished the letter within. “Margo left me a big house in San Francisco! This is a letter from her lawyers in New York. She left everything she owned on Malta and some stocks and War Bonds she’d left with a bank in Boston to the St Catherine’s Hospital for Women, but according to her will she left me her old house at 1217 Haight Street, San Francisco because ‘Marija will enjoy travelling’.
Peter blinked thoughtfully as he took this in. He and Marija had settled close together on a sofa while the Hannays had pulled up two padded chairs to face them across a low coffee table. He unconsciously patted his wife’s left knee and she instantly took the opportunity to seize his right hand and clasp it to herself.
“So,” the man checked, “it now transpires that I’m married to a woman of property?”
“The lawyers say Margo’s younger brother, John, has been living at the house but he seems to have disappeared. It sounds a little mysterious to me. Anyway, if we’re going to California we can visit,” she checked the address again, “1217 Haight Street. It’ll be fun!”
Peter nodded absent-mindedly.
He was struggling to adjust to ‘normality’.
He had spent much of the last three days watching a British Prime Minister writing the longest and most comprehensive political suicide note in history. She had been doing the right thing for all the right reasons and yet, her own people would almost certainly crucify her when she got home.
Less than a hundred yards away in the road in front of the Embassy there was a baying mob, gloating over Jack Kennedy’s self-proclaimed humiliation of the ‘old country’; and back in England Margaret Thatcher would shortly be confronting another, possibly crueller and even more unforgiving Parliamentary mob, baying for her blood.
And yet here he was, reunited with his wife and his friends contemplating, quite literally, several balmy seasons in the sun in distant California. It was as if the war in the Middle East was nothing to do with him; or as if the fall of the shooting star which had been Margaret Thatcher’s premiership was happening in another, disconnected world.
A small voice in the back of his mind warned him against writing off the Angry Widow. Nothing in her demeanour last night at Otis Air National Guard Air Base had given him any inkling that she planned to meekly accept her supposedly inevitable downfall back in England.
If he had learned anything from the whirlwind rollercoaster ride of the last few months it was that when all was said and done, they lived in a funny old World.
He glanced ruefully to his wife and his friends.
“Yes, it will be fun,” he agreed. “I think we all deserve a little of that.”
Chapter 61
The French submarine had clattered across the Alliance’s bow at a distance of about a mile-and-a-half, surfacing twenty minutes later as it entered the southern reach of the Gulf of Ajaccio.
Lieutenant-Commander Francis Barrington had let the noisy gatecrasher go on her way unmolested; he had other, bigger fish to fry. Creeping along at barely four knots, he had worked Alliance closer to the coast guessing that the two T-47 class destroyers approaching from the south west would steer almost directly towards Capu di Muru and then use it as a navigational way point to enter the broad sweep of the great natural harbour to the north.
Unlike the French submarine which had announced its presence from afar, Alliance’s most recent refit and modernisation had streamlined her hull and significantly quietened her machinery. Already a quiet boat when she was running on electric motors with all inessential equipment turned off, she could be, given helpful sea conditions — today there was a light chop running on the surface — like a wraith, deathly quiet at low speeds.
Neither of the oncoming French destroyers was using active sonar.
And helpfully, they were steaming very nearly in line ahead.
If Barrington had been in command of either of those ships — given that they had committed an act of war against a powerful foe with a long vengeful sword arm — he would have been zigzagging as if his life depended upon it right now. The Mediterranean was a big sea and it was axiomatic to Barrington that the place one’s new enemies would come to look for one was at one’s home port; therefore, until he was safe inside the anti-torpedo booms which he presumed protected the inner harbour of Ajaccio, he would have been pinging his active sonar like mad and manoeuvring erratically so as to make it as hard as possible for anybody to compute a firing solution.