Pat Harding-Grayson had been Marija’s sometime companion most of the last week. Marija had met the ‘Prime Ministerial twins’ twice, once for tea in Margaret Thatcher’s rooms in Corpus Christi. The Prime Minister had been somewhere else on business, which had been a pity. The twins were bright and friendly; particularly Carol who had asked her a series of polite questions about Malta, Mark had only wanted to know about the big battle.
Pat tended to materialise whenever there was a possibility Marija was going to encounter ordinary people, or worse, the gentlemen of the press. Pat was, it seemed, Marija’s chaperone.
Marija realised passengers were disembarking from the Hercules. She was a little taken aback when the first person she recognised walking down the ramp was Clara Pullman. Clara looked…different. The other woman smiled towards Marija, but waited in the shadow of the Hercules’s tail plane.
Maria took her appearance as her cue to approach the aircraft, paying no heed to the other passengers emerging from the Hercules.
Clara waved, glanced back into the cargo bay.
Rosa appeared, walking stiffly but hardly limping at all.
She stepped onto the cold tarmac.
“Sister!” Marija screeched, completely oblivious of the half-dozen cameras clicking thirty feet to her right. In her excitement she almost but not quite forgot that she could not run. That was a mistake she had made back at the beginning of February and fallen flat on her face; ensuring that the first time the man she had loved half her life actually laid eyes on her, she looked like she had been beaten up!
Compromising she hurried, threatening to skip.
In moments Marija and Rosa fell into a joyous embrace.
A man in a wheelchair swathed in blankets, his face hidden by the rim of a hat drawn down over his brow, was pushed around the young Maltese women by a stoic middle-aged woman with straw-coloured hair shivering in the chill of the northern spring. The man glanced at the two young women as they trundled past. He said something to the woman propelling his chair forward, she retorted with an impatient snort.
In their delight to be reunited neither Rosa nor Marija even noticed their passing.
They laughed, sobbed, clung to each other in relief and…hysteria.
For both of them the last week had been a giddy rollercoaster of extreme emotions and for reasons that only they could understand, there was nobody in the world either of them needed to be with more at that moment.
They had been very distant sisters-in-law until Samuel had disappeared, presumed dead in the wreck of HMS Torquay in January. Then Marija’s friend and protector, Jim Siddall had been killed by a booby trap bomb investigating Sam’s workshop and Rosa badly injured. Rosa had been shunned, virtually disowned by her own family and Marija had befriended her; what else would she have done in the circumstances? Thereafter the two women had been inseparable until a week ago when Marija had flown to England. To be together again was sublime.
The women stood back.
Rosa bit her lip.
“I can never tell Alan,” she whispered, knowing her sister would understand.
Marija blinked back tears.
Both the women were misty eyed, close to breaking down.
“Peter knows,” she murmured, aware that other people were approaching. “But nobody else can ever know.”
Rosa nodded, tears trickling down her cheeks.
The sister hugged again, this time clinging to each other for dear life as if they were afraid they were about to be parted forever.
Chapter 6
Margaret Thatcher swept into that morning’s appointed Cabinet Room to an accompaniment of scraping chairs and a stentorian chorus of ‘Good morning, Prime Minister’. Last Thursday, in consultation with her deputy, James Callaghan the leader of the minority Labour and Co-operative Party element of the tottering Unity Administration of the United Kingdom, it had been decided to alter the structure of the government machine and to create a formal ‘War Cabinet’. Today was the first meeting of that new sub-committee of the full Cabinet.
Several members of the UAUK had objected to their exclusion from the ‘inner circle’, one — Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Labour — had protested bitterly about ‘the decision to go to war’ having ‘gone through on the nod’ before Cabinet had had an opportunity to ‘discuss it’. The feisty Member of Parliament for Blackburn had not, however, resigned over the issue.
Margaret Thatcher had reminded all her colleagues that if they could not support her in this ‘hour of crisis’ that they ought to seriously consider their ‘positions now rather than later’.
While she had no inclination to attempt — like Winston Churchill — to fight this new war single-handed, she had no intention of allowing ministers who ought to be solely focused on their own department’s domestic responsibilities to be ‘distracted’ by military and strategic considerations that were in no way their ‘proper business’. In the current crisis the fact that she honestly did not think that she would still be Prime Minister in a few weeks time was oddly liberating.
“Please,” she enunciated primly, “everybody sit down.”
Margaret Thatcher eased herself into the hard chair that one of her Royal Marine bodyguards, a walking wounded survivor from the Brize Norton atrocity, had brought down from her Private Office in the minutes before the War Cabinet convened. Like his charge, the man — Corporal David Sampson, on detached service to Oxford from his unit, 45 Commando — had moved stiffly as he shepherded the Prime Minister to her place at the long oval table positioned in the middle of the commandeered former ground floor common room. Sampson, like several of his ‘oppos’ who had suffered minor wounds at Brize Norton, having refused to go on the sick list was restricted to ‘inside duties’.
At least one of Margaret Thatcher’s AWPs escorted her everywhere, even inside the medieval walls of Corpus Christi College. Like their comrades of the Black Watch in the Royal Protection Company, the Royal Marines of the Prime Ministerial Bodyguard had taken the ‘outrage’ at Brize Norton a week ago as an unforgivable slight to the proud escutcheons of their units. Notwithstanding the circumstances and the death and wounding of so many of their brothers in arms, each and every man regarded the attack upon and the harming of their respective charges as being a profoundly personal insult.
The AWPs former commanding officer, Captain Hamish McLeish a Charterhouse educated, charming, red-headed former England rugby player, who had always treated Margaret Thatcher as if she was a senior member of the Royal family, had died of his injuries three nights ago. The Prime Minister, noting the look in the eyes of her AWPs, had taken his replacement, thirty-five year old Major Sir Steuart Pringle aside and reiterated that she ‘did not want anybody getting shot just because they inadvertently look at me in the wrong way!’
‘Oh, absolutely not, Ma’am,” the Royal Marine had promised.
Margaret Thatcher had sighed with undiluted exasperation.
‘Ma’am is how one addresses Her Majesty the Queen, Major Pringle,’ she had complained, wondering if she ought to be addressing the man as Sir Steuart, given that he was, strictly speaking, 10th Baronet Pringle? ‘I am just the Prime Minister. Therefore, Prime Minister or Mrs Thatcher will suffice in future.’