The security people had wanted to get out the armoured limousines for the half-mile or so journey from the embassy, located almost in the shadow of Oxford Castle, to the Foreign Secretary and his wife’s rooms at Christ Church College. Walter, her husband, had irritably and with rare discourtesy towards subordinates, brusquely vetoed this suggestion.
‘I didn’t come over here to hide in the goddammed Embassy!’
He had called the head of protocol back a few minutes later and apologised for his ‘rudeness and inappropriate language’. The poor man had been so surprised he had not known if he was coming or going! Walter’s predecessor had treated the Embassy staff like hired help; whereas her husband’s quietly spoken, ‘gentlemanly’ demeanour and her own, somewhat ‘down home’ attitudes to housekeeping and the domestic management of the Embassy — a compound of several old buildings linked with passageways and what might once have been ‘priest holes’ — had promoted a relaxed, collegiate atmosphere more in keeping with their surroundings in historic Oxford.
Regrettably, the recent ‘security nightmare’ had largely curtailed the husband and wife’s freedom to stroll in and around the old city. They had come to look forward to their early morning or late afternoon ‘walks’, during which they would dip into tiny shops, leisurely peruse the shelves of antiquarian bookshops and generally behave — quite unashamedly — like two ‘hick’ sightseers.
Today two Secret Servicemen strode ahead of the Ambassador and his wife, others guarded their backs and at points along the planned route rifle-armed British Military Policemen stood sentinel with suspicious eyes.
What troubled Joanne Brenckmann most was that her husband usually told her everything, well, not really top secret military things — she did not want to hear about those things and she did not expect him to tell her them anyway — but everything else. Late last night he had taken a call from the State Department in Philadelphia. It had been a long call, well over an hour and afterwards Walter had not come to bed until the early hours of the morning. Even when she had snuggled close and wrapped her arms around him he had still not slept.
‘Something bad has happened?’ She prompted. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. ‘I mean, something else bad has happened, sweetheart?’
Her husband’s stride faltered for a half-step.
When he was silent Joanne probed further; it was the last attempt she planned to make to find out what was eating him up inside. Whether it was about his time in the Navy, a legal matter, or the latest dumb thing the Administration had done back home she had far too much respect for her husband’s discretion to push him too far beyond his self-imposed boundaries.
‘I mean something that’s not on the news yet?’
Walter Brenckmann grunted, shook his head.
‘After what happened to the President’s vote in the New Hampshire Primary,’ he explained wearily, ‘I was afraid the Administration would go down the ‘America First’ route; but I never thought it would happen so soon.’
Jack Kennedy had won the New Hampshire Primary with thirty-one percent of the vote against a field of no-hopers. It was unprecedented! The President of the United States of America had only attracted the support of ‘thirty-one percent’ of Democrat voters in New Hampshire!
New Hampshire had not torpedoed the re-election campaign but it had given it a nasty jolt. Congress’s now obvious intention to vote to reject the US-UK Mutual Defense Treaty agreed in January — to reject rather than to indefinitely defer ratification as was often the practice in election year — had brought things to a head. No ‘America First’ candidate could claim ideological purity if he stuck his neck out and went into bat for the rejected open-ended treaty with the ‘old country’. Theoretically, the President had the option of ignoring Congress, of issuing a new Executive Order in the interests of ‘national security’; and that was what Walter Brenckmann had tacitly assumed the Administration would opt to do. JFK had won a global nuclear war by placing American vital geopolitical strategic interest first, second, third, et cetera. If he wanted to stand on an ‘America First’ platform nobody had his credentials and Walter had assumed that his President had the moral courage to stand up for, and to account for his actions before the American people. One of the reasons he now felt so bad was that it was clear that he had been suckered in to believing that when his President spoke, his words actually meant something.
‘I was sent here to lie to our friends and allies,’ he murmured wearily. ‘That’s what ambassadors do, I suppose. But I thought things would be different. More fool me.’
Joanne squeezed her husband’s hand.
Eighteen months ago they had held each other while they waited for a second, killer bomb after the strike on Quincy. Back then in their Cambridge basement, not knowing if the world — their world, leastways — was about to end they had had the comfort of being together, inseparable in life and soon, in death. Nothing that had happened to them since that night had been so simple, or so real.
Joanne had missed home, Boston, her circle of girlfriends, but she had loved her short time in England. She had met so many new people, so many potential lifelong friends and the idea that her country might let down any of the people around her in Oxford and elsewhere in England was, or rather, had been unthinkable until that moment.
She stopped herself asking another question, knowing that her husband would explain in his own good time.
‘The line in the sand the British want the President to draw is several thousand miles east of the one the Administration has in mind,’ he said eventually.
They followed the road as it curved around the flank of St Aldate’s Church to their left and Pembroke College to their right. Ahead the thoroughfare of St Aldate’s itself, still bustling with pedestrians and traffic cut north through the city. On the other side of the road were the walls of Christ Church College, where the Foreign Secretary and his wife had rooms.
‘And the British don’t know this yet?’
‘I don’t know, honey.’
Walter Brenckmann had thought Christ Church College was a medieval castle of some kind the first time he had been ushered inside its cloistered walls, and walked out into the great grassy quadrangle within. Today he felt like a man offering himself — and his wife — as hostages to fortune; torn between his loyalty to his flag, the oaths he had taken as an officer and later upon assuming the role of ambassador, ties of reason and friendship and the indescribable ache of knowing that some lies were just plain inexcusable between allies.
Notwithstanding that the fare was always blander and less plentiful than when the Harding-Graysons were guests of the Embassy; the Brenckmann’s were regular dinner guests in the Foreign Secretary’s rooms at Christ Church College. Joanne had sent half-a-crate of various Californian wines ahead, just to oil the wheels of diplomacy, although as the door opened and Pat Harding-Grayson’s smile welcomed the ‘ambassadorial couple’ she was beginning to wonder if the wine might not just be to drown their sorrows.
The Brenckmann’s and the Harding-Graysons had hit it off from the outset. They were of an age, more or less, and each of the parties liked each other. Moreover, it helped, especially on evenings like this, that they understood how not to let secrets come between friendship.