The man was taking in his surroundings. He noted the children’s toys, old battered wooden things tidied away in a wicker box. Two threadbare armchairs and between them in front of a low brick hearth in which a few coals glowed apologetically, a tray bearing a silver tea service. He’d heard that some prominent members of the UKIEA were beginning to cultivate more modest lifestyles, at least for public consumption. He doubted the Angry Widow had time for that kind of nonsense. No patience for artifice. There were several small photographs in metal frames on the narrow mantelpiece above the hearth. The bespectacled older man who looked like a banker or an accountant must be the dead husband?
Margaret Thatcher’s gaze followed her visitor’s eyes.
“Denis was my rock, Admiral Christopher,” she said quietly, with deathly purpose. “My rock. I will never forgive those people for taking him from me. Never! Not if I live to be a hundred-and-one!”
The man decided that the precise identity of ‘those people’ was a thing best explored another time.
“It must be difficult carrying the burdens that you carry,” he suggested emolliently, “and to care for your children? You have twins, I believe?”
“Indeed,” the Angry Widow replied. “Mark and Carol. I see little of them during the day, and when I have to travel I must leave them entirely in the custody of a nanny. But my sacrifices are immaterial in comparison to that of so many others. Please, do sit down. This is the one room in this place where I try to avoid standing on ceremony.”
“Avoiding standing on ceremony isn’t as easy as most people imagine,” her guest sympathised. He was appraising his host as he spoke, trying to explore beyond the immaculately presented, not one single hair out of place, utterly self-sufficient, controlling persona that she projected with apparently effortless grace and assurance. There was something almost regal about the woman.
“How do you manage it, Admiral?”
Julian Christopher didn’t make the mistake that so many of Margaret Thatcher’s detractors made. The huskiness in the woman’s voice wasn’t a tease, it was a subtle test. Anybody who took this woman at face value, or who mistook her femininity for vulnerability was a fool.
“I don’t as a rule,” he said truthfully. “I am closer to some of my senior subordinates than others but when all is said and done I remind myself that I’m the man who might, at a the drop of hat, have to send each and every one of them to their deaths.”
The woman nodded and continued to weigh his answer as she poured two cups of tea.
“I am reliably informed that you detest milk in your tea, Admiral,” she checked, passing him his cup and saucer.
“I compliment you on the efficacy of your intelligence network, Madam.”
“Airey has spies everywhere,” the Angry Widow smiled.
“Ah, the remarkable Mr Neave,” Julian Christopher grinned. “He and I have met, of course. It was at an investiture at Buckingham Palace just after the war. I should imagine he’s a good man to have at one’s side at times like this?”
“Airey and some of my colleagues in Government don’t get on very well.”
“I’d heard that. But then one hears a lot of things. Several of your colleagues don’t approve of me either.” He’d continued his slow appraisal of the room, little more than ten feet by twelve. Closed doors led off to each side and an overly high, broad window given the other proportions of the room, occupied at least half the wall space opposite the entrance to the corridor at his back. This must once have been quarters for servants. He sipped his tea, a Ceylonese blend of leaves, he guessed.
“Several of my colleagues still secretly believe that the world will someday be remade in the image of its former self,” Margaret Thatcher remarked ruefully. “Even if that was possible I am not convinced that would be a very good idea. Some of us came into politics to change the world rather than to preserve the status quo.”
There was something disarmingly wifely, straightforward and utterly transparent in the woman’s earnest expression that almost but not quite beguiled the fighting Admiral.
“Was the old world really so bad?” He asked.
“No,” she shot back immediately, “but it was far from perfect and it was nothing like the picture postcard rural idyll that so many of my colleagues now mourn. Britain was a nation in systemic decline, Admiral Christopher. In a few years West Germany would again have been the pre-eminent European economic powerhouse, what was left of the Empire would have been gone and who knows what would have happened to our centuries old traditional trading relations around the world with the rise of Japan and Hong Kong as efficient low-cost exponents of mass production. In the years before the October War Britain enjoyed a golden age because, America apart, every single one of our global economic competitors was still recovering from the ravages of the Second World War. But for the war of last October all those old competitors, and many new ones, all equipped with modern post-1945 industries would have swept our old-fashioned manufacturers from the world stage. Every one of our major industries; steel, shipbuilding, textiles, coal, electronics, pharmaceuticals would have been in rapid and probably terminal structural decline by the end of this decade.” Margaret Thatcher realised she was hectoring her guest. “Forgive me,” she smiled transient self-deprecation, “my colleagues refer to me as the ‘Angry Widow’ for good reason.”
Julian Christopher’s whole attention had been galvanised by this strangely normal and yet, utterly different woman. She reminded him a small ways of his late wife, Joan; except that Joan had never had this woman’s inner steel and slow burning rage.
“Madam,” he murmured, leaning slightly towards her in conspiratorial confidence, “any one among us who is not angry about what has happened ought not to be in a position of power.”
Margaret Thatcher didn’t reply for a long time. She put down her cup and saucer on the tray on the table between her and her visitor and rested her hands, clasped in her lap as she held long, curious eye contact with the man.
“I don’t know what happened to my husband,” she said, her voice neutral. “The children and I were staying with friends in Herefordshire. It was half-term. Denis had promised to get away from work for a few days. My constituency, Finchley, no longer exists. One of the bombs that destroyed London exploded three thousand feet above the High Street, they say. I’m told that nationally the death toll from the attack, starvation, disease and the cold of last winter may be as high as thirteen million. I think I have a right to be angry. The only thing I don’t understand and I don’t think I shall ever understand, is why so few of my colleagues aren’t angry.”
Julian Christopher had been back in England long enough to fully ingest the mood of the Chiefs of Staff and of the caucus of key senior civil servants who were actually running the country. There was a dangerous undercurrent of frustration — verging on contempt — directed at many of the leading members of the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration. The UKIEA was top-heavy with politicians who seemed more preoccupied with preserving their ‘status’ and fighting their ‘corners’ than in actually governing the sorely wounded nation. Moreover, it seemed that most of the members of the UKIEA operated much in the fashion of absentee landlords sending their placemen — other than Margaret Thatcher there were no women in the higher echelons of government — to Cheltenham to represent their feudal interests. Christopher’s impression was that the political classes were standing back from the fray — which was as disgraceful and it was inexcusable in such times of dire extremity — waiting to see what happened next. Presumably, they were positioning themselves to pick up the pieces if, probably when, Edward Heath’s administration fell flat on its face.