Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher — the Queen had ennobled him yesterday afternoon for ‘making Operation Manna a reality’ — walked stiffly into the high security transit lounge beneath the Grandstand of the old racing course. He’d been patched up, his medal ribbons transferred onto the breast of his brand new uniform for the benefit of the photographers. Oddly, he’d felt uncomfortable wearing Sir David Luce’s ceremonial sword. His own was still in a locker onboard Ark Royal with practically all his other personal effects.
Margaret Thatcher with her two-Marine bodyguard — the Prime Minister had mandated that no member of the newly remodelled War Cabinet was ever to be without ‘adequate security’ outside the Government compound — arrived some ten minutes after the C-in-C Designate of the Mediterranean Fleet and the newly reconfigured Joint Combined Mediterranean and Middle East Command, had settled to wait until his aircraft had finished ground checking and refuelling for the three-and-a-half hour flight to Malta. The woman found him thumbing through a sheaf of briefing papers.
The man struggled to his feet.
“Margaret,” he smiled, “I hoped to see you before I jetted off but I knew how busy you must be right now.”
Margaret Thatcher waved her Marines away and shook Julian Christopher’s hand. She’d been so eager to get to the airfield in time to wave him off that she’d not given any thought to what she was going to say or do in the last few minutes they had together.
“It was the least I could do,” she asserted, her voice betraying how trite she realised it sounded. She viewed the man with concern. She noted that he’d washed off the stage make up Ian Macleod’s people had smeared all over his face to conceal the worst of the bruising and the stitches from the eyes of the cameras. She’d seen the welts and bone deep bruises all over his lean torso, the burns to his arm, now heavily bandaged under his pristine uniform. “I only wish you’d had a few more days to,” she shrugged helplessly, “recover your strength.”
“Never fear,” the man grimaced, “there’s life in this old sea dog yet!”
“I shall miss you,” she said simply.
“And I shall miss you, Margaret.” For a moment Julian Christopher’s emotions completely distracted him from his aches and pains and the brutally hard decisions he was going to have to start making the moment he stepped off the plane in Malta. Hugh Staveley-Pope had been his first brother in arms at Dartmouth all those years ago when they’d been snotty-nosed cadets. They’d sailed together on the old Warspite, joining the great battleship in Scapa Flow a month before the end of what they’d then called the Great War. Well, the war to end all wars had signally failed. After that war they’d sailed out to take the surrender of the Kaiser’s High Seas Fleet, a seemingly endless row of rusty, weather beaten, unkempt walls of steel meekly steaming into captivity. Hugh Staveley-Pope had stood beside him at the lee rail in the shelter of Warspite’s mighty X-turret as they stared in wonder and perversely, shame, as the Grosser Kurfurst, Derfflinger, Seydlitz and the Markgraf and a dozen other massive dreadnoughts and battlecruisers slowly, ignominiously passed under the guns of the Grand Fleet. So many memories, so many mistakes repeated. It had been Hugh Staveley-Pope — on all his ships his men had nicknamed him ‘the Pope’ for his bookish demeanour, his high forehead and his religious devotion to maintaining the traditions of the service — who’d introduced him to his wife…
“Forgive me, Margaret,” he said eventually, breaking the shackles of remembrance. “You and I were strangers a week ago. But a lot has happened in the few days of our,” he struggled because he didn’t begin to know how to describe the bond which had spontaneously formed between them, “acquaintance,” he said feebly, cursing his ineptitude. “No. Our friendship,” he corrected himself instantly. “Believe me when I say that you will be much in my thoughts in the coming days and weeks.”
“And you will be in mine.” The Angry Widow straightened, snapped out of her threatened slide towards the dreaminess she so deeply mistrusted, and regarded in others as an inexcusable weakness. The fighting admiral had come into her life in the hours that her political career had leapt ahead, propelling her into a position of power and influence unimagined before the October War. She had no particular hunger for high office just for the sake of holding high office but she’d always thirsted to be of service, to get things done and now she had a golden opportunity to be of great service and to achieve great things and in the very core of her being, she knew that with this man at her side the sky was the limit. She liked and trusted Airey Neave — the man everybody suspected pulled her strings like some well-meaning opportunistic puppeteer — but Airey was only her adviser, a faithful lieutenant whom she’d been meticulous careful to keep at arm’s length both emotionally and intellectually. Julian Christopher would never settle for being just that and if she’d believed, for a moment, that he would have she’d have walked through fire to douse the troubling, possibly debilitating feelings that his mere proximity stirred in the well of her being.
“I know that you won’t,” she prefaced, a little tight-lipped, “take care, Julian. I don’t think that is in your nature. However, at those times when you conspicuously determine not to take care please spare a thought for those of us back in England in whose thoughts you will always be foremost.”
Julian Christopher read volumes into the convoluted sentiments expressed so painfully and thought: What a remarkable woman!
“I promise I will bear that in mind, Margaret.”
“Thank you. When we meet again I am sure we will have a lot to discuss.” She took a deep breath, composed herself. “I must return to my duties,” she announced.
The man considered asking permission; in the event he damned the consequences and acted. He bent his face to the woman’s and kissed her. His lips brushed her cheek and lay, momentarily on her lips.
And to his astonishment she kissed him back likewise.
The old admiral watched the newly appointed Home Secretary marching across the concourse, her heels clicking on the newly laid concrete pan, flanked by her Sten Gun toting Royal Marine bodyguards. She didn’t look back, or wave. She’d swept into his life and now she was sweeping out of it. For how long neither of them could tell…
“They’re ready for us on the tarmac, sir,” squeaked his ludicrously young-looking Flag Lieutenant, Alan Hannay. Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord, had recommended the boy, who’d served on his staff since the spring.
‘If the young man is not to your liking send him back to me at your convenience, Julian,” Christopher’s old friend had suggested as they’d mulled over the problems awaiting the new C-in-C Mediterranean and Middle East Command, after breaking into the First Sea Lord’s last bottle of Laphroaig Single Malt Whiskey. ‘Hannay’s not quite as young as he looks, he’s as keen as mustard and he’s got a talent for tactfully dealing with people who have inflated opinions as to their own importance. That comes in handy around here, so, as I say, I shall miss him and welcome him back if it comes to it.’
“Mrs Thatcher is a lovely lady, isn’t she, sir,” Julian Christopher’s new Flag Lieutenant remarked innocently — or at least, with a convincing air of innocence — as he followed his master’s gaze. “Now she’s been promoted I’m sure she’ll really shake things up!”
The Admiral gave his Flag Lieutenant a paternally severe look.
It seemed he wasn’t the only sea dog in Cheltenham who’d fallen under the Angry Widow’s thrall.