The room had cleared without her having to say a word.
‘Perhaps, if we sat down?” The man had suggested as orderlies had brought fresh cups of tea and retreated to a safe distance out of earshot.
The couple had at sat at the end of a long trestle table, sipping their tea.
‘I am very much afraid that this will be a bloody thing, Margaret,’ Julian Christopher had said eventually. ‘But you must not worry about me.’
‘That’s impossible!’ She had blurted.
‘My proposal stands,’ he had continued, quirking a wry smile, his eyes locked on her face, ‘I will be honoured to be your husband at the drop of a hat. But I know that now is not our time.’
Time had been so short there was no scope for beating about the bush.
‘I think about you a lot,’ she had explained, feeling tongue-tied.
‘And I you, Margaret.’ He had seemed a little distracted for a moment. ‘Right now you belong to our people. Even from where I’ve been sitting in Malta it is abundantly clear to me that you have caught a mood, galvanised in some way the imagination of the man and the woman in the street. In Britain certainly, and perhaps, elsewhere throughout the Commonwealth.’ He had set his jaw. ‘Nothing must distract you from your,’ he had shrugged apologetically, ‘destiny, is probably what I am trying to say.’
She had looked at him in astonishment.
‘Destiny?”
‘Yes, I think so. Things are so mixed up these days that perhaps, there is room for that sort of word. The war changed everything. For example; I was appointed C-in-C Pacific Fleet just before the October War in recognition that I would never be First Sea Lord. My time had passed, you see, and the Pacific Fleet was my, shall we say, quid pro quo for acknowledging with such good grace that some time in 1963 David Luce would succeed the then First Sea Lord, Sir Caspar John. As it happens I can think of no better man than David to be at the helm in these times. But for the war I’d have left the Navy by now. I’d be sailing my yacht, the Aysha, in the Solent, and preparing myself to circumnavigate the British Isles single-handedly. That, incidentally, was the one thing I’d promised myself I’d do before I died. Sail single-handed all the way around these, er, sceptred isles.’
She had summoned her courage.
‘The night after the Balmoral atrocity you were a little delirious. You mention ‘Aysha’ several times. It was my impression that you weren’t talking about a yacht, Julian?’
He had tossed back his greying, tanned, handsome head and fixed her with twinkling grey blue eyes.
‘No,” he admitted, shaking his head. ‘I was at Singapore before the Second War. Attached to the staff of the C-in-C Far East. There was hardly any ‘staff work’ to be done and I’d spent most of the thirties racing yachts. I dreamed of winning back the America’s Cup for Britain and the Empire, but it wasn’t to be. My career was in the doldrums, I’d probably have left the Service but for the war. Peter was only a few months old when I was posted to Singapore and my marriage was already a farrago, truth be told. In Singapore I raced yachts, I drank heavily, and I womanized. Aysha was the mistress of one of the richer, more obviously crooked rubber planters; one of the ones who dealt contraband and kept a foot or a hand or a finger in every conceivable pot. He was the sort of man without whom no Empire can function. His name was Li Leung-Chung, a Chinaman, probably a gangster although we didn’t ever use words like that in those days. A man like Li Leung-Chung never gave a fig about who was running the show just so long as he got his cut. That was the way of Empire; people like him were the glue that held the whole edifice together. In Singapore nobody asked any questions so long as the rubber kept flowing to the factories of the English Midlands, and nobody — not for a single minute — cared if the underlying fabric of the Imperium was rotten.’
He had realised he was rambling.
‘No, Aysha was not a yacht. Aysha was my mistress for three months in 1939 and then the war happened. The rest is, as they say, history.’
‘Have you had many mistresses?’ She heard herself asking, not believing she’d had the temerity to ask the question so brazenly.
The man had shaken his head.
‘No, not since my wife died.’
Her face must have been a picture because Julian Christopher had smiled ruefully, belatedly recognising that his answer had been less than unambiguous.
‘That wasn’t said very well,” he decided, ruefully. ‘Let’s just say that there has been no one for several years.’
Bidding the man that one day she would marry farewell hadn’t been easy, and her colleagues must have noticed her distraction on the drive back to Cheltenham last night. Somehow she’d managed to hold back her tears until she was alone, that was the main thing.
Margaret Thatcher took her seat and waited for her male colleagues to settle again. And then she waited a little longer until she had everybody’s undivided attention.
“Several amendments to the proposed agenda for this Cabinet have been submitted to the Cabinet Secretary. I do not doubt that any of these amendments deserve discussion at the highest level. However, I do not wish to be diverted from the two matters originally mooted for this Cabinet. Any other matters of substance may be debated after we have addressed those key challenges facing the UAUK, if there is time. Otherwise it is my general view regarding how we should proceed in these difficult times that inter-departmental issues should be hammered out between the ministries involved, rather than raised at Cabinet. Nobody around this table would have been invited to join Cabinet if they did not enjoy the total, unqualified confidence of both Jim,” she nodded to her left where the lugubrious, brooding presence of James Callaghan, the Deputy Prime Minister, and the leader of the Labour and Co-operative Party, sat deep in thought, “and myself.”
Several men stirred, none actually voiced an objection until Admiral Sir David Luce, the First Sea Lord who sat in Cabinet representing the Chiefs of Staff Committee raise a hand an inch or so off the gleaming polished surface of the big oval table around which they sat.
“The first item on the agenda is an essentially political one, Prime Minister. I would not be uncomfortable if you asked me to absent myself while it was discussed.”
“I appreciate your sense of propriety in this, Sir David,” Margaret Thatcher countered, having anticipated the First Sea Lord’s unease. “The matter of the relocation of Parliament to Oxford and the reconvening of the House of Commons will inevitably be major headache from the point of view of security. There may well be questions that you will need to take back to the Chiefs of Staff. I would like you to remain in Cabinet.”
The First Sea Lord nodded his assent.
The Angry Widow wasted no time jumping into the bear pit.
“I propose that not later than the last day of February the House of Commons should be recalled to sit in Oxford. Furthermore, I propose that at that time the UAUK immediately seeks a vote of confidence to legitimise its writ for a period of not more than two calendar years. It is my intention that all surviving Parliamentary constituencies currently without a Member of Parliament should organise and conduct a by-election within the next ninety days, and that a General Election be held not later than eighteen months from this day.”
Her Cabinet had had several days to digest the topic, openly stated in the agenda which she’d had published seventy-two hours in advance. Notwithstanding, there was an ominous silence when the Prime Minister sat back and looked around at the faces of her colleagues.