It was a funny old World.
“They ought to roll out the red carpet, Prime Minister!” The older woman decided. If only the Prime Minister had the confidence in her looks that she ought to have she’d be on the front page of Time every week of the year, not just when there was at a big US-UK summit.
Margaret Thatcher nodded satisfaction. Patricia Harding-Grayson — since her husband’s elevation to a life peerage in the New Year’s Honours List, now Lady Patricia — had ordered half-a-dozen dresses from Bloomingdales in New York ahead of the delegation’s arrival at Andrews Air Force Base. The ‘trousseau’ had been ready and waiting for the Prime Minister.
‘I know you took a host of measurements but all these dresses fit me like a glove?” The Angry Widow — in her most gushing, pacific mode — had demanded of her friend.
‘I gave Bloomingdales all your measurements and they tailored these exactly for your figure, Margaret.” Pat and her husband were on strictly first name terms in their private dealings with the Prime Minister; and because of it meticulous about observing the appropriate public protocols.
“A dress fit for a soirée attended by three Presidents, Prime Minister,” agreed Lord Franks, a wise, patient man with gentle eyes and the charm of a born diplomat. Oliver Sherwell Franks had previously been British Ambassador in Washington between 1948 and 1952. A graduate of Queen’s College, Oxford, he had pursued an academic career between First and Second World War. He had been Provost of Worcester College, and then Professor of Moral Philosophy between 1936 and 1946 at the University of Glasgow. During World War II he’d joined the Ministry of Supply, ending the war as its Permanent Secretary. He had encapsulated the lessons learned during the war in Central Planning and Control in War and Peace, a document which had been at Margaret Thatcher’s elbow for much of the last year and was, basically, the source ‘bible’ for much of the work of the UKIEA Ministry of Supply in the aftermath of the October War. After the 1945 war Franks had been close to Clement Atlee, the Labour Prime Minister and to Ernest Bevin. It was the latter who had tempted him away from Queen’s College, where he was provost, to head the British mission to discuss the Marshall Plan; later he was involved in the founding of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), and Chairman of the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation. Returning to London after four years in Washington he had spent the eight years before the October War as Chairman of Lloyds Bank. What with one thing and another Lord Franks had been top of a very, very short list when candidates were mooted to replace Sir James Sykes, who’d been assassinated in the ‘Battle of Washington’.
“Thank you, Lord Franks,” Margaret Thatcher grimaced, a little uncomfortable to be complimented.
Jack Kennedy was at the head of the somewhat daunting reception committee.
First the United Kingdom delegation was introduced to Dwight Eisenhower, thirty-fourth President of the United States of America.
Margaret Thatcher had to fight to resist the urge to curtsy.
“I am delighted to meet you, Mister President,” she smiled.
The flinty-eyed, lean, somewhat more grizzled version of the great wartime leader she’d only previously seen in Pathe movie clips and newspaper and magazine pictures shook her hand and held it just long enough for her to meet his gaze. She met his stare unblinkingly and after a moment the man nodded.
Harry Truman, Eisenhower’s predecessor and the only American other than Jack Kennedy to order the ‘first use’ of nuclear weapons was visibly frail yet more openly pleased to make the Angry Widow’s acquaintance.
“It is an honour to meet you, Mister President.”
It was all a blur.
Behind her Lord Franks swapped banter with the two former Presidents and at her side Jack Kennedy was talking, exuding a charismatic charm that at once fascinated and vexed her.
Ahead lay a set-piece banquet and her moment in the limelight; her opportunity to state, definitively her own vision of an Anglo-American alliance which no longer relied upon the eddying currents of some mythical ‘special relationship’.
“You must miss being with your family?” She asked Jack Kennedy when drinks were being served and the VIPs were mingling in tightly coordinated circles. “You have young children, just as I do.”
“Washington isn’t safe for Jackie and the kids,” the man shrugged. “I’ve managed to get back to Hyannis Port a couple of times since the rebellion but you know how it is. You and I, we don’t get to have a normal family life.”
“No, I suppose not.”
“Forgive me, that wasn’t said very well, Prime Minister,” Jack Kennedy apologised instantly.
Not for the first time Margaret Thatcher felt the loneliness of her role, recognised how exposed she was on this frighteningly dangerous World-stage. Her life before the October War had been busy and fulfilling, carefully ordered and managed but in retrospect so stultifyingly narrow that nothing in her past had remotely prepared her for this test.
“Please don’t apologise, Mister President,” she said quickly, and changed the subject.
Over a month ago Vice-Admiral Sir Julian Christopher — a man she whom she hardly knew but who’d she’d known intensely for hours and subsequently for snatched pieces of less than a single week before he had flown to the Mediterranean to stop the rot — had proposed marriage to her and she’d…stalled. Or rather, she’d asked for time to consider his ‘kind offer’. The ‘Fighting Admiral’ hadn’t mentioned the matter again, and she knew he wouldn’t unless she broached it. It had been easy to defer a decision, she’d faced down one crisis after another in the last four weeks, sleeping barely two to three hours some nights, travelling the length and much of the breadth of the surviving areas of United Kingdom attempting, with uncertain success, to tie the Party and the nation together once again into some kind of cohesive entity. After Ted Heath’s death she’d had no real mandate — and nor did she now — to govern. All she had, all she owned, was a fleeting opportunity to do the only thing she’d ever wanted to do in her whole life; to make a difference. Specifically, to make the lives of the people she represented and now led, better and if at all possible, safer. If she was to do that she had to earn the right to do it and that meant earning the trust and the respect of her people. Not just the Tory faithful but of many of her natural political gainsayers as well. In her mind there was no more Conservative or Labour, Liberal, Communist, or any other kind of grouping that ideologically mattered; that sort of thing belonged to the old pre-cataclysm World. For better or worse the October War had changed everything. Oh, the old parties would survive but there was no real scope for alternative agendas, the priorities were so patently obvious to anybody who had eyes to see that it was positively unpatriotic to pretend otherwise. The country and those who relied upon it had to be made safe, fed, and offered a real chance to make a World that was fit for their children, all their children, to live in.
“My loss is as nothing compared to that suffered by so many of our fellow countrymen and women.”
Jack Kennedy pursed his lips, waited, knowing intuitively that the seemingly unfathomable woman who’d come to Washington and acted — against all expectations — with such disconcerting sure-footedness, and with such a profound grasp of the underlying political realities facing his Administration, was about to let him glimpse a little of her vulnerability.