Michael Foot had thrust his left hand inside his jacket and adopted the declamatory pose he had patented on a hundred platforms; the exact pose he had struck at the end of each annual Aldermaston CND march in Trafalgar Square. He fixed the Prime Minister in his sights.
She met his stare with steely blue eyes that glinted with the light of battle and a hint of something that he thought, just for a moment, he recognised as pity…
No, I must be imagining it.
The public knew Michael Foot for his fiery rhetoric and his deeply held convictions. He was a man who had remained true to his socialist beliefs through thick and thin. He had condemned Neville Chamberlain’s Government for appeasing fascism; he had been Aneurin Bevan’s biographer and disciple but broken with him and for some years with the rest of the Labour Party, after Bevan had renounced unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1957. Returning to Parliament after a five year absence in 1960 he had promptly rebelled and had had Labour Whip withdrawn by the Party’s then leader, Hugh Gaitskell. The rift had been so deep he had not come back into the fold until Gaitskell’s death — or rather, disappearance — on the night of the October War. Outside of Parliament Foot had enjoyed a long and varied career in journalism including becoming the editor of the major organ of the left in British politics, Tribune, and writing for the Evening Standard and the Daily Herald. Before the October War he was one of, if not the most high profile political pundit on British television, and despite his chronic asthma no man had worked harder, or spoken on more soap boxes than Michael Foot in opposition to Supermac’s ancien regime. Michael Foot’s many friends and widespread admirers knew him to be a generous man whose motives were pure and whose disputatious nature was leavened with a gentleness of spirit and a disinclination to cling overlong to a grudge.
He was that most rare thing; a good man.
Watching from the wings Tom Harding-Grayson felt a little sorry for him, it was not enough to be a ‘good man’ if one had a fatal flaw. Michael Foot honestly believed that the pen was mightier than the sword and that there was nothing reasonable men — and women — could not resolve by means of free and frank discussion.
The Angry Widow did not believe in any of those things.
She believed that actions spoke louder than words.
Michael Foot, a decent and rational man who tended to get carried away by the persuasiveness of his own rhetoric had made the mistake of assuming that his political foe, the thirty-eight year old widowed mother of twins, did not actually know what she was doing; when in fact, she had brought all her most dangerous political enemies to this one place on this day for one reason.
One reason.
Yes, she could lose everything with a single throw of the dice but she did not think that was going to happen. There was nothing Michael Foot could do — or wanted to do, his principles would not permit it — or say that would save the old Labour Party tearing itself apart this afternoon. Enoch Powell might yet see the trap and withdraw his hand; although that was unlikely. Even if he recognised the trap for what it was he probably would not be able to stop himself testing it.
Michael Foot, the loquacious and honourable scion of the left, and Enoch Powell the implacable standard bearer of the right of the old pre-war Unionist cause; dinosaurs each, both racing to embrace their inevitable downfall.
Neither man could see beyond the illusion of the attractive, feisty widow with the hectoring manner.
Neither man saw the bare knuckle street fighter standing behind the blond bombshell’s dazzling smile.
Chapter 25
The big ships had been sighted about an hour before sunset. It had been a warm, clear day with light winds that barely ruffled the surface of the sea. The lookout positioned high on the hillside behind the abandoned fishing village had seen the smoke first, a rising column of grey-blackness slowly emerging out of the haze. Several of the Securitates had got excited, started babbling about taking the boat out to meet the approaching ships.
‘They will kill us all!’ Nicolae Ceaușescu had rasped. His voice was like the rest of his emaciated, pain-wracked body, a whispering shadow. His beard had grown, his hair was a filthy tousled mess and he stank. They all stank. They were all hungry and thirsty for every well and cistern had been fouled with dead goats and dogs and cats before the island’s tormentors had dragged its original population off in big grey warships just like the one’s preparing to anchor offshore in the gathering dusk.
Within hours of interrogating the crew of the small damaged fishing boat which had put into the port of Samothraki to make repairs over a week ago, the band of survivors had camouflaged the wreck of the Mil Mi-6 helicopter in which they had escaped from Bucharest two weeks ago. The boat’s crew, two men in their late twenties, a teenage boy and a sinewy hard-faced woman in her forties only spoke Greek but eventually Ceaușescu’s Securitate bodyguards had discovered that the ‘Russians’ had first come to Samothrace about six months ago. They had returned several times since. First ‘they came to steal our boats and our young men’. Only a few of the island’s women had been molested on that first visit; the next time the ‘big ships’ returned the ‘Russian soldiers’ had rounded up all the men and every woman was ‘violated’, even little girls. Some women were killed; the rest had been loaded onto a small rusty merchant ship while their surviving men folk were forced to watch by soldiers in Red Army uniforms carrying Kalashnikov assault rifles. Afterwards the soldiers had marched the village’s men away; there had been shooting and in the morning there were bodies floating in the water all along the shore.
Ceaușescu had ordered his Securitates to treat the woman from the fishing boat ‘with respect’. He had been intensely irritated to learn the Securitates had beaten up the two men and the boy. How the fuck did the imbeciles think they were going to get off this fucking island? Fortunately, neither of the adults or the kid was seriously hurt, just bloody, angry and uncooperative for several days.
The former First Deputy Prime Minister of the People’s Republic of Romania still lived, but only just. However, his pain-addled mind was slowly regaining a little of its former acuity, he had taken command of the survivors again and begun to re-assert his will over his fate.
Once the middle-aged woman had understood she was not to be raped by her captors and that her men folk were not to be shot out of hand — and that the rough stuff had been a mistake, a misunderstanding — she had organised the boiling of water, and using gestures and drawing pictures in the sand, persuaded Ceaușescu’s bodyguards to let her men bait lines and start to fish in the shallow water around their grounded boat. The resulting supply of clean drinking water and the additional nourishment provided by sudden bounty of a large number of small fish, had marginally improved the morale and the physical condition of every member of the marooned group.