Chapter 11
The inky blackness of the winter night was rent asunder by the bellow of a jet airliner clawing into the night off the south western end of the great, concrete runway which now slashed across what until the previous year had been Cheltenham Race Course. The leaded windows of the mansion rattled. The central heating system — the one thing upon which the dead press magnate who’d built the monstrous old country pile before the Great War had neglected to lavish either money or attention — had broken down again and wherever the hearths hadn’t been bricked over, apologetic coal fires smouldered and glowed, smokily. Everybody was wearing coats, extra layers of clothing and still they shivered because nothing it seemed, could warm the chill out of the Portland stone blocks that formed the greater part of the building’s structural fabric.
Tom Harding-Grayson stirred the coals in the grate of his first floor office and returned to the threadbare armchair. He surveyed his guest and reached for his cup and saucer. Tea without milk, a slice of lemon was out of the question. A biscuit would have been nice. His stomach rumbled; the Government Compound was subject to the same rationing regime that was being applied in the nearby towns. That hadn’t been a Cabinet decision. The Prime Minister had announced the diktat and that, was that!
Margaret Hilda Thatcher sipped her tea, viewing the recently appointed Foreign Secretary with hooded eyes. She’d spent most of the afternoon trying not to worry about Malta, Julian Christopher and the fighting admiral’s son’s fate onboard the bomb-damaged HMS Talavera in the storm-swept seas off the rocky coast of Portugal. Until a few days ago she’d been the United Kingdom Interim Emergency Administration’s Minister of Supply — essentially, the ‘rationing queen’ as Airey Neave was wont to quip — now she was at the heart of Government wrestling with a host of new and possibly, intractable problems. Not least among these were the infuriatingly contradictory the reports from the survey teams which had been investigating the bombed out, and it had been assumed, largely uninhabitable zones to the east. The UKIEA’s writ did not run very deep into what had once been Greater London, or along either side of much of the Thames Estuary, or Kent. In fact until recently the presumption had been that virtually nobody had survived in these areas; it now seemed there were, potentially, significant numbers of survivors and possibly numerous coherent settled communities within the bomb-damaged areas of whose existence the UKIEA had had no inkling until the last few weeks. Army survey teams, mostly Royal Engineer-led, which had penetrated the ‘destruction zones’ had been mainly searching for recoverable strategic materials and industrial assets because there had been little expectation of finding hundreds, let alone tens of thousands of people actually living in the ruins. The most recent reports contained tantalising indications — anecdotal reports from people actually living many miles inside the ‘dead’ zones — that even within the inner districts of London there might be pockets of relatively light damage where, for example, archives and even gold or other valuable metals, or say, diamonds might remain untouched in vaults. More important, there were real hopes that large areas of the London docks and riverside quays identified by aerial reconnaissance remained intact, or easily repairable. Unfortunately, the photographic evidence was patchy and nobody cared to speculate on local levels of persistent radioactive contamination. Maddeningly, two naval salvage units which had been tasked to explore the Thames Estuary from the Medway as far upstream as was navigable had yet to report back.
The door opened to admit Airey Neave, who’d replaced Margaret Thatcher as Minister of Supply, and a middle aged man in the crumpled uniform of the United States Navy. The Home Secretary had not been overly amused when she learned that her friend had been trespassing on Foreign Office territory rather than concentrating on his own duties; the trouble was that Airey Neave hadn’t escaped from Colditz by ‘waiting for things to happen’ and was pathologically incapable of sticking rigidly to any ‘assigned brief’.
“We meet again, Captain Brenckmann,” Tom Harding-Grayson observed wryly as he shook hands with Airey Neave’s ‘friend’. The Foreign Secretary observed ‘the Angry Widow’ — everybody called Margaret Thatcher ‘the Angry Widow’ because she’d never made any bones about how ‘bloody angry’ she was that, for whatever grandiose geopolitical reason or mischance, somebody had murdered her husband and her children’s father along with hundreds of millions of other innocent people, thirteen months ago — coolly greeting the newcomer.
The Angry Widow treated all Americans with the utmost suspicion. The only thing that was ever going to be ‘special’ for her in her future relations with representatives of the lost colonies was her innate mistrust of everything they said, did and had done in the days leading up to the October War. Which, assuming they all lived through the next few days and weeks might be a problem because Tom Harding-Grayson had a feeling that the Angry Widow, having arrived at the top table of Government at the tender age of only thirty-eight, wasn’t leaving it any time soon.
Margaret Thatcher resumed her seat.
Around her the three men settled, each man aware that she was uncomfortable with the fact of this hastily arranged meeting, and had it not been for her chagrin at the way Airey Neave had cavalierly walked all over Tom Harding-Grayson’s domain would not have accepted his invitation to attend.
“Margaret,” Tom Harding-Grayson said cautiously, “I have a confession to make.” It was his turn to tread carefully. Notwithstanding they’d recently gone through the Balmoral nightmare together and that in the aftermath of the initial attack his wife, Pat, and the Angry Widow had formed an unlikely friendship, he suspected this was flimsy ground upon which to presume on this particular lady’s indulgence. “When Airey suggested to me that it was vitally important to attempt to keep channels of communication open, it was I who suggested it might be fruitful to approach Captain Brenckmann.”
Margaret Thatcher let the subterfuge go unremarked. Instead she concentrated on the person of the unobtrusive, leanly made figure of the interloper in their midst. Captain Walter Brenckmann was of average height, his dark hair heavily flecked with grey at the temples. She guessed he was in his mid-fifties, although it was hard to work out a person’s age these days because so many people seemed prematurely aged. She wasn’t convinced she’d even heard Walter Brenckmann’s name before that evening.
“I joined the Prime Minister after the War Cabinet earlier today,” she said coldly, “and he remarked that this was the second successive year that the death of Winston Churchill had gone uncelebrated and unremarked within the Party, and by his surviving circle of friends, admirers and family. The Prime Minister considers himself to have been Sir Winston’s friend, and to some extent, one of his protégés. Dear Winston was one of four living Prime Ministers, or former Prime Ministers of our country who disappeared in the holocaust of October last year.”
Walter Brenckmann returned her fierce gaze with the inscrutable dead pan face of a long serving litigator. There were no questions in his grey blue eyes, no censure, simply patience for he knew from experience that even the fiercest flame burned itself out, sooner or later.
“Harold MacMillan and the Earl of Avon, Anthony Eden, from my own Party ceased to exist, as did Mr Clement Atlee, who served as Winston’s deputy in the war against Hitler. Churchill, MacMillan, Eden and Atlee, murdered and for what, Captain Brenckmann?”