Saving the Queen (15 page)

She was not exactly tired, but she was a little bored and saw no point in unnecessarily accelerating her schedule and thereby increasing the length of her day. Being Queen was a marvelous job, really, with no end of compensations, but she had to admit that whereas she was awfully skeptical when her cousin, during her brief reign, complained on one occasion at Sandringham about the burdens of office, she knew now that her predecessor had been entirely correct. Not that she had given it much thought. No doubt if she had had to submit to one of those tests they give to common criminals (“
You say you were at Brighton when Nellie was murdered
?”), in the course of which she was asked: “
Did you ever dream about being Queen
?” she would have to confess that yes, she did, but it was psychically meaningless—after all, Emily and every other serving woman probably dreamed from time to time about being Queen. Caroline's dreams had been purely in the nature of fantasy. That an exquisitely tended airplane would crash, killing a pregnant Queen and her younger and only sister, was statistically outrageous. The House of Commons had since passed a law forbidding the sovereign, and the next in line for the throne, from traveling together in the same plane. She mused, all the time that debate was going on, on the inexplicit premise of the bill, namely that nature should not be permitted to strike again in such a way as to saddle the kingdom with another Queen Caroline. But that was perhaps too personal a way of looking at it, really. The protest was more in the nature of a routine precaution against multiple tragedy than a bill of attainder animadverting on the performance of the incumbent monarch.

As a matter of fact, it had turned out quite the contrary—Caroline took fugitive satisfaction out of it. Her manifest concern for every English problem struck neither her ministers as officious nor her public as imperious or even unfeminine. She was on the one hand unequivocally pro-British—the least penitent monarch who ever lived, by no means given to ostentation for its own sake, but utterly prepared to use the huge resources of the crown for public effect. So that when she was putting on a state dinner she was a great theatrical success. But she was a great success also when she visited bits of her kingdom laid waste by tragedy—fires, pestilence, storms, whatever. She would talk quite freely within the range of the microphones and television cameras to the victims, make practical suggestions, show a familiarity with the mechanical availability of state services. And—altogether unusual—she would sometimes express a pulverizing royal impatience over the failures of the state bureaucracy. She was in that sense an ombudsperson: always on the side of her subjects, opposed—theoretically—to herself, the embodiment of the state. But she would be seen, sometimes in these extraordinarily frank glimpses of her on television, thinking out loud; inquisitive about things; naturally curious. Her reactions were never packaged, and not entirely predictable, except for that predilection to side with the victim and against the man who specialized in rushing forward with forms to fill. In a year, she had become an omnipresence—eccentric, autocratic, desirable, feared, and quite frankly beloved.

To be sure, thought Caroline, reaching down with her toes to touch the gilt footboard, which she liked to do to remind herself how very tall she was, in contrast to her predecessor—she was by no means a perfect Queen. For one thing, she was perfectly capable of making it perfectly clear that she was bored to death. She did not shirk those duties she had to perform in virtue of her office; but she did not see it anywhere specified that she should
pretend
to enjoy them. Some she enjoyed hugely: receiving the weekly report from the Prime Minister in particular. She was deeply and meticulously informed about politics, in which she had been interested even as a girl, her father's favorite, with whom he would discuss political matters as animatedly as if he were talking to a party leader. The Prime Minister, accustomed to thirty-minute ritual sessions with her predecessor, found himself, before the flowers had bloomed on her predecessor's grave, required to allocate as much as two hours to answering Queen Caroline's searching questions.

She had begun by meticulously observing the rule that she was merely an auditor. But, really, that was unrealistic, she soon discovered. If she were entirely passive in receiving the news of her first minister, why could he not send his reports over on magnetic tape—or rather, Caroline smiled, on Royal Magnetic Tape?
Excuse me, ma'am, the Lord Chamberlain is here with the Royal Tape from the Prime Minister.” The Lord Chamberlain, in his silk knickers, advanced reverentially toward her, his hands extended under a velvet cushion on top of which was one sixty-minute tape
.

She was smart enough to advance herself slowly, and before long the Prime Minister really had no alternative than to talk to her as he might talk to the Home Secretary. He had explicit authority over the Home Secretary, and she had explicit authority over the Prime Minister—she could discharge him if she wanted to. But that would result, as she learned from her tutor twenty years ago when as a precocious child of eleven she had asked about it, in a “constitutional crisis.”

“What is a constitutional crisis?” she asked.

“That”—her father, sitting nearby smoking his pipe and reading the afternoon paper, interposed—“is, for instance, when the King fires his Prime Minister, the Parliament calls a general election, the same party is returned to power, and elects the same man as Prime Minister. The monarch would have to resign.”

“Why?” Caroline had asked.

“Why? Because, dear, Parliament is really sovereign.”

“Then why do they call the King the sovereign?”

“It is a protracted metaphor,” her father had said; and she did not quite know what that meant, not for a few years. The phrase had stuck in her memory, and she had decided, on finding herself suddenly the sovereign of Great Britain and its diminishing empire, that if other people were going to play along with the metaphor, she might as well see what was in it for her. The Prime Minister, who had inexplicit authority over the Queen, could not really exercise it without weakening, perhaps even destroying, the metaphor. And this no Prime Minister was likely to want to do. Under the circumstances, she began to exercise not her theoretical powers to command compliance, but her indisputable powers to command attention—anywhere; for just about as long as she chose. Moreover, she insisted on talking about the things that interested her. At the third session with the Prime Minister, who had been rattling on for at least ten minutes about what the Houses of Parliament were intending to appropriate to preserve the parks' deteriorating rose gardens, she interrupted him:

“How many atom bombs do we have?”

“How many what, ma'am?”

“Atom bombs.”

The Prime Minister—an old Etonian, who had cultivated the public school stutter to political advantage—half opened, shut, half opened his mouth again, and said, “I d-d-don't know exactly, ma'am.”

“I don't need to know
exactly
, Prime Minister. Is it more like
ten
, like
one hundred
, or like
one thousand
?”

“Do you mean, m-m-ma'am, those held in Great Britain by the United States, pursuant to the codicils of the NATO Treaty? Or d-d-do you mean those bombs over which we have total authority?”

“The latter.”

The Prime Minister let out a half sigh—he would not have given out this information to his own Home Secretary.

“Twenty-six, ma'am.”

“How many do the Americans have?”

“I don't have the e-e-exact figures. Approximately ten times as many.”

“How many do the Russians have?”

“We assume they have only a dozen. But they are manufacturing them very rapidly.”

“How do you know?”

“American intelligence, ma'am. They have contacts.” He was vastly relieved to be able to add, “We don't know, of course, who those contacts are, or how reliable they are.”

“I see. Well, get on with the rose gardens.”

The Prime Minister did, but it had become a listless performance.

She yawned and pressed the button. Instantly the large white gilt doors opened, and Emily entered with five newspapers, walked to the Queen's left and drew the curtains letting in light from the garden, walked to the bedside and bobbed a quick curtsy as she handed the papers to the Queen.

“Good morning, ma'am.”

“Good morning, Emily.”

She flicked on her bedside light and began reading. “Emily,” she called out just as Emily had reached the door.

“Yes, ma'am?”

“Please tell Lady Mabel to attend me.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

Lady Mabel Lunford knocked and entered.

“Mabs, please take this cablegram.”

Lady Mabel, who had been a secretary before marrying her husband, had eagerly revealed her knowledge of shorthand to the Queen on being retained by the court after her husband's death. The Queen was delighted to learn this about her family's old friend, having resisted the dictation of intimate communications through her official personal secretaries. It was always Lady Mabel she asked for when she wanted to communicate with her husband, which was infrequently, during his absences, which were frequent.

She munched on her toast and toyed with the sausage, looking up at the ceiling. “
To the Duke
, wherever he is in the Gold Coast, wherever the Gold Coast is.
Dear Richard: I plan to give a party on January
—what is the second Monday in January?”

Lady Mabel paused only briefly. “That would be the fourteenth, ma'am.”

—on the fourteenth of January in honor of Margaret Truman comma whose father comma you will recall comma will be entering his final year of office with visible reluctance period I need to know now whether you will be in London on that day comma as if so comma I shall plan one kind of party dash stuffy end dash semicolon if not comma I shall plan another kind of party dash more amusing period Please advise by return cable period And if you can possibly bring yourself to refrain from doing so comma dear Richard comma I should deem it a personal favor if you can complete your tour of Africa without publicly apologizing for Great Britain's history of imperialism period Affectionately Caroline.

The Queen stuck the sausage into her mouth and munched it happily, ringing for Emily who, waiting in the next room, came in instantly.

“Bring me another sausage, Emily.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“And Mabs, kindly instruct the Lord Chamberlain to instruct the Foreign Minister to instruct the ambassador in Washington to convey to Miss Truman an invitation by Her Majesty to be the guest of honor at a dinner dance at Buckingham Palace on January 14. You will note, Mabs, how readily I have mastered royal procedure?” Lady Mabel said nothing, but smiled respectfully. But Caroline felt the affection behind the official smile. “Thank you, Mabs.”

“Yes, ma'am.”

She bobbed, turned, and went out the door, and the Queen settled down to reading her five newspapers, to which she would give a full hour.

Nine

Boris Andreyvich Bolgin peered through the little round porthole on the tatterdemalion IL 12 as the pilot circled the airport. He sometimes felt, approaching Moscow, that it might all end better for him if the pilot would miscalculate while landing in one of those frequent snowfalls, plunging the airplane straight into the ground. He recalled that, as a matter of fact, Comrade Stalin had not eschewed this as an expeditious means of execution. His old superior, Constantine Oumansky, was ambassador to Mexico and in active charge of the entire NKVD operation in Latin America when Comrade Stalin sent for him in 1945. The plane took off, reached fifteen thousand feet, and exploded. For a few months, toward the end of the war, when Stalin was cultivating the image of the fatherly protector of the Russian homeland and the memory of the great bloodshed of the 1930s dimmed, it was possible to talk about Stalin, discreetly to be sure. But his colleagues had talked candidly about the execution of Oumansky and the novel way in which it had been effected.

“Mexico is becoming a laboratory for Comrade Stalin's executions,” his counterpart in Norway had commented, not without a trace of admiration. “Trotsky they bungled the first time, but, Boris Andreyvich, you don't bungle when you put an explosive in an airplane and set it to go off at fifteen thousand feet. Of course there are a few innocent victims, but isn't that true in any situation?”

Boris Andreyvich had learned merely to nod his head, rather than contribute verbally to any discussion that might find him suddenly co-opted by the speaker to a point of view.

Boris Andreyvich Bolgin was not born laconic or passive. As a young exuberant revolutionist in the twenties he had experienced great joy rising up through the party ranks, obeying orders with will and verve, and practicing his catechism in extended ideological conversations over a bottle of vodka with his colleagues and even his superiors. In 1933 the superior in question calculated that at the rate Boris was rising, it would be approximately one year before he would be displacing—the superior in question. Accordingly, on March 30, he was brought in to the headquarters of the OGPU (as the NKVD was then called), and there he was confronted with a sworn statement. He had been overheard to say that however justified Comrade Stalin's control of the party, someday it would necessarily yield, according to Marxist dogma, to the stateless society.

He had never said it, the sworn statement was a fabrication, the trial was swift, and the prison sentence was ten years, seven of which he served at a forced-labor camp in Siberia until the requirements of the war effort took precedence and he was assigned to the army, then to army intelligence (he was fluent in German and English), then to the NKVD, though he continued to serve, ostensibly; as military attaché to the Soviet ambassador. Seven years in Siberia permanently dampened Boris Andreyvich's spirits, and the frostbite permanently altered his physical appearance, so much so that his wife, on seeing him when he first arrived at their tiny flat in Kiev after seven years, screamed; in due course suffered a nervous breakdown; and finally went off with their fourteen-year-old daughter to live with her mother. During the war, she quietly divorced him. Boris lost his final link to his spirited youth and settled down to the job for which there was no practical alternative, as agent of the will of Joseph Stalin, about whom he asked no questions, and permitted himself to think no heretical thoughts, except, in respect of himself, that he hoped he would not live too long, that when he died it would not be in a torture chamber of the NKVD, and that no day would go by in which, at night, he would be deprived of the solace of his own little apartment, his large glass of vodka, and the huge library of the Russian masters of the nineteenth century, which he would not complete, at the studious rate he read them, in the ten years or so he had left to read.