To Play the King. Michael Dobbs

piped Christmas music the staff had turned on for their own entertainment. There were large photos of Brando on the walls, in motorcycle leathers from one of his early films, along with posters of Presley, Jack Nicholson, and a couple of other younger film stars he didn’t recognize. It was odd, different, a total contrast to the gentlemen’s clubs of Pall Mall to which Mycroft was accustomed. There were no seats; this was a watering hole designed for standing and moving, not for spending all evening mooning over a half pint. He rather liked it.

      ‘You entered in something of a hurry.’ A man, in his thirties and well presented, a Brummie by his accent, was standing next to him. ‘Mind if I join you?’

      Mycroft shrugged. He was still dazed from his encounter and lacked the self-confidence to be rude and turn away a friendly voice. The stranger was casually but very neatly dressed, his stone-washed jeans immaculately pressed, as was his white shirt, sleeves rolled up narrow and high and with great care. He was obviously fit, the muscles showed prominently.

      ‘You looked as if you were running from something.’

      The whisky was making Mycroft feel warmer, he needed to ease up a little. He laughed. ‘A woman actually. Tried to pick me up!’

      They were both laughing, and Mycroft noted the stranger inspecting him carefully. He didn’t object; the eyes were warm, concerned, interested. And interesting. A golden shade of brown.

      ‘It’s usually the other way round. Women running from me,’ he continued.

      ‘Makes you sound like something of a stud.’

      ‘No, that’s not what I meant…’ Mycroft bit his lip, suddenly feeling the pain and the humiliation of being alone at Christmas. ‘My wife walked out on me. After twenty-three years.’

      ‘I’m sorry.’

      ‘Why should you be? You don’t know her, or me…’ Once more the confusion flooded over him. ‘My apologies. Churlish of me.’

      ‘Don’t worry. Shout if it helps. I don’t mind.’

      ‘Thanks. I might just do that.’ He extended a hand. ‘David.’

      ‘Kenny. Just remember, David, that you’re not on your own. Believe me, there are thousands of people just like you. Feeling alone at Christmas, when there’s no need. One door closes, another opens. Think of it as a new beginning.’

      ‘Somebody else I know said something like that.’

      ‘Which must make it right.’ He had a broad, easy smile which had a lot of life to it, and was drinking straight from a bottle of exotic Mexican beer with a lime slice stuffed in the neck. Mycroft looked at his whisky, and wondered whether he should try something new, but decided he was probably too old to change his habits. He tried to remember how long it had been since he had tried anything or met anyone new, outside of work.

      ‘What do you do, Kenny?’

      ‘Cabin crew. Fly-the-fag BA. And you?’

      ‘Civil servant.’

      ‘Sounds horribly dull. Then my job sounds horribly glamorous, but it’s not. You get bored fending off movie queens in first class. You travel a lot?’

      Mycroft was just about to answer when the piped strains of ‘Jingle Bells’ was replaced by the heavy thumping of the juke box. The evening was warming up. He had to bend close to hear what Kenny was saying and to be heard. Kenny had a freshly scrubbed smell with the slightest trace of aftershave. He was bawling into Mycroft’s ear to make himself heard, suggesting they might find a place to eat, out of the din.

      Mycroft was trembling once again. It wasn’t just the prospect of going back out alone onto the cold streets again, perhaps finding the tart waiting to accost him, or returning home to an empty house. It wasn’t just the fact that this was the first time for years someone had been interested in him as a person, rather than as someone who was close to the King. It wasn’t even that he felt warmed by Kenny’s easy smile and already felt better than he had done all week. It was the fact that, however much he tried to hide from it or explain it away, he wanted to get to know Kenny very much better. Very much better indeed.

       CHAPTER NINE

       His royal mind progresses by a series of afterthoughts. He treads the tightrope that stretches between the Constitution and his conscience with the blinding sense of purpose of a pilchard.

      The two men were walking around the lake, one dressed warmly in hacking jacket and gumboots while the other shivered inside his cashmere overcoat and struggled to prevent his hand-stitched leather shoes slipping in the damp grass. Near at hand a domestic tractor was ploughing up a substantial section of plush lawn marked off inside guide ropes while, beyond, a pair of workmen manoeuvred saplings and young trees into holes which further disfigured the once gracious lawn, already scarred by the tyre marks of earth-moving equipment. The effect was to spread dark winter mud everywhere, and even the enthusiasm of the King couldn’t persuade Urquhart that the gardens of Buckingham Palace would ever recover their former glories.

      The King had suggested the walk. At the start of their first weekly audience to discuss matters of state, the King had clasped Urquhart with both hands and thanked him fervently for the decision on the Westminster Abbey site, announced that morning, which had been hailed as a triumph by heritage groups as vehemently as it had been attacked by the luminaries of the architects’ profession. But as Urquhart had concluded at Cabinet Committee, how many votes had the architects? The King inclined to the view that his intervention had probably been helpful, perhaps even crucial, and Urquhart chose not to disillusion him. Prime Ministers were constantly surrounded by the complaints of the disappointed and it made a refreshing change to be greeted with genuine, unaffected enthusiasm.

      The King was ebullient and, in the characteristically Spartan fashion that often made him oblivious to the discomfort of others, had insisted on showing Urquhart the work which had begun to transform the Palace gardens. ‘So many acres of barren, closely cropped lawn, Mr Urquhart, with not a nesting-place in sight. I want this to be made a sanctuary right in the heart of the city, to recreate the natural habitat of London before we smothered it in concrete.’

      Urquhart was picking his way carefully around the freshly ploughed turf, trying unsuccessfully to avoid the cloying earth and divots while the King enthused about the muddy tract. ‘Here, this is where I want the wild-flower garden. I’ll sow it myself. You can’t imagine what a sense of fulfilment it gives me, dragging around a bucket of earth or manhandling a tree.’

      Urquhart decided it would be ill-mannered to mention that the last recorded instance of someone with such an upbringing manhandling a tree had been the King’s distant ancestor, George III, who in a fit of clinical madness had descended from his coach in Windsor Great Park and knighted an oak. He also lost the American colonies, and had eventually been locked away.