The Lords' Day (retail) Read online

  ‘I’m sorry, Harry,’ he heard her saying. Just like the Swiss doctor. Everybody was always fucking sorry. So why didn’t it make a difference?

  ‘You were going to talk about it with me, weren’t you? And we are going to discuss it, aren’t we?’ His tone was untrusting, full of accusation. She hated it when he grew angry. There was, perhaps, something in her that feared Harry, even when he was naked, when his body reminded her of what Harry in his anger could do. The scars, the bullet wound in his back.

  ‘Harry, there’s something else I wanted to talk to you about.’

  ‘What could be more important than our baby?’

  ‘Harry, I want a divorce.’

  The spare, balding man looked out from his high window and stared down the Mall. From the street below he would have seemed a small, insignificant figure in such a grand building, and at times like this he felt it. His eyes wandered past the ceremonial flags hanging limply from their gibbets towards the outline of the palace that was beginning to emerge in the grey, oily light. He stood for a considerable time, motionless, the only sign of his inner turmoil being the relentless twisting of the crested cufflink on his left wrist. He would be on duty today, just as he had been, and would continue to be, every day of his life.

  He turned from the window. A mahogany clotheshorse stood next to the dressing table. From it hung the uniform of the Welsh Guards. He’d first been fitted for that uniform more than thirty years before, yet it had remained unaltered, like so much else in his life. Duty, obligation, the sense of being owned by others, hadn’t faded with the years, unlike the hairline and his patience – particularly his patience. Later that morning he would climb into the uniform and once again do his duty, even though he wasn’t Welsh and had guarded nothing more than his reputation these past years, and that often poorly. He was commanded to attend upon the State Opening of Parliament, an annual ritual stuffed to the studded collar with symbolism yet without the slightest trace of any substance. Just like his wretched life. He had been ordered to take part – ordered, him, a man of sixty! Yet in spite of all his years he was in no position to refuse. So he would damn them and do what was required of him, as he so often did, with reluctance.

  No, not reluctance. Stupid word! He didn’t feel reluctance, instead he felt a burning, blinding resentment. How dare they? It would be kinder to send the bloody clotheshorse, yet kindness didn’t come into it; there wasn’t even a sub-clause in the constitution for compassion. With a low curse he started tugging once more at his cufflink.

  He’d wriggled out of the occasion for years, but this year was different. His father was ill, too wobbly even to climb into his boots, so in his place they demanded the son. England expects! They commanded his presence, yet they were unwilling to pay even the simple price he asked. And what could be simpler, more dignified, more appropriate, more just, than to permit him to walk with his wife? A woman who had done none ill, a lady who gave none harm, who had brought only joy and gentleness to his life. Yet they wouldn’t let her be. She’d been the reason for the divorce so they treated her like an outcast. They deemed his wife’s appearance . . . inappropriate.

  Inappropriate. That was the word they’d used, those cowards and courtiers, as they shuffled round the issue like three-legged spaniels. It was no explanation at all. So she had taken herself out of London to avoid causing him any embarrassment while he was left on his own to—

  Bugger! The cufflink, tired with its mistreatment, shot from its post and disappeared somewhere in a dark corner. He cried out, first for assistance and then in an outpouring of unremitting despair. He was the grandest man in the land, yet also the most powerless and pathetic. From the other side of the window the outlines of the palace seemed to be mocking; it was so close, yet in some respects so very far away from him. It was from near this point, several hundred years before, that they had taken one of his ancestors, walked him across the park dressed in a double layer of clothing to prevent him shivering, and when they had reached Whitehall they had chopped off his head. Right now, that seemed the very best part of the deal.

  Charles Philip Arthur George, heir apparent to all he surveyed yet master of not even a humble cufflink, let forth a howl of frustration and sent a footstool crashing into a corner. It was going to be one of those lousy, screwed-up days.

  Masood was their leader, although not the eldest of the men gathered at the table. Ghulam, the bomb maker, made up their simple breakfast of paratha flatbreads fried in butter, with which they ate the remnants of the lamb pulao that had gone unfinished the night before. Mukhtar sat quietly soaking his bread in the dark, bitter-sweet tea, and chewing thoughtfully. No one spoke much.

  A portable television flickered mutely in the corner of the kitchen; the breakfast news showed scenes of preparation for the State Opening and warned of traffic disruption in Central London. All was as it should be.

  When they had finished their food, they prayed, for the last time, in the formal manner. ‘We shall not pray like this again,’ Masood announced. ‘It will only persuade them that we are what they call fundamentalists or fanatics. Then their hatred for us will burn all the more. No, we must show them that we are simple men, who wish nothing more than to show them justice.’

  ‘Until they choke on it,’ Jehanzeb, the eldest, added.

  They were dressed in different clothing; some in suits, some in workmen’s garb. Masood made one final inspection. Then it was time. They left the house without cleaning up after their breakfast. There was no point. None of them would be returning.

  6.40 a.m.

  It would be a long morning. This was, after all, the most significant state occasion of the year. The State Opening of Parliament is more than merely the beginning of a new parliamentary session, it is an occasion snatched from the furnace of British history. The ceremony is held in the House of Lords because the Monarch has been denied access to the House of Commons ever since her ancestor, the hapless – and soon to be headless – Charles kicked down its door while trying to arrest several of its members. Faced with the inhospitality and not infrequent hostility of the Commons, the Monarch retaliates by summoning a member of the Government to the palace and holding him hostage for the duration, just in case. Uneasy sits the crown.

  There was also the lesson of Guy Fawkes, of course, when he and other Catholic conspirators stocked the cellars with gunpowder and attempted during the State Opening to blow up not only the King but also the entire government, lock, stock and explosive barrel, yet that was more than four hundred years ago. Affairs had settled on a gentler keel since then. Even the royal hostage is treated gently and to a glass of something suitably old.

  As the skies above London yielded to the first rays of a sickly sun, the Household Cavalry was well into its preparations. Reveille had long since been sounded and the members of the Sovereign’s Escort were mucking out the stables at Knightsbridge Barracks, surrounded by spit and polish and the pungent smell of horse piss. On the roads around Westminster, access routes were being blocked. Metal crowd barriers already lined the Mall and large concrete barriers were being hauled around in the jaws of forklift trucks to divert the traffic away from the processional route. Nothing would be allowed through, unless it was waving the right pass or arriving in a gilded coach.

  Inside the ornate Gothic gingerbread Palace of Westminster, the members of the Works Department were making last-minute adjustments to the chamber of the House of Lords, where the red leather benches had been rearranged to permit the largest possible number of peers and guests to be seated. Behind the chamber, in the Robing Room that the Monarch would use as her private chambers, the Head Housemaid was making one last sweep while the Staff Commander himself gave the dainty toilet with its ancient blue-porcelain bowl one final discreet check. Flowers bloomed on all sides. Elsewhere, employees from the tailor Ede and Ravenscroft, the oldest tailoring firm in London, stood by to assist peers into their ermine robes, while seamstresses were at hand to help those in need. No stitch
would be left unsewn, no corner left undusted or unsecured.

  The ceremonial was as old as time itself, but all was not as it once had been. Standards were changing, and some would say slipping. What had once been a close-knit, almost family affair had been slowly squeezed dry in the vice of equal opportunities and Exchequer meanness. Posts were opened up to all comers, even part-timers. The magnificent doorkeepers who kept order throughout the place had once been drawn exclusively from the ranks of the military and conducted themselves as though still on parade, yet now they found their jobs offered to all and sundry, even women. Black Rod himself, the Lords’ most senior official, was always a knight and, typically, at least a Lieutenant-General or Air Vice-Marshal, yet even his job was advertised in the pages of the Evening Standard. New times, new manners. Traditions came and went, and so did the cleaners, ever since the contract had been put out to tender. Lowest cost, and often lowest common denominator. Some cleaners had been busy inside the palace since five that morning, and many more arrived in the ensuing hours. Three of them came through the underpass that led from Westminster tube station. It wasn’t an entrance open to the public, only those who were authorised, and they came forward, small bags in their hands, their photo IDs strung round their necks. As he stood before the revolving glass security door and passed his swipe card through the electronic reader, one of the men smiled faint-heartedly at the policeman on duty. The constable barely acknowledged the greeting.

  ‘What’s in the bag, sunshine?’

  ‘Only lunch,’ the man replied in a thick accent, as the other man also passed through. Although they had not been asked, the three competed in their eagerness to open their cheap holdalls for inspection, revealing little more than sandwiches, a couple of chocolate bars and several cans of Coca-Cola each. ‘We hold a little party with other cleaners. After Her Majesty has left. When our work is done,’ the first explained.

  ‘Coca-Cola, eh? The dear old Queen Mum’ll be rolling in her grave just to hear of it.’

  His little joke was met with the blankest of expressions; the policeman sighed and nodded them through. He nudged his colleague as they passed.

  ‘And where d’you think those little teetotallers crawled in from, then?’

  ‘Dunno,’ the other replied. ‘Could be Pakis. There again, might be African, Sudanese, Ethiopian. Bleedin’ Iranian, for all I know.’ He sighed, the deep, distracted sigh of an unreconstructed Englishman. ‘So many asylum seekers clogging up the works these past years.’

  ‘Yet you don’t dare say it.’

  ‘But it’s true. They do,’ the other man insisted.

  ‘Can’t argue the point.’

  ‘Extraordinary, ain’t it?’

  ‘How they all look the ruddy same.’

  ‘Makes you feel nostalgic for the Irish.’

  Their attention was soon diverted by a parliamentary secretary who had struggled through the security door with an armful of papers, only to spill them on the pavement and reveal a quite unnecessary length of thigh as she bent to retrieve them. The dark skinned cleaners walked on. One, Mukhtar, had beads of sweat gathering below his hairline; he wiped his brow with his palm, Jehanzeb gripped his arm in reproof. Their eyes met, exchanging a private prayer. Mukhtar’s fingers searched for the tehwiz at his neck, a small square of fabric into which was sewn a verse from the Quran. Inshallah. Already he felt better. It was remarkable how nervous a man could grow, even when he had volunteered to die.

  7.30 a.m.

  Robert Treat Paine, the US Ambassador to what is formally known as the Court of St James’s, had also risen early that day; indeed, he had been awake since four and had barely slept. It had become something of an uncomfortable habit with the tall, angular Bostonian ever since his wife had died suddenly two years earlier from a brain haemorrhage. She might have been saved, had they not been miles from help on a walking holiday in the Lake District where mobile phones don’t work and passing shepherds were nowadays as scarce as undiseased elms. ‘She died in one of the most beautiful spots on earth,’ he told her memorial service, ‘and facing up to God.’ Their only son, also named Robert T, hadn’t attended; he had been away serving with the Marine Corps in Afghanistan. He was never to come home. A roadside bomb. And there were no saccharined words of comfort that could soothe that particular death. It hadn’t been a good year for the ambassador.

  Slowly he climbed from the bed that he now shared only with his red setter and stood at the window of his cavernous bedroom. Winfield House, the US ambassador’s official residence, looked out over Regent’s Park and the ambassador spent some time watching a young urban fox stalk the grounds looking for breakfast, scratching at roots, sniffing at the fungi that had sprouted beneath the birch trees. Strange, and sad, the ambassador thought, that this garden would probably be as close as the animal ever made it to real countryside. Everything in this turbulent world seemed to have been snatched from its proper place. His eyes, as so often, were drawn towards the photograph on his dresser. It showed his son in his Marine captain’s uniform, a young man so full of confidence, brimming with ambition, yet . . . he was gone, another thing taken from its rightful place. And now the name of Robert Treat Paine would be no more. That noble line had come to its end, a story closed.

  Oh, but what a magnificent story it had been! The first Robt. Treat Paine had been one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, signing it with a bold flourish that would forever mark his name in history. Now he lay buried beside the likes of Sam Adams and Paul Revere in the Granary Burial Ground in Boston, a hallowed place, a spot reserved for American heroes. Old Robt. had left a clear trail and the ambassador had followed in his ancestor’s footsteps, through Harvard and law school before embarking on a sparkling career that had left successive presidents in his debt. The Paine family had always played its part, but now the wheel of family life had turned full circle. The youngest and brightest of all the Robert T. Paines had gone off to war and got himself killed. The wheel had stopped.

  For the father, there were few consolations. He buried himself in his work and was excellent at his job, everyone said that, including the President when she had called him after his son’s death to tell him that the post was his as long as he wanted it. She understood the ties of blood, being the third member of her own family to have won the White House. And he should have been happy with this posting in a country that had given him his Old English roots, yet there was something missing in this New Britain. They knew what they used to be, but couldn’t decide what they had become. They’d allowed their culture, and with it their self-confidence, to slip through their fingers, leaving them clutching at little but empty air. It was a modern sickness, and Paine had come to the conclusion that they would never find a cure. Sometimes, it seemed to him, he cared more for their customs than they did.

  He reached for the phone and pressed the button. His steward answered it.

  ‘Breakfast in half an hour, I think, O’Malley.’ He stretched his vowels in the slow, New England manner.

  ‘The usual, Ambassador Paine?’ That would be easy. Fresh grapefruit, muesli and sweet black coffee. Paine did little more than peck when he had to eat on his own.

  ‘No, this is a special day, O’Malley.’

  ‘You mean Guy Fawkes and all the bonfires.’

  ‘You really are a totally unrepentant Irish rebel, aren’t you?’

  ‘I hope so, sir.’

  ‘I’m talking about the State Opening of Parliament. I’m going to rub shoulders with the Queen.’

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be having a wonderful time, sir,’ the steward responded, his voice hoarse with irony and nicotine.

  ‘It’ll be a long day, O’Malley, and we’ll need more than prune juice to get through it. I think we’ll celebrate the occasion with something a little more substantial. The Full English.’

  ‘The Full Irish, it’ll be, sir.’

  Paine replaced the phone. He tolerated O’Malley, was even amused by him. At least the
fellow knew who he was.

  Yet in a bedroom in a different part of town, matters were progressing less smoothly with another of the actors who would play a significant part in the events that were to mark this day. It was by no means such an expansive bedroom as that in Winfield House, but Tricia Willcocks had done pretty well for herself by any measure. It had taken three marriages and a fair bit of swallowing of male smugness during her earlier years in government circles, but she had ended up as Home Secretary. At times, even she had to pinch herself. Not bad for a woman who had been forced to struggle mightily through these meritocratic times to live down her expensive convent-based education. Girls from St Trinian’s had long been out of fashion. Yet still it wasn’t enough for Tricia. She’d built her career on an adroit mixture of tokenism and toe sucking, and it had left her with a disagreeable taste in her mouth. She knew men, knew their ample shortcomings, and also knew she was as able as most, yet, in spite of these qualities, she was forced to live off their finances and upon their favours. That made her irritable, while age had made her a little menopausal, and the combination was not always a happy one.