“I am perfectly all right, Margo,” Marija protested irritably.
“No,” the older woman told her, “you are not, Nurse Calleja.”
Margo only resorted to Nurse Calleja when Marija was being really stubborn. Or being stupid, or acting like a child, or being argumentative. Marija didn’t think she was being, or doing any of those things. She simply wanted to get out of bed!
“Mirror,” Margo sighed, resignedly.
Marija looked at herself.
Or rather, she catalogued the damage. It was not as if she was unaccustomed to viewing her own numerous old scars. She had a very respectable collection — some quite grotesque — of those on her slender frame, enough to make any sober man blanch she’d realised from earliest puberty. If one couldn’t be honest with one self about these things who could one be honest with?
“Three stitches?” She scowled, viewing the leaking gash in her eyebrow above her right eye. Her hand carefully explored her puffy cheek and explored the lower orbit of the eye which was half-shut and mottling black and blue. She looked like she had been in a boxing match. Her nose was sore, she examined it tentatively.
“I don’t think you broke your nose when you fell over,” Margo assured her, turning sternly matriarchal. “In fact, I don’t think you broke anything but how I honestly don’t know!”
“Peter was in the piazza,” Marija started, stopped. Tears were trickling down her bruised and swollen cheeks.
“Yes, I know,” her friend said, a little impatiently.
“I tried to catch up with him.”
“Rosa tells me you were running.”
“Yes, I don’t know how…”
“Well, you were. You were running right up until you fell flat on your face, Nurse Calleja.”
Sometime in the last few minutes Marija had stopped feeling humiliated. She was still feeling sorry for herself, and from the evidence in the mirror she had a perfect right to feel sorry for herself. Long experience had taught her that self-knowledge often comes at a painful personal cost. She had wanted to be with Peter Christopher so much that she had run — albeit only half-a-dozen steps — for the first time in over twenty years to be with him. If she had done that once she could do it again. If and when her friends ever allowed her out of this bed!
“I want to get up!” She declared.
“So you can run after Peter again?”
Marija gave the older woman a determinedly vexed look.
“If I have to! Yes!”
Margo Seiffert considered this briefly, before shaking her head.
“I don’t think that will be necessary, sweetheart.”
Now Marija was beyond bewilderment.
“Your young man is outside.”
Marija blinked.
“If Lieutenant Hannay hadn’t been holding him down he’d have been climbing up the walls by now.” Margo smiled. “I was going to keep him on tenterhooks a little longer. But I was so sorry for him I promised I’d ask you if you wanted to see him before he has to go back to his ship.”
Chapter 44
Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith entered the ancient room ahead of her Prime Minister. She smiled to the two dozen men and three other women in the ancient wood-panelled borrowed lecture hall as she carefully, and regally — in the quiet, unfussy way which was her signature — descended the steps to the semi-circular space beneath the great, wide blackboard. Privately, the Monarch had entertained many doubts about the apparently reckless rush with which her Government was attempting to transform Christ Church and the surrounding colleges into the new seat of the Mother of Parliaments. Several of her qualms — but not all — had been assuaged by her whistle stop tour of the work in progress around St Aldate’s. She had expected the military to be overtly visible, and for things to be a little more chaotic; in both preconceptions she had been, to her relief, disappointed. The whole of Oxford was alive, buzzing with the coming re-opening of the House of Commons in the exquisite setting of the Great Hall of Christ Church College.
The Queen turned and faced the newly nominated Privy Counsellors, allowing herself a ghost of a smile. The men and the women settling into the benches in front and above her included many unlikely candidates, as many opponents and critics of the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom as it did outright supporters. She was beginning to understand that this was a trait of her new, and remarkable, Prime Minister. Margaret Thatcher did not waste time manoeuvring around obstacles, she confronted them head on. Moreover, the closer she approached to that obstacle, the faster she went!
Seated at the left hand of the bottom step, the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West, Enoch Powell was hurtfully erect in his Sovereign’s presence, wearing his terrible scars like a badge of honour.
The Queen stepped towards him, motioning him not to rise to his feet. The poor man would have had quite enough difficulty in journeying from his hospital bed to this place without her wishing to cause him further, completely unnecessary discomfort.
“I am glad that you were able to be with us this morning, Mr Powell.”
The gaunt, tortured figure bowed his head.
“It is my honour to be at this place at this hour, Your Majesty.”
The legend of how the terribly injured MP had risen to his feet and gone to Margaret Thatcher’s aid when the gunman had opened fire during the ‘great debate’ at Cheltenham Town Hall, had granted Enoch Powell an odd cult status of exactly the kind he detested. That he had suffered a painful flesh wound in the episode was simply grist to the mill. Having tried to shield the Angry Widow — his most implacable political foe — from the assassin’s bullets, he had collapsed and been rushed to hospital.
In the aftermath even the iron heart of the Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West had been softened — a little — by the obviously sincere solicitude of his rival. Margaret Thatcher had visited him, very privately, in hospital and wished him a speedy recovery.
‘Our destiny is to continue our debate in a place fitted to the occasion,’ she had informed him. ‘I look forward to that day.’
The Queen focused on the business of the day, lifting her face to meet every eye in the room.
“I apologise to you all for the brevity and the cursory nature of your admission to the ranks of My Privy Council.” The thirty-seven year old recently bereaved mother, whose husband was still in the early stages of a long road to recovery from the injuries he had sustained during the regicidal attack on Balmoral which had claimed the life of infant son, Andrew, was not and never would be entirely comfortable with the modified constitutional role she had assumed in recent weeks. Having been brought up all her life to be apolitical, completely above the fray, she had been obliged by the absolute necessity to rebuild a sense of national unity to stand, foursquare behind Her Ministers and Her Government. Gone were the days when the Royal Assent was a rubber stamp framed in archaic Norman French; in this brave new World she exercised real power of a kind that would have been intimately familiar to her early Georgian antecedents. “In these difficult times your Queen needs the counsel of patriots of all parties and political persuasions. More than that, it is vital that the true dimensions of the threats we face, and the challenges we must surmount, are understood by as many of our people as possible. My Government will deliver everything it has promised in terms of political reforms and the normalisation and relaxation where possible, of the harsh civil order and austerity regime under which most of our people still live. However, before we can ‘heal ourselves’ we must confront the deadly perils facing us and our vital interests in the wider World. My Government is convinced that if we fail to do battle with our enemies abroad, those enemies will inevitably seek us out in our own land. What then would become of our efforts to rebuild? What then would become of the great reconstruction that fills all our dreams?”