Marija went up on tiptoes and planted a wet kiss on her husband’s lips.
“When do we go to England?”
“Tomorrow or the day after. The plan keeps changing.” He waved at the typewriter on the small desk behind them. “AVM French’s people are in a funk to get Talavera’s After Action Report cobbled together before the first VIPs fly in tomorrow afternoon or evening. I keep remembering things which ought to be included. Fellows who ought to be mentioned in despatches, that sort of thing. I thought they’d be more interested than they are in my recommendations for gongs. Did you know that it was your little brother, Joe, who was the chap who actually fired the torpedoes that hit those two big ships?”
“Petty Officer Griffin talks of little else, husband,” Marija confirmed, her tone soothing. She had recovered her composure and recognised that it was too early to expect the man she loved to be fully himself. After what he had been through it might take weeks or months, he might never again be exactly the man she had known before the battle.
Marija would have whispered comfort and sympathy, clung to him but there was a quiet knock at the door and she knew the Royal Navy wanted Peter — her Peter — back. She was torn by the helpless look that flickered in his face.
She laid and hand on his chest over his heart.
“I will be here waiting for you when you have finished your work, husband.”
Chapter 46
Sir Thomas Harding-Grayson was as shocked as his wife had warned him he would be when he set eyes on the Prime Minister. She had not slept for forty-eight hours, her eyes were red-rimmed, her pallor grey and her normally perfectly coiffured hair was — by her own exacting standards — distinctly careworn. But that was not the most worrying thing; all the fight seemed to have gone out of her.
The Defence Secretary, William Whitelaw rose from his chair as the Foreign Secretary entered the room, nodding a weary greeting to his friend.
“Willie has been filling me in on the latest news from the Mediterranean, Tom,” Margaret Thatcher explained, her tone just minutely diffident. “And explaining a little more about his plan to blockade the Falkland Islands with submarines.”
The man in question gave the newcomer a somewhat wan look.
“I had a trans-Atlantic chat with Bob McNamara,” he reported. “I’ve done my best to quash this nonsense about the First Sea Lord being despatched to the Mediterranean to become the Supreme Allied Commander,” Willie — only his enemies called him ‘William’ — Whitelaw went on. “The Americans are still livid about it.” He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t need to tell you that. You’re the poor fellow who has had to mend the fences.”
Notwithstanding she was two decades his junior Margaret Thatcher was viewing her Foreign Secretary with maternally concerned eyes.
“You look all in, Tom. You must sit down. We’ll see if somebody can rustle up a nice mug of chocolate, or perhaps, Horlicks for you.”
Tom Harding-Grayson was glad to take the weight off his tired and aching frame. He had been trying to decide whether he ought to recommend the summary dismissal of Sir Dick White to the Prime Minister when Walter Brenckmann had called to update him on the latest news from Philadelphia.
Somebody at the US State Department — of all places — had put out a press release confirming that quote ‘following the breakdown of the chain of command in the Mediterranean the Unity Administration of the United Kingdom has demanded the appointment of Admiral Sir David Luce as Allied Supreme Commander in Europe and the Middle East’.
“You’ve reassured our American friends that there is no substance to the reports about Sir David’s mission to Malta?” The Prime Minister asked.
“Bill Fulbright knows the stories are nonsense, but…”
Where there ought to have been anger and a steely glint in the Angry Widow’s eyes there was mild, housewifely forbearance.
“Willie thinks I should speak to President Kennedy?”
“I agree. We have to do something to clear the air, Margaret.”
“What would I say to him, Tom? Now look here, Jack. Your boys were supposed to be patrolling the waters around Malta but Admiral Detweiller decided to play war games two hundred miles to the west and left his allies in the lurch?”
Forty-eight hours ago Margaret Thatcher would have said it with venom and excoriating sarcasm; tonight she spoke with tired resignation.
“Yes, I’d recommend you to say exactly that to President Kennedy.”
William Whitelaw gave the Foreign Secretary a quizzical look.
Tom Harding-Grayson shrugged.
Neither the disaster in the Mediterranean nor the humiliation in the South Atlantic had done such irreparable damage to Anglo-American relations as the ongoing campaign of misinformation being waged over the ‘Supreme Commander Question’. Make no mistake; a well-orchestrated ‘campaign’ was being waged in the pages of American newspapers, across continental television and radio networks and from the back rooms of the House of Representatives. As many as a score of Senators and Congressmen, mostly but not exclusively Republican, were out on the stomp in Philadelphia and their voices were drowning out the relatively feeble cries of ‘foul’ coming from the British Embassy and a State Department Press Office that literally, to J. William Fulbright’s incandescent rage, did not seem to know if it was coming or going. What made the situation worse was that the President had yet to utter a single word on the subject and would not until he ‘returned to Philly’ sometime in the next few hours.
The whole thing was a dreadful comedy of errors compounded on the UAUK side by an exhausted middle ranking official in Iain Macleod’s Ministry of Information. Responding to the American furore a briefing note had been issued to the British press concerning the proposed visit to Malta by Sir David Luce on a morale boosting inspection and fact-finding mission. However, the note had been badly worded and this, in combination with several uncorrected typographical errors and omissions had failed to unambiguously deny that the First Sea Lord was being send to Malta to take command of All Allied Forces. The American East Coast media circus had fallen on the Ministry of Information’s ‘note’ like a colony of vultures and had been picking over the entrails of the unfortunate document ever since.
In Philadelphia the damage was done.
It made no difference that the United States Ambassador to the Court of Blenheim Palace, Walter Brenckmann, fully understood what had happened and that there had never been any underhand British plot to install ‘one of their own’ in command of ‘American GIs’.
In Philadelphia the Anglophobes who had never wanted the Washington rapprochement of last December were on the war path; there was already talk in Congressional circles of re-applying some of the sanctions and prohibitions to cut off the recently restored food, fuel, drugs and munitions lifelines across the North Atlantic. It seemed Britain’s enemies in America had been patiently awaiting their moment, keeping their powder dry for just such an opportunity to turn the screw.
It was a doomsday scenario that Tom Harding-Grayson had not foreseen. He could conceive of nothing that would be so injurious to the long-term interests of his country than a new split with the United States. Once driven back into its former isolation America might wallow in its own troubles for a generation.