A lesser man than Liskard might have been gravely offended by the Saint’s bluntness, gently put though it was. But the Prime Minister accepted the Saint’s comment without a trace of embarrassment or irritation.
“Nonsense,” he said. “Please sit down. I’m looking forward to a chat with you on the flight. My wife is just... overexcited. She’ll calm down when she gets a drink into her.”
Simon sat down again with a shrug of thanks for Liskard’s understanding.
“Well, where is that drink?” his wife demanded of Lockhart, who came through the curtains at just that moment.
Lockhart gave the Prime Minister a questioning but otherwise absolutely neutral look.
“Would you please ask the stewardess to bring my wife a gin and tonic?” Liskard said, with quiet dignity.
“Yes, sir,” said Lockhart, and turned back through the curtain.
All four of the engines had been switched on now, and their noise hindered casual conversation. Simon took a deep breath of relief as he saw that Anne Liskard had decided to sink into sullen silence. A stewardess hurried in with a double gin and tonic and profuse apologies to Mrs Liskard. The voice of another stewardess sounded from a loudspeaker in the cool blue upholstery of the ceiling in the standardized litany to which today’s airline passengers have become so wearily immune that they scarcely hear it.
“... Please fasten your seat belts and refrain from smoking until after take-off.”
A moment later the tone of the jets changed, and the blinding white of the terminal building began to move slowly across the plane’s windows. Todd turned to speak to the Prime Minister.
“It’ll be good to get off the ground — and better still to get down again.”
“Let’s just hope it’s not a question of leaving the frying pan for the fire,” Liskard said good-humoredly. “From what our advance group tells me about the greeting we can expect in London, that little business in the waiting room may seem like a tea party in comparison.”
3
Prime Minister Liskard’s advance information about his English reception proved to be unpleasantly accurate. Even as the jet came down through the clouds to land at London Airport, one of Liskard’s aides pressed his cheek to the window beside his seat and exclaimed, “Do you see that? Must be five hundred of them!”
Simon leaned across Mrs Liskard, who had been sleeping off the effects of the first half of the flight during the second half with her head resting against the outer wall of the plane, and caught a glimpse of the dark herd of human figures congregated in an open space among the terminal’s complex of huge buildings. Then the momentary view was lost as the plane with strange slowness moved down an invisible incline of air toward contact with the runway.
“The welcoming committee?” Liskard asked with amused irony.
He was sitting across the aisle from the Saint, and had not been able to see.
“Your admirers seem to be out in force,” Simon confirmed.
“More likely a lynch mob,” Liskard responded dourly. “At least somebody cares.”
The wheels of the jet screeched suddenly against the pavement of the runway, and Mrs Liskard woke up.
“Who cares about what?” she asked blearily.
Half a dozen gin and tonics had not improved her perceptions nor her appearance. Her face was puffy and her lipstick smeared at one corner of her mouth. Even so, any man with reasonable tolerance for human frailty could have spotted her as potentially one of the most attractive women he was ever likely to meet. All the more pity, Simon thought, that she should be torn apart by whatever tensions drove her into a continual desire for semiconsciousness.
“We’re in London,” he told her. “We were just noticing the crowd that’s out to meet you.”
She tried to see. The plane was taxiing in toward the passenger terminal, but was still some distance away.
“Where?” she asked.
“On the other side of that building,” the Saint answered.
“Carrying roses, I suppose,” she said sarcastically.
Stewart turned from his place in front.
“Possibly,” he said, “but what they were carrying looked more like pitchforks.”
Anne Liskard’s eyes widened in a gullible expression which may or may not have been entirely put on.
“You couldn’t really see that well, could you?” she asked.
Stewart shook his head, sighed, and faced front again.
“Were there really so many?” Lockhart asked. “Five hundred? The opposition must be much worse than we thought.”
He was the only one of the party who seemed openly worried, but his statement sent a silent but somehow clearly perceptible wave of uneasiness through the rest of the group. The Prime Minister, who had spent the last two hours of the trip concentrating on paper work, snapped down the clasps of his briefcase.
“Let’s not blow this up out of proportion,” he said firmly. “These demonstrators are of no real importance. Keep that in mind. British public opinion is entirely on our side, and that’s what counts. The people in most civilized countries can still tell sanity from insanity even if a lot of their politicians can’t. Those howling monkeys with the placards can sound pretty bloodcurdling, but when the government gets down to business they’ll think of votes.”
“But these monkeys will get top play in the headlines,” one of the aides put in. “When you see the papers tomorrow you’ll hardly know we were here.”
The Deputy Prime Minister, Todd, made an uncomplimentary and fairly obscene remark about newspapermen and the bias of the international press, which almost invariably took a dim view of self-assertive activities on the part of Europeans anywhere in the world.
“It doesn’t matter,” Liskard insisted. “I don’t want anybody in this delegation to show any sign of disturbance, no matter what kind of demonstration they have in store for us. Is that understood? Look pleasant. Keep your dignity. It’s the best way to turn one of these situations into a defeat for the other side. Remember — if out of a hundred photographs the editors can find one that makes us look bad, that’s the one they’ll print on the front page.”
“Right,” Foreign Minister Stewart said. “And the same goes for statements. I don’t need to remind you that an unwise word to some interviewer could ham up the negotiations completely.”
He was speaking not to Liskard, of course, but to the younger aides, and surprisingly, to Todd, who looked grim suddenly and avoided the eyes of the other men. Apparently the Deputy Prime Minister had indiscreetly overstepped the bounds of his authority at some time in the past while dealing with the press.
“Excuse me, please,” Anne Liskard said. “I must go put on a face to meet the faces that I’ll meet.”
“It’ll be a little easier after the plane stops,” said the Saint
She gave him a crisply cool smile as she stood up. She had by no means forgiven him for refusing to respond to her public displays of affection at the beginning of the trip, and then for devoting himself almost entirely to conversation with her husband during the middle hours of the flight.
“Thank you for the warning,” she said in clipped tones.
“I’m quite capable of lurching down the aisle to the ladies’ room without any advice from Robin Hood.”
Simon let her lurch and sat back down to have a look out the drizzle-beaded window. It was late in the day, and the brightness of the sky far above the earth had been abruptly exchanged, when the plane descended below the sea of clouds that had been like a solid surface beneath it, for the fading gray light of a rainy winter afternoon. The pavement glistened clammily, and east was merged with west, and north with south, in the congested sky that seemed to press down and smother the whole country as night came on.