High Jinx (7 page)

Now there would be the testimonial dinner—he was due at the Master's lodge in a few minutes, where the round of feasting would begin. His first night out as ‘Sir' Alistair. He sat down on his red velvet couch, opposite the teeming bookcase that contained, leatherbound, all the books and scholarly articles he had published during the past fifteen years, and poured himself a glass of sherry. He reasoned with himself that, in fact, he would have very little trouble in getting used to it all, notwithstanding his doctrinal disapproval of titles. But that disapproval was, again, his secret, and certainly not something Queen Caroline would have had any suspicion of earlier that day, no suspicion at all. If he said so himself, he had to admit it, his comportment had been exemplary. Exemplary!

He had been ceremoniously invited, along with Dame Myra Hess, as he had discovered that day, to stay on after the ceremony at Buckingham Palace to lunch with the Queen. After he knelt and accepted the knighthood, following the great pianist, an equerry led them into a large, ornate sitting room. ‘Her Majesty will be with you in just a moment.'

And indeed, in just a moment she breezed in, her poodle in her left hand, followed by a lady-in-waiting who took a chair in the corner of the room. Dame Myra and Sir Alistair had begun to rise, but before they were properly up the Queen had descended onto a petit-point couch, and they reversed their movement, reoccupying their chairs.

Fleetwood had seen her often enough on television and was not surprised by the lovely face, the perfect complexion, the fine honey-coloured hair, the loose curls held in place by a near-invisible pearl slide. But he could not exactly have anticipated the eyes. They were dark blue and sent out a bolt of relentless curiosity. Her mind, he had the impression, was forever in high gear, and at this particular moment it was at cruising speed, taking the measure of her newest knight, Sir Alistair Fleetwood. Evidently the Queen was familiar with Dame Myra, and one soon learned that even as a girl the Queen had known the artist, Myra Hess having been a friend of the late Duchess, Queen Caroline's mother.

She took a glass of champagne from the tray and began instantly to speak to him. ‘Do you know, Sir Alistair, that I haven't the remotest, not the remotest idea of what it is that you have accomplished, for which you have been so systematically honoured during the past six weeks? Now Myra here—Dame Myra—I can personally appreciate, because I know that she could, right this minute, put down her glass of champagne, go over there'—the Queen pointed to the far corner of the room—‘to that loathsome Steinway—it is loathsome, Myra, and you don't have to pretend it isn't, but everybody around here raised such an unholy rumpus when I suggested giving it away to a museum. They kept sighing,' she turned back to Fleetwood, mimicking the royal ululations she described, ‘that it was after all made in Hamburg especially for Queen Victoria, my great-great-grandmother, on commission by Kaiser Wilhelm, her idiotic grandson. My first reaction when I heard
that
about the piano was, “Why on earth do we want
anything
in the Palace given to us by that horrible man, my great uncle, who managed to slaughter 750,000 Englishmen, including my father, in a stupid war?” Please take note, Sir Alistair, that it is not only scientists who can remember figures. So I said to Lord What'shisname who looks after royal treasures here, “In that case, why don't we give it to the Victoria and Albert Museum? Maybe my great-great-grandmother would be more comfortable having it there? So to speak, as a part of her special collection?” Anyway,
that
Steinway. The tone is terrible, the action is too heavy, and twice I have without success had it overhauled by, of course, the best technicians in Great Britain.

‘But anyway, assuming she would consent to play that piano, which Myra is too sensible to do, she would instantly transport us by her skill and poetry. But what can you do to humble intelligences like ours to persuade us that you deserve the Nobel Prize and, now, a knighthood? I mean, Sir Alistair, what is a Fleetwood Zirca going to do for us?'

‘Well, ma'am, what does a telescope do for us?'

‘Now, that's silly, isn't it? It keeps us from running our ships into the rocks, among other things.'

Fleetwood smiled. ‘The more powerful the telescope, the sooner you know there are rocks out there, wouldn't that follow?'

‘Yes, I suppose that would follow, as you put it. But why do I need to know that there are rocks out there, a million miles away, if there is no possibility of my bumping into them?'

‘Ma'am, you are teasing me, and I don't really mind your doing so one bit. Because I cannot believe that you deprecate natural curiosity, even if you don't exhibit it.'

Queen Caroline smiled, a huge appreciative smile, settling back totally on the sofa, mussing the hair of her dog's head.

Just the right answer, she thought. But she mustn't let him have the last word.

‘Curiosity leads to desirable ends and to undesirable ends. Are we so glad there was curiosity on how to cause an atom to implode?'

Fleetwood answered cautiously. ‘One can't tell always, can one, whether a scientific discovery will be used to help or hurt humankind. Scientists are not responsible for the use made of their tools. That is the responsibility of our governors. Offhand I cannot think of one scientist, or ex-scientist, who is a president or prime minister, or even—' he added cautiously, ‘a monarch.'

The Queen smiled again. ‘Of course, you are correct, and I hope that your Zirca shows us all kinds of things. Perhaps we can do something about the British climate, after we discern how other planets handle their weather? By the way, is the Zirca a state secret?'

‘Well, hardly, Your Majesty. You can't award a Nobel Prize for a secret.'

‘I didn't mean that. I meant: do the communists now also have a Zirca?'

‘Not at the moment. There is, of course, a patent. And your government has not yet ruled on whether its strategic capability will put it on the list of products British manufacturers are not permitted to ship to the Soviet Union and certain other countries.'

‘Hmm.' Queen Caroline acknowledged with a nod the bow of her steward. She rose and began to walk toward the small blue-toned Dresden dining room at the left, followed by her company. ‘Well, I hope the government decides against giving the Zirca to the Soviet Union. There isn't anything, Sir Alistair, anything at all'—she sat down, the steward having drawn back the chair, motioned Fleetwood to sit on her left, Dame Myra to sit on her right, and nodded absentmindedly at her lady-in-waiting and equerry to take their places—‘that the communists will not transform to evil purposes. You could give them Mercurochrome and they would use it to poison somebody.'

She continued in her celebrated, animated way, her eyes flashing. ‘Why don't you invent something,' she handed her dog to an attendant, and dipped her fingers in her fingerbowl, ‘—something that immobilises everyone in the Kremlin? We'll just manage to plop it into Red Square one day when nobody—nobody but you, Sir Alistair, and you, Myra, and
I
, on behalf of my kingdom—is looking.' Queen Caroline's voice reduced to a conspiratorial whisper. ‘And suddenly—the next day!—the entire government apparatus, all those horrible men—notice, Myra, you don't see any women in the Politburo, do you?
Not one.
I specifically asked that question of my foreign minister as recently as last week. Not one. Though, I admit it, there was that dreadful Ana Pauker in Roumania, whom Stalin was goodhearted enough to purge before being especially goodhearted by dying. And then the next day, they would all have lost their memory!

‘Think of it, Sir Alistair! They would all forget how many people they need to kill during the next few weeks! Forget how many million people they wish they could enslave! What the formulas are for firing their nuclear weapons! What the secret codes are for reaching their spies! Think of it! I will tell you this, in the presence of'—she counted decisively, pointing to each of her guests seated about the table, one after another—‘in the presence of four witnesses:
you
invent
that,
and I shall make you a baron. No. I shall make you a duke. Come to think of it, if you do
that,
I shall divorce Prince Richard and marry you! With Myra, here, playing the organ. What would you choose to play at that wedding, Myra? Remember, the Queen of England would be marrying the man who had brought us peace on earth. Wonderful!'

Dame Myra spoke, for the first time. ‘I shall certainly make myself available for that performance, ma'am. I shall practice ‘Amazing Grace,' with 1,001 variations.'

‘Splendid! It is a covenant. Never mind the Fleetwood Zirca. It will blow away, in memory of the Fleetwood Covenant.' Queen Caroline turned to her soup, which was cold. She noticed quickly that none of her guests had begun to eat, waiting for her.

‘Oh dear, oh dear. I got carried away, and the soup is cold. Would you like yours reheated, Myra?' The Queen brought her spoon to the tip of her tongue, and gingerly tasted the consommé. ‘Hmm. Well, not too bad.' Without looking up she said, ‘I beg you, anyone who would like the soup reheated, just motion over there.'

It had been a memorable lunch, Alistair Fleetwood thought. No doubt about it. It served, among other things, to fortify his loyalties.

9

When, at the age of eighteen, on completing his first year at Trinity, Alistair Fleetwood was given the Duhem Prize for outstanding academic work, which prize customarily went to a graduating student or, every now and then, to a singular second-year student, his parents felt that they would have to yield to his entreaty, resisted during the previous two summers, to travel in the Soviet Union. ‘He has, quite simply, earned it,' the senior Mr. Fleetwood, the librarian in Salisbury, had said after reading his son's letter. Mrs. Fleetwood agreed, though she didn't like what they had all been reading about the Soviet Union under Stalin, about the show trials and the executions. And so, that night, father and mother went over their accounts and calculated how they might assemble the eighty-nine pounds necessary to give Alistair the month in Russia as a member of the tour sponsored now for the third year by the Cambridge Socialist Society.

The eight students and their guide, Alice Goodyear Corbett, travelled by Soviet steamship, leaving Southampton early in an afternoon of mid-June, arriving nine days later in Leningrad having, at about midpassage, ambled lazily through the long cool green of the Kiel Canal, as it had been called ever since Kaiser Wilhelm lost a world war and with it the right to continue to attach his name to the canal that joins the North Sea to the Baltic, saving five hundred miles of circumnavigation.

The students were very serious about their month in Russia, and the 12,000-ton
Pushkin
was well equipped with appropriate reading for inquisitive young scholars visiting the Soviet Union for the first time.

Alistair's roommate, Brian Scargill, was a third-year student, the president of the Socialist Society. He took his duties as, in effect, the student group leader very seriously. In consultation with Miss Corbett it was decided that there would be two seminars every day at sea, each lasting two hours. During the first of these Miss Corbett would give general lectures on Soviet life and the history of the Soviet Union. In the afternoon she would teach elementary Russian.

The first day out, in the Channel, they ran into something of a gale. Attendance at the first seminar was accordingly sparse. But Miss Corbett made it without apparent difficulty, as did Fleetwood and two others, not including Scargill who, when late that afternoon he emerged from his stateroom, was volubly mortified that an ordinary storm would stand in the way of his instruction in the great socialist experiment being conducted in the Soviet Union.

Alice Goodyear Corbett was a lithe, pretty, full-breasted, nimble-minded young woman, twenty-four years old. Her father was an American journalist who had been posted to Moscow just four months after the October Revolution, and now was recognised by the community of journalists there as the senior Western journalist in residence. Alice Goodyear Corbett (the convention had always been to use her full name, dating back to when, at age five, asked by a visiting Russian what her name was, she had answered, ‘
Moye imya
Alice Goodyear Corbett') had attended schools in Moscow from kindergarten and, at first with her father and in due course with others, had travelled everywhere foreigners were permitted to go.

Her early life was confused by the commotions that so absorbed her father professionally but affected her personally. There were the years in the early twenties when she was in secondary school and was treated erratically by her teachers, who had not yet been instructed on the proper attitude to exhibit to a young daughter of a representative of the imperialist press. The children, before they reached ideological puberty, accepted her—as a foreigner to be sure, but also as someone apparently as familiar as they were with the ways of Moscow. Alice Goodyear Corbett knew all about their holidays and their history, their museums and their toys. She went regularly to play with other girls, daughters of other Americans and of English and German journalists, but she found, after reaching her teens, that her relations with them tended to be more mechanical than those with her Russian friends. Given her choice, she elected to accept invitations to spend time with her Russian friends.

But then, approaching college age in the late twenties, she discovered, after one incident in particular, that as a foreigner she was generically suspect. She had been excitedly invited to a birthday party by her oldest friend, Olga. The day before the party and after Alice Goodyear Corbett had saved two weeks' allowance to buy a special birthday present, a Mickey Mouse watch, Olga said that her parents had called off the party. Alice Goodyear Corbett stared hard at Olga, who turned her head to one side and began to cry. She confessed that her parents had become afraid of foreigners coming to their home, Comrade Stalin having pronounced recently on the dangers of cosmopolitanism. Alice Goodyear Corbett had replied that she was not Jewish, so at least that particular charge could not apply to her, but Olga was simply confused, and cried some more. There were other such incidents.