'Yes, indeed,' said Wigram, the King's private secretary. He could talk of constitutional subtleties like the King's butler of the wines in his cellar. 'On the death of King Edward, a troop of Life Guards was under orders at Albany Street Barracks, ready to be turned out within five minutes of a trumpet call.'
'Perhaps I deserved their attentions?' suggested Eliot. 'Remember, I was a bolshevik. I'd probably have stood cheering, if we'd cut the hedonistic old gentleman's head off in Whitehall like Charles the First's.'
'You cannot make our flesh creep,' Dawson chaffed him. 'Even Mr Pickwick's Fat Boy had to grow up. Wigram, we shall need to compose a bulletin.'
'Yes. I looked out the final one on King Edward in 1910.' Wigram efficiently produced a folded sheet from his inside pocket.
'I know what it says. I signed it,' Dawson reminded him. 'His Majesty's condition is now critical' was stark enough for the morning papers. Now we have the wireless. The BBC will want something to put on the air between nine and ten, when people start going to bed. We must send a message which will touch their hearts.'
Dawson reached for the menu card in its clip, and wrote quickly on the back-
_The King's life is moving peacefully towards its close._
Wigram nodded appreciatively. Eliot wondered how early in his patient's illness Dawson had composed the phrase.
'I'll take it to the Queen at once, then have it telephoned to Portland Place.' Dawson rose.
'I'll come with you,' said Eliot, abandoning his fish. 'I'm not hungry.'
The remaining men at the table also stood. Lady Beckett had entered the dining-room.
Nancy Beckett was better known than Eliot in Mayfair or Monte Carlo or Manhattan. Her social star had twinkled before cultivating Americans in London society had moved from the freakish to the smart. Her hair was cut square and loose like Greta Garbo's, and had never been a richer shade of auburn. She had large green eyes and a pert nose. Her pale skin, as clear as a silk mask, was submerged regularly under mud-packs in Bond Street. Her figure represented a slim-waisted trophy for self-discipline. She wore a black silk calf-length dress, and in deference to the melancholy evening no jewellery except a diamond the size of a humbug.
She exchanged a smile with her husband. Her place was next to Lady Evesham, a lady-in-waiting with pale grey hair, which Nancy suspected she would have loved to peroxide.
'I was
Nancy was aware that the war had been conducted for Britain largely by members of Lady Evesham's own family.
'You must have always known Sir Eliot a brave man?' Lady Evesham added.
'I'm afraid I'd no chance to tell. You see, he was a conscientious objector until the middle of the war.' Lady Evesham looked aghast. 'When conscription came in 1916, my husband had the choice of going either into the army or into jail. And Eliot is simply a man who develops wholehearted enthusiasm for anything he happens to find himself doing. Pacifists are the fiercest of people,' Nancy confided, 'If Bertrand Russell had provided himself with a machine-gun instead of a typewriter, there wouldn't be room on his chest for medals.'
Eliot and Dawson were walking upstairs together. The Queen was with the Prince of Wales and the Dukes of York and Kent. Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret had been packed back to Windsor, where their mother the Duchess of York was recovering from pneumonia, complicating flu caught in that winter's savage epidemic. The Duke of Gloucester was in Buckingham Palace with a sore throat. The three Privy Councillors-Ramsay MacDonald, Lord Hailsham and Sir John Simon-had the unsought adventure of a flight back to London that chilly, bright afternoon. The Prince of Wales' offer of his private plane from nearby Bircham Newton aerodrome was unrefusable. Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Lang, past seventy, gaitered and aproned, bald and sharp-nosed, fonder of Christians if they were kings, had arrived with vulturish timing.
Eliot wondered if Dawson resented Nancy as well being invited to Sandringham, but decided him too seasoned, too secure a courtier. Eliot had been summoned from their home in Kent by telephone at three on the Sunday morning. Dawson recognized that Eliot knew more about the heart than himself, and the King's was starting to fail. He almost killed the old boy in 1928, Eliot reflected, missing a pocket of pus hidden behind the lung until almost too late. Everyone had heard how he failed his exams as a student at the London Hospital. Dawson's skill was stagemanager of the sickbed, the impressario of dramatic illness.
'I read your _Health of Nations_ when it was published after the war,' Dawson said politely.
'I'd toned it down enormously. A young man can do his future severer damage by publishing a book than indulging his irresponsibility with racehorses and women.'
'No man is one person, but a succession,' Dawson ruminated. 'We're like the portrait-gallery of wicked ancestors in
'It's unthinkable to the medical profession.'
'The unthinkable is often inevitable. The death of kings is more certain than the birth of princes.'
Eliot admitted, 'I suppose it was unthinkable to kill germs with mouldy bread, when I tried in 1910. Now Professor Fleming at St Mary's has proved me right. He's even purified the penicillin mould, you know. But unlike me, Fleming's a canny Scot, he doesn't claim too much for it.'
'Very sensibly. Penicillin will never have any use whatever outside the laboratory.'
'I offered it as a panacea because I was a zealous revolutionary.' Eliot smiled. 'And revolutionaries generally come to grief through their own egotism.'
'Thank God for all of us you did, in those particular activities.' Eliot was gratified to sense Dawson's feeling as genuine.
They had reached the landing. Behind the door to their right lay the ruler of an Empire on which the sun never set. He received the loyalty of 66 million white subjects, and of 372 million coloured ones, who had no option. King George V had a talent for fatherliness, whether at a Delhi durbar or on the wireless at Christmas, and had presided with equal composure over the House of Lords revolt in 1910, the General Strike of 1926 and the Great War.
'Did you find much change this evening?' asked Dawson.
'No. The cyanosis is worse. There's only slight pulmonary congestion, but the heart is obviously failing.'
'His illness of 1928 ran a heavy overdraft on his powers of recuperation.' Dawson paused, menu-card in hand. Seventeen years later, Eliot was to see it again, at a dinner on the evening of his patient's granddaughter's Coronation. 'I must not delay this message, but I hope for another word alone with you this evening. About yourself.' Dawson hesitated. 'If this Government-or a future Government-decides to take over the medical profession, the wisest of us will safeguard ourselves, and our fellow-doctors, by becoming sufficiently important in the eyes of the country to dictate the terms.'
They exchanged glances. 'Very well,' said Eliot.
That night did not end for Eliot until six o'clock. Nancy was asleep, smeared with cold cream, the bedside lamp burning. She stirred as he gently opened the door. 'He's dead?'
'At five to midnight. I had to stay up. The embalmers got lost.' Eliot tore off his wing-collar. 'I could do with a bath, but it's about half a mile away. What a ridiculous country! Why must snobbishness be equated with unnecessary discomfort?'
The Becketts lived in a castle, gutted and refurbished with steam heating, gushing plumbing, hygienic kitchens, efficient drains. Its off-white reception rooms were designed as a favour by Syrie Maugham, and hung with Impressionists chosen by Nancy's admirer Lord Duveen. Nobody gets value for money like an American millionairess.
'When's the funeral?'
'Today week. It's been planned by Lord Wigram and the Lord Chamberlain down to the last tap of muffled drums. Parliament must meet, and Stanley Baldwin's going on the wireless.' He sat on the silk coverlet, taking her chin in his hand. His eyes gleamed with the mingled excitement and exhaustion she seldom saw now. 'Why must you lard yourself like a joint for the oven, old thing?'
