let me do it, with no questions asked and no answers given . . . which you'll do for the same reason that Oliver Cromwell came down on the Levellers: either we break them or they break us.'
They stared at each other. The five minutes was long passed, thought Audley, but for this cause a Royalist general ought to be indulgent.
Strode blinked at last. 'All right, Audley. . . . But not for that reason.'
Audley shrugged. 'Then whatever reason you like.'
'I don't like—and neither should you.' Strode shook his head. 'It's because there'll always be someone like you, whoever wins. But if Charlie Ratcliffe has his way you won't have to ask me to help you—you'll be giving the orders. And I wouldn't like that.'
Butler lingered at the door, one eye on the hall until Strode had gone.
'And now?' he said.
'And now—if they start cracking anywhere, Jack—then we're in with a chance.'
'Aye. And if they don't?'
'Then we fail.' Audley met the odds blandly. 'This is bloody politics, man. We do our best, but we go by the rule book, like Mr. Moderate William Strode. So at least we don't get our fingers burnt picking up someone else's chestnuts.'
Butler grimaced at him. 'You don't think we've got a hope, do dummy5
you? You're just causing mischief, that's all.'
Audley shrugged. 'All right, then. Let's say: 'Mischief, do thy work', Jack. Maybe it will, at that.'
'Aye.' Butler looked out of the window, towards the cavaliers guarding the bridge. 'But whose work will it do, I wonder?'
Part Two:
How to be a bad winner
1
15. Royalist Army regroups. Final exhortation by Lord Monson (to be relayed by loudspeaker to crowd). Pioneers will obtain fresh fascines.
16. Roundhead Army regroups. Regimental commanders to ensure that no personnel are within fifty (50) yards of glacis below Great Bastion (red flag markers).
17. 4.40: Special Effects Section will fire simulated magazine explosion.
18. 4.41: The Great Assault. Pioneers will . . .
It had taken Audley four days to complete his report on the current state of the Central Intelligence Agency, which was dummy5
three days less than he had allowed himself originally; and which, he reminded himself irritably, would have left him ten days buckshee holiday with Faith and Cathy if he hadn't been conned, bullied and dragooned into messing around with politicians' chestnuts to absolutely no effect.
He looked up from the Double R Society's scenario for the storming of Standingham Castle to check the time by the grandfather clock beside his study door.
Absolutely no effect as of 10.15 a.m., Thursday August 28.
Nobody had panicked, nobody had misbehaved, nobody had done anything that he ought not to have done. Nobody had done
In a minute or two Faith would bring him a cup of coffee, and with luck she would kiss him, and since the heat of the day was yet to come he would kiss her back; and at 10.30 he would phone Jack Butler, and Jack would report that nothing had happened since 6 p.m. the previous evening, at considerable cost to the taxpayer.
He reached across his desk to check his assignment diary.
(Afterwards, when he looked at the diary, before he dropped it in his waste-paper basket, he would recall 10.15 a.m., Thursday, August 28, with what he assumed must be the same bitterness as that with which some US Navy veterans must remember the last few minutes before 7.55 a.m., Sunday, December 7, 1941. By that time there was nothing they could do to stop the Japanese bombs and torpedoes, just as by that time there was nothing he could have done to dummy5
stop Sergeant Henry Digby going down to the Ferryhill Industrial Estate in answer to a phone call the nature of which he never was able to establish. But those last minutes of peace of mind, before everything changed, were still the moments to regret.)
Faith came in with the coffee, still wearing her serene morning-after-last-night face, when everything had gone the way it ought to go, if not somewhat better.
(10.16 a.m. now: Sergeant Digby was turning into the Ferryhill estate, looking for the Wessex Electronics building.
'I'm just going down to Ferryhill,' he had told his mother,
'to meet someone.' He had seven minutes of life ahead of him then.)
But Faith didn't stay—
'Darling, I've got to fly—got to take Cathy down to the village to play with—'
No matter. Audley bent his head over the scenario.
