It was probably the most difficult and the bravest thing Ned had ever done, apart from telling Jillie he couldn’t marry her; but Persephone was right, he had to do it sometime. Most people there that evening who knew him nodded a little coolly, but then ignored him, clearly afraid of some involvement. Persephone met a couple of friends there, who joined them for coffee and brandy, and even made Ned laugh. He went back to work at St Peter’s and opened his rooms in Welbeck Street the following Monday.
Jillie went to see Miss Moran and asked her for a further month’s leave; Miss Moran said her attendance levels had been so execrable she was of a mind to ask her to leave altogether. ‘There are many, many girls who would give all they had to be in your position here. You have abused it disgracefully. However, you don’t look well, I have to admit. Take one month from now. You will return then and work as you certainly haven’t worked this summer.’
‘Miss Moran, thank you. I can promise you, I am about to become one of your best pupils.’
‘I really don’t think that is remotely possible,’ said Miss Moran. She paused, clearly in thought, then turned and said, ‘I was sorry to hear about your marriage. But really, I’m sure you’ll come to see in time one is much better on one’s own. Men are such a brake on one’s life.’
And then she was gone.
For the first time in weeks, Jillie laughed.
Chapter 33
1953–4
‘I simply don’t understand it,’ said Tom. ‘It really is quite beyond me. ‘I’m with John Osborne –’
‘Who’s John Osborne?’
‘This brilliant new playwright,’ said Tom slightly irritably. ‘Surely you know he wrote Look Back in Anger. He calls the Royal Family a fatuous industry. My view exactly.’
‘Well, you’d better not let any of your Labour voters hear you say that. They’d lynch you.’
It was true. Coronation fever gripped the nation and royal fervour was at its peak. It had begun with the death of George VI. The lovely young Queen Elizabeth, mother of two small children, and her absurdly handsome husband became the darlings of the press. The New Elizabethan Age was written about every day. The date was set for the coronation, 2 June. A national holiday was declared; every town had street parties and carnivals planned.
An argument raged about televising the event. A fairly new phenomenon, television had been pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘potentially one of the great dangers of the world’. The Duke of Norfolk, who was masterminding the whole thing, was also opposed to it, believing it would rob the ceremony of its mystique. The press wanted it; it was a little-known fact that the Queen, young, shy and already nervous at the prospect of what would be a huge ordeal, did not. But in the end, the cameras were in the Abbey, and the reverently respectful voice of Richard Dimbleby provided the commentary.
The country drowned in a red, white and blue sea of flags and bunting. People came to the capital in their thousands to celebrate, and on the morning of 2 June, when it was announced that the Union Jack had been set on the very top of Mount Everest, it was as if some benign force was guiding the day, ensuring its place in history. Anybody who was anybody had a balcony, or at least a window to watch the procession from; tickets were sold for the stands in the Mall, changing hands on the black market for as much as ￡50, while seats on balconies that lined the route cost as much as ￡3,500.
People dressed up in their very best clothes simply to watch it on television; those who were not among the privileged few who owned a set were invited into their friends’ and neighbours’ homes. The hit song of the day, crooned by one Mr Donald Peers, was entitled ‘In a Golden Coach’.
But as if begrudging the people total euphoria, it rained. Hard. On the many thousands who had come to camp out, all along the route, and indeed on the long, long procession of foreign kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, princes and princesses. The star of the procession, apart from the Queen, radiantly beautiful, was undoubtedly Queen Salote of Tonga, who insisted on having the roof of her carriage open and sat waving, smiling determinedly, and getting extremely wet.
The coronation also brought into the public eye one of the great royal romances of all time: that of Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend, equerry to the King and, after his death, to the new Queen. Townsend, who had been a fighter pilot in the war, was extraordinarily handsome, exceptionally charming – and divorced. Margaret, less troubled by the rigours of her royal duties than her sister, more beautiful, more glamorous, and certainly more spoilt, could see no reason why she and the group captain should not marry; and the press saw a new royal drama to fill their pages, sending the curtain up on the unarguably intimate evidence of the way the Princess picked a bit of fluff from the group captain’s uniform, stroking the lapel as she did so. A new fever, more thrilling than any since the abdication of King Edward VIII, seized people’s imagination. The Daily Mirror ran a poll by way of a voting form on its front page as to whether Margaret should be allowed to marry her great love; there were seventy thousand replies and only just over two thousand said she should not. Other papers took a more serious and respectful approach, debating the matter carefully. The Daily News adopted a middle road, giving a male columnist a whole page to come down against the marriage, and on the opposite page, the women’s editor rhapsodised in her inimitable way on its golden possibilities.
The palace, and indeed the church and the government, were in a flat spin. A temporary solution was found; Townsend was sent to Brussels, the Regency Act was changed, and Margaret was given the two years until her twenty-fifth birthday to make up her mind.
Tom’s first words, when Alice told him she was pregnant again, were, ‘I hope that doesn’t mean you won’t be able to come to the conference in October.’
‘Tom!’
‘Well, it’s important, I –’ And then he realised he had overstepped the mark as her eyes filled with the easy, hormone-induced tears.
‘I’m sorry, Alice. I’m a brute. I sound like a nineteen thirties husband.’
‘Yes, you do. A very bad example of one, I’d say.’
‘I’m truly sorry. It’s wonderful news. But I thought –’
‘That I was being careful. Well, I am, usually. But if I could just say “caravan” to you –’
‘It would stir up some pretty good memories,’ said Tom, grinning reluctantly.
They had rented a caravan in August, and driven it to Hampshire, settling in a caravan park not far from Sandbanks, the glorious stretch of golden beach opposite the Isle of Wight. They were lucky with the weather, seven days of sunshine; Kit was ecstatic, displaying his building skills as he patted his bucket prior to tipping out what Alice decided must have been a hundred sand pies. They also got him a rubber ring and he bobbed about in the warm water, laughing, his fists beating up waves, his feet thrashing up and down, propelling him along.
They were so happy, sated with sunshine, and the sun acted on them like an aphrodisiac; after supper the first night, Tom put his arm round her, and kissed her shoulder.
‘You taste of salt,’ he said.
‘So do you.’
‘How about a new experience?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Shall we call it carasex?’