Night of Triumph (9 page)

‘Oh goodness, it’s at times like these that one feels lonely, doesn’t one?’ said Katharine, surveying the courting couples once more.

‘Mm.’

‘One has nobody to kiss oneself.’

‘No.’

‘When are you next going to see your chap, Lil?’

‘Oh, I’m not sure.’

‘One feels that one is jolly well in danger of getting out of practice!’

‘Ha!’

‘One shouldn’t like to get out of practice.’

‘Rather not.’

‘Well, one jolly well isn’t going to be left out of things. One wants to be in practice, after all.’

Before Elizabeth knew what was happening, Katharine moved around to stand in front of her and placed her hands on Elizabeth’s shoulders, as if positioning her for a photograph. Then she
placed her hands, gently but firmly as before, on Elizabeth’s hips, leaned in and kissed her on the mouth. Elizabeth felt Katharine’s forehead pressing against her spectacles; she could
smell Katharine’s pepperminty breath and the flicker of her tongue. She had a funny, fluttery feeling in her stomach. After a while, Katharine broke away, and keeping an arm around
Elizabeth’s waist she swung around to survey the scene once more.

‘Ah, Lil,’ she said dreamily, somehow addressing both her and those heedless couples that Elizabeth could now see everywhere. ‘What a night! What a pity neither of us has got
anyone to kiss. But there we are. One has to bear up. Ours is not to reason why, and so on. Don’t you think?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, there’s no point in hanging around here. The time is getting on. Let’s go and get a proper drink. What do you say?’

‘Well, I don’t know.’

‘Oh, go on,’ said Katharine, pushing out her lower lip in a pouty expression. ‘Be a pal.’

Peter felt his body touch the ground, hard enough for his spine to be jarred on a discarded tin can, before the crowd, holding the tarpaulin on which he was being tossed,
wrenched it taut and hoisted it again so that he was hurled upwards. At ground level, he was able to glimpse Hugh’s smile, amused and alarmed in a ratio of three to one, and Margaret’s
fixed smirk.

They had only been part of the conga line for a minute or so before the Princess had become very bored, and then fascinated by a crowd of men nearby who were throwing people up in the air,
really quite high, in what looked like some sort of cloth or blanket.

‘Oooh, look!’ she had shouted. ‘I want to have a turn!’ She detached herself from the line and so, quickly, did her two protectors, each assuming the other was keeping an
eye on Elizabeth.

‘Oh, let’s have a go!’ she had called to them, her eyes unnaturally bright with mischief and excitement. ‘Oh, do let’s!’

She ran over and started talking to one of the men, who was just letting someone free from the tossing: a middle-aged woman, slightly tearful but forcing herself to laugh good-naturedly,
revealing that the thing was much more of an ordeal than she had anticipated. Margaret was showing every sign of wanting to be next.

‘Your Royal—’ said Hugh urgently, and corrected himself, ‘Your Roy— You real— You really shouldn’t do this, please. I’m sorry—’ Hugh
made a bland, ingratiatingly good-sport gesture to the crowd, who were inching closer. ‘I’m sorry, we really have to get on.
Please
.’

Margaret turned to him, highly displeased. She put her hands on her hips and glanced past him – perhaps taking in, as Hugh now realised, Elizabeth’s continued attachment to the conga
line. How
would
they re-insert themselves into that conga line, come to think of it?

There were cries of ‘Come on’ and ‘Be a sport’ from the men, all in civilian clothes. Some had shirts off; they had tied them around their waists like schoolboys,
standing there in their vests, and with a tiny, fastidious shudder, Hugh registered the prominence of their chest and armpit hair.

‘I think it looks fun,’ said Margaret, her face now set. ‘I think it would be very jolly.’

Both Hugh and Peter felt their faces contract and pulse with competing needs: to deny the Princess this unwise request, and a need to placate her, to placate the crowd and to withhold from the
crowd the Princess’s identity.

‘Should we not, um,
rejoin the conga line?
’ The fatuity of this last remark from Peter went fortunately unnoticed, being timidly inaudible.

One of the men belched, another laughed, and a third stretched, put his palms behind his head and flexed his upper arms, revealing symmetrical tattoos of birds. Peter and Hugh could see Margaret
changing her mind.

‘I don’t mean me doing it,’ she then said, crisply. ‘I mean one of you doing it.’

‘Well now,’ began Peter, in the sad, worldly tone of one forced by circumstance to deny a reasonable request.

‘Oh, all right then, Peter!’ interrupted Hugh genially, gesturing to him with an open palm, and both he and the Princess stood back, to give Peter a clear path to the tarpaulin,
which was being picked up again by the men who shuffled around and pulled it into a roughly circular shape, like firemen preparing to catch someone jumping from a burning building. It was
apparently a groundsheet.

‘Come on, mate!’

‘Come on, if you’re coming!’

‘Come
on!
’

The men, Hugh and the Princess herself had instantly assumed the manner of people who were granting Peter’s request, though a little impatient at his puppyish immaturity.

Peter felt his face sag, though it snapped into a fleeting grimace of resentment at Hugh as he walked past him – Hugh met it with a bland smirk – and then into the good-sport grin he
knew was expected of him. Everyone in the vicinity persisted in behaving as if they were indulging his whim.

Peter climbed onto the taut material, wondering if he should take his shoes off. He expected a ragged, supportive cheer. Disconcertingly, there was a sudden, weird quiet. To initiate the
proceedings, Margaret began to sing:

They started to throw Peter into the air, and instead of a rhythmic, invigorating trampoline bounce, Peter experienced a series of brutal wrenches. As he was flung skywards, he felt the blood
rush unpleasantly into his head; only after two or three times did he think to close his eyes.

‘Wait!’ he shouted, or perhaps it was ‘Stop!’ or ‘Help!’

The fun continued.

After half a dozen throws, Peter opened his eyes and caught a glimpse of faces, grinning faces, jeering faces, blank faces, that all suddenly turned upwards.

There was a massive roar overhead. Peter thought that something had exploded, or that the Germans had finally achieved a last-gasp success with a new, undreamt-of secret weapon. But no, it was
some sort of fly-past, a salute from RAF aircraft whose pilots on any other day would have been subject to court martial. Were they Lancasters?

The entire crowd gasped and cheered; the men all let go of the tarpaulin as Peter was on his eighth and final descent. He landed, very hard, on his left shoulder and elbow, and felt the tin
can’s sharp edge under his back.

‘Hooray!’ cheered the crowd.

‘Argh,’ said Peter, whose arm was broken.

‘Wha-hay!’ shouted the crowd.

‘Ow, I, ah ...’ said Peter. His face was the colour of chalk.

Zoom
, went the Lancasters as they headed off.

‘Well, jolly good,’ said Margaret. ‘Where’s Lilibet?’

‘Your Royal Highness,’ said Peter, for whom pain had extinguished the need to keep secrets, ‘I can’t move my arm.’

‘Where’s Lilibet?’

‘I think my arm is broken.’

‘Your Highness,’ said Hugh.

‘Lilibet? Lilibet! Where is Lilibet?’

‘Your Highness?’

‘Where are you, Lilibet?’

‘Your Highness?’

‘I can’t see her anywhere. Where is the conga line?’

‘She might be further ahead, towards Trafalgar Square.’

‘Lilibet! Lilibet!’

‘My arm.’

‘Oh my God.’

‘Lilibet!’

‘Uh.’

Hugh and Margaret stood motionless and wordless, as the crowd swelled away from them. Peter was still left on the neglected tarpaulin, like a castaway on a raft. He was drifting in and out of
consciousness. Margaret ran some way across the littered grass, looking for Elizabeth, and then back to where Hugh was standing, also scanning the crowd. Then she trotted in the opposite direction,
looking, and ran back. She was always hopeless at finding things.

‘Uh.’ Peter returned to a bleary wakefulness. Margaret looked over to him, pity and concern in her face entirely subordinate to irritation and distaste. Peter tried to speak to her,
and vomited weakly down his chin. Someone nearby said something about not holding his drink.

Hugh bent over Peter and listened as he whispered that he could not move his arm. Then Hugh quickly removed his jacket and attempted to make a rudimentary sling from his shirt, all the time
frantically and pointlessly looking around for signs of Elizabeth.

‘I think
that’s
her!’ said Margaret, and ran off to a young woman standing in shadow under a tree. Hugh and Peter limped and straggled behind as Margaret shouted,
‘Lilibet, Lilibet,’ now entirely heedless of the need to remain incognito.

The woman turned to them, her face in shadow. It was only then that all three of them saw that she was not in uniform, but in some sort of dark coat and skirt, and that she was smoking a
cigarette, her right elbow cupped in her left palm.

‘Five shillings each,’ was all she said.

‘I do beg your pardon,’ said Hugh, as Margaret turned away and Peter vomited once again.

Singing and rowdiness and cigarette smoke drifted in the wind as night fell further. The trio mentally exerted themselves to the utmost to suppress their fear.

‘Well, we appear to have become split up from Her Royal Highness, in the crowds,’ said Hugh at last, a great believer in exerting mastery over any situation by speaking and
summarising, however superfluous his words would appear. Peter groaned, and Hugh grunted as he shifted his own weight to keep Peter upright.

Margaret herself was speechless, and in a state of some suspense, postponing her vituperation and scorn for when this situation was rectified by her attendants.

Hugh cleared his throat with a bark and then said, ‘What Her Royal Highness has undoubtedly done ... what she has undoubtedly done is set off back to the Palace on her own.’

‘I’ve broken my arm.’

Both Hugh and Margaret ignored Peter as the reality of this situation dawned on them. Elizabeth would present herself at the side gate of the Palace again, present her warrant card, and be
re-admitted. There would then be the most ferocious row, especially if she had to encounter Their Majesties on her own. The fuss would be bad enough for Elizabeth and then for Margaret, but for
Peter and Hugh it would indeed be horrible.

‘My arm.’

But surely, Hugh pondered, Elizabeth herself would sense all of this, and be very reluctant simply to head off back to the Palace? They had, after all, only been separated for half an hour. They
should look for her.

Peter almost fainted again, and Hugh clutched him.

‘I say,’ said Margaret loudly, to three young women in nurses’ uniforms that were walking past nearby.

‘Yes?’ one replied.

‘This man would appear to be in some pain. We think he has broken his arm.’ Margaret left it ambiguous as to whether or not she was actually acquainted with the injured party.

‘Oh?’

‘Do you happen to know if there’s anywhere he can go?’

‘Yes,’ said a second nurse eagerly. ‘There’s a medical station in Charing Cross – St John’s Ambulance.’

‘Oh jolly good.
Would
you mind taking this poor man there?’ said Margaret, adroitly implying that in volunteering this information, they had also volunteered to accompany
Peter to Charing Cross. Helpfully, and piteously, Peter then fell forwards in the women’s direction. The second and third women bent down to pick him up while the first continued to look
keenly at Margaret’s face.

‘Thanks awfully,’ said Hugh, instinctively interposing himself between the two women and preventing recognition. ‘That’s awfully good of you. I think he can walk. You can
walk, can’t you, old chap?’

Peter straightened up and was able to stagger alongside the nurses, his arms around their shoulders, without having to be a deadweight. He was now pale and silent, and hardly responded to his
fellows’ hearty farewell. The four of them disappeared.

Hugh turned around and to his dismay found that Margaret was now smoking a cigarette – having presumably secreted the packet about her person – and was again looking around the
throng, that sweet oval face expressionless.

‘Your Royal Highness,’ said Hugh urgently, ‘what I suggest we do is this. Let us walk up to Trafalgar Square together. Then I think we should split up. I shall search up St
Martin’s Lane. You walk up Pall Mall, and into the Haymarket and back, and we can rendezvous back at, let’s say, Nelson’s Column in one hour.’ Hugh found himself breathless,
even faint, at having to give Margaret these instructions.

She looked at him, tolerant and amused, and tipped ash onto the ground in a way that Hugh, even in this situation, could not help finding improper.

‘Oh I say, Hugh, don’t be feeble. Lilibet is perfectly all right. After all, she’s not a child. She’s just gone for a walk. She will have just gone for a ... a stroll and
then back to the Palace. Honestly, what did you think would happen if we got separated?’

Margaret herself started to walk in the direction of the Mall; Hugh had no choice but to follow her. Faces and bodies loomed at them from the dusk, and bonfires caused fragments of charred paper
to flutter over their heads, as if from a distant volcano. Firefly-points of lit cigarettes dotted the gloom – one of these bobbed periodically from Margaret’s mouth to her waist.