To Play the King. Michael Dobbs

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       CHAPTER THREE

       Loyalty is the vice of the underclasses. I hope I am above such things.

      ‘Put the papers down, David. For God’s sake, take your nose out of them for just a minute of our day together.’ The voice was tense, more nervous than aggressive.

      The grey eyes remained impassive, not moving from the sheaf of documents upon which they had been fixed ever since he had sat down at the breakfast table. The only facial reaction was an irascible twitch of the neatly trimmed moustache. ‘I’m off in ten minutes, Fiona, I simply have to finish them. Today of all days.’

      ‘There’s something else we have to finish. So put the bloody papers down!’

      With reluctance David Mycroft raised his eyes in time to see his wife’s hand shaking so vigorously that the coffee splashed over the edge of her cup. ‘What on earth’s the matter?’

      ‘You. And me. That’s the matter.’ She was struggling to control herself. ‘There’s nothing left to our marriage and I want out.’

      The King’s press aide and principal public spokesman switched automatically into diplomatic gear. ‘Look, let’s not have a row, not now, I’m in a hurry and…’

      ‘Don’t you realize, we never have rows. That’s the problem!’ The cup smashed down into the saucer, overturning and spreading a menacing brown stain across the tablecloth. For the first time he lowered his sheaf of papers, every movement careful and deliberate, as was every aspect of his life.

      ‘Perhaps I could get some time off. Not today, but…We could go away together. I know it’s been a long time since we had any real chance to talk…’

      ‘It’s not lack of time, David! We could have all the time in the world and it would make no difference. It’s you, and me. The reason we don’t have any rows is because we have nothing to argue about. Nothing at all. There’s no passion, nothing. All we have is a shell. I used to dream that once the children were off our hands it might all change.’ She shook her head. ‘But I’m tired of deluding myself. It will never change. You will never change. And I don’t suppose I will.’ There was pain and she was dabbing her eyes, yet held her control. This was no flash of temper.

      ‘Are you…feeling all right, Fiona? You know, women at your time of life…’

      She smarted at his patronizing idiocy. ‘Women in their forties, David, have their needs, their feelings. But how would you know? When did you last look at me as a woman? When did you last look at any woman?’ She returned the insult, meaning it to hurt. She knew that to break through she was going to have to batter down the walls he had built around himself. He had always been so closed, private, a man of diminutive stature who had sought to cope with his perceived physical inadequacies by being utterly formal and punctilious in everything he did. Never a hair on his small and rather boyish head out of place, even the streaks of grey beginning to appear around his dark temples looking elegant rather than ageing. He always ate breakfast with his jacket on and buttoned.

      ‘Look, can’t this wait? You know I have to be at the Palace any—’

      ‘The bloody Palace again. It’s your home, your life, your lover. The only emotion you ever show nowadays is about your ridiculous job and your wretched King.’

      ‘Fiona! That’s uncalled-for. Leave him out of this.’ The moustache with its hint of red bristled in indignation.

      ‘How can I? You serve him, not me. His needs come before mine. He’s helped ruin our marriage far more effectively than any mistress, so don’t expect me to bow and fawn like the rest.’

      He glanced anxiously at his watch. ‘Look, for goodness sake, can we talk about this tonight? Perhaps I can get back early.’

      She was dabbing at the coffee stain with her napkin, trying to delay meeting his gaze. Her voice was calmer, resolved. ‘No, David. Tonight I shall be with somebody else.’

      ‘There’s someone else?’ There was a catch in his throat, he had clearly never considered the possibility. ‘Since when?’

      She looked up from the mess on the table with eyes which were now defiant and steady, no longer trying to evade. This had been coming for so long, she couldn’t hide from it any more. ‘Since two years after we got married, David, there has been someone else. A succession of “someone elses”. You never had it in you to satisfy me. I never blamed you for that, really I didn’t, it was just the luck of the draw. What I bitterly resent is that you never even tried. I was never that important to you, not as a woman. I have never been more than a housekeeper, a laundress, your twenty-four-hour skivvy, an object to parade around the dinner circuit. Someone to give you respectability at Court. Even the children were only for show.’

      ‘Not true.’ But there was no real passion in his protest, any more than there had been passion in their marriage. She had always known they were sexually incompatible; he seemed all too willing to pour his physical drive into his job while at first she had contented herself with the social cachet his work at the Palace brought them. But not for long. In truth, she couldn’t even be sure who the father of her second child was, while if he had doubts on the matter he didn’t seem to care. He had ‘done his duty’, as he once put it, and that had been an end of it. Even now as she poured scorn on him as a cuckold she couldn’t get him to respond. There should be self-righteous rage somewhere, surely, wasn’t that what his blessed code of chivalry called for? But he seemed so empty, hollow inside. Their marriage had been nothing but a rat’s maze within which both led unrelated lives, meeting only as if by accident before passing on their separate ways. Now she was leaping for the exit.

      ‘Fiona, can’t we—’

      ‘No, David. We can’t.’

      The telephone had started ringing in its insistent, irresistible manner, summoning him to his duty, a task to which he had dedicated his life and to which he was now asked to surrender his marriage. We’ve had some great times, haven’t we, he wanted to argue, but he could only remember times which were good rather than great and those were long, long ago. She had always come a distant second, not consciously but now, in their new mood of truth, undeniably. He looked at Fiona through watery eyes which expressed sorrow and begged forgiveness; there was no spite. But there was fear. Marriage had been like a great sheet anchor in strong emotional seas, preventing him from being tossed about by tempestuous winds and blown in directions which were reckless and lacking in restraint. Wedlock. It had worked precisely because it had been form without substance, like the repetitive chanting of psalms that had been forced on him during his miserable school years at Ampleforth. Marriage had been a burden but, for him, a necessary one, a distraction, a diversion. Self-denial, but also self-protection. And now the anchor chains were being cut.

      Fiona sat motionless across a table littered with toast and fragments of eggshell and bone china, the household clutter and crumbs which represented the total sum of their life together. The telephone still demanded him. Without a further word he rose to answer it.