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  ‘Shhhhh,’ said Joan, in agony. ‘Shhhhhh.’

  ‘Why? What’s the matter, no, let me tell you, if the safety of the nation is going to depend on condoms, then …’

  At this point a young man who had been sitting near them, listening, got up because it was time for him to be off on his way to somewhere or other in the world. He tapped Sybil on the shoulder and said, ‘If you can’t get the hang of condoms, then just get in touch with me …no, no, any time, a pleasure!’

  His words were far from an invitation, were more of a public rebuke, and on his face was the look that goes with someone taking it on himself to keep things in order. But from the door he sent them a glance and a grin and disappeared for ever with a wave. As for Joan and Sybil, they sat half turned to watch him go. They looked like a couple of teenagers, their hands half- covering scandalised and delighted smiles.

  THE BUNTING AFFIRMS

  H. R. F. Keating

  The King came out of the Home Office into Whitehall at twenty minutes to eleven exactly. The year of Our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty. Maurice, from his place in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowd almost directly opposite with the swathed shape of the newly-erected Cenotaph between them, fastened his eyes on the bearded uniformed figure.

  King, he thought. But didn’t he have a body too? Coiled intestines, toe-nails that needed cutting? He had had to go to the lav like anyone else that morning. And he would have eaten his bacon and eggs. But served, of course, from a silver dish. A man, too, had had to serve that man down there, that white body, soft belly, dangling thing inside the stiff uniform breeches. A man had had to bow as he had lifted pink rashers out of a silver dish for him.

  He watched the isolated figure in its smooth khaki, with the imprisoning strap of the Sam Browne a dark band across his chest, go stiffly and proudly over to the steps of the Colonial Office where the others were waiting – the Prince of Wales, the Duke of York, Prince Henry, the Archbishop of Canterbury, a figure of floppy white and straitlaced black among the khakis and dark blues of the uniforms, and little stumpy Lloyd George, black again, tailcoat and top hat, with half a dozen other cabinet ministers all looking the same. Dressed up, false, wrong. There had been plenty of time to decide which of them was which since the barriers had been removed at the end of Whitehall just before ten.

  And the day would come when they were all puffed away. Their world looked strong enough now. But it would go. They might laugh at the very name People’s Trumpet now. They might never even have seen a copy, in their palaces, their clubs, their Ministries. But one day a trumpet would sound, and that would be more than just the name of a thin newspaper selling not much more than a thousand copies – no, be honest, not selling a thousand copies. It would be a blast of hatred, swelling up from the people, that would sweep them away, all the pretences and inequalities and cant. All away.

  Suddenly the thought, the tiny possibility, that the blast would begin to blow today, that it should begin with him himself in only nineteen minutes’ time, at eleven exactly, snickered up to the surface of his mind like the tip of a thin black blade beginning to rip from underneath a smooth stretched white cloth. This might be it. It might be the signal. Coming at that hushed moment of silence, when, as they said, an Empire would be still and pay homage, coming then the words he was going to call out, the words he was going to shout aloud, might do it. They might run like a fissure along the whole sugar-icing façade of the great sham and split it apart for ever.

  Down in front of the tapering square block of the new Cenotaph, wholly draped in its bunting, a man in the uniform of a police superintendent walked quickly over to the short dark wooden pillar on which the King was to press the button that would make those too-bright flags fall. He held a brief conference there with a young official in top hat and long black overcoat. After a minute or so they both walked away together into the Home Office.

  Maurice’s heart raced suddenly. Could information about their plan have somehow got out? Was that short conference down there to discuss how to get him quietly arrested before the Silence began? But at once he told himself that this was impossible. So few of them were in the secret. Only the inner group of the party and the two who had been asked to make the demonstrations, himself and Frances, himself here and Frances in Fleet Street at the People’s Trumpet office.

  The suddenness of his onset of panic worried him. He had thought his nerve had been steadier. He had prided himself, for all his lack of years, on being the equal in courage to the men who had been in the trenches and, boastful or quiet, were so besottedly pleased with themselves for having undergone that experience. And yet a flush of sweat had risen up between his legs and on either side of his chest at the mere thought of arrest.

  When the time came would he even be able to break in on that hush of quiet? But he must. He would.

  He turned to look north over the heads of the dense and curiously subdued crowd towards Trafalgar Square, hidden in the misty haze, despite the extraordinarily blue sky and clear golden sunshine that graced, as they were saying everywhere, this November day. At any moment – Yes, here it was. Clearly over the uncanny noiselessness of the immense crowd the sound of a high-barked order came. And then the little tinny rattle of a piece of military drill being perfectly executed. What they called ‘reversing arms’. There had been, of course, endless reverent explanations in the papers of everything that was to be done. They had proved useful enough in making the plans, but what sickening boot-licking they were to the whole great stage-managed structure. And now the band music was just audible, the faint faraway notes of the Chopin funeral march played crassly on great brass tubas and trumpets.

  All round him that distant miniature music was having an almost tangible effect. A woman in close-fitting black two paces in front of him had given one gulping, hastily stifled sob that had sounded extraordinarily loud in the quiet. He could not blame her: for all their brassiness those faraway notes were moving.

  Coming nearer bit by bit now were the sounds of the troops who were lining the procession route reversing arms company by company, first the piping cry of the order and then the tiny distant crash of rifles being slapped and thumped. The ritual: that would go. All the pomp. It would go one day, and perhaps the start of its going would come – he slipped a hand under his coat and pulled out his watch – in sixteen, no in fifteen, minutes from now.

  The sound of Big Ben chiming the three-quarter hour boomed hollowly out in the clear air, echoing over the slowly rising band music. The King moved forward like a clockwork doll – there would be no soldier toys in the new world – from his place in front of the Colonial Office to a new position facing the uprearing bulk of the hidden Cenotaph and the huge, garish and brutal Union Jack draping its whole front. And after the King came his sons and what they called his Ministers. His. Elected by the people, or some of the people, and yet called his.

  And now it had come into sight, what the King and all of them were waiting to receive, the funeral procession of the Unknown Warrior. Poor hopeless victim of cruel and greedy forces he would never have known anything of. But there it was, the procession. First, four policemen on white horses – symbolic figures, little though the onlookers realised it – then the bands, four of them, the regiments of the Foot Guards, their scarlet shining with soft deepness in this mellow-clear light, and next the pipers of the Scots Guards. That keening music had taken over now. And then – Maurice involuntarily caught his breath – the drums. Their muffled insistent beat seemed to enter on the scene all at once as if they had stepped through an invisible sound-proof curtain. At the same instant, it seemed, it was possible to pick out the drummers from the dark haze-swallowed serpent of the procession, the drummers and their black-draped drums and just behind them the bright flag spread over the coffin on its gun-carriage.

  He watched, held in fascination, as they approached. The minutes ticked by. The long column of Servicemen split to left and right and took up places lining three-deep the wide roadw