Saving the Queen Read Free Page A

brotherhood. His distinctive individualism had been already conspicuous at seventeen, at Greyburn College: Though a prefect, Anthony was never a member of the prefecture. In the naval air force, he would contrive to go to a movie whenever there was a squadron social function, or a threat of one. At Yale he was asked to join, and declined: a fraternity, an honor society, a secret society, and a literary society. His only apparent extracurricular involvements were an occasional letter to the Yale Daily News , acerbic, polished, and conclusive in the sense of unfailingly suggesting that any contrary opinion should not presume to expect from him any rebuttal, and membership in the Political Union and debating team, whose meetings he generally missed. But in those letters there was a strain of idealism. He did not believe in cheating, which wasn’t that unusual; but it was awfully unusual to say so, in public: and rarer still to combine moralism with a debonair style. He thought the coup in Czechoslovakia the most devastating development in European history since Hitler’s march on the Sudeten-land, and he was savage in his destruction of the local fellow traveler in the History Department who had dismissed it at a college forum as a natural pre-emptive Soviet maneuver against a fascist resurgence. The candidacy of Henry Wallace aroused his supreme scorn, and he actually tabulated the Communist fronts to which Wallace’s most conspicuous backers had belonged, and on one occasion even defended, at a formal debate, the proposition: “ Resolved, fellow travelers are worse than the real thing and should go to jail until they are old and gray. ” Sarah Lawrence won, defending the negative, and everyone cheered, and Anthony remained unimpressed. Although he was studying as an exchange student at Oxford when the Wallace movement realized its fiasco in November, he was amused by the virtually unanimous pleasure that defeat had given to campus spokesmen for liberalism—Blackford had sent him a copy of the Yale Daily News . “They caught up with me,” he told Black.
    Blackford tore open the envelope. He fingered then the longest form he had ever seen. Forty pages. Leafing through it, he realized it would take him a full dull day’s work to complete. The questions were of a dogged thoroughness that made the comprehensive form for flight school in 1943 look like a driver’s license application.
    Blackford was methodical, and neatly put away in a file case a foot from his typewriter, all the necessary autobiographical documents reposed: birth certificate, draft card, discharge papers, curriculum and grades dating back to early childhood. He had neatly recorded the date of his mother’s birth in Buffalo, and of his father’s in Akron, and even the basic figures on his stepfather. He could see that he would have to explain in some detail the reason he spent the night in jail in Cambridge, but he thought the circumstances innocent enough—or was the CIA made up only of people who never attended a bachelor party? He had never belonged to any political organization of any sort, though he would certainly have joined America First if they had accepted fourteen-year-olds; and other than the air force reserve, there was only the fraternity at Yale, and the senior society, in response to any mention of which, he smiled, he would dutifully leave the room, as tradition prescribed. He knew how many countries he had visited, how long he had spent there, even if some of these countries he could not remember—he had been too young. Anyway, his father junketing about the world to exhibit and sell airplanes, it was natural, until the divorce, that Black should have jogged about with the family. He knew exactly whose names to give as references, though he would not give the name of Dr. Chase at Greyburn or of Mr. Simon, but—yes, he would give the name of Mr. Long, the athletic director, with whom, in