Fifty-First State (10 page)

‘Coming to London,' William said. ‘If anything happens, it happens here. Where's the sense in that?'

‘She thinks we all ought to die together,' Lucy said flatly.

‘Sounds a lot easier than living together,' William couldn't help saying. He picked up the bottle from the table and poured himself more wine. Lucy hadn't touched hers. They were in dangerous territory now, moving into Sutcliffe-land, where common sense did not prevail. He asked hopefully, as if the question might have some meaning, ‘Did your dad give you any idea how long they planned to stay in London?'

‘It's not the sort of thing you plan,' Lucy replied. ‘I know you don't want them here.'

‘Nor do you,' William said. He changed tack. ‘Look, Lucy, this is hopeless. They can't come here. This dying together stuff is rubbish. You're a nurse. You know perfectly well your mother shouldn't come here. She needs expert help.'

‘And you know she won't accept it. The only way to do it would be to
have her sectioned. I'm not even sure a doctor would agree to it – and you've never been inside a mental hospital. I have. I wouldn't put my worst enemy in one.'

‘Joe could pay privately,' William said. ‘They can well afford it.'

They had had this discussion many times. They were drifting away from the point and William sensed Lucy was making this happen.

‘Think how often we've stayed with them,' Lucy appealed. William might have pointed out that this was not their decision. He could have added that as far as he was concerned each visit to the Sutcliffes had been a waste of free time which would have been more enjoyably spent elsewhere. But Lucy knew quite well what he thought.

William told her this, adding, ‘I wouldn't mind so much if I knew how long they were staying.'

‘Yes, you would,' Lucy declared.

‘Not as much,' said William, drinking. He knew that after one more glass of wine he would start a row. He didn't care.

‘There it is!' cried Lucy. The suicide bombing at Thwaite was old news now but on the TV there was a picture of a wide gate being rebuilt, armed guards and fluttering police tapes. A medalled RAF officer and a man in a suit stood in the wind, discussing the event. Worldwide terror, constant vigilance and full alert were mentioned. The terrorist, blown to fragments, had not been identified. The van had been stolen in Swansea.

William said, ‘This business at Thwaite is just an isolated incident. Anyway, they live ten miles away. London's one security alert after another. How's your mother going to feel getting patted down going into the Tube? Oh, I forgot, she won't be going into the Tube.'

‘I don't suppose she'll be going anywhere,' Lucy admitted.

‘No – we're just going to sit here waiting to die together.'

‘Mum's just terribly afraid of being left alone, without Dad,' Lucy said defensively. A thought struck her. ‘You won't walk out on me, William, if they come?'

‘Don't talk rubbish,' he said. ‘If I walk out, it'll be with you. Maybe we should go and stay at the B and B.'

Lucy surprised him when she said, ‘I thought about that, but it'd put a dent in our savings.'

‘Let's go out to the Venezia tonight to celebrate our last night of freedom.'

‘I didn't tell you they were coming tomorrow,' Lucy said.

‘You didn't have to,' William said. ‘I'm good for a week, Lucy. But after that we'll have to think long and hard. And Charlie stays.'

They went to the restaurant and tried not to talk too much about the imminent arrival of Lucy's parents.

Manderton, Oakdene Avenue, Bromley, Kent. August 25th, 2015. 3.30 p.m.

Joshua Crane was only too pleased, on the afternoon of the day after his return from a month's holiday with his family in Italy, to be rung up by Edward Gott and invited to a last-minute meeting over dinner at Sugden's. Standing in the French windows of their long living room, he told his wife Beth, who was sitting by their pool maintaining her tan, ‘I'll have to go to London. The election.' In fact, he was keen to get to Chelsea to discover if his girlfriend was back. She'd told him she would be holidaying with friends, unspecified, in Goa while he was away giving his wife what he thought he owed her – a month in four-star hotels in Italy, with shopping trips to Rome and Milan thrown in. But knowing Saskia, she might just as easily have gone to Cape Cod, Saint Tropez or Thailand. She might have found a new boyfriend or even got married. He'd tried phoning her at midnight from the bottom of the garden the day before, but had only reached her answering machine.

Beth Crane looked up from her magazine and said, ‘I can't see why. Your seat's safe. And I don't suppose they're going to ask you to stand for leader.'

This squib, after a month of the same, made Joshua revise his plan to be detained in London overnight and turn it into being detained there for several days. When he was with Saskia he always claimed to be staying in Batter sea with his old friend, a fellow MP, Douglas Clare. Douglas, without approving, covered for him. Although Beth was, of course, right that the dinner with Gott could not concern any really important matter. The Party Chairman, Graham Barnsbury, who had been hastily appointed election co-ordinator, had already rung him in Italy and briefly checked he would be supporting Alan Petherbridge for leader.

‘Perhaps something's come up,' he muttered to Beth.

She sat up and began to file her nails. ‘Try to get back as soon as you can. While the boys are still on holiday.'

She wasn't demonstrating any desire for his company as a husband. No surprise there, thought Joshua, piqued. He sometimes feared that his wife guessed something about the affair with Saskia. In morbid moments he wondered if she knew everything about it. He concealed his mobile phone bills, but she could have obtained copies – she might even have hired a detective.

He had accepted that after twelve years of marriage, during which he and Beth were supposed to have drawn closer, they had only discovered more things about each other they did not like. Beth made no effort to bridge the gap (why should she, if she knew he'd been unfaithful to her since she'd been pregnant with Marcus, their first child?). She repelled Joshua's few remorseful, bumbling efforts to improve matters. Joshua wondered if Beth was patterning her own marriage on her parents', which was distant. Perhaps she just didn't like him. Perhaps she knew or guessed about all his infidelities over the years and believed that if she weakened, and tried to trust – even love – him once more, she would suffer even more when he betrayed her again. But when he considered making a clean breast of it to his wife and offering to start again, his courage failed. He doubted if Beth would forgive; he doubted if he would remain faithful to her even if she did. The marriage had become a marriage of convenience, with Beth enjoying the good standard of living and kudos which went with being an MP's wife and Joshua benefiting from the family he needed for his political career.

His solution was to erect a mental wall between his marriage and the rest of his life. If the wall ever came down and he had to confront the situation directly the results, he guessed, would break his heart – separation, divorce, his wife would take his sons away. His sons, he would think – his sons – and then run and crouch behind the wall again.

‘I'm not sure how long I'll be gone – I'll ring, of course,' he said.

‘Chambers' party on Saturday,' she reminded him.

Barrington Chambers was Joshua's local Party Chairman. A self-made man, he owned several men's outfitters in Finchley and Frognal. Joshua thought privately that while you couldn't really describe Barry Chambers' political views as being to the right of Adolph Hitler's, Barry and Hitler would certainly have found common ground if they'd ever got together for a chat about immigration, gypsies and gays. He would have disliked Barry more if Barry had not been inconsistent. When one of the asylum seekers, part of a band of builders run by a gang master, fell off Barry's roof and broke a leg, Barry gave him a large sum of money in cash to tide him over until his leg mended. Beth said that if Barry had any real concern for the man, or others like him, he wouldn't have employed a cheap firm that had no regard for the safety of its workers.

‘You'll come?' questioned Joshua. It was important not to seem to snub the Chambers.

‘Of course,' Beth told him. ‘But I don't know who's more unbearable – Barry or his wife. He's too loud and she never speaks – but when she does she's got a voice that could cut metal.'

‘Thank you, darling,' Joshua said, and, packing a small bag, then drove to his girlfriend's mews house in Chelsea. He rang the bell. There was
no answer. The fuchsias in the baskets hanging on wrought iron hooks beside the front door had withered and died. The bay tree in its earthenware pot beside the door was browning. Joshua borrowed a hose from a man on the other side of the mews, who was washing his car, and gave the plants and the tree a good drenching. Doing this, he wetted his shoes and left, disconsolate. His next stop was Douglas Clare's flat in Battersea, where he left his bag. Then he went back across the river to Sugden's, where Edward Gott was waiting for him.

He wondered what Gott wanted. Probably nothing – or just lunch – he thought. Parliamentary holidays are very long, giving rise to all kinds of behaviour – boredom is the least of an MP's problems. And he knew Gott had many sons, six in all. Three were married, with children of their own, and all were expected by Lady Gott to spend part of their holidays at the family's house in the Borders. Joshua had stayed at Brigstock once. It was a semi-fortified house in a charming wooded place by a loch and had been occupied by Lady Margot's family since Culloden (Edward Gott had married above himself. He had brought the money, Lady Margot the status).

Once seated, each man asked the other about holidays, both claimed to have enjoyed them and neither fully believed the other. Gott did mention that in spite of a converted barn and several cottages Brigstock, at mealtimes, seemed crowded, and that he had begun to understand the old tales and ballads where people eating dinner, often relatives, started quarrels and set on each other with swords. Joshua, in turn, mentioned that shopping in Rome's fashion stores with two restless boys, aged nine and seven, made him feel like wielding a sword himself.

Lord Gott asked the waiter about William, whom he'd not seen. ‘He'll be in later,' the waiter said. ‘What have we here?' Gott said, studying the wine list critically. He ordered a bottle. Then they turned to the menu. Gott settled on veal and fried potatoes as he was, he said, on a diet at home. Joshua ordered trout. ‘So,' Joshua said, when the orders had been taken, ‘what's afoot, Edward?'

‘Not a lot,' Gott confessed. ‘It's still Alan Petherbridge, of course. That little turd Geoffrey Shawcross tried to try it on,' Gott added. ‘He began to wonder if an open leadership campaign might not make the party look more democratic, wondered if him standing might help. But we got him behind the bike sheds and persuaded him he was wrong. “The election's the thing – your seat's safe, no trouble there?”'

Joshua thought of the coming election and asked Gott, nervously, ‘What does it look like?' His own seat ought to be safe enough, with a majority of 8,000, but elections bring out the high-wire artist in politicians – fear, excitement and dread of the unexpected mingle.

‘We'll win, barring accidents. Carl Chatterton's got all the appeal of
a wet sock and we've shed Muldoon, who had all the appeal of the other half of the pair. We'll have Petherbridge, a new face no one's had time to get disillusioned about. He's been an efficient and careful Home Secretary, due to good luck and good management he's been able to open three new prisons during his period of office and there's nothing the electorate likes better than seeing shiny, new slammers opening up. And he came well out of the Kim Durham affair. So we'll win. But only a third of the public will vote because they're fed up with elections. And politicians. And they're guessing whoever wins won't have a majority – again. Well, I don't think you or I, privately, would dare disagree with them. The upshot will be that Liberals will hold the balance of power again, as usual. Then comes a National Government. Muldoon has made that inevitable.' He added gloomily, ‘We can't afford to fight, of course, but we've got to. So have the others and they've no money, either.'

‘Petherbridge won't like a National Government.'

‘No PM fancies presiding over a Cabinet full of his opponents.'

‘What's he like?' asked Joshua, who knew that, as Party Treasurer, Gott must know more about the man than he did.

‘A cross between Cardinal Richelieu and Torquemada,' Gott replied readily. ‘He's very brainy, of course. Outwardly he's a civilized man. But he's got hidden depths, where monsters lurk.'

‘What monsters?'

Gott evaded the question. ‘The highest office in the land,' he said, ‘is like an extreme psychological test – like being in the condemned cell or suspended in a sensory deprivation tank, alone and afraid. The problem is that the man being tested, the PM, doesn't realize this and no one around him will tell him. Our problem is that we don't know what the incumbent's weaknesses are until he's tested, and by then it's too late.'

Joshua persisted. ‘But you say Petherbridge isn't a stable man. What do you know?'

‘Not enough,' said Gott shortly.

‘There's a Mrs Petherbridge, isn't there? But she's never around. What's the story there?'

‘Annabel Petherbridge is very frail, physically and mentally. As long as she stays where she is, on what I believe is a nice little farm in Gloucestershire, she's all right. Too much exposure to the bright lights – or her husband – and she starts to get a little wobbly. She always turns out for the Party Conference and she'll be there in a hat when Petherbridge kisses the Queen's hand. Alan just has to use her sparingly, that's all.'